Early Modern English

Early Modern English
Shakespeare's English, King James English
English
William Shakespeare's Sonnet 132 in the 1609 Quarto
Region	England, southern Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British colonies
Era	developed into Modern English in late 17th century
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic North Sea Germanic Anglo-Frisian Anglic Early Modern English
Early forms	Old English Middle English
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
ISO 639-6	emen
Glottolog	None
IETF	en-emodeng
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For a guide to IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Early Modern English, Early New English (sometimes abbreviated to EModE,^[1] EMnE or EME) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle English, in the late 15th century, to the transition to Modern English, in the mid-to-late 17th century.^[2]

Before and after 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.

The grammatical and orthographical conventions of literary English in the late 16th century and in the 17th century are still very influential on Modern Standard English. Modern readers of English can understand texts written in the late phase of the Early Modern English, such as the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare, and they have greatly influenced Modern English.

Texts from the earlier phase of Middle English, such as the late-15th century Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) and the mid-16th century Gorboduc (1561), may present more difficulties but are still obviously closer to Modern English grammar, lexicon and phonology than are 14th-century Middle English texts, such as the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

History[edit]

English Renaissance[edit]

Transition from Middle English[edit]

The change from Middle English to Early Modern English was not just a matter of changes of vocabulary or pronunciation; a new era in the history of English was beginning.

An era of linguistic change in a language with large variations in dialect was replaced by a new era of a more standardised language, with a richer lexicon and an established (and lasting) literature.

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

Tudor period (1485–1603)[edit]

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

Henry VIII[edit]

• c. 1509 – Pynson becomes 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 is largely from the work of Tyndale. It is read to congregations regularly in churches, which familiarises much of the population of England with a standard form of the language.
• 1549 – Publication of the first Book of Common Prayer in English, under the supervision of Thomas Cranmer (revised 1552 and 1662), which standardises 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 (1611) did.^[3]
• 1557 – Publication of Tottel's Miscellany.

Elizabethan English[edit]

Elizabethan era (1558–1603)

• 1582 – The Rheims and Douai Bible is completed, and the New Testament is released in Rheims, France, in 1582. It is the first complete English translation of the Bible that is officially sponsored and carried out by the Catholic Church (earlier translations into English, especially of the Psalms and Gospels existed as far back as the 9th century, but it is the first Catholic English translation of the full Bible). Though the Old Testament is ready complete, it is not published until 1609–1610, when it is released in two volumes. It does not make a large impact on the English language at large, it certainly plays a role in the development of English, especially in the world's heavily-Catholic English-speaking areas.
• Christopher Marlowe, fl. 1586–1593
• 1592 – The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd
• c. 1590 to c. 1612 – Shakespeare's plays written.
  See also: Chronology of Shakespeare's plays and Shakespeare's influence

17th century[edit]

Jacobean and Caroline eras[edit]

Jacobean era (1603–1625)[edit]

• 1609 – Shakespeare's sonnets published
• Other playwrights:
  • Ben Jonson
  • Thomas Dekker
  • Beaumont and Fletcher (Francis Beaumont and John 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 (such as moose, racoon).
• 1611 – The King James Bible is published, largely based on Tyndale's translation. It remains the standard Bible in the Church of England for many years.
• 1623 – Shakespeare's First Folio published

Caroline era and English Civil War (1625–1649)[edit]

• 1630–1651 – William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony, writes in 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[edit]

The English Civil War and the Interregnum were times of social and political upheaval and instability. The dates for Restoration literature are a matter of convention and differ markedly from genre to genre. In drama, the "Restoration" may last until 1700, but in poetry, it may last only until 1666, the annus mirabilis (year of wonders), and prose, it last until 1688, with the increasing tensions over succession and the corresponding rise in journalism and periodicals, or until 1700, when those periodicals grew more stabilised.

• 1651 – Publication of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.
• 1660–1669 – Samuel Pepys writes in 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, which long remains a standard work in English.
• 1667 – Publication of Paradise Lost by John Milton and of Annus Mirabilis by John Dryden.

