Early Modern English (1500-1700) PDF

Early Modern English (1500-1700) ELS 1-4 [M 7:30-10:30] ELS 1-3 [M 10:30-1:30] In this discussion Printing, Literacy, EME Spelling & Introduction & Texts Sounds EME Morphology EME Syntax EME Lexicon Attit...

Early Modern English (1500-1700) ELS 1-4 [M 7:30-10:30] ELS 1-3 [M 10:30-1:30] In this discussion Printing, Literacy, EME Spelling & Introduction & Texts Sounds EME Morphology EME Syntax EME Lexicon Attitudes towards Regional & a standard Register Varieties  Introduction ❑The Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural development initially inspired by the desire to revive Greek and Latin culture and learning, as indicated by its name, meaning ‘rebirth’. ❑The Renaissance also fostered scientific and scholarly inquiry and a humanistic world view. ❑It started at different times in different parts of Europe; in England, it began a little before 1500.  Introduction ❑The Renaissance is a time of freedom of ideas; for language that means freedom in creating and borrowing words. ❑During the Renaissance, English continues to become more analytic. ❑By 1700, the Great Vowel Shift is more or less complete and the spelling relatively uniform; 1700 is therefore considered the end of this period even though that date, like 1500, is somewhat debatable.  Printing, Literacy, & Texts ❑A number of events took place at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries that make 1500 an appropriate date for the start of Early Modern English: ❑In 1476, Caxton introduced the printing press to England and made texts available to a wider group of people, and in 1492 Columbus reached the ‘New World’. ❑By 1500, the English language was such that native speakers of Modern English generally need no translations to understand it.  Printing, Literacy, & Texts ❑A compositor was the person selecting the letters and arranging them in a frame, making a page. ❑Once the frame was filled, ink was rolled over it and a sheet of paper pressed against the letters. ❑This produced a printed page that could be used for a pamphlet. ❑For books, more than one page was printed on a sheet of paper.  Printing, Literacy, & Texts ❑Usually a set of sheets, called a quire, was folded, as shown in Figure 7.1, and bound.  Printing, Literacy, & Texts ❑A quarto is in some ways more complicated. ❑It involved printing four pages on one side of a sheet and four on the other and folding the sheet twice.  Printing, Literacy, & Texts ❑Literacy must have increased a great deal since the king was (unsuccessfully) petitioned in the late 14th and again in the 16th century to make it illegal for ‘common’ people to learn to read (Knowles 1997). ❑Despite strong opposition to literacy, literacy continued to spread. This made the selection of books printed more varied and the printing press made book ownership easier. ❑In fewer than 200 years after the introduction of the printing press, between 1476 and 1640, 20,000 titles were printed in English (Baugh & Cable 2002).  Printing, Literacy, & Texts ❑At this time, there were also numerous attempts to print an English version of the Bible. ❑In 1229, the Synod of Toulouse had made it illegal for laymen to read the Bible; hence it was not permitted to translate it into languages such as French, German, and English. ❑In the 1370s, John Wycliff started a reform movement in the church, and in 1382 a translation of the Bible was completed (but banned in England).  Printing, Literacy, & Texts ❑After Henry VIII managed to lessen the power of the Pope in the 1530s, English Bibles were no longer considered dangerous. ❑Miles Coverdale worked on a version of Tyndale’s Bible that appeared in 1539 in over 20,000 copies. ❑Queen Elizabeth I decreed that a copy of Coverdale’s Great Bible be present in every church. ❑The King James Version, or KJV, named after King James who hired a group of people to work on it soon after he succeeded Elizabeth, appeared in 1611; it is said to have incorporated vast portions of Tyndale’s New Testament.  Printing, Literacy, & Texts ❑In addition to the KJV, which was composed by a number of people, and Shakespeare’s steady output between 1590 and 1616, there are many other important works in the Early Modern English period. ❑Thomas More lived in the early part of the English Renaissance and was known for his Utopia written in Latin in 1515 as well as some other dramatic and humanist works. ❑In 1565, Montaigne was translated by Florio; the Iliad and Odyssey were translated as well. Printing, Literacy, & Texts  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑We will see that Early Modern English spelling displays more variation than Modern English but is starting to look quite ‘modern’. Sound changes continue to occur, as expected. ❑In a facsimile of an excerpt from Act II (Scene 1) of Richard II, taken from the First Folio (1623), there is a u where Modern English has v: siluer. ❑We notice some word-final -e, as in Moate, farre, ransome, and Farme, and a few other minor points such as the double -ll in royall, shamefull, and scandall. ❑Also, [s] is spelled either as s or resembling an f, depending on its position in the word.