spelling
Old English cwen became queen. Who changed the spelling, and to what?
Norman scribes, using French conventions: qu replaced cw.
Old English scip became ship. What happened to sc?
It gradually became sh (or sch), the /ʃ/ sound.
Which word order was by far dominant in Chaucer?
SVO (Subject–Verb–Object). Old English had a tendency to it, but Middle English consolidated it.
Name the 12th-century book famous for doubled consonants after short vowels.
The Ormulum, by Orm, who doubled consonants so readers would pronounce words correctly.
Why do we say “Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe” when ye was really the?
Thorn (þ) came to look like a y, so later readers misread it. Printers and shop owners kept it.
ban became bon and swa became so. What changed?
Old English long /ɑː/ moved higher and further back to /ɔː/ in most of the country (except the north).
Which pronouns, they, their, them, were borrowed from Scandinavian?
They replaced the Old English h- forms. they came first (north to south), their and them by the 15th century.
Middle English double or triple negatives: error or emphasis?
Emphasis. Extra negatives made the meaning stronger, e.g. ne hadden nan more to gyuen.
Why did scribes write o instead of uin come, love, one, son?
Minim confusion: u, n, m, v, i were all short strokes, so a row of them was hard to read.
The final -e in stane (‘stone’) was once pronounced. What does silent e do today?
After the /ə/ vanished, the e stayed and came to mark that the vowel before is long (name, nose).
Old English þæm scipum became to the shipes. What took over from case endings?
Prepositions plus a common plural ending. Only the genitive (’s) survived.
Why is the origin of she called an unsolved puzzle?
Competing theories: heo shifted through [hjo:] → [çjo:] → [ʃjo:], or it came from sēo(‘the’, feminine). Neither has clear evidence.