Module 17: Bifil that in that seson

•  The verb wenden is noteworthy in two ways: it has an ending which the modern verb, wend, does not have, and it reminds us of the modern Past Tense of go, which is actually derived from this verb. Here we have a change in form, i.e. a morphological change, and a change in vocabulary, i.e. a semantic change.
• The Past Perfect of come is formed with be, not have, as an auxiliary, just like in modern German (war gekommen), an example of a change concerning the way sentences are formed, i.e. a syntactical change.
• The smaller unit of the number comes before the higher unit, just like in modern German (neunundzwanzig).
• The word folk, although still used, is now only used in certain phrases such as folk art or folk music (or in the familiar form of address folks) and is limited to certain contexts, but has been replaced by people as the more general term. Here, we have another case of semantic change.
• The form yfalle has a prefix, y+falle, which is has dropped in the meantime, just like the prefix which is still present in the Past Participle of the word in modern German (ge+fallen), another example of a morphological change.

All in all, we have seen that changes have occurred in various areas - semantic, morphological, syntactical - and that many forms have a certain similarity with modern German. This is worth remembering.

It should be stressed, however, that an important area of change, that of phonological change, has not been dealt with in this module. It should also be stressed that this text cannot of course be taken as a representative example of the English of the time. We have only pretended that it is for the sake of the exercise.