Early Modern English · Lablypedia

Before and after the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603, the emerging English standard began to influence the spoken and written Middle Scots of Scotland.

The grammatical and orthographical conventions of literary English in the late 16th century and the 17th century are still very influential on modern Standard English. Most modern readers of English can understand texts written in the late phase of early modern English, such as the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare, and they have greatly influenced Modern English.

Texts from the earlier phase of early modern English, such as the late-15th-century Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) and the mid-16th-century Gorboduc (1561), may present more difficulties but are still closer to Modern English grammar, lexicon and phonology than are 14th-century Middle English texts, such as the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

History

English Renaissance

Transition from Middle English

The change from Middle English to early modern English affected much more than just vocabulary and pronunciation.

Middle English underwent significant change over time and contained large dialectical variations. Early Modern English, on the other hand, became more standardised and developed an established canon of literature that survives today.

1476 – William Caxton started printing in Westminster; however, the language that he used reflected the variety of styles and dialects used by the authors who originally wrote the material.

Tudor period (1485–1603)

1485 – Caxton published Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, the first print bestseller in English. Malory's language is often described as late Middle English, but it also shows transitional Early Modern features, including the beginnings of the Great Vowel Shift.
1491 or 1492 – Richard Pynson started printing in London; his style tended to prefer Chancery Standard, the form of English used by the government.

Henry VIII

c. 1509 – Pynson became the king's official printer.
From 1525 – Publication of William Tyndale's Bible translation, which was initially banned.
1539 – Publication of the Great Bible, the first officially authorised Bible in English. Edited by Myles Coverdale, it was largely from the work of Tyndale. It was read to congregations regularly in churches, which familiarised much of the population of England with a standard form of the language.
1549 – Publication of the first edition of the Book of Common Prayer in English, under the supervision of Thomas Cranmer (revised in 1552, 1559, 1604, and 1662), which standardised much of the wording of church services. Some have argued that since attendance at prayer book services was required by law for many years, the repetitive use of its language helped to standardise Modern English even more than the King James Bible (1611) did.
1557 – Publication of Tottel's Miscellany.

Elizabethan English

Elizabethan era (1558–1603)

1560 – The Geneva Bible was published. The New Testament was completed in 1557 by English Reformed exiles on the continent during the reign of Mary, and the complete Bible three years later, after Elizabeth succeeded the throne. This version was favoured by the Puritans and Pilgrims due to its more vigorous and forceful language. Its popularity and proliferation (due in large part to its copious notes) over the following decades sparked the production of the King James Bible to counter it.
1582 – The Rheims and Douai Bible was completed, and the New Testament was released in Rheims, France, in 1582. It was the first complete English translation of the Bible that was officially sponsored and carried out by the Catholic Church (earlier translations into English, especially of the Psalms and Gospels, existed as far back as the 9th century, but it was the first Catholic English translation of the full Bible). Though the Old Testament was already complete, it was not published until 1609–1610, when it was released in two volumes. While it did not make a large impact on the English language at large, it certainly played a role in the development of English, especially in heavily Catholic English-speaking areas.
Christopher Marlowe, fl. 1586–1593
1592 – The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd
c. 1590 – c. 1612 – Shakespeare's plays written

17th century

Jacobean and Caroline eras

Jacobean era (1603–1625)

1609 – Shakespeare's sonnets published
Other playwrights:
- Ben Jonson
- Thomas Dekker
- Beaumont and Fletcher (Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher)
- John Webster
1607 – The first successful permanent English colony in the New World, Jamestown, is established in Virginia. Early vocabulary specific to American English comes from indigenous languages (such as moose, racoon).
1611 – The King James Version of the Bible was published. It was largely based on the Bishops' Bible translation and revision of 1602. The "Authorised Version" as it is called in the U.K. remained the standard Bible in the Church of England until the 1769 Oxford edition supplanted it with updated modern English spelling and grammar.
1623 – Shakespeare's First Folio published

Caroline era and English Civil War (1625–1649)

1630–1651 – William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony, wrote his journal. It will become Of Plymouth Plantation, one of the earliest texts written in the American Colonies.
1647 – Publication of the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio

Interregnum and Restoration

The English Civil War and the Interregnum were times of social and political upheaval and instability. The dates for Restoration literature are a matter of convention and differ markedly from genre to genre. In drama, the "Restoration" may last until 1700, but in poetry, it may last only until 1666, the annus mirabilis (year of wonders), and in prose lasts until 1688. With the increasing tensions over succession and the corresponding rise in journalism and periodicals, or until possibly 1700, when those periodicals grew more stabilised.