Development to Modern English[edit]

The 17th-century port towns and their forms of speech gain influence over the old county towns. England experiences a new period of internal peace and relative stability, which encourages the arts including literature, from around the 1690s onwards.

Modern English can be taken to have emerged fully by the beginning of the Georgian era in 1714, but English orthography remained somewhat fluid until the publication of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, in 1755.

The towering importance of William Shakespeare over the other Elizabethan authors was the result of his reception during the 17th and the 18th centuries, which directly contributes to the development of Standard English^{[citation needed]}. Shakespeare's plays are therefore still familiar and comprehensible 400 years after they were written,^[4] but the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, which had been written only 200 years earlier, are considerably more difficult for the average modern reader.

Orthography[edit]

The orthography of Early Modern English was fairly similar to that of today, but spelling was unstable. Early Modern English, as well as Modern English, inherited orthographical conventions predating the Great Vowel Shift.

Early Modern English spelling was similar to that of Middle English. Certain changes were made, however, sometimes for reasons of etymology (as with the silent ⟨b⟩ that was added to words like debt, doubt and subtle).

Early Modern English orthography had a number of features of spelling that have not been retained:

• The letter ⟨S⟩ had two distinct lowercase forms: ⟨s⟩ (short s), as is still used today, and ⟨ſ⟩ (long s). 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 ⟨ſſ⟩, ⟨ſs⟩ or ⟨ß⟩ (the last ligature is still used in German ß).^[5] That is similar to the alternation between medial (σ) and final lower case sigma (ς) in Greek.
• ⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ were then considered as not two distinct letters but as still different forms of the same letter. Typographically, ⟨v⟩ was frequent at the start of a word and ⟨u⟩ elsewhere:^[6] hence vnmoued (for modern unmoved) and loue (for love). The modern convention of using ⟨u⟩ for the vowel sound(s) and ⟨v⟩ for the consonant appears to have been introduced in the 1630s.^[7] Also, ⟨w⟩ was frequently represented by ⟨vv⟩.
• Similarly, ⟨i⟩ and ⟨j⟩ were also still considered as two distinct letters but as different forms of the same letter: hence ioy for joy and iust for just. Again, the custom of using ⟨i⟩ as a vowel and ⟨j⟩ as a consonant began in the 1630s.^[7]
• The letter ⟨þ⟩ (thorn) was still in use during the Early Modern English period but was increasingly limited to handwritten texts. In Early Modern English printing, ⟨þ⟩ was represented by the Latin ⟨Y⟩ (see Ye olde), which appeared similar to thorn in blackletter typeface ⟨𝖞⟩. Thorn had become nearly totally disused by the late Early Modern English period, the last vestiges of the letter being its ligatures, y^e (thee), y^t (that), y^u (thou), which were still seen occasionally in the 1611 King James Bible and in Shakespeare's Folios.^[8]
• A silent ⟨e⟩ was often appended to words, as in ſpeake and cowarde. The last consonant was sometimes doubled when the ⟨e⟩ was added: hence manne (for man) and runne (for run).
• The sound /ʊ/ was often written ⟨o⟩ (as in son): hence ſommer, plombe (for modern summer, plumb).^[9]
• 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.^[10]

Many spellings had still not been standardised, however. For example, he was spelled as both he and hee in the same sentence in Shakespeare's plays and elsewhere.

