A History of the English Language

1. A History of the English Language Chapter 5: Early Modern English

2. Time Line 1 • 1509 Henry VIII • 1534 Act of Supremacy • 1536 Small monasteries dissolved • 1534 English translation of Bible in any church • 1547 Edward VI • 1553 Mary Tudor • 1558 Elizabeth I • 1559 Act of Supremacy restores laws of Henry VIII • 1574 First company of actors; theatre building begins • 1584 Colonists at Roanoke • 1600 English East India Co. Formed • 1603 James I • 1607 London Co. plants colony at Jamestown • 1611 King James Bible

3. Time Line 2 • 1616 Death of Shakespeare • 1625 Charles I • 1639 English established at Madras • 1642-1646 Civil War • 1649 Charles I beheaded • 1649 Commonwealth established • 1653 Cromwell becomes Lord Protector • 1660 Charles II restored to the throne • 1689 William and Mary proclaimed king and queen in England and Ireland • 1702 Queen Anne • 1707 Union of England and Scotland as Great Britain • 1727 George I • 1760 George III • 1775-1783 American War of Independence

4. Political, Cultural, and Technological Influences • 1: The Introduction and Dissemination of Printing: 1476 William Caxton introduces printing press • 2: The Renaissance • 3: The Protestant Reformation • 4: The Enclosures • 5: Exploration and Colonization • 6: The American Revolution

5. The Self-Conscious Language • Writings in Latin: • Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620) • Isaac Newton, Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687): Latin works

6. The Debate over Vocabulary • Early Modern English is the Age of Linguistic Anxiety: debates about its deficiencies and its purity • Earliest perceived inadequacy was in the lexicon • Borrowing was the easiest and most obvious way to fill the gaps and Latin was the easiest and most obvious language from which to borrow • Largest number of borrowings in the history of English • Borrowing was deliberate to improve the language

7. Inkhorn terms vs. Archaisms • Thomas Wilson:Some seeke so far for outlandish English, that they forget altogether their mothers tongue. And I dare sweare this, if some of their mothers were aliue, thei were not able to tell what they say: … The vnlearned or foolish phantasticall, that smelles but of learning (such fellowes as haue seen learned men in their daies) wil so Latin their tongues, that the simple can not but wonder at their talkes… • Edmund Spenser, John Cheke: crossed vs. crucified, fleshstrings/muscles grosswitted, endsay, over-reacher, drymock • discretion, exaggerate, transumptive, effodicate, exinanite

8. The Spelling Reformers • The ideal: a simplified, consistent, phonetic, standardized spelling system for English • John Cheke (1569), Thomas Smith (1568), John Hart (1569), William Bullokar (1580), Richard Mulcaster (1582) • No effect of the proposed reforms

9. The Dictionary Makers • Robert Cawdrey (1604): A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latine, or French &c. With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words. gathered for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons. Whereby they may the more easilie and better understand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in Scriptures, Sermons, or elseqhere, and also be made able to use the same aptly themselues • Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

10. The Movement for an English Academy • Accademia della Crusca (1582) • Académie Française (1635) • Daniel Defoe (1697), Jonathan Swift (1712), Joseph Addison (1711) • John Adams (1803) in the US

11. Prescriptive Grammars • Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553) • William Bullokar, Bref Grammar (1586) • Alexander Gil, Logonomia Anglica (1621) • John Wallis, Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1653): all Latin-based • Robert Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) • Joseph Priestley, The Rudiments of English Grammar (1762) • Noah Webster, Plain and Comprehensive Grammar (1784) • Lindley Murray, English Grammar (1795)

12. Early Modern English Phonology: Basic Features

13. Consonants • Addition of phonemic /N Z/: • sing vs. sin • pleasure, vision: assibilation • The postvocalic allophones of /h/, [ Ç] and [ X ] disappeared

14. The Great Vowel Shift 1

15. The Great Vowel Shift 2:

16. Great Vowel Shift 3 • threat, head, death, deaf • cheat, plead, wreath, leaf • break, yea, steak, great • boot, loose, mood, pool, soon • foot, good, hook, wood, wool • flood, blood • But, thou, false guardian of a charge too good/Thou, mean deserter of thy brother’s blood (Alexander Pope) • root, soot, room

17. Development of Short Vowels 1 • All remaining final unstressed -e’s from ME were lost during EModE • /æ/ > / / before /r/ and voiceless fricatives; 17th and 18th c. : harm, scarf, hard, park; staff, class, path, fast, half; classical, passage: no change if the fricative was followed by another vowel • / / resulting from /a/ before /l/: all, fall, walk, salt, chalk, halt; after /w/: want, wash, swan

18. Development of Short Vowels 2: • A following nasal tends to raise /E/ to /I/: wing, England, hinge, mingle, nimble; pen,sense • Dialectal variant in Britain extensively used in US: /A/ for /O/: hot, rock, pocket,top, shot • /u/ centering and unrounding to /V/: run, mud, cut, cup; unrounding did not occur in protected environments: full, push, bull, bush, butcher; bulky, shrub; put, putt