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑In Early Modern English, capital letters are used more frequently than in Middle English, where they only occur at the beginning of the line, if at all. ❑Shakespeare does capitalize nouns and sometimes adjectives.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑We have mentioned the Great Vowel Shift (GVS) before because we have to ‘undo’ it to arrive at the pronunciation of Old and Middle English. ❑The sounds of Early Modern English have undergone the shift. ❑For instance, isle in is pronounced [ajl], with the vowel shifted, and in nature, the first vowel is pronounced [e], as expected after the GVS.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑This shift, however, does not take place overnight and, even as late as 1600, some sounds have not completely raised.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑The vowels yet to be shifted can be heard in words such as seate and sea, pronounced with an [e] where Modern English has [i]. ❑The sound spelled ea is pronounced [ɛ] in Middle English, and it raises to [e] around 1600 and to [i] around 1700.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑In Shakespeare’s English, see and sea are therefore pronounced differently: the former has already shifted to [i], in accordance with the GVS, but the latter has not and is pronounced more like [e].  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑Table 7.2 shows a more accurate representation of the shift would have four levels of vowel height.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑We now know that the GVS proceeds in stages. The approximate dates of the changes are shown in Table 7.2, adapted from Lass (1999). By 1700, the sound system resembles that of Modern English.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑Some sound changes that were part of the GVS were interrupted before being complete. ❑Compare, for example, the words in (2) to those in (3); all would be expected to be pronounced with [i]. ❑The more frequent Modern English pronunciation is indeed [i], as in (2), but there are a few [e] pronunciations, as (3) shows.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑Since [e] and [o] change last, the GVS must have started either with the high vowels or the low ones. ❑If high vowels were the first to change (min [min] to [majn]), there would be a void in the middle of the vowel diagram, and the mid vowels would be pulled up (drag chain). ❑If the low vowels were first (name [namǝ] to [nemǝ]), they would push up the higher ones (push chain).  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑In the time since 1978, the exact cause of the GVS has still not been determined. ❑Once one vowel shifts, we know that speakers tend to repair that by having other vowels occupy that empty space. Fennell (2001: 159ff.) thinks a social reason can be given for the start of the shift. ❑This view is based on Dobson (1957) who discusses the struggle between the [i] and [e] pronunciations in sea, great, meat, and break.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑As for Early Modern English consonants, some of them are deleted, especially in consonant clusters. ❑For instance, there are puns on knight and night in Shakespeare, an indication that the initial [k] is no longer pronounced. ❑The word-initial [w] ceases to be pronounced, e.g. in wrist and write. ❑Shakespeare comments on the extra consonants that are put into words such as debt and calf to bring the spelling closer to Latin. ❑This process is referred to as etymological respelling.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑In Early Modern English – and as early as Middle English – the r sound starts to disappear in certain environments; this later leads to much sociolinguistic investigation on prestige variants. ❑The loss starts before s in words such as bass and ass (from earlier bærs and arse). The Cely Letters, where parcel is written as passel, provide examples from the 15th century. ❑By 1770, r has disappeared after vowels in southern English but not in other areas; this gives rise to the well-known difference between rhotic (with r) and non-rhotic (no r in most positions) dialects (Lass 1987).  