Modern English
On
the cusp between late Middle and early Modern English are texts like the Paston
family letters, mostly from the 1450s-1480s. Here is a letter from an English
gentlewoman named Agnes Paston to her son John in London, written in 1465.
Paston lived in Norwich in East Anglia, not far north of London today, but
quite a distance to travel 533 years ago.
"Tho
my wele be-louyd son John Paston be þis delyuered in haste.
Sonne,
I grete 3ow wele and lete 3ow wete þat, for as myche as 3oure broþir Clement
leteth me wete þat 3e desyre feythfully my blyssyng, þat blyssyng þat I prayed
3oure fadir to gyffe 3ow þe laste day þat euer he spakke, and þe blyssyng of
all seyntes vndir heven, and myn, mote come to 3ow all dayes and tymes. And
thynke veryly non oþer but þat 3e haue it, and shal haue it wyth þat þat I
fynde 3ow kynde and wyllyng to þe wele of 3oure fadres soule and to þe welfare
of 3oure breþeren. Be my counseyle, dyspose 3oure-selfe as myche as 3e may to
haue lesse to do in þe worlde, 3oure fadyr sayde, 'In lityl bysynes lyeth myche
reste.' þis worlde is but a þorugh-fare and ful of woo, and whan we departe
þer-fro, ri3th nou3ght bere wyth vs but oure good dedys and ylle. And þer
knoweth no man how soon God woll clepe hym, and þer-for it is good for euery
creature to be redy. Qhom God vysyteth, him he louyth. And as for 3oure
breþeren, þei wylle I knowe certeynly laboren all þat in hem lyeth for 3ow.
Oure Lorde haue 3ow in his blyssed kepyng, body and soule. Writen at Norwyche
þe xxix day of Octobyr. "
The
main difficulties we have in reading this text are the variable spelling
(remember that this text comes from before the introduction of printing to
Britain) and the use of the letters þ "thorn" (which we'd now spell
"th") and 3 "yogh," which mostly in this passage would be
the modern consonant "y." With those spelling changes in mind, we can
see that this is still very much English--very little vocabulary is strange
here, especially if you know a little Old or Middle English.
The
spelling and usage of Paston's text looks odd to us, for one thing, because it
was written just a few years before printing was introduced to England by
William Caxton in the 1470s. (If you had never seen a printed book, your
spelling wouldn't be too good either.) When government documents and literary
texts began to be printed in London and distributed across England, the process
of standardization begun by the Chancery clerks in the early 1400s moved into a
modern and high-tech mode.
The
pronunciation of words has (probably) also changed since Paston's time, and in
fact may have been changing in her neighborhood during her lifetime. The most
significant of these phonological changes is probably the Great Vowel Shift.
Even as printing helped to freeze the spelling of English vowels in the 1400s,
people continued to drift in their spoken language, to adopt new values for the
vowels they used.
One
element of the Great Vowel Shift had begun to move in Early Middle English.
Recall that the vowel in stone, home, and road is, in Old English, a low back
vowel: stan, ham, rad. In Middle English, this vowel had moved up to the
position now present in Standard Modern caught or bought. (The words were
variously spelled in Middle English: stoon, hoom, road, rod, stane, hame can
all be observed.)
In
Standard Modern American English, of course, the vowel in these words is /o/
--it has gone up still further since the Middle English period. That's the
basis of the whole Great Vowel Shift. It is a moving-up of positions of long
vowels.
So
in Old and Middle English we have words like bote, fode (boot, food); nu, hus
(now, house); make and take (with a "Spanish" value for
"a"); me and thee (with a "Spanish" value for
"e"), and like and mind (with a "Spanish" value for
"i"). Along with stoon and home, these words illustrate the six major
shifts of the Great Vowel Shift.
