Modern English History

Lecture 8

Literature

1. Расторгуева Т.А. История английского языка: Учебник для вузов М.: Астрель, 2003 (чз-5, аб-15).

2. Иванова И., Чахоян Л., Беляева Т. История английского языка:

3. Учебник. Хрестоматия. Словарь/ И.Иванова, Л.Чахоян,Т.Беляева СПб.: Лань, 2006 (чз-5, аб-17).

4. Ярцева В.Н. Языкознание: Большой энциклопедический словарь / Под ред. В.Н.Ярцевой М.: Большая Российская энциклопедия, 2000 (чз-3).

5. «Сrosscultural Aspects of The English Language History (Historical, social and cultural backgrounds of the English language history)»: учебное пособие по курсу истории английского языка/ Сост.: Р.Ж. Саурбаев, C.Г. Кулагина; Сургут. гос ун-т. – Сургут: Изд-во СурГУ, 2003 (медиатека ИнЕУ).

1. Essential knowledge and literary terms to understand Shakespeare

1. Early Modern English is the stage of the English language used from about the end of the Middle English period (the latter half of the 15th century to 1650. Thus, the first edition of the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare both belong to the late phase of Early Modern English. Prior to and following the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603 the emerging English standard began to influence the spoken and written Middle Scots of Scotland.

Current readers of English are generally able to understand Early Modern English, though occasionally with difficulties arising from grammar changes, changes in the meanings of some words, and spelling differences. The standardisation of English spelling falls within the Early Modern English period and is influenced by conventions predating the Great Vowel Shift, which is the reason for much of the non-phonetic spelling of contemporary Modern English.

The translators of the King James Version of the Holy Bible intentionally preserved, in Early Modern English, archaic pronouns and verb endings that had already begun to fall out of spoken use. This enabled the English translators to convey the distinction between the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person singular and plural verb forms of the original Hebrew and Greek sources.

In Early Modern English, there were two second-person personal pronouns: thou, the informal singular pronoun, and ye, which was both the plural pronoun and the formal singular pronoun. (This usage is analogous to the modern French tu and vous and modern southern German du and ihr). Thou was already falling out of use in the Early Modern English period, but remained customary for addressing God and certain other solemn occasions, and sometimes for addressing inferiors.

Like other personal pronouns, thou and ye had different forms depending on their grammatical case; specifically, the objective form of thou was thee, its possessive forms were thy and thine, and its reflexive or emphatic form was thyself; while the objective form of ye was you, its possessive forms were your and yours, and its reflexive or emphatic forms were yourself and yourselves.

In other respects, the pronouns were much the same as today. One difference is that my and thy became mine and thine before words beginning with a vowel or the letter h (or, more accurately, the older forms "mine" and "thine" had become "my" and "thy" before words beginning with a consonant other than "h," while "mine" and "thine" were retained before words beginning with a vowel or "h"); thus, mine eyes, thine hand, and so on.

The possessive forms were used as genitives before words beginning with a vowel sound and letter h (e.g. thine eyes, mine heire). Otherwise, "my" and "thy" is attributive (my/thy goods) and "mine" and "thine" are predicative (they are mine/thine). Shakespeare pokes fun at this custom with an archaic plural for eyes when the character Bottom says "mine eyen" in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

From the earlyEarly Modern English period up until the 17th century, his was the possessive of the third person neuter it as well as of the third person masculine he. Genitive "it" appears once in the 1611 King James Bible (Leviticus 25:5) as groweth of it owne accord.

On the cusp between late Middle and early Modern English are texts like the Paston family letters, mostly from the 1450s-1480s. Here is a letter from an English gentlewoman named Agnes Paston to her son John in London, written in 1465. Paston lived in Norwich in East Anglia, not far north of London today, but quite a distance to travel 533 years ago.

The main difficulties we have in reading this text are the variable spelling (remember that this text comes from before the introduction of printing to Britain) and the use of the letters þ "thorn" (which we'd now spell "th") and 3 "yogh," which mostly in this passage would be the modern consonant "y." With those spelling changes in mind, we can see that this is still very much English--very little vocabulary is strange here, especially if you know a little Old or Middle English.

The spelling and usage of Paston's text looks odd to us, for one thing, because it was written just a few years before printing was introduced to England by William Caxton in the 1470s. (If you had never seen a printed book, your spelling wouldn't be too good either.) When government documents and literary texts began to be printed in London and distributed across England, the process of standardization begun by the Chancery clerks in the early 1400s moved into a modern and high-tech mode.

The pronunciation of words has (probably) also changed since Paston's time, and in fact may have been changing in her neighborhood during her lifetime. The most significant of these phonological changes is probably the Great Vowel Shift. Even as printing helped to freeze the spelling of English vowels in the 1400s, people continued to drift in their spoken language, to adopt new values for the vowels they used.

One element of the Great Vowel Shift had begun to move in Early Middle English. Recall that the vowel in stone, home, and road is, in Old English, a low back vowel: stan, ham, rad. In Middle English, this vowel had moved up to the position now present in Standard Modern caught or bought. (The words were variously spelled in Middle English: stoon, hoom, road, rod, stane, hame can all be observed.)