Transcript Slide 1

PART III
(Early Modern English)
Factors affecting the development of Early
Modern English:
•
•
•
•
printing (1476)
spread of popular education
improved means of communication
growth of specialized knowledge (Latin became
less and less the vehicle for learned discourse)
• self-consciousness about language (awareness
of language standards; “language policy”)
Problems for modern European
languages in the 16th c.:
(1) scholarly recognition (i.e. in the fields
where Latin had been used);
(2) establishment of a more uniform
orthography;
(3) enrichment of the vocabulary
(1) scholarly recognition of English:
-
translations from Greek and Latin
slavish imitation of Cicero
the Protestant Reformation
book market (English books sell more!)
At first, writers often justified choosing English
over Latin in their scholarly works (see B&C:
207). By the close of the 16th c., various
writers praised The Excellency of the English
Tongue (Richard Carew, 1595).
(2) orthography
Various attempts at phonetic writing:
Thomas Smith’s (1568) Dialogue concerning the Correct and
Emended Writing of the English Language (in Latin)
John Hart, An Orthographie (1569), A Method or Comfortable
Beginning for All Unlearned, Whereby They May Bee Taught to
Read English (1570)
William Bullokar, Booke at Large, for the Amendment of
Orthographie for English Speech (1580)
Charles Butler, The English Grammar, or the Institution of Letters,
Syllables, and Woords in the English Tung (1634)
The most important treatise on English spelling is:
Richard Mulcaster’s Elementarie (1582)
He doesn’t devise a new phonetic system but makes use
of the letters already available in English. He pays
attention to usage (which sometimes clashes with
phonetic consistency) and analogy.
It is impossible to say how influential Mulcaster’s work
was, though. To be sure, the tendency towards spelling
uniformity increased steadily in the first half of the 17th c.
Your book claims, rather controversially, that the modern
system was practically settled by about 1650 (at least in
the case of printed English).
(3) enrichment:
new words mainly from Latin, but also, French, Greek, Italian,
Spanish
(sometimes it’s difficult to say whether a word came from Latin
directly or via French)
Various people reacted against classical borrowings (even classical
scholars such as “purist” Sir John Cheke), disparagingly referred to
as “inkhorn terms” (e.g. by Sir Thomas Chaloner, translator of
Erasmus’ Praise of Folly in 1549). Such words were often felt to be
obscure (see Thomas Wilson’s 1553 Arte of Rhetorique, see B&C:
218-20).
Others defended classical borrowings. Among them are Dryden,
Mulcaster, Sir Thomas Elyot, George Pettie and Bullokar.
By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the opposition to inkhorn terms had
spent its force. The attack was then directed at the abuse of the
procedure rather than the procedure itself.
• ‘Inkhorn’ terms advanced a ‘foreign’
English which was, above all, associated
with an educated elite.
• Thus, elite writers could mock those ‘guilty’
of malapropism – the misunderstanding of
the new, Latinate English – and create
class distinctions through language.
Some inkhorn terms:
democracy, encyclopedia, allusion;
external, habitual, hereditary, impersonal,
insane; adapt, assassinate, benefit,
consolidate, disregard, emancipate,
eradicate, erupt, excavate, exist,
extinguish, harass, meditate
Remember that purists not only objected
to inkhorn terms but also
oversea terms (words from French, Italian,
Spanish)
and
Chaucerisms
• By the 16th c., old (i.e. especially Middle
English) words (from Chaucer) were often set as
alternatives to inkhorn terms.
• Even those who objected to such archaisms
conceded that poets were allowed to use them.
• Edmund Spenser’s (1552-1599) language is for
example deliberately archaic.
• Literary English emerged as a dialect in its own
right, see Alexander Gil’s Logonomia Anglica
(1619): “There are six major dialects: the
general, the Northern, the Southern, the
Eastern, the Western, and the Poetic.”
• Western English was usually portrayed as
the most “barbarous”, “rustic”, uneducated,
as a kind of corrupted English.
• Richard Carew (The Survey of Cornwall,
1602), by contrast, viewed the English
spoken in Cornwall as the oldest, purest
surviving descendant of the “Saxon, our
natural language”.
• The representations of northern English were more
complex.
• Comedy often prevails in the representations of northern
provincialism.
• But northern English also had its own (modest) literary
tradition.
• Further, it was also, at times, regarded as the most
authentic of dialects because Old English words still
survived in it.
• The observation that elements of a language, long out of
