1. E ARLY M ODERN RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
ENGLISH
1400—1600 The history of English since 1700 is filled with many
movements and countermovements.
English underwent
a couple of sound changes
which made the language of 18th century
Shakespeare quite different Attempts were made to regu-
from that of Chaucer. late and control the English lan-
guage. There was talk of an academy which would rule
The elimination of a vowel sound in on what could be said or written. The academy never
certain unstressed positions. i.e. the words came to be.
name, stone, wine, dance, laughed, seemed,
stored were pronounced as two syllables by A product of the wish to fix and establish the language
Chaucer. The “e” in these words became silent, was the development of the dictionary. Samuel John-
but it wasn’t silent for Chaucer. son published his English Dictionary in 1755 and Noah
Webster published his in 1828.
The Great Vowel Shift. A systematic
shifting of half a dozen vowels and diphthongs in
stressed syllables. i.e. the word name had in
Middle English the vowel like that in the modern ENGLISH GRAMMAR The invention of “English
word father; wine like mean. grammar”. English grammars
on the Latin model were worked
The invention of printing introduced into
out and taught in the schools.
England by William Caxton in 1475, hastened
the standardization of spelling. The most important force on the development of the
modern period has been the tremendous expansion of
Early Modern English was also the pe-
riod of the English Renaissance. Englishmen English speaking people. In 1500 English was a minor
language. Now it’s spoken natively by over a quarter of
Origins of
had grown accustomed to borrowing words from
a billion people and as a second language by many
French; now they borrowed from Latin and
Greek. Thousands of words from the classical millions more. the English
languages poured in. Pedestrian, bonus, contra-
dict, climax, dictionary, benefit, exist, paragraph, Language
inspire. Probably the average educated Ameri-
can today has more words from French in his
vocabulary than from Native English, and more
from Latin than from French.
There were considerable sound changes be- By: David, Luis &
tween Early Modern English and the English of Lenin
today. Shakespearean actors putting on a play
speak the words properly enough, but it is very
doubtful that Shakespeare himself would under-
stand them. i.e. the word reason was pro-
nounced like raisin.

2. Some native English words are: the, of, I, and,
man, mother, road; of the the thousand most
The sound structure and
common words in English 62% are native English.
grammar had some changes. The sys-
Old, middle and Old English did not borrow words from other lan- tem of English nouns and adjectives
modern English... guages but it had a part of English since it was part became simplified; people came to rely
more on word order and prepositions
of the Indo-Europeadn family. However, there were
some borrowings from Norse. Latin from the Ro- than on inflectional endings to commu-
mans during their rule and also borowed from the nicate. German on the other hand, did
After the conversion the
7th century Anglo-Saxons when they were still in the continent. not experience a Norman Conquest
most advanced king-
to 1100 and is today highly inflected compared
dom was Northumbria.
to its cousin English.
The 7th century was called
TIME:
the Northumbrian Renaissance. The FRENCH WORDS THAT CAME INTO EN-
best known literary work is the epic 1100 – Middle English GLISH
poem Beowulf. 1500
Parliament, majesty, treaty, allience,
8th century Old English became Middle tax, sermon, crusifix, veal, beef, bacon,
English after the Norman Conquest by William the jelly, peach, lemon, cream, biscuit,
The power of the Northum- blue, scarlet, curtain, chair, lamp, to-
Conqueror. For several hundred years, England
wel, blanket, story, romance, poet,
brian kingdom declined and Mercia, the was ruled by king whose mother tongue was chess, music, study, logic, grammar,
country of West Saxons (Wessex) be- French. noun, surgeon, anatomy, stomach,
came the centre of the land. nice, second, age, bucket, final, flower,
Great number of Normans came to England, but count, surprise, plain.
English remained the lang. of the people and
French of the court, nobility, polite society and lite-
Second half of
Alfred the Great a rature.
the 9th century Saxon king reigned By 1500.... ... ... ...
in the second half of the
th
9 century; supported schools and Many people must have had more
translated many books from French words than English at their
Latin to English. command. But pronouns, prepositions,
conjunctions, auxiliaries were not repla-
He made a treaty with the ced by borrowings.
Norsemen who prevailed in
For us Middle English is simpler than
the East and this made a
Old English; it takes 3-4 mo. to learn to
considerable injection to
read Old English prose and
English especially sound more for poetry, but a week to
and grammar. put one in touch with Middle
English.