The Owl and the Nightingale Diacrona y Tipologa del Ingls

1. Introduction.
2. Changes in the English Grammar.
a. Decay of the Inflection.
b. The Noun.
c. The Adjective.
d. The Pronoun.
e. The Verb.
f. Loss of Grammatical Gender.
g. Syntax.
3. Conclusion.
4. Bibliography.
5. Excerpt from the original poem.

1. Introduction.
The Owl and the Nightingale, also known as The Hule and the Nightingale, is a medieval
poem written around the 12-13th century in the South of England, credited by some scholars to
Nicholas Guildford although its authorship remains uncertain. It is composed in the form of a
debate. so popular in the Middle Ages Poetry, being the earliest example of debate poem in
Middle English; in it, the two eponymous birds argue about which of them is the most virtuous
in an allegorical mode and colloquial language to encourage proper religious thoughts in the
reader. Its almost two thousand-lines length, coupled in octosyllabic tetrameters, provide us a
good example of how English was evolving after the Norman Conquest, changing from a
synthetic language to an analytic one.
This poem was neglected for a very long time, and only at the end of the 19th century
started to be considered as a remarkable piece of literary interest.
2. Changes in the English Grammar.
a. Decay of the Inflection.
The Norman takeover triggered changes in the native language, but mainly in the
vocabulary, spelling and pronunciation, whereas it just allowed the already started
transformations in grammar unrestrained. English was transformed from a half-inflected
language (retaining only four of the Germanic languages cases) to a language reliant on word
order, periphrastic constructions and prepositions to denote the grammatical functions of the
nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases. Throughout the Middle English Period, the
adjective lost all its inflections in case, gender and number; the article was reduced to one
indeclinable form; the possessive pronoun appeared, alternating with the genitive inflection.
This levelling of unstressed vowels into a schwa -also called indeterminate vowel- in the
spoken language gradually spread southwards, being this region the most conservative due to
the distance from the Danelaw.

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As a first example in the excerpt of the poem studied, we can find the recursive end in
the third person present in plural, drive, and live in line 2, which refers to the cat and is also
the third person present but in singular, thus we see the homogenization in the third form as a
result of the decay of the inflection mentioned above.
b. The Noun.
The inflectional endings for the noun in Old English were heavily disturbed in Middle
English; the eight strong masculine declensions were reduced to three: the genitive singular
(which developed into the PDEs Saxon Genitive), the nominative plural and accusative plural
which, by analogy in the final -s, extended to form all the plural forms. Therefore, only two plural
forms survived in Middle English, the -s or -es from the strong masculine declension and the -en
from the weak. In the text, we find foxes/fox and vox, showing both the singular/plural form and
the progressive voicing of the f.
As an example of the loss of the declensions, we have smak (scent) in line 15 or wrench
(line 3), both working as prepositional objects and without the final -e of the accusative case,
which anticipates the decay of the case system. Nevertheless, the presence of words such as
hund/hunde, more or weie confirms that Old English declensions were still in use in the South.
c. The Adjective.
All the cases of the singular were reduced to that of the nominative singular, and so
were the cases of the plural, in both declensions. As a result of this simplification of forms, there
was no longer distinction between the singular and the plural forms in the weak declension and
both ended in -e. Only a few monosyllabic adjectives from the strong declension kept the
difference between plural and singular forms, which eventually merged in one single form, as
the endings lost their grammatical meanings.
In the text we have several examples of adjectives that show the Southern conservative
tendency of keeping the adjective inflections, as in godne (line 4), which appears in agreement
with the noun it accompanies (nanne); or the numeral anne, functioning as an adjective after
wrench (line 3). In Middle English however, the preferred position for quantifying adjectives is
before the head, as in line 5 vele wrenche. As time goes by, the freedom in word order regarding
the adjective position narrows, and Middle English poetry gets more syntactically restricted.
d. The pronoun.
The decay of pronominal inflections was not the consequence of the weakening of final
syllables, as happened with the noun and the adjective, and the Middle English personal
pronouns were mostly developed from those of Old English, with the exception of the third
person plural. The greatest loss was suffered by the demonstratives: of the numerous forms that
we had in Old English (s, so, t, s, one, , , ) the only two that remain at the end
of the period are the and that, and the plural tho, that survived to Golden Age. Any other
different form used in Old English to distinguish gender, number or case, disappeared, as the
demonstrative forms s, os, isses, isse, issum, isne, s lead into this: the neuter form
is came to be used for all genders and cases of the singular (line 17), whereas those and these
appeared for all the cases of the plural.
The personal pronoun did not suffer such a great loss: the forms of the dative and the
accusative merged in favour of the dative (him, her, [t]hem), and in the neuter form, this battle
was won by the accusative form hit as it was the same than in the nominative. However, in line
20 of the poem we still have (he) hine where hine functions as direct object (himself).

