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Middle English is the name given to the English language during the time from 1100 to 1500.
Most of the elaborate inflections of Old English were reduced to an unaccented e sound. This final e sound was still pronounced in Middle English and is retained in a multitude of todays spellings complete, hope, late, mute where the effect is simply to lengthen the preceding vowel. Use of natural gender. Among European languages English is unique in calling male beings masculine, female beings feminine, and sexless objects neuter. Contraction of vocabulary. Much of the vocabulary of Old English poetry is alien to us because that poetry was aristocratic and perished with the Anglo-Saxon nobility. The illiterate peasant, with his narrrow life in field, had no use for the Old English vocabulary of abstract ideas and elevated life. When English rose in prestige in 1250, it had to look to French to supply many words in place of lost Old English words.
*East Midlands was a subdivision spoken in most of Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Derbyshire, and in all the counties of the east. *West Midlands was spoken through the rest of the Midlands, although this was the smaller of the two subdialects. *Southern (Old English Wessex) was spoken south of the Severn-Thames river line. *Kentish was spoken only in the far southeastern county of Kent. Modern English is derived from the dialects of London, essentially East Midlands, but revealind admixtures from other dialects, particularly Southern and Kentish.
(southern France) showed a veneration of women which was stimulated by the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary. *Idealized concept of medieval knight. The British Isles in Medieval times knew the romances in all three of the languages current in England: Latin, French and English.
Poets
Geoffrey of Monmouth is the real founder of the Arthurian legend Robert Wace only significant plot addition is the Round Table, probably never previously mentioned. Layamon wrote the first Arthurian account in English, Brut. Chrtien de Troyes two great contributions:
*fusing diverse elements into a complex cycle of Arthur and his Knights *shaping the whole cycle into a love sequence, courtly love for the most part, but spiritual love in the case of the Holly Grail. For English Literature, the finest telling of the Arthurian material was the work of Sir Thomas Malory. However the interest of English writers did not stop there. Milton had planned an epic upon Arthur. Among other numerous English poets using Arthurian materials are Spenser, Dryden, Tennyson, Swinburne, Morris, Arnold, Masefield. Properly speaking, the Matter of Britain was of Celtic origin.
Works
*King Horn (1250) *Havelok the Dane (1300) *Guy of Warwick (1300) *Beavis of Hampton (1300) *Richard Coeur de Lion (1300) This work takes the nickname of Richard I, this King took part during the Crusades.
*Trojan War *Aeneas *Siege of Thebes *Alexander, this was the most popular of all the ancient material.