Early Modern English

History

English Renaissance

Transition from Middle English

• 1476 – William Caxton started printing in Westminster; however, the language that he used reflected the variety of styles and dialects used by the authors who originally wrote the material.

  Tudor period (1485–1603)

• 1485 – Caxton published Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, the first print bestseller in English. Malory's language, while archaic in some respects, was clearly Early Modern and was possibly a Yorkshire or Midlands dialect.
• 1491 or 1492 – Richard Pynson started printing in London; his style tended to prefer Chancery Standard, the form of English used by the government.

Henry VIII

• 1509 – Pynson became the king's official printer.
• From 1525 – Publication of William Tyndale's Bible translation, which was initially banned.
• 1539 – Publication of the Great Bible, the first officially authorised Bible in English. Edited by Myles Coverdale, it was largely from the work of Tyndale. It was read to congregations regularly in churches, which familiarised much of the population of England with a standard form of the language.
• 1549 – Publication of the first edition of the Book of Common Prayer in English, under the supervision of Thomas Cranmer, which standardised much of the wording of church services. Some have argued that since attendance at prayer book services was required by law for many years, the repetitive use of its language helped to standardise Modern English even more than the King James Bible did.
• 1557 – Publication of Tottel's Miscellany.

Elizabethan English

• 1560 – The Geneva Bible was published. The New Testament was completed in 1557 by English Reformed exiles on the continent during the reign of Mary, and the complete Bible three years later, after Elizabeth succeeded the throne. This version was favoured by the Puritans and Pilgrims due to its more vigorous and forceful language. Its popularity and proliferation over the following decades sparked the production of the King James Bible to counter it.
• 1582 – The Rheims and Douai Bible was completed, and the New Testament was released in Rheims, France, in 1582. It was the first complete English translation of the Bible that was officially sponsored and carried out by the Catholic Church. Though the Old Testament was already complete, it was not published until 1609–1610, when it was released in two volumes. While it did not make a large impact on the English language at large, it certainly played a role in the development of English, especially in heavily Catholic English-speaking areas.
• Christopher Marlowe,
• 1592 – The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd
• – Shakespeare's plays written

17th century

Jacobean and Caroline eras

Jacobean era (1603–1625)

• 1609 – Shakespeare's sonnets published
• Other playwrights:
• *Ben Jonson
• *Thomas Dekker
• *Beaumont and Fletcher
• *John Webster
• 1607 – The first successful permanent English colony in the New World, Jamestown, is established in Virginia. Early vocabulary specific to American English comes from indigenous languages.
• 1611 – The King James Version was published, largely based on Tyndale's translation. It remained the standard Bible in the Church of England into the latter half of the twentieth century.
• 1623 – Shakespeare's First Folio published

  Caroline era and English Civil War (1625–1649)

• 1630–1651 – William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony, wrote his journal. It will become Of Plymouth Plantation, one of the earliest texts written in the American Colonies.
• 1647 – Publication of the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio

Interregnum and Restoration

• 1651 – Publication of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.
• 1660–1669 – Samuel Pepys wrote his diary, which will become an important eyewitness account of the Restoration Era.
• 1662 – New edition of the Book of Common Prayer, largely based on the 1549 and subsequent editions. It long remained a standard work in English.
• 1667 – Publication of Paradise Lost by John Milton and of Annus Mirabilis by John Dryden.

Development to Modern English

Orthography

• The letter had two distinct lowercase forms:, as is still used today, and . The short s was always used at the end of a word and often elsewhere. The long s, if used, could appear anywhere except at the end of a word. The double lowercase S was written variously, or . That is similar to the alternation between medial and final lowercase sigma in Greek.
• [U|] and [V|] were not considered two distinct letters then but as still different forms of the same letter. Typographically, was frequent at the start of a word and elsewhere: hence vnmoued and en-emodeng. The modern convention of using for the vowel sounds and for the consonant appears to have been introduced in the 1630s. Also, was frequently represented by.
• Similarly, [I|] and [J|] were also still considered not as two distinct letters, but as different forms of the same letter: hence ioy for joy and en-emodeng for just. Again, the custom of using as a vowel and as a consonant began in the 1630s.
• The letter was still in use during the Early Modern English period but was increasingly limited to handwritten texts. In Early Modern English printing, was represented by the Latin, which appeared similar to thorn in blackletter typeface . Thorn had become nearly totally disused by the late Early Modern English period, the last vestiges of the letter being its ligatures, en-emodeng, en-emodeng, en-emodeng, which were still seen occasionally in the 1611 King James Version and in Shakespeare's Folios.
• A silent was often appended to words, as in ſpeake and cowarde. The last consonant was sometimes doubled when the was added: hence manne and runne.
• The sound that became Modern English was often written : hence ſommer, plombe.
• The final syllable of words like public was variously spelt but came to be standardised as -ick. The modern spellings with -ic did not come into use until the mid-18th century.
• was often used instead of.
• The vowels represented by and changed, and became an alternative.

