A common narrative in history of the English language textbooks is based on Samuels (1963) and Fisher (1977), and goes like this: migrating merchants from the East and Central Midlands of England brought their English with them to London, and this became the basis for the standard. This is at best an oversimplification. London was certainly a centre of immigration during the period, but from all areas of the country, in particular the southern counties surrounding the city.5 Not all of the features that eventually make it into Standard English have their origin in the East Midlands, and not all of the spelling features found by Fisher (1977) in Chancery texts make it into Standard English either: see Wright (1996), the papers in Wright (2000), and Benskin (2004). Much still remains to be understood about the process of selection, but we can at least say with confidence that it was not a single variety that was "selected": instead, selection seems to have operated opportunistically, with individual linguistic features finding their origin in Northern, Southern and Midlands varieties, Chancery spelling norms, literary texts, the spoken and written usage of merchants, and beyond. Standard English is a mongrel, not a purebred. And research in this area continues! See Auer et al. (2016) for discussion of a recent project that aims to shed more light on this issue.

Elaboration involves the spread of a variety to domains that had previously been dominated by other languages: for instance, law, science, medicine, politics, religion, philosophy, and the like. The "one nation, one language" ideology demands that a standard language should be usable for any purpose. But in order to function well in these new domains, new lexical items need to be created. These come from the usual sources: either lexical borrowing, or word formation via derivation or compounding. The linguistic process and consequences of elaboration are discussed in §4.5, on the Early Modern English lexicon.

5These processes of migration may have been a crucial factor in determining the course of the Great Vowel Shift: see §4.2.1!

### 4.1 History and context

One important domain in which the English language was breaking new ground during the Early Modern English period is that of religion. In the early sixteenth century, in what is now Germany, Martin Luther was influentially propounding the view that Christianity needed to return to its roots in scripture, dispensing with many of the traditions of the Catholic church. This new perspective – Protestantism – spread like wildfire across Europe, and was adopted by the English King Henry VIII in the 1530s. Its linguistic importance lies in the fact that Luther and the other reformers were insistent that the clergy use modern European languages to communicate with the people rather than Latin. Luther himself translated the Bible into German from Hebrew and Greek. Before the Reformation, translating the Bible into English was illegal: William Tyndale produced a partial translation, but was convicted of heresy, sentenced to death by strangulation, and finally burned at the stake in 1536. Myles Coverdale and John Rogers completed the task, however, and their version became widely circulated, with an important influence on other major translations such as the famous King James Bible of 1611.

Natural philosophy (the origin of what we now call "science") also saw an increase in English-language texts, especially during the seventeenth century. Robert Boyle's *Sceptical Chymist* (published in 1661) was a seminal work in chemistry. Isaac Newton published his most famous work, *Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica*, in Latin in 1687, but his second major book *Opticks* (1704), on the nature of light, was published in English.

If the goal of elaboration can be described as "maximal variation in function", the goal of codification is "minimal variation in form" (Haugen 1966: 931). In Chapter 3 we've already seen how codification takes shape in the history of English: §3.1.1 mentions the grammars, dictionaries, and pronunciation and usage guides that proliferate during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular. Nowadays we tend to take the existence of such books for granted – where else would you check how to use the "correct" form? – but the fact is that many languages that have not undergone standardization do not have grammars or dictionaries written for them, and in the history of English there were no serious attempts to write books like these before the Early Modern period. We'll see an example of the effects of codification and the prescriptivism it gives rise to in §4.4.2, on preposition stranding. It's also worth noting at this point that codification took different paths in Britain and North America: see the text by Noah Webster in §6 in the previous chapter for an early US perspective on standardization. Millar (2012: chapter 4) has a good discussion of codification in English.

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

### **An English Academy?**

Other countries went further than the United Kingdom and established an official institution with responsibility for the country's (standard) language. The *Accademia della Crusca* was founded in 1583 in Florence, and is the world's oldest linguistic academy. The powerful *Académie française* followed in 1635 in France. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries there were calls to set up a similar institution: in 1665 a group including John Dryden (see §4.4.2) actually met at Gray's Inn in London to plan an academy, but their efforts came to nought. The most famous such suggestion came from the political writer and satirist Jonathan Swift, in his 1712 *Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue*. This proposal briefly won royal support from Queen Anne, but was nevertheless ultimately unsuccessful: Anne died in 1714, and subsequent monarchs did not return to the idea. See Millward & Hayes (2018: 236–238) for more.

Finally, "a standard language, if it is not to be dismissed as dead, must have a body of users" (Haugen 1966: 933). The gradual orientation of a speech community towards a single abstract standard is the process of acceptance. Far from being an active, deliberate process, what Haugen describes as acceptance is driven by a mixture of carrot and stick. On the one hand, users of the standard have access to greater power and more influential positions, and a potent signifier of (national) group identity.6 On the other hand, those who cannot use the standard, or choose not to, have reduced access to those opportunities, and will often face overt scorn and prejudice. Thus, a complex web of conscious and subconscious incentives keeps the ideal of a standard language enmeshed in people's minds. In this respect, very little has changed over the past centuries: once again, see Lippi-Green (2012) on the toxic present-day effects of standard language ideology.

Throughout this chapter we'll come back to standardization and its effects, which are felt at all linguistic levels.

6Which also, of course, plays a central role in *constituting* that group identity.

4.1 History and context

### **4.1.2 The Empire strikes**

By itself, the standardization process doesn't explain how English came to be a world language. For that, we need a little history of empire.

At the beginning of the Early Modern period, England (with Wales), Scotland, and Ireland were separate countries. The three kingdoms came to share a single ruler when James VI of Scotland acceded to the thrones of England and Ireland in 1603, though they were not formally unified as a single "United Kingdom" until 1707. On the world stage, however, England in particular was flexing its military and political muscles throughout the period. The "discovery" of the Americas by Columbus in 1492 had opened the door for an international scramble to snap up as much territory and as many resources as possible on this "new" landmass, and elsewhere too; France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain were other important European actors. The fact that the territories being snapped up were already occupied by other humans who had been there much longer didn't stop colonies from being established around the world. Jamestown, the first colony in what is now the United States of America, was established in 1607, and Plymouth, Massachusetts, the first permanent colony, in 1620. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded in 1629, and the well-known Harvard University emerged here in 1636.

Any good history book will tell you about the rise of the United States, and the linguistic aspects of this rise have already been discussed in §3.1.2 in the previous chapter. It's useful to know that many of the colonists who made the long journey across the Atlantic did so for religious reasons: the founders of Plymouth – the famous Pilgrim Fathers who sailed aboard the *Mayflower* – were Protestants, Puritan separatists who wanted to live apart from the Church of England, and the founders of the Massachusetts Bay colony were Puritans who wanted to reform the Church. The Jesuits – an evangelizing Catholic society heavily involved in the Counter-Reformation – also did their bit to spread English to the Americas and the rest of the world. Jesuits set up missions all over the world, with educational goals that included teaching European languages to colonized peoples. The Province of Maryland was founded in 1632 as a haven for Catholics, and the Jesuits there played an important role in establishing relations between colonizers and Native Americans – attempting to teach the latter English and convert them to Christianity, while also carrying out some of the earliest translations of religious texts into the Algonquian languages.

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

Figure 4.2: Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor

Throughout the Early Modern period, Britain was dominated by two rapacious dynasties, the Tudors and the Stuarts. During the second half of the sixteenth century, two powerful women ruled England and Scotland: Elizabeth Tudor (Elizabeth I of England) and Mary Stuart ("Mary, Queen of Scots"). Mary, a Catholic, was forced to abdicate, and spent eighteen years in captivity before eventually being executed: see Guy (2004) for a scholarly but lively account.

The two women are linguistically very interesting. Mary Stuart grew up in France, and was natively bilingual in French and Scots, as well as able to write in English, Italian and Latin. Her letters are a linguistic treasure trove. As for Elizabeth, she was described posthumously as having spoken nine languages, including Cornish, Irish and Welsh, at near-native level – though we probably shouldn't take this glowing testimony at face value. We know, however, that throughout her life she translated Latin and Greek works: in 2019, a manuscript of a translation of Tacitus was shown to be written by her (Philo 2020).

### 4.2 Sounds

English colonizers also reached India, the Caribbean, and Africa during the Early Modern period. The African situation was particularly important for the ongoing developments in the United States, since this continent furnished the seaborne Europeans with an almost inexhaustible supply of people to be enslaved. As peoples, plants, products, diseases and ideas were taken from continent to continent – called the Columbian Exchange after Christopher Columbus (Crosby 1972) – the world changed irrevocably. Diseases such as smallpox (from Europe) and yellow fever (from West Africa) are estimated to have killed 80–95% of the Native American population (Newson 2001: 167 and references cited there; Nunn & Qian 2010: 165). Subsequently, the circulation of different forms of crops and livestock allowed for major population increases in all of these countries: tomatoes, potatoes and maize were all brought back to Europe from the Americas (see §4.5 for the origins of words like these!), and farm animals such as cows, horses and chickens were transported to the Americas from Europe, for instance. The most obvious linguistic impact of the Columbian Exchange was the spread of English (alongside other languages of Europe such as Spanish and Portuguese), but of course English itself was dramatically changed by these events too, through lexical innovations and the emergence of new varieties shaped by language contact around the globe.

In what follows, you'll learn about some of the main linguistic changes characteristic of this period.

### **4.2 Sounds**

In this section, you are going to learn about what is considered one of the most important sound changes in the history of the English language: the Great Vowel Shift (sometimes abbreviated to GVS). However, the fact that we only focus on this sound change in the Early Modern English period should not leave you thinking that this is the only interesting aspect of Early Modern English phonology. Because the Great Vowel Shift is a fairly complex phenomenon (as you will soon find out for yourself), for practical reasons we will not cover all the other exciting phonological and phonetic aspects of Early Modern English, such as the loss of certain consonants (postvocalic /h/; some cases of /t/, as in *castle* /kɑːsɫ/; some cases of /l/, as in *talk* /toːk/ and *walk* /woːk/); changes related to unstressed vowels; changes in the quality of the vowels in words like TRAP and DRESS; the change from /aʊ/ to /ɔː/, as in *cause* [kauz] > [kɔːz]; and certain diphthong mergers.7

7Check out Millward & Hayes (2018: 248–255) and Nevalainen (2006: Chapter 9) if you're hungry for more on these.

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

### **4.2.1 The Great Vowel Shift**

### **<IP_ADDRESS> What is the Great Vowel Shift?**

Early Modern English is full of variation, and long vowels are particularly interesting. They show variation related to vowel quality, and some also show variation in whether or not this quality changes from the beginning to the end of a vowel, i.e. whether they are monophthongs or diphthongs. Such variation in long vowels is primarily due to the Great Vowel Shift. The Great Vowel Shift presents us with a rather grand vowel change, as it affected the *entire* system of long monophthongs of the language. As long as you were a long monophthong, your quality eventually changed. Some of the variants were those we are familiar with from standard Present Day English. However, other variants no longer survive in standard Present Day English – these are the historically older variants. We can see the older variants in Figure 4.3, which shows you the very early Early Modern English long monophthongs.

Figure 4.3: Early Modern English long monophthongal vowel system

You will notice the following. First, the words you will recognize from Present Day English contained vowel qualities that differ from those they have in Present Day English – these are the pre-shift vowel qualities. Second, there seems to be a fairly neat correspondence between the vowel qualities implied by the IPA symbols and the graphemes (letters). Thus, the word *bite* is spelt with an  and pronounced with an [i] as well. You may be a bit puzzled about *mouth*, which was pronounced as /mu:θ/ and spelt with an <ou> rather than an . However, as we will see in the next chapter (§5.2.2), <ou> and  both reflected [u] at the time. You will also notice that there are two types of e and two types of o, corresponding to [e] and [ɛ], and [o] and [ɔ], respectively. One thing not visible from

### 4.2 Sounds

the figure is that these long monophthongs have corresponding short monophthongs, i.e. corresponding in vowel quality, but differing in vowel quantity (i.e. duration, whether the vowel is long or short).

Now that we have established what the pre-shift long monophthongal system was like, you are probably burning to find out just what exactly happened to get us to the vowel qualities we are used to for the words in Figure 4.3 in standard Present Day English. As indicated in Figure 4.4, the vast majority of the vowels have changed in quality by being raised. Thus, the vowel in *boat* [bɔːt] was raised to [boːt], and later also became a diphthong ([boʊt], [bəʊt]), although there are still dialects of English that preserve the monophthongal quality, as we will see below. Similarly, the vowel in *boot* was also raised, although this time the higher quality is that of [u], giving us [buːt]. This is a nice example of a shift: a change in the phonetic realization of one vowel phoneme is connected to a change in the realization of another vowel phoneme. Importantly, the vowel phoneme in words like *boat* did not become the same as that found in words like *boot* – speakers today still produce and perceive these as two distinct categories.8 You may then wonder what happened to Early Modern English /uː/, considering this vowel has nowhere higher to go. What happened to /uː/ is diphthongization: the vowel in *mouth* [muːθ] ultimately became [maʊθ].

