Early Modern English

10 Key excerpts on "Early Modern English"

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  English Words

  History and Structure

  • Donka Minkova, Robert Stockwell(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 Composition of the Early Modern and Modern English vocabulary 1 The Early Modern English cultural scene The linguistic period identified as Early Modern English began some time during the second half of the fifteenth century. There is no single historical event comparable to the Norman invasion of 1066 for Middle English which can be taken conveniently as the boundary between Middle and Early Modern English. The language changes which characterize the transition of Middle to Early Modern English coincide chronologically with several major cultural and social changes. The most notable among these is the introduction of the printing press, by Sir William Caxton, in 1476. This year is commonly taken as the cut-off date because it marks a turning point in the production and accessibility of books. It is also easy to remember. Another historical event which coincides roughly with the beginning of Early Modern English is the discovery of the New World in 1492. While its effect on our word-stock was not as immediate as the availability of printed books, the discovery of the Americas has had extraordinary consequences for the composition of the English lexicon. The end-point of Early Modern English coincides with two important events which occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century. We have already mentioned the appearance in 1755 of the first really influential dictionary of English, the Dictionary of the English Language (in two volumes) by Samuel Johnson. That dictionary boosted enormously the prestige of English lexicogra- phical research. It was the first dictionary to use quotations, and it contributed more than any other eighteenth-century work to the establishment of spelling standards. Another demarcation point of immense cultural and social significance is the American Revolution of 1776, when along with their political independence Americans began to develop more linguistic autonomy relative to British English.

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  Introduction to the History of English

  • Thomas Kohnen(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

    (Publisher)

  123 5. English ca. 1500 to ca. 1700 (Early Modern English) 5.1. Political and socio-cultural background In the last chapter we saw that the end of the Middle English period was marked by the re-emergence of English as the major means of communication in many important domains of language use. This re-establishment of English and the beginning of standardisation can serve as one criterion for delimiting the opening of the Early Modern English period. In this period, English is used in most areas of life, and in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most of the remaining fields (for example, scientific and academic prose, liturgical religious texts) adopt English as well. Also, during the last half of the fifteenth century, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell, with the help of dialectal features, where a written text stems from (except for clearly Northern texts). So, at the outset of Early Modern English we encounter an incipient norm of a written (orthographic) standard which is used in the literate sections of society, a standard, however, which will not be codified until the very end of the period. This incipient standardisation is closely linked to another event, which may be said to introduce the new era, the invention of printing from movable type and the introduction of the printing press in England in 1476 by William Caxton. Printing and the mass production of books very much contributed to standardisation. Other phenomena which are sometimes said to mark the new period are the beginning of the Tudor era (1485) and the Renaissance. These language-external factors, which may serve to delimit the start of Early Modern English, will be dealt with in more detail in the following sections. With regard to language-internal factors for delimitation, the so-called Great Vowel Shift is also mentioned by some scholars (see Chapter 5.2.1. below).

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  Varieties of Modern English

  An Introduction

  • Diane Davies(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 The March of Modern English 3.1    Introduction

  No study of varieties of English in the modern era can afford to ignore the key events and influences in the development of the language. In this chapter we will look at the roots of ‘modern’ English, at the standardisation processes that have accompanied the language and its evolution into a ‘global’ language and international lingua franca.

  Modern English is most simply defined as a third stage in the history of the language, beginning around 1450 (the first two being the Old English and Middle English stages). However, this three-stage chronological model of the language is generally refined by linguists, with Modern English itself seen as divisible into distinct phases, normally called ‘Early Modern English’ (1450–1700) and ‘Modern English’ (1700 to the present day). Some linguists argue for a further stage in the language, beginning around 1945 and called ‘Late Modern English’ or ‘World English’, reflecting the globalisation of English as an international lingua franca.

