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Middle English (abbreviated to ME [1]) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period.
During the late 14th century, English became the main spoken language, but Latin and French continued to be exclusively used in official legal documents until the beginning of the 18th century. Nevertheless, the French language used in England changed from the end of the 15th century into Law French, that was used since the 13th century. [14]
Geoffrey Chaucer, who lived in the late 14th century, is the most famous writer from the Middle English period, and The Canterbury Tales is his best-known work. The English language changed enormously during the Middle English period, in vocabulary, in pronunciation, and in grammar.
A musician plays the vielle in a 14th-century Medieval manuscript. Music was an important part of both secular and spiritual culture, and in the universities, it made up part of the quadrivium of the liberal arts. [167] From the early 13th century, the dominant sacred musical form had been the motet, a composition with text in several parts. [168]
Early Modern English (sometimes abbreviated EModE [1] or EMnE) or Early New English (ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle English, in the late 15th century, to the transition to Modern English, in the mid-to-late 17th century.
The latter portion of the 14th century also saw the consolidation of English as a written language and a shift to secular writing. In the late 15th century William Caxton printed four-fifths of his works in English, which helped to standardize the language and expand the vocabulary.
Inflectional evidence suggests that occurred first when the following word began with a vowel. A century or so later, unstressed /ə/ also dropped in the plural genitive ending -es (spelled -s in Modern English) and the past ending -ed. The changes steadily effaced most inflectional endings: OE mētan → ME meete(n) → LME /meːt/ → NE meet ...
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...