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑The pronunciation of initial h- is also interesting. ❑As mentioned in the previous chapter, the h- is lost in clusters, e.g. before liquids and nasals (as in hlaf to loaf and hnitu to nit ‘louse egg’) and later before glides in most dialects. ❑The loss of h before vowels in many dialects, as in hand, may be due to French influence since words such as history do not have an [h] in French, from which they are borrowed. ❑The absence of initial [h] is stigmatized after the 18th century, which causes a hypercorrected [h] in history, hospital, and hymnal. In some contexts, initial h is not pronounced, however: hour and heir.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑In many varieties of present-day English, [θ] and [ð] are pronounced as [t] and [d], respectively. ❑This must have been common in Early Modern English as well. ❑Debt and death were pronounced similarly enough to be ‘confused’ in the pun from around 1600.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑Some changes in Early Modern English sounds are summarized in Table 7.3.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑From the 13th century on, the choice between a and an and the forms of the possessive (e.g. my or mine) depend on the word that follows. ❑If that word starts with a vowel (or h in earlier English), an is used: an eager ayre and mine owne eyes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. ❑Otherwise, a or my is used: A most auspitious starre and my Magick garment in the Tempest. ❑This system remains more or less in place until the 18th century for possessives and until the present for articles.  EME Spelling & Sounds ❑By the end of the Early Modern English period, English pronunciation is more recognizable to Modern English speakers than Old or Middle English because of the completion of the GVS. ❑Even though the GVS is mostly complete by 1700, there are exceptions: Alexander Pope (1688–1744) rhymes survey and sea and away and tea (Bolton 1982: 248), which indicates that sea and tea still have an [e].  EME Morphology ❑Early Modern English is characterized by a further loss of inflections and an increase in the number of prepositions and auxiliaries (grammaticalization), as expected of a language becoming more analytic. ❑The loss of inflections is artificially stopped by prescriptive grammarians, editors, and schoolteachers in the centuries that follow. ❑If that had not happened, we might have lost the third person -s ending and the case endings on personal (I/me, she/ her, etc.) and relative pronouns (who/whom).  EME Morphology ❑We will start the discussion of these changes by examining the pronominal paradigm in Table 7.4. ❑Compared to Middle English, the accusative has merged with the dative; one case, referred to as acc(usative), is now used for all objects.  EME Morphology ❑The situation with the second person pronouns is complex; in Table 7.4 the forms that are disappearing are in parentheses. ❑Around 1600, English thou and you are both used in similar situations, but you ‘wins out’ since the plural nominative pronoun ye(e) also disappears. ❑The use of pronouns in the KJV, where the older ye is adhered to, is archaic, as (6) shows.  EME Morphology ❑The changes in second person pronouns are presented in simplified form in Table 7.5.  EME Morphology ❑In Early Modern English, sometimes these pronouns follow the older rules, as in the first two lines in (7), where Hamlet uses the respectful you and his mother the familiar thou/thy, but this system breaks down, possibly out of irritation, in the third line.  EME Morphology ❑An interesting innovation is the neuter genitive its. In Old and Middle English, the genitive of it is his and this is still occasionally found in Early Modern English, as in (8), typical of the KJV. ❑Its must have come into existence as an analogy to yours, hers, etc.; well into the 18th century, both its and it’s are found.  EME Morphology ❑Another development is the occurrence of reflexive pronouns. As mentioned earlier, in Old English, forms such as himself and myself do not exist. ❑They gradually come into existence, but even at the time of the F1 edition of Shakespeare, simple pronouns are used, as (9) and (10) show; my/thy and self are always printed separately, as in (11) and (12), even though himself has become one unit already.  EME Morphology ❑Case is further disappearing (Algeo & Pyles 2004: 187–8). ❑This is evident from the loss of second person plural ye(e) in favor of a general you, the loss of whom, and the inconsistent use of pronouns. ❑Examples of the inconsistent use of pronouns are provided in (13) to (15), all from Shakespeare.  EME Morphology ❑As to verbal endings, the distinctive second person singular -st ending is lost due to the loss of the second person singular pronoun thou. ❑The third person singular verbal ending changes from -th to -s in the course of the Early Modern English period. ❑Some examples from Shakespeare where the verb has second person singular -st and third person singular -th are given in (16) and (17).  