  3.2    Early Modern English

  During the Early Modern English phase a number of highly significant and liberating changes took place in English society that were to have a profound effect on the way the language was to be used and regarded. During the 16th and 17th centuries the concept of the autonomous nation state became a reality in Europe. In the growing market economy there was a breaking away in England from the authority of the Catholic Church through the period called the Reformation.1 There were rapid developments in Europe in the areas of medicine, science, the arts and theology, all of which had an impact on the English language, and the beginnings of colonial exploitation of Africa, Asia and the Americas brought a further dimension of change. However, if there was one event that was to have a more profound effect on English than any other, it was probably the establishment in London of William Caxton’s printing press in 1476 and the subsequent publication of books and translations in English (notably the English translation of the Bible in the mid-16th century). The new print medium demanded that a decision should be made as to which regional variety of English should be used in books to be read throughout the country, and Caxton chose the variety he knew best – that of London. In fact, a preference for the London standard was already apparent in most literary writings by the mid-15th

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  Early Modern English

  • Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  At the end of the 19th century, it was replaced by a three-period model with the periods Old English, Middle English, and Modern English (Sweet 1891: 211). In this model, Early Modern English figures as a sub-period of Modern English, covering the time span 1500–1650. The most recent newcomer to the period model is Late Modern English. Although it already formed part of Sweet’s three-period model, where it figured as the sub-period from 1650 onwards, it is now conceived as a full-fledged period covering the 18th and 19th centuries. Its wide acceptance as a separate period is witnessed by a series of conferences, the first of which took place in Edinburgh in 2001. Late Modern English is perhaps too new a period to have caused discussions about its beginning and end. This is different for Early Modern English. Barber (1997) and Nevalainen (2006) agree on 1500 and 1700 as the beginning and the end of the EModE period without justifying these dates as more appropriate than others. But both scholars also mention other possible dates based on language-internal criteria. After reviewing earlier suggestions about the dating of Early Modern English, Görlach (1991: 9–11), too, proposes 1500 and 1700 as its limits. The dates 1476–1776 in the title of volume III of the Cambridge History of the English Language mark a wider time span for Early Modern English with cultural and political events as points of demarcation. In the introduction to the volume, Lass (1999: 6) defends the establishment of Caxton's printing press in England as the starting-point of a linguistic period by the repercussions it had on the text production process. The American Declaration of Independence as the end-point of the period is justified, because it initiated the development of English into a global language

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  The History of English

  A Student's Guide

  • Ishtla Singh, Ishtia Singh(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5

     

  Early Modern English, 1500-1700

  5.1 Introduction

  In Chapter 4 we mentioned that the Middle English period is often characterized as one of extensive social and linguistic change. As we have seen, this was undoubtedly true, but it was also a period in which many socio-political and very generally sociolinguistic ideologies and frameworks remained relatively untouched. For instance, although the fourteenth century had seen the collapse of the old feudal system and its replacement by one which carried, for certain sectors of the society, more potential for entrepreneurship and economic gain, a stratified class system remained firmly in place. Despite the upheavals and replacements at the upper echelons of the Church and State that had followed the Norman Conquest, as well as the disputes that periodically erupted between the two, these entities remained anchored in a mutually beneficial relationship that had existed for centuries. English had regained its position as an important written language, but was still secondary in status to Latin, which continued to serve as the medium of scholarship and of the all-powerful Catholic Church. Smith (1984: 16) therefore states that a contemporary ‘perceptive observer’ would very likely have assumed that the new, sixteenth century would simply see a continuation of this status quo.

  What Smith's observer could not have foreseen was how, within a relatively short space of time, the medieval fabric of England would begin to be ripped apart and reshaped into a more modern form. The years approximately between 1500 and 1700 (Early Modern) in particular would see significant social, political, religious and indeed linguistic change as a result of various factors; the most important of which included increasing hostility to the established church, a growing sense of national identity and advances in technology. While some of these elements were not in themselves new or unprecedented, their combined effect was dramatic. The Catholic Church, for example, would continue to face anticlerical feeling but for the first time in its history, would see this grow into a reforming zeal through the widespread, and therefore damaging, dissemination of printed heretical literature to an increasingly literate populace. It would also engage in a dispute with the crown – again, not an unprecedented event in its history – but one which, this time, would not end in ‘compromise and conciliation’ but instead in a ‘clear rejection of papal authority and the creation of an English nation state’ (ibid.: 17). In addition, part of the tensions between English Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, as well as between the English monarchy and Roman papacy, would be reflected in debates about language use. Although Latin would maintain its classical prestige for many Renaissance scholars, it would also come to be derided by some as a ‘popish’ tongue that had little or no place as the language of the new English nation and English Church. Overall, this Early Modern period would be characterized by the operation of ‘forces of centripetalization’ in state, religion and print which when combined, not only ‘tied the [English] language firmly to the nation’, but was also ‘victorious in establishing recognisable forms of the English language as central and stable’ (Crowley, 1996: 55). By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the ideology of a ‘monolithic’ English language would begin to take hold (leading to the standardization efforts of that century and beyond) – not just within England but also within the nascent British Empire.

