PRINTING: William Caxton1476; fixing of spelling; literacy; translations of classics; loanwords from Latin and Greek
RENAISSANCE: interest in classical learning, loanwords, English style affected, attempts to improve English
REFORMATION: Henry VIII's disputes with the Pope, Reformation, Church of England, reading of Bible, translations into English, Authorized Version 1611 (King James Bible), effect on style, education transferred to state, emphasis on English
ECONOMY: wool production, large sheep pastures, migration to cities, urbanization, dialectal mixing, rise of middle class, upward mobility, quest for correct usage, authoritarian handbooks; Industrial Revolution: more intensive urbanization, technical vocabulary based on Latin and Greek roots, decreased literacy due to child labor
EXPLORATION AND COLONIZATION: defeat of Spanish Armada 1588, control of seas, acquisition of colonies throughout the world (Bermuda, Jamaica, Bahamas, Honduras, Canada, American colonies, India, Gambia, Gold Coast, Australia, New Zealand); exotic products, loanwords from non-Indo-European languages, spread of English around the world
AMERICAN REVOLUTION: separation of English speakers, beginning of multiple national Englishes
SCHOLARLY WRITING: 17th c. scholarly writing still mostly in Latin, Newton, Bacon; middle class embraced English as scholarly language during18th c.
LINGUISTIC ANXIETY: perceived lexicon inadequacies, borrowing from Latin, deliberate attempts to improve the language: Sir Thomas Elyot, definition of neologisms; critics of such borrowings termed them inkhorn terms, Thomas Wilson, Roger Ascham, Sir John Cheke (translated New Testament using only English words); attempt to preserve purity of English, reviving of older English words; archaizers, Edmund Spenser (1552-1599); compounding of English words: Arthur Golding (1587); attempts to produce English technical vocabulary: threlike (equilateral triangle), likejamme (parallelogram), endsay (conclusion), saywhat (definition), dry mock (irony)
LOANWORDS: Greek and Latin technical vocabulary; continued borrowing from French (comrade, duel, ticket, volunteer), also Spanish (armada, bravado, desperado, peccadillo), Italian (cameo, cupola, piazza, portico)
SPELLING REFORM: John Cheke (1569): proposal for remove all silent letters; Sir Thomas Smith (1568): letters as pictures of speech, elimination of c and q, reintroduction of thorn, use of theta, vowel length marked with diacritics; similar proposals by John Hart (1569-70), elimination of y, w, c, capital letters; William Bullokar (1580): diacritics and new symbols, dictionary and grammar to set standards; public spelling standardized by mid 1700's, under influence of printers, scribes of Chancery
DICTIONARIES: desire to refine, standardize, and fix the language
ENGLISH ACADEMY MOVEMENT: 17th-18th c., language sentinel, regulate excesses of the Renaissance, precedents in Académie Française (1635); proponents: scientist and philosopher Robert Hooke(1660), curator of experiments of Royal Society; Daniel Defoe (1697); Joseph Addison (1711); Jonathan Swift (1712), Queen Anne supported idea but died in 1714 and her successor George I was not interested in English; opposition from liberal Whigs who saw it as Tory scheme; Johnson's dictionary substituted for academy; John Adams's proposal for American Academy
GRAMMAR: attention given to proper and improper usage after mid 18th c.; aspiring middle classes, desire to acquire appropriate linguistic behavior; Age of Reason, logic, organization, classification; attempts to define and regulate grammar of language; notion of language as divine in origin, search for universal grammar, Latin and Greek considered less deteriorated, inflection identified with grammar; William Jones's Indo-European hypothesis, end of 18th c.; 18th c. grammarians: attempts to provide rules and prevent further decay of language, to ascertain, to refine, to fix
Lowth and Priestly: grammar as art, issue of propriety, effects of analogy; 18th c. grammarians: usage as moral issue, attempt to exterminate inconvenient facts
Fossilization of spelling, difficulty ascertaining phonology, help from written statements about the language; dialectal variations
Consonants
addition of phonemic velar nasal [ng, as in 'hu/ng/'] and voiced alveopalatal fricative [z, as in 'mea/s/ure']
disappearance of allophones of /h/ after vowel; disappeared before t: sight, caught, straight; disappeared or became f in final position: sigh, tough
loss of l after low back vowel and before labial or velar consonant: half, palm, talk
loss of t/d in consonant clusters with s: castle, hasten
loss of ME instrusive t after s: listen, hustle
g/k lost in initial position before n: gnaw, gnome, know, knight
w lost in initial position before r: wrong, wrinkle, wrist
g lost in ng in final position, producing the phonemic velar nasal; in some dialects further simplification occurred so that the velar nasal became n, alternate spellings: tacklin/tackling, shilin/shilling
general loss of r before consonants or in final position; also regular loss of r in unstressed positions or after back vowels in stressed positions: quarter, brother, March
