Early Modern English (1500-1800) and Modern English (1900-present)

Old English, Anglo-Saxon Period

(450-1100 A.D.)

Historical Background:

• Neolithic period, c. 4000 BC, agriculture, mound tombs
• Bronze Age, Indo-European language, burial with drinking vessels, flint, metal, Stonehenge III, 2300 BC
• farms, circular huts, oblong fields 1200 BC
• Celtic inhabitants arrived around 750 BC, hill forts
• Iron Age, population growth, 650 BC
• Belgian Gaul migrations, coins, potter's wheel, cremation 100 BC
• Julius Caesar invades Britain, 55 BC
• 43/50 AD Claudius, Roman conquest; Romanization/Christianization, Latin
• conquest of Wales completed 78 AD
• Hadrian's Wall, 122-130 AD
• Roman departure 410 AD, Britain besieged by Picts, Scots and Saxons
• British leader Vortigern invites Saxons (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) into alliance against Picts, Scots and Roman Catholic factions
• Saxons rebel against Britons 442
• Large-scale Germanic invasions (Angles, Saxons, Jutes), 449; British resistance, King Arthur, Mt. Badon British victory 500; but Anglo-Saxons in control by sixth century
• Gildas, De Excidio Britanniae, 540, historical account of the fall of Britain
• Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy: Northumberland, East Anglia, Mercia, Essex, Kent, Sussex, Wessex; seventh century Northumbrian dominance, eighth century Mercian dominance, ninth/tenth century West Saxon dominance
• Pope Gregory sends St. Augustine to Kent 597; Aethelbert I of Kent, converted to Christianity by Augustine, first Christian king of Anglo-Saxon England, also compiled law code (definitions and rules of kinship, wergild, slaves and freemen/ceorl, nobles); Christianization of Anglo-Saxons by Roman and Irish missionaries
• cenotaph of East-Anglian Raedwald at Sutton Hoo, 625
• Caedmon, oldest poetic vernacular work ("Hymn of Creation", c. 670)
• Lindisfarne Gospels, 698, Latin Vulgate text with interlined Old English paraphrase
• Venerable Bede (673-735), Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum
• Mercian King Offa (757-796); Alcuin of York (732-804), high level of scholarship
• first Viking attacks 787, sack of Lindisfarne Priory 793
• King Alfred (849-899), revival of learning, Anglo Saxon Chronicle, victories over Vikings at Ashdown 871, Edington 878, Treaty of Wedmore 878, Danish king Guthrum forced to accept Christianity and retreat to Danelaw
• second half of tenth century: Dunstan, Ethelwold, Oswald, monastic reform, copying of manuscripts
• Battle of Maldon 991
• Aethelred II Unraed (978-1016); peak of monastic and literary revival: Aelfric (955-1020), Catholic Homilies, Lives of the Saints; Wulfstan d. 1023, Sermo Lupi ad Anglos
• early eleventh century renewed Norse invasions
• Danish King Cnut r. 1016-1035
• Edward the Confessor r. 1042-1066
• William the Conqueror, Battle of Hastings 1066, end of Anglo-Saxon Period

Old English

West Saxon literary dialect

Phonology

Old English consonants (p. 83)

Old English consonant changes from Common Germanic /k/ and /sk/. Examples:

• claene, crypel, corn (before a consonant or back vowel)
• ceap, cild, dic (next to a front vowel) (new sound)
• fisc, wascan, scearp (from Germanic /sk/; in all environments) (new sound)

Old English consonant changes from Common Germanic /g/ and /gg/. Examples

• graes, god, gyltig (before consonants, back vowels, and mutated front vowels)
• sagu, beorg, fylgan (between back vowels or after /l/ or /r/)
• gear, giet, gellan (before or between front vowels and in final position after a front vowel)
• brycg, secg, mycg (from Germanic /gg/; in medial or final position) (new sound)

no phonemic voiced fricatives as in PDE (/v/, /z/, etc)

OE /h/. Examples:

• hraefn, hand (similar to PDE, in initial position before vowels and l, r, n, w)
• sihp (palatal fricative after front vowels)
• eahta, heah, purh (elsewhere, velar fricative)

loss of OE consonant clusters (/hr/, /hl/, /hn/, /hw/, /kn/, /gn/) in PDE (Examples: OE hraefn, PDE raven, OE hlud, PDE loud; sometimes still spelled: what, whale, whistle, knee, gnat)

unstressed final m, n > n

relative stability of English consonant system for past 1200 years

Old English Vowels (p. 88)