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  English in Modern Times

  • Joan C Beal(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Modern English and modern times 1.1 Introduction: Defining ‘modern times’ ‘Modern times’ in this book are defined as the years from the beginning of the eighteenth century through to the end of World War II. This more or less coincides with the period generally referred to in more recent histories of English (e.g. Blake, 1996) as ‘Later Modern English’. Dates are always contentious in histories of English, and the boundaries of ‘Modern’ and ‘Later Modern’ English have long been, and are still, a matter of debate. In this chapter, I intend to demonstrate that the period covered is one in which the characteristics of both ‘Modern’ English and the modern world evolve. The term ‘Modern English’ with reference to a historical period seems to have been coined by Sweet in a lecture delivered to the Philological Society in 1873 and published in the society’s Transactions for 1873–4: ‘I propose … to start with the three main divisions of Old, Middle and Modern, based mainly on the inflectional characteristics of each stage’ (1873–4: 620). Since Sweet defined ‘Modern English’ as the period of lost inflections, there would be no need in his view for any further subdivision of this period, since the only inflection lost after the seventeenth century is the second-person singular - st. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Wyld proposes a modification of Sweet’s threefold division, with Early Modern English ‘from 1400 or so to the middle of the sixteenth century’ and ‘Present-day English’ from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the time of writing (1920). Wyld is fairly typical of writers from the first half of the twentieth century in viewing the period from 1700 to what for them was ‘the present’ as coherent

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  English Historical Linguistics. Volume 1

  • Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The new corpora or new supplements to existing ones would include legal texts of var-ious kinds produced by the local administrative and legal institutions as well as private transactions such as land transfers arranged by advocates, official correspondence, and a wide range of private writing, diaries, autobiographies, accounts, commonplace books, and letters in particular. The linguistic examination of these will inevitably show that there are quite complex texts among these; some texts, such as trial proceedings consist of a number of different texts, witness depositions often reflecting local linguistic prac-tices, while some other texts represent legalese, for example, formulaic language use adapting Latin or French models. It is generally agreed that historical dialectology in the Early Modern English period is not as advanced as that focusing on Middle English. While the Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English (LALME) (McIntosh et al. 1986) and especially the recently launched Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) (Laing and Lass 2007) 42 Early Modern English: Dialects 671 have completely changed our ability to reconstruct dialectal variation in Middle English, the situation is quite different in Early Modern English, as Kyto ¨, Grund, and Walker (2007) point out: We still know comparatively little about regional Early Modern Englishes: they have been difficult to study since edited material that can be clearly anchored in a specific region of England is scarce. The ongoing standardisation of English during the period also means that regional features were being increasingly suppressed in favour of the norm in most formal written records (Kyto ¨, Grund, and Walker 2007: Section 4). As regards the availability of relevant data, innovative work by Kyto ¨ et al.

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  Literacy, Narrative and Culture

  • Jens Brockmeier, David R Olson, Min Wang, Jens Brockmeier, David R Olson, Min Wang, David R. Olson, Jens Brockmeier, David R. Olson, Min Wang(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  R. C. Alston began cataloging grammars, dictionaries, glossaries, and other works in 1966 in his comprehensive multi-volume bibliography of printed books on the English language to 1800. Scolar Press and Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints have reprinted many of these texts. In 1978 Richard Bailey added thousands of antedatings, new words, and new senses to what is known in the OED. Throughout the 1970s and up to his death in 1985, Jürgen Schäfer built a lexical database extracted from English glossaries and monolingual dictionaries he encountered in reviewing almost 2,000 microfilms of STC books. His Early Modern English Lexicography, which came out in 1989, succinctly analyzed and indexed word-entries from 133 works from 1485 to 1640. It gives 5,000 entries that add information to the OED about new words and senses, and antedatings, and lists all word-entries in these monolingual works. It remains to integrate the English-language glosses to foreign words in the bilingual dictionaries with the full text of entries in the monolingual glossaries served by Schäfer’s work. The Early Modern English Dictionaries Database (EMEDD) begins that task. It has 225,000 word entries from 16 bilingual dictionaries and monolingual hard-word glossaries dating from 1530 to 1657. They can be searched on the World Wide Web. 2 Let me approach an answer to “how do words mean in Early Modern England?” through a related question, “Did a definition give an explanation of a word or the thing or idea denoted by that word, or something else?” All definitions inform a reader, but their purposes may differ. An entry in Renaissance dictionaries might be a lexical definition, which describes verba (words), or a logical definition, which describes res (things), or yet another alternative. 3 On the surface, it is unclear what the typical EME dictionary entry aims to do. For example, in Sir Thomas Elyot’s Latin entry, “Gentilis

