Beginning of Modern English

Introduction of Printing

General overview

Lecture 7. Modern English in the History of the English Language

1. General overview.

2. Beginning of Modern English.

3. Normalisation of the English Language.

In the 15^th – 16^th c. the feudal system started to decay and bourgeois relationships and capitalism started to develop. England became a centralised state.

The first printer of English books was William Caxton (1422-1491). He was born in Kent. In 1441 he moved to Flanders (a region in Belgium) and later, in 1473, he opened up his own printing press in Bruges.

1475 – the first English book was printed in Bruges by William Caxton. It was a translation of the story of Troy.

A few years later William Caxton brought his printing press to England and set it up in Winchester. Here he published the work of the famous authors of that time – Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Lydgate – and translated books from French.

Contribution of Printing:

v The works of the authors of that time were edited and brought into conformity with the London Dialect and as far as all the books were written in this dialect, it spread quickly and became the true standard of the English language;

v As far as printing allowed to multiply books in great number, they were sold and thus the literacy of the population grew;

v Before the introduction of printing different scribes could spell the same words differently; with the introduction of printing the spelling became fixed and it hasn’t changed since that time though the pronunciation has changed greatly (this fact explains the difficulties of the English spelling).

The sources of information about the language:

? private letters (as far as books became available, more people became literate and started to write letters, wills, diaries, etc.);

? books for pupils and didactic works (e.g. “An Orthographie” by John Hart; “Grammatica Lingæ Anglicanæ” by John Wallis, etc.);

? lists of difficult words and dictionaries (e.g. “English-English Dictionary” (dialectal words explained with the help of the bookish English) by Henry Cockeram, etc.).

The 16^th century was full of changes in Europe. The Protestant churches developed, Europeans began to explore the Americas, Asia and Africa, and creativity and learning in all areas flowered. In England, the English language grew enormously in order to express a huge number of new ideas.

At the beginning of the 16^th century Latin was the language of learning in all Europe, and it was seen as richer than English and the other spoken European languages. However, with the growth of education, the invention of printing and the new interest in learning, this began to change. More and more people wanted to read books by Roman and Greek writers, and in England they wanted to read them in English. So these books were translated, and other books about learning were printed in English. Using English meant that a writer could reach a larger audience. Between 1500 and 1640 about 20,000 different books were printed in England. Before this there had been only about 35,000 different books in the whole of Europe.

However, the acceptance of English as a language of learning was not complete until the end of the seventeenth century, for example, in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton wrote his Principia in Latin, but fifteen years later he wrote Opticks in English.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writers in English borrowed about 30,000 words from about fifty languages, mainly to describe new things and ideas, and many of them are still used today. This huge growth of vocabulary was the main change in English at this time. The new words came mainly from Latin as well as desperate, expensive, explain, fact. Other important sources of new words were French, Italian, Greek, Spanish and Portuguese. And as the European exploration of the words widened, so words came into English from America, Africa and Asia, for instance, chocolate and tomato came from Mexico, banana from Africa, coffee from Turkey, and caravan from Persia.

Not everyone agreed with the practice of borrowing, particularly of Latin words. Some thought that all the strange words were hard to understand and unnecessary.

English could express everything quite well without all the new words. Thus the borrowings implementation continued, and the new words that survived slowly lost their strangeness. New words were also added to English in other ways. People were adventurous with language: they used verbs as nouns (laugh and scratch), or noun as verbs, or made adjectives from nouns (shady from shade). They put two words together (chairman), or they added parts of words: un - to comfortable, for example.

The age of Queen Elizabeth I (Queen of England 1558-1603) was one of a great flowering of literature. There were poets Spenser and Sidney, and the writers of plays Marlowe, Jonson, and of course, William Shakespeare. The Elizabethans pronounced the letters -er- as /a:/, for example, serve as /sa:v/. This pronunciation remains in names such as Derby (pronounced /da:bi/).

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is considered the greatest writer of plays. In them – and in his poems – he explored the complications of human nature and expressing his understanding of them in extraordinarily rich language. He had the largest vocabulary of any English writer and was a great inventor of words and expressions. He created about two thousand words, and a huge number of expressions which are now part of everyday English. For example, he invented: it’s early days (it is too soon to know what will happen); in my mind’s eye (in my imagination); tongue-tied (unable to speak because you are shy); the long and the short of it (all that needs to be said about something). His success and fame during his lifetime meant that his plays had an enormous effect on English.

When Elizabeth I died in 1603 she had no children, so her cousin, James VI of Scotland, became King James I of England, Wales and Scotland. In 1604, he ordered a translation of Bible into English. The King James Bible, completed in 1611, was not the first translation of the Bible into English, but it became the most widely used and was read in churches everywhere in England, Wales and Scotland for the next three hundred years.

The King James Bible had an important influence on the English language. The translators did not invent new words, like William Shakespeare. They used old ones, even ones that were out of date, and they did not use a huge variety: only 8,000 different words, compared with Shakespeare’s 20,000.They aimed to make the language sound poetic and musical when it was read aloud, and on the whole they succeeded. It was read at church and in the home, and taught at school. Its language became part of everyday English, with expressions like: the apple of somebody’s eye (a person who is loved very much by somebody); by the skin of your teeth (you only just manage to do something); the salt of the earth (a very honest person), the straight and narrow (an honest way of living). Its poetry influenced many English writers in the centuries that followed.

As well as taking a huge number of new words, English developed in other ways too. People began to use do with a main verbs. For example, you could hear I know not and I do not know. You could say I know or I do know and also know you? or do you know? In the 17^th century, it became more common to use do with a main verb in questions and negative sentences, and to leave it out of the positive sentences. Another verb change was the ending of the third person singular in the present tense. By 1700 the -th ending was no longer used and all verbs took -s; for example loveth was now loves.

Pronouns also changed a little. In 1500 the word ye was used as well as you, but by 1700 it had disappeared. So, the new adjective appeared: its replaced his to talk about things without gender.

Changes in pronunciation were continually taking place. From the middle of the 15^th century the long vowels /a:/, /i:/, /u:/ began to change, for example in Chaucer’s time the word life (lyf) was pronounced /li:f/ and this became /leif/ and then /laif/ by the 18^th century.

Sounds in some other words disappeared: the /k/ or /w/ at the beginning of words were lost, for example knee and write were now pronounced as they are today. The pronunciation of /t/ in castle and the /l/ in would disappeared. But the spelling of all these words did not change and so they do not match their modern pronunciations. The big growth in vocabulary and the flowering of literature happened when England was politically quite peaceful. However, in the middle of the seventeenth century this peace was destroyed, and the changes that followed had some interesting effects on the language.

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