Some changes from Common Germanic:

• breaking or fracture (a kind of diphthongization involving the insertion of a glide after front vowels and before velar consonants. Examples: fehtan>feohtan, hærd>heard)
• back mutation (diphthongization of stressed short vowels when followed by back vowel in next syllable, e.g. hefon>heofon)
• palatal diphthongization (e > ie and ae > ea after palatal consonants, e.g. giefan, gieldan, giet, sceaft, gear)
• front mutation (i-umlaut, i/j mutation) (if stressed syllable followed by unstressed syllable containing i or j, the vowel of stressed syllable was fronted or raised, e.g. OE dom/deman, Gothic doms/domjan; OE plural endings with i resulted in foot/feet, other plurals men, teeth, geese, lice; in comparatives/superlatives: old/elder; derived weak verbs, sit/set, lie/lay, fall/fell, whole/heal, doom/deem; 2nd and 3rd person singular present indicatives of strong verbs had i in endings, cuman/cymp, feohtan/fyht, standan/stent

reduction of vowels in unstressed inflectional endings

Prosody

OE verse, alliteration, stress-timed line, root syllable took major stress; compounds stressed on first element

Graphics

beginning of Christian era, Germanic alphabet, Futhorc or runic alphabet (p. 90), derived from Greek/Latin alphabets, 24 symbols; Ruthwell Cross, 8th c. inscribed in runes with portion of "Dream of the Rood"; sixth c. Christianization of England led to adoption of Latin alphabet; influence of Irish practice, Insular alphabet, special characters for f, g, r, s (p. 91).

Punctuation: raised point to indicate pause; semicolon and inverted semicolon (punctus elevatus) also indicated pause; no capitals/lowercase distinction

Morphology

loss of inflections: reduction of vowels in inflectional endings, need for syntactical support, adaptation of imported words, inflections in form of suffixes

Old English noun declensions (p. 97)

Adjective declensions: definite/weak declension (needing demonstrative, numeral, or possessive pronoun), indefinite/strong declension ( p. 99)

Personal pronouns (p. 100)

Demonstrative pronouns (p. 101)

Interrogative pronouns (p. 101)

Other pronouns (indeclinable pe, indefinite pronouns: aelc, hwilc, aenig, eall, nan, swilc, sum, man)

Verbs

• inflected for tense, person, number, and mood; two tenses: present and preterite
• Strong verbs: seven subclasses, ablaut system, four principal parts (infinitive, past sing., past plural, past participle)(p. 103, 104)
• Weak verbs: Germanic innovation (dental preterite), led to regular verbs in PDE (p. 104)
• Other verbs: irregular, beon/wesan, don, willan, gan; preterite-present verbs (sculan, cunnan, magan, agan, ic dearr, durfan), ancestors of Present Day English modal auxiliaries (shall, can, may, ought, dare, must)

Uninflected words

prepositions (to, for, be, in, under, ofer, mid, wip, fram, geond, purh, ymbe, of)

conjunctions (and, ac, gif, peah, forpæm, see also correlative conjunctions, p. 105)

adverbs (ofer, under, on, purh, æfter, ne, eac, næfre, hider, to)

• formed by addition of -an to other words (innan, feorran, sippan)
• formed through inflection in genitive/dative of other words (ealles, geara, hwilum)
• formed by adding -e or -lice to adjective (rihte, rihtlice),

interjections (la, eala, whæt)

Syntax

modifiers close to modified word

prepositions preceded objects

interrogative formed by inverting the subject and the verb

SVO order in main declarative clauses, SOV in dependent clauses, VSO in interrogative and imperative clauses;

parataxis vs hypotaxis: less subordination than in PDE (hypotaxis) , simple links with conjunctions (parataxis) and, pa, some subordination with pa, gif, forpan

use of apposition/variation in poetry

idioms: correlative comparative ("the bigger, the better"), genitive with numerals (twentig geara), some Latinisms

Lexicon

Indo-European or Germanic, IE: basic words, 1-10 numerals, kinship terms; some words found only in Germanic/West Germanic languages: baec, ban, folc, grund, rotian, seoc, swellan, werig, wif, broc, crafian, idel, cniht, sona, weod)

few Celtic borrowings, some place names (Thames, Dover, London, Cornwall, Carlisle)

some Scandinavian influence

major Latin influence (words for religious, intellectual concepts/activities, plants, calques or loan translations)

formation of new words:

