Questions – Millward, Chapter 6: Middle English
1. Explain the following statement: The Norman Conquest was “the last of the great
Germanic invasions of England”. (p. 142)
2. What were the principal Norman imports to England in sociological and cultural
terms?
3. Why did dialectal differences in English proliferate after the Norman Conquest?
4. Why are most Norman and French borrowings into English recorded only from
the 13th century onwards? Is the lag between the use in speech and in writing of
Scandinavian borrowings in ME due to identical reasons?
5. Identify the following names and concepts: Harold Godwineson, Central French,
mutated plurals, unchanged neuter plurals.
6. Explain the primacy of London in establishing the late medieval standard English.
7. Explain the rise of voiced fricatives as phonemes in Middle English.
8. Explain the principal mechanisms of short vowel lengthening and long vowel
shortening in Middle English.
9. Explain the ME spelling changes in the following words: young (OE gung),
queen/queen (OE cwēn), tongue (OE tunge), child (OE cild), while (OE hwīl).
10. List all the morphological categories that had been a) retained and b) given up by
ME nouns, adjectives and verbs.
11. Describe briefly the main (simplifying) tendencies at work in ME among the
strong verbs.
12. Demonstrate why weak verbs represent the only productive verbal group in ME.
13. What are the sources of new ME prepositions, needed to support the emergent
isolating structure of the language?
14. Explain the following statement: “By the ME period, the English language was
well suited linguistically to borrow easily and freely from other languages.” (p.
195)
15. Summarise the main differences between lexical borrowing from Old French and
Old Norse.
16. Does borrowing in the ME period affect lexicon only?