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Verbs continued the Germanic distinction of strong and weak, ast hey still do. Although the vowels of endings were leveled, the gradation distinctions expressed in the root vowesl of the strong verbs were fully preserved. The tendency to used exclusively one or the other of the preterit vowel grades (singular or plural) had begun, thought there was little consistency: the vowel fot he odler plural might be used in the singular, or viceversa. The odler distinction (as in I sang, we sungen) was more likely to be retained in the Midlands and the Sourth than in the NOrthe.

The seven classes of strong verbs survived with the following regular gradations (although there were also many phonologically irregular ones).

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Throghout the history of English, consonants have remained relatively stable, compared with the notable vowel changes that have occurred. The old English consonant sounds written b, c (in both its values in late Old English, [k] [c],) d, (in both its values, [f] and [v] , 3 (in two of its values, [g] and [y], h (in both its value, [h] and [x]), k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, pb ( ð ), w, and x (that is, [ks] remained unchanged in Middle Norman influence))

The Old English seuquences h, hn, and hr, were simplified to l, n, and r.  To some extent hw, written wh in Middle English, was also frequently reduced to w, at least in the Soutern dialect. In NOrth , however, the h in this sequence was not lost. It survives to this day in some types of English including the speech of parts of the United States. The sequence was frequently written qu and quh in Othern texts.

Final inflectional n was gradually lots, as was the final n of the unstressed possessive pronouns and the indefinite article before a consonat.

Many words were borrowed from Old French (and less frequently from Latin) beginning with [v] (for instance, veal, virtue, visit) and later with [z] (for instance, zeal, zodia). AS a result, these sounds frequently appeared in initial position, where they had not occurred in Old English.

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Middle English became a language with few inflectional distintions, whereas Old English, as we have seen was relataively highly inflected, although less so than Proto-Germanic. This reduction  of inflections was responsible for a structural change of the greates importance.

Old English weak adjectives (those used after the demostratives) had the endigns -a (masculene nominative ) and -e (neuter nominative-accusative and feminine nominataive); in Middle Eglish those endings fell together as -e-

To describe the situation more simply, Middle English monosyllabic adjectives ending in consonats had a single inflection, -e, used to modify singular nouns in the wak function and all plural nouns.

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Just as French words were borrowed, so too were French spelling conventions. Yet some of the apparent innovations in Middle English Spelling were, in fact a return to earlier conventions.

The digraph th had been used in some of earliest Englilsh texts-those written before 900 but was replaced in later Old English writing by ð . During the Middle English peiod, th was gradually reintroduced, and during tearly Modern English times printers regularized its use.

Similarly, "uu", used for (w)  in the early manuscripts, was supplaned by the runic, but was brought back to England by Norman scribes in a ligature form as "W".

"Ch" was used under French influence, to indicate the initial sound of child, which in Old English had been spelled simply with c, as in cild. Following a short vowel, the same sound might also be spelled cch or chch; thus catch apperars a cache, cacche, and cachche.

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During the Middle English period, Latin continued to exert an important influence on th English Vocabulary.

Scandavian loanwords that must have started making their way into the language during the Old English peiod became readily apparent in Middle English, and Dutch and Flemish were also significant sources. However, the major new influence, and ultimately the most important, was FRENCH.

As a result of the Conquest, English acquireda new look.

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For a long time after the NOrman Conquest, England was trilingual. Latin was the language of the Church, NOrman French of the governmente, and English of the majority of the country's population.

Meanwhile, John Wcliffe had challenged the authority of the Church in both doctrinal and organizational matters as part of the movemente called Lollardy ( a derogatory  term for heresy), which translated the Bible into English and popularized doctrines taht anticipated the Reformation.

The fourteenth century also saw the development of a mystical tradition in England that carried through to the early fifteenth century and included works still read, such as Richard Rolle's Form of Perfect Living, the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hitlon's Scale of perfection, Julian (or Julianan) of Norwich's REvelations of Divine Love and others more.

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Almost at the end of the Old English period, the Normans invaded and conquered England.

The Norman Conquest-fortunately for Anglo-American culture and civilization, the last invansion of Enland was, like the earlier Danish invasions, carried out by the NOrthmen. Under the leadership of William the Conqueror, they defeated the English and their hapless King Harold at the Battle fo Hastings in 1066.

The Scandinavians who settled in France are commonly designated by an Old French form of Northmen, that is, Normans, and the section of France that they settled and governed wass called Normandy.

English Culture changed under French influence, most visibly in the construction of churches and castles, but ir retained a distinctively English flavor.

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The term Middle indicates taht the period was a transition between Old English (which was grammatically very different from the language taht followed) and Early Modern English (which in pronunciation was differente from what had come before but was much the same as our own.)