use in the standard written variety, survive in nonstandard speech was first due to Lawrence Nowell. In
1565, he began to compile the first Old English
dictionary, the Vocabularium Saxonicum.
• The language of beggars and thieves (the ‘underworld’) was known
as the ‘canting’ language (or ‘pedlar’s French’) and was first
described by Thomas Harman in his A Caveat or Warening for
Common Cursetors (1567). [Interestingly, glossaries of the canting
language preceded the first English-English dictionaries!]
• Cant was viewed as a sort of English mingled with other languages.
For example, Thomas Dekker (1608) claims that many words were
Latin in origin:
“As for example, they call a Cloake (in the Canting tongue) a
Togeman, and in Latine, toga signifies a gowne, or an upper
garment. Pannam is bread: and Panis in Lattin is likewise bread.
Cassan is Cheese, and is a word barbarously coynde out of the
substantiue Caseus which also signifies Cheese. And so of others.”
• In fact, as Robert Greene suggested in 1591, cant is probably best
viewed as a jargon: “If you maruail at these misteries and queynt
words, consider, as tge Carpenter hath many termes familiar inough
to his prentices, that other vunderstand not at al, so haue the[y].’
Dictionaries of hard words:
Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words
(1604)
John Bullokar, English Expositor (1616)
Henry Cockeram, English Dictionary (1623)
Thomas Blount, Glossographia (1656)
Edward Philipps, New World of Words (1658)
Nathaniel Bailey, Universal Etymological English
Dictionary (1721)  the first ‘real’ dictionary
• Numerous Renaissance ‘English-English’ dictionaries
specialize in the terms of arts and sciences.
• For many writers, the ‘multicultural’ nature of Early
Modern English was a ‘Babellish confusion’ (Carew).
This led to the call, in the middle of the 17th c., for a
language academy, see John Evelyn (1665):
“a Lexicon or collection of all the pure English words by
themselves; then those which are derivative from others,
with their prime, certaine, and natural signification ... all
the technical words, especially those of the more
generous employments ... a full catalogue of exotic
words, such as are daily minted by our Logodaedalie ...
and that it were resolved on what should be sufficient to
render them current ... since, without restraining that
same indomitam novandi verba licentiam, it will in time
quite disguise the language.”
Some important grammatical changes in Early Modern
English (see Nevalainen 2006 for more details):
• Verbal ending –(e)s in place of –(e)th. It gained ground
first in everyday speech and informal writings. This
change is usually viewed as being due to language
contact (e.g. immigration into London from the north).
(Remember also that –s is found occasionally in the 3rd
personal plural.)
• The spread of auxiliary do in affirmative sentences was
well under way but suddenly came to a halt. This change
has also been related to dialect contact.
• The spread of you at the expense of thou illustrates a
deferential practice being adopted in the private sphere.
(Remember also that the Nominative form ye was lost.)
• The plural of nouns is consistently marked by –s
but a few exceptions are found, e.g.
Shakespeare’s eyen, shoon, kine.
• the his-genitive:
ME stonis – ston his  stone’s
• the group genitive:
the Wife of Bath’s Tale
the Wyves Tale of Bathe
• Replacement of neuter genitive pronoun
his with its (originally it’s). It gained
acceptance rapidly towards the close of
the 17th c. Some alternatives:
Two cubits and a half was the length of it (Bible)
nine cubits was the length thereof (Bible)
It lifted up it head (Shakespeare)
growing of the own accord (Holland)
• The use of who as a relative pronoun.
• Variation in the comparative and
superlative forms of adjectives (e.g. more
larger, most boldest)
• Other features: double negatives,
prepositions (see Companion)
ME
PDE
time
/ti:m@/
/taIm/
green /gre:n/
/gri:n/
clean /klE:n/
/kli:n/
break /brE:k/
/breIk/
name /na:m@/
/neIm/
loud
/lu:d/
/laUd/
GVS







i:

u:

e
i
e
:

o:


E:

:


a
:



ou




Phase I
Phase II
i:

u:

e
i
e
:

o:


E:

:


a
:


ou
e
i

i:

u:

e
:

o:

E:

:

a
:

ou
• 2nd step raisings:
/E:/> /e:/> /i:/
clean
(butgreat,
break,steak)

/a:/> /E:/> /e:/
name
• Simplifications of some ME diphthongs:
/EI/> /E:/> /e:/
day
/U/> /o:/
grow
/aU/> /U/> /:/
law
• Further development of diphthongs:
/@I/(or/eI/)>
/EI/ > /aI/ time(ME
/i:/)
/@U/(or/oU/)> /U/
> /aU/
loud(ME
/u:/)
Northern /o:/ fronting

i:

u:


e
:

o:


E:

:

a
:








i:

u:

e
:

:


E:

:

a
:

Inception:
• Lass (see Luick): close-mid vowel raising
• McMahan: open-mid vowel raising
• Stockwell and Minkova (see Jespersen):
lowering and centralization of pre-existing
diphthongs
• Jespersen: close vowel diphthongization