Phonology[edit]

Consonants[edit]

Most consonant sounds of Early Modern English have survived into present-day English; however, there are still a few notable differences in pronunciation:

• Today's "silent" consonants found in the consonant clusters of such words as knot, gnat, sword were still fully pronounced up until the mid-to-late 16th century but had been fully reduced by the early 17th century.^[11] The silent l of would and should, for example, may have even persisted up until 1700 in Britain and perhaps several decades longer in the British American colonies.^[12]
• Most words with the spelling ⟨wh⟩, such as what, where, and whale, were still pronounced [ʍ] ( listen), rather than [w] ( listen). That means, for example, that wine and whine were still pronounced differently, unlike in most varieties of English today.^[13]
• Early Modern English was rhotic. In other words, the r was always pronounced,^[13] but the precise nature of the typical rhotic consonant remains unclear.^{[citation needed]} It was, however, certainly one of the following:
  • The "R" of most varieties of English today: [ɹ̠] ( listen)
  • The "trilled or rolled R": [r] ( listen)
  • The "retroflex R": [ɻ] ( listen).
• In Early Modern English, the precise nature of the light and dark variants of the l consonant, respectively [l] ( listen) and [ɫ] ( listen), remains unclear.
• Word-final ⟨ng⟩, as in sing, was still pronounced /ŋɡ/ until the late 16th century, when it began to coalesce into the usual modern pronunciation, [ŋ].
• H-dropping at the start of words was common, as it still is in informal English throughout most of England.^[13]

Pure vowels and diphthongs[edit]

The following information primarily comes from studies of the Great Vowel Shift;^[14][15] see the related chart.

• The modern English phoneme /aɪ/ ( listen), as in glide, rhyme, and eye, was [ɘi] and later [əi]. Early Modern rhymes indicate that [əi] was also the vowel that was used at the end of words like happy, melody and busy.
• /aʊ/ ( listen), as in now, out and ploughed, was [əu ~ əʊ] ( listen).
• /æ/ ( listen), as in cab, trap and sad, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today.
• /ɛ/ ( listen), as in fed, elm, and hen, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today or perhaps a slightly higher [ɛ̝] ( listen), sometimes approaching [ɪ] ( listen) (as it still retains in the word pretty).^[13]
• /eɪ/ ( listen), as in name, case and sake, was a long monophthong, approximating [ɛː] ( listen), perhaps at first more open, such as /æ/ ( listen) (with Shakespeare rhyming words like haste, taste and waste with a fronted last and shade with sad),^[16] and later less open, such as [ɛ̝ː] ( listen). The phoneme was just beginning or already in the process of merging with the phoneme [ɛːi] ( listen) as in day, pay, and say. Depending upon the exact moment or dialect of Early Modern English, met was a potential homophone with mate; the same was true for even mat and mate. Such an open pronunciation of remains in some dialects mostly in Northern England.
• /iː/ ( listen) (typically spelled ⟨ee⟩ or ⟨ie⟩) 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 ⟨ea⟩ or ⟨ei⟩ (and perhaps ⟨ie⟩, particularly with fiend, field and friend), as in east, meal and feat, which were pronounced with [eː] ( listen) or [ɛ̝ː].^[17][16] However, words like breath, dead and head may have already split off towards /ɛ/ ( listen)).
• /ɪ/ ( listen), as in bib, pin and thick, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today.
• /oʊ/ ( listen), as in stone, bode and yolk, was [oː] ( listen) or [o̞ː] ( listen). The phoneme was probably just beginning the process of merging with the phoneme [ou], as in grow, know and mow, without yet achieving today's complete merger. The old pronunciation remains in some dialects, such as in Yorkshire and Scotland.
• /ɒ/ ( listen), as in rod, top and pot, was [ɒ] or [ɔ] ( listen).
• /ɔː/ ( listen), as in taut, taught and law, was [ɔː] or [ɑː] ( listen).
• /ɔɪ/ ( listen), as in boy, choice and toy, is less clear than other vowels. By the late-16th century, the similar but distinct phonemes /ɔɪ/, /ʊi/ and /əɪ/ all existed. By the late-17th century, only /ɔɪ/ remained.^[18] Because those phonemes were in such a state of flux during the whole Early Modern period (with evidence of rhyming occurring among them as well as with the precursor to /aɪ/), scholars^[11] often assume only the most neutral possibility for the pronunciation of /ɔɪ/ as well as its similar phonemes in Early Modern English: [əɪ] (which, if accurate, would constitute an early instance of the line–loin merger since /aɪ/ had not yet fully developed in English).
• /ʌ/ ( listen) (as in drum, enough and love) and /ʊ/ ( listen) (as in could, full, put,) had not yet split and so were both pronounced about as [ɤ] ( listen).
• /uː/ ( listen) was about the same as the phoneme represents today but occurred in not only words like food, moon and stool but also all other words spelled with ⟨oo⟩ like blood, cook and foot. The nature of the vowel sound in the latter group of words, however, is further complicated by the fact that the vowel for some of those words was shortened and either was beginning or already was in the process of approximating the Early Modern English [ɤ] ( listen) and later [ʊ] ( listen). For instance, at certain stages of the Early Modern period and/or in certain dialects, doom and come rhymed. That phonological split among the ⟨oo⟩ words was a catalyst for the later foot–strut split and is now called the "early shortening" by phonologists.^[19] The ⟨oo⟩ words that were pronounced as something like [ɤ] ( listen) seem to have included blood, brood, doom, good and noon.^[20]
• /ɪʊ̯/ or /iu̯/ occurred in words spelled with ew or ue such as due and dew. In most dialects of Modern English, it became /juː/ and /uː/ by yod-dropping and so do, dew and due are now perfect homophones. A distinction between the two phonemes remains in Wales and in other conservative dialects.

