Grammatical Features of Middle English

Old English was a synthetic language and grammatical relationship between words was
understood on the basis of inflexions. The inflexions in Old English words became weak during
the 12th century.These inflexions were more or less fully replaced by prepositions from the
point of view of their function. The Middle English period, is period of radical changes, a
period in which a synthetic language changed into an analytic language.Old English and
modern English should be considered two different languages and not two different phases in
the history of the same language.Nouns—word =stan stana (-as) used to from plurality of the
noun.
—Huntaa --huntan (-an) used to from plurality of the noun. Suffix(-as) was extended to
modern English (-s,-es) to form plural such as (boys, boxes, churches ).This form was used in
the northern dialects of OE. Suffix(_an) was extended to modern English (-en) to from plural
like (children, oxen, brethren). This form was used in the southern dialects of OE
(i.e., eyen, englen).
—By 15th Century the suffixes –s and –es were more or less displaced –in all over England.
The possessive Form—

According to the rules of inflection in old English, certain nouns had- es at the end in their
singular genitive form. The singular genitive form of the word stone, for example
was stanes. This - es at the end of words of this class was generalized and later became
accepted as the common suffix for forming the genitive form of most nouns in English.
—With the passage of time ,this –es at the end of plural nouns was changed into-is and then into
the modern English apostrophe followed by an s.
Adjectives—
During the first half of the middle English period, adjectives had two forms. the unmarked
singular form (e.g, fair) and the marked plural form with an e at the end (e.g. ,faire).—Chaucer,
for example,
—Uses expressions Like :
—(i)the weder is fair (The weather if fair)
—(ii)faire waves (fair waves).

——Towards the end of the middle English period the –e at the end of plural adjectives was lost
and adjectives in English became indeclinable.

—The formation of the comparative and superlative adjectives were basically the same as they
are in present-day English.
—In Middle English, the comparative and the superlative were generally formed directly form
the positive . Late old English, for example, had gret, gretter and grettest. These forms
survived for some time even after the old English period but Middle English
had greater and greatest formed directly from the positive great.

—Late old English had old, elder and eldest. Elder and eldest have survived with a slight change
in meaning and are part of the twentieth-century English vocabulary. But Middle English
formed its own comparative form its own comparative and superlative
forms older and oldest directly from the positive form old.

—Late old English had late, latter and last, these forms were used in middle English as they are
used even in present-day English.

—Middle English formed its own comparative and superlative forms later and latest directly
from late. Besides, Middle English dropped t occurring before st in Old English adjectives. Old
English bet(e)st, for example, became best in Middle English and Old
English latost became last.

Articles

—As is evident from the following table, in Old English the use of the definite article was
subject to an elaborate paradigm of declension.

Singular Plural

Masculine Feminine Neuter All genders

Nominative se seo ðӕt ða

Genitive ðӕs ðӕre ðӕs ðaar

Accusative ðӕm ðӕre ðӕm ðӕt

Dative ðone ða ðӕt ða

—Se = used before singular masculine nouns in their nominative form.

—Seo = used before singular feminine nouns in their nominative form.

—Se & seo were changed into the to represent both masculine and feminine nouns.

—ðӕt was used as a neuter in Old English but it took the demonstrative function since the
Middle English period up to date to represent both masculine and feminine forms.
Pronouns

OE ME Modern —
English — The personal pronouns
was used for the first time
Thouàpl ye Thee &thou used for children, “you” used for inn modern English.
familiars, and inferior status 2ndsingular and Perhaps, it was derived
theeàpl you
plural either from the Old
pronouns. English feminine
pronoun heo or seo (i.e.,
the feminine form of the definite article).

— In Old English, personal pronouns were inflected according to gender, case, and number.

There are three forms of inflections in Old English period according to numbers; singularity,
duality, and plurality. The dual form disappeared in Middle English.

