A History of the English Language: Modern English

The Great Vowel Shift and Move Towards Modern English

During the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries a radical change in pronunciation began to take place in the English language.  Transforming Middle English into a form of early Modern English.  This was the result of vowel sounds being made higher and further forward in the mouth, with shorter vowel sounds mostly unchanged, and the transition happening slowly between 1400 and 1700.  A lot of languages undergo vowel shifts, but none as quickly as the English vowel shift in linguistic terms.  The purer vowel sounds that had been used by most European languages, and phonetic pairings of long and short vowel sounds, were gradually disappearing, and this took place within a century or two.

To this day the reason for this shift is highly debated, and the main element being the intake of loanwords from the Romance languages of Europe, needing a different kind of pronunciation.  Strangely, neighbouring languages such as Spanish, French and German were unaltered.  Native ancestry and borrowings from French and Latin were words most impacted.

During the time of Chaucer in Middle English, long vowels would be pronounced much like the latin-derived Romance languages of Europe, for example; sheep would have been pronounced more like “shape”; me as “may”; mine as “meen”; shire as “sheer”; mate as “maat”; out as “oot”; house as “hoose”; flour as “floor”; boot as “boat”; mode as “mood".  The "Doomsday" book would have been pronounced "Domesday", as it is incorrectly spelled today.  Many words like this would have started to sound like they are spoken today.  The shift involved a series of connected changes, with one vowel pushing another to change with the aim of "keeping its distance".  Although there is a debate as to the order of these movements, and in different parts of the country the changes progressed at different times.

Consequently, Chaucer’s word lyf (pronounced “leef”) became the modern word life, and the word five (originally pronounced “feef”) gradually acquired its modern pronunciation.  By the time of Shakespeare in the late 16th century, lyf was spelled life and pronounced more like “lafe”, only further down the line sounding like its modern pronunciation.  It's worth nothing that propensity of upper-classes of southern England to pronounce a broad “a” in words like dance, bath and castle, to sound like “dahnce”, “bahth” and “cahstle”.  Purely an 18th Century fashionable pretension which happened to stick, and had nothing to do with a general shifting in vowel pronunciation.

The peculiarities of English pronunciation were brought on by the Great Vowel Shift, and hides the relationship between many English words and their foreign equivalents.  With some words changing to reflect the change in pronunciation for example; stone from stan, rope from rap, dark from derk, barn from bern, heart from herte.  But most did not.  Sometimes, two separate forms with different meanings continued, for example; parson, which is the old pronunciation of person.

The results of  a vowel shift mostly occurred earlier, and were more pronounced in the south, and northern words like uncouth and dour still retaining their pre-vowel shift pronunciation like "uncooth” and “door” rather than “uncowth” and “dowr”.  Busy kept its old West Midlands spelling, but an East Midlands/London pronunciation; bury has a West Midlands spelling but a Kentish pronunciation. 

As well as irregularities and local variations in a vowel shift that have culminated in deviations and regional variations finishing up with inconsistencies in pronunciation of words such as food compared to good, stood, blood, and roof which still has variable pronunciation, and the different pronunciations of the “o” in shove, move, hove.

During this time,  the Old English consonant X – technically a “voiceless velar fricative”, pronounced as in the “ch” of loch or Bach – vanished from English, and the Old English word burX (place), for example, was replaced with “-burgh”, “-borough”, “-brough” or “-bury” in many place names. 

Sometimes,  voiceless fricatives began to be pronounced like an “f” (e.g. laugh, cough). A lot of other consonants ceased to be pronounced at all for example; the final “b” in words like dumb and comb; the “l” between some vowels and consonants such as half, walk, talk and folk; the initial “k” or “g” in words like knee, knight, gnaw and gnat).  By the late 18th century, the “r” after a vowel steadily lost its force, although the “r” before a vowel remained unchanged for example; render, terror, unlike in American usage where the “r” is fully pronounced.