1651 – Publication of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.
1660–1669 – Samuel Pepys wrote his diary, which will become an important eyewitness account of the Restoration Era.
1662 – New edition of the Book of Common Prayer, largely based on the 1549 and subsequent editions. It long remained a standard work in English.
1667 – Publication of Paradise Lost by John Milton and of Annus Mirabilis by John Dryden.

Development to Modern English

The 17th-century port towns and their forms of speech gained influence over the old county towns. From around the 1690s onwards, England experienced a new period of internal peace and relative stability, which encouraged the arts, including literature. Modern English can be taken to have emerged fully by the beginning of the Georgian era in 1714, but English orthography remained somewhat fluid until the publication of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, in 1755.

The Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1730 made English, instead of Law French and Latin, the obligatory language for use in the courts of England and in the court of exchequer in Scotland. It was later extended to Wales, and seven years later a similar act was passed in Ireland, the Administration of Justice (Language) Act (Ireland) 1737.

The towering importance of William Shakespeare over the other Elizabethan authors was the result of his reception during the 17th and the 18th centuries, which directly contributes to the development of Standard English. Shakespeare's plays are therefore still familiar and comprehensible 400 years after they were written, but the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, which had been written only 200 years earlier, are considerably more difficult for the average modern reader.

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Orthography

The orthography of early modern English is recognisably similar to that of today, but spelling was unstable. Early Modern and Modern English both retain various orthographical conventions that predate the Great Vowel Shift.

Early Modern English spelling was broadly similar to that encountered in Middle English. Some of the changes that occurred were based on etymology (as with the silent ⟨b⟩ that was added to words like debt, doubt and subtle). Many spellings had still not been standardised. For example, he was spelled as both he and hee in the same sentence in Shakespeare's plays and elsewhere.

Certain key orthographic features of early modern English spelling have not been retained:

The letter ⟨S⟩ had two distinct lowercase forms: ⟨s⟩ (short s), as is still used today, and ⟨ſ⟩ (long s). The short s was always used at the end of a word and often elsewhere. The long s, if used, could appear anywhere except at the end of a word. The double lowercase S was written variously ⟨ſſ⟩, ⟨ſs⟩ or ⟨ß⟩ (the last ligature is still used in German ß). That is similar to the alternation between medial (σ) and final lowercase sigma (ς) in Greek.
⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ were not considered two distinct letters then but as still different forms of the same letter. Typographically, ⟨v⟩ was frequent at the start of a word and ⟨u⟩ elsewhere: hence vnmoued (for modern unmoved) and loue (for love). The modern convention of using ⟨u⟩ for the vowel sounds and ⟨v⟩ for the consonant appears to have been introduced in the 1630s. Also, ⟨w⟩ was frequently represented by ⟨vv⟩.
Similarly, ⟨i⟩ and ⟨j⟩ were also still considered not as two distinct letters, but as different forms of the same letter: hence ioy for joy and iust for just. Again, the custom of using ⟨i⟩ as a vowel and ⟨j⟩ as a consonant began in the 1630s.
The letter ⟨þ⟩ (thorn) was still in use during the early modern English period but was increasingly limited to handwritten texts. In Early Modern English printing, ⟨þ⟩ was represented by the Latin ⟨Y⟩ (see Ye olde), which appeared similar to thorn in blackletter typeface ⟨𝖞⟩. Thorn had become nearly totally disused by the late early modern English period, the last vestiges of the letter being its ligatures, y^e (thee), y^t (that), y^u (thou), which were still seen occasionally in the 1611 King James Version and in Shakespeare's Folios.
A silent ⟨e⟩ was often appended to words, as in ſpeake and cowarde. The last consonant was sometimes doubled when the ⟨e⟩ was added: hence manne (for man) and runne (for run).
The sound that became Modern English was often written ⟨o⟩ (as in son): hence ſommer, plombe (for modern summer, plumb).
The final syllable of words like public was variously spelt but came to be standardised as -ick. The modern spellings with -ic did not come into use until the mid-18th century.
⟨y⟩ was often used instead of ⟨i⟩ and occasionally instead of ⟨j⟩ (see William Shakespeare's sonnet 19 in the Thomas Thorpe quarto; "Tyger's yawes").
The vowels represented by ⟨ee⟩ and ⟨e_e⟩ (for example in meet and mete) changed, and ⟨ea⟩ became an alternative.

