Middle English
Old English did not disappear overnight at the Norman Conquest, nor did it
immediately stop being written, for the West Saxon literary tradition was continued for
a time in some of the great monasteries. But, in the years following the Conquest,
changes which had already begun to show themselves in pre-Conquest Old English
continued, and in less than a century we can say that Old English period is over, and
that Middle English has begun.
The Conquest made the change from Old English to Middle English look more sudden
than it really was, by introducing new spelling conventions. An established literary
language like late West Saxon tends to be conservative in its spelling: changes occur
in pronunciation, but the scribes often go on writing the words in the traditional way.
But the Norman scribes disregarded traditional English spelling, and simply spelt the
language as they heard it, using many of the conventions of Norman French. So, many
changes that had not been reflected in OE spelling, or which had appeared only in
occasional spelling, now emerged clearly.
New spelling conventions
The new orthography gave English writings quite a new look. A number of new
consonant symbols were introduced.
•A new symbol g was introduced for the stops represented by OE 3 and the OE
symbol was retained only for the fricatives.
•Where OE used f to represent both [f] and [v], ME scribes used u or v (which
were allographs at this period) for the voiced sound
•Similarly, z was introduced besides s, though not consistently
•The digraph th gradually replaced o and p, but o is found up to about 1300, and
p remained quite common until about 1400; indeed, a debased form of p
survives even today in the initial Y of expressions like ‘Ye Olde Tea Shoppe’, in
which Ye is simply a late medieval way of writing pe.
•It is to be noted that in ME there were separate phonemes /f/ and /v/, /s/ and /z/
and /O/ and /o/, where in OE there had been pairs of allophones. In the spelling,
this fact was only fully recognized for /f/ and /v/, and this still remains the case
today, as for cloth/clothe and close (adj) and close (verb)
Some of the remaining differences in orthography between OE and ME (vedi tabella p.
162). We are discussing about changes in spelling and not in pronunciation. The
changes shown are typical ones:
1. The letter y was no longer used to represent a front rounded vowel, but was
simply used as an alternative to I, so that ME king and kyng represent exactly
the same pronunciation.
2. The ME dialects that preserved the front rounded vowels [y] and [y:] from OE y
and y usually spelt them u or ui: OE cynn became kunn, OE fyr (fire) became fur
or fuir.
3. OE [d3] never occurred in word-initial position, only medially and finally, but ME
loanwords from French, like judge have [d3] in initial position.
4. Not all these changes were improvements: both q and y were superfluous and
ou was not a very satisfactory spelling for [u:], because it was also used to
represent 2 different ME diphthongs.
Change of script: in place of the insular script of OE, the Norman scribes introduced
a continental style of handwriting. In this style, it was difficult to tell how many strokes
had been made when letters like m,n and u occurred together, and groups like un, uu
and um were difficult to distinguish from one another. For this reason, scribes took to
writing o instead of u when it occurred in groups of this kind. E.g. OE sunu-cuman-lufu,
we often find mE sone-comen and loue (love). But this was a change in spelling, not in
pronunciation: sun (OE sunne) has always had the same vowel-sound as the word son
(OE sunu), and the modern difference in spelling is a matter of change.
Changes in pronunciation
