| Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993. |
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| MIDDLE ENGLISH |
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was the stage of the language following Old English, distinguished from it by two factors. First, the Norman invasion in 1066 began a long and increasing influence of French words on the English vocabulary; second, the growing importance of London, both politically and commercially, made its Southeast Midland dialect (in which Geoffrey Chaucer wrote) the most influential of English dialects and turned it ultimately into the basis for the English we know today. Middle English gradually lost many of its grammatical inflections, replacing them with function words and an increasingly modern-looking syntax. We have many literary works from the Middle English period, some of them masterpieces. We conventionally date Middle English after 1066 to the appearance of printing in the late 1500s. Here is some of Genesis from a late fourteenth-century translation: compare its more familiar-looking vocabulary with that of the same passage in the Old English entry, and note the syntactic and other grammatical differences too:| | In the first made god of nought heuen and erth. The erth forsothe wæs veyn withinne and voyde, and derknesses weren vp on the face of the see. And the spirite of God was yborn vp on the waters. And God seid, “Be made light,” and made is light. And God sees light that it was good and dyuidide light from derknesses. And clepide light day and derknesses night, and maad is euen and moru, o day. |
The next chronological stage of the language was called Early Modern English, the language of the Renaissance. | 1 |
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| | | The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Copyright © 1993 Columbia University Press. |
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