the grammar of the language was not directly affected by it.
There was no reason why it should—we might almost add, no
way by which it could. While the English used their own words,
they could not forget their own way of using them, the inflections
and constructions by which alone the words expressed ideas—in
other words, their grammar; when one by one French words
were introduced into the sentence they became English by the
very act of admission, and were at once subjected to all the
duties and liabilities of English words in the same position. This
is of course precisely what happens at the present day: telegraph
and telegram make participle telegraphing and plural telegrams,
and naïve the adverb naïvely, precisely as if they had been in the
language for ages.
But indirectly the grammar was affected very quickly. In languages in the inflected or synthetic stage the terminations must be pronounced with marked distinctness, as these contain the correlation of ideas; it is all-important to hear whether a word is bonus or bonis or bonas or bonos. This implies a measured and distinct pronunciation, against which the effort for ease and rapidity of utterance is continually struggling, while indolence and carelessness continually compromise it. In the Germanic languages, as a whole, the main stress-accent falls on the radical syllable, or on the prefix of a nominal compound, and thus at or near the beginning of the word; and the result of this in English has been a growing tendency to suffer the concluding syllables to fall into obscurity. We are familiar with the cockney winder, sofer, holler, Sarer, Sunder, would yer, for window, sofa, holla, Sarah, Sunday, would you, the various final vowels sinking into an obscure neutral one now conventionally spelt er, but formerly represented by final e. Already before the Conquest, forms originally hatu, sello, tunga, appeared as hate, selle, tunge, with the terminations levelled to obscure ě; but during the illiterate period of the language after the Conquest this careless obscuring of terminal vowels became universal, all unaccented vowels in the final syllable (except i) sinking into e. During the 12th century, while this change was going on, we see a great confusion of grammatical forms, the full inflections of Old English standing side by side in the same sentence with the levelled ones of Middle English. It is to this state of the language that the names Transition and Period of Confusion (Dr Abbott’s appellation) point; its appearance, as that of Anglo-Saxon broken down in its endings, had previously given to it the suggestive if not logical appellation of Semi-Saxon.
Although the written remains of the transition stage are few, sufficient exist to enable us to trace the course of linguistic change in some of the dialects. Within three generations after the Conquest, faithful pens were at work transliterating the old homilies of Ælfric, and other lights of the Anglo-Saxon Church, into the current idiom of their posterity.[1] Twice during the period, in the reigns of Stephen and Henry II., Ælfric’s gospels were similarly modernized so as to be “understanded of the people.”[2] Homilies and other religious works of the end of the 12th century[3] show us the change still further advanced, and the language passing into Early Middle English in its southern form. While these southern remains carry on in unbroken sequence the history of the Old English of Alfred and Ælfric, the history of the northern English is an entire blank from the 11th to the 13th century. The stubborn resistance of the north, and the terrible retaliation inflicted by William, apparently effaced northern English culture for centuries. If anything was written in the vernacular in the kingdom of Scotland during the same period, it probably perished during the calamities to which that country was subjected during the half-century of struggle for independence. In reality, however, the northern English had entered upon its transition stage two centuries earlier; the glosses of the 10th century show that the Danish inroads had there anticipated the results hastened by the Norman Conquest in the south.
Meanwhile a dialect was making its appearance in another quarter of England, destined to overshadow the old literary dialects of north and south alike, and become the English of the future. The Mercian kingdom, which, as its name imports, lay along the marches of the earlier states, and was really a congeries of the outlying members of many tribes, must have presented from the beginning a linguistic mixture and transition; and it is evident that more than one intermediate form of speech arose within its confines, between Lancashire and the Thames. The specimens of early Mercian now in existence consist mainly of glosses, in a mixed Mercian and southern dialect, dating from the 8th century; but, in a 9th-century gloss, the so-called Vespasian Psalter, representing what is generally held to be pure Mercian. Towards the close of the Old English period we find some portions of a gloss to the Rushworth Gospels, namely St Matthew and a few verses of St John xviii., to be in Mercian. These glosses, with a few charters and one or two small fragments, represent a form of Anglian which in many respects stands midway between Northumbrian and Kentish, approaching the one or the other more nearly as we have to do with North Mercian or South Mercian. And soon after the Conquest we find an undoubted midland dialect in the transition stage from Old to Middle English, in the eastern part of ancient Mercia, in a district bounded on the south and south-east by the Saxon Middlesex and Essex, and on the east and north by the East Anglian Norfolk and Suffolk and the Danish settlements on the Trent and Humber. In this district, and in the monastery of Peterborough, one of the copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, transcribed about 1120, was continued by two succeeding hands to the death of Stephen in 1154. The section from 1122 to 1131, probably written in the latter year, shows a notable confusion between Old English forms and those of a Middle English, impatient to rid itself of the inflectional trammels which were still, though in weakened forms, so faithfully retained south of the Thames. And in the concluding section, containing the annals from 1132 to 1154, and written somewhere about the latter year, we find Middle English fairly started on its career. A specimen of this new tongue will best show the change that had taken place:
1140 A.D.—And [4] te eorl of Angæu wærd ded, and his sune Henri toc to þe rice. And te cuen of France to-dælde fra þe king, and scæ com to þe iunge eorl Henri. and he toc hire to wiue, and al Peitou mid hire. þa ferde he mid micel færd into Engleland and wan castles—and te king ferde agenes him mid micel mare ferd. þoþwæthere fuhtten hi noht. oc ferden þe ærcebiscop and te wise men betwux heom, and makede that sahte that te king sculde ben lauerd and king wile he liuede. and æfter his dæi ware Henri king. and he helde him for fader, and he him for sune, and sib and sæhte sculde ben betwyx heom, and on al Engleland.[5]
With this may be contrasted a specimen of southern English, from 10 to 20 years later (Hatton Gospels, Luke i. 46[6]):
Da cwæð Maria: Min saule mersed drihten, and min gast geblissode on gode minen hælende. For þam þe he geseah his þinene eadmodnysse. Soðlice henen-forð me eadige seggeð alle cneornesse; for þam þe me mychele þing dyde se þe mihtyg ys; and his name is halig. And his mildheortnysse of cneornisse on cneornesse hine ondraedende. He worhte maegne on hys earme; he to-daelde þa ofermode, on moda heora heortan. He warp þa rice of setlle, and þa eadmode he up-an-hof. Hyngriende he mid gode ge-felde, and þa ofermode ydele for-let. He afeng israel his cniht, and gemynde his mildheortnysse; Swa he spræc to ure fæderen, Abrahame and his sæde on a weorlde.
To a still later date, apparently close upon 1200, belongs the versified chronicle of Layamon or Laweman, a priest of Ernely on the Severn, who, using as his basis the French Brut of Wace, expanded it by additions from other sources to more than twice the extent: his work of 32,250 lines is a mine of illustration for the language of his time and locality. The latter was intermediate between midland and southern, and the language, though forty years later than the specimen from the Chronicle, is much more archaic in structure, and can scarcely be considered even as Early Middle English. The following is a specimen (lines 9064–9079):
- ↑ MS. Cotton Vesp. A. 22.
- ↑ Gospels in Anglo-Saxon, &c., ed. for Cambridge Press, by W. W. Skeat (1871–1887), second text.
- ↑ Old English Homilies of Twelfth Century, first and second series, ed. R. Morris (E.E.T.S.), (1868–1873).
- ↑ The article þe becomes te after a preceding t or d by assimilation.
- ↑ Earle, Two of the Saxon Chronicles parallel (1865), p. 265.
- ↑ Skeat, Anglo-Saxon and Northumbrian Gospels (1874).