EME Morphology ❑Another development related to Early Modern English verbs is that the Old and Middle English subjunctive endings are being replaced by modal auxiliaries and infinitival complements, as in (21). ❑As Görlach (1991: 113) states, “[b]efore 1650 the frequency of the subjunctive varied from one author to the next.” ❑This is an indication that it is seen as a stylistic variant, rather than a part of the grammar.  EME Morphology ❑Comparatives and superlatives in Early Modern English can be doubled: most unkindest, more richer, and worser. ❑A search for more followed by an adjective ending in -er in Shakespeare’s First Folio produces 24 examples and most is followed seven times by an adjective ending in -est.  EME Morphology ❑Other noteworthy morphological distinctions concern adverbs and verbs. ❑Adverbs do not consistently end in -ly yet, as (30) and (31) show, and the distinction between strong and weak verbs is different in Early Modern English.  EME Morphology ❑For instance, in (32), holp is a strong verb, and in (33) shake is a weak verb.  EME Morphology ❑A language that loses inflections might have words that in different contexts can be verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, or prepositions. ❑This is the case in Early Modern English: in (34), the nouns grace and vnckle are used as verbs, and in (35), the preposition beneath [bIneθ] is used as an adjective. ❑The technical term for this process that converts one category into another without an affix is conversion.  EME Syntax ❑The transformation of English into an analytic language continues in the Early Modern English period. ❑As mentioned earlier, in syntactic terms, this transformation leads to an increasingly fixed word order and the introduction of grammatical words. ❑Starting in the Early Modern English period, the grammatical words introduced are mainly auxiliaries. ❑The trend towards more embedded sentences that started in Middle English also continues in Early Modern English.  EME Syntax ❑The word order is fairly similar to that of Modern English. ❑Subjects are only left out in a few cases.  EME Syntax ❑Some Yes/No questions continue to be formed as in (39) and main verbs can still be used in forming questions, as (40) shows.  EME Syntax ❑Auxiliaries are introduced or expanded, but neither simple auxiliaries nor sequences of auxiliaries are as elaborate as in Modern English. ❑The expression of tense, mood, and aspect is perhaps still the most important difference between Early Modern and Modern English (Rissanen 1999; van Gelderen 2004).  EME Syntax ❑For instance, Modern English would have the progressives are going and are saying in (40) and (41) and a present perfect form with have in (42), as shown in the gloss.  EME Syntax ❑The end of the Middle English period is also when auxiliaries start to be contracted. ❑The Cely letters, in (43), the Paston Letters, in (44), and the late 17th century John Bunyan, in (45), show very interesting reductions after modals, something that continues until Modern English.  EME Syntax ❑In questions and negative sentences, do is not obligatory. Shakespeare, for instance, uses both (47) and (48).  EME Syntax ❑In Old and Middle English, negation can be expressed by one or two negatives. ❑This is changing in Early Modern English where not or nothing typically appear alone in a clause. ❑There are, however, a few cases where single negation is expressed using multiple negative words: nothing neither, as in (49).  EME Syntax ❑Preposition stranding, which occurs when a preposition is left behind after its object moves in a question, as in (53), is common in Early Modern English. ❑When the object takes the preposition along, as in (54), we have a case of pied piping.  EME Syntax ❑Punctuation and capitalization in Old and Early Middle English are fairly rare. ❑They become more common in Late Middle English, but remain somewhat arbitrary. ❑In the 17th century, syntactic punctuation is introduced, especially through the work of Ben Jonson.  EME Syntax ❑It is one of the changes modern editors make when editing Early Modern English texts for a present-day audience. ❑When the language gets a strict(er) word order, it is natural for writers to punctuate according to grammatical function.  EME Syntax ❑A In conclusion, Early Modern English continues to lose case and verbal inflection. There are very few prescriptive rules, but this changes in the centuries to come.  