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They conquered England, replacing the native English nobility with Anglo-Normas and introducing Norman French as the language of government in England.

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In Old English , gender was readily distinguishable in most nouns; masculine nominative-accusative plurals typically ended in -as, femininies in -a, and short-stemmed neuters in -u. In Middle English, on the other hand, all but a handful of nouns acquired the same plural ending, -es (from OE -as) These changes, coupled with invariable the eliminated grammatical gender as a feature of English.

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He lost Normandy to the French, beginning the loosening of ties between England and the Continent.

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The Old English long vowel sound e, i, o and u  remained unchanged in Middle English althoug their spelling possibilities  altered.

Old Engllish  y [u:]  underwent unround to [i:] in the Northern and the East part of the West Midland and all fo the Southwest until the later years of the fourteenth century, when it was unrounded there also. In the Southeast the Old Englishsound became [e
:]
If the modern sound is [o], typically spelled o with "silent e" (as in row and rode) or oa (as in road), then the Middle English sound is (ɔ:). IF however, the Modern English sound is [i ], [ʊ] or [ə] , spelled oo, the Middle English sound is [o:] as in, respectively, Modern English food, foot, and flood, going back to Middle English (fo:de), [fo:t] and [flo:d]

The Middle English [to:] , the source Modern English two [tu ] and who  [hu] (spelling preserves the now archaic forms from early Middle English).

The Old English [æ ] became Middle  English [ɛ]. Both [e:] were written e or ee in Middle English. In early Modern English times ea was adopted as a spelling for most of those words that in the MIddle English dialects spoken north of the Thames had [ɛ:], whereas in the same dialects those words that had [e:]  usually continued the Middle English e(e) spelling.

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He issued the first English -language royal proclamation since the Conquest, having been forced by his barons to accept the Provisions of Oxford, establishing a Privy Council to oversee the administration of the government, so beginning the growth of the English constitution and parliament.

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To indicate vowel length, Middle English writing frequently doubled letters, particularly "ee" and "oo", the practice becoming general i the East Midland dialect late in the period .

Double "o" came to be commonly used in later Middle English times for the long rounded vowel [ɔ:], the voweld that develped out the Old English long á.

Because [ɛ] and [ɔ:]  are both lower vowels than [e] and [o] and thus are made with the mouth in a more open position, they are called Open e and Open o, as distinc from the second pair, which a close e and close o.

Short u was commonly written o during the latter part of the Middle English period if i, m, n, or u (v,w) were continous , because those stroke letters were made with the parallel slanting lines and so, when writtten in succession, could not be distinguished.

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Diphthongs changed radically between Old English and Middle English. The old diphthongs disappeared and a number of new ones (aI, eI, aʊ, ɔʊ, ɛʊ, Iʊ , ɔI , ʊI) develped.

The short diphthongs ea and eo becmae, respectively, a and e, as in Middle English.

Two Middle English diphthongs are of French origin, entering our language in loanwords borrowed from the French -speaking conquerors of England. The dipgthong [ɔI] is spelled oi or oy, joi "joy"
or cloystor "cloister". The dipgthong [ʊI ]
is also spelled or or oy, as in boilent "to boil" or poyson "poison".

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During the Middle English period, practically all nouns wre reduced to two forms, just as in Modern English-One with -s and one without it - the  -s form for the plural and genitive singular and the form without ending for other singular uses. The English language thus acquired a device for indicating plurality without considerartion of case - namely, the -s endingin, which had been in Old English only one of the threee plural endings in the strong  masculine declension. It also lost all trace of any case distinctions except for the neitive, identical in form with the plural.

English had come to depend on particles - mainly prepositions and conjunctions and on word order to express grammatical relations that had had previously been expressed by inflection.

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Only personal pronouns retained (as they still do)  a considerable degree of their complexity from Old English. They alone have preserverd distinctive subject and objet case forms, the distinction between accusative and dative having already disappeared in late Old English for the first and second person pronouns.

The dual number of the personal pronouns also virtually disappeared in Middle English.

The dialects of Middle English used different pronoun forms. The nominative forms they or thai (and other spelling variants such as thei and thay), derived from  Scandinavian, prevailed in the North and MIdlands.  The corresponding objective and genitive forms them, thaim, theim and their were used principally in the NOrth during most of the Middle English period.

The genitive forms of the personal pronouns came in Middle English to be restricted in the ways they could be used.

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Template:Middle English personal pronouns (table) - Wikipedia

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Many other variations are noted in Middle English sources due to difference in spellings and pronunciations. See Francis Henry Stratmann (1891). A Middle-English dictionary . [London]: Oxford University Press. and A Concise Dictionary of Middle English from A.D. 1150 TO 1580 , A. L. Mayhew, Walter W. Skeat, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1888.