Figure 4.4: The Great Vowel Shift in a nutshell – vol. 1

The front vowels changed in a similar fashion, although they present us with some complications in contrast to the back vowels. As you would expect by now, the highest vowel, /iː/, diphthongized, giving us a change from *bite* [biːt] to (ultimately) [baɪt]. Also as you would expect, *beet* [beːt] was raised to [biːt]. So far so good. But then we come across *beat* [bɛːt]. Again as expected, the vowel in

8We saw the same process in Chapter 2 when the Northern Cities Shift was introduced.

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

[bɛːt] was raised to [beːt], but this is not where the raising stopped. The raising continued, so that the original /ɛː/ vowels were raised to [iː], taking a stop on this journey at [eː]. And yes, if you were reading carefully, you may have come to this realization: the vowel phonemes in words such as *beet* and *beat* merged into a single category, into a single phoneme. This is no longer a phonetic change whereby one vowel quality changes into another vowel quality. What happened here is that one vowel phoneme was lost: we have a merger of the two.

We have not mentioned what happened to the vowel phoneme found in words such as *name* yet. The vowel in *name* [naːm] got raised, just like most of the other vowels, becoming [nɛːm] and ultimately diphthongizing into [nɛɪm]. The final diphthongization change, however, did not take place in all dialects of English, and again, as we will see later on in this section, some dialects still have a monophthong in words like *name*. Figure 4.5 sums these added observations up.

Figure 4.5: The Great Vowel Shift in a nutshell – vol. 2

Now that we have got the basics of the Great Vowel Shift off our shoulders, there is no time to relax, because things are just getting started. First of all, the raising phenomena and the diphthongization steps were presented to you in a way that really simplified what took place during the shift. A change of this magnitude takes time, and the Great Vowel Shift took centuries: some would even argue that it may have never quite reached completion, at least in some dialects of English. First of all, there are some exceptions, irregularities, to the Great Vowel Shift. The vowels in words such as *great*, *steak*, *yea*, and *break* were not raised, and their original [ɛ] therefore merged with the vowel in the *name* class, giving us homophones such as *break* and *brake*. Another unexpected outcome of the shift is the vowel qualities we get in words such as *death* and *head*, where the originally long vowel [ɛː] became a short [ɛ] (Millward & Hayes 2018: 251). This serves as a good reminder: the Great Vowel Shift only affected *long* monophthongs. If an

### 4.2 Sounds

originally long vowel became short before the Great Vowel Shift kicked in, it was unaffected by the shift. An interaction of various vowel shortening processes and the Great Vowel Shift has resulted in the "irregular" vowel pairs in words such as *sane* /s**ɛɪ**n/ and *sanity* /s**a**nɪti/, to the chagrin of non-native English speakers; the spelling nevertheless reflects the pre-GVS stage. A related outcome of the shift are seemingly illogical grapheme-phoneme correspondences, as in *round* /raʊnd/ but *soup* /suːp/, where <ou> corresponds to two different vowel phonemes. What happened here? What explains this inconsistency is the fact that *round* was borrowed into English in time to be affected by the shift, whereas *soup* wasn't, and hence the grapheme-phoneme discrepancy! There are more complexities, but we believe you have had quite enough of those at this point.

### **Hotly debated**

Some of the changes described above include intermediate stages. /iː/ and /uː/ in particular have been a popular subject of discussions about the GVS. To give a more specific example, one of the mainstream proposals is that the [iː] in *night* [niːt] went through an [əɪ] stage before reaching today's standard [aɪ]. But the by far most passionate debate surrounding the shift concerns which vowel phonemes started changing first and when, and which changes therefore motivated other changes that happened. If you're particularly intrigued by any of these topics, we recommend McMahon (2006) on the famous Stockwell & Minkova vs. Lass debates. What is more, some researchers have even questioned whether all the different vowel changes involved are in fact a single event, whether the shift started already in Early Middle English, or actually even earlier, and which phenomena should or should not be subsumed under the label of the Great Vowel Shift (see e.g. Stenbrenden 2016: chapter 1 and again McMahon 2006).

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Further outcomes of the Great Vowel Shift**

There are two important outcomes of the Great Vowel Shift which are useful to know for anyone engaging with Present Day English phonetic variation. As already mentioned, not all dialects of English have undergone all of the stages

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

of the shift. Some dialects in the UK have monophthongs in words such as *face* and *name* (the FACE lexical set) in contrast to the standard diphthong, and also in words such as *goat* and *boat* (the GOAT lexical set). Similarly, in some dialects of English, the pre-shift /uː/ vowel did not diphthongize, giving us Present Day English *loud* [luːd], *cow* [kuː], and *mouth* [muːθ] (the MOUTH lexical set). Monophthongal variants of the vowels found in words such as FACE and GOAT are typical of northern English dialects, for instance. You will be asked to explore this regional variation in Exercise 1.

In this context, it is worthwhile to also mention accents such as Indian English and Welsh English in particular. These have features that at first sight look like traces of the pre-Great Vowel Shift state of affairs. Namely, one of the traditional features of Indian English is monophthongal pronunciations of the vowels we find in words such as GOAT and FACE: /goːt/ for /gəʊt/, and /feːs/ for /fɛɪs/ (Wells 1982b: 626). The same goes for traditional Welsh English accents as well (Wells 1982c: 382–385). This raises interesting questions. Could these represent an older historical stage of the phonological system of English? Regarding Welsh English, Wells (1982c: 382–383) strongly implies that the monophthongal pronunciations are due to the influence of Welsh, rather than a historical leftover of pre-GVS days. Furthermore, in *some* South Wales English accents, two groups of words are attested where one group shows monophthongal pronunciations and the other diphthongal ones: *toe* [toː] vs. *tow* [tou ∼ tɔu], *nose* [noːs] vs. *knows* [nous ∼ nɔus].9 Wells (1982c: 384–385) proposes that all of these present older borrowings, whose production is most likely based on the spelling. As nonnative English speakers (who aren't necessarily widely exposed to native English), learners with near 1:1 grapheme-phoneme vowel correspondences in their L1, as is the case in Welsh, can easily think that if a word is spelt as a <nose>, the spelling surely indicates something like an o (i.e. a monophthong). Regarding Indian English, one could speculate that the presence of monophthongs could be put down to the vowel system of the native language(s) of the learners, or alternatively be a historical archaism (Wells 1982b: 626 for a tentative thought), or possibly a mixture of the two.

The second important outcome of the Great Vowel Shift is the discrepancy between the spelling system of Present Day English and the actual pronunciation supposed to be reflected by this spelling system, as evidenced for instance by the presence of webpages titled "Absolutely Ridiculous English Spelling",10 as well as by poems composed to illustrate the ambiguity of the English spelling system,

9Welsh English traditionally lacks the voiced alveolar fricative /z/.

10See here: http://www.say-it-in-english.com/SpellHome.html.

### 4.2 Sounds

such as *The Chaos* by Gerard Nolst Trenité. Millward & Hayes (2018: 231) state that "[t]he sixteenth century was perhaps the last time a thoroughgoing reform of English spelling was possible. Soon thereafter, the spread of printed books was to make the vested interest in older customs too great to be overthrown [...]." Some have blamed the Great Vowel Shift for the numerous discrepancies between the spelling and the pronunciation of the English language. It doesn't take too much online searching to come across claims such as "A lot of English's "crazy" spelling can be explained by the Great Vowel Shift."11 And here's the explanation provided: "Because spelling was pretty much already established at the time the Great Vowel Shift occurred, the pronunciation changed while the spelling did not. And that is why English has such "crazy" spelling." But is this really a good enough explanation?

Irish playwright and social commentator George Bernard Shaw was one of the individuals in support of a spelling reform during his times (1856–1950). To illustrate the need of a spelling reform, Shaw referred to one of the rather absurd examples invented to demonstrate the idiosyncracies of the English spelling: the word *fish* might as well be spelt as <ghoti>. Why? 1. <gh> is not used just to signal /g/ (*ghost*) but also /f/ (*tough*); 2. <o> corresponds to /ɪ/ in the word *women*; 3. and <ti> corresponds to /ʃ/ in a number of words (e.g. *pronunciation*). As we can see from the <ghoti> example, it is certainly not just the vowels that present us with the lack of one-to-one spelling-pronunciation correspondence. This means that the "crazy" English spelling cannot really be blamed solely on the Great Vowel Shift.

There is another problem with the idea that the Great Vowel Shift alone is responsible for the craziness of Present Day English spelling. As we've just seen, there have in fact been individuals like Shaw who argued for a spelling reform. If English spelling was so intolerably insane, we might have expected reform efforts to succeed, putting an end to the craziness. So why didn't they?

The answers put forward rely on a mixture of three factors. First, different spelling standards existed before the printing press arrived; however, these standards were only standard in so far as different scriptoria (places where manuscripts were copied) had established spelling tendencies.12 Secondly, the arrival of the printing press meant that the type-setters had to decide which spelling one should choose – and there were plenty of options to choose from, as we

11http://languagenerdadventures.blogspot.com/2009/06/great-vowel-shift.html.

12We could think of these as the different formatting rules dictated by stylistic guidelines that different university programmes and publishing houses may adopt, such as APA, Chicago, and MLA, if we want to get a Present Day English approximation of the issue at hand.

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

shall see in Chapter 5. Moreover, since the printing press was brought to England from the Low Countries, it was common for type-setters to be speakers of Dutch, and so they introduced new ways to spell using Dutch conventions (e.g. <gh> for /g/, as in *ghost*). The printing press was an important factor to consider, and yet, even during the times following immediately after its introduction to England, the presence of spelling variation was not socially frowned upon. This stigmatization of spelling variation came later when dictionaries of English were compiled, as we saw in Chapter 3. This step represents the codification stage of standardization as discussed in §4.1.1 above. Once specific spellings were used in dictionaries, they started gaining social prestige, and it has become difficult to reform the spelling system as a result. We may of course ask why the creators of dictionaries had not taken on the task to reform the spelling. Here, we may refer to Marshall (2011: 113), who states that "[h]undreds of proposals have been offered on how to reform the spelling of English", and Crystal (2005: 268), who sheds some light on the whole matter:

The new symbols and the conventions introduced by the different reformers were unfamiliar, complex, idiosyncratic, and not entirely self-consistent.

Finally, there's also the matter of variation to consider. If a spelling reform is supposed to make the mapping between spelling and pronunciation clearer, *whose* pronunciation should the spelling most closely mirror? British English? American English? Something else? No spelling reform would please everyone, and a spelling reform adopted by only part of the English-speaking world would make things worse rather than better.

### **Why did the GVS happen in the first place?**

The traditional sociolinguistic account of what caused the Great Vowel Shift is linked to the Black Death, which created a considerable labour shortage. As a result, speakers from various parts of England moved to the London area. It has been suggested that the inevitable dialect mixing that this led to functioned as a cause of the vowel shift (Millward & Hayes 2018: 250). Smith (1993) discusses the differences between the phonological systems of different social layers in London, including immigrants

### 4.3 Morphology

from East Anglia. What may have happened, Smith argues, is that speakers who didn't have a higher /eː/ and a lower /ɛː/ in their phonological system may have overshot when trying (presumably hard) to produce the fairly high /eː/. In doing so, they overdid this and reached something that resembled /iː/ instead. Smith provides a more in-depth discussion of the situation. More recently, Stenbrenden (2016: chapter 9) proposes an intriguing suggestion that there may be language-internal precursors to the GVS, seeds that potentially provided the grounds for the GVS to be set in motion. In particular, she speculates that certain prosodic changes in the Germanic languages may have presented such precursors. See Chapter 7 for more on Germanic phonological innovations.

### **4.3 Morphology**

### **4.3.1 Second person pronouns**

All languages make a distinction between first person pronouns – referring to the speaker – and second person pronouns, which refer to the addressee. English is no exception, either today or at any point during its history. When it comes to first person pronouns, Present Day English is pretty rich: there's *I*, which is used (mostly) for singular subjects, and *we*, for plural subjects, as well as *me* (singular) and *us* (plural), which are the default pronouns in other contexts.

Most varieties of Present Day English aren't as rich when it comes to second person pronouns, though. Whether you're dealing with singular or plural, subject or non-subject, there's only one form that comes into question: *you*. This use of *you* is enshrined in the standard (Wales 1983: 177) – so much so that people who use a distinct form in the plural (e.g. *yous*(*e*) in Ireland and the southern hemisphere, or *y'all* in the US – perhaps also *you lot* and gender-neutral *you guys* for some speakers) face criticism and condemnation from prescriptivists, even though the distinction is, if anything, a useful thing to have (Hickey 2003).

It wasn't always this way. Before the Early Modern period, there were four different forms for second person pronouns, just as there are four different forms for first person pronouns. In the plural, *ye* was used for subjects, with *you* restricted to non-subjects. In the singular, we find two other forms: *thou* for subjects and *thee* for non-subjects. Here are some examples from the King James Bible (1611).

