What is the difference between Old English Middle English and Modern English literature?

Answer 1

Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon, was the language spoken in England from the Germanic invasions in the 5th century until the twelfth century. To a modern reader it looks like a foreign language, and it shares many features with German, including a four-case noun declension, grammatical gender, and strong and weak adjective declensions. An example of a text in Old English is the anonymous epic poem Beowulf, which begins: Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon

hu ða æþelingas Ellen fremedon.

Middle English, which developed from Old English with significant influece from Norman French, was spoken between the twelfth century and the great vowel shift, which began in the mid-fifteenth century. Middle English had a simplified grammar and a much more familiar look, but it would have sounded quite different from modern English by virtue of its vowels, which still had their European values (e.g., long 'i' was pronounced like modern English long 'e', as in French or Spanish). A representative Middle English text is Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales:

Whan that Aprille with hise shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in switch licour

Of which virtu engendred is the flour . . .

Modern English is the form of English spoken since about the middle of the fifteenth century, encompassing both Shakespeare (Early Modern English, c. 1450-1650) and the contemporary language. A representative Early Modern English text is William Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date . . .

Answer 2

In Middle English, many of these endings were lost, and the role a word played in the sentence was determined by word order, like it is today. The word order in Middle English is pretty similar in most cases to Modern English. (There are differences of course, but in general a Middle English sentence is like a Modern English sentence.)

Answer 3

;lliohf libat