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Under the Scandinavian influence, the forms they, their and them became the normal
plurals by the end of the Middle English.
One of the most remarkable traits of the evolution of the pronoun in Middle English is
the loss of the dual number: the pronouns wit (we two) and git (ye two) disappeared and today
we only have memories of them in both.
In the second line of the poem, we have the beginning of the reflexive pronoun, him
sulve (himself) where the agreement between the adjective and the pronoun indicates that the
language is in the process of building up the reflexive.
e. The verb.
As a consequence of the phonological changes developed after the Norman Conquest,
unstressed vowels weaken to schwa and the three classes of weak verbs are reduced to two,
and strong verbs also suffer some alterations:
- A third of the strong verbs in Old English disappeared at the beginning of the Middle
English period.
- As the regularity of weak verbs made them easier to conjugate, many speakers
among the lower classes progressively began to apply the pattern of weak verbs to
strong verbs. By the 14th century this tendency stopped with the printing of
literature. An example is found in line 9 of the poem, forlost, which is a weak preterit
the strong verb forlese.
- The past participles of strong verbs have proved more resistant to change than past
tenses, and continue in use in PDE, especially in adjectives.
The loss of unstressed vowels resulted in the loss of complete inflections, which made
many forms of the verb indistinguishable; particularly the subjunctive, indistinguishable from
the indicative, became irrelevant and stopped being used; this fact triggered the development
of modal verbs and compound tenses by the process of grammaticalization. This process is
visible in line 16 in shal, form that started to work as auxiliary although in this line we do not
find any infinitive verb accompanying it because of the tendency in Old English of omitting
motion verbs to go in this case. In the poem we find different forms for the subjunctive in line
3 (kunne) and the indicative in line 4 (can).
Phrasal verbs began to take form in Middle English when the particles were
progressively confined to post-verbal position, as in line 12 turne ut.
Another interesting feature in the text is the evidence of the loss of unstressed forms,
as in line 8 the infinitive hongi, which was hongien in Old English and evolved to hang in PDE.
f. Loss of Grammatical Gender.
In Old English, the grammatical gender of nouns was determined by the agreement with
the adjectives and demonstratives, which showed whether the noun was neuter, feminine or
masculine by their different endings. With the decay of inflections in the adjective and in the
demonstratives this, that, these and those, this grammatical gender disappeared and gender sex
became the only factor in determining the gender of English nouns.
This fact evidences, once again, that the poem was written in the South (where these
changes occurred later than in the rest of the Island) and at the beginning of the period, as we
still find agreement between nouns and adjectives in lines 4, 5 and 6, for example.

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g. Syntax.
With the decay of inflections, semantic and syntactic relationships that were marked by
the different endings of words became dubious, and syntax had to rely in world order to
establish these relations. The previous freedom in the pattern Subject Verb Object existent in
Old English was reshaped into rigid rules to avoid ambiguity.
In the text we can appreciate the inversion of the pattern SVO from the first line, where
foxes precedes drive conforming with the pattern SOV, one more trait of Old English.
As the case system is starting to fall down, the functions of cases are carried out by
prepositions, that means that the speaker has to find the more suitable preposition to get his
aim; the most frequent preposition in Old English was of (line 17).
In Old English adverbs and conjunctions were ambiguous and presented the same form,
but in Middle English this ambiguity starts to disappear; in line 14 onne works as an adverb and
this forces the inversion subject-verb (is e hundes smel).
Another interesting feature of the Old English still present in this poem is the double
negation in lines 3 (nebute) and 4 (nenanne).
Preposition stranding was not allowed in Old English and the prepositional object had
to follow the preposition, like in line 8 (bi e boe) but it started to change through Middle
English.

3. Conclusion.
Although the Norman Conquest introduced great changes in the native language, these
were produced mainly in the vocabulary, but it made it possible for English to freely develop its
own grammar, as it was the language of the unlettered and it was not subjected to the severe
rules of the Latin or the Norman, the other coetaneous languages.

4. Bibliography.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Owl_and_the_Nightingale
Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 6th ed. Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2013. N. pag. Print. ROUTLEDGE.
Guarddon Anelo, Maria del Carmen. Diachrony and Typology of the English Language
through the texts. 1st ed. Madrid. 2011. EDIASA.

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5. Excerpt from the original text.

1 Oft an hundes foxes driue,
2 e kat ful wel him sulue liue,
3 e he ne kunne wrench bute anne.
4 e fo[x] so godne ne can nanne,
5 e[] he kunne so uele wrenche,
6 at he wen eche hunde atprenche.
7 Vor he can paes rite & woe,
8 an he kan hongi bi e boe,
9 an so forlost e hund his fore,
10 an turn aen eft to an more.
11 e uox kan crope bi e heie,
12 an turne ut from his forme weie,
13 an eft sone kume arto:
14 onne is e hundes smel fordo:
15 he not, ur[] e imeinde smak,
16 weer he shal auor e abak.
17 if e uox mist of al is dwole,
18 at an ende he crop to hole:
19 ac naeles mid alle his wrenche,
20 ne kan he hine so bienche,
21 e he bo ep an sue snel,
22 at he ne lost his rede uel.
23 e cat ne kan wrench bute anne
24 noer bi dune ne bi uenne:
25 bute he kan climbe sue wel,
26 armid he were his greie uel.
27 Al so ich segge bi mi solue,
28 betere is min on an ine twelue.

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