Whichever side of the debate one favours, however, it is fair to say that, by the end of the 16th Century, English had finally become widely accepted as a language of learning, equal if not superior to the classical languages. Vernacular language, once scorned as suitable for popular literature and little else - and still criticized throughout much of Europe as crude, limited and immature - had become recognized for its inherent qualities.
As mass-produced books became cheaper and more commonly available, literacy mushroomed, and soon works in English became even more popular than books in Latin. At the time of the introduction of printing, there were five major dialect divisions within England - Northern, West Midlands, East Midlands a region which extended down to include London , Southern and Kentish - and even within these demarcations, there was a huge variety of different spellings.
For example, the word church could be spelled in 30 different ways, people in 22, receive in 45, she in 60 and though in an almost unbelievable variations. The "-eth" and "-th" verb endings used in the south of the country e. The Chancery of Westminster made some efforts from the s onwards to set standard spellings for official documents, specifying I instead of ich and various other common variants of the first person pronoun, land instead of lond , and modern spellings of such , right , not , but , these , any , many , can , cannot , but , shall , should , could , ought , thorough , etc, all of which previously appeared in many variants.
Chancery Standard contributed significantly to the development of a Standard English, and the political, commercial and cultural dominance of the "East Midlands triangle" London-Oxford-Cambridge was well established long before the 15th Century, but it was the printing press that was really responsible for carrying through the standardization process. With the advent of mass printing, the dialect and spelling of the East Midlands and, more specifically, that of the national capital, London, where most publishing houses were located became the de facto standard and, over time, spelling and grammar gradually became more and more fixed.
IMAGE Early printing was a very labour-intensive process from EHistLing Some of the decisions made by the early publishers had long-lasting repercussions for the language. One such example is the use of the northern English they , their and them in preference to the London equivalents hi , hir and hem which were more easily confused with singular pronouns like he , her and him. Caxton himself complained about the difficulties of finding forms which would be understood throughout the country, a difficult task even for simple little words like eggs.
But his own work was far from consistent e. Many of his successors were just as inconsistent, particularly as many of them were Europeans and not native English speakers. Sometimes different spellings were used for purely practical reasons, such as adding or omitting letters merely to help the layout or justification of printed lines. A good part of the reason for many of the vagaries and inconsistencies of English spelling has been attributed to the fact that words were fixed on the printed page before any orthographic consensus had emerged among teachers and writers.
Printing also directly gave rise to another strange quirk: It is only since the archaic spelling was revived for store signs e. Ye Olde Pubbe that the "modern" pronunciation of ye has been used. As the Early Modern period progressed, there was an increased use of double vowels e. The letters "u" and "v", which had been more or less interchangeable in Middle English , gradually became established as a vowel and a consonant respectively, as did "i" and "j". The grammarian John Hart was particularly influential in these punctuation reforms.
The History of English - Early Modern English (c. - c. )
Standardization was well under way by around , but it was a slow and halting process and names in particular were often rendered in a variety of ways. But, in , William Tyndale printed his New Testament, which he had translated directly from the original Greek and Hebrew. By the time of his death he had only completed part of the Old Testament, but others carried on his labours. It appears to be deliberately conservative, even backward-looking, both in its vocabulary and its grammar, and presents many forms which had already largely fallen out of use, or were at least in the process of dying out e.
The "-eth" ending is used throughout for third person singular verbs, even though "-es" was becoming much more common by the early 17th Century, and ye is used for the second person plural pronoun, rather than the more common you. Matthew in the Wycliffe, Tyndale and Authorized versions respectively gives an idea of the way the language developed over the period:.
Much of its real power, though, was in exposing the written language to many more of the common people. Several other dictionaries, as well as grammar, pronunciation and spelling guides, followed during the 17th and 18th Century. Johnson also deliberately omitted from his dictionary several words he disliked or considered vulgar including bang , budge , fuss , gambler , shabby and touchy , but these useful words have clearly survived intact regardless of his opinions. Several of his definitions appear deliberately jokey or politically motivated.
