From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Middle English
or
ME
[1]
is an older type of the
English language
that was spoken after the
Norman invasion
in
1066
until the
1500s
.
[2]
It came from
Old English
after
William the Conqueror
came to
England
with his French nobles and stopped English from being taught in schools for a few hundred years. Over this time, English borrowed several
Old French
words and became part of the
Anglo-Norman language
. This period of the development was from the
High Middle Ages
to the
Late Middle Ages
.
In the
1470s
, the
Chancery Standard,
a type of English spoken in
London
, started to become more common. This was partly because
William Caxton
brought the
printing press
to England in the 1470s. The type of English that people spoke in England between then and 1650 is called
Early Modern English
. There were many different
dialects
of Middle English.
Geoffrey Chaucer
wrote
The Canterbury Tales
in Middle English.
- Brunner, Karl (1962)
Abriss der mittelenglischen Grammatik
; 5. Auflage. Tubingen: M. Niemeyer (1st ed. Halle (Saale): M. Niemeyer, 1938)
- Brunner, Karl (1963)
An Outline of Middle English Grammar
; translated by Grahame Johnston. Oxford: Blackwell