• compounding: noun+noun (sunbeam), adjective+noun (yfelweorc), adverb+noun (innefeoh), compound adjectives (isceald, wishydig), some compound adverbs (neafre, eallmaest), compound verbs (goldhordian)
• prefixing, ge-: past participles, perfective sense, association in nouns, derivation from verb
• abstract nouns with -nes, -ung, -dom, -scipe, etc.
• agent nouns with -end, -a, -bora, -ere, -estre
• adjective suffixes: -ig, -lic, -ful, -leas, -ed, -isc, -sum, etc.
• prefixes: un-, in-, ofer-, æfter-, fore-, mis-, under-, etc.

loss in PDE of large part of OE vocabulary due to sound changes, reductions, confusions with other words, cultural and technological change, taboo, chain reactions in semantic changes, dialectal differences, fashion

Semantics

relation to culture and ways of interpreting the world

terms for kinship (OE ego-oriented, nuclear family, little distinction beyond nuclear family, no separate terms for marriage relationship, distinction between paternal and maternal relatives)

color (infrequent use of terms for hue, frenquent reference saturation, lightness, luster, scintillation)

semantic change: generalization and narrowing, amelioration and pejoration, strengthening and weakening, shift in stylistic level, shift in denotation

Dialects

Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, Kentish; phonological differences; north lost inflectional endings earlier than the south; heavier use of diphthongs and extensive palatalization of velar consonants in West Saxon areas

Literature

literacy among the clergy, use of vellum, hand copying, command of Latin, English and Irish/Gaelic by the literate, anonymity of texts, religious literature, translations from Latin; prose: King Alfred's translations of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care, Boethius's Consolations of Philosophy, biblical translations, compilation of Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Aelfric (955-1020): sermons, homilies, saints' lives; Wulfstan (d. 1023): Sermon to the English; verse, four-stress alliterative line with caesura (alliteration determined by first stressed word in second half-line, formulaic style, recurring images (eagle, wolf, ice, snow), kennings (e.g. swan-road); earliest verse: Caedmon's hymn late 7th c., epic: Beowulf, elegies: The Wanderer, The Seafarer.

Middle English

Middle English

• French influence
• Scandinavian influence
• loss of inflections
• less free in word order
• loss of grammatical gender
• more phonetic spelling
• final -e pronounced, as well as all consonants
• resurrection of English in 13th and 14th c.
• dialects: Northern, Midland, Southern, Kentish
• dominance of London dialect (East Midland)

Middle English Subperiods

Decline of English

• Norman invasion (1066), French conquest and unification of England; Norman = North-man, descendants of Danes, spoke French influenced by Germanic dialect
• William in full control of England within ten years
• death of many Anglo-Saxon nobles
• end of internal conflicts and Viking invasions; control of the Welsh
• Frenchmen in all high offices
• Anglo Saxon Chronicle written until 1154
• imposition of feudal system, vassalage, peasants bound to the land
• increase in dialectal differences
• kings of England spoke French, took French wives and lived mostly in France, French-speaking court
• Henry II Plantagenet (r. 1154-1189), married to Eleanor of Aquitaine, father of Richard I, the Lionheart (r. 1189-1199) and John Lackland
• assassination of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket in 1170
• lack of prestige of English; Latin was written language of the Church and secular documents; Scandinavian still spoken in the Danelaw, Celtic languages prevailed in Wales and Scotland
• development of bilingualism among Norman officials, supervisors, some marriages of French and English, bilingual children
• examples of French words: tax, estate, trouble, duty, pay, table, boil, serve, roast, dine, religion, savior; pray, trinity
• very little written English from this period

Rise of English

• King John (John Lackland) (r. 1199-1216), loss of Normandy in 1204
• many Norman landholders chose to stay in England, spoke Anglo-French dialect
• barons revolt against John, Magna Carta (1215), origins and development of Parliament
• Henry III (r. 1216-1272), son of John; francophilia of Henry III, many Frenchmen given official positions
• Edward I (r. 1272-1307), son of Henry III, conquered Wales and waged war with Scotland
• decline of French cultural dominance in England
• rise in use of English, smoothing out of dialectal differences, beginning of standard English based on London dialect; crusades, pilgrimages contributed to increase in communication and formation of common language.