When most Modern English speakers read Chaucer's Middle English, his pronunciation would have been unfathomable to the modern ear.  William Shakepeare's English would have been emphasised but intelligible, and more in common with today's language than that of Chaucer.  During Shakespeare's  day and for some time afterwards short vowels were almost interchangeable and not was often pronounced, and even written, as nat, when as whan, and the pronunciation of words like boiled as “byled”, join as “jine”, poison as “pison”, merchant as “marchant”, certain as “sartin”, person as “parson”, heard as “hard”, speak as “spake”, work as “wark” continued well into the 19th Century. Even today we retain the old pronunciations of a few words like derby and clerk as “darby” and “clark”, and place names like Berkeley and Berkshire as “Barkley” and “Barkshire”, except in America where more phonetic pronunciations were adopted.

English Renaissance Period

The "Elizabethan Era" or "Age of Shakespeare" was also known as the English Renaissance period.  With many additions to the English language being deliberate borrowings and not a consequence of any invasion.

With Latin still considered to be the language taught for education and scholarship, the passion for classical languages during the English Renaissance brought in as many 1600 new words.  This was a result of many classical works being translated into English during the 16th century, with terms that didn't exist within the English language of the time.

Words from Latin or Greek were imported and included; genius, species, militia, radius, specimen, criterion, squalor, apparatus, focus, tedium, lens, antenna, paralysis, nausea, or slightly altered horrid, pathetic, illicit, pungent, frugal, anonymous, dislocate, explain, excavate, meditate, adapt, enthusiasm, absurdity, area, complex, concept, invention, technique, temperature, capsule, premium, system, expensive, notorious, gradual, habitual, insane, ultimate, agile, fictitious, physician, anatomy, skeleton, orbit, atmosphere, catastrophe, parasite, manuscript, lexicon, comedy, tragedy, anthology, fact, biography, mythology, sarcasm, paradox, chaos, crisis, climax.  And words ending with the Greek-based suffixes “-ize” and “-ism” were also introduced around this time.

Lexical gaps were plugged by Latin-based adjectives where no adjective was available for an existing Germanic noun, for example; marine for sea, pedestrian for walk, or where an existing adjective had acquired unfortunate connotations for example; equine or equestrian for horsey, aquatic for watery, or merely as an additional synonym for example; masculine and feminine in addition to manly and womanly, paternal in addition to fatherly.  Flamboyant French phrases became naturalised in English, and included; soi-disant, vis-à-vis, sang-froid, as well as more mundane French borrowings such as crêpe, étiquette.

"Inkhorn" was coined to describe pedantic writers who overused Latin terms, creating obscure and many terms which no longer belong in today's Modern English.  Popular "inkhorn" terms included; revoluting, ingent, devulgate, attemptate, obtestate, fatigate, deruncinate, subsecive, nidulate, abstergify, arreption, suppeditate, eximious, illecebrous, cohibit, dispraise.  The Inkhorn Controversy was one of many disagreements that erupted in the Salons of England.

It is interesting to note that some words did survive and included; dismiss, disagree, celebrate, encyclopaedia, commit, industrial, affability, dexterity, superiority, external, exaggerate, extol, necessitate, expectation, mundane, capacity and ingenious.

The 17th century's devotion to classical language transformed the spelling of words like debt and doubt, which had a silent “b” added at this time out of adherence to their Latin roots debitum and dubitare accordingly. On the same rationale island gained its silent “s”, scissors its “c”, anchor, school and herb their “h”, people its “o” and victuals gained both a “c” and a “u”. And in the same way, Middle English perfet and verdit became perfect and verdict with the added “c” at least being pronounced in these cases, faute and assaut became fault and assault, and aventure became adventure.

At the end of the 16th century English had become accepted as the language of learning, but still panned in Europe and called crude, immature and limited.

Standardisation and the Printing Press

The advent of the printing press, and one of the world's greatest technological innovations, was the final big development of Modern English.  Introduced into England by William Caxton in 1476, Johann Gutenberg had originally invented the printing press in Germany around 1450.  "The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye”, was the first book printed in the English language and Caxton’s own translation.  The 150 years after, 20,000 books were printed ranging from mythic tales and popular stories to poems, phrasebooks, devotional pieces and grammars, making Caxton quite a wealthy man.  With mass-produced books becoming more commonly available to all, and English books more popular than Latin.

