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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