OE ME

min à genitive form of Mi &di were used when the following

the 1stperson sg. word began with a consonant.

din à genitive form of min & din were used when the following
the 2ndperson sg word began with avowel

Gender

— Old English had a system of grammatical gender similar to that of modern G, German with
three genders: masculine, feminine, neuter. Personal pronouns showed gender inflection in
agreement . E.g. sun is feminine, so a feminine pronoun should be used.

Wife, girl used as neutral, so a neutral pronoun should be

—The Middle English of the 13th century was in transition to the loss of a gender system, as
indicated by the increasing use of the gender-neutral identifier þe (the).] The loss of gender
classes was part of a general decay of inflectional endingsand declensional classes by the end of
the 14th century. Gender loss began in the north of England; the south-east and the south-west
Midlands were the most linguistically conservative regions, and Kent retained traces of gender
in the 1340s. Late 14th-century London English had almost completed the shift away from
grammatical gender, and Modern English retains no morphological agreement of words with
grammatical gender.

Great Vowel Shift

A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is known as the Great Vowel
Shift, a radical change in pronunciation during the 15th, 16th and 17th Century, as a result of
which long vowel sounds began to be made higher and further forward in the mouth (short
vowel sounds were largely unchanged). In fact, the shift probably started very gradually some
centuries before 1400, and continued long after 1700 (some subtle changes arguably continue
even to this day). Many languages have undergone vowel shifts, but the major changes of the
English vowel shift occurred within the relatively short space of a century or two, quite a
sudden and dramatic shift in linguistic terms. It was largely during this short period of time that
English lost the purer vowel sounds of most European languages, as well as the phonetic pairing
between long and short vowel sounds.

The causes of the shift are still highly debated, although an important factor may have been the
very fact of the large intake of loanwords from the Romance languages of Europe during this
time, which required a different kind of pronunciation. It was, however, a peculiarly English
phenomenon, and contemporary and neighbouring languages like French, German and Spanish
were entirely unaffected. It affected words of both native ancestry as well as borrowings from
French and Latin.

In Middle English (for instance in the time of Chaucer), the long vowels were generally
pronounced very much like the Latin-derived Romance languages of Europe (e.g. sheepwould
have been pronounced more like “shape”; me as “may”; mine as “meen”; shire as
“sheer”; mate as “maat”; out as “oot”; house as “hoose”; flour as “floor”; boot as
“boat”; mode as “mood”; etc). William the Conqueror’s “Domesday Book”, for example, would
have been pronounced “doomsday”, as indeed it is often erroneously spelled today. After the
Great Vowel Shift, the pronunciations of these and similar words would have been much more
like they are spoken today. The Shift comprises a series of connected changes, with changes in
one vowel pushing another to change in order to "keep its distance", although there is some
dispute as to the order of these movements. The changes also proceeded at different times and
speeds in different parts of the country.

Thus, Chaucer’s word lyf (pronounced “leef”) became the modern word life, and the
word five (originally pronounced “feef”) gradually acquired its modern pronunciation. Some of
the changes occurred in stages: although lyf was spelled life by the time of Shakespeare in the
late 16th Century, it would have been pronounced more like “lafe” at that time, and only later
did it acquired its modern pronunciation. It should be noted, though, that the tendency of upper-
classes of southern England to pronounce a broad “a” in words like dance, bath and castle (to
sound like “dahnce”, “bahth” and “cahstle”) was merely an 18th Century fashionable affectation
which happened to stick, and nothing to do with a general shifting in vowel pronunciation.

The Great Vowel Shift gave rise to many of the oddities of English pronunciation, and now
obscures the relationships between many English words and their foreign counterparts. The
spellings of some words changed to reflect the change in pronunciation
(e.g. stone from stan, rope from rap, darkfrom derk, barn from bern, heart from herte, etc), but
most did not. In some cases, two separate forms with different meaning continued (e.g. parson,
which is the old pronunciation of person). The effects of the vowel shift generally occurred
earlier, and were more pronounced, in the south, and some northern words
like uncouth and dour still retain their pre-vowel shift pronunciation (“uncooth” and “door”
rather than “uncowth” and “dowr”). Busy has kept its old West Midlands spelling, but an East
Midlands/London pronunciation; bury has a West Midlands spelling but a Kentish
pronunciation. It is also due to irregularities and regional variations in the vowel shift that we
have ended up with inconsistencies in pronunciation such as food (as compared
to good, stood, blood, etc) and roof (which still has variable pronunciation), and the different
pronunciations of the “o” in shove, move, hove, etc.

