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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: MIC-MOL |
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MODERN ENGLISH thus dates from Caxton. The language had at length reached the all but flectionless state which it now presents. A single older verbal form, the southern -eth of the third person singular, continued to be the literary prose form throughout the 16th century, but the northern form in -s was intermixed with it in poetry (where it saved a syllable), and must ere long, as we see from Shakespeare, have taken its place in familiar speech. The fuller an, none, mine, thine, in -the early part of the 16th century at least, were used in positions where their shortened forms a, no, my, thy are now found (none other, mine own = no other, my own). But with such minute exceptions, the accidence of the 16th century was the accidence of the 19th. While, however, the older inflections had disappeared, there was as yet no general agreement as to the mode of their replacement. Hence the 16th century shows a syntactic licence and freedom which distinguishes it strikingly from that of later times. The language seems to be in a plastic, unformed state, and its writers, as it were, experiment with it, bending it to constructions which now seem indefensible. Old distinctions of case and mood have disappeared from noun and verb, without custom having yet decided what prepositions or auxiliary
gentleman as `the fairest she he has yet beheld.' An adverb can be used as a verb, as `they askance their eyes'; as a noun, `the backward and abyss of time'; or as an adjective, a `seldom pleasure.' " For, as he also says, " clearness was preferred to grammatical correctness, and brevity both to correctness and clearness. Hence it was common to place words in the order in which they came upper-most in the mind without much regard to syntax, and the result was a forcible and perfectly unambiguous but ungrammatical sentence, such asThe prince that feeds great natures they will slay him. Ben Jonson. or, as instances of brevity, Be guilty of my death since of my crime. Shakespeare. It cost more to get than to lose in a day. Ben Janson." These characteristics, together with the presence of words now obsolete or archaic, and the use of existing words in senses ! A Shakspearian Grammar, by Dr E. A. Abbott. To this book we are largely indebted for its admirable summary of the characters of Tudor English. different from our own, as general for specific, literal for metaphorical, and vice versa, which are so apparent to every readet of the 16th-century literature, make -it. useful to separate Early Modern or Tudor English from the subsequent and still existing stage, since the consensus of usage has declared in favour of individual senses and constructions which are alone admissible in ordinary language. The beginning of the Tudor period was contemporaneous with the Renaissance in art and literature, and the dawn of modern discoveries in geography and science. The revival of the study of the classical writers of Greece and Rome, and the translation of their works into the vernacular, led to the introduction of an immense number of new words derived from these languages, either to express new ideas and objects or to indicate new distinctions in or grouping of old ideas. Often also it seemed as if scholars were so pervaded with the form as well as the spirit of the old, that it came more natural to them to express them-selves in words borrowed from the old than in their native tongue, and thus words of Latin origin were introduced even when English already possessed perfectly good equivalents. As has already been stated, the French words of Norman and Angevin introduction, being principally Latin words in an altered form, when used as English supplied models whereby other Latin words could be converted into English ones, and it is after these models that the Latin words introduced during and since the 16th century have been fashioned. There is nothing in the form of the words procession and progression to show that the one was used in England in the 11th, the other not till the 16th century. Moreover, as the formation of new words from Latin had gone on in French as well as in English since the Renaissance, we often cannot tell whether such words, e.g. as persuade and persuasion, were borrowed from their French equivalents or formed from Latin in England independently. With some words indeed it is impossible to say whether they were formed in England directly from Latin, borrowed from contemporary late French, or had been in England since the Norman period, even photograph, geology and telephone have the form that they would have had if they had been living words in the mouths of Greeks, Latins, French and English from the beginning, instead of formations of the 19th century.' While every writer was thus introducing new words according to his notion of their being needed, it naturally happened that a large number were not accepted by contemporaries or posterity; a long list
