Early Modern English

The late Middle Ages had seen the restoration of English as a major literary language in England, and the beginnings of
the establishment of a standard form of written English.
However, Latin still had great prestige as the language of international learning, and it was a long time before English
replaced it in all fields.
The 3 greatest scientific works published by Englishmen were all in Latin:

· Gilbert’s book on magnetism (1600),

· Harvey’s on the circulation of the blood (1628) and
· Newton’s Principia (1689).

English vs. Latin

In the supplanting of Latin and the final establishment of English as the sole literary medium in England, there are 3
factors to consider:

· Religious disputes (15th – 17th century)

 Thomas More, Utopia (1516) and Milton wrote books and pamphlets in English.
 The translation of the Bible into English.
 The changeover from Latin to English in church services raised the prestige of English as well.

· Increase in national feeling national L

Nationalism led to conscious efforts to create a vernacular literature to vie with that of Greece and Rome, and both
Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) were conscious attempts to do for English what
Homer and Virgil had done for Greek and Latin.

· Rise of social groups which had little or no Latin

Here an important part was played by the introduction of printing in the late 15 th century.
The level of female literacy around 1500 has been calculated at 1%, as opposed to 10% of the male population.

Opposition
On the other hand, there were social groups which fought hard for the retention of Latin, particularly medical works
published in English. This led to fierce controversy about the suitability of English for works of science and scholarship;
nevertheless, we see the constant influence of Latin literature, Latin rhetorical theories and the Latin language.

Loanwords from Latin

The flood of Latin loanwords peaked in the period between 1580 and 1660.
English invaded a field of discourse in 3 stages (rhetoric, logic, geometry, classical history, warfare):
1. translations of standard Latin works
2. original English works deeply indebted to Latin originals
3. entirely independent English works
In this process, there was a strong tendency for writers to invent English technical terms by adapting those of the Latin
originals.
There was also a ‘purist’ movement which attacked the use of loanwords, and advocated the coining of new technical
terms from native elements (Ralph Lever invented such words as endsay ‘conclusion’, saywhat ‘definition’).
None of these coinages caught on. -

Inkhorn terms
Two different motives for the loans:
- a necessity - because the language needs new words to say new things;
- fashion and prestige - a sign of education or of social superiority
Such pompous words were called inkhorn terms, and were frequently ridiculed by Thomas Wilson and Ben Jonson
(turgiduous ‘swollen’). However, some of them have been fully accepted and made it to contemporary English:
reciprocal, retrograde.
The Remodeling of Words
Not only did Latin influence bring in new words; it also caused existing words to be reshaped in accordance with their real
or supposed Latin etymology.
We owe the b in our modern spelling of debt and doubt to Renaissance etymologizing, for the earlier spellings were dette
and doute, which were their forms in Old French; the b was inserted through the influence of Latin debitum and dubitāre.
Thus in Middle English we find the words assaut, aventure, descrive, parfit and verdit, which in the Renaissance were
remodeled under Latin influence to assault, adventure, describe, perfect and verdict.

Loanwords from other Ls

Although Latin was by far the main source of loanwords in the early modern period, a number were borrowed from other
Ls too.
The next largest source after Latin was French; then Greek, Italian, Spanish and Dutch.

Word-formation
Despite the entering of loans into the L, words nevertheless continued to be coined from existing English language-
material by traditional methods of word-formation, especially affixation, compounding and conversion.

By far the commonest method of word-formation in the early modern period was affixation, that is, the coining of new
words by the use of prefixes and suffixes (-ness and -er).
A considerable number of words were formed by compounding, that is, the combination of two or more free morphemes.
They are nearly all Ns (N + N, Adj + N, V + O).
The third reasonably common type of word-formation was conversion, the process by which one word is derived from
another with no change of form (NV, AdjN, VN).
IMPORTANT
Early Modern English Grammar
Some of the grammatical features of the period can be illustrated by an excerpt from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1
(1597).
· In the 3rd person singular, the passage has -es (rides), but also the -eth morpheme (hath, judgeth)
· The use of the subjunctive in Early Modern English was normal even in colloquial styles (‘if he haue robd these
men’).
· Noun-plurals ending in –es, (masters, markes).
· A demonstrative yon, or yond(er) – ‘remote from both speaker and hearer’.
· There was a choice between you and thou – thou was the emotionally charged form: it could be used to express
intimacy and affection.
· The introduction of proN its - the traditional possessive form of it was his, but its spread very rapidly.
· Modern English used the ordinary proNs, not forms with -self; (‘ile hide me’); these were reserved for the
intensive or emphatic use (as in the Prince’s ‘I my selfe’).
· The perfect tense formed with have (‘if he haue robd these men’) - the action of the verb as a continuing process;
in perfects with be, the concern is the situation that has arisen as a result of the action of the verb (‘they are come
to search the house’).
· V-S and V-S-O orders were not uncommon.
V-S never disappeared completely (Never before have I tasted such…).

The Dummy Auxiliary

An auxiliary do was used in Early Modern English, but its use was not restricted as it is today.
In present-day English, auxiliaries have 4 key uses:
· They are used immediately before not when a sentence is made negative.
· They are used before the subject of a sentence to form Qs.
· They are used in echo-repetitions (Q tags).
· When stressed they are used to assert emphatically the truth of the sentence as a whole - sentence-emphasis (John
will come).

The widespread use of do as dummy auxiliary dates from early modern times, but the present-day restriction in its use had
not been reached in Shakespeare’s time.
IMPORTANT
Changes in Pronunciation
The biggest changes were in the vowel system - Great Vowel Shift - a change in the quality of all the long vowels (early
15th – late 17th century).
All vowels became closer in quality, except for the two which were already as close as they could be. These two became
diphthongized.

Strong and Weak Forms

These phonological changes of Middle English and Early Modern English apply to stressed syllables.
In unstressed syllables, the changes were often different:
· long vowels were shortened,
· short vowels reduced to /ǝ/ or /ɪ/
· consonants lost or, in initial or final position, voiced

Depending on the stress some words developed double forms, which are usually called strong and weak forms.
(a-n-d ‘/ænd/’ – this is a strong form, however, more often, in normal speech, we use a weak form, /ǝnd/,[ǝn], or even
just /n/)

Regional Variation
The standard written variety of English that had emerged in the 15 th century was used for printed texts in England.
In Scotland, printed texts still had some features of Scots:
· the use of quh- where English texts would have wh- (quhilk for which);
· -it rather than -ed in past-tense endings;
· present participle -and for English -ing

After the Union of the Crowns in 1603, texts printed in Scotland were increasingly anglicized. Although written English
had thus been standardized, the spoken language was much more variable.
There was a consensus emerging that the English spoken by educated people around London is more prestigious than any
other variety. The prestige model being recommended to the aspiring poet is that of London and the Home Counties.
Regional pronunciations became increasingly stigmatized during the late modern period.
There was also awareness of different national varieties of English in this period.