Since the 16th Century, there had been calls for the regulation and reform of what was increasingly seen as an unwieldy English language, including John Cheke's proposal for the removal of all silent letters, and William Bullokar's recommendation of a new letter alphabet including 8 vowels, 4 "half-vowels" and 25 consonants in order to aid and simplify spelling. There were even attempts similarly unsuccessful to ban certain words or phrases that were considered in some way undesirable, words such as fib , banter , bigot , fop , flippant , flimsy , workmanship , selfsame , despoil , nowadays , furthermore and wherewithal , and phrases such as subject matter , drive a bargain , handle a subject and bolster an argument.
But, by the early 18th Century, many more scholars had come to believe that the English language was chaotic and in desperate need of some firm rules. He was supported in this by other important writers like John Dryden and Daniel Defoe, but such an institution was never actually realized. Interestingly, the only country ever to set up an Academy for the English language was South Africa, in Thomas Sheridan attempted to tap into the zeitgeist , and looked to regulate English pronunciation as well as its vocabulary and spelling.
His son, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, later gave us the unforgettable language excesses of Mrs. In fact, some works on grammar and rhetoric were published between and , and no less than during the 19th Century.
Great Vowel Shift
Lowth was the main source of such "correct" grammar rules as a double negative always yields a positive, never end a sentence with a preposition and never split an infinitive. One such peak for the English language was the Early Modern period of the 16th to 18th Century, a period sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of English Literature other peaks include the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th Century, and the computer and digital age of the late 20th Century, which is still continuing today.
Between and , an estimated 10,, new words were coined, about half of which are still in use today. Up until the 17th Century, English was rarely used for scholarly or scientific works, as it was not considered to possess the precision or the gravitas of Latin or French. In each pronunciation variant, different pairs or trios of words were merged in pronunciation. Four different pronunciation variants are shown in the table below.
The fourth pronunciation variant gave rise to Modern English pronunciation.
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Modern English typically has the meet — meat merger: The Great Vowel Shift affected other dialects as well as the standard English of southern England but in different ways. In Northern England , the long back vowels remained unaffected because the long mid back vowel had undergone an earlier shift. The words bite , feet , boot have shifted vowels, but house does not:. In both Northern and Southern English, close-mid vowels were raised: The vowels mentioned in words like break or steak underwent shortening, possibly by the plosives following the vowels, and then diphthongization.
The presence of [r] in swear and bear caused the vowel quality to be retained but not in the cases of hear and near.
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The word room , which was spelled as roum in Middle English, retains its Middle English pronunciation. Shortening of long vowels at various stages produced further complications: That is known as the bred—bread merger. Similar but older shortening occurred for some instances of ou: The printing press was introduced to England in the s by William Caxton and later Richard Pynson. The adoption and use of the printing press accelerated the process of standardization of English spelling , which continued into the 16th century.
The standard spellings were those of Middle English pronunciation, and spelling conventions continued from Old English. However, the Middle English spellings were retained into Modern English while the Great Vowel Shift was taking place, which caused some of the peculiarities of Modern English spelling in relation to vowels. History of the language Spelling. In Minkova, Donka; Stockwell, Robert. This is due to what is called The Great Vowel Shift. Beginning in the twelfth century and continuing until the eighteenth century but with its main effects in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the sounds of the long stressed vowels in English changed their places of articulation i.
Old and Middle English were written in the Latin alphabet and the vowels were represented by the letters assigned to the sounds in Latin. It had much the same value as written long e has in most modern European languages. Consequently, one can read Chaucer's long vowels with the same values as in Latin or any continental European language and come pretty close to the Middle English values. To many it seemed that the pronunciation of English had moved so far from its visual representation that a new alphabet was needed, and in the sixteenth century we have the first attempts to "reform" English spellings, a movement still active today.
In John Hart in his Orthographie went so far as to devise a new phonetic alphabet to remedy what he considered a fatal flaw in our system of language.