Why
is this interesting? First, because it explains why the letters for the front
vowels a, e, and i have such different values in Spanish, French, Italian and
German than they do in English. Second, because vowel shifts are still going
on. For instance, the Standard American pronunciation of stone and home is /ow/
but the Received Pronunciation reflects yet another shift in the vowel, to a
much different diphthong. The American pronunciation is conservative; the RP
has shifted since Early Modern English.
The
century 1450-1550 is never much studied in English Lit courses. There was a
good deal written in English during this period, both poetry and prose. Steven
Reimer says that "there is a growing consensus that the fifteenth-century
in English literature is not the literary wasteland of bad Chaucer
impersonators as it has been traditionally characterized. There is in
fifteenth-century English poetry a range of genre, theme, and tone which is
worthy of serious study, and much of that poetry is actually European in
inspiration and context rather than Chaucerian." He mentions Lydgate from
the early 1400s especially. But the great age of early Modern English
literature is generally seen to come after the mid-1500s. Much of the reason
for this is, again, institutional. The century 1450-1550 saw great upheaval in
England, politically, dynastically, and ecclesiastically. For all the upheaval
of Chaucer's lifetime, it was fairly clear to him that the next king would be
like the old one and that he would continue to be a Roman Catholic and get his
stipend from the government. With the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation
that followed, English people could not be quite so sure. Until the flourishing
of Tudor court culture in the mid-1500s, a stable system of patronage and
audience was hard to guarantee.
Under
Elizabeth I (born 1533, reigned 1558-1603), a massive court apparatus and a
strong Protestant government led to a great "English Renaissance" of
letters. Under Elizabeth's successor James I (reigned 1603-1625), the process
of standardizing Protestant worship led to the definitive Bible translation of
1611, the "King James Bible." The Bible and Shakespeare are major
factors in the standardization of Early Modern English. The King James Version
was the standard Bible in English for almost 300 years, and remains a powerful
influence on 21st-century English. Shakespeare, in his own day, was just
another popular playwright, one of many whose works were revived after the
reopening of English theatres in 1660; but the 18th and 19th centuries made him
the supreme English literary writer, and his influence on popular culture and
education continues strong in the 21st century.
Shakespeare
wrote at a time of quick and thorough standardization of written English. His
characters, unlike Chaucer's, have a keen sense of standard English, and in
plays like the Henry IV series or King Lear, you can see dialects other than
London standard being represented as sub-standard: "clownish,"
inferior. Some Internet and print sources will tell you that Shakespeare added
innumerable phrases and words to the English language, but that's not really
so; his impact comes slightly from his own very large vocabulary, which was "sticky"
as well as inventive (he represents an unusually large slice of the usage of
his own times), but it comes much more from the social decision to revere him
as the greatest English author. Harold Bloom would have you believe that
Shakespeare changed the entire moral and cognitive psychology of the Western
world, but that's nonsense. When did he do that, exactly? Shakespeare has been
an important part of world culture, but hardly ever a dominant part--unless you're
a professor of English.
Modern
English, since about 1650, has been more stable than any previous stage in the
history of the English language. If you compare the English of 1300 to the
English of 1650, and then the English of 1650 to that of 2000--well, there's
just no comparison. The various non-standardized dialects of 1300 are remote
from the standardized language of 1650, but the English of 1650 is near enough
to our own to need no "translation" and hardly any adaptation. The
poetry of John Milton, for instance, from the 1650s is difficult for modern
readers, but only because it expresses difficult concepts in deliberately
thorny language.
When
I consider how my light is spent
Ere
half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And
that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged
with me useless, though my soul more bent
To
serve therewith my Maker, and present
My
true account, lest he returning chide,-
Doth
God exact day-labor, light denied?
I
fondly ask:-But Patience, to prevent
That
murmur, soon replies; God doth not need
Either
man's work, or his own gifts: who best
Bear
his mild yoke, they serve him best: His state
Is
kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And
post o'er land and ocean without rest:-
They
also serve who only stand and wait.