development of palatal semivowel /j/ in medial positions (after the major stress and before unstressed vowel: tenner/tenure, pecular/peculiar; when semivowel j followed s, z, t, d, the sounds merged to produce a palatal fricative or affricate: pressure, seizure, creature, soldier (this phenomenon is known as assibilation and is the origin of voiced alveopalatal fricative /z/); dialectal exceptions and reversals: graduate, immediately, Injun/Indian
d > / th/ after major stress and before r: OE faeder> father; th > d after r or before l: OE morthor>murder
Spelling pronunciations:
Vowels
Long Vowels
Great Vowel Shift (GVS): major changes in ME long vowels, loss of vowel length; long vowels came to be pronounced in higher positions, the highest were diphthongized. GVS example: ME bite > PDE bite
exceptions to GVS:
Short Vowels
further loss of final unstressed -e (exceptions: judges, passes, wanted)
in general a became æ; but then æ > a before r: harm, scarf, hard; also æ > a before voiceless fricatives: staff, class, path; original /a/ remained however when the fricative was followed by another vowel: classical, passage
a before l became lax o: all, fall, walk; also after w: want, wash, reward; but not if the vowel preceded a velar consonant: wax, wag, quack
U> schwa: run, mud, gull, cut, hum, cup; but not if preceded by labial and followed by l, or palatal s, or palatal c: full, pull, push, bush, butcher
lax i (I) and E stable but often confused with each other as attested by alternate spellings: rever/river, derect/direct, niver/never
E followed by nasal became I: wenge>wing, sengle>single
lax o before l became o (bolt, cold, old, bowl) but was retained in other environments; notice British dialectal variant: lax o > a: hot, rock, pocket
Influence of following R:
Diphthongs
tendency for diphthongs to smooth into simple vowels; also tendency for new dipththongs to come into being
iu and lax e + u > iu>ju (pure, mute, hew, cute) and sometimes (after non-labials) ju>u (new, glue, rude)
au>lax o (cause, hawk, claw); but before l+labial au> a or æ: half, calf, calm, palm (notice also the loss of l in these examples)
lax o + u> o (know, blow, soul, grow) (notice how o is actually also a diphthong)
æi > e (day, pay, raise, stake, eight) (notice how e is also a diphthong)
ui and lax o + i> laxoi (toil, joy)
Prosody
rising pitch in questions; falling pitch in statements; tendency to stress on first syllable; but actually quite a bit of variation in placement of major stress in polysyllabic words
often secondary stresses in syllables which today have only reduced stress
variant pronunciations were common
extensive use of contractions. EMnE preferred proclitic contractions ('tis), while PDE prefers enclitic contractions (it's)
Graphics
abandonment of yogh; thorn became indistinguishable from y; i and j (Iohn) and u and v used interchangeably, v at beginning of words, u elsewhere; use of long s, except at end of word (s)
spelling fixed in printed words by end of 17th c.
respellings under Latin influence
common nouns often capitalized
comma replaced the virgule (/)
apostrophe used in contractions
heavier 18th c-punctuation than in PDE
blurring of boundary morphology/syntax, grammatical functions defined primarily by syntax
loss of 2nd person singular pronouns (pu and thou)
loss of 2nd person singular indicative endings of verbs
Nouns: only two cases (common and possessive), two numbers (singular and plural), no grammatical gender; some mutated plurals, a few -n plurals (shoes/shoon, housen, eyen), some unmarked plurals (month, year, horse, fish); some unmarked genitives (mother tongue, lady slipper); -s of genitives sometimes omitted when word ended in sibilant (s-like sound) or following word started with one (peace sake); misinterpretation of genitive ending -s as 'his' (e.g. John Browne his meaddow, Ann Harris her lot)
Adjectives: adjectives had lost all inflections except comparative (-er) and superlative (-est) by the end of ME; use of more and most as intensifiers, mixing and combination of more/most with endings -er/-est
Pronouns: most heavily inflected word class; development of separate possessive adjectives and pronouns (my/mine, etc); possessive of it: his > it > its sometimes spelled it's; 2nd person singular forms thou and thee disappeared in 17th c, the plural forms (ye/you) prevailed for both singular and plural; subject ye became you; demonstrative form tho used instead of those
Relative pronouns: that, which, who, as ("all the goods as was brought to our view"), omission of relative sometimes acceptable ("I have a brother is condemn'd to die")
Reflexive pronouns: simple object form or self + personal pronoun; decline in use of reflexives
Indefinite pronouns: every, other, some, somewhat, something