(1) And he saith unto them, Why are **ye** fearful, O **ye** of little faith? (plural subject; Matthew 8:26)

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

Note that the subject pronoun *thou* comes with its own special verbal ending, which is -*est* (with most verbs), as in example (3). Just as verbs in Present Day English end in -*s* in the third person singular, verbs with second person singular *thou* end in -*est*. There'll be more on verbal endings in the next chapter (§5.3.1).

The pronouns *ye*, *thou* and *thee*, and the verbal ending -*est*, were lost between 1500 and 1800 in most varieties – though they survive in some British dialects, and in some areas of religious discourse (Wales 2004; Beal 2008: 377–378). By the time the King James Bible translation was composed in 1611, the use of *thou* must already have been seen as archaic. What's really interesting about these forms in Early Modern English, though, is that "singular" and "plural" isn't actually the whole story. Instead, the use of *thou* (and *thee*) versus *you* (and *ye*) is a fascinating reflection of social relations between speakers, and justifies a brief foray into the domain of historical pragmatics.

Many languages have two different second person singular pronouns reflecting different status relations. Latin had *tu* and *vos*, modern French has *tu* and *vous*, German has *du* and *Sie*, Czech has *ty* and *Vy*, and Mandarin Chinese has *nǐ* and *nín*. We can call these systems "T-V" systems, following Brown & Gilman (1960). In each of these languages there's a familiar pronoun (T) and a polite pronoun (V), though exactly what determines the use of the two pronouns varies. Brown & Gilman (1960) described two types of system: the "power semantic", in which a powerful person uses the familiar pronoun to address others and expects to be addressed with the polite pronoun in return, and the "solidarity semantic", in which everyone uses the familiar pronoun with those who they perceive to be social equals, but the polite pronoun to mark distance. They suggest that in most languages of Europe the power semantic system has given way to the solidarity semantic system, and that this language change reflects broader societal changes.

Brown & Gilman's model, and the power semantic explanation, is a useful starting point for Early Modern English: *thou* is the T pronoun, and *you* is the V pronoun. However, Wales (1983) argues that the power-or-solidarity model is too simplistic to account for what we find in the Early Modern English period,

### 4.3 Morphology

especially because "there was always considerable fluctuation between T and V forms" of a kind not found in, say, present-day German or French (Wales 1983: 114). In Early Modern English, the choice between *thou* and *you* seems often to be determined by emotional or expressive factors, and to vary from context to context. By the late sixteenth century, she argues, *thou* was already a relatively rare and unusual form, and shifts to using the T-form were often motivated by particular expressive considerations.

An example from Shakespeare's play *Twelfth Night* (1601–2) illustrates this point. In Act III, scene 2, Sir Toby Belch is persuading Sir Andrew Aguecheek to write a letter of challenge to a rival (the play's protagonist). Belch comments that "if thou **thou**'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss". The suggestion is not that Aguecheek and his rival stand in a particular power relation to one another. Instead, Aguecheek uses the T-form rather than the V-form (*you*) because it serves a particular expressive function, in this case most likely displaying contempt and dismissiveness (Brown & Gilman 1960; Jucker & Taavitsainen 2013: 83).

The study of second person pronouns, terms of address, and historical pragmatics more broadly is flourishing at the time of writing! If you'd like to find out more, check out Jucker & Taavitsainen (2013), particularly chapter 5.

### **Pronoun iconoclasts: the Quakers**

Not everyone was happy with the pronoun situation and the power relations they historically encoded. George Fox, the founder of the Quakers – a Christian group focused on individual enlightenment and social equality – was a strong advocate for using *thou* with everyone, describing the use of *you* as an "evill custome". As he put it in his journal,

When the Lord sent me into the world, he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low: and I was required to "**thee**" and "**thou**" all men and women, without any respect to rich or poor, great or small.

Since people expected traditional social hierarchies to be respected, this did not make the Quakers popular: Fox pointed out that priests and professors were likely to become particularly enraged. Sometimes violence was used to enforce the system. Thomas Ellwood, a Quaker, noted ruefully in 1683 that when talking to his father,

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

I durst not say "**You**" to him; but "**Thou**", or "**Thee**", as the occasion required, and then would he be sure to fall on me with his fists.

The Quakers did not succeed in convincing everyone to use universal *thou*: Leith (1997: 107) even suggests that the general disreputability of the Quakers might instead have encouraged people to move away from it! However, in Present Day English we mostly use universal *you*, and in that respect George Fox's wish for social hierarchies not to be represented in language has come true.

### **4.3.2 Other morphology to look out for**

The discussion in this subsection is brief, and is intended to mention only those aspects that might trip you up when reading Early Modern English texts.

In §2.3.1 we discussed how there is variation in Present Day English as to whether there is an -*s* at the end of third person singular verbs (e.g. standard *she likes* vs. *she like*). In Early Modern English, another variant can be found: the -*th* ending, as in *she liketh*. This ending is in fact very old, going all the way back to Old English. At the beginning of the Early Modern English period, in 1500, it is the most common form in the third person singular, but it declines dramatically during the period, and by 1700 it is rarely found. Originally, -*s* was a regional form used much more in the north of England than in the south, but during the Early Modern period it becomes the norm almost everywhere (see Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg 2016: 67–68, 177–179). The -*th* ending survives longest with the very common verbs *HAVE* (*hath*) and *DO* (*doth*). Shakespeare, for example, normally uses the -*s* variant, but uses the forms *hath* and *doth* as exceptions for these specific lexical items.

In Early Modern English you are also likely to see more irregular forms. This is true both of verbs (e.g. *holpen* as the past participle of *HELP* rather than the Present Day form *helped*) and of nouns (e.g. *kine* as the plural of *COW* rather than *cows*). The verbs, and the notions of regular and irregular, are covered in more detail in the next chapter, in §5.3.2. To find out how noun plurals worked in earlier English you'll have to wait longer, but we will cover this in §6.3.3. In the meantime, don't hesitate to look up unfamiliar forms in a dictionary if you can't figure out what they mean.

4.4 Syntax

### **Frequency effects**

Why are some morphological forms regular and other forms irregular? For instance, in Present Day English, why is the plural of *SHOE shoes* while the plural of *CHILD* is *children*? Why is the past participle of *PLAY played* while the past participle of *EAT* is *eaten* and the past participle of *DRINK* is *drunk*? One explanation that has gained prominence in recent years involves frequency effects. Simply put, words that are used more often – lexical items which have a high token frequency – are more resistant to regularization over time. So, all else being equal, it's more likely (for instance) for a very common noun to have an irregular plural than it is for a rare noun. This type of approach doesn't explain everything: why, for example, is the plural of *OX oxen*, when this isn't a high-frequency word at all? Still, the token-frequency approach provides a good rule of thumb for understanding patterns of regularity and irregularity. See Bybee (2015: chapter 5) for a textbook explanation of frequency effects in morphological change.

### **4.4 Syntax**

### **4.4.1 Verbs and** *DO***-support**

Present Day English has a class of auxiliaries consisting of *HAVE*, *BE*, *DO* and the modals (mainly *CAN*, *MUST*, *SHOULD*, *WILL*). These auxiliaries are set apart from normal verbs by the NICE properties (see Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 92– 93):

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

part is "Sam has had breakfast", and this meaning can be recovered from the linguistic context. This property of allowing meaning to arise seemingly out of thin air is unique to the auxiliaries, and normal verbs don't allow it: \**Taylor likes eating breakfast but Sam doesn't like*, for instance – with ellipsis of what follows *LIKE* – is ungrammatical, whereas *Taylor likes eating breakfast but Sam doesn't* – with ellipsis of what follows the auxiliary *DO* – is fine.

• Emphasis. When an auxiliary is heavily stressed, as in *I DO play basketball!* or *I HAVE been to Japan!*, what is emphasized is the truth or falsity of the whole clause. In this case, one's presence in Japan (at some point in the past) is being emphasized – perhaps to counter the implication that it isn't true. You can stress normal verbs too, e.g. *I EAT snails!*, but this has a different effect on meaning: it serves to contrast different types of action or state (e.g. eating snails rather than racing them or selling them, in this example).

The NICE properties can be NICEly accounted for by assuming that auxiliaries are elements of category I, occupying the head of the IP in a syntactic tree, whereas normal verbs (henceforth lexical verbs) are of category V, occupying the head of the VP (see Los 2015: §4.3).13

The strategy of assuming a difference between I elements and V elements won't work for Early Modern English, though. Examples like \**Plays she?* and \**She plays not* are in fact grammatical and well attested here, as the following examples illustrate.

In the Early Modern English period and before, then, lexical verbs – just like auxiliaries – occupied the I position, rather than the V position. This can be described as involving movement of the verbs from V to I, and onward to C in the case of inversion, since the subject is in the specifier of IP. Some trees illustrating this are given in (9) and (10).

13If you don't recall what terms like "I", "V" and "head" mean, take another look at §1.2.3.

4.4 Syntax

The loss of this V-to-I movement is a long process, stretching from 1400 to 1800, and involving substantial variation both within and between individuals (see e.g. Haeberli & Ihsane (2016) for details). At the same time as this fundamental change in the positioning of lexical verbs occurred, new auxiliaries were emerging. One of these is the emergence of what's called *DO*-support.14 The *DO* of *DO*-support, like the other auxiliaries, is an I element, and bears its name because it's semantically empty: it simply has to be inserted in order to form a negative statement or a question, as in the Present Day English trees (11) and (12). Because this *DO* is an I element, it exhibits the four NICE properties discussed above.

14Also known in the literature as periphrastic or dummy *DO*.

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

Among the Germanic languages, *DO*-support is completely unique. In Old and Middle English, *DO* was simply a lexical verb with the semantic content of 'make' or 'achieve' (as in e.g. *I am doing my homework*). But what's striking when you compare the trees in (9) (Early Modern English) and (11) (Present Day English) for negation, or in (10) (Early Modern English) and (12) (Present Day English) for questions, is that *DO* seems to play the same role as V-to-I movement: it fills the I "slot". If that's true, the rise of *DO*-support should take place at the same time as the fall in V-to-I movement – and this seems to be correct (Roberts 1985, 1993, Kroch 1989).15

Figure 4.6: The rise of *DO*-support in a variety of linguistic contexts. The dip after 1575 is clearly visible. From Ecay (2015: 54), used with author's permission; data are taken from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English, replicating Ellegård (1953).

15Why *DO*, of all verbs, becomes an auxiliary with no semantic content is another question. One prominent suggestion is that influence from the Celtic languages of Britain (see §6.1.2) may have played a role. Present Day Welsh offers us sentences such as *Dwi'n hedfan hefo alarchod* 'I fly/I'm flying with swans', where the auxiliary verb *BE* is the *dwi* component in this case ('am', literally). The Welsh *dwi* is phonologically quite close to the Present Day English *DO*. See van der Auwera & Genee (2002) for references and an evaluation.

### 4.4 Syntax

Sociolinguistic and stylistic factors also play a role in the change. In negative declarative clauses like (9) and (11), the use of *DO*-support increases up until 1575, then levels out for a while (see Figure 4.6). Warner (2005) shows that, before 1575, texts that contain a more complex vocabulary also contain more *DO*-support, but after 1600 the picture is reversed: texts with a more complex lexicon use less *DO*support. The rate of *DO*-support increases steadily in texts with a less complex lexicon, but rises and then falls after 1575 in texts with a more complex lexicon. After 1600, older people also use *DO* less. How to explain this? Warner (2005) suggests that after 1600 a strong stylistic dispreference for *DO*-support in higher register texts emerged. It's plausible to think that this is linked to the rise of a standard language ideology (§4.1.1) and of an increasingly judgemental behaviour around written norms during the same period: perhaps what was perceived as more formal/standard at the later stage reflected a "pre-*DO*" stage.

### **The modals**

The core modals – *can*, *could*, *may*, *might*, *must*, *shall*, *should*, *will*, and *would* – have properties in Present Day English that are odd even by auxiliary standards: for instance, they can't have non-finite forms (e.g. \**I want to can*). See §5.4.2 of this book for discussion of the morphosyntactic properties of the modals, and also §3.4.2 on the more recently emerging "semimodals".

For more detail on the changes discussed in this subsection, and fuller versions of the arguments developed here, see Los (2015: Chapter 4, especially §4.6).

### **4.4.2 Preposition stranding**

Is a preposition something you'd end a sentence with? If not, what are you afraid of? Preposition stranding – i.e. the placement of a preposition apart from, usually after, the noun phrase it belongs to – is one of the grammatical features of English that prescriptivists most love to complain about (Crystal 2006b: 107–115). Nevertheless, it has been part of the English language since before the earliest texts were written.16 All three of the opening sentences of this paragraph con-

16Though not in exactly the same contexts in which it appears in Present Day English. See Fischer et al. (2000: 64–67) for a discussion of preposition stranding in Old English, and a syntactic analysis.