EME Lexicon ❑English acquires numerous words of Latin origin in this period as it did after the Norman Invasion of 1066. ❑The tension between native and non-native vocabulary becomes important in the inkhorn debate (an ink-horn is a container for ink but the term comes to be used for ‘a learned or bookish word’). ❑This debate remains significant to this day although not to the same extent as in countries such as France and Iceland.  EME Lexicon ❑The English language as a medium for serious writing has had to reemerge (at least) twice in its history – once around 1300 when its use had to be justified over the use of French and once after 1500 when it was seen as an unsophisticated alternative to Latin. ❑Middle English manuscripts frequently included apologies for using English rather than Latin. ❑By the 1550s, however, English reemerges: while it was ‘barbarous and unrefined’ before, now it is ‘elegant’.  EME Lexicon ❑The pride of writers about using English becomes obvious from the words of Richard Mulcaster (1582), provided in (61). ❑Mulcaster still sees a need for Latin because of “the knowledge which is registered in” it and for communicating with “the learned of Europe,” but he feels English should be developed as well.  EME Lexicon ❑Old and Middle English lack many of the terms that become important in the Renaissance; thus, English ends up borrowing many words from Latin and Greek. ❑Sometimes, the words are borrowed for practical purposes, other times for stylistic ones. ❑Some estimate that between 1500 and 1660 nearly 27,000 new words enter the language (Garner 1982). ❑Görlach (1991: 136) says that the period between 1530 and 1660 “exhibits the fastest growth of the vocabulary in the history of the English language.”  EME Lexicon ❑Half of the neologisms are probably loans, such as the ones in (62a), and half are new words (sometimes made up from Latin or Greek models), such as in (62b). ❑Creating a new word is called coining a word. John Cheke and Edmund Spenser create new words from old ones: Cheke coins mooned ‘lunatic’ and foresayer ‘prophet’ and Spenser belt, elfin, dapper, glee, grovel, gloomy, and witless.  EME Lexicon ❑Latin is a highly inflected, synthetic, language. Its nouns are divided into five classes (or declensions) and can be marked for five or six cases in the singular and plural. ❑English speakers, however, are not familiar with the Latin grammatical system, so when they borrow Latin words, they adapt them to fit the English grammatical system. ❑Therefore, Latin noun and verb endings are ignored: audio, audit, video, and recipe are verbs in Latin but become nouns in English. ❑This is why we usually say that Latin had no influence on English grammar, only its vocabulary.  EME Lexicon ❑After the 1530s, when the most significant increase in new vocabulary starts, there is a lot of criticism of the use of inkhorn terms. ❑Elyot introduced the terms education and persist and most speakers of present-day English would have a hard time doing without these words. ❑John Cheke is a fierce opponent of new words and comes up with his own terms, mooned for lunatic and foresayer for prophet, as mentioned earlier.  EME Lexicon ❑In 1557, he wrote what is given as (64) below.  EME Lexicon ❑Not all new words come from Latin and Greek. ❑French continues to influence the vocabulary of English, as (66) shows, as do other Romance languages. ❑Italian provides the words in (67) and many music terms.  EME Lexicon ❑Spanish provides the words in (68), many of which are derived from native American languages which the Spanish (and Portuguese) came into contact with in their colonial past (and anchovy is from Basque via Spanish).  EME Lexicon ❑Wermser (1976) presents the data in Table 7.8 (adapted from Görlach 1991: 167). The numbers represent the percentages for the origins of the loanwords. ❑They show that Latin and French sources are the most frequent.  EME Lexicon ❑Shakespeare is celebrated for his neologisms, puns, and malaprops. ❑Shakespeare is said to have introduced more words into the language than anyone else, but that might be due to the fact that he is the most studied English author; it is possible that a lesser known author introduced more new words.  EME Lexicon ❑A malaprop, a term not introduced until much later, involves the erroneous use of a long and difficult word. ❑Shakespeare uses malaprops frequently with certain characters to indicate pomposity or lack of sense, as in (69) and (70).  EME Lexicon ❑The Early Modern English period is one of great freedom, not only from grammatical constraints, but also when it comes to the creation of words.  