An Introduction to Middle English
Contents
Abbreviations vii
To readers viii
PART I
1 Introduction 1
1.1 The purpose of this book 1
1.2 How to use this book 2
1.3 A note about technical terms
3
Recommendations for reading 4
2 What did Middle English look
like? 7
2.1 Introduction 7
2.2 A passage from The Canterbury Tales 8
2.3 Linguistic analysis 11
2.4 Evidence for Middle English
13
2.5 Two illustrations 14
2.6 Editing Middle English 19
Exercises 20
Recommendations for reading 22
3 Middle English in use 26
3.1 Introduction 26
3.2 Who used Middle English? 26
3.3 For what was Middle English
used? 30
3.4 The dialects of Middle
English 31
3.5 Written standardisation 34
3.6 The standardisation of speech
36
Exercises 38
Recommendations for reading 38
PART II
4 Spellings and sounds 40
4.1 Some preliminaries: the relationship
between speech
and writing 40
4.2 Reconstructing ME
pronunciation 42
4.3 Middle English sounds and
spellings: an outline history 44
4.4 Chaucerian transmission 46
4.5 Middle English sound-systems
50
4.6 Middle English
writing-systems 60
Exercises 64
Recommendations for reading 65
5 The lexicon 69
5.1 Some preliminaries: the word
and its structure 69
5.2 The origins of ME vocabulary
70
5.3 Some notes on meaning 77
5.4 Word geography 79
5.5 Chaucer’s lexicon 80
5.6 Vocabulary and style 81
Exercises 84
Recommendations for reading 85
6 Grammar 89
6.1 Some preliminaries 89
6.2 Syntax 92
6.3 Morphology 103
Exercises 118
Recommendations for reading 119
PART III
7 Looking forward 126
7.1 Language change 126
7.2 Language and text 133
Exercises 139
Recommendations for reading 139
Appendix: Middle English texts 142
Discussion of the exercises 170
References 173
Index 178