Phonology

Consonants

• Many initial consonant clusters which have disappeared in the modern day were still fully pronounced. These include. All but have fully reduced in the 16th and 17th centuries.
• * as in write was the first to disappear, merging into in the first half of the 17th century.
• * as in knife evolved into a variety of pronunciations including, some of which remained into the 18th century until it merged with.
• * Similarly, as in gnat evolved into or merged into or.
• *, spelled such as in what, where and whale, were still pronounced, rather than. That means, for example, that wine and whine were still pronounced differently, unlike in most varieties of English today. A merger into had started by 1700, but did not become common until the late 18th century.
• Much variation existed in words with postvocalic, like night, thought, and daughter, written. In Middle English, this phoneme had allophones. While dropped entirely via, either dropped via the same path or became. The most conservative dialects retained the original allophones until the 1630s, but gh-dropping dialects had already started appearing in Middle English.Would and should had started losing in weak forms by the 1640s, but may have persisted several decades longer in the British American colonies. While the in could is unetymological, having descended from Old English cūþe, both its spelling and its pronunciation were affected by analogy with would and should, showing in its strong forms.
• The modern phoneme was not documented as occurring until the mid-17th century, when it formed from coalescence of the sequence. The word vision was pronounced prior to the change.
• Early Modern English was rhotic, as postvocalic was not lost until the late 1700s. It was a trill or tap word-initially and an approximant finally, but Dobson and Lass disagree on which was the intervocalic allophone based on different sources.
• In Early Modern English, the precise nature of the light and dark variants of the l consonant, respectively and, remains unclear.
• Word-final, as in sing, was still pronounced until the late 16th century, when it began to coalesce into the usual modern pronunciation,. Coalescence happened at morpheme boundaries in the 17th century, except in inflected adjectives, giving us modern "sier" and "stroer". However, coalescence happened earlier in unstressed -ing and the nasal further changed to, becoming more and more common until the end of the 17th century. The original pronunciation is preserved in parts of England, in dialects such as Brummie, Mancunian and Scouse.
• H-dropping at the start of words was common. In loanwords taken from Latin, Greek, or any Romance language, a written h was increasingly pronounced from the 17th to 18th centuries, e.g. in humble, host, and British herb.

Vowels

• The modern English phoneme, as in glide, rhyme and eye, was, and was reduced word-finally. Early Modern rhymes indicate that was similar to the vowel that was used at the end of words like happy, melody and busy.
• , as in now, out and ploughed, was.
• , as in fed, elm and hen, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today, sometimes approaching .
• , as in name, case and sake, was a long monophthong. It shifted from to and finally to. Earlier in Early Modern English, mat and mate were near-homophones, with a longer vowel in the second word. Thus, Shakespeare rhymed words like haste, taste and waste with last and shade with sad. The more open pronunciation remains in some Northern England English and rarely in Irish English. During the 17th century, the phoneme variably merged with the phoneme as in day, weigh, and the merger survived into standard forms of Modern English, though a few dialects kept these vowels distinct at least to the 20th century.
• as in see, bee and meet, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today, but it had not yet merged with the phoneme represented by the spellings or .
• , as in bib, pin and thick, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today.
• , as in stone, bode and yolk, was or. The phoneme was probably just beginning the process of merging with the phoneme, as in grow, know and mow, without yet achieving today's complete merger. The old pronunciation remains in some dialects, such as in Yorkshire, East Anglia, and Scotland.
• , as in rod, top and pot, was or, much like the corresponding RP sound.
• , as in taut, taught and law was more open than in contemporary RP, being or
• , as in boy, choice and toy, is even less clear than other vowels. In the late 16th century, the similar but distinct phonemes, and all existed. By the late 17th century, they all merged. Because those phonemes were in such a state of flux during the whole Early Modern period, scholars often assume only the most neutral possibility for the pronunciation of as well as its similar phonemes in Early Modern English: .
• and had not yet split and so were both pronounced in the vicinity of.
• occurred not only in words like food, moon and stool, but also all other words spelled with like blood, cook and foot. However, the vowel for some of those words was shortened at an early stage: either beginning or already in the process of approximating the Early Modern English. That phonological split among the words was a catalyst for the later foot–strut split and is called "early shortening" by John C. Wells. The words that came to be pronounced with the shortened vowel included, for example, good and blood. They, like other words with /ʊ/, were subsequently subject to the foot–strut split and many of them, like drum and love, came to be pronounced with the vowel and eventually. However, the words with a shortened vowel also seem to have included, at least in some pronunciations such as Shakespeare's and at certain stages, some words that are pronounced with the original non-shortened vowel in Present-Day English - e.g. brood, doom and noon. For example, doom and come rhyme in Shakespeare's writing for this reason.
• or occurred in words spelled with ew or ue such as due and dew. In most dialects of Modern English, it became and by yod-dropping and so do, dew and due are now perfect homophones in most American pronunciations, but a distinction between the two phonemes remains in other versions of English. There is, however, an additional complication in dialects with yod-coalescence, in which dew and due are distinguished from do purely by the initial consonant, without any vowel distinction.

Rhoticity

Specific words

Grammar

Pronouns

Verbs

Tense and number

• The third-person singular present lost its alternate inflections: -eth and -th became obsolete, and -s survived.
• The plural present form became uninflected. Present plurals had been marked with -en and singulars with -th or -s. Marked present plurals were rare throughout the Early Modern period and -en was probably used only as a stylistic affectation to indicate rural or old-fashioned speech.
• The second-person singular indicative was marked in both the present and past tenses with -st or -est. Since the indicative past was not and still 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

Perfect and progressive forms

Vocabulary

Works cited

Primary sources cited