The Renaissance, 1500-1650. Pages 187-237

A History of the English Language.

8.   The Renaissance, 1500-1650.   Pages 187-237

152. Changing Conditions in the Modern Period.

In the development of languages particular events often have recognizable and at times far reaching effects. But there are also more general conditions that come into being and are no less influential.

1.- Printing Press.   2.- Rapid spread of popular education.   3.- Increased communication and means of communication.    4.- Growth of specialized knowledge.    5.- Emergence of various forms of self-consciousness about language.

153. Effect upon Grammar and Vocabulary.

In the Middle English period the changes in grammar were revolutionary, but, apart from the special effects of the Norman Conquest, those in vocabulary were not so great.

154. The Problems of the Vernaculars.

Vernacular:     adjective    *(of language) native or indigenous (opposed to literary or   learned ).

In the Middle Ages the development of English took place under conditions that, because of the Norman Conquest, were largely peculiar to England.

None of the other modern languages of Europe had had to endure the consequences of a foreign conquest that temporarily imposed an outside tongue upon the dominant social class and left the native speech chiefly in the hands of the lower social classes.

155. The Struggle for Recognition.

Latin and Greek were not only the key to the world’s knowledge but also the languages in which much highly esteemed poetry, oratory, and philosophy were to be read. And Latin, at least, had the advantage of universal currency, so that the educated all over Europe could freely communicate with each other, both in speech and writing, in a common idiom.

Much was to be learned from their discussion of conduct and ethics, their ideas of government and the state, their political precepts, their theories of education, their knowledge of military science, and the like.

Translations. The historians were great favorites, probably because their works, as so often described on the title pages, were “very delectable and profitable to read.”

Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius appeared in whole or in part, while the poets and dramatists included Horace (1566–1567), and most of the lesser names.

156. The Problem of Orthography.

Spelling is for most people a pedestrian subject, but for the English, as for the French and the Italians, in the sixteenth century the question of orthography or “right writing,” was a matter of real importance and the subject of much discussion.

A certain difference is to be noticed between the spelling of pamphlets like those of Robert Greene, which we can hardly believe were proofread.

In one of Greene’s coney-catching pamphlets, A Notable Discovery of Coosnage (1591), we find coney spelled cony, conny, conye, conie, connie, coni, cuny, cunny, cunnie, while in other words there are such variations as coosnage, coosenage, cosenage, cosnage, been, beene, etc.

In 1568 Thomas Smith published a Dialogue concerning the Correct and Emended Writing of the English Language. He increased the alphabet to thirty-four letters and marked the long vowels.

The next year another attempt at phonetic writing was made in a work by John Hart called An Orthographie, elaborated in the following year in A Method or Comfortable Beginning for All Unlearned.

157. The Problem of Enrichment.

In 1531 Sir Thomas Elyot, statesman as well as scholar, published what has been described as the first book on education printed in English. He called it The Governour because it had to do with the training of those who in the future would be occupied at court.

Enlarging the vocabulary was one of the three major problems confronting the modern languages in the eyes of men in the sixteenth century.

The very act of translation brings home to the translators the limitations of their medium and tempts them to borrow from other languages the terms whose lack they feel in their own.

The greater number of new words were borrowed from Latin. Some were taken from Greek, a great many from French, and not a few from Italian and Spanish.

158. The Opposition to Inkhorn Terms.

The wholesale borrowing of words from other languages did not meet with universal favor. The strangeness of the new words was an objection to some people.

The great exponent of this view was Thomas Wilson, whose Arte of Rhetorique (1553) was several times reprinted in the course of the century and was used by Shakespeare.

159. The Defense of Borrowing.

The attitude revealed in these utterances was apparently not the prevailing one. There were many more who in precept or practice approved of judicious importations.

As Dryden wrote somewhat later, “I trade both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native tongue. We have enough in England to supply our necessity, but if we will have things of magnificence and splendour, we must get them by commerce.”

160. Compromise.

At the end of Elizabeth’s reign. By this time borrowing had gone so far that the attack was rather directed at the abuse of the procedure than at the procedure itself. The use of unfamiliar words could easily be overdone.

No Elizabethan could avoid wholly the use of the new words. The safest course was a middle one, to borrow, but “without too manifest insolence and too wanton affectation.”

161. Permanent Additions.

It is among the verbs, perhaps, that we find our most important acquisitions, words like adapt, alienate, assassinate, benefit, consolidate, disregard, emancipate,  erupt, excavate, exert, exhilarate, exist, extinguish, harass, meditate.

162. Adaptation.

Some words, in entering the language, retained their original form; others underwent change. Words like climax, appendix, epitome, exterior, delirium, and axis still have their Latin form.

The adaptation of others to English was effected by the simple process of cutting off the Latin ending. Conjectural (L. conjectural-is), consult (L. consult-are) exclusion (L. exclusion-em), and exotic (L. exotic-us) show how easily in many cases this could be done.

163. Reintroductions and New Meanings.

Sometimes the same word has been borrowed more than once in the course of time.

The Latin words episcopus and discus appear in Old English as bishop and dish and were again borrowed later to make our words episcopal and disc (also dais, desk, and discus).

A word when introduced a second time often carries a different meaning.

164. Rejected Words.

There are some things about language that we cannot explain. One of them is why certain words survive while others, apparently just as good, do not.

Among the many new words that were introduced into English at this time there were a goodly number that we have not permanently retained. Some are found used a few times and then forgotten.

165. Reinforcement through French.

It is not always possible to say whether a word borrowed at this time was taken over directly from Latin or indirectly through French, for the same wholesale enrichment was going on in French simultaneously and the same words were being introduced in both languages.

It is really not important which language was the direct source of the English words because in either case they are ultimately of Latin origin.

166. Words from the Romance Languages.

Sixteenth-century.

The English vocabulary at this time shows words adopted from more than fifty languages, the most important of which (besides Latin and Greek) were French, Italian, and Spanish.

167. The Method of Introducing New Words.

The Latin words that form so important an element in the English vocabulary have generally entered the language through the medium of writing. The various Latin influences, except the earliest, have been the work of churchmen and scholars.

If the words themselves have not always been learned words, they have needed the help of learned people to become known. This was particularly true in the Renaissance.

168. Enrichment from Native Sources.

By far the greater part of the additions to the English vocabulary in the period of the Renaissance was drawn from sources outside of English.

The poets, of course, were rather more given to the revival of old words, especially words that were familiar to them. Among poets who consciously made use of old words to enlarge the poetical vocabulary the most important was Spenser, although there were also others.

169. Methods of Interpreting the New Words.

The difftculty for the reader presented by these new words of many different origins was met in various ways.

170. Dictionaries of Hard Words.

Nathaniel Bailey published his Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721).

Anyone attempted to list all the words in the language.

The earliest dictionaries were those explaining the words in Latin or some other foreign language, and the earliest English dictionaries were dictionaries of hard words.

171. Nature and Extent of the Movement.

In order to appreciate the importance of the Renaissance in enriching the English vocabulary it is worth while to form some idea of the number of new words added at this time. A calculation based upon the data available in the Oxford Dictionary gives a figure somewhat above 12,000.

Many of the new words, enjoyed but a short life. Some even appeared only once or twice and were forgotten. But about