The voyages of English navigators in the latter part of the 16th century introduced a considerable number of Spanish words, and American words in Spanish forms, of which negro, potato, tobacco, cargo, armadillo, alligator, galleon may serve as examples. The date of 1611, which nearly coincides with the end of Shakespeare's literary work, and marks the appearance of the Authorized Version of the Bible (a compilation from the various 16th-century versions), may be taken as marking the close of Tudor English. The language was thenceforth Modern in structure, style and expression, although the spelling did not settle down to present usage till about the revolution of 1688. The latter date also marks the disappearance from literature of ' Evangelist, astronomy, dialogue, are words that have so lived, of which their form is the result: Photograph, geology, &c., take this form as if they had the same history.a large numbet of words, chiefly of such as were derived from Latin during the 16th and 17th centuries. Of these nearly all that survived 1688 are still in use; but a long list
canto
As to the actual proportion of the various elements of the language, it is probable that original English words do not now form more than a fourth or perhaps a fifth of the total entries in a full English dictionary; and it may seem strange, therefore, that we still identify the language with that of the 9th century, and class it as a member of the Low German division. But this explains itself, when we consider that of the total words in a dictionary only a small portion are used by any one individual in speaking or even in writing; that this portion includes the great majority of the Anglo-Saxon words, and but a minority of the others. The latter are in fact almost all namesthe vast majority names of things (nouns), a smaller number names of attributes and actions (adjectives and verbs), and, from their very nature, names of the things, attributes and actions which come less usually or, it may be, very rarely under our notice. Thus in an ordinary book, a novel or story, the foreign elements will amount to from so to 15% of the whole; as the subject becomes more recondite or technical their number will increase; till in a work on chemistry or abstruse mathematics the proportion may be 4o%. But after all, it is not the question whence words may have been taken, but how they are used in a language that settles its character. If new words when adopted conform them-selves to the manner and usage of the adopting language, it makes absolutely no difference whether they are taken over from some other language, or invented off at the ground. In either case they are new words to begin with; in either case also, if they are needed, they will become as thoroughly native, i.e. familiar from childhood to those who use them, as those that possess the longest native pedigree. In this respect English is still the same language it was in the days of AIfred; and, comparing its history with that of other Low German tongues, there is no reason to believe that 2 See ext ended lists of the foreign words in English in Dr Morris's Historical Outlines of English Accidence, p. 33. stone, mine, doom, day, nail, child, bridge, shoot, Anglo-Saxon stein, min, dons, dreg, nags?, citd, brycg, sceot. The history of English sounds (see PHONETICS) has been treated at length by Dr A. J. Ellis and Dr Henry Sweet; and it is only necessary here to indicate the broad facts, which are the following. (1) In an accented closed syllable, original short vowels have remained nearly unchanged; thus the words at, men, bill, God, dust are pronounced now nearly as in Old English, though the last two were more like the Scotch o and North English u respectively, and in most words the short a had a broader sound like the provincial a in man. (2) Long accented vowels and diphthongs have undergone a regular sound shift towards loser and more advanced positions, so that the words ban, /Jeer, soece or site, stol (bahn or bawn, her, sok or saik, stole) are now bone, hair, seek, stool; while the two high vowels u (= oo) and i (se) have become diphthongs, as hits, stir, now house, shire, though the old sound of u remains in the north (hoose), and the original i in the pronunciation sheer, approved by Walker, " as in machine, and shire, and magazine." (3) Short vowels in an open syllable have usually been lengthened, as in nO-ma, co fa, now name, cove; but to this there are exceptions, especially in the case of i and u. (4) Vowels in terminal unaccented syllables have all sunk into short obscure e, and then, if final, disappeared; so oxa, see, wudu became ox-e, se-e, wud-e, and then ox, see, wood; oxen, lufod, now oxen, loved, lov'd; settan, setton, later settee, setter sett, now set. (5) The back consonants, c, g, sc, in connexion with front vowels, have often become palatalized to ch, j, sh, as circe, rycg, fist, now church, ridge
Our remarks from the end of the 14th century have been confined to, the standard or literary form of English, for of the other dialects from that date (with the exception of the northern its grammar or structure would have been very different, however different its vocabulary might have been, if the Norman Conquest had never taken place. A general broad view of the sources of the English vocabulary and of the dates at which the various foreign elements flowed into the language, as well as of the great change produced in it by the Norman Conquest, and consequent influx of French and Latin elements, is given in the accompanying chart. The transverse lines represent centuries, and it will be seen how limited a period after all is occupied by modern English, how long the language had been in the country before the Norman Conquest, and how much of this is prehistoric and without any literary remains. Judging by what has happened during the historic period, great changes may and indeed must have taken place between the first arrival of the Saxons and the days of 9 -,7010 ,- boy ~, ENGL INN p4~~' a L A T I N CONQUES 0 BI- IN 000 ENO! ;SR - ONVERSIO / ~ creeltnon II/ a.L s... uaid. ir u a e0o DANISH CLD ENGLISH Ill K. Alfred .00 RAMalral W.rd../Cwaa.n,LU. \Irv, 1 1000--- OLD aue Dula ` ENGLISH 1 ~r r i ~ NORMAN CONQUEST f' -__-.._. II. ENGLISH TRANSITION _-. --' o er -:rlrin ~. OHO EMIDDLE EARLY 0 1 ~ 190 ---~ ENGLISH ~' LIME ----F:.ria-aa:'a.it Otau 4' RD'1 RE b'! : *~ MIDDLE I LAT I '~ Wydif & C aucegGower' _ a~ate/ / i~ATE MIDDLE ENGUrSH 1 #Aog 160 T E RENASCENCE EARL