Dominance of English

• French remained official language of England until second half of 14th c.; by mid to late 14th c. English was normal medium of instruction; in 1362 English became official language of legal proceedings, everyone in England spoke English by end of 14th c., displacing of French, Norse, and Celtic languages
• persistence of dialectal differences, increase in English writing, more common in legal documents than French or Latin by 15th c.
• emergence of London/East Midland dialect as standard spoken and written language, compromise dialect, London as commercial center, seaport, proximity to Westminster court
• printers' activity (William Caxton 1474), increased literacy
• Edward III (Windsor) (r. 1327-1377), his claim to French throne led to Hundred Years' War (1337-1453), English victories at Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), Agincourt (1415), role of Joan of Arc (1429), eventual French victory, loss of all English continental holdings, French no longer significant to the English
• Black Death 1348-1351, death of one third of English population, social chaos, labor shortages, emancipation of peasants, wage increases, rise in prestige of English as language of working classes
• Richard II (1377-1399) (grandson of Edward III), John of Gaunt (1340-1399) (son of Edward III), Richard II deposed by Henry IV (Bolingbroke)
• War of the Roses (1455-1485), York vs. Lancaster, Richard Duke of York vs. Henry VI
• Henry VI executed 1471
• Edward II's brother Richard III (1483-85) killed by Lancastrian Henry VII (Tudor), Henry marries Elizabeth of York (daughter of Edward IV), fathers Henry VIII;
• 1509 begins reign of Henry VIII, end of Middle English period

Middle English Phonology

not much English writing during 1100-1200 period; match between sound and spelling worsened; influence of French scribes, confusion in spelling system; new standard English not a direct descendant of West Saxon

Consonants

• consonant inventory much like that of Present Day English except for sounds in hu/ng/ (velar nasal) and mea/s/ure (alveo-palatal voiced fricative)
• addition of phonemic voiced fricatives: v, , z; effect of French loanwords: vetch/fetch, view/few, vile/file
• voiceless fricative /h/ had velar (ME thurh) and alveo-palatal (ME niht) allophones
• loss of long consonants (OE mann )
• h lost in clusters, OE hlæfdige>ME ladi, OE hnecca>ME necke, OE hræfn>ME raven
• voiced velar fricative allophone of g (normally a voiced velar stop in OE) became w after l and r: OE swelgan>ME swolwen, OE feolaga>ME felawe, OE morgen>ME morwen, OE sorg>ME sorow
• OE prefix ge- lost initial consonant and was reduced to y or i: OE genog>ME inough, OE genumen>ME inomen
• unstressed final consonants tended to be lost after a vowel: OE ic>ME i, OE -lic>ME ly
• final -n in many verbal forms (infinitive, plural subjunctive, plural preterite) was lost (remains in some past participles of strong verbs: seen, gone, taken); final -n also lost in possessive adjectives my and thy and indefinite article 'an' before words beginning with consonant (-n remained in the possessive pronouns)
• w dropped after s or t: OE sweostor> sister, OE swilc>such (sometimes retained in spelling: sword, two; sometimes still pronounced: swallow, twin, swim)
• l was lost in the vicinity of palatal c in adjectival pronouns OE ælc, swilc, hwilc, micel> each, such, which, much (sometimes remained: filch, milch)
• fricative v tended to drop out before consonant+consonant or vowel+consonant: OE hlaford, hlæfdige, heafod, hæfde>ME lord, ladi, hed, hadde (sometimes retained: OE heofon, hræfn, dreflian>heaven, raven, drivel)
• final b lost after m but retained in spelling: lamb, comb, climb (remained in medial position: timber, amble); intrusive b after m and before consonant: OE bremel, næmel, æmerge>ME bremble, nimble, ember (also OE puma>ME thombe)
• intrusive d after n in final position or before resonant: OE dwinan, punor > ME dwindle, thunder
• intrusive t after s in final position or before resonant: OE hlysnan, behæs > ME listnen, beheste
• initial stops in clusters gn- and kn- still pronounced: ME gnat, gnawen, knowen, knave
• h often lost in unstressed positions: OE hit>ME it

Vowels

loss of OE y and æ: y unrounded to i; æ raised toward e or lowered toward a

all OE diphthongs became pure vowels

addition of schwa; schwa in unstressed syllables, reduction of all unstressed vowels to schwa or i as in K/i/d, reason for ultimate loss of most inflections; a source of schwa was epenthetic or parasitic vowel between two consonants, generally spelled e (OE setl, æfre, swefn> ME setel, ever, sweven)