Phonology

The phonology of early modern English is reconstructed from a variety of sources, including phonetic descriptions by orthoepists, spellings, and usage in poetry.

Consonants

Most consonant sounds of early modern English have survived into present-day English; however, there are still a few notable differences in pronunciation:

Many initial consonant clusters which have disappeared in the modern day were still fully pronounced. These include . All but had fully reduced in the 16th and 17th centuries.
- as in write was the first to disappear, merging into in the first half of the 17th century.
- as in knife evolved into a variety of pronunciations including , some of which remained into the 18th century until it merged with .
- Similarly, as in gnat evolved into or merged into or .
- , spelled ⟨wh⟩ such as in what, where and whale, were still pronounced , rather than . That means, for example, that wine and whine were still pronounced differently, unlike in most varieties of English today. A merger into had started by 1700, but did not become common until the late 18th century.
Much variation existed in words with postvocalic , like night, thought, and daughter, written ⟨gh⟩. In Middle English, this phoneme had allophones . While dropped entirely via , either dropped via the same path or became . The most conservative dialects retained the original allophones until the 1630s, but gh-dropping dialects had already started appearing in Middle English. Between the 16th and 17th centuries, became the dominant form of the phoneme.
Would and should had started losing in weak forms by the 1640s, but may have persisted several decades longer in the British American colonies. While the ⟨l⟩ in could is unetymological, having descended from Old English cūþe, both its spelling and its pronunciation were affected by analogy with would and should, showing in its strong forms.
The modern phoneme was not documented as occurring until the mid-17th century, when it formed from coalescence of the sequence . The word vision was pronounced prior to the change.
Early Modern English was rhotic, as postvocalic was not lost until the late 1700s. It was a trill or tap word-initially and an approximant finally, but Dobson and Lass disagree on which was the intervocalic allophone based on different sources.
In Early Modern English, the precise nature of the light and dark variants of the l consonant, respectively and , remains unclear.
Word-final ⟨ng⟩, as in sing, was still pronounced until the late 16th century, when it began to coalesce into the usual modern pronunciation, . Coalescence happened at morpheme boundaries in the 17th century, except in inflected adjectives, giving modern singer and stronger . However, coalescence happened earlier in unstressed -ing and the nasal further changed to , becoming more and more common until the end of the 17th century. The original pronunciation is preserved in parts of England, in dialects such as Brummie, Mancunian and Scouse.
H-dropping at the start of words was common. In loanwords taken from Latin, Greek, or any Romance language, a written h was increasingly pronounced from the 17th to 18th centuries, e.g. in humble, host, and British herb.

Vowels

The following information partially comes from studies of the Great Vowel Shift alongside studies of Early Modern English.