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

tain preposition stranding. Here are some more examples from Early Modern English:

The more standard option for preposition placement is called pied-piping, and has the preposition next to its complement, e.g. *Of what were you talking?*

Where did the proscription against stranded prepositions come from, then, and how did it enter into the standard language? The first person to explicitly condemn stranding seems to have been John Dryden, an English literary critic and poet. In an essay of 1672 criticizing the "errors" of earlier writers, Dryden seizes upon example (15),17 describing it as "[t]he preposition in the end of the sentence; a common fault with him [Jonson], and which I have but lately observed in my own writings." When revising his own work after 1668, Dryden attempted to "correct" stranded prepositions (Bately 1964; Yáñez-Bouza 2015: 157–158, 188– 194). Dryden also rewrote Shakespeare's *Troilus and Cressida*, a play which he described as a "heap of Rubbish", in 1679, and corrected *talking of* in example (16) to *a talking*.

Dryden clearly saw himself as someone trying to improve the English language. However, why Dryden disliked stranded prepositions so much, and considered them a "fault", is not entirely clear. Bately (1964: 275) suggests that he is trying to "force the mother tongue into a Latin mould": Latin does not allow separation of a preposition from the noun phrase that follows it.18 Many writings on English grammar from the same period were heavily influenced by the

17Ironically, Dryden actually makes an error in his citation of Jonson, writing *waves* rather than the original *mawes*.

18Note that this is not a *prescriptive* rule of Latin. Rather, Latin native speakers (and writers) simply didn't strand prepositions, just as modern French or German or Czech native speakers don't today. In these languages, we're talking about a part of the mental grammar that is largely below the level of consciousness, not a taught prescriptive rule. See Freidin (2019: 75–83) for discussion of the difference.

regularities of Latin. But the fallacy in this way of thinking is patently obvious: English simply isn't Latin.

The proscription against preposition stranding may originate with Dryden, but makes its way into the standard as part of the process of codification (see §4.1.1) during the eighteenth century. Robert Lowth, who is known to have read Dryden, discusses stranding in his extremely influential 1762 *Short Introduction to English Grammar*, and says the following (Lowth 1762: 127–128):

[Stranding] is an Idiom, which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing of a Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style.

"Bishop Lowth" has been demonized as the arch-prescriptivist, but more recent research has shown that this is not really fair (Beal 2004: 111; Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2010). In this quote we see Lowth making a distinction between speech and writing, and between "familiar" and "solemn" styles (Yáñez-Bouza 2015: 214– 218).

Lowth also uses stranding himself here ("strongly inclined **to**"). Still, Lowth gives no reason for considering stranding to be less graceful or perspicuous. And all of the nuance in Lowth's careful statement is stripped out by later grammarians, who adopt much of Lowth's work almost verbatim (norms around authorship, attribution, and plagiarism were not the same in the eighteenth century as they are today). Yáñez-Bouza (2015: 218) is able to trace Lowth's influence in twenty different texts by fifteen different authors of the period. Lindley Murray's (1795) *English Grammar* is one notable example, reproducing Lowth's text almost exactly but changing the text to get rid of the stranding ("an idiom **to which** our language is strongly inclined"). Traces of Lowth's passage can

Figure 4.7: Robert Lowth

also be found in the works of the female grammarians of the period, such as Ellin Devis.

Dryden's and Lowth's remarks and the codification of stranding as outside the standard had a real effect on usage. Yáñez-Bouza (2015: chapter 4) and Sairio

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

(2009) show that the frequency of preposition stranding in written texts sinks dramatically during the second half of the eighteenth century, even in the usage of individuals over their lifespan. Still, preposition stranding is alive and well in Present Day English, even if still frowned upon by some prescriptive authorities, suggesting that even the strongest prescriptive condemnation is unlikely to extirpate a syntactic feature entirely.

### **4.5 Lexicon**

Three phenomena are particularly noteworthy when it comes to the lexicon of Early Modern English. Two are related to borrowings: as we saw in §4.1, Early Modern English is marked by English becoming standardized and by colonization. The former, as we shall see here, is closely tied to lexical borrowings from Latin, French, and Greek, and caused quite a stir-up at the time (the so-called inkhorn controversy). The latter meant that English speakers came into contact with speakers of many other languages, on an unprecedented scale at the time. Finally, when contrasted with the older periods, Early Modern English saw a rise in a derivational process called conversion. Let's have a look at these one by one in what follows.

### **4.5.1 Conversion**

We have seen a process known as conversion already in Chapters 1 and 2. It is also known as zero shift, functional shift, or zero derivation (or a derivation by a zero morpheme, to add one more term to the menagerie). Conversion involves a process whereby a word of a specific word class is used as a word of another word class without its structure being changed in any way. For instance, the word *bottle* would come to our mind most likely as a noun by default, as in *There's a bottle on the table*. However, if we put this word in a different syntactic context, it becomes a verb, as in *Let's bottle some wine!* and *She had been bottling wine for as long as she could remember, introduced to the art by her father.*19

We can find some remarkable cases of conversion already in Early Modern English, e.g. in Shakespeare's *Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle* from *Richard II*, where the nouns *grace* and *uncle* are unconventionally used also as verbs. In Present Day English, we can occasionally find even entire clauses used as verbs or modifiers, as in *"Don't "I told you so" me," Martin snapped.* (Clark-Platts 2016).

This has nevertheless not always been the case throughout the earlier history of the English language. This word-formation strategy became "the third most

19OED, s.v. bottle, v.1.

4.5 Lexicon

common way of expanding the vocabulary" only in the period of 1500–1700 (Millward & Hayes 2018: 283), following affixing and compounding.

### **I'd be bumblebeed**

Some internet searching gives us cases of conversions such as the following:*a*

• *however we were now short of a header tank for the heating/stove and as its 40 miles to town I was bumblebeed if I was going to buy one* [...]

The word *bumblebee*, historically and by default used as a noun, can apparently also be used as a verb, albeit extremely marginally so. Well, I'd sure be bumblebeed...

*a*https://www.navitron.org.uk/forum/index.php?topic=7443.15.

### **4.5.2 Colonial borrowings**

Figure 4.8: Wombat: a marsupial native to Australia (photo by Stygiangloom, licensed under CC-BY 2.0)

Encounters with new cultures and new fauna and flora typically require new labels for new concepts. These concepts are typically nouns (e.g. a wombat, a rather cute marsupial native to Australia; see Figure 4.8), which makes sense considering new labels are typically needed for fairly specific objects, unknown to the explorers.

If we use the advanced search option in the Oxford English Dictionary and limit our search to loans from Australian Aboriginal languages between the years of 1500–1700, we find no results. Considering

what we said about the history of Australian English (in the box in §2.1.3), this makes sense: Anglophone presence in Australia dates back to 1788. It therefore also makes sense that extending the period to 1800 produces 11 loanwords, such as *dingo* and *wombat* (from Dharug) and *kangaroo* (from Guugu Yimidhirr). Ten of these are nouns and ten refer to the fauna and flora of Australia, and Australian culture. This trend is confirmed by searches restricted to other groups of non-European languages: loanwords are often nouns necessary to label newly encountered objects and entities.

Searching within 1500–1700, we get 46 loans from Austronesian languages of the Asia-Pacific region and Oceania, all of which are nouns (three of these are nouns as well as another word class). One Austronesian loan is *babirusa*, 'a longlegged wild pig', from Malay. Considering the longer colonial history in North America (in contrast to Australia), it is not surprising that Native American languages give us 106 results. Of these, all can function as nouns, and some as other word classes as well. Some of these loans include *maize* and *potato* (both from Taíno via Spanish), *tomato* (from Nahuatl via Spanish), *jaguar*, *moccasin*, *moose*, *raccoon*, *squash*, and *terrapin*. Limiting the search to contact with languages of the Indian subcontinent, 239 results are provided. This high number also makes sense: the Indian subcontinent was heavily exploited by the colonizers. Again, all but three of these loans can function as nouns. Some of these include *Buddha* (from Pali), *dungaree*, *ghee*, *guru*, *pukka*, *pundit*, and *yogi* (from Hindi/Urdu), and *mongoose* (from Telugu via Portuguese). Central and Eastern Asian languages result in 131 entries, including for instance *baklava*, *harem*, and *yoghurt* (from Turkish), *cha* (related to Present Day English *chai* and *tea*; from Chinese), *Islam* (from Arabic), *jackal* (from Persian and Turkish), *ketchup*, *litchi* and *kumquat* (from Chinese), *lama* (from Tibetan), *soy* (from Japanese), and *tulip* (multiple languages). Middle Eastern and Afro-Asiatic languages lead to 357 entries and African languages give us 15 loans (such as *okra*, a type of edible plant, from a Niger-Congo language, probably Igbo).

These trends are by no means limited to Early Modern English. If we did similar searches for the languages relevant for Late Modern English or Present Day English, we would also find plenty of borrowings necessary for unknown objects, perfectly known in the newly explored locales. Typically, as we shall see in the chapters to follow, the type of linguistic materials borrowed from a language depends on the nature of the cultural contact and very much on the situational power relationships. Studying where which words come from can thus provide interesting evidence related to the relationships of different cultures through times.

### 4.5 Lexicon

### **4.5.3 Latin and Greek borrowings: the inkhorn controversy**

By the start of the Early Modern period in 1500, the Renaissance was in full flow in Europe. A philosophical movement originating in what is now Italy, the intellectual roots of the Renaissance were in Classical Latin and Greek thought, particularly the Greek philosophers, who had been "rediscovered" in Europe shortly before. Its effect upon the intelligentsia of early modern Europe was profound: from 1450 onwards, universities began to spring up in great numbers all around Europe.

Comparison with Latin and Greek no doubt played an important role in the emerging standardization of the modern languages of Europe. In the lexicon of English, this is particularly evident in the borrowing of many new words from Latin and Greek during the Early Modern period. According to the data from the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in Durkin (2014: 23–28), Latin is by far the most prolific donor language in the history of English to date, responsible for over thirteen thousand borrowings into English.20 English has always borrowed words from Latin, but the peak of these borrowings is just after 1600.21 Greek, meanwhile, is in third place after French (on which see §5.5.1 in the next chapter), responsible for well over two thousand borrowings, almost all dating to after 1500. Together, Latin and Greek account for over half of all lexical borrowings in the history of English. Admittedly, the vast majority of these Latin and Greek borrowings are highly learned and/or technical terms which only appear very rarely and in specific registers. Nevertheless, the impact of these classical languages on the lexicon of English during the Early Modern period was clearly immense. The second half of the seventeenth century saw more borrowings enter English than any other period in history (Durkin 2014: 299–301). Perhaps even more strikingly, these new Latin and Greek words were ready input to further word-formation processes, which continued robustly in English during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the scientific domain (Durkin 2014: 340–347).

As we've seen in the section on standardization (§4.1.1), one of the processes involved is elaboration: the new standard language is used in new domains, or used increasingly in domains where other languages were dominant, and this brings with it a need for new words. These words can be formed using the language's own word-formation strategies, such as conversion (§4.5.1 above), or they can simply be borrowed. Since the discourse in many of these new domains

20The total number of headwords in the OED3 is 92,500.

21If you have access, you can check this for yourself at http://www.oed.com/timelines.

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

Table 4.1: Some borrowings from Latin in Early Modern English (Durkin 2014: chapter 14)

was previously dominated in usage by Latin in particular, borrowing words from Latin was the most obvious fix.

This influx of borrowings from classical languages did not sit well with everyone. The incipiently standardizing English language was becoming a source of pride: headmaster Richard Mulcaster commented in 1582 that "I take this present period of our English tung to be the verie height thereof". Mulcaster also commented on the number of words being borrowed into the language, "either of pure necessitie in new matters, or of mere brauerie, to garnish it self withall". Here *brauerie* means 'showiness' or 'ostentatiousness', implying that some of these borrowings were for reasons of fashion, not because they were needed. The prestige of classical languages meant that using Latin and Greek words in English could be taken as a mark of education, or of (perceived) social superiority. In turn, people could be mocked for this. The teacher Holofernes in Shakespeare's *Love's Labours Lost* peppers his language liberally with Latin and Latinisms (e.g. when reading a letter, he says "I will **overglance** the **superscript**"), and is intended as a figure of ridicule. Thomas Wilson's influential *Arte of Rhetorique* (1553) puts it like this:

Among all other lessons this should first be learned, that wee neuer affect any straunge ynkhorne termes, but to speak as is commonly received ... Some seeke so far for outlandish English, that they forget altogether their mothers language.

Wilson writes of "inkhorn terms", which became a catchphrase for Latin and Latinate words that were perceived to be unnecessary or affected. This influenced the first generation of dictionaries in the seventeenth century, such as Thomas Blount's (1656) *Glossographia*: these works were lists of explanations of words thought to be difficult, not dictionaries in the sense we're more familiar with today. Although it's easy to laugh at the supposed pretentiousness of the Early Modern writers criticized, the darker side of the inkhorn controversy is linguistic purism (Thomas 1991, Langer & Nesse 2012), the desire to preserve languages

### 4.6 Final note

from foreign elements, and the view that inherited words are better than borrowed ones. Linguistic purism goes hand in hand with standard language ideology and with ethnonationalism, and so it is not surprising to see it on show in the Early Modern period.