Other changes in spelling and pronunciation also occurred during this period. The Old English
consonant X - technically a “voiceless velar fricative”, pronounced as in the “ch”
of loch or Bach - disappeared from English, and the Old English word burX (place), for
example, was replaced with “-burgh”, “-borough”, “-brough” or “-bury” in many place names.
In some cases, voiceless fricatives began to be pronounced like an “f” (e.g. laugh, cough).
Many other consonants ceased to be pronounced at all (e.g. the final “b” in words
like dumb and comb; the “l” between some vowels and consonants such
as half, walk, talk and folk; the initial “k” or “g” in words like knee, knight, gnaw and gnat; etc).
As late as the 18th Century, the “r” after a vowel gradually lost its force, although the “r” before
a vowel remained unchanged (e.g. render, terror, etc), unlike in American usage where the “r”
is fully pronounced.

So, while modern English speakers can read Chaucer’s Middle English (with some difficulty
admittedly), Chaucer’s pronunciation would have been almost completely unintelligible to the
modern ear. The English of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late 16th and
early 17th Century, on the other hand, would be accented, but quite understandable, and it has
much more in common with our language today than it does with the language of Chaucer.
Even in Shakespeare’s time, though, and probably for quite some time afterwards, short vowels
were almost interchangeable (e.g. not was often pronounced, and even written,
as nat, when as whan, etc), and the pronunciation of words like boiled as “byled”, join as
“jine”, poison as “pison”, merchant as “marchant”, certain as “sartin”, person as
“parson”, heard as “hard”, speak as “spake”, work as “wark”, etc, continued well into the 19th
Century. We retain even today the old pronunciations of a few words like derby and clerk (as
“darby” and “clark”), and place names like Berkeley and Berkshire (as “Barkley” and
“Barkshire”), except in America where more phonetic pronunciations were adopted.

Renaissance:

The next wave of innovation in English vocabulary came with the revival of classical
scholarship known as the Renaissance. The English Renaissance roughly covers the 16th and
early 17th Century (the European Renaissance had begun in Italy as early as the 14th Century),
and is often referred to as the “Elizabethan Era” or the “Age of Shakespeare” after the most
important monarch and most famous writer of the period. The additions to English vocabulary
during this period were deliberate borrowings, and not the result of any invasion or influx of
new nationalities or any top-down decrees.
Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek and French) was still very much considered the language of
education and scholarship at this time, and the great enthusiasm for the classical languages
during the English Renaissance brought thousands of new words into the language, peaking
around 1600. A huge number of classical works were being translated into English during the
16th Century, and many new terms were introduced where a satisfactory English equivalent did
not exist.

Words from Latin or Greek (often via Latin) were imported wholesale during this period, either
intact
(e.g. genius, species, militia, radius, specimen, criterion, squalor, apparatus, focus, tedium, lens
, antenna, paralysis, nausea, etc) or, more commonly, slightly altered
(e.g. horrid, pathetic, iilicit, pungent, frugal, anonymous, dislocate, explain, excavate, meditate,
adapt, enthusiasm, absurdity, area, complex, concept, invention, technique, temperature, capsu
le, premium, system, expensive, notorious, gradual, habitual, insane, ultimate, agile, fictitious, p
hysician, anatomy, skeleton, orbit, atmosphere, catastrophe, parasite, manuscript, lexicon, com
edy, tragedy, anthology, fact, biography, mythology, sarcasm, paradox, chaos, crisis, climax,
etc). A whole category of words ending with the Greek-based suffixes “-ize” and “-ism” were
also introduced around this time.