The modern English phoneme , as in glide, rhyme and eye, was , and was reduced word-finally. Early Modern rhymes indicate that was similar to the vowel that was used at the end of words like happy, melody and busy.
, as in now, out and ploughed, was .
, as in fed, elm and hen, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today, sometimes approaching (which is still in the word pretty).
, as in name, case and sake, was a long monophthong. It shifted from to and finally to . Earlier in early modern English, mat and mate were near-homophones, with a longer vowel in the second word. Thus, Shakespeare rhymed words like haste, taste and waste with last and shade with sad. The more open pronunciation remains in some Northern England English and rarely in Irish English. During the 17th century, the phoneme variably merged with the phoneme as in day, weigh, and the merger survived into standard forms of Modern English, though a few dialects kept these vowels distinct at least to the 20th century (see pane–pain merger).
(typically spelled ⟨ee⟩ or ⟨ie⟩) as in see, bee and meet, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today, but it had not yet merged with the phoneme represented by the spellings ⟨ea⟩ or ⟨ei⟩ (and perhaps ⟨ie⟩, particularly with fiend, field and friend), as in east, meal and feat, which were pronounced with or . However, words like breath, dead and head may have already split off towards ).
, as in bib, pin and thick, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today.
, as in stone, bode and yolk, was or . The phoneme was probably just beginning the process of merging with the phoneme , as in grow, know and mow, without yet achieving today's complete merger. The old pronunciation remains in some dialects, such as in Yorkshire, East Anglia, and Scotland.
, as in rod, top and pot, was or , much like the corresponding RP sound.
, as in taut, taught and law was more open than in Standard Southern British, being or (and thus being closer to Welsh and General American )
, as in boy, choice and toy, is even less clear than other vowels. In the late 16th century, the similar but distinct phonemes , and all existed. By the late 17th century, they all merged. Because those phonemes were in such a state of flux during the whole early modern period (with evidence of rhyming occurring among them as well as with the precursor to ), scholars often assume only the most neutral possibility for the pronunciation of as well as its similar phonemes in early modern English: (which, if accurate, would constitute an early instance of the line–loin merger since had not yet fully developed in English).
(as in drum, enough and love) and (as in could, full, put) had not yet split and so were both pronounced in the vicinity of .
occurred not only in words like food, moon and stool, but also all other words spelled with ⟨oo⟩ like blood, cook and foot. However, the vowel for some of those words was shortened at an early stage: either beginning or already in the process of approximating the early modern English . That phonological split among the ⟨oo⟩ words was a catalyst for the later foot–strut split and is called "early shortening" by John C. Wells. The ⟨oo⟩ words that came to be pronounced with the shortened vowel included, for example, good and blood. They, like other words with , were subsequently subject to the foot–strut split and many of them, like drum and love, came to be pronounced with the vowel and eventually . However, the words with a shortened vowel also seem to have included, at least in some pronunciations such as Shakespeare's and at certain stages, some words that are pronounced with the original non-shortened vowel in Present-Day English - e.g. brood, doom and noon. For example, doom and come rhyme in Shakespeare's writing for this reason.
occurred in words spelled with ew or ue such as due and dew. In most dialects of Modern English, it became either , or with yod-dropping so that do, dew and due are now perfect homophones in most American pronunciations, but a distinction between the two phonemes remains in other dialects of English that did not yod-drop. There is an additional complication in dialects with yod-coalescence (such as Australian English and younger RP) where the portion of merges with preceding consonants, resulting in dew and due (homophonous with Jew) being distinguished from do by the initial consonant, without any vowel distinction.

Rhoticity

The r sound (the phoneme ) was probably always pronounced following vowel sounds, as in modern General American, West Country English, Irish English, and Scottish English.

At the beginning of the early modern English period there were three non-open and non-schwa short vowels before in the syllable coda: , and (roughly equivalent to modern , and ; had not yet developed). In London English they gradually merged into a phoneme that became modern , known as the NURSE mergers. While ⟨ur⟩ spellings for ⟨ir⟩ words exist in the 1500s, these are descended from Old English words with the segments and suggesting that they may not be part of the merger. The earliest native speaker to comment on mergers between the classes is John Wallis in 1653, showing a near merger of and , with "turn" and "burn" having the vowel of "dull", and "virtue" with a slightly closer or unrounded vowel. However, a smaller number of speakers merge and instead. The full three-way NURSE mergers only completed in England around 1800.

Specific words

Yes and yet were pronounced approximately as and . Nature was pronounced approximately as and may have rhymed with letter or, early on, even latter. One may have been pronounced own, with both one and other using the era's long GOAT vowel, rather than today's STRUT vowels. Canonized, advertized and gallantry has different stress patterns and Ulysses probably rhymed with says. Tongue derived from the sound of tong and rhymed with song.

Grammar

Pronouns

Early Modern English had two second-person personal pronouns: thou, the informal singular pronoun, and ye, the plural (both formal and informal) pronoun and the formal singular pronoun.