The critics of inkhorn terms were not, on the whole, successful in suppressing Latin words. All of the words in Table 4.1 are still found in English today, with no particular negative connotations. Still, in some quarters the sentiment behind the inkhorn critics persists. As recently as 1946, George Orwell's essay *Politics and the English Language* complains that "unnecessary words like *expedite*, *ameliorate*, *predict*, *extraneous*, *deracinated*, *clandestine*, *subaqueous*, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers". Needless to say, Orwell provides no evidence for this claim, nor any argument for the superiority of their inherited Germanic "opposite numbers".22

### **4.6 Final note**

It's the Early Modern period more than any other that explains how and why the English language got to where it is today – both in terms of its geographical distribution and its social status. We've seen that the process of standardization – closely linked to the rise of nationalism – really took off during this period, as did the spread of English worldwide via colonialism and imperialism. Some of the linguistic changes we see during this period are also connected to this emerging sense of British self-importance: the rise of borrowings from the prestige languages Greek and Latin (and the pushback against these borrowings) is a case in point. But, just like in every other period, we also see structural changes that bear no obvious relation to social or cultural developments, such as the rise of *DO*-support and the Great Vowel Shift. These are good indications that standardization – for all its centrality to the way we think about language today – can never prevent a language from developing in new and unexpected ways.

22For more on the inkhorn controversy, see https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2019/04/ 05/inkhorn-controversy-latin-greek-english-words/ and Barber (1997: Chapter 2) – also make sure to have a go at Exercise 7!

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

### **Suggested exercises**

### **E.1 Reflexes of the Great Vowel Shift**

You will be using a dataset created as part of the project called "Seeing Speech" (Lawson et al. 2015).*a*

### A.

Listen to the production of FACE, GOAT, MOUTH of the speakers from the following places:

Note whether the vowel is a monophthong, a diphthong, or somewhere in between. Is it always easy to decide?

### B.

Which of these speakers show more conservative vowel features? In other words, which speakers' accents reflect older stages of the language?

*Tip for the teachers:* This can be assigned as a written exercise practising summarizing skills. Give the students a maximum word count and a deadline for the written exercise.

Suggested exercises

*Tip for the students:* If you're asked to submit your answers as a written assignment, your answer should be structured as follows: 1. What's the question/problem? (setting up the context); 2. Show us how you answer this question/tackle the problem. (argumentation); 3. What's your answer/conclusion? (sum up clearly)

*a*The dataset is available here: https://www.dynamicdialects.ac.uk/accent-chart/.

### **E.2 For I thou thee, thou traitor!**

Look at the 2nd person pronouns in the two passages below. The pronouns are highlighted for you. The first passage comes from the *Trial of Sir Walter Raleigh, Knight, for High Treason, by a Special Commission of Oyer and Terminer, at Winchester, 17th November, 1603. 2 James I* (Jardine 1832: 408–410). The second bunch of excerpts is taken from Shakespeare's *Hamlet*. We give you a snippet of a conversation between Hamlet and the Queen, his mother, and also a conversation between Hamlet and the Ghost, who turns out to be his dead (murdered) father. Your tasks are presented following the excerpts.*a*

### A.

**Sir Walter Raleigh.** All this while **you** tell me news, Mr. Attorney.

**Attorney General.** Sir Walter, I cannot blame **you**, though **you** be moved.

**Sir Walter Raleigh.** Nay, **you** fall out with **yourself**; I have said nothing to **you**; I am in no case to be angry.

[...]

**Attorney General.** After Raleigh understood that he was accused by my Lord Cobham, it was contrived that the Lord Cobham should retract his accusation, and that he might make his retraction known and believed, the course was this: [...]. Came this contrivance, think **you**, out of Cobham's quiver? No, but out of Raleigh's devilish and Machiavelian policy. **You** shall hear that it was after Cobham had had intelligence with this viper in the Tower, that he devised this false artifice. But Sir Thomas Fane would be no party in such a business, and sent the letter to the Council.

**Sir Walter Raleigh.** What is that to me? I do not hear yet that **you** have spoken one word against me; here is no treason of mine done; if my Lord Cobham be a traitor, what is that to me?

**Attorney General.** All that he did was by **thy** instigation, **thou** viper, for I **thou thee**, **thou** traitor! I will prove **thee** the rankest traitor in all England.

**Sir Walter Raleigh.** No, no, Mr. Attorney, I am no traitor. Whether I live or die, I shall stand as true a subject as any the King hath; **you** may call me traitor at your pleasure; yet it becomes not a man of quality and virtue to do so; but I take comfort in it, it is all that **you** can do, for I do not yet hear that **you** charge me with any treason.

**Lord Chief Justice.** Sir Walter Raleigh, Mr. Attorney speaks out of the zeal of his duty for the service of the King; and **you** for your life; be patient on both sides.

B.

**QUEEN.** Let not **thy** mother lose her prayers, Hamlet. I pray **thee** stay with us; go not to Wittenberg.

**HAMLET.** I shall in all my best obey **you**, madam.

[...]

**HAMLET.** Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be **thou** a spirit of health or goblin damn'd, Bring with **thee** airs from heaven or blasts from hell, be **thy** intents wicked or charitable, **thou** com'st in such a questionable shape that I will speak to **thee**. [...] What may this mean, that **thou**, dead corse, again in complete steel, [...] say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?

**HORATIO.** It beckons **you** to go away with it, as if it some impartment did desire to **you** alone.

[...]

**HAMLET.** Whither wilt **thou** lead me? Speak, I'll go no further.

**GHOST.** Mark me.

**HAMLET.** I will.

**GHOST.** My hour is almost come, when I to sulph'rous and tormenting flames must render up myself.

**HAMLET.** Alas, poor ghost!

**GHOST.** Pity me not, but lend **thy** serious hearing to what I shall unfold.

**HAMLET.** Speak, I am bound to hear.

**GHOST.** So art **thou** to revenge, when **thou** shalt hear. [...] I am **thy** father's spirit, doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, [t]ill the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purg'd away. [...] List, list, O, list! If **thou** didst ever **thy** dear father love—

**HAMLET.** O God!

**GHOST.** Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.

**HAMLET.** Murder! [The Ghost/Father tells him how he was murdered by Hamlet's uncle, the Ghost's/former King's brother.] O my prophetic soul! Mine uncle!

**GHOST.** Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, with witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts,— o wicked wit, and gifts, that have the power so to seduce!—won to his shameful lust the will of my most seeming-virtuous queen. [...] Adieu, adieu, adieu. Hamlet, remember me.

**HAMLET.** O all **you** host of heaven! O earth! What else? And shall I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, my heart; And **you**, my sinews, grow not instant old. But bear me stiffly up. Remember **thee**? Ay, **thou** poor

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe. Remember **thee**?

And here are your tasks:

*a*These passages are taken from the following Project Gutenberg webpage, accessed in February 2020: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1524/1524-h/1524-h.htm.

### **E.3 Shakespearean syntax**

Examine the Shakespearean quotations below and describe how they differ from Present Day English morphologically and syntactically. Pay particular attention to what the finite verb is doing.

1.1)

### **E.4 Preposition stranding in your own daily life?**

	- on the social media you engage with
	- in spoken interactions you have with others

*Acknowledgement:* this exercise was suggested to us by Nicole Tamer.

4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

### **E.5 Whence synonymity?**

The following 20 words represent 10 pairs of synonyms. You need to identify these 10 pairs:

*bless*, *break*, *chew*, *cogitate*, *consecrate*, *depart*, *disintegrate*, *drink*, *emancipate*, *flood*, *free*, *go*, *imbibe*, *inundate*, *job*, *lie*, *masticate*, *position*, *prevaricate*, *think*

One word in each pair is Latin- or French-derived and one is Germanic. Sort the individual words into two categories: one with all the Germanic words and one with all the Romance words.

*Acknowledgement:* this exercise was taken and slightly adapted from Johanna Wood's 2016 teaching materials.

### **E.6 Irregular plurals in Present Day English**

Sometimes borrowed words keep their foreign plurals. This often happens with Latin and Greek words used in specialized areas by educated people. Among such loan words are the following:

*analysis*, *cherub*, *index*, *matrix*, *medium*, *nucleus*, *species*, *stigma*, and *stratum*

For each, give the foreign plural and the language from which it derives. (You will need a good dictionary, such as the online OED.)

Suggested exercises

Sometimes two different plural forms may be used with different functions. Are you aware of any of these words above using both a regular and irregular plural with different meanings?

### **E.7 Inkhorn controversy**

*Note: for this exercise you will need access to the online Oxford English Dictionary (OED) via your library or university.*

In 1557, Sir John Cheke wrote the following:

I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges, wherin if we take not heed by tiim, ever borowing and never payeng, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth our tung naturallie and praisablie utter her meaning, when she bouroweth no counterfeitness of other tunges to attire her self withall, but useth plainlie her own, ... and if she want at ani tiim (as being unperfight she must) yet let her borow with suche bashfulness, that it mai appear, that if either the mould of our own tung could serve us to fascion a woord of our own, or if the old denisoned wordes could content and ease this neede, we wold not boldly venture of unknowen wordes. (in Wells 1973: 31)

Look up the etymology of the following words in the OED: *opinion*, *clean*, *pure*, *unmixed*, *unmangled*, *borrow*, *tongue*, *never*, *paying*, *fine*, *keep*, *house*, *bankrupt*.

Having looked up the etymology, what would you say to Sir John Cheke as a trained linguist?

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

### **E.8 Food for thought**

### **E.9 Investigating** *y'all***,** *youse***,** *you guys***, and** *you lot*

As mentioned in the chapter, new second person plural forms have recently emerged, such as *y'all*, *youse*, *you guys*, and *you lot*. How would you design a project whose aim would be answering one of the following questions?

• Is the pronoun stigmatized in any way, or is it viewed positively?

When thinking about your project design, consider the type of language you'd analyse (e.g. spoken, written, formal, informal), and whether you'd have to collect your own data (and how you would do that) or whether you could use already existing materials (corpora, evidence online, etc.). Don't be afraid of the power of imagination!

### **T.1 A narrative of the captivity and removes of Mrs Mary Rowlandson**

Captivity narratives were a popular genre of literature in colonial North America. Here, Mary Rowlandson (c. 1637–1711) describes her capture by Native Americans (she was later ransomed and released). Texts like these are useful as sources on Native Americans and their encounters with the colonists at the time, though they are far from neutral, and tell us as much if not more about the Puritan morality of the writers.*a*

ON the 10th of *February*, 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon *Lancaſter*: their firſt coming was about ſun-riſing; hearing the noiſe of ſome guns, we looked out: ſeveral houſes were burning and the ſmoke aſcending to heaven. There were five perſons taken in one houſe, the father and mother, and a ſucking child they knocked on the head, the other two they took and carried away alive. There were two others, who being out of their garriſon upon occaſion, were ſet upon; one was knocked on the head, the other eſcaped: Another there was who running along was ſhot and wounded, and fell down; he begged begged them to let of them his life, promiſing them money (as they told me) but they would not hearken *hearken*: listen; to him, but knocked him on the head, ſtript

him live

stripped

him naked, and ſplit open his bowels. Another ſeeing many of the *Indians* about his barn, ventur'd and went out, but was quickly ſhot down. There were three others belonging to the ſame garriſon who were killed; the *Indians* getting up upon the roof of the barn, had advantage to ſhoor *ſhoor*: shower down upon them over their fortification. Thus theſe murther- murderous ous wretches went on burning & deſtroying all before them.

### ...

Then I took my children (and one of my ſiſters her's) to go forth and leave the houſe: but as ſoon as we came to the door, and appear'd, the *Indians* ſhot ſo thick, that the bullets rattled againſt the houſe, as if one had taken a handful of ſtones and threw them, ſo that we were forced to give back. We had ſix ſtout dogs belonging to our garriſon, but none of them would ſtir *ſtir*: move though at another time, if an *Indian* had come to the door, they were ready to fly upon him and tear him down. The Lord hereby would make us the more to acknowledge his hand, and to ſee that our help is always in him. But out we muſt go, the fire increaſing, and coming along behind us roaring, and the *Indians* gaping before us with their guns, ſpears, and hatchets to devour us.

### ...

 I hope ſhe is reaping the fruit of her good labours, being faithful to the ſervice of God in her place. In her younger years

hauling

### Suggested exercises

ſhe lay under much trouble upon ſpiritual accounts, till it pleaſed God to make that precious ſcripture take hold of her heart, *3 Cor. 12. 9. And he ſaid unto me, My grace is ſufficient for thee.* More than twenty years after, I have heard her tell how ſweet and comfortable that place was to her. But to return; The *Indians* laid hold of us, pulling me one way, and the children another, and ſaid, *Come, go along with us*: I told them they would kill me; they anſwered, *If I were willing to go along with them, they would not hurt me.*

*a*The text is taken from the *Emerging Voices* corpus (Walkden 2019), and is originally from the 1791 edition available at https://archive.org/details/ narrativeofcapti00inrowl/, pp. 3–5.