Verbs: development of verb phrases; transformation of strong verbs into weak; further reduction of verbal inflections; decline in use of subjunctive; strong verbs were becoming weak, disappearing or losing separate forms for past and past participle (cling/clung/clung), perhaps following pattern of some irregular weak verbs which featured vowel changes but identical past and past participle forms (hear/heard/heard); regular and irregular verbs; survival of some strong past participles as adjectives (molten, sodden); weak verbs became regular verbs; infinitive -n ending disappeared; present indicative plural endings -n or -th disappeared; -ing became universal present participle ending; -s and -th were 3rd person singular present indicative endings, eventually just -s; many changes in modal auxiliaries, instability, loss of all non-finite forms, can/could, mote/must, may/might, will/would as modal, dare as regular verb, need as modal in some contexts; two-part verbs very common (shorten up, wear out, cut off)
Uninflected word classes: loss of some prepositions (maugre, sans, betwixt, fro), development of new phrasal prepositions (by means of, in spite of, because of); ac > but; new compound subordinating conjuctions (provided that, insofar as); adverbs formed by adding -ly to adjectives, also plain adverbs (absolute dead, exceeding worn); intensifying adverbs: very, pretty; interjections: excuse me, please (if it please you), hollo, hay, what, God's name in euphemistic distortions (sblood, zounds, egad)
possessive and demonstrative adjectives sometimes used together (that their opinion); adjectives sometimes allowed to follow noun (faith invincible, line royal); increased use of noun adjuncts (sugar almonds, merchant goods)
Adverbial Modifiers
tendency to place adverbial modifier before words modified (is again come); double negatives still acceptable
Verb Phrases
full-fledged perfect tense, be as auxiliary for verbs of motion (he is happily arrived); have displacing be as auxiliary; reduction of have to schwa in speech (should a return'd); progressive tense use increased; periphrastic use of do (I do weep, doth heavier grow); do as auxiliary in questions and negatives (I doubt it not, why do you look on me?); phrasal quasi-modals: be going to, have to, be about to; some continued use of impersonal constructions (it likes me not, this fears me, methinks) but former impersonal verbs were more often used personally with a nominative subject
Syntax in clauses
Syntax of sentences
influence of Latin, "elegant English," long sentences featuring subordination, parallelism, balanced clauses; bus also native tradition, parataxis, use of coordinators (but, and, for)
Lexicon
heavy borrowing from Latin and other languages, including non-Indo-European ones
Classical languages: free borrowing and reconstitution of roots and affixes often in combination with native words and other loans; many Latin borrowings were doublets of words previously borrowed from French or Latin (invidious/envious, camera/chamber, paralysis/palsy, fragile/frail); Greek loans were highly specialized, scholarly words (anarchy, aorist, aphrodisiac)
Other European Languages: French, many borrowings in specialized words (hospitable, gratitude, sociable); Italian, terms in trade, architecture, the arts (tariff, sonata, oratorio, balcony, ghetto); Spanish and Portuguese, terms related to exploration, colonization, exotic products (Spanish: cigar, potato, tomato, hammock, breeze, cockroach; Portuguese: mango, tank, yam, molasses); Dutch, terms in trade, seafaring, painting (cruise, yacht, landscape, sketch, brandy, uproar); German, terms in geology, mining, etc. (quartz, zinc, noodle, plunder, waltz); Celtic (leprechaun, plaid, shamrock, trousers, whiskey).
Non-Indo-European Languages: English settlements in North America, borrowings mostly from from Algonquian languages, cultural terms, names of plants, animals, objects (moose, raccoon, skunk, hominy, pecan, squash); Asian languages, Chinese (ketchup, tea, ginseng), Japanese (soy, sake), Hindi (jungle, shampoo, bandanna)
Formation of new words: affixing was the largest source of new words in English; new derivational affixes from Latin and Greek; compounding (buttercup, jellyfish, nutcracker, pickpocket, good-looking, old-fashioned); functional shift or zero derivation (noun to verb: badger, capture, pioneer); clipping (arrear > rear); back-formation (greedy > greed, difficulty > difficult, unity > unit); blending (dumb + confound > dumfound); proper names>common nouns (Fauna > fauna); echoic words (boohoo, boom, bump, bah, blurt); folk etymology (Dutch oproer [up + motion] > uproar); verb + adverb (take-out pick up); reduplication (so-so, mama, papa); words of unknown origin (baffle, chubby, lazy, pet, sleazy)
lost vocabulary, shedding off of many French loans
Semantics
narrowing was the most common, ('deer' formerly had meant 'animal'); generalization ('twist' formerly meant twig or branch); amelioration ('jolly' had meant arrogant) and pejoration ('lust' had meant pleasure, delight); strengthening ('appalled' had meant only pale or weak) and weakening ('spill' had meant destroy, kill); shift of stylistic level (stuff, heap, lowered in stylistic level); shift in denotation ('blush' had meant look or gaze)
Dialects
fixing of written language obscured dialectal differences; information about
dialects from personal letters, diaries, etc; e.g. New England dialect features
observable in spellings like 'Edwad', 'octobe', 'fofeitures', 'par', 'warran',
'lan'