Middle English

“Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote
the droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote”
– opening lines of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

This is part 2 of 3 from my current commuting CD, History of the English Language by Professor Seth Lerer for the Teaching Company.

In 1066 AD England was defeated by the Norman (French) William the Conqueror. For the next 300-400 years French was the official language of British politics and the court. During this same period the language of scholarship was Latin. So an educated Englishman needed to be trilingual in English, French and Latin. Today we call this time period “Middle English” with an end date of 1470 when the Chancery established an English standard for political documents.

The trilingual Middle Ages has made English rich in synonyms:

• kingly (Old English)
• royal (French)
• regal (Latin)

The impact of French and Latin upon modern English is immense. As one example consider the grammatical rule against split infinitives. Some English teachers would require Star Trek to rephrase “To boldly go” as “To go boldly.” The rule was an attempt by Renaissance scholars to impose Latin grammar on English. Latin infinitive verbs, like “to go”, are one word and so impossible to split with an adverb.

According to Wikipedia, Joseph M. Williams in Origins of the English Language surveyed 10,000 words taken from several thousand business-letters and produced these statistics for the origins of our words:

• French: 41%
• "Native" English: 33%
• Latin: 15%
• Old Norse: 2%
• Dutch: 1%
• Other: 10%

Some studies show the influence of Latin as high as 29%. For centuries, when scientists added new words to English, they often used Latin and Greek roots like “telescope”. Modern examples include telephone and television.

The Middle English period established some interesting word patterns dividing the rich and poor. When we eat meat, the name of the animal (raised by peasants) is Old English while the name of the meat (eaten by the noble) is of Norman origin: pig/pork, cow/beef, deer/venison and sheep/mutton. The peasants lived in a English “hus” (house) while the nobles lived in a French “mansion”. Our words for government and law are mostly from the French: attorney, bailiff, baron, city, conservative, countess, county, damage, duchess, duke, empire, executive, felony, govern, judicial, jury, justice, legislative, liberal, marriage, nobility, parliament, perjury, petty, prince, prison, regal, representative, republic, royal, senator, sovereign, state, traitor, viscount.

Originally all vowels and consonants were pronounced ('knight' was pronounced /kniçt/) but by Chaucer's time (late 1300s) the final 'e' had become silent in normal speech but could optionally be pronounced in verse as the meter required. The rise of “silent” letters and elimination of the complex system of inflected endings from Old English has led some to call Middle English a "creole" language. When speakers of two different languages (English/French) need to communicate with one another, fancy inflections are ignored and rules simplified.

Another interesting aspect of Middle English is the diversity and extremity of dialects. During late Old English, the West Saxony dialect was made the “standard” by royalty. In 1470 the government printing office, the Chancery, established London English as the standard. But in between during the Middle English period, royalty ignored English and no standards were set. Dialects separated the people. The Northumbrians (with a Norse dialect) were viewed by the south as ill-educated peasants while the Northumbrians considered the Londoners as pompous French imitators.

Bottom Line

Scholars in the 1500s and 1600s would rant about the loss of purity in the English native tongue but by that time the battle was lost. Three plus centuries of French and Latin had made Middle English a polyglot that continues to the present. Unlike France, neither the UK nor the US have language officials to control and restrict new additions to the language. Shakespeare alone may have added 6000 words to our language.

Linguists argue over the “size” of the English language. How do you count the words? Do we count “fiancé” which is clearly French? Do we count cat and cats as one word family or two words? Eat/ate, walk/walked, etc? One study counted 54,000 word families in the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1963). Claims of individual word-counts range from 400,000 to two million.

Regardless of its size, English is richer for its diversity of word origins.