### **T.2 Anne Bradstreet,** *A Dialogue between Old England and New*

Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) has the distinction of being the first published writer of the English colonies in North America. Born in England to a well-off family, she emigrated to America in 1630, where she remained for the rest of her life, becoming a poet widely read on both sides of the Atlantic.

This poem, written in 1642 and taken from her collection *The tenth muse lately sprung up in America*, has as its subject matter the unease that was to lead to the English Civil War. An extract is presented here.*a*

New England. ALas, deare Mother, fairest Queen, and best, With honour, wealth, and peace, happy and blest blessed , What ayles ails thee hang thy head, and crosse thine armes?

And sit i'th in the dust, to sigh these sad alarms? What deluge of new woes troubles thus over-whelme The glories of thy ever famous Realme? What meanes this wailing tone, this mourning guise? Ah, tell thy Daughter, she may simpathize. Old England. Art ignorant indeed, of these my woes? Or must my forc•d tongue these grief•s disclose? ... Well, to the matter then, there's grown of late, 'Twixt King and Peeres a question of state, between Which is the chief, the law, or else the King, One saith says it is him its he, the other no such thing. My better part in Court of Parliament, To ease my groaning land shew show their intent, To crush the proud, and right to each man deal. To help the Church, and stay the Common-Weal shared good , So many obstacles comes in their way, As puts me to a stand what I should say, Old customes, new Prerogatives stood on, Had they not held law fast, all had been gone, Which by their prudence stood them in such stead, They took high *Strafford* lower by the head, Earl Strafford and Archbishop Laud, two And to their *Laud* be't spoke, they held i'th' Tower, prominent Royalists All *Englands* Metropolitane that houre, This done, an Act they would have passed fain *fain*: gladly , No prelate *prelate*: bishop should his Bishoprick retain; Here tugg'd they hard indeed, for all men saw, This must be done by Gospel, not by law. Next the *Militia* they urged sore, This was deny'd, I need not say wherefore *wherefore*: why . The King displeas'd, at *York* himself absents, They humbly beg return, shew show their intents, The writing, printing, posting to and fro, Shews all was done, I'll therefore let it go.

Suggested exercises

But now *I* come to speak of my disaster, Contention's grown 'twixt Subjects and their Master: They worded it so long, they fell to blows,

That thousands lay on heaps, here bleeds my woes.

*a* From https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A77237.0001.001/1:11?rgn=div1;view= fulltext, pp186–187, accessed May 2020.

### **T.3 King James Bible**

The King James Bible translation was commissioned by James I of England and translated between 1604 and 1611. Despite the availability of newer, more readable translations, the King James version has not lost its relevance: in 2011, to mark its 400th anniversary, British Education Secretary Michael Gove sent a copy to every school in the country, a gesture that met with mixed responses. The section presented here is from the Book of Obadiah.*a*

THe viſion of Obadiah: Thus ſaith the Lord GOD, concerning Edom; Wee haue heard a rumour from the Lord, and an ambaſſador is ſent among the heathen: Ariſe yee, and let vs. riſe against her in battell.

2 Behold, I haue made thee ſmall among the heathen: thou art greatly deſpiſed.

3 ¶ The pride of thine heart hath deceiued thee: thou that dwelleth in the clefts of the rocke, whoſe habitation is high, that ſaith in his heart; Who shall bring me downe to the ground?

4 Though thou exalt thy ſelfe as the eagle, and though ſet thy neſt among the ſtarres, thence will I bring the downe, ſaith the Lord.

5 If theeues came to thee, if robbers by night (how art thou cut off?) would they not have ſtollen til they had enough? if the grape gatherers came to thee, would they not leaue some grapes?

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

6 How are the things of Eſau ſearched out? how are his hid things ſought up?

7 All the men of thy confederacie haue brought thee euen to the border: the men that were at peace with thee, haue deceiued thee, and preuailed againſt thee: they that eate thy bread haue laide a wound vnder thee: there is none vnderſtanding in him.

8 Shal I not in that day, ſaith the Lord, euen deſtroy the wiſe men out of Edom, and vnderſtanding out of the mount of Eſau?

9 And thy mightie men, O Teman, ſhall be diſmayed, to the end that euery one of the mount of Eſau may be cut off by ſlaughter.

*a* From https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible\_(King\_James\_Version,\_1611)/Obadiah, accessed May 2020; marginalia removed. For a version in Present Day English see http://web.mit.edu/jywang/www/cef/Bible/NIV/NIV\_Bible/OBAD+1.html.

### **T.4 Shakespeare,** *A Midsummer Night's Dream*

The Bard of Avon is famous enough that we don't need to dwell on him here. *A Midſommer nights Dreame* was written in 1595–1596. Pay attention to the use of the second person pronouns in this text.*a*

HERMIA What's this to my *Lyſander*? where is he? Ah good *Demetrius*, wilt thou giue him me?

DEMETRIUS I'de rather giue his carkaſſe to my hounds.

HERMIA Out dog, out cur, thou driu'ſt me paſt the bounds Of maidens patience. Haſt thou ſlaine him then? Henceforth be neuer numbred among men. Oh, once tell true, euen for my ſake, Durſt thou a lookt vpon him, being awake? And haſt thou kill'd him ſleeping? O braue tutch, Could not a worme, an Adder do ſo much? An Adder did it: for with doubler tongue Then thine (thou ſerpent) neuer Adder ſtung.

### Suggested exercises

*a*The text above was transcribed from the First Folio (1623) edition at https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:First\_Folio, pp. 151–152. For a translation into Present Day English see https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/msnd/page\_88/.

### **T.5 texts**

Letter from Bess of Hardwick to Elizabeth I

Elizabeth Cavendish (c. 1527–1608), better known as Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury, was one of the most powerful individuals in Tudor England – a successful businesswoman who rose through the ranks of the nobility through a series of judicious marriages. This letter of 1577 is from her to Queen Elizabeth I.

Letters are a great source for historical linguists, as they give us insight into a less "policed" register than that which we find in printed and literary texts – and, if investigated appropriately, can even give us insight into the spoken language. For an in-depth investigation of Elizabeth Cavendish's letters from this perspective see Marcus (2018). *a*

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

To the quenes moust *moust*: most; excelente magystye

16. March 1577 The Countes of Shrewsbury to the Quenes majestie

may yt plese your moust exelente magystye I am outterly onhabyll utterly unable; to expresse the monyfolde causus I haue to yelde your magystye my moust humbyll thankes and presently yn that I vnderstand by my vary good lorde of lescester that yt hath plesed your magystye of your moust special especyall and gracyous goodnes to grante vnto my poure poor daughter Lennox dowter lenex the costody of har chylde nott withstandynge that ther were dyuers meanes yoused to your heghnes diverse; used for the conterary contrary; so much someche the more am I bounden to rest your faythefoull faithful; thankful and thanfoull saruante for the same / and I do beseche beseech, ask; commit your magystye that I may commette wolly vnto your moust Gracyous Consederacyon my sayde poure dowteres case of whoyes only goodnes I repouse repose, leave; whole my wolle troust / besechinge your magystye also to haue yn remembrance the forder sutte further suit of my lord and me one theyes two owre chylderyne behalfe on behalf of these two, , and so as we are moust bowden we wyll neuer seasse to prey to the almyghte god longe to prosper your magystye yn all joy perfytt healthe and selycyte perfect; happiness; with longe and happy reyne ouer vs. at shefelde the xvij of marche

*magystye*: majesty

*monyfolde*: many; *yelde*: yield, give; humble

wholly

trust

our children

Sheffield

your magystyes moust bouden subgett and saruant

bound, obligated; subject; servant

### EShrouesbury

*a*The text is taken from the *Emerging Voices* corpus (Walkden 2019), and is originally from the online edition of Bess of Hardwick's letters available at https://www. bessofhardwick.org/letter.jsp?letter=120.

Suggested exercises

### **T.6 Anne Askew,** *Examinations*

Anne Askew (1521–1546) was tortured and burned at the stake for "heresy" (she was a Protestant). Unusually, Askew provided a first-person account of her experiences, and the following is an excerpt from this account.

Askew's narrative belongs to the broad category of egodocuments – "those historical sources in which the researcher is faced with an "I" [...] as the writing and describing subject with a continuous presence in the text" (Presser 1958) – whose value as source is increasingly recognized in both history and historical sociolinguistics (van der Wal & Rutten 2013, Mascuch et al. 2016).*a*

Then would they nedes *nedes*: necessarily know of me, what I saide to the sacrament. I answeared, þt *þt*: that I already had said that I could say, Then after diuers *diuers*: diverse; *bad*: wordes, they bad me go by, Then came my Lord Lisle, my Lord of Essex, and the Bishop of Winchester, requiringe me earnestlye that I should confesse the sacrament to be flesh bloud and bone, Then said I to my lord Parr and my Lorde Lisle, that it was greate shame for them to councell *councell*: advise contrarye to theyr knowledge, Whervnto *Whervnto*: to which in few words they did saye, that they would gladly all thinges were well, Then the bishop said, he wold speake with me familierly, I sayde, so did Iudas whan he vnfrendly betrayed Christ, Then desyred *desyred*: desired, the byshop to speake with me alone, But that I refused, He asked me why? I said: that in þe mouthe of two or thre witnesses, euery matter shoulde stand, after Christes and Paules doctrine, Mathew xviii. ii. Corinth. xiii. Then my Lord Chauncelor began to examine me again of the Sacrament, Then I asked him how longe he would hault on bothe sides? Then woulde he neades know where I found that, I said in the scripture, iii. Regum *Regum*: Kings , xviii. Then he went hys way, Then the

### 4 Early Modern English (1500–1700)

Bishop said I should be brent *brent*: burnt : I answered that I had searched all the scryptures, yet coulde I neuer finde, that eyther Christe or his Apostles putte anye creature to death, Well well said I, God will laugh your threatninges to skorne, Psalme, ii. Then was I commaunded to stande aside, Then came to me Doctor Cox, and Doctor Robinson, In conclusion we coulde not agree, Then they made me a bil of the sacrament: willing me to set my hand thervnto *thervnto*: to it but I would not, Then on the sonday I was sore sicke, thinkinge no les then to die, Therfore I desired to speake with Latimer, it wold not be, Then was I sent to Newgate in my extremity of sicknes, For in al my life afore was I neuer in such pain, Thus the lord *afore*: before strēgthen you in þe *þe*: the truth, pray, pray, pray.

*a*The text is taken from the *Emerging Voices* corpus (Walkden 2019), and is originally from the 1563 edition of John Foxe's *Acts and Monuments* available at https://www. johnfoxe.org.

**Recommended further reading**

Barber (1997) and Nevalainen (2006) are textbook introductions to Early Modern English specifically, providing more detail on most topics than this chapter does. The study of Early Modern English, particularly from a sociolinguistic perspective, has flourished over the past twenty years: see Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg (2016) for a range of sociolinguistic investigations focusing on England during this period.

On standardization in the history of English, Millar (2012: Chapter 3) and Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2017) provide overviews, and for more detailed discussion see the papers in Wright (2000). Haugen (1966), which laid the groundwork for discussion of standardization cross-linguistically, is still worth a read.

### Suggested exercises

If you wanted to read more about the complexities of the Great Vowel Shift, including the debates on which individual changes are or are not part of this change and whether the Great Vowel Shift is indeed a single overarching change, we strongly recommend McMahon (2006) to start with. McMahon (2006) also presents a very clear summary of the debates related to the relative chronology of the individual changes subsumed under the Great Vowel Shift. If you are hungry for even more, we recommend reading the references in McMahon (2006) and also Stenbrenden (2016), an entire monograph devoted to a range of hotly debated issues surrounding the Great Vowel Shift.

Any textbook on Early Modern English will give an overview of the morphological changes the language underwent. The historicalpragmatic approach taken in the section on second person pronouns is engagingly presented in Jucker & Taavitsainen (2013), which deals with a range of pragmatic issues, many with reference to the Early Modern period.

When it comes to syntax, Los (2015: Chapter 4) is excellent on the changes to the verbal system and constituent order discussed in this chapter. Fischer et al. (2017) take a thematic approach to syntactic changes in the history of English, with lots of critical discussion. On the relation between syntax, rhetoric, and standardization during the period, the book by Yáñez-Bouza (2015) on preposition stranding will not leave you hungry.

Durkin (2014: Chapter 14) is about the Latin and French lexical impact on English after 1500; Barber (1997) has a good discussion of the inkhorn controversy. Finally, Nevalainen (1999) provides a detailed overview of additions to the lexicon and semantic change during the period.

# **5 Middle English (1150–1500)**

### **5.1 History and context**

Conveniently, the Middle English period maps quite neatly onto what is called the (High and Late) Middle Ages in European history. This is popularly known as the age of knights, castles and chivalry. More prosaically, it's also a period of growing populations, booming trade, and (during the Late Middle Ages) terrible catastrophes such as the Black Death. As we will see in this chapter, Middle English is also a period typically seen as a transition during which the English language underwent some of its most major changes. While the earliest Middle English texts can seem incomprehensible without training, texts from the end of the period look a lot more familiar to most readers.

