![]() For Robert the appropriate language for lay education was French, but by the late fourteenth century his book had been translated into English.ĭetail from Robert of Gretham, Mirur, in Anglo-Norman (WLC/LM/4, f.57v) It was still dominant in the mid-thirteenth century when Robert of Gretham wrote his advice on moral conduct, the Mirur. Hebrew and Aramaic were used by the medieval Jewish community in England.Īnglo-Norman had emerged as a distinct dialect of French after the Norman Conquest in 1066 established a French-speaking aristocracy in English. ![]() Eventually English emerged as the standard literary medium, but it was not until the eighteenth century that Latin disappeared from legal documents. Authors made choices about which one to use, and often used more than one language in the same document. ( A History of the English Language.Three main languages were in use in England in the later medieval period – Middle English, Anglo-Norman (or French) and Latin. In changing from French to English, they transferred much of their governmental and administrative vocabulary, their ecclesiastical, legal, and military terms, their familiar words of fashion, food, and social life, the vocabulary of art, learning, and medicine." the upper classes carried over into English an astonishing number of common French words. "When we study the French words appearing in English before 1250, roughly 900 in number, we find that many of them were such as the lower classes would become familiar with through contact with a French-speaking nobility: ( baron, noble, dame, servant, messenger, feast, minstrel, juggler, largess). Where two languages exist side by side for a long time and the relations between the people speaking them are as intimate as they were in England, a considerable transference of words from one language to the other is inevitable. "French influence is much more direct and observable upon the vocabulary. "By making English the language mainly of uneducated people, the Norman Conquest made it easier for grammatical changes to go forward unchecked. During this period the inflections, which had begun to break down during the end of the Old English period, become greatly reduced. "From 1150 to 1500 the language is known as Middle English. ( Fatherhood and Its Representations in Middle English Texts. "By the fifteenth century Middle English was extensively used in the written documentation of business, civic government, Parliament, and the royal household." ![]() This has resulted in a critical tendency to place English at the bottom of the linguistic hierarchy of medieval England, with Latin and French as the dominant languages of discourse, instead of seeing the symbiotic relationship between English, French, and Latin. ![]() a language at all but rather something of a scholarly fiction, an amalgam of forms and sounds, writers and manuscripts, famous works and little-known ephemera.' This is a little extreme, but certainly prior to the later fourteenth century Middle English was primarily a spoken rather than a written language, and did not have official administrative functions in either a secular or religious context. Indeed, some scholars go so far as to say that Middle English is 'not. " Middle English varied enormously over time and by region Angus McIntosh notes that there are over a thousand 'dialectically differentiated' varieties of Middle English.
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