French loanwords added several new diphthongs (e.g. OF point, bouillir, noyse > ME point, boille, noise) and contributed to vowel lengthening; diphthongs resulted from vocalization of w, y, and v between vowels;

lenghtening and shortening:

• phonemic vowel length in ME (lost in Modern English)
• already in OE short vowels tended to lengthen before certain consonant clusters OE climban, feld> ME climbe, feld
• lengthening of short vowels in open syllables (OE gatu, hopa > ME gate, hope)
• shortening of long vowels in stressed closed syllables, OE softe, godsibb, sceaphirde> ME softe, godsib, scepherde, exceptions (before -st): OE last, gast, crist>ME last, gost, Christ; if two or more unstressed syllables followed the stressed one, the vowel of the stressed syllable was shortened (Christ/Christmas [ME Christesmesse], break/breakfast [ME brekefast]); some remnants of distinctions caused by lengthening or shortening in open and closed syllables: five/fifteen, wise/wisdom; in weak verbs, the dental ending closed syllables: hide/hid, keep/kept, sleep/slept, hear/heard

loss of unstressed vowels: unstressed final -e was gradually dropped, though it was probably often pronounced; -e of inflectional endings also being lost, even when followed by consonant (as in -es, eth, ed) (e.g. breath/breathed), exceptions: wishes, judges, wanted, raided; loss of -e in adverbs made them identical to adjective, hence ambiguity of plain adverbs e.g. hard, fast; final -e in French loanwords not lost because of French final stress, hence cite>city, purete>purity

Middle English Prosody

stress on root syllables, less stress on subsequent syllables; loss of endings led to reduction in number of unstressed syllables, increased use of unstressed particles such as definite and indefinite articles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, analytic possessive (of), marked infinitive (to), compound verb phrases; OE trochaic rhythm shift to iambic rhythm of unstressed syllables followed by stressed ones (caused by increase in use of unstressed particles and by French loans)

Middle English Graphics

26 letters, ash and eth dropped, thorn and yogh retained; French loans j and v treated as allographs of i and u; v reserved for initial position; interchangeable y and i;

yogh: velar fricative /x/ (po/h/t), semivowel /j/ (/y/ung), alveopalatal voiced affricate /j/ (brid/g/e), also used as z (daiz)

q and z more widely used under French influence, qu for /kw/ OE cwic, cwen> ME quicke, quene

tendency for use of digraph th instead of thorn, thorn retained in function words, that, thou, then; confusion of y and thorn, hence ye olde coffee shoppe

poor match of sound and symbol caused by OE > ME sound changes, French influence, new spelling conventions, dialectal differences

o for u (come, love, son, won, tongue, some), way to avoid confusion caused by use of minims (vertical strokes)

c for s, influence of French loans like cellar, place affected spelling of native words like lice, mice

k for /k/, before i/e, n (OE cene, cyssan, cneow> keen, kiss, knee), cf. cat, cool, cut, clean

increased use of digraphs: th for thorn/eth sounds, ou/ow for long u (hour, round); doubling of vowels to indicate length (beet, boot); sh for alveopalatal fricative s (OE scamu> shame); ch for alveopalatal affricate c (OE ceap, cinn> ME cheap, chin); dg for alveopalatal affricate j (OE bricg>ME bridge), (but j in initial position according to French convention, ME just); gh for velar fricative (OE poht, riht> ME thought, right; wh for w (voiceless aspirated bilabial fricative), OE hwæt, hwil, order of letters reversed in ME, what, while; gu for g, in French loans, guard, guile, guide, OE gylt>guilt

punctuation: point, virgule indicated syntactic break; punctus elevatus, somewhat like comma; question mark; hyphen for word division at end of line; paragraph markers

handwriting: insular hand replaced by Carolingian minuscule in cursive and gothic styles

Early Modern English (1500-1800) and Modern English (1900-present)