### **5.1.1 Dividing lines**

The dividing line between Middle English and Early Modern English is the year 1500. Like all dividing lines, it's arbitrary: people didn't wake up on New Year's Day 1500 speaking a completely different language. Still, 1500 is a relatively good dividing line because of two major events.

The first is Caxton's introduction of the printing press to England in 1476. The consequences of this were discussed in the previous chapter, §4.1.1, but it's worth reflecting on the situation before printing as well. Without the ability to quickly and automatically reproduce texts, it wasn't at all easy to reach a wide audience, since every single copy had to be made by hand. This was time-consuming and expensive, and it's not surprising that the literacy rate was extremely low during the Middle English period:

Figure 5.1: An illuminated folio from British Library Additional manuscript 37049, f. 32v

even as late as 1451–1500, Buringh & Van Zanden (2009) estimate that only 5%

### 5 Middle English (1150–1500)

of the population was able to read or write. This literacy was also very unevenly distributed across the population, with most of those able to write being part of the (Christian) clergy, especially in the first half of the period. The physical nature and cultural context of our written records from the Middle English period and before is thus very different. We are dealing with handwritten manuscripts, which were extremely rare and valuable objects in their own right, increasingly so the further we go back in time. The introduction of the printing press towards the end of the Middle English period therefore represents a fairly important event in the history of the language, for several reasons, but also for the historical linguist!

The second convenient turning point is Christopher Columbus's discovery of a reliable sailing route from Europe to the Americas and his voyages there between 1492 and 1501. Columbus himself wasn't English: he was born in Genoa (now part of Italy), and his travels were funded by the Spanish monarchy. He also wasn't the first European to travel to the Americas, but his experiences were instrumental in setting the scene for the colonial expansion of various European states during the Early Modern and Modern periods (see §4.1.2). Before 1500, although some English speakers travelled widely, there were no substantial, stable communities of English-speaking people outside Britain and Ireland. When we talk about the English of the Middle English period and earlier, we are talking about the English spoken and written in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland: English had simply not reached the rest of the world during this period.

### **Scots**

The West Germanic variety spoken at present in Scotland, today known as Scots, has its origins in Northumbrian Old English. It's sometimes treated as an English dialect and sometimes as a language in its own right. As you know by now, there are no systematic and accepted linguistic criteria for distinguishing between "dialects" and "languages": the question is a sociopolitical one. Between 1150 and 1500, the variety was known by its users as *Inglis* (English), just like the English of England; the term *Scottis* (Scottish/Scots) is first recorded in 1494. We can't do justice to the fascinating history of Scots in this book, but see Jones (1997), Smith (2012), and Millar (2012: Chapter 3) if you're interested in finding out more.

What about the dividing line at the start of the Middle English period, 1150? Here the key event is one that's probably the most famous date in British history: 1066 and the Norman Conquest.

### **5.1.2 The Norman Conquest and French influence**

Any history of Britain will give an account of the events of 1066. In brief, upon the death of King Edward the Confessor, three rulers scrambled to assert dominance over England: Edward's brother-in-law Harold Godwinson; the king of Norway, Harald Hardrada; and the duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror. As his name suggests, William the Conqueror was victorious: his army defeated Harold Godwinson's at the Battle of Hastings in October 1066. (Harald Hardrada's forces had been defeated three weeks earlier by Godwinson's at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.)

Figure 5.2: Norman knights and archers at Hastings, from the famous Bayeux Tapestry

It's easy to overplay and essentialize the differences between these three men: Harold the "Saxon", Harald the "Norseman", and William the "Norman". In reality, they had plenty in common. Godwinson's mother was the Scandinavian Gytha Thorkelsdóttir, a noblewoman from Denmark. William was descended from Rollo (or Hrólf), a Scandinavian Viking leader of the ninth and tenth centuries who eventually settled and established Normandy as a political entity: the terms *Norman* and *Normandy* originated in reference to the northern origins of these settlers. Even Edward the Confessor was half-Norman through his mother Emma.

Nevertheless, the linguistic impact of William's conquest was dramatic. William was brought up in Normandy, now part of France, where the dominant

### 5 Middle English (1150–1500)

language was the Norman dialect of Old French. As part of the conquest, on becoming king, he appointed several of his French-speaking allies to positions of power within England. William himself died in 1087, but his successors for the next four hundred years were monarchs whose ties to France were at least as strong as their ties to England. In particular, the House of Plantagenet held the throne of England from 1154 until the death of Richard III in 1485. This quite naturally led to French – first Norman French, then Parisian French – becoming the language with the most overt prestige in England, and being used for a wide range of political, literary and other functions. Among the literate minority, in particular, there was widespread English-French-Latin trilingualism (Durkin 2014: §11.2). Throughout this chapter we'll see evidence of French influence on Middle English, especially as regards the lexicon. This situation certainly had important effects on the vocabulary of the language, but also on some of its structural properties.

### **Anglo-Norman**

The variety of Norman French spoken in Britain during the Middle English period is known as Anglo-Norman, and rapidly developed its own linguistic features, distinct from those found in Normandy itself. Introduced as the language of a relatively small elite, Anglo-Norman was never ubiquitous among the population of England. The dominant view until recently was that Anglo-Norman died out in England fairly rapidly from about 1160 onwards, but Ingham (2012), following Rothwell (2001), makes a powerful case that the language was still being transmitted and learned by children until at least the beginning of the fifteenth century, and that Middle English and Anglo-Norman continued to influence each other as living languages throughout.

### **5.1.3 Middle English texts**

The Middle English period has been described as having "by far the greatest diversity in written language of any period before or since" (Milroy 1992: 156). Just take a look at the text samples at the end of this chapter! Certainly the limited

### 5.1 History and context

Old English records that have survived to us, and the more-or-less standardized written language of the period 1500–1900, are more homogeneous. Only the present day, with its superdiversity of Englishes around the world, might be said to have a better claim to this title.

Nevertheless, the Middle English textual records are skewed and limited in certain important ways. For a start, as we've seen, Middle English is exclusively a language of Britain and Ireland. The majority of texts that have come down to us are also written by men rather than women. On the other hand, the first named female authors to enjoy a wide reception also date from this period: the mystics Julian of Norwich, whose *Revelations of Divine Love* was written in the 14th century, and Margery Kempe, who wrote her semi-autobiographical *Book of Margery Kempe* in the early 15th century. We also have letters written by the Paston family of Norfolk, both men and women, from the 15th century – though we can't be sure to what extent these documents reflect women's language, as the scribes who were employed to write the letters were all male.1 This highlights another important limitation: basically all Middle English writers were part of the church, the nobility, or both.

The early and late parts of the Middle English period also differ in terms of what texts have come down to us. Traditional scholarship has often stated (or at least implied) that English as a written language died out entirely after the Norman Conquest, later rising phoenix-like from the flames during the 13th and 14th centuries. Under this view, the transition from Old to Middle English is very abrupt. However, Treharne (2012: Chapter 5) shows convincingly that this interpretation is not justified: hundreds of texts were produced in English during this early period, and these are catalogued online in Da Rold et al. (2010). The disregard shown to these texts by scholarship until relatively recently may be due to the fact that these were generally not brand-new literary texts, instead building on and reworking earlier Old English material. This also means that it is difficult to know to what extent these texts reflect the spoken language of the period. In the 12th century, however, a few texts like the Peterborough Chronicle, a historical record kept by monks in the east of England, and the *Ormulum*, another East Midlands text dealing with the interpretation of the Bible (and written in a unique phonetically-inspired orthography), give us an indication of some of the changes that the language had undergone.

The texts aren't evenly distributed geographically, especially during the early part of the period. For the 12th century, most of our localizable texts are from

1 See Conde-Silvestre & Hernández-Campoy (2004) and Bergs (2011) for studies investigating the Paston letters from a sociolinguistic perspective.

### 5 Middle English (1150–1500)

the East Midlands. In the 13th century this shifts, with a proliferation of West Midlands texts attested, such as Layamon's *Brut*, a poem about the history of Britain. The 14th and 15th centuries are better attested, and our first texts from north of the Humber estuary date from this later part of the period. This is also when the texts emerge that have been most intensively studied as works of literature: Arthurian romances such as *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight*, and poetry by such writers as William Langland, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Figure 5.3 gives an overview of some important texts and writers and where they were from (or where they wrote).

Figure 5.3: Some key texts and authors during the Middle English period

5.1 History and context

### **Chaucer**

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) is one of the most famous Englishlanguage writers of all time. Born into a family of merchants, he travelled Europe as a young adult, and later spent twelve years working as a high-ranking customs official in London. Best known for his literary output, especially the *Canterbury Tales*, he also produced philosophical and astronomical texts. Like other key figures of the period (e.g. Gower, Caxton), Chaucer was multilingual, and his writings show him expertly navigating the space between English, French and Latin (Davidson 2010, Hsy 2013). An introduction to Chaucer's life and works can be found in Minnis (2014), and the recent biography by Turner (2019) foregrounds his European travels.

For many readers, Middle English is the period when the texts really start to feel like they're written in a different language. On the other hand, it's not quite as alien-looking as Old English is, as we will see in Chapter 6. Early Middle English texts in particular are difficult to understand if you're not aware of the peculiarities of morphology and syntax in this language stage, closer to Old English in its appearance. Don't worry, though: in this and the following chapter we'll be including details that will help you to make sense of what you see.

To keep things relatively simple, in this introductory chapter we'll present you with what could be seen as Chaucer's English, since that's the type of Middle English you'll most likely encounter in your literature classes. This is not to imply, however, that Chaucer's English is either the only type of Middle English or a variety of Middle English more prestigious than other Middle English varieties – neither is the case. We have evidence of Middle English varieties used from the far north to the far south of England, from the west coast to the east coast, and spanning a period of four hundred years – though not all areas or centuries are equally well represented. If you want to get your hands dirty and dive into Middle English in all its glorious diversity, we recommend the Linguistic Atlases of Late Middle English (LALME) and Early Middle English (LAEME), both available online for anyone to use.2

2LALME: http://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/amc-projects-hub/project/elalme/. LAEME: http://www. amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/amc-projects-hub/project/laeme/.

### 5 Middle English (1150–1500)

Figure 5.4: An illuminated folio from the British Library from Cotton MS Caligula A IX, ff. 322 r., showing the beginning of *The Owl and the Nightingale*

### **5.2 Sounds**

In this section, we'll first provide a general overview of the phonological system of Middle English. We will also introduce you to some graphical features of Middle English to be aware of when approaching texts. Finally, we will take you through the main sound changes of this period as well. As we will see, Middle English is full of variation on every corner, and this variation stands out already at the first glance at most texts written in the language of the time, for Middle English can indeed be considered the period associated with the least standardized spelling in the entire history of the English language as used in Britain. This is not surprising considering the sociocultural changes happening during this period. Read on to discover more!

### **5.2.1 General properties of Middle English phonology**

Looking at the phonological system of Middle English, we'll notice several differences in contrast to the phonological system of standard Present Day English varieties:

5.2 Sounds

a, aː ram 'ram', name 'name'

Figure 5.5: Chaucerian Middle English monophthongs, based on Horobin & Smith (2002: 48)

	- we distinguish short and long vowels in stressed syllables
	- unstressed syllables carried important morphosyntactic functions
	- we find diphthongs not necessarily like those in Present Day English

Middle English monophthongs are shown in Figure 5.5. In addition to these twelve monophthongs, there were also five diphthongs: /aɪ/ *day*, /ɔɪ/ *joye*, /aʊ/ *saugh* 'saw', /ɔʊ/ *knowe* 'to know', and /ɪʊ/ *newe* 'new'. But this is not where the differences end, as we shall see in what follows in this section. However, we need to learn a little bit about some of the aspects of Middle English spelling first.

### **5.2.2 Graphical features to look out for**

When dealing with texts written in Middle English, it's important to be aware of some graphical differences between Middle English and Present Day English which may startle you at first. To begin with, Middle English is typically seen as *the* period of spelling and phonetic variation (Strang 1970: 224) in the history of the English language. For instance, Horobin & Smith (2002: 33) mention that the Present Day English word *though* is attested in more than 500 spelling variants between the years 1350 and 1450. We find a considerable degree of variation across different regions, but we also find variation across individual scribes – irrespective of the region. In addition, even a single scribe frequently shows variation: not just across different manuscripts but also within a single one. To illustrate the point, let's have a look at how the word *when* is spelt in the Cotton Caligula manuscript version of *The Owl and the Nightingale*. In line 620, we find <wan>, alongside variants such as <wane> (line 420), <wone> (line 687),

### 5 Middle English (1150–1500)

<wanne> (line 1446), <won> (line 324), <wonne> (line 38); and in line 1566 we find <hwon>, and yet other variants can be seen in the same manuscript: <hwanne> in line 1244; <hwan> in line 1537, <hwon> in line 1566.