Sometimes, Latin-based adjectives were introduced to plug "lexical gaps" where no adjective
was available for an existing Germanic noun (e.g. marinefor sea, pedestrian for walk), or where
an existing adjective had acquired unfortunate connotations
(e.g. equine or equestrian for horsey, aquatic for watery), or merely as an additional synonym
(e.g. masculine and feminine in addition to manly and womanly, paternal in addition to fatherly,
etc). Several rather ostentatious French phrases also became naturalized in English at this
juncture, including soi-disant, vis-à-vis, sang-froid, etc, as well as more mundane French
borrowings such as crêpe, étiquette, etc.

IMAGE

Early Modern English loans from

Latin & French (from Scribd,
originally from T. Nevaleinen "An
Introduction to Early Modern
Some scholars adopted Latin terms so excessively and English")
awkwardly at this time that the derogatory term
“inkhorn” was coined to describe pedantic writers who
borrowed the classics to create obscure and opulent terms, many of which have not survived.
Examples of inkhorn terms
include revoluting, ingent, devulgate, attemptate, obtestate, fatigate, deruncinate, subsecive, nid
ulate, abstergify, arreption, suppeditate, eximious, illecebrous, cohibit, dispraise and other such
inventions. Sydney Smith was one writer of the period with a particular penchant for such
inkhorn terms, including gems
like frugiverous, mastigophorus, plumigerous, suspirous, anserous and fugacious, The so-called
Inkhorn Controversy was the first of several such ongoing arguments over language use which
began to erupt in the salons of England (and, later, America). Among those strongly in favour
of the use of such "foreign" terms in English were Thomas Elyot and George Pettie; just as
strongly opposed were Thomas Wilson and John Cheke.

However, it is interesting to note that some words initially branded as inkhorn terms have
stayed in the language and now remain in common use
(e.g. dismiss, disagree, celebrate, encyclopaedia, commit, industrial, affability, dexterity, superi
ority, external, exaggerate, extol, necessitate, expectation, mundane, capacity and ingenious).
An indication of the arbitrariness of this process is that impede survived while its
opposite, expede, did not; commit and transmit were allowed to continue, while demit was not;
and disabuse and disagree survived, while disaccustom and disacquaint, which were coined
around the same time, did not. It is also sobering to realize that some of the greatest writers in
the language have suffered from the same vagaries of fashion and fate. Not all of Shakespeare’s
many creations have stood the test of time,
including barky, brisky, conflux, exsufflicate, ungenitured, unhair, questrist, cadent, perisive, ab
ruption, appertainments, implausive, vastidity and tortive. Likewise, Ben
Jonson’s ventositous and obstufact died a premature death, and John Milton’s
impressive inquisiturient has likewise not lasted.

There was even a self-conscious reaction to this perceived foreign incursion into the English
language, and some writers tried to deliberately resurrect older English words
(e.g. gleeman for musician, sicker for certainly, inwit for conscience, yblent for confused, etc),
or to create wholly new words from Germanic roots
(e.g. endsay for conclusion, yeartide for anniversary, foresayer for prophet, forewitr for pruden
ce, loreless for ignorant, gainrising for resurrection, starlore for astronomy, fleshstrings for mu
scles, grosswitted for stupid, speechcraft for grammar, birdlore for ornithology, etc). Most of
these were also short-lived. John Cheke even made a valiant attempt to translate the entire "New
Testament" using only native English words.

The 17th Century penchant for classical language also influenced the spelling of words
like debt and doubt, which had a silent “b” added at this time out of deference to their Latin
roots (debitum and dubitare respectively). For the same reason, island gained its silent
“s”, scissors its “c”, anchor, school and herb their “h”, people its “o” and victuals gained both a
“c” and a “u”. In the same way, Middle
English perfet and verdit became perfect and verdict (the added “c” at least being pronounced in
these cases), faute and assaut became fault and assault, and aventure became adventure.
However, this perhaps laudable attempt to bring logic and reason into the apparent chaos of the
language has actually had the effect of just adding to the chaos. Its cause was not helped by
examples such the “p” which was added to the start of ptarmigan with no etymological
justification whatsoever other than the fact that the Greek word for feather, ptera, started with a
"p".