HISTORICAL EVENTS

• HENRY VIII (r. 1509-1547), establishment of Church of England; incorporation of Wales
• ELIZABETH I (r. 1558-1603), defeat of the Armada 1588, begins period of colonial expansion
• JAMES I (VI of Scotland) (r. 1603-1625), patron of King James Bible
• CIVIL WAR, 1642, royalists vs. parlamentarians, execution of Charles I (1625-1649)
• OLIVER CROMWELL, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth (1653-1658)
• RESTORATION, Charles II (1660-1685)
• ACT OF SETTLEMENT (1701), provision by Parliament for throne to be transferred to German house of Hanover in the event of absence of heirs from William III or Queen Anne--succession to go to Sophia, electress of Hanover and granddaughter of James I, and her protestant heirs
• ACT OF UNION (1707), England and Scotland united to form Great Britain
• GEORGE I (r. 1714-1727), greatgrandson of James I, could not speak English, begins Hanover (German) dynasty (five kings) which ended with Queen Victoria
• GEORGE III (r. 1760-1820), independence of American colonies (1783); beginnings of industrial revolution; eventual insanity of king
• WAR WITH FRANCE (1789-1815), English against French Revolution and later against Napoleon I (Emperor of France, 1804-1814); English victories by Nelson at Trafalgar (1806) and finally by Wellington at Waterloo (1815), Napoleon's death (1821).
• IRELAND incorporated to England 1801
• QUEEN VICTORIA (r. 1837-1901), granddaughter of George III

PRINTING:

William Caxton, introduction of printing to England in 1474; fixing of spelling; literacy; translations of classics; loanwords from Latin and Greek

RENAISSANCE:

interest in classical learning; many loanwords; attempts to improve English according to vocabulary, grammar, and style of classical languages (Greek and Latin)

REFORMATION:

Henry VIII's disputes with the Pope; Reformation; Church of England; Bible, translations into English, Authorized Version 1611 (King James Bible), effect on style

ECONOMY:

wool production, large sheep pastures, migration to cities, urbanization, rise of middle class, upward mobility

dilution of dialectal differences through population blending at urban centers

middle class quest for "correct" laguage usage; production of authoritarian grammar handbooks

Industrial Revolution: more intensive urbanization, technical vocabulary based on Latin and Greek roots, decreased literacy due to child labor

EXPLORATION AND COLONIZATION:

defeat of Spanish Armada 1588, control of seas, acquisition of colonies throughout the world (Bermuda, Jamaica, Bahamas, Honduras, Canada, American colonies, India, Gambia, Gold Coast, Australia, New Zealand);many loanwords from languages of the colonies used to designate new and exotic products, plants, animals, etc., spread of English around the world

AMERICAN REVOLUTION:

separation of English speakers, beginning of multiple national English varieties

SCHOLARLY WRITING:

17th c. scholarly writing still mostly in Latin, (e.g. Newton, Francis Bacon); middle class embraced English as scholarly language during18th c.

LINGUISTIC ANXIETY:

perceived lexicon inadequacies, borrowing from Latin, deliberate attempts to improve the language; Sir Thomas Elyot, introduction of neologisms (e.g. consultation, fury, majesty)

critics of borrowings and neologisms called them "inkhorn terms"(Thomas Wilson, Roger Ascham, Sir John Cheke); John Cheke tried to translate the New Testament using only English words

attempt to preserve "purity" of English, reviving older English words;archaizers like Edmund Spenser (1552-1599); compounding of English words: Arthur Golding (1587): "fleshstrings" (instead of the French borrowing "muscles"), "grosswitted" (instead of the French borrowing "stupid");

others tried to produce English technical vocabulary: threlike (equilateral triangle), likejamme (parallelogram), endsay (conclusion), saywhat (definition), dry mock (irony)

LOANWORDS:

Greek and Latin technical vocabulary; continued borrowing from French (comrade, duel, ticket, volunteer), also Spanish (armada, bravado, desperado, peccadillo), Italian (cameo, cupola, piazza, portico)

PROPOSED SPELLING REFORMS:

John Cheke (1569): proposal for removal of all silent letters

Sir Thomas Smith (1568): proposal to make letters into "pictures" of speech; elimination of redundant letters like c and q; reintroduction of thorn (þ), use of theta for [ð]; vowel length marked with diacritical symbols like the macron (a horizontal bar on top of a vowel to indicate a long sound)

similar proposals by John Hart (1570): proposals for use of diacritics to indicate sound length; elimination of y, w, c, capital letters

William Bullokar (1580): proposed diacritics and new symbols, noted the desirability of having a dictionary and grammar to set standards;

public spelling eventually became standardized (by mid 1700's), under influence of printers, scribes of Chancery