T 9 F I '/" w -------- Ia' 17*" CE URY TRANSIT? a MRtan kr v' 170 HIaD~.. ODENENGLI + .nM Primary Watch T..hale.I. f LO. R M.e. G.e.nl Tana. Belroofl.. Cammx.I. _ King Alfred, when literature practically begins. The chart also illustrates the continuity of the main stock of the vocabulary, the body of primary " words of common life," which, notwithstanding numerous losses and more numerous additions, has preserved its corporate identity through all the periods. But the " poetic and rhetorical," as well as the " scientific " terms of Old English have died out, and a new vocabulary of " abstract and general terms " has arisen from French, Latin and Greek, while a still newer " technical, commercial and scientific " vocabulary is composed of words not only from these, but from every civilized and many uncivilized languages. The preceding sketch has had reference mainly to the grammatical changes which the language has undergone; distinct from, though intimately connected with these (as where the confusion or loss of inflections was a consequence of the weakening of final sounds) are the great phonetic changes which have taken place between the 8th and igth centuries, and which result in making modern English words very different from their Anglo-Saxon originals, even where no element has been lost, as in words like English in Scotland, where it became in a social and literary sense a distinct language), we have little history. We know, however, that they continued to exist as local and popular forms of speech, as well from occasional specimens and from the fact that they exist still as from the statements of writers during the interval. Thus Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie (1589) says: " Our maker [i.e. poet] therfore at these dayes shall not follow Piers Plowman, nor Gower, nor Lydgate, not yet Chaucer, for their language is now not of use with us: neither shall he take the termes of Northern-men, such as they use in dayly talke, whether they be noble men or gentle men or of their best clarkes, all is a [=one] matter; nor in effect any speach used beyond the river of Trent, though no man can deny but that theirs is the purer English Saxon at this day, yet it is not so Courtly nor so currant as our Southern English is, no more is the far Westerne mans speach: ye shall therefore take the usual speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within Ix myles, and not much above. I say not this but that in every shyre of England there be gentlemen and others that speake but specially write as good Southerne as we of Middlesex or Surrey do, but not the common people of every shire, to whom the gentlemen, and also their learned clarkes do for the most part condescend, but herein we are already ruled by th' English Dictionaries and other bookes written by learned men."Arber's Reprint, p. 157.In comparatively modern times there has been a revival of interest
pioneer
The researches of Prince L. L. Bonaparte and'Dr Ellis were directed specially to the classification and mapping of the existing dialects,' and the relation of these to the dialects of Old and Middle English. They recognized a Northern dialect lying north of a line drawn from Morecambe Bay to the Humber, which, with the kindred Scottish dialects (already investigated and classed),2 is the direct descendant of early northern English, 1 See description and map in Trans. of Philol. Soc., 1873-1876, p. 570. 2 The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, its Pronunciation, Grammar and Historical Relations, with an Appendix on the present limits of the Gaelic and Lowland Scotch, and the Dialectal Divisions of the Lowland Tongue; and a Linguistical Map of Scotland, by James A. H. Murray (London, 1873).and a South-western dialect occupying Somerset, Wilts, Dorset, Gloucester and western Hampshire, which, with the Devonian dialect beyond it, are the descendants of early southern English and the still older West-Saxon of Alfred. This dialect must in the r4th Century have been spoken everywhere south of Thames; but the influence of London caused its extinction in Surrey, Sussex and Kent, so that already in Puttenham it had become " far western." An East Midland dialect, extending from south Lincolnshire to London, occupies the cradle-land of the standard English speech, and still shows least variation from it. Between and around these typical dialects are ten others, representing the old Midland proper, or dialects between it and the others already mentioned. Thus " north of Trent " the North-western dialect of south Lancashire, Cheshire, Derby and Stafford, with that of Shropshire, represents the early West Midland English, of which several specimens remain; while the North-eastern of Nottingham and north Lincolnshire represents the dialect of the Lay of Havelak. With the North Midland dialect of south-west York
3 A Glossary (with some pieces of Verse) of the Old Dialect of the English Colony of Forth and Bargy, collected by Jacob Poole, edited by W. Barnes, B.D. (London, 1867). End of Article: MODERN ENGLISH If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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