Rhotic vowels[edit]

It is clear that the r sound (the phoneme /r/) was probably always pronounced with following vowel sounds (more in the style of today's Northern English, Irish or Scottish accents and less like today's typical London or standard British accents). Furthermore, /ɛ/, /ɪ/ and /ʌ/ were not necessarily merged before /r/, as they are in most modern English dialects. The stressed modern phoneme /ɜːr/, when it is spelled ⟨er⟩, ⟨ear⟩ and perhaps ⟨or⟩ (as in clerk, earth, or divert), had a vowel sound with an a-like quality, perhaps about [ɐɹ] or [äɹ].^[16] With the spelling ⟨or⟩, the sound may have been backed, more toward [ɒɹ] in words like worth and word.^[16] In some pronunciations, words like fair and fear, with the spellings ⟨air⟩ and ⟨ear⟩, rhymed with each other, and words with the spelling ⟨are⟩, such as prepare and compare, were sometimes pronounced with a more open vowel sound, like the verbs are and scar. See Great Vowel Shift § Later mergers for more information.

Particular words[edit]

Nature was pronounced approximately as [ˈnɛːtəɹ] ^[13] and may have ryhmed with letter or, early on, even latter. One may have merged to the sound of own, with both one and other using the era's long GOAT vowel, rather than today's STRUT vowels.^[13] Tongue merged to the sound of tong and rhymed with song.^[16]

Grammar[edit]

Pronouns[edit]

Early Modern English had two second-person personal pronouns: thou, the informal singular pronoun, and ye, the plural (both formal and informal) pronoun and the formal singular pronoun.

"Thou and "ye" were both common in the early-16th century (they can be seen, for example, in the disputes over Tyndale's translation of the Bible in the 1520s and the 1530s) but by 1650,"thou" seems old-fashioned or literary.^{[citation needed]} It has effectively completely disappeared from Modern Standard English but is still in use in some situations. In many churches in the United Kingdom and the United States, primarily those that use the King James Bible, "thou" is still used to address God in prayer and is felt to denote reverence. "Thou" also remains in regular use in particular regional English dialects, but its pronunciation is often reduced to "tha".^{[citation needed]}

The translators of the King James Bible of the Bible (begun 1604 and published 1611, while Shakespeare was at the height of his popularity) had a particular reason for keeping the "thou/thee/thy/thine" forms that were slowly beginning to fall out of spoken use, as it enabled them to match the Hebrew and Ancient Greek distinction between second person singular ("thou") and plural ("ye"). It was not to denote reverence (in the King James Bible, God addresses individual people and even Satan as "thou") but only to denote the singular. Over the centuries, however, the very fact that "thou" was dropping out of normal use gave it a special aura and so it gradually came to be used to express reverence in hymns and in prayers.^{[citation needed]}

Like other personal pronouns, thou and ye have different forms dependent on their grammatical case; specifically, the objective form of thou is thee, its possessive forms are thy and thine, and its reflexive or emphatic form is thyself.

