Never the twain shall meet. Early Middle English - the East-West divide

Middle English religious vocabulary is radically different from that of the previous period: while Old English is characterised more by lexical pattern replication of Latin (and Greek) etyma, Middle English is the period of matter replication. Due to the intake of new French religious words, English lexemes and also whole word families undergo semantic transformation and lexical replacement. Other terms, however, survive from the Old English period into the present day, resisting contact-induced pressure. This study shows that the survival of old lexemes into Middle English is largely determined by the extent of their diffusion and frequency of occurrence before the Norman Conquest. It is postulated that two kinds of inherited Old English lexis should be distinguished in the Middle English period: (i) established terms that had belonged to the West Saxon standard and were still preserved in general use by the lower regular clergy, parish priests and the faithful at large, and (ii) terms of limited currency that had failed to spread outside local communities with strong ties and survived for a short time after the Conquest in smaller religious foundations. The innovation and spread of new francophone religious lexis was conditioned by the new preaching practices that began to develop in Europe in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council and the emergence of mendicant orders. Preachers of the new type were the multilingual innovators who generated new lexis in English and at the same time were instrumental in its diffusion, serving as weak ties between the various levels of the medieval society. Urban middle classes, on the other hand, were the most likely English-speaking early adopters of new norms.

Section: Old English Frequencies As Predictors Of Lexical Survivalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Survival and loss of Old English religious vocabulary between 1150 and 1350

Timofeeva¹

2018

“…First, documentation of English from 1100 to 1300 is notably sparse (Laing 2000: 103–4). This means that to the extent that periphrastic do first appears in two 1300 texts, it could easily have been accidental that no text was written, or survived, in which the construction occurred as early as 1100.…”

Section: Ch Objection Number Four: Periphrastic Do Appears Too Late Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Middle English between 1100 and 1300 varies between the new variety reflecting spoken norms and more antique varieties reflecting the Old English tradition. In fact, most Early Middle English is distinctly conservative (Laing 2000: 105; Sweet 1892: 211). The Owl and the Nightingale text of c. 1200 retains grammatical gender marking on definite articles and nouns; the Ancrene Wisse text of c. 1215 retains Old English features such as the genitive plural, present-tense plural, and infinitive endings.…”

Section: Ch Objection Number Four: Periphrastic Do Appears Too Late Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

What else happened to English? A brief for the Celtic hypothesis

McWhorter¹

2009

This article argues that despite traditional skepticism among most specialists on the history of English that Brythonic Celtic languages could have had any significant structural impact on English's evolution, the source of periphrastic do in Cornish's equivalent construction is virtually impossible to deny on the basis of a wide range of evidence. That Welsh and Cornish borrowed the construction from English is impossible given its presence in Breton, whose speakers left Britain in the fifth century. The paucity of Celtic loanwords in English is paralleled by equivalent paucity in undisputed contact cases such as Uralic's on Russian. Traditional language-internal accounts suffer from a degree of ad hocness. Finally, periphrastic do is much rarer cross-linguistically than typically acknowledged, which lends further support to a contact account.

“…1. Paucity of data points and unevenness of coverage make for genuine gaps in the evidence for the dialectal continuum that must have existed (Laing, 2000). 2.…”

Section: Implications For Dialect Mapsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tales of the 1001 nists: the phonological implications of litteral substitution sets in some thirteenth-century South-West Midland texts

Laing

Lass

2003

Self Cite

There are two main strands to this paper. The first is that in Middle English – and early Middle English especially – there are many writing systems that are so complex as to seem disorderly. But a sympathetic and careful interpretation of these systems shows sophisticated underlying order. The second strand is related to the first: early Middle English writing systems are local and may be represented on maps. When complex systems are assigned geographical positions close to each other – and indeed close to where simpler, more economical systems are localized – a picture emerges that can appear haphazard and unlike the dialect continuum we would expect. We refer to this phenomenon as surface nubbliness. This masks the underlying regional dialect continuum we believe to have been present in the spoken language. But knowledge of how these written systems mapped symbol to sound may enable us to uncover a continuum at the level of sound substance.