Publishers like Caxton struggled with the difficulties of finding forms which would be understood throughout the country, one example was the use of the northern English they, their and them in preference to the London equivalents hi, hir and hem which were more easily confused with singular pronouns like he, her and him.

By 1650 standardisation was well underway which would make the English language closer to what we know today.

The Bible

The "Book of Common Prayer” a translation of the Church liturgy in English, significantly revised in 1662 was introduced into English churches, followed by the Authorized, or King James Bible in 1611.  A culmination of more than two centuries of work to produce a Bible in the native language of the people of England.  T

The Tyndale Bible was a clearer and more poetic version than Wycliffe’s.  With completely new English words like fisherman, landlady, scapegoat, taskmaster, viper, sea-shore, zealous, beautiful, clear-eyed, broken-hearted and many others.  It also included many well-known phrases that would be later be used in the King James Version, such as let there be light, my brother’s keeper, the powers that be, fight the good fight, the apple of mine eye, flowing with milk and honey, the fat of the land, am I my brother’s keeper?, sign of the times, ye of little faith, eat drink and be merry, salt of the earth, a man after his own heart, sick unto death, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, a stranger in a strange land, let my people go, a law unto themselves.

1611 saw the publication of the "King James Bible" by 54 scholars and clerics endeavouring to standardise the plethora of new Bibles that had sprung up over the preceding 70 years.  It included language that had largely fallen out of use, such as; brethren, kine and twain.  

Considered a masterpiece of the English language, with many phrases today still used in every-day speech.  Regarded by many as the definitive English version of “The Bible”.  With its iconic opening line “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”, and many of its phrases borrowed from Tyndale,  which include; how are the mighty fallen, the root of the matter, to every thing there is a season, bent their swords into ploughshares, set your house in order, be horribly afraid, get thee behind me, turned the world upside down, a thorn in the flesh.

Grammar and Dictionaries

“A Table Alphabeticall”, the first English dictionary, published by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604.  Published 8 years before the first Italian dictionary, and 35 years before the first French dictionary, and some 800 years after the first Arabic dictionary.  And nearly 1,000 after the first Sanskrit dictionary.  Cawdrey’s dictionary included 2,543 of what he called “hard words”, many taken from Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French.  Though not a very trustworthy resource, with the word words spelled in two different ways on the title page alone, as wordes and words.

"An Universall Etymological English Dictionary”, compiled by Nathaniel Bailey in 1721, the 1736 edition contained about 60,000 entries.  Was one of several grammar, pronunciation and spelling guides, published during the 17th and 18th Century.   

Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language”, published in 1755, was the first dictionary thought to be the most reliable.  A 43,000 word dictionary remained the dominant English dictionary until the “Oxford English Dictionary” came along more than 150 years later.  But was riddled with errors in both spelling and definitions.  Johnson’s dictionary included many blatant examples of inkhorn terms which have not survived, and included; digladation, cubiculary, incompossibility, clancular, denominable, opiniatry, ariolation, assation, ataraxy, deuteroscopy, disubitary, esurine, estuation, indignate and others. 

By the 16th century there were calls for the reform and regulation of the English language, and attempts to ban certain words and phrases that included; fib, banter, bigot, fop, flippant, flimsy, workmanship, selfsame, despoil, nowadays, furthermore and wherewithal, and phrases such as subject matter, drive a bargain, handle a subject and bolster an argument, considered to be undesirable words and phrases.

The 18th century led many scholars to believe the English language to be chaotic, and needing some firm rules set in place.  In his “Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue” of 1712, Jonathan Swift decried the “degeneration” of English and thereby sought to “purify” it and fix it forever in unchanging form.  Calling for the establishment of an Academy of the English Language similar to the Académie Française. With support from other important writers like John Dryden and Daniel Defoe, and ending up with it never being established. 