The objective form of ye was you, its possessive forms are your and yours and its reflexive or emphatic forms are yourself and yourselves.

My and thy become mine and thine before words beginning with a vowel or an h. More accurately, the older forms "mine" and "thine" had become "my" and "thy" before words beginning with a consonant other than h, and "mine" and "thine" were retained before words beginning with a vowel or an h, as in mine eyes or thine hand.

Personal pronouns in Early Modern English

		Nominative	Oblique	Genitive	Possessive
1st person	singular	I	me	my/mine[# 1]	mine
	plural	we	us	our	ours
2nd person	singular informal	thou	thee	thy/thine[# 1]	thine
	plural or formal singular	ye, you	you	your	yours
3rd person	singular	he/she/it	him/her/it	his/her/his (it)[# 2]	his/hers/his[# 2]
	plural	they	them	their	theirs

Verbs[edit]

Tense and number[edit]

During the Early Modern period, the verb inflections became simplified as they evolved towards their modern forms:

• The third-person singular present lost its alternate inflections: -(e)th became obsolete, and -s survived. (Both forms can be seen together in Shakespeare: "With her, that hateth thee and hates us all").^[21]
• The plural present form became uninflected. Present plurals had been marked with -en and singulars with -th or -s (-th and -s survived the longest, especially with the singular use of is, hath and doth).^[22] 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.^[23]
• The second-person singular indicative was marked in both the present and past tenses with -st or -est (for example, in the past tense, walkedst or gav'st).^[24] Since the indicative past was not and still is not otherwise marked for person or number,^[25] the loss of thou made the past subjunctive indistinguishable from the indicative past for all verbs except to be.

Modal auxiliaries[edit]

The modal auxiliaries cemented their distinctive syntactical characteristics during the Early Modern period. Thus, the use of modals without an infinitive became rare (as in "I must to Coventry"; "I'll none of that"). The use of modals' present participles to indicate aspect (as in "Maeyinge suffer no more the loue & deathe of Aurelio" from 1556), and of their preterite forms to indicate tense (as in "he follow'd Horace so very close, that of necessity he must fall with him") also became uncommon.^[26]

Some verbs ceased to function as modals during the Early Modern period. The present form of must, mot, became obsolete. Dare also lost the syntactical characteristics of a modal auxiliary and evolved a new past form (dared), distinct from the modal durst.^[27]

Perfect and progressive forms[edit]

The perfect of the verbs had not yet been standardised to use only the auxiliary verb "to have". Some took as their auxiliary verb "to be", such as this example from the King James Bible: "But which of you... will say unto him... when he is come from the field, Go and sit down..." [Luke XVII:7]. The rules for the auxiliaries for different verbs were similar to those that are still observed in German and French (see unaccusative verb).

The modern syntax used for the progressive aspect ("I am walking") became dominant by the end of the Early Modern period, but other forms were also common such as the prefix a- ("I am a-walking") and the infinitive paired with "do" ("I do walk"). Moreover, the to be + -ing verb form could be used to express a passive meaning without any additional markers: "The house is building" could mean "The house is being built".^[28]

Vocabulary[edit]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

A number of words that are still in common use in Modern English have undergone semantic narrowing.

The use of the verb "to suffer" in the sense of "to allow" survived into Early Modern English, as in the phrase "suffer the little children" of the King James Bible, but it has mostly been lost in Modern English.

See also[edit]

• Early modern Britain
• Early Modern English literature
• History of the English language
• Inkhorn debate
• Elizabethan era, Jacobean era, Caroline era
• English Renaissance
• Shakespeare's influence
• Middle English, Modern English, Old English

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• English Paleography: Examples for the study of English handwriting from the 16th–18th centuries from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University