Week 4

Question 1

Latin
Entrance via written language >

Answer 1

formal, learned words

Question 2

Latin
Domains (2)

Answer 2

• Religion and church, legal documents, scholarship, science, medicine and literature
• More general domains: PDE history, intellect, reject

Question 3

Latin
Periods (2)

Answer 3

• late Middle English
• 15century aureate diction: ‘artificial and unusual borrowings’ that ‘writers self-consciously and extensively used’

Question 4

Latin
Relation with French loanwords (4)

Answer 4

• Some difficulties to distinguish Lat - Fr. loanwords
• Triplets: ‘quasi-synonyms (partly semantically, partly just stylistically differenciated)’
• English = colloquial; French = literary; Latin = learned
• NO SIEMPRE ESTAMOS HABLANDO DE FORMALIDAD

Question 5

Latin
Derivation in Middle English
Borrowing of

Answer 5

Romance affixes (>derivation)

Question 6

Latin
Derivation in Middle English
Individual loans with derivation >

Answer 6

‘derivetional relations could also be established in English’, e.g. acceptable, agreeable, comparable, reasonable > -able

Question 7

Latin
Derivation in Middle English
Effects (3)

Answer 7

• Compounding decreases
• OE suffixes disappear or reduce/lose producivity
• Affix rivalry, e.g. -ity/-ness (competivity or competitiveness?)

Question 8

The French-origin suffixes competed (and still compete) with

Answer 8

inherited suffixes of similar meanings.

Question 9

Hybrid form:

Answer 9

‘a complex word form which consists of a native part and a borrowed part’, e.g.
understandable, eatable, unthinkable…

Question 10

Latin
Derivation in Middle English
Productivity:

Answer 10

fairly late (even EModE)

Question 11

Written records in Middle English (3)

Answer 11

• Middle English dialects
  Middle English is very wide-ranging at every linguistic level. There are also several non-linguistic
  dimensions in which this variation can be observed. Of these, the geographical and chronological
  dimensions are most immediately obvious: texts from different areas…
• Almost any ME written before c. 1430 is dialectal as a matter of definition
• Areas: phonology, morphology

Question 12

Written records in Middle English
Further divisions Issoglosses →

Answer 12

OE Northumbrian, OE Mercian, OE West-Saxon, OE Kentish

Question 13

Written records in Middle English
Dialectal areas (2)

Answer 13

• Innovative (Northern dialects) vs. conservative (Southern dialects)
• Correspondence to OE dialects → dialectal situation was ‘more complex and fluid’

Question 14

Written records in Middle English
Dialect features

Answer 14

• Are differences lexical or orthographic?

Question 15

Records =

Answer 15

not just literary texts BUT science, law, medicine, history…