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.

Printing Press and Standardization

The final major factor in the IMAGE

development of Modern English was
the advent of the printing press, one
of the world’s great technological
innovations, introduced into England
by William Caxton in 1476 (Johann
Gutenberg had originally invented the
printing press in Germany around
1450). The first book printed in the
English language was Caxton's own
translation, “The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye”, actually printed
in Bruges in 1473 or early 1474. Up
to 20,000 books were printed in the
following 150 years, ranging from
mythic tales and popular stories to
poems, phrasebooks, devotional The first book printed in English was “Recuyell of the
pieces and grammars, and Caxton Historyes of Troye”by Raoul Lefevre, translated by
himself became quite rich from his William Caxton in 1473
printing business (among his best (from John Rylands University Library)
sellers were Chaucer’s “Canterbury
Tales” and Thomas Malory’s “Tales
of King Arthur”). 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, peoplein 22, receive in 45, she in 60 and though in an almost unbelievable 500 variations.
The “-ing” participle (e.g. running) was said as “-and” in the north, “-end” in the East Midlands,
and “-ind” in the West Midlands (e.g. runnand, runnend, runnind). The "-eth" and "-th" verb
endings used in the south of the country (e.g. goeth) appear as "-es" and "-s" in the Northern and
most of the north Midland area (e.g. goes), a version which was ultimately to become the
standard.

The Chancery of Westminster made some efforts from the 1430s onwards to set standard
spellings for official documents, specifying I instead of ichand 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.

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.g. booke and boke, axed and axyd) and his use of double letters and the final "e" was
haphazard at best
(e.g. had/hadd/hadde, dog/dogg/dogge, well/wel, which/whiche, fellow/felow/felowe/fallow/fallo
we, etc). 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: the word the had been written for centuries as þe, using the thorn character of Old
English, but, as no runic characters were available on the European printing presses, the letter
“y” was used instead (being closest to the handwritten thorn character of the period), resulting
in the word ye, which should therefore technically still be pronounced as “the”. It is only since
the archaic spelling was revived for store signs (e.g. Ye Olde Pubbe) that the "modern"
pronunciation of ye has been used.

Dictionaries and Grammars Back to Top

The first English dictionary, “A Table Alphabeticall”, IMAGE
was published by English schoolteacher Robert
Cawdrey in 1604 (8 years before the first Italian
dictionary, and 35 years before the first French
dictionary, although admittedly some 800 years after
the first Arabic dictionary and nearly 1,000 after the
first Sanskrit dictionary). Cawdrey’s little book
contained 2,543 of what he called “hard words”,
especially those borrowed from Hebrew, Greek, Latin
and French, although it was not actually a very
reliable resource (even the word words was spelled in
two different ways on the title page alone,
as wordes and words).

Several other dictionaries, as well as grammar,

pronunciation and spelling guides, followed during
the 17th and 18th Century. The first attempt to list
ALL the words in the English language was “An
Universall Etymological English Dictionary”,
compiled by Nathaniel Bailey in 1721 (the 1736
edition contained about 60,000 entries).

But the first dictionary considered anything like

reliable was Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the
English Language”, published in 1755, over 150
years after Cawdrey’s. An impressive academic
achievement in its own right, Johnson’s 43,000 word “A Table Alphabeticall” by Robert
dictionary remained the pre-eminent English Cawdrey
dictionary until the much more (from British Library)
comprehensive “Oxford English Dictionary” 150
more years later, although it was actually riddled with inconsistencies in both spelling and
definitions. Johnson’s dictionary included many flagrant examples of inkhorn terms which have
not survived,
including digladation, cubiculary, incompossibility, clancular, denominable, opiniatry, ariolati
on, assation, ataraxy, deuteroscopy, disubitary, esurine, estuation, indignate and others.
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 1569 proposal for
the removal of all silent letters, and William Bullokar's 1580 recommendation of a new 37-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, furthermo
re 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. Jonathan Swift, in
his “Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue” of 1712,
decried the “degeneration” of English and sought to “purify” it and fix it forever in unchanging
form, calling for the establishment of an Academy of the English Language similar to the
Académie Française. 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 1961).

