LITERATURE QUESTIONS
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE AND CULTURE
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Question
[CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
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An early form spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons
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A filed-down Old English with heavy French influence
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A unique form of English spoken in Germany
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A form brought to England by the Scandinavians
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Detailed explanation-1: -The French influence on the English vocabulary had its greatest expansion in the period of the Middle English (1150 – 1500). During this time over 10, 000 French words were adapted into the English language and about 75 per cent of these are still in use.
Detailed explanation-2: -Middle English developed gradually in the decades following the Norman Conquest of 1066. It emerged not only through the linguistic influence of Norman French, but also of Old Norse from the Viking populations that had settled in northern Britain.
Detailed explanation-3: -’Middle English’ – a period of roughly 300 years from around 1150 CE to around 1450 – is difficult to identify because it is a time of transition between two eras that each have stronger definition: Old English and Modern English.
Detailed explanation-4: -Two very important linguistic developments characterize Middle English: in grammar, English came to rely less on inflectional endings and more on word order to convey grammatical information. (If we put this in more technical terms, it became less ‘synthetic’ and more ‘analytic’.)