The English used by losing some of the different endings for nouns, adjectives and pronouns.
The main change to verbs was to the past tense.
In old English there were two main tenses: past and present. In Middle English other tenses developed which used Shall and will began to be used to express the future. These tenses were not used very often at this time, but later they were used much more.
When the different noun endings disappeared, people had to put words in a particular order to express meaning.
Between 1100 and 1500, about ten thousand French words were taken into English, three-quarters of which are still in use. New words arrived to describe the law and some things in nature.
French (F) words very often replaced Old English (OE) words. But sometimes both the French and the Old English words survived, with small differences in meanings. Sometime French words were used for life in the upper classes, and Old English ones for life in the Lower classes.
New English words were made from of the new French words almost immediately.
At the same time several thousand words also entered English from Latin.
Some words which came into Middle English from Latin at this time. One important source of Latin words was the first translation of the Bible from Latin to English which was made by John Wycliffe.
More than a thousand Latin words appear for the first time in English in their translation of the Bible.
The changes to the grammar and vocabulary of Middle English did not happen at the same time everywhere.
The main dialects in Middle English were similar to those of Old English, but they used different words, word endings, and pronunciations. There is a famous description by William Caxton, who later brought the printing machine to England. When people wrote, they used the words and pronunciations of their dialects. Some time a spelling from one dialect has survived, together with the pronunciation form another.
During this time were changes to the ways sounds were spelt.
Much more literature has survived from this time than from the earlier time of Old English.
.jpg)
The grates writer in Middle English was Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400). Chaucer was very good at describing people and also at writing conversation which counded very real. He had a great effect on writers in the fifteenth century, and many of them copied him.
Another very popular poem in the fourteenth, fiftieth and sixteenth centuries was Piers Plowman by William Langland.
In the fifteenth century a machine was brought to England which has a great effect on English. This was the printing machine, Which William Caxton brought to London in 1476. Suddenly it was possible to produce thousands of copies of books.
Caxton and other printers decided to use the East Midlands dialect, mainly because it was spoken in London and used by government officials.
By the end of the fifteenth century English was starting to be read by thousand of people. In the next century it was starting to be read by many more, and used by the great star of English literature William Shakespeare.
