What where the The Middle English.?
‘Middle English’ is a modern term. The people who spoke and wrote Middle English called their language English (even though they didn’t spell it like that). And that is what it is – English. But it is not easy for modern people to read, because the spelling was quite different and there were no standard rules for spelling and no dictionaries in that period. Middle English is the term used for early varieties of English real and proper (as opposed to Anglo-Saxon, which was a different language). These early varieties of English were spoken in the medieval period, between the years 1000 and 1350, approximately. The literary form of Middle English is exemplified by the tales of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer was to English as Dante was to Italian. But Dante’s Italian is possibly easier for modern Italians to understand than Chaucer’s English is for modern English people. Middle English was also pronounced differently from today’s English. In particular, the vowel system was quite different. In