"Thou" and "ye" were both common in the early 16th century (they can be seen, for example, in the disputes over Tyndale's translation of the Bible in the 1520s and the 1530s) but by 1650, "thou" seems old-fashioned or literary. It has effectively completely disappeared from Modern Standard English.

The translators of the King James Version of the Bible (begun 1604 and published 1611, while Shakespeare was at the height of his popularity) had a particular reason for keeping the informal "thou/thee/thy/thine/thyself" forms that were slowly beginning to fall out of spoken use, as it enabled them to match the Hebrew and Ancient Greek distinction between second person singular ("thou") and plural ("ye"). It was not to denote reverence but only to denote the singular (in the King James Version, God addresses individual people and even Satan as "thou"). Over the centuries, however, the very fact that "thou" was dropping out of normal use gave it a special aura and so it gradually and ironically came to be used to express reverence in hymns and in prayers.

Like other personal pronouns, thou and ye have different forms dependent on their grammatical case; specifically, the objective form of thou is thee, its possessive forms are thy and thine, and its reflexive or emphatic form is thyself. The objective form of ye was you, its possessive forms are your and yours and its reflexive or emphatic forms are yourself and yourselves. The older forms "mine" and "thine" had become "my" and "thy" before words beginning with a consonant other than h, and "mine" and "thine" were retained before words beginning with a vowel or an h, as in mine eyes or thine hand.

Verbs

Tense and number

During the early modern period, the verb inflections became simplified as they evolved towards their modern forms:

The third-person singular present lost its alternate inflections: -eth and -th became obsolete, and -s survived. (Both forms can be seen together in Shakespeare: "With her, that hateth thee and hates us all".)
The plural present form became uninflected. Present plurals had been marked with -en and singulars with -th or -s (-th and -s survived the longest, especially with the singular use of is, hath and doth). Marked present plurals were rare throughout the early modern period and -en was probably used only as a stylistic affectation to indicate rural or old-fashioned speech.
The second-person singular indicative was marked in both the present and past tenses with -st or -est (for example, in the past tense, walkedst or gav'st). Since the indicative past was not and still is not otherwise marked for person or number, the loss of thou made the past subjunctive indistinguishable from the indicative past for all verbs except to be.

The modal auxiliaries cemented their distinctive syntactical characteristics during the early modern period. Thus, the use of modals without an infinitive became rare (as in "I must to Coventry"; "I'll none of that"). The use of modals' present participles to indicate aspect (as in "Maeyinge suffer no more the loue & deathe of Aurelio" from 1556), and of their preterite forms to indicate tense (as in "he follow'd Horace so very close, that of necessity he must fall with him") also became uncommon.

Some verbs ceased to function as modals during the early modern period. The present form of must, mote, became obsolete. Dare also lost the syntactical characteristics of a modal auxiliary and evolved a new past form (dared), distinct from the modal durst.

Perfect and progressive forms

The perfect of the verbs had not yet been standardised to use only the auxiliary verb "to have". Some took as their auxiliary verb "to be", such as this example from the King James Version: "But which of you... will say unto him... when he is come from the field, Go and sit down..." [Luke XVII:7]. The rules for the auxiliaries for different verbs were similar to those that are still observed in German and French (see unaccusative verb).

The modern syntax used for the progressive aspect ("I am walking") became dominant by the end of the early modern period, but other forms were also common such as the prefix a- ("I am a-walking") and the infinitive paired with "do" ("I do walk"). Moreover, the to be + -ing verb form could be used to express a passive meaning without any additional markers: "The house is building" could mean "The house is being built".

Vocabulary

A number of words that are still in common use in Modern English have undergone semantic narrowing. The use of the verb "to suffer" in the sense of "to allow" survived into early modern English, as in the phrase "suffer the little children" of the King James Version, but it has mostly been lost in Modern English. This use still exists in the idiom "to suffer fools gladly". Also, this period includes one of the earliest Russian borrowings to English (which is historically a rare occasion itself); at least as early as 1600, the word "steppe" (rus. степь) first appeared in English in William Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is believed that this is a possible indirect borrowing via either German or French. The substantial borrowing of Latin and sometimes Greek words for abstract concepts, begun in Middle English, continued unabated, often terms for abstract concepts not available in English.