### **Books were expensive**

If you're reading this book, it's rather likely you come from or have found yourself in a society where a range of individuals from different social groups can produce texts of various types online or offline via digital software. Chances then also are that it's not a problem to grab a piece of paper and scribble down whatever your heart desires. This was far from being the case in the Middle English period. Paper was to arrive in Britain only in the 15th century (Horobin & Smith 2002: 9). Prior to this, parchment was used for writing: scribes used animal skin to pass down what was considered worth the effort and the materials. The costs associated with obtaining enough parchment formed just one rather small part associated with the book making process (Overty 2008).

Considering how much spelling variation there is in Middle English texts, we can't discuss all the spelling variation that awaits anyone who intends to read texts in Middle English. However, here are at least some general, more obvious graphical differences between Present Day English and Middle English. First, in Middle English we still find a letter called thorn, which looks like this: <þ>.3 This letter was ultimately replaced by the Present Day English , but we find it frequently both in Middle English and Old English texts (see Chapter 7, §7.2.2, for more details). Just like the Present Day English , thorn could be used to represent either the voiced dental fricative /ð/ or the voiceless dental fricative /θ/. We also encounter a letter known as yogh /jɒx/, which is written this way: <ȝ>. This letter was used primarily for the sounds /j/ and /x/ (the latter being a voiceless velar fricative).

We should also comment on how, under the influence of the Norman scribal traditions, the sound /u/ came to be spelt with <ou>. If you speak or learn French, this will make a lot of sense to you, as French textbooks often tell the learner that

3You may have seen this unfamiliar letter already in the previous chapter if you read the text sample from Anne Askew's *Examinations*.

### 5.2 Sounds

<ou> is to be pronounced as /u/. As mentioned in Chapter 4 (§4.2.1), in some Present Day English dialects in the north of Britain words such as *mouth* can be pronounced with a vowel resembling /u/, which is the vowel we also find in these words in Middle English (and Old English). This is reflected by the <ou> spelling in such words, coexisting with an older simple , as in <mouth> and <muð> for *mouth* /muːθ/, and <hous> and <hus> for *house* /huːs/.

### **Ye Olde Shop**

Where does the phrase *ye olde shop* come from? The strangely looking letter <y> in phrases of this type has descended from the letter thorn, <þ>. Thorn could be hand-written in a number of ways. Think for instance of how you write a word such as *the*: is it always shaped in exactly the same way and does your handwriting match that of others? Once we start looking at manuscripts more closely, we find a range of shapes that thorn came in. One of the shapes found could be interpreted as the letter <y> instead. This ambiguity opened the window to reinterpreting one letter (thorn) with another (<y>). So, the standard Present Day English version of the definite article, <the>, represents a substitution of thorn with the digraph , whereas the version spelt as <ye> represents a substitution of thorn with the letter <y>. See Figure 5.6 if intrigued.

### **5.2.3 /h/-clusters and /h/-dropping**

Remember instances of words such as *house* being pronounced variably either as /haʊs/ or /aʊs/ from Chapter 3? Indeed, we've already seen the phenomenon of /h/-dropping and the social stigma attached to it in LModE and Present Day English in §3.2.1. This phenomenon is attested already in Old English, but crucially primarily in pronouns and unstressed words. /h/-dropping in unstressed syllables is common for all varieties of English today, standard and non-standard, and is not stigmatized (Minkova 2014: 104). On the other hand, omission of <h> in words such as *house*, i.e. words that contain at least one syllable with primary stress, is sporadic in Old English: it is only in Middle English when initial /h/ in stressed syllables is attested more frequently. In this context, it's interesting that French loans which in writing started with an initial <h> did not contain an /h/

Figure 5.6: An illuminated folio from the British Library from Cotton

MS Caligula A IX, ff. 322 r., showing three close-ups

in pronunciation in the source language – this may have only contributed to an overall confusion as to whether one should or should not pronounce an /h/ in words such as *honour* (of Romance origin) or *house* (of Germanic origin).

/h/-dropping is not the only feature that's of relevance to the changes linked to this consonant in Middle English. What we variably find in Middle English is also the presence of /h/ in clusters that no longer survive in Present Day English: /hl/, /hr/, and /hn/; and also one cluster which has survived in some Present Day English dialects: /hw/ or /ʍ/. Similarly to /h/-dropping, we also start seeing the loss of /h/ in these clusters in Middle English. We'll see that Old English had these four clusters by default. Although traces of this cluster reduction do show up in Old English, the process properly kicks in only in Middle English. This cluster reduction change had swooshed through these clusters by the end of Middle English, simplifying them to /l/, /r/, and /n/ and giving us *lofe* for the older *hlaf* 'loaf', *raven* for the older *hræfn* 'raven', and *nut* for the older *hnut* 'nut'. This cluster simplification process has never really reached completion in the case of /w/ and /ʍ/. And just like in Present Day English, where we find

### 5.2 Sounds

variation between /w/ and /ʍ/, as in /wɛɪlz/ vs. /ʍɛɪlz/ *whales* (see Chapter 1), in Middle English we also find variable forms reflected in the spelling, even within a single manuscript. These cluster simplifications lead to a language which is phonologically closer to Present Day English.

### *gnats* **/gnats/ and** *knives* **/kniːvәs/**

In Middle English, the word-initial <gn> and <kn> were pronounced as consonantal clusters: /gn/ and /kn/, respectively! This is still preserved in the Present Day English spelling, although these clusters were simplified to /n/ over the course of time.

### **5.2.4 Reduction of vowels in unstressed syllables**

Some of the spelling and phonological variation typical of the Middle English period is related to the vowels found in unstressed syllables. Look at the following spelling variants of the same words (OED; s.v. 'book, n.', 'feel, v.', and 'see, v.'):

These are just a couple of representative examples taken from the OED. However, these variants do not merely reflect orthographic variation. Rather, this variation is representative of phonological variation as well. Thus, a form such as <sien> indicates that the nasal consonant /n/ was part of the infinitive form of the verb, but a form such as <sie> indicates a lack of this consonant. Next, if we contrast <sie> and <sy>, we could suggest that the former may contain a schwa, i.e. be pronounced as /siːə/ rather than /siː/.

These instances of vowel reduction are attested in some dialects of Old English already, but the process takes up speed as we transition into and throughout the Middle English period. As we'll see in §5.3.2 and §6.3.3, this vowel reduction process was to have massive consequences for the morphological system of the language.

### 5 Middle English (1150–1500)

### **Middle English poetry: to schwa or not to schwa?**

Words ending in <e> in Middle English manuscripts feature in many hot debates over whether these <e>s were realized as schwas or nothing at all. This seemingly innocent issue has implications for our understanding of the metrical system of the poetic works at hand, since the numbers of syllables are at stake. If you'd like to know more, we refer you to Duffell (2000) as a sample case study.

### **5.2.5 A note on vowel lengthening and shortening**

Have you ever wondered how come the word pairs below show the irregularities they do? At least two consonants in each pair indicate that the two words on each line are related: *keep* and *kept* both contain the letters <k> and
, corresponding to the sounds /k/ and /p/. And the spelling representing the vowel in each pair is not too dissimilar either: e.g. <ee> vs. <e>. In Present Day English, these pairs contain different vowel phonemes, and that's what makes them irregular. So how did these vowel differences come about?

In Chapter 4, we've seen the effects of the Great Vowel Shift on the long vowels of the language (§4.2.1), which were thereby qualitatively transformed (e.g. Middle English /eː/ became Early Modern English /iː/). Sticking to the *keep* ~*kept* pair, in Present Day English *keep* contains an /iː/, whereas *kept* contains an /ɛ/. What happened here is that the vowel in *keep* is long, and was long also in Middle English; so as a long vowel, it underwent the Great Vowel Shift: /keːp/ > /kiːp/. But the vowel in *kept* was short and thus remained unaffected. This vowel length

### 5.3 Morphology

difference, combined with the effect of the Great Vowel Shift, explains why *keep* shows /i:/ whereas *kept* shows /ɛ/, i.e. a different vowel quality as well as quantity.

In Middle English, before the Great Vowel Shift kicked in, most pairs such as *keep* and *kept* didn't differ in vowel quality, but all of these pairs did differ in vowel quantity, i.e. whether the vowel was long or short. It's really crucial to remember that only long vowels underwent the Great Vowel Shift.4

As shown in Figure 5.5 above, vowel length presented a dimension of vowel contrasts that could have implications for the lexical meaning of a word so that if for example the word *name* /naːm(ə)/ 'name' was pronounced with a short vowel, this would result in a different word, *nam* /nam/ 'took' (past tense, singular). Several processes related to vowel length took place in Middle English, known under the rather complex names of lengthening before voiced homorganic consonant groups, shortening before non-homorganic consonant groups, open syllable lengthening, and trisyllabic shortening. Don't worry, we've given you enough Middle English phonology at this stage and won't discuss these processes individually (though much ink has been spilt debating these four fascinating and intricate processes; see Millward & Hayes 2018: 156–159 and Minkova 2014: §7.5).

It is useful, however, to know that there were a number of shortening and lengthening processes operating in Middle English, which resulted in the irregular pairs given above. Sound change and phonological variation can therefore have clear connections with – and implications for – the morphological system of a language. And Middle English morphology is the topic of the next section.

### **5.3 Morphology**

### **5.3.1 Verbal endings**

As we saw in §2.3.1, Present Day English varieties don't have much variation in the form of verbs. In most varieties there's an extra -*s* in the third person singular, e.g. *she plays* and *she loves* as opposed to *I/you/they play/love*. We've also seen in Chapter 4 that Early Modern English has an extra second person singular ending -*(e)st*, which goes with the second person singular pronoun *thou*, as in *thou playest* and *thou lovest* (see §4.3.1). In Middle English, the verbal endings become even more complicated. Table 5.1 gives an overview. The terms weak and strong verbs are explained in the next section (§5.3.2) – be patient.

4And if you wonder about the difference between the Present Day English [ɛ] and the Middle English [e], this is a phonetic one. [e] has been lowering in many varieties. See our discussion of vowel shifts taking place in Present Day English in §2.2.2.

### 5 Middle English (1150–1500)

Table 5.1: Finite verb endings in Middle English: *to love* (weak) and *to bind* (strong)

Table 5.1 is an example of a paradigm, which is simply a table listing all the possible forms of a given word. For verbs, we also need the non-finite forms: infinitives such as *loue(n)* and *binde(n)*, present participles such as *louyng(e)* and *bindyng(e)*, and past participles such as *(y)loued(e)* and *(y)bound(e)*. These are given in Table 5.2.

Table 5.2: Non-finite verb endings in Middle English: *to love* (weak) and *to bind* (strong)

You'll notice that both weak and strong verbs have the same endings for person and number in Middle English. The only difference, at this stage, is how they form their past tense and past participle forms: with -*ed* after the stem (weak verbs) or with a vowel change (strong verbs). There are only a few exceptions to the paradigms in Tables 5.1 and 5.2, though they mostly involve very highfrequency verbs like *be* and the modals.

5.3 Morphology

### **Subjunctive and imperative**

Table 5.1 only gives indicative forms (see §6.3.1 for the difference between indicative and subjunctive mood). There are not many distinct subjunctive forms in Middle English. In all persons of the singular, the subjunctive form is always the same as the first person singular indicative, i.e. *loue*, *binde* in the present and *louede*, *bounde* in the past. Again, *be* and the modals are exceptions. The imperative is the bare stem in the singular (*bind!*), sometimes with an -*e* added (*loue!*), and ends in -*eth* in the plural (*loueth*, *bindeth*).

Table 5.1 is valid for a roughly "Chaucerian" Middle English (following Horobin & Smith 2002: 115–116), but there is substantial variation.5 For instance, the third person singular form ending in -*s* (e.g. *loues*, *bindes*) is present in Northern Middle English texts, and competes with -*th*, without replacing it entirely until well into the Modern English period (see §4.3.2). In the Early Middle English period, an even greater variety of forms is found, anticipating what we'll see for Old English in Chapter 6. The Northern Subject Rule (as discussed in the box in §2.3.1) can also be found in Middle English texts, and affects the distribution of verb endings (de Haas & van Kemenade 2014).

Past participles deserve special mention as well. In Present Day English, past participles are not distinct from finite past tense forms of weak verbs (e.g. *I have played* vs. *I played*. In Middle English, on the other hand, a prefix *y*- is often found on past participles. Chaucer, for instance, has *he was ypreved* ('he was proved'; from the *General Prologue*, line 485. There's variation here too, though: Chaucer doesn't always use *y*-. For example, in line 2 of the *General Prologue* Chaucer writes *hath perced* ('has pierced'), not *yperced*. Older texts have more use of *y*-.

The general trend is that the further we go back in time, the more complex morphology we observe. Middle English, then, is somewhere in between Old English and Present Day English in terms of the complexity of its morphological system.

5 See Mossé (1952) if you're interested in the gory details of morphological variation in Middle English.

### 5 Middle English (1150–1500)

### **5.3.2 Strong verbs vs. irregular verbs**

The terms weak, strong, regular and irregular are important when discussing the history of English verbs. This section will give you an overview of what they mean and how to use them.