19. Development of Short Vowels 3 • Influence of following /r/: • Lowering: /Er/ to /Ar/: far, star, farm, barn; vs. Servant, sermon, certain, verdict, sterling • Lowering and centering: /I u E/ to /E:/ > /W/ girl, dirty, hurt, her, curse • In many words, a following /r/ blocked the GVS: wear, bear, floor, sword, course, court

20. Development of Diphtongs • /iu/ and /Eu/ fell together as /iu/; then /iu/ became /ju:/: pure, mute, beauty, accuse; after labial consonants, /ju:/ almost always remains, but after other consonants there is often dialectically variable simplification to /u:/: new, fruit, rude, duty, lute • ME /Au/ became /o/: cause, hawk; before /l/ plus a labial consonant /æ / or /a/: half, calm, palm and /l/ was lost • /Ou/ > /o:/ > /C/: know, blow, grow • /ai/ > /æi/ > /e:/ > /Y/: day, pay, stake

21. Spelling and Punctuation • By the end of the 17th c., the principle of a fixed spelling for every word was firmly established for printed works, and , over the course of the following century, personal spelling followed • (Un)etymological spelling: rhyme, indict, victuals; debt > dette; island; aisle; delight • Capitalization remained haphazard • During the 16th c, the comma replaced the virgule (/) as the primary mark of sentence-internal punctuation • The apostrophe was used for contractions; not used for marking the possessive before late EModE

22. Early Modern English Morphology: Basic Facts 1 • In all essentials, noun morphology in EModE was the same as that of PDE • By EModE, the ‘s-possessive for both sg. and pl. nouns was almost universal, although traces of uninflected genitives remained. mother tongue, lady slipper, for peace sake • John Browne his meadow, his deceased mother her will, Mister Jones his cow; after mine & my wifes her decease • in the calmest and most stillest night, less happier lands, violentest, certainer, more bold, most brave (Sh)

23. Morphology: Basic Facts 2 • Development of separate forms for possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns: my, mine; thy, thyne • Appearance of possessive its at the beginning of the 17th c (between it’s lips, Sh) • During the 17th c., the sg. thou/thee forms dropped out altogether: sg.-pl. distinction lost; ye gave way to you in the 17th c; result: one form you • who as a relative pronoun became frequent in EModE and was rare before restrictive clauses; that, which and as used as relative pronouns: All the goods as was brought to our view

24. Morphology: Basic Facts 3 • Forming reflexive pronouns by combining -self with the personal pronouns became more frequent in EModE, but the older practice of using the simple object form of the pronouns as a reflexive continued: thou dost thyself a pleasure, get thee a good husband, I will shelter me heere (Sh) • General use of reflexive pronouns declined • By the end of the EModE period, the division of English verbs into strong and weak was no longer viable • Collapse of the distinction between past tense and past participle

25. Morphology: Basic Facts 4 • By the end of ME, weak verbs had become the regular verbs of English, and almost any new verb entering the language would follow this paradigm • By the end of EModE, the total number of verb inflections had been reduced to its PDE state; the last vestiges of the -n infinitive disappeared; as did the present plural indicative plural endings -n or -th; the present participle suffix -ing became universal in all dialects; second person sg. present ending -est survived until the category was lost, that is, until you supplanted thou

26. Morphology: Basic Facts 5 • Although -th was still being written as the third-person sg. ending as late as the 18th c., the -s ending seems to have been universal in speech from the 17th c. on • EModE was the period of great changes in what were to become the modal auxiliaries of English; will moved into the category of modal auxiliaries;need and dare; in EModE the modals were still sufficiently independent to appear without a following infinitive: I must away this night, thou shalt to prison (Sh); can could still mean ‘know’; would was still the past tense of will

27. Morphology: Basic Facts 6 • Verb-particle constructions became extremely common during the period • New phrasal prepositions: by means of, in spite of, because of, with regard to, in accordance with • The chief means of forming new adverbs from existing adjectives in EModE was by adding -ly; plain adverbs were still common, however

28. Early Modern English Syntax: Basic Facts 1 • In most of the larger patterns, the syntax of EModE is like that of PDE; more elusive are the differences that are merely statistical, such as the greater use of the inflected subjunctive • A number of ways in which E ModE syntax differs from that of PDE are negative ones: e.g., market data analysis sheets • The ME legacy of allowing single adjective modifiers (especially Latinate adjectives) to follow rather than precede their noun head continued in EModE: means convenient, faith invincible

29. Early Modern English Syntax: Basic Facts 2 • A tendency remained to place the adverbial before rather than after the words being modified: which he behind him left, and was by them examined • Double negatives became less common in EModE • By the 16thc. have continued to suppress be in compound tenses; cf.: this gentleman is happily arrived; I have since arrived; did he not say my brother was fled; love’s golden arrow at him should have fled • The progressive was fully developed by the end of the 16th c. though still used less frequently

30. Early Modern English Syntax: Basic Facts 3 • The combination of progressive and perfect in a single verb phrase was still rare: I have been watching you; the progressive passive (you are being watched) did not develop until the late 18th c.; the construction you have been being watched did not appear until PDE • Passive constructions were less common