The
syntax of this sonnet may seem tortuous, but only because it is poetic; every
word is common today (though some like "fondly," which for Milton
meant "foolishly," have shifted in meaning). This is Modern English,
from 350 years ago. There have been few major changes in the pronunciation and
morphology of Standard English since Milton's day--I mean relative to the great
changes in the three centuries before Milton. Even the word "doth" in
Milton's sonnet above is slightly archaic, "poetic" for the
mid-1600s. We wouldn't say "lest" anymore except in a formulaic
phrase like "lest we forget."
Two
significant changes since 1650 or so are the loss of the second-person singular
pronoun and a vowel-shift in the RP "ask" words. In Shakespeare's English,
"thou" and "you" are quite distinct. "You" is
both the plural form and the form used in respectful address. When people
addressed others of higher rank, when children addressed adults, when they
addressed a stranger whom they wanted to show respect, they would say
"you." To close friends, children, social inferiors, and to God, the
pronoun of address was "thou."
In
many ways, English of the early 1600s was much like French today--the plural
2nd-person form was also the polite form of address to one person. English
speakers alternated very purposefully between "thou" and
"you," as French speakers do today between tu and vous. (Cf. the
pattern in Mexican Spanish, which has tu and both singular and plural polite
forms (Usted and Ustedes).
By
the early 1700s, "thou" was almost unknown--so much so that
contemporary memoirs by Friends, like the American Elizabeth Ashbridge, who
died in 1755, recount incidents like this one:
In
this Condition I continued till my Husband came, & then began the Tryal of
my Faith. Before he reached me he heard I was turned Quaker, at which he
stampt, saying, "I'd rather heard She had been dead as well as I Love her,
for if so, all my comfort is gone." He then came to me & had not seen
me before for four Months. I got up & met him saying, "My Dear, I am
glad to see thee," at which he flew in a Passion of anger & said,
"the Divel thee thee, don't thee me."
By
the early 1700s, use of "thou" and "thee" was a sign of
belonging to the Society of Friends--unless you were addressing God in prayer
or public worship, where the older sense of God as "thou" has
persisted till very recently and still has a place in hymns and the King James
Bible.
What
happened? The linguistic change here reveals a social change--the breakdown of
a hierarchy of respect that is still deeply encoded in Europe. It's hard to
specify an exact origin or course of events, but we simply have chosen to
eliminate the familiar form, to treat all people, including strangers and
children, with respect. In a sense, we lack a form to use to social
"inferiors," perhaps because the concept of social inferiority,
though alive and well in English-speaking countries today, is now considered
somewhat "unspeakable."
The
second change is more trivial but interesting. In the early 1800s, another
smaller vowel shift occurred in British English, between an older /æ/ and a
newer /a/ before certain consonant clusters. Say the words "gas
mask." If you are a native speaker of American English, you probably have
an /æ/ in both words. Speakers of the RP, by contrast, have /æ/ in
"gas" and /a/ in "mask." Speakers from the West Indies or
from India frequently have /a/ in both words.
And
if you have /a/ in "gas" and /æ/ in "mask"? You are doing a
bad American attempt at a British accent. :-)
Some
of the references in the last paragraph, of course, point to our next
direction: the consideration of English as a world language. In the reign of
Elizabeth, the English government, though an international player, was largely
concerned with its own island, and not the whole of that--Scotland being a
co-equal and sometimes ornery neighbor. James, I was also King of Scotland, and
the thrones were officially united in 1701; the throne of Ireland was united to
that of Britain in 1798. As this consolidation went on at home, Britain won and
lost empires overseas--America and the West Indies in the 1600s, India in the
1700s and 1800s, Australia in the 1800s, and Africa in the 1800s and 1900s.
From the margins of Western Europe, the English language came into common use
on all the world's continents. England also became the world's greatest
economic power, the motor of the expansion of capitalism that we call the
Industrial Revolution in the 1700s and 1800s. One of the driving forces in this
imperialist expansion was the homogeneity of standard written English.
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