In the wake of Johnson’s “Dictionary”, a plethora (one could even say a surfeit) of other
dictionaries appeared, peaking in the period between 1840 and 1860, as well as many
specialized dictionaries and glossaries. Thomas Sheridan attempted to tap into the zeitgeist, and
looked to regulate English pronunciation as well as its vocabulary and spelling. His
book “British Education”, published in 1756, and unashamedly aimed at cultured British
society, particularly cultured Scottish society, purported to set the correct pronunciation of the
English language, and it was both influential and popular. His son, Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
later gave us the unforgettable language excesses of Mrs. Malaprop.

In addition to dictionaries, many English grammars started to appear in the 18th Century, the
best-known and most influential of which were Robert Lowth's “A Short Introduction to
English Grammar” (1762) and Lindley Murray's “English Grammar” (1794). In fact, some 200
works on grammar and rhetoric were published between 1750 and 1800, and no less than 800
during the 19th Century. Most of these works, Lowth’s in particular, were extremely
prescriptive, stating in no uncertain terms the “correct” way of using English. 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. A refreshing exception to
such prescriptivism was the “Rudiments of English Grammar” by the scientist and polymath
Joseph Priestley, which was unusual in expressing the view that grammar is defined by
common usage and not prescribed by self-styled grammarians.

The first English newspaper was the “Courante” or “Weekly News” (actually published in
Amsterdam, due to the strict printing controls in force in England at that time) arrived in 1622,
and the first professional newspaper of public record was the “London Gazette”, which began
publishing in 1665. The first daily, “The Daily Courant”, followed in 1702, and “The Times” of
London published its first edition in 1790, around the same time as the influential
periodicals “The Tatler” and “The Spectator”, which between them did much to establish the
style of English in this period.

William Shakespeare

Whatever the merits of the other contributions IMAGE

to this golden age, though, it is clear that one
man, William Shakespeare, single-handedly
changed the English language to a significant
extent in the late 16th and early 17th Century.
Skakespeare took advantage of the relative
freedom and flexibility and the protean nature
of English at the time, and played free and easy
with the already liberal grammatical rules, for
example in his use nouns as verbs, adverbs,
adjectives and substantives - an early instance
of the “verbification” of nouns which modern
language purists often decry - in phrases such
as “he pageants us”, “it out-herods
Herod”, dog them at the heels, the good Brutus
ghosted, “Lord Angelo dukes it well”, “uncle
me no uncle”, etc.

He had a vast vocabulary (34,000 words by

some counts) and he personally coined an
estimated 2,000 neologisms or new words in
his many works, including, but by no means
limited to, bare-
faced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate
, majestic, obscene, frugal, aerial, gnarled, ho
micide, brittle, radiance, dwindle, puking, coun A page from “Hamlet” from Shakespeare's
tless, submerged, vast, lack- First Folio
lustre, bump, cranny, fitful, premeditated, assas (from Hamlet on the Ramparts, originally
sination, courtship, eyeballs, ill-tuned, hot- from Folger Shakespeare Library)
blooded, laughable, dislocate, accommodation,
eventful, pell-
mell, aggravate, excellent, fretful, fragrant, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, gloomy,
and hundreds of other terms still commonly used today. By some counts, almost one in ten of
the words used by Shakespeare were his own invention, a truly remarkable achievement (it is
the equivalent of a new word here and then, after just a few short phrases, another other new
word here). However, not all of these were necessarily personally invented by Shakespeare
himself: they merely appear for the first time in his published works, and he was more than
happy to make use of other people’s neologisms and local dialect words, and to mine the latest
fashions and fads for new ideas.

