The Middle English Vocabulary

Borrowings came mostly from two sources:Scandinavian And French Scandinavian borrowings were not so great, but

they were mostly everyday words of very high frequency. There were such borrowings as

bag anger skin happy take call window fog ugly happy

Apart from many place names (over1400)in – by, -thorpe and -thwaite some personal pronouns were borrowed as well. The Scandinavian forms þeir(they), þeim (them) and þeirra (their) ousted the OE. forms hie, him, hira.

In some cases only the meaning of a word, not its form was

changed. For example, ME word bloom has not only the meaning of ‘‘flower’’ but also ‘‘the technical meaning ‘‘of a thick bar or iron’’ The OE word bloma had only the second meaning. The first was borrowed from the Scandinavian word blom.

The OE dream meant ‘‘joy’’ .Its present meaning came with the Scandinavians.

The number of French borrowings was much greater than the Scandinavian loan words There were 2 stages of borrowing. During the 1st

one words connected with titles of respect (E. sir, madam), ranks( prince, duke, noble).

During the 2nd one words connected with administration and government (E. parliament,

crown, reign) war (E. enemy, battle, war, victory, defence) religion ( pray, saint, miracle) art ( painting, colour, beauty, romance,

sculpture, )

The relation between the English people and the French aristocracy is also reflected in the semantic correlation of some English words. As Walter Scott pointed out in ‘‘Ivanhoe’’, the domestic animals kept their English names while the English were looking after them in the fields (E. ox, cow, sheep), but were given French names when they appeared on the Norman lord’s table( E. veal, beef, mutton)

It is necessary to remember that there were 2 varieties of French borrowings Norman French (NF) and Central French (CF).

Up to the 13th century French borrowings were mostly from NF. Later the overwhelming majority of French loan-words came from CF. It often happened that a word was borrowed twice and new doublets were formed (canal (NF) and channel (CF)).

The word building in Middle EnglishThere were 2 types of word derivation: 1)based on native elements 2)based on the mixture of elementsNative affixes + borrowed words.The English suffixes(- ful,-less,-hood,-like and –ship )were

added to French words. For example, unfaithful, beautiful,

courtship.The same situation with compounding.Gentle(1225) + woman=gentlewoman(1230).

Middle English borrowed a lot of foreign elements and with

the help of them new words were formed. For example,

such morphemes as –able, dis- and –re were used with

words of French origin. So we have enter-reenter, write-

rewrite, blame-blamable. Some of them were used with

native Germanic roots as well:eatable, readable, bearable,

misdo.

One of the most important innovations was the development of conversion. Owing to the levelling of endings and the loss of –n in unstressed syllables this way of word formation gains importance. As a result of conversion a lot of new nouns from verbs and vice versa were formed:

smile-to smile comfort-to comfort, annoy-to annoy chance –to chance

account-to account.