Between1840 and 1860, many specialized dictionaries and glossaries started appearing. Thomas Sheridan took to regulating English pronunciation, vocabulary and spelling. With his book “British Education”, published in 1756, targeting British society, specifically cultured Scottish society, alleged  to set the correct pronunciation of the English language.  The book was both influential and popular.  His son, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, later published the memorable language excesses of Mrs. Malaprop.

The first newspaper arrived in 1665, the “London Gazette”,  followed by “The Daily Courant”, in 1702, and “The Times of London" published its first edition in 1790.  With influential periodicals “The Tatler” and “The Spectator”, which established the style of English in this period.

The Golden Age of English Literature and Modern English

Between the 1500 to 1650, more commonly known as the "Golden Age of English Literature", an estimated 10,000-12,000 new words were coined, about half of which are still in use today.  Other peaks included the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th Century, and the computer and digital age of the late 20th Century, which is still continuing today.

The English language was not considered to possess the precision or the gravitas of Latin or French and rarely used for scholarly or scientific works, right up until the 17th Century.  The likes of Thomas More, Isaac Newton, William Harvey and a number of other English scholars wrote their works in Latin.  In the 18th Century, Edward Gibbon wrote his works in French, then translated them into English.  Sir Francis Bacon, however, played it safe and wrote many of his works in both Latin and English, taking his inspiration mainly from Greek.  Worked on several scientific words such as thermometer, pneumonia, skeleton and encyclopaedia. In 1704, Newton,  chose to write “Opticks” in English, having written in Latin until that time.  Adding, in the process such words as lens, refraction, etc. Over time, nationalism came in and led to the increased use of the native spoken language instead of Latin, and as the medium of intellectual communication.

New poetical forms and experimentation began with Thomas Wyatt during the early 16th century.  With his introduction of the sonnet from Europe.  And would become the testing ground for several generations of English writers during the Golden Age of English Literature, and included;  Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope and many others who rose to the challenge. Important English playwrights of the Elizabethan era include Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster and of course William Shakespeare.

Sir Thomas Elyot, the English scholar and classicist, found new words like; animate, describe, dedicate, esteem, maturity, exhaust and modesty in the early 16th Century.  While his contemporary Sir Thomas More contributed absurdity, active, communicate, education, utopia, acceptance, exact, explain, exaggerate and others, largely from Latin roots. Milton was responsible for an estimated 630 word creations, including lovelorn, fragrance and pandemonium. Ben Jonson, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, is credited with the introduction of many common words, including damp; defunct, strenuous, clumsy and others; John Donne gave us self-preservation, valediction and others; and Sir Philip Sydney are accredited bugbear, miniature, eye-pleasing, dumb-stricken, far-fetched and conversation in its modern meaning.

By the 17th century dialects or differences from the Standard English of Middlesex and Surrey were considered to be uncouth, and an indication of inferior class.  But were considered fair game, and provided good comic material for the growing Theatre industry.  In the 18th century the word class  acquired its modern sociological meaning, and by the end of the century it had become present everywhere insofar as the sound of a Cockney accent was enough to brand the speaker a vagabond, thief or criminal.  

The Impact of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare, changed the English language significantly in the late 16th and early 17th century.   Taking advantage of the relative freedom and flexibility and the malleable nature of English at the time.  Playing free and easy with the already liberal grammatical rules, for example in his use nouns as verbs, adverbs, adjectives and substantives – an early instance of the “verbification” of nouns which modern language purists often decry – in phrases such as “he pageants us”, “it out-herods Herod”, dog them at the heels, the good Brutus ghosted, “Lord Angelo dukes it well”, “uncle me no uncle”.

With a huge vocabulary of 34,000 words, he created an estimated 2,000 neologisms or new words in his many published works, including; bare-faced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, aerial, gnarled, homicide, brittle, radiance, dwindle, puking, countless, submerged, vast, lack-lustre, bump, cranny, fitful, premeditated, assassination, courtship, eyeballs, ill-tuned, hot-blooded, laughable, dislocate, accommodation, eventful, pell-mell, aggravate, excellent, fretful, fragrant, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, gloomy.  By some calculations, almost one in ten of the words used by Shakespeare were of his own creation.  

