CIENCIAS Y LETRAS

      We cannot know with exactitude the date of the beginning of the Early Modern English. Some Scholars opt for any early date, around 1500, after the effects of the printing revolution had become well established. But it would be more accurate to consider the beginning of the written Early Modern English when William Caxton set up his press in Westminster in 1476.

      �Shakespeare had one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, some 30,000 words. (Estimates of an educated person�s vocabulary today vary, but it is probably about half this, 15,000). (Robert McCrum, et al., The Story of English. 1986:102). Scholars discuss about the origin of the meaning of many Early Modern English words, we do not know if the meaning of some words were Shakespeare�s invention, used as metaphors or puns. Or, the use of these words had the same meaning when they were used by ordinary people in late XV century.

      My task will consist on a dyachronic study of English language from Early Modern English to Present Day English. I shall write a brief summary of some of the features of the Early Modern English grammar, and subsequently I shall illustrate the ones which appear in an extract on a Shakespeare�s text.. I shall explain them taking into account that Shakespeare�s work provides countless instances of the way English was developing at the time, and some examples are unavoidable under discussion of word formation, syntax or language use.

      �All textbooks on the history of English agree that the most important influences on the development of the language during the final decades are the works of William Shakespeare (1564-1616)�. (Crystal, David. The Cambridge Enciclopedia of The English Language, 1995: 62). This theory is based on the fact that many words which are present in Shakespeare�s writings are nothing less than the first recorded use of these words in English, e.g. Shakespeare�s use of obscene (in Richard II). Here we need to remark an important difference: there are some Shakespeare words and quotations which have a literary meaning (whom I shall not work on this essay), and Shakespearean words which correspond as far as the Early Modern English grammar is concerned.

      Some Early Modern English pronouns and words are regularly used in modern literature in order to beautify the language or to create a cultivated style. We find a highly elaborate language such as Joyce�s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Finnegan�s Wake, Joyce sometimes uses �thou�, �thee�, �ye� or �doth�. The concept of the use of Latin words, French words or terms which have survived into Modern English such as: laughable or assassination have always been used in literature. The romantic poets kept on using pronouns such as �thou� instead of �you� in order to maintain a characteristic literary style, these words were used in the Renaissance poetry for instance by Thomas Wyatt or Ben Johnson . Moreover we find this words in the religious contexts, for example �Thou shall not kill� is one of the ten commandments.

      �Many words first recorded in Shakespeare which have survived into Modern English are: barefaced, countless, courtship, dislocate, dwindle, eventful, fancy-free, lack-lustre, submerged, etc. Conversely, many words have not survived. About a third of all his Latinate neologisms fall into this category. Some examples: abruption (though today it remains the adverb �abruptly�), appertainments, cadent, exsufflicate, persistive, protractive, questrist, tortive, vastidity...� (Paraphrased from Crystal, David. The Cambridge Enciclopedia of The English Language. 1995:63).

Noun

Possessives

e.g. boy/boys (plural and possessive)

e.g. man, poss.mans, poss.pl mens

? morpheme

-a word ends in s

e.g poore Clarence death (Richard III)

Frier Lawrence Cell (Romeo and Juliet)

-the following word begins with s

e.g for sport sake (Henry IV. Part I).

Exceptions:

e.g. for Fames sake (Love Labours Lost)

Adjectives

Comparison structures

Inflected

Fitter/more fit

Naturalnest/more natural

Double Comparison

This was the most unkindest cut of all (Julious Caesar)

Pronouns

Difference between Ye/You/Thou

First and Second person singular possessive pronouns/adjectives

Alternatives: my/myne; thy/thine

Relatives

Which: personal antecedents; Who: occasionally with non-personal antecedents; that: introduced non-restrictive clauses.

The Mistris which I serue (Tempest)

Zero relative when functioning as subject:

e.g. My father had a daughter � lou�d a man. (Twelfth Night)

Noun Phrase Order

French influence:

N-Adj:

e.g. armour defensive; captain general; Court Christian

Adj-Determiner-Noun

e.g. good my brother (Hamlet); Ah poore our sexe (Troilus and Cressida)

Verbs

Present

Past

Past Participle

The verb to be

Present Simple

Past

Weak Verbs. Present ending

Loss of the vowel except in: say/saith. Do/doth. Have/hath.

Weak Verbs Past ending

The Subjunctive

The forms that remained in EME were:

-3rd person present e.g. he take vs present indicative he taketh

-1st-3rd person present e.g. I, thou, he be vs am, art, is

      Sixteenth-century purists objected to three classes of strange words, which they characterized as inkhorn terms, oversea language and Chaucerisms. For the foreign borrowings in this period were by no means confined to learned words taken from Latin and Greek. The English vocabulary during the Renaissance (1500-1650) shows words taken from more than fifty languages, the most important of which (besides Latin and Greek) were French, Italian and Spanish. English travel in France and consumption of French books are reflected in such words as alloy, ambuscade, baluster, bigot, bizarre, bombast, chocolate, detail, essay, talisman, tomato, vogue and volunteer. Also Italian words were frequently adopted in England. Words like algebra, balcony, cameo, capricio, piazza, grotto, stanza, violin, etc. From Spanish and Portuguese: apricot, anchovy, potato, embargo, cocoa, banana, sombrero, armadillo, armada and so on.

The Great Vowell Shift

Differences in the sound after the GVS:

      The Duke�s palace. Music. Enter Orsino, Duke of Illyria, Curio, and Attendants.

Words which have a different meaning

      The meaning of the words Shakespeare used on his texts does not always correspond to the meaning we give to them in modern English. Also we know that this is a poetical language, very different from the spoken language.

French Words

      It may be interesting to pay attention to the words taken from French:

(Oxford English Dictionary)

      In this section I will comment on those words which have EME characteristics and are different from NE words. (Some pronouns, verbs, adjectives, etc do not appear because they are the same nowadays).

Pronouns:

      How quick and fresh art thou, is an inversion. Nowadays we use inversion in interrogative clauses changing the place of the subject and the verb. e.g. Where are you?. But in the case of the exclamations, in general, we do not invert subject and verb: How attractive you are! However in EME, or at least in this Shakespeare�s text we find �art thou� in an exclamation.

Relatives

Verbs

Great Vowel Shift changes

      To finish I would like to add a little bit of information about the change in pronunctiation of the words after the Great Vowel Shift.

      Some examples of the sound of words, from Middle English to Early Modern English in this extract of �Twelfth Night� are:

Maya Zalbidea Paniagua