Читать книгу A Book of Middle English - J. A. Burrow - Страница 16

It would be wrong to leave the impression that the ‘gret diversité’ of written Middle English is solely a matter of regional variation. There is variation over time as well as over space. The texts represented in this book span a period of about 250 years, and even in the Middle Ages 250 years was a long time. Our selection opens with a group of Early Middle English writings by twelfth‐ and early thirteenth‐century poets and prose writers whose language would have appeared distinctly archaic to their fourteenth‐century successors. Laʒamon and Langland both belonged to the same South‐West Midland dialect area; but Langland would have found much that was strange in the vocabulary and inflexions of Laʒamon’s Brut, had he known it.