Introducing new phrases, many of which are in use today, including; one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, brave new world, in my mind’s eye, laughing stock, love is blind, star-crossed lovers, as luck would have it, fast and loose, once more into the breach, sea change, there’s the rub, to the manner born, a foregone conclusion, beggars all description, it’s Greek to me, a tower of strength, make a virtue of necessity, brevity is the soul of wit, with bated breath, more in sorrow than in anger, truth will out, cold comfort, cruel only to be kind, fool’s paradise and flesh and blood.

Word order had become more fixed in a subject-verb-object pattern, and English had developed a complex auxiliary verb system by the time of Shakespeare.  

Apart from the spellings of words such words as weild, libertie, valewed and honor.  The most obvious differences from today's spellings are the continued transposition of of “u” and “v” in loue and vnable, and the trailing silent “e” in lesse, Childe and poore, both hold-overs from Middle English and both in the process of change at this time. However, it should be remembered that, just as with Chaucer, the Shakespeare writings we have today were made by followers like John Hemming, Henry Condell and Richard Field.  All of whom were not above making the odd change or improvement of their own to the text, so we can never be really sure that William Shakespeare himself actually wrote it.

Thee, thou and thy were commonly used in Shakespeare's time and signify familiarity or social inferiority, as in most European languages today. By the middle of the 17th century thee and thou had disappeared almost completely from standard usage.  Ironically making English one of the least socially conscious of all languages. The commonplace letter “e” found at the end of many medieval English words was also beginning to decline by this time.  Even though it was retained in many words to indicate the lengthening of the preceding vowel for example; name pronounced as “naim”, not as the Old English “nam-a".  The effects of the Great Vowel Shift were well underway, but not quite complete.

International Trade and Words

International trade had really begun to expand by the 16th and 17th century, along with British naval superiority.  And the English language started absorbing loanwords from other countries such as Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. These words included:

• Basque - bizarre, anchovy
• Norwegian - maelstrom, iceberg, ski, slalom, troll
• Icelandic - mumps, saga, geyser
• Finnish - sauna
• Persian - shawl, lemon, caravan, bazaar, tambourine
• Arabic - harem, jar, magazine, algebra, algorithm, almanac, alchemy, zenith, admiral, sherbet, saffron, coffee, alcohol, mattress, syrup, hazard, lute
• Turkish - coffee, yoghurt, caviar, horde, chess, kiosk, tulip, turban
• Russian - sable, mammoth
• Japanese - tycoon, geisha, karate, samurai
• Malay - bamboo, amok, caddy, gong, ketchup
• Chinese - tea, typhoon, kowtow
• Polynesian - taboo, tatoo
• French - bizarre, ballet, sachet, crew, progress, chocolate, salon, duel, brigade, infantry, comrade, volunteer, detail, passport, explorer, ticket, machine, cuisine, prestige, garage, shock, moustache, vogue
• Italian - carnival, fiasco, arsenal, casino, miniature, design, bankrupt, grotto, studio, umbrella, rocket, ballot, balcony, macaroni, piano, opera, violin
• Spanish - armada, bravado, cork, barricade, cannibal
• Portuguese - breeze, tank, fetish, marmalade, molasses
• German - kindergarten, noodle, bum, dumb, dollar, muffin, hex, wanderlust, gimmick, waltz, seminar, ouch!
• Dutch/Flemish - bale, spool, stripe, holster, skipper, dam, booze, fucking, crap, bugger, hunk, poll, scrap, curl, scum, knapsack, sketch, landscape, easel, smuggle, caboose, yacht, cruise, dock, buoy, keelhaul, reef, bluff, freight, leak, snoop, spook, sleigh, brick, pump, boss, lottery

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Read more:

An Introduction to the English Language

A History of the English Language: English Language Beginnings

A History of the English Language: Old English

A History of the English Language: Middle English