E AR LY M OD E RN E N G LI S H

1400—1600

By: David, Luis & Lenin

Origins of

the English

Language

English underwent

a couple of sound changes

which made the language of

Shakespeare quite different

from that of Chaucer.

The elimination of a vowel sound in

certain unstressed positions. i.e. the words

name, stone, wine, dance, laughed, seemed,

stored were pronounced as two syllables by

Chaucer. The “e” in these words became silent,

but it wasn’t silent for Chaucer.

The Great Vowel Shift. A systematic

shifting of half a dozen vowels and diphthongs in

stressed syllables. i.e. the word name had in

Middle English the vowel like that in the modern

word father; wine like mean.

The invention of printing introduced into

England by William Caxton in 1475, hastened

the standardization of spelling.

Early Modern English was also the pe-

riod of the English Renaissance. Englishmen

had grown accustomed to borrowing words from

French; now they borrowed from Latin and

Greek. Thousands of words from the classical

languages poured in. Pedestrian, bonus, contra-

dict, climax, dictionary, benefit, exist, paragraph,

inspire. Probably the average educated Ameri-

can today has more words from French in his

vocabulary than from Native English, and more

from Latin than from French.

There were considerable sound changes be-

tween Early Modern English and the English of

today. Shakespearean actors putting on a play

speak the words properly enough, but it is very

doubtful that Shakespeare himself would under-

stand them. i.e. the word reason was pro-

nounced like raisin.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

The history of English since 1700 is filled with many

movements and countermovements.

Attempts were made to regu-

late and control the English lan-

guage. There was talk of an academy which would rule

on what could be said or written. The academy never

came to be.

A product of the wish to fix and establish the language

was the development of the dictionary. Samuel John-

son published his English Dictionary in 1755 and Noah

Webster published his in 1828.

The invention of “English

grammar”. English grammars

on the Latin model were worked

out and taught in the schools.

The most important force on the development of the

modern period has been the tremendous expansion of

English speaking people. In 1500 English was a minor

language. Now it’s spoken natively by over a quarter of

a billion people and as a second language by many

millions more.

18th century

ENGLISH GRAMMAR

After the conversion the

most advanced king-

dom was Northumbria.

The 7th century was called

the Northumbrian Renaissance. The

best known literary work is the epic

poem Beowulf.

The power of the Northum-

brian kingdom declined and Mercia, the

country of West Saxons (Wessex) be-

came the centre of the land.

Alfred the Great a

Saxon king reigned

in the second half of the

9th century; supported schools and

translated many books from

Latin to English.

He made a treaty with the

Norsemen who prevailed in

the East and this made a

considerable injection to

English especially sound

and grammar.

Some native English words are: the, of, I, and,

man, mother, road; of the the thousand most

common words in English 62% are native English.

Old English did not borrow words from other lan-

guages but it had a part of English since it was part

of the Indo-Europeadn family. However, there were

some borrowings from Norse. Latin from the Ro-

mans during their rule and also borowed from the

Anglo-Saxons when they were still in the continent.

M id d l e En g l i s h

Old English became Middle

English after the Norman Conquest by William the

Conqueror. For several hundred years, England

was ruled by king whose mother tongue was

French.

Great number of Normans came to England, but

English remained the lang. of the people and

French of the court, nobility, polite society and lite-

rature.

The sound structure and

grammar had some changes. The sys-

tem of English nouns and adjectives

became simplified; people came to rely

more on word order and prepositions

than on inflectional endings to commu-

nicate. German on the other hand, did

not experience a Norman Conquest

and is today highly inflected compared

to its cousin English.

FRENCH WORDS THAT CAME INTO EN-

GLISH

Parliament, majesty, treaty, allience,

tax, sermon, crusifix, veal, beef, bacon,

jelly, peach, lemon, cream, biscuit,

blue, scarlet, curtain, chair, lamp, to-

wel, blanket, story, romance, poet,

chess, music, study, logic, grammar,

noun, surgeon, anatomy, stomach,

nice, second, age, bucket, final, flower,

count, surprise, plain.

By 1500.... ... ... ...

Many people must have had more

French words than English at their

command. But pronouns, prepositions,

conjunctions, auxiliaries were not repla-

ced by borrowings.

For us Middle English is simpler than

Old English; it takes 3-4 mo. to learn to

read Old English prose and

more for poetry, but a week to

put one in touch with Middle

English.

Old, middle and modern English...

7th century

to 1100

8th century

Second half of

the 9th century

TIME:

1100 –

1500