DICTIONARIES: desire to refine, standardize, and fix the language

• William Caxton, French-English vocabulary for travelers (1480)
• Richard Mulcaster's treatise on education,The Elementarie (1582), 8,000 English words but no definitions
• Roger Williams's Key into the Languages of America (1643)
• first English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall (1604), 2,500 rare and borrowed words, intended for literate women who knew no Latin or French, and wanted to read the Bible; concern with correctness
• John Bullokar's An English Expositor (1616), marked archaic words
• Henry Cockeram's English Dictionarie (1623), including sections on refined and vulgar words and mythology
• Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656), 11,000 entries, cited sources and etymologies
• John Kersey's A New English Dictionary (1702), first to include everyday words
• Nathaniel Bailey's An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721) and Dictionarium Britannicum (1730), 48,000 entries, first modern lexicographer, ordinary words, etymologies, cognate forms, stress placement
• Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), 40,000 entries, based on Dictionarium Britannicum; illustrative quotations
• Oxford English Dictionary (OED), dictionary on historical principles; followed model of Johnson's dictionary; origins in 1857 proposals at Philological Society in London; first installment published 1884; first full version 1928; second edition 1989, 290,500 main entries

ENGLISH ACADEMY MOVEMENT:

17th-18th c., movement favoring the creation of an organization to act as language sentinel, keep English "pure"; following the model of the Académie Française (1635); proponents: scientist and philosopher Robert Hooke(1660); Daniel Defoe (1697); Joseph Addison (1711); Jonathan Swift (1712); Queen Anne supported the idea but died in 1714 and her successor George I was not interested in English; opposition from liberal Whigs who saw it as a conservative Tory scheme; Samuel Johnson's dictionary substituted for academy; John Adams proposed an American Academy

GRAMMARS:

Age of Reason, logic, organization, classification; attempts to define and regulate grammar of language

notion of language as divine in origin, search for universal grammar, Latin and Greek considered less deteriorated, inflections identified with better grammar

18th century attempts to define proper and improper usage; aspiring middle classes, desire to define and acquire "proper" linguistic behavior to distinguish themselves from lower classes

18th c. grammarians: attempts to provide rules and prevent further "decay" of language, to ascertain, to refine, to fix; usage as moral issue, attempt to exterminate inconvenient facts

• Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique (1553) based on classical models
• Henry Peacham's The Garden of Eloquence (1577), dictionary of rhetorical tropes
• William Bullokar's Bref Grammar (1586)
• Alexander Gil's Logonomia Anglica (1621), very tied to Latin
• Jeremiah Wharton's The English Grammar (1654), accepted lack of inflections
• Robert Lowth's A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), most prominent of 18th c. grammars; authoritarian, prescriptive, moralistic tone
• Joseph Priestley's The Rudiments of English Grammar (1761), more enlightened and liberal attitude towards language usage, awareness of change and conventionality of language features
• Noah Webster's Plain and Comprehensive Grammar (1784), American grammar, based on common usage but concerned with "misuse" by Irish and Scots immigrants

MISCELLANEOUS ISSUES

fossilization of spelling; spelling fixed in printed words by end of 17th c.

addition of phonemic velar nasal ([ ], as in 'hu/ng/') due to loss of g in final positions; evidence from alternative spellings: tacklin/tackling, shilin/shilling

addition of phonemic voiced alveopalatal fricative [ ], as in 'mea/s/ure'], the result of a phenomenon known as assibilation (see below)

general loss of r before consonants or in final position;also regular loss of r in unstressed positions or after back vowels in stressed positions: quarter, brother, March

development of palatal semivowel [y] in medial positions(after the major stress and before unstressed vowel: tenner/tenure, pecular/peculiar; when [y] followed s, z, t, d, the sounds merged to produce a palatal fricative or affricate: pressure, seizure, creature, soldier (this phenomenon is known as assibilation and is the origin of voiced alveopalatal fricative [ ]); dialectal exceptions and reversals: graduate, immediately, Injun/Indian

Spelling pronunciations:

French loans spelling [t] as "th" led to [ ] pronunciation in English, e.g. anthem, throne, author, Anthony, Thames

French and Latin words with unpronounced initial "h" led to English words with pronounced initial h: habit, hectic, history, horror (exceptions: hour, honor) (compare heir/heritage)

respellings under Latin influence: influence of Latin words led to introduction of "l" into loans from French: Latin fallita, OF faute, EMnE fault; other consonants also introduced in pronunciation in the same manner a/d/venture, perfe/c/t, bapti/s/m(ME aventure, perfit, bapteme); some exceptions featuring resistance to the pronunciation of the unhistorical p or b: receipt, debt, doubt (Latin receptus, debitus, dubitare)

Great Vowel Shift (GVS): Middle English (ME) long vowels came to be pronounced in higher positions, the highest were diphthongized. GVS examples:

ME leef [l f] > Modern English leaf [lif]

ME grete [gr t ] > Modern English great [gret]

Early Modern English tea [te] > Modern English tea [ti]

ME bite [bit ] > Modern English bite [bait]

ME hous [hus] > Modern English house [haus]

extensive use of contractions. Early Modern English preferred proclitic contractions ('tis), while Modern English prefers enclitic contractions (it's)

abandonment of yogh in writing

common nouns often capitalized

comma replaced the virgule (/) as punctuation for a pause

apostrophe used in contractions

2nd person singular pronouns (þu and thou) disappeared in 17th c; the plural forms (ye/you) prevailed for both singular and plural

Pronouns: most heavily inflected word class; development of separate possessive adjectives and pronouns (my/mine, etc)

Verbs:-s and -th were 3rd person singular present indicative endings (e.g.does/doth)

interjections: excuse me, please (if it please you), hollo, hay, what; God's name used in euphemistic distortions: sblood, zounds, egad

full-fledged perfect tense, be as auxiliary for verbs of motion (he is happily arrived); increasing use of have as auxiliary; periphrastic use of do (I do weep, doth heavier grow); do as auxiliary in questions and negatives (why do you look on me?); phrasal quasi-modals: be going to, have to, be about to; some continued use of impersonal constructions (it likes me not, this fears me, methinks)

syntax of sentences: influence of Latin, "elegant English," long sentences featuring subordination, parallelism, balanced clauses; bus also native tradition, parataxis, use of coordinators (but, and, for)

Semantics:

narrowing was the most common, ('deer' formerly had meant 'animal')

generalization ('twist' formerly meant twig or branch)

amelioration ('jolly' had meant arrogant)

pejoration ('lust' had meant pleasure, delight)

strengthening ('appalled' had meant only pale or weak)

weakening ('spill' had meant destroy, kill)

shift of stylistic level (stuff, heap, lowered in stylistic level)

shift in denotation ('blush' had meant look or gaze)

fixing of written language obscured dialectal differences; information about dialects from personal letters, diaries, etc; e.g. New England dialect features observable in spellings like 'Edwad', 'octobe', 'fofeitures', 'par', 'warran', 'lan'

Modern English language had been subdivided into Early Modern English which was used from the fifteenth century, more or less up to end of the seventeenth century, or according to some scholars even in the eighteenth century, and Modern English was used from that time till now. Only recently was this division renewed as with the end of the twentieth century the time perspective enabled linguists to look at the English language from a different angle and thus nowadays Modern English is subdivided into Early Modern English and Late Modern English (more or less 1700-1900), while the language used in the twentieth and twenty first century is called Contemporary English, or sometimes Present Day English.

There are numerous factors influencing the development of the English language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The technological advances enabled faster travels, therefore people started visiting different parts of Britain more often and so the dialects blended. At that time in America sound voices supported the division between British and American English. Dictionaries were published in the USA which provided deliberately distinct norms of spelling to make the American variety more distinguishable. In addition to that many new words came from the British colonies with the new concepts, inventions customs and scientific discoveries.

The grammatical peculiarities of the Late Modern English are divided into two types: changes in syntax which begun in Early Modern English and continued till that time, and totally new aspects introduced in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The former include the use of ‘do’ in questions and negatives which became a standard at that time. Moreover, the rules regarding the use of wh-relatives: who, whom, whose, which became standardized and more stable. Innovations introduced in the Late Modern English include the ‘be + -ing’ construction not only in Present Continuous tense, but also in passives. Also at that time the two schools of approaching grammar emerged. According to some linguists grammarians should only describe the language as it is actually used, while others provided rules that should be obeyed in the ‘correct’ English. The long discussion between the representatives of the two different schools of thought is still serious.

In the period of Late Modern English the standard of pronunciation which is aimed at by all the contemporary learners of English as a foreign language, namely Received Pronunciation (RP), emerged. Since that time Received Pronunciation has been a standard for noblemen and upper class of society in Great Britain. However, unlike nowadays in the Late Modern English RP the phoneme <r> was pronounced in all positions.

When it comes to the sources of Early Modern English loanwords what is interesting is the fact that at that time the Englishmen opposed the influx of French words to their language. Thus the major sources of lexis were Latin and Greek. According to current estimates about two thirds of loanword of Late Middle English have either Latin or Greek etymology.

Brown K. (Editor) 2005. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics – 2nd Edition. Oxford: Elsevier.