Margery Kempe's English | Margery Kempe

English in the time of Margery Kempe

Around 1400, the speech sounds of Margery Kempe’s Middle English started slipping and sliding.

The sounds /iː/ and /uː/ were the first to change. Both are made with the tongue high in the mouth. With /iː/ it’s high at the front of the mouth; with /uː/ it’s high at the back of the mouth.

In the south and east of England these sounds gradually modulated to new ones made more centrally in the mouth and exhibiting diphthongisation. Thus /iː/ became /aɪ/ and /uː/ became /aʊ/ - the sounds we still use.

The change was not complete until about 1700, implying a timescale so broad that Margery Kempe’s own speech can hardly have been affected. She said /bəni:n/ (‘benyn’) where we say /bənaɪn/ (‘benign’); she said /hu:s/ (‘hus’) where we say /haʊs/ (‘house’).

The redundant letters of Modern English reflect speech sounds Margery Kempe would have made. Thus when her scribe writes ‘nyght’ he has heard her say /ni:xt/. His written ‘gh’ represents a fricative sound no longer heard – but preserved in our orthography. Had Kempe referred to knights on horseback she would have pronounced the /k/ as well, thus differentiating the two nouns. She does refer to the /kniz:/ (‘kneys’) she bent in worship.

The change from back-of-mouth /uː/ to more central /aʊ/ is exemplified in ‘hus’ and ‘mus’ - /hu:s/ and /mu:s/ in Kempe’s Middle English but ‘house’ and ‘mouse’ by 1700.

With /iː/ and /uː/ words acquiring new sounds it might be supposed that /iː/ and /uː/ fell out of use. However, other words filled these phonetic spaces. For example, the /iː/ space at the front of the mouth attracted words with the vowel sounds /æ:/ and /e:/. Thus /bæ:tʃ/ and /be:tʃ/ came together as new /iː/ words – the identically-sounded beach and beech that we still have today. Like other changes, this had scarcely begun in the early 15th century and our spellings remind us of Margery Kempe’s pronunciation, with ‘ea’ representing the /æ:/ of /bæ:tʃ/ and ‘ee’ representing the /e:/ of /be:tʃ/.

Besides similar pairs such as ‘meat’ and ‘meet,’ ‘sea’ and ‘see’ we have countless individual words spelled ‘ea’ and ‘ee.’ (It’s easy – yes, easy – to find examples.) Kempe made them at the front of her mouth with differing, moderate degrees of tongue raising. After her time they crowded into the newly vacated /iː/ space right at the top of the mouth. Why put up with ‘searts’ when you can have balcony seats!

Sounds at the back of the mouth moved upwards in a similar way. Once ‘mus’ and ‘hus’ gave up the sound /uː/ a new group of words took it over. What had formerly been /gɔ:s/ (‘gos’) became /gu:s/ (‘goose’).

I’ve mentioned the silent letters in our Modern English spelling of knight. Our commonest silent letter is the ‘e’ at the end of words. We say /neɪm/ where Kempe said /nɑːmə/ - and pronounced her own name /kempə/. Wouldn’t she and her scribes have marvelled at our silent letters?

The change in the vowels of Middle and Early Modern English is known as

The Great Vowel Shift. Consonantal usages were changing too. Certain consonants continued in use but no longer paired up with certain others. Thus /k/ fell silent before /n/ in words like knyght, /w/ was no longer heard before /r/ in words like wrist (which is now just /rist/) and /h/ was no longer heard before /w/ in words like ‘hwæt’ and ‘hwit,’ which have given us modern ‘what’ and ‘white.’

In addition, English lost its rhoticity. A few examples will show what this means: /lord/ has given us our word /lɔ:d/, /part/ has given us our word /pɑ:t/ and /væ:rtu/ has given us our word /vɜ:tju/.

We speak Modern English but our spelling recalls the English spoken by Margery Kempe – and recorded by the long-suffering scribes who gave us her Book.

The word 'recorded' prompts an interesting thought: There is at least one commercial sound recording of the Book in translation; will it ever be recorded in Middle English?

Tony D Triggs