He also introduced countless phrases in common use today, such as one fell swoop, vanish into
thin air, brave new world, in my mind’s eye, laughing stock, love is blind, star-crossed
lovers, as luck would have it, fast and loose, once more into the breach, sea change, there’s the
rub, to the manner born, a foregone conclusion, beggars all description, it's Greek to me, a
tower of strength, make a virtue of necessity, brevity is the soul of wit, with bated breath, more
in sorrow than in anger, truth will out, cold comfort, cruel only to be kind, fool’s
paradise and flesh and blood, among many others.

By the time of Shakespeare, word order had become more fixed in a subject-verb-object pattern,
and English had developed a complex auxiliary verb system, although to be was still commonly
used as the auxiliary rather than the more modern to have (e.g. I am come rather than I have
come). Do was sometimes used as an auxiliary verb and sometimes not (e.g. say you so? or do
you say so?). Past tenses were likewise still in a state of flux, and it was still acceptable to
use clomb as well as climbed, clew as well as clawed, shove as well as shaved, diggedas well
as dug, etc. Plural noun endings had shrunk from the six of Old English to just two, “-s” and “-
en”, and again Shakespeare sometimes used one and sometimes the other. The old verb ending
“-en” had in general been gradually replaced by “-eth” (e.g. loveth, doth, hath, etc), although
this was itself in the process of being replaced by the northern English verb ending “-es”, and
Shakespeare used both (e.g. loves and loveth, but not the old loven). Even over the period of
Shakespeare’s output there was a noticeable change, with “-eth” endings outnumbering “-es” by
over 3 to 1 during the early period from 1591-1599, and “-es” outnumbering “-eth” by over 6 to
1 during 1600-1613.

A comparison of a passage from "King Lear" in the 1623 First Folio with the same passage
from a more familiar modern edition below gives some idea of some of the changes that were
still underway in Shakespeare's time:

Sir, I loue you more than words can weild ye Sir, I love you more than word can wield the
matter, matter,
Deerer than eye-sight, space, and libertie, Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty,
Beyond what can be valewed, rich or rare, Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare,
No lesse then life, with grace, health, beauty, No less than life, with grace, health, beauty,
honor: honour,
As much as Childe ere lou'd, or Father As much as childe e'er loved, or father
found. found.
A loue that makes breath poore, and speech A love that makes breath poor and speech
vnable, unable,
Beyond all manner of so much I loue you. Beyond all manner of 'so much' I love you.

Other than the spellings of words such as weild, libertie, valewed and honor, the most obvious
differences from modern-day spellings are the continued transposition of of "u" and "v"
in loue and vnable, and the trailing silent "e" in lesse, Childe and poore, both hold-overs
from Middle English and both in the process of transition at this time. However, it should be
remembered that, just as with Chaucer, the Shakespeare folios we have today were compiled by
followers such as John Hemming, Henry Condell and Richard Field, all of whom were not
above making the odd change or “improvement” to the text, and so we can never be sure
exactly what Shakespeare himself actually wrote.

Thee, thou and thy (signifying familiarity or social

inferiority, as in most European languages today) were still very prevalent in Shakespeare’s
time, and Shakespeare himself made good use of the subtle social implications of
using thou rather than thou. Thee and thou had disapeared almost completely from standard
usage by the middle of the 17th Century, paradoxically making English one of the least socially
conscious of languages. The commonplace letter “e” found at the end of many medieval English
words was also beginning its long decline by this time, although it was retained in many words
to indicate the lengthening of the preceding vowel (e.g. name pronounced as “naim”, not as the
Old English “nam-a”). The effects of the Great Vowel Shift were underway, but by no means
complete, by the time of Shakespeare, as can be seen in some of his rhyme schemes
(e.g. tea and sea rhymed with say, die rhymed with memory, etc)

Diiference between Chaucer and todays lang

The main difference between Chaucer's language and our own is in the pronunciation of the
"long" vowels. The consonants remain generally the same, though Chaucer rolled his r's,
sometimes dropped his aitches, and pronounced both elements of consonant combinations, such
as "kn," that were later simplified. And the short vowels are very similar in Middle and Modern
English. But the "long" vowels are regularly and strikingly different. 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.e., how the sounds are made).