Attitudes towards a standard ❑Until the 1650s, there is much debate on vocabulary and spelling, and English is technically without a standard, i.e. the language of one social or regional group that is typically taught in schools and used in official circles. ❑The centuries that follow impose many restrictions on linguistic freedoms and the need for an Academy is debated  Attitudes towards a standard ❑As mentioned in earlier chapters, spelling conformity is one of the results of the introduction of the printing press in 1476. The need for spelling regularity is debated in the Early Modern English period. ❑The attempts to establish a standard spelling are numerous: in the 1550s, Cheke suggests having long vowels in maad ‘made’ but no final –e.  Attitudes towards a standard ❑Other well-known works of the period are John Hart’s Orthographie (1569), which introduces several new letters, William Bullokar’s Booke at Large (1580) and Bref Grammar (1586), and Richard Mulcaster’s Elementarie (1582). ❑Mulcaster’s Elementarie is perhaps the most extensive but least phonetic. He ends his book with recommended spellings for over 8,000 common words. Many of these spellings are similar to those in Modern English. ❑Noticeable differences between Early Modern and Modern English in endings such as the ones on abbie ‘abbey’ and abilitie ‘ability’ and the final letters of actuall and aduerbiall.  Attitudes towards a standard ❑Word lists and dictionaries are natural standardizers for words and spelling patterns, but they appear relatively late. Therefore, they do not help standardize the spelling of Early Modern English. ❑The first word lists/dictionaries to appear are of foreign and difficult words rather than common ones. These lists are different from Mulcaster’s since they provide a definition.  Attitudes towards a standard ❑A chronological list of word list/dictionary compilers for the Early Modern English period appears in Table 7.9.  Attitudes towards a standard ❑Cockeram’s dictionary is in three parts: ❑The first of which explains difficult words (ranging from acersecomick ‘one whose hair was never cut’ to collocuplicate ‘to enrich’ to abandon, actress and abrupt. ❑The second part does the opposite and goes from simple to learned words, ❑Whereas the third provides encyclopedic information. ❑This concern with words and word lists helps standardize spelling. Thus, by 1650, the spelling system is pretty much settled.  Attitudes towards a standard ❑At this time, there are many popular spelling books such as Richard Hodges’ The English Primrose (1644) and Most Plain Directions for True- Writing (1653). ❑The spelling books and dictionaries demonstrate a concern with a standard, consistent spelling. ❑Some differences exist between Early Modern and Modern English spelling – such as generall and musick, for example – but the basic system is in place, certainly by 1700.  Attitudes towards a standard ❑Grammars are not very prescriptive in the 16th century: they take usage into account and do not provide the arbitrary rules based on Latin grammar that we currently still have. ❑For instance, in 1653, John Wallis wrote a grammar of English in Latin, written for foreigners, but he did not feel genders and cases should be introduced since there was “no basis in the language itself ” (Kemp, 1972)  Attitudes towards a standard ❑He also realized, as shown in (75) that English had become analytic.  Attitudes towards a standard ❑Thus, correct spelling and vocabulary seem more of a concern than correct grammar. ❑Neither dictionaries nor grammars express grammatical value judgments.  Regional & Register Varieties ❑In the Early Modern English period, the language is moving towards a standard, and differences in writing – though not in speech – become less obvious as a result. ❑Thus, many of the features we identified in Middle English remain in the spoken language to this day and are transported to the colonies of Britain.  Regional & Register Varieties ❑Register variations, which are usually reflected only in vocabulary, are used by certain occupations or on special occasions and called jargon. ❑Specialized jargon dictionaries appear in the 17th century: John Smith’s (1641) The Sea-Mans Grammar and Dictionary and Henry Manwaring’s (1644) The Sea-mans Dictionary. ❑These are special kinds of ‘hard word’ dictionaries and the latter is more of an encyclopedia. ❑There is no social stigma attached to specialized vocabulary, or jargon, unlike the stigma attached to slang.  Regional & Register Varieties ❑Slang and cant are often seen as styles, but the terms are complex and used differently by different linguists. ❑After the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of the middle classes, poverty is on the rise, resulting in vagrancy and a fear of the poor. This may be related to the increased interest in slang. ❑The earliest is a glossary of 114 terms in Thomas Harman’s (1567) Caveat or Warening for Commen Cursetors.  Regional & Register Varieties ❑Thus, regional and register varieties are relevant in this period, as in all others.