the_antisocial_hermit wrote:A quote from a professor of English language history on the Middle English (ME) time period:Dr. Jacobsen wrote:Culturally, the Norman occupation resulted in a feudal society with French spoken at the top and English spoken at the bottom. Widespread borrowing and bilingualism eventually led to the collapse of the inflectional system. While some inflectional machinery certainly existed in ME, by the 1200s English largely relied on syntax. Vowel length remains phonemic, but the loss of word final inflections begins to shorten vowels across the board. The London dialect becomes the basis for standardization. This is by far the period of greatest change in the history of English.
Yeah, so English basically developed as a Creole between Norman French and Anglo-Saxon (germanic).
But literary quotations... that's not the same.