Old and Middle English were written in the Latin alphabet and the vowels were represented by
the letters assigned to the sounds in Latin. For example, Middle English "long e" in Chaucer's
"sheep" had the value of Latin "e" (and sounded like Modern English "shape" [/e/] in the
International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA]). 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.

The Great Vowels Shift changed all that; by the end of the sixteenth century the "e" in "sheep"
sounded like that in Modern English "sheep" or "meet" [IPA /i/]. 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 1569 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. (His alphabet and the work of other language reformers provides us with our best
evidence for the pronunciation of English in his time).

To understand how English changed (not why; no one knows) one must first note that vowels
are articulated in particular parts of the mouth; we make the sound in Modern English "deep"
[/dip/] with our tongue forward and high in the mouthr, and the sound in Modern English "boat"
[/bot/] with our tongue lowered and drawn toward the back of the mouth and the jaw relatively
low (open). Say "ee" (or "beet") and "o" (or "boat") in succession and you may be able to feel
the movement of your tongue from front to back.

This chart roughly represents the places where the "long vowels" are articulated:

FRONT CENTER BACK

HIGH /i:/ [Modern "beet"] . /u:/ [Modern "boot"]
MID /e:/ [Modern "bait"] . /o:/ [Modern "boat"]
LOW /æ:/ [Modern "bag"] /a:/ [Modern "father"] "au" [Modern "bought"]

[The "au" representing the low back vowel above is there because I cannot find a way to print a
backward c, the usual means of representing this sound.]

The Great Vowel shift invloved a regular movement of the places of articulation: The front
vowels each moved up a notch, except for /i:/, which formed a dipthong. Likewise the back
vowels moved up, except for /u:/, which formed another dipthong:

Position . Middle English Modern English

FRONT VOWELS HIGH /i:/ ---> /ai/
. MID (CLOSED) /e:/ ---> /i:/
. LOW (OPEN) /æ:/ ---> /e:/ (later --> /i:/)
CENTRAL VOWEL LOW /a:/ ---> /e:/
BACK VOWELS HIGH /u:/ ---> /au/
. MID (CLOSED) /o:/ ---> /u:/
. LOW (OPEN) "au" ---> /o:/

Note that the change affects only long, stressed vowels. The "y" in Middle Enghlish "my" was
affected because it has primary stress, and we say /mai/; the "y" in a word like "only" was not
affected (the primary stress is on the first syllable and -ly lacks stress, so we say /li:/, making
the -ly of "only" rime with "see."

The change is not as neat as is shown; /æ:/ ("open e," as it is called in most discussions) did not
complete the movement from /æ:/ to /e:/ to /i:/ (contrast Mod. Eng. "break" and "beak").
Moreover, when Middle English "e" represents /æ:/ and when the spelling "o" or "oo"
represents the open vowel often can be determined only by the etymology of the words. Modern
spellings offer a clue: as a general rule, where modern English uses "ea" (as in "read") or "oa"
(as in loaf), the Middle English equivalent was the open vowel sound. ("Open" and "close" or
"closed" refer to the jaw -- lowered for "open" and raised for "close" vowels.)

There are other, more exact but more complex, ways of representing the change. (There is also
an excellent presentation -- See and Hear the Great Vowel Shift on The Great Vowel Shift site
maintained by Melinda Menzer at Furman University.) Moreover, our best attempts at
recovering Chaucer's pronunciation can be only approximations. Nevertheless the following
chart will provide a guide to the pronunciation of Chaucer's "long vowels":

Middle English Sounds like Modern

y,i "myne, sight" "meet"
e, ee "me, meet, mete" (close e) "mate"
e "begge, rede" (open e) "bag"
a, aa "mate, maat" "father"
u, ou "hus, hous" "boot"
o, oo "bote, boot" (close o) "oak"
o "lof, ok" (open o) "bought"