Development to Modern English
The
17th century port towns (and their forms of speech) gained in influence over
the old county towns. England experienced a new period of internal peace and
relative stability, encouraging the arts including literature, from around the
1690s onwards. Modern English can be taken to have emerged fully by the
beginning of the Georgian era in 1714, although English orthography remained
somewhat fluid until the publication of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English
Language in 1755.
The
towering importance of William Shakespeare over the other Elizabethan authors
was the result of his reception during the 17th and 18th century, directly
contributing to the development of Standard English. As a consequence,
Shakespeare's plays are familiar and comprehensible today, 400 years after they
were written, [3] but the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland,
written only 200 years earlier, are considerably more difficult for the average
reader.
Orthography
Shakespeare's writings are universally
associated with Early Modern English.
The
orthography of Early Modern English was fairly similar to that of today, but spelling
was unstable. Early Modern English as well as Modern English had inherited
orthographical conventions predating the Great Vowel Shift.
Early
Modern English orthography had a number of features of spelling that have not
been retained:
The
letter <S> had two distinct lowercase forms: <s> (short s) as used
toda
y,
and <ſ> (long s). The short s was used at the end of a word, and the long
s everywhere else, except that the double lowercase S was variously written
<ſſ> or <ſs> (cf. the German ß sligature). This is similar to the
alternation between medial (σ) and final lower case sigma (ς) in Greek.
<u>
and <v> were not yet considered two distinct letters, but different forms
of the same letter. Typographically, <v> was used at the start of a word
and <u> elsewhere; [5] hence vnmoued (for modern unmoved) and loue (for
love).
<i>
and <j> were also not yet considered two distinct letters, but different
forms of the same letter, hence "ioy" for "joy" and
"iust" for "just".
The
letter <Þ> (thorn) was still in use during the Early Modern English
period, though increasingly limited to hand-written texts. In print, <Þ> was
often represented by <Y>.
A
silent <e> was often appended to words. The last consonant was sometimes
doubled when this <e> was appended; hence ſpeake, cowarde, manne (for
man), runne (for run).
The
sound /ʊ/ was often written <o> (as in son); hence ſommer, plombe (for
modern summer, plumb).
Nothing
was standard, however. For example, "Julius Caesar" could be spelled
"Julius Cæſar", "Ivlivs Cæſar", "Jvlivs Cæſar",
or "Iulius Cæſar" and the word "he" could be spelled
"he" or "hee" in the same sentence, as it is found in
Shakespeare's plays.
Grammar
Pronouns
Early
Modern English has two second-person personal pronouns: thou, the informal
singular pronoun, and ye, both the plural pronoun and the formal singular
pronoun. Thou was already falling out of use in the Early Modern English period.
[citation needed]. It remains in customary use in Modern Standard English for
certain solemn occasions such as addressing God, and sometimes for addressing
inferiors, while it remains in regular use in various English dialects. The
translators of the King James Version of the Holy Bible intentionally
preserved, in Early Modern English, archaic pronouns and verb endings that had
already begun to fall out of spoken use. This enabled the English translators
to convey the distinction between the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person singular and
plural verb forms of the original Hebrew and Greek sources.
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.
My
and thy become mine and thine before words beginning with a vowel or the letter
h. More accurately, the older forms "mine" and "thine" had
become "my" and "thy" before words beginning with a
consonant other than "h", while "mine" and
"thine" were retained before words beginning with a vowel or
"h", as in mine eyes or thine hand.
Personal
pronouns in Early Modern English Nominative
Oblique
Genitive
Possessive
1st
person singular I, me my/mine mine
Plural
we us our ours
2nd
person singular informal thou thee thy/thine, thine
plural
or formal singular ye, you you your yours
3rd
person singular he/she/it him/her/it his/her/his (it) his/hers/his
Plural
they them their theirs
^
a b The possessive forms were used as genitives before words beginning with a
vowel sound and letter h (e.g. thine eyes, mine heire). Otherwise,
"my" and "thy" are attributive (my/thy goods) and
"mine" and "thine" are predicative (they are mine/thine).
Shakespeare pokes fun at this custom with an archaic plural for eyes when the
character Bottom says "mine eyen" in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
^
a b From the early Early Modern English period up until the 17th century, his
was the possessive of the third person neuter it as well as of the third person
masculine he. Genitive "it" appears once in the 1611 King James Bible
(Leviticus 25:5) as groweth of it owne accord.
Verbs
Marking
tense and number
During
the Early Modern period, English verb inflections became simplified as they
evolved towards their modern forms:
The
third person singular present lost its alternate inflections; '-(e)th' became
obsolete while -s survived. (The alternate forms' coexistence can be seen in
Shakespeare's phrase, "With her, that hateth thee and hates vs all").
The
plural present form became uninflected. Present plurals had been marked with
-en, -th, or -s (-th and -s survived the longest, especially with the plural
use of is, hath, and doth). Marked present plurals were rare throughout the
Early Modern period, though, and -en was probably only used as a stylistic
affectation to indicate rural or old-fashioned speech.
The
second person singular 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 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.
Modal auxiliaries
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, mot, became obsolete. Dare also lost the syntactical
characteristics of a modal auxiliary, evolving a new past form (dared) distinct
from the modal durst.
Perfect and progressive forms
The
perfect of the verbs had not yet been standardized to use uniformly the
auxiliary verb "to have". Some took as their auxiliary verb "to
be", as in this example from the King James Bible, "But which of you
... will say unto him ... when he is come from the field, Go and sit
down..." [Luke XVII:7]. The rules that determined which verbs took which
auxiliaries were similar to those 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. These included 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 which remained in common use in Modern English have undergone
semantic narrowing. An example would be the verb to suffer, which literally
means "to endure pain or hardship" (used alongside the native to
thole), but which since the 14th century could carry the extended meaning of
"to allow, to permit", similar to suffrage today. This sense survived
into Early Modern English, as in the Suffer the little children of the King
James Bible, but has mostly been lost in Modern English.
No comments:
Post a Comment