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  Teaching English Language 16-19

  A Comprehensive Guide for Teachers of AS and A Level English Language

  • Martin Illingworth, Nick Hall(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In considering the modern period, you are again able to offer the student the opportunity to develop important study skills. Having outlined the two earlier periods, you could entrust the research of important linguistic developments in the modern era to the students.

  This process could begin with a group discussion of what they need to know. Open and collaborative questioning can set the guidelines for choosing how and what to research.

  Rather than have this timeline tell you about the modern period, get your students to research into the topic. They could try to identify five key events or factors that have helped to shape the language. Groups could present their findings to the class and try to make a case for the particular area that they have researched.

  Just in case you are feeling that we are not being all that helpful here, here is a list of ‘key’ areas that should prove to be illuminating:

  •    social upheavals of 1640–60 •    increases in trade •    British settlement of America •    Inkhorn Debate 1560–1640 •    the 1611 King James authorised Bible •    the Renaissance (1500s and 1600s) •    the Great Vowel Shift 1450–1750 •    the impact of the British Empire.

  Let your students chart their ways through the impact that these and other factors have had upon the language in the modern period. Collectively, they can join the different factors onto the timeline creating a clear sense of chronology.

  ____________________________

  The exam boards might also choose to make use of a text from the very recent past. These sorts of texts often throw students as they appear not to have changed very much. Certainly, the explicit internal features visible on the page seem to be like those of today. More modern texts need very careful consideration.

  An example of a more modern text for study

  This is the text printed on a tea towel.

  We are Survivors (For those born before 1940)

  We were born before television, before penicillin, polio shots, frozen foods, Xerox, contact lenses, videos and the Pill. We were before radar, credit cards, split atoms, laser beams and ballpoint pens, before dishwashers, tumble driers, electric blankets, air conditioners, dry clothes … and before man walked on the moon.

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  Placing Middle English in Context

  • Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, Matti Rissanen, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, Matti Rissanen(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Standard language in Early Middle English? Jeremy Smith Questions of standardisation have for a long time bedevilled our understanding of the evolution of the written language during the Middle English period. In this paper, an attempt is made to clarify what is meant by the notion of standardisation, and to assess how far standardisation was achieved during the transition from Old to Middle English. Although the focus of attention is on the best-known case of standardisation from this period, ie. the so-called AB language of Ancrene Wisse and the texts in MS Bodley 34, more general research questions are also identified. 1. Orientation The current paper derives its orientation from work in progress on a major project: the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (hence LAEME), a text-based dialect survey currently being undertaken in the Institute of Historical Dialectology, University of Edinburgh, with input from colleagues in the Department of English Language, University of Glasgow. The aim of LAEME is to provide scholars with (1) a fully-tagged, machine-readable archive of the complete corpus of Early Middle English (ca. 1100-1350), and (2) an atlas of Early Middle English comparable in aims - although not of course in size - with that already produced for the period 1350-1450, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME ; Mcintosh, Samuels, and Benskin 1986). My own, somewhat limited, contribution to the project so far has been largely to do with the production of machine-readable texts relating to the South-West Midlands area (my senior co-worker, Dr Laing, has made great strides in the tagging, interpretation and mapping of material from the rest of the country, and has produced inter alia a major Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English). Yet it is already possible to draw some preliminary conclusions about a number of issues involved in such a project. One such issue is that of the respective roles of tradition and

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