31. Early Modern English Syntax: Basic Facts 4 • The use of do as a dummy auxiliary for forming interrogatives and negatives was fully developed by EModE, but not yet obligatory: I doubt it not/I do not doubt you; Why do you look on me/Why look you so on me (Sh) • Be going to, have to, be obliged to, be about to became common during EModE • I don’t like to have to keep on nagging you • EModE still had more word-order flexibility

32. Stylistic Traditions • The influence of Latin on English complex syntax: long, heavily subordinated, periodic sentences, absolute participles were imitated • Plain style tradition found in the King James Bible as a rival conception • Ornate style became popular

33. Early Modern English Lexicon 1 • Loans from Latin and Greek: English borrowed roots and affixes to form new words that had not existed in the classical languages themselves: cortex, cortical; fibroma • An A-Z sample: ambiguous, biceps, census, decorate, emotion, fanatic, gladiator, harmonica, identical, joke, lichen, mandible, navigate, opponent, perfidious, quotation, ratio, scintillate, tangent, ultimate, vacuum, zone

34. The Early Modern English Lexicon 2: • Lexical doublets: armor/armature; chamber/camera; choir, chorus; frail/fragile; gender/genus; jealous/zealous; mould/module; pale/pallid; porch/portico; prove/probe; strait/strict; strange/extraneous; treasure/thesaurus • Functional shifts: fac simile, propaganda, deficit, fiat, veto, tenet

35. Loans from Other Languages • French: liaison, sociable, compute • Italian: trade, architecture, arts: balcony, bandit, ghetto, carnival, arsenal • Spanish and Portuguese: mango, cashew, cigar, papaya, cannibal, tomato, tortilla • Dutch: prominence in seafaring gave nautical words: deck, smuggle, yacht; etch, landscape, sketch • German: German loans have never been heavy in English: cobalt, gneiss, quartz, zinc, waltz

36. Early Modern English Word-Formation 1 • Compounding: • The most productive type was noun + noun; gerund + noun: spelling book; walking stick; possessive noun + noun: saleswoman, townspeople; verb + noun combinations: catchword, pickpocket, scatterbrain; adjective + noun: commonplace, easy chair, hotbed • Noun + adjective: bloodthirsty, knee-deep, lifelong, top-heavy • Adjective + noun + -ed: good-natured, red-haired • Noun/adj + Participle: earthborn,painstaking, henpecked, easy-going

37. Early Modern English Word Formation 2 • Affixing: has always been the single largest source of new vocabulary items in English: • Numeral 1530 ,numerality 1646, numerally 1646, numerant 1660, numerous 1586, numerosity 1611, numerously 1611, numerousness 1631, numerical 1628, numerically 1628, numerist 1646, numerication 1694 • Functional Shift/Zero Derivation • Accelerated during EModE: guarantee, pioneer, segment, cheat, contest, split, whimper, lower

38. Semantic Processes • Generalization and Narrowing • Adventure: ‘unusual and exiciting experience; courage ‘heart, mind, disposition, nature, bravery, valor’ > ‘bravery, valor’; deer ‘animal’ > ‘mammals of the family Cervidae’; • Amelioration and Pejoration • Lust ‘pleasure, delight’; coy ‘quiet, shy, modest’; knave ‘boy’; jolly ‘arrogant, wanton, lustful’; luxury ‘lust, licentiousness’; boy ‘rascal, servant, slave’; fond ‘idiotic, mad’; artful, crafty, cunning

39. Shakespeare, Richard III

40. Development of English in the United States 1 • The development of English in the US is not synonymous with the development of language, since there were already indigenous Native American languages when the European settlers first arrived • The language that the British brought with them to America, beginning with the first settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, 1607, is Early Modern English, and is largely the English of South-East England

41. English in the United States 2 • Subsequent development in America affected by a number of factors: • The source of the original British dialect • Maintenance of contact with the ‘home’ country • Patterns of settlement • Influences of languages other than English • Caused by immigration • Caused by contact with speakers of other languages within America • Social and geographical mobility

42. Settlement by Region: The Original Thirteen Colonies 1 • New England, the Middle Atlantic States, South Atlantic States (Georgia) • Mid-Atlantic: Jamestown was mostly settled by speakers of south-eastern English dialect, though there was some admixture of other dialects, and all social classes were represented in Virginia • From the outset the population of the Mid-Atlantic states was mixed in character and did not have the solid English core of the other areas

43. Settlement by Region 2 • The settlement of New England began around Massachusetts Bay in 1620, extended to Connecticut in 1634 • The majority of the settlers came from the eastern and south-eastern counties of England, with a significant number of Puritans from East Anglia

44. How, Why and When American English Began to Diverge from British English • The physical separation of America from Britain • The different physical conditions encountered by the settlers • Contact with non-native speakers of English, both Native American and immigrant • Developing political differences between the two countries and the growing American sense of national identity

45. Noah Webster (1758-1843) • Dissertations of the English Language (1789): “As an independent nation our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline. But if it were not so, she is at too great distance to be our model, and to instruct us in the principles of our own tongue. […] A national language is a band of national union.”