3Rd person sg present tense ending

–es in the Northern dialects (comes)

–eth in the Southern dialects (cometh)

plural of nouns

–es in the Northern dialects (cares)

–en in the Southern dialects (caren)

In the forms of personal pronouns

scho in the Northern dialects

sche in the East Midland

hue un the West Midland

hi South Eastern

he Southern

During the ME period, there was a tendency for northern forms to penetrate southwards.

3) the differences in vocabulary between the dialects are more striking in the matter of loan-word. In the Northern and East-Midland there are many Scandinavian words; French words, on the contrary, first appeared most densely in Southern and East Midland dialects, especially around London and spread northwards and westwards from there.

3.4. Characteristics of me.

To see, how different ME is from OE, take a look at this passage from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Unlike the OE text, you should have fewer problems understanding it, even though it still looks odd compared with MnE.

ME:

A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,

That fro the tyme that he first bigan

To riden out, he loved chivalrie,

Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.

What do you think this is about?

This is the description of the Knight, one of the group of pilgrims described in the poem; later we’ll look at this poem more closely as we work through some ways of understanding ME. This is how it might run in MnE:

There was a Knight, a most distinguished man,

Who from the day on which he first began

To ride abroad had followed chivalry,

Truth, honour, generousness and courtesy.

ME spelling has changed and is more like MnE. The pronunciation is still different from MnE. But you can recognise more words either when seeing them or when hearing them: a, the, that, was, and, man, loved, honour, he, first, etc. So, ME is to some extent like MnE but still differs from it.

Over four centuries all the elements of the ME language changed fundamentally.

The writing system changed dramatically due to the influence of French scribal tradition. The grammar system in ME suffered fundamental changes towards its simplification. At the end of the period analytical features, which began developing in ME, are predominant. Word order became stricter and more prepositions were used. The English lexicon has been enhanced by thousands of French borrowings. In pronunciation new phonemes appeared as well as there occurred numerous sound changes.

The influx of French words differed in several ways from the influx of Scandinavian words.

Scandinavian words	French words
spread down from the Danelaw	tended to spread from London and the court, and locally from the lord's caste
The Vikings had mixed with the English on more or less equal terms	The Normans formed a separate caste that imposed much of their culture on their subordinates
came in on the ground floor of the society	tended penetrate downwards in society
many of them were merely dialectical variants of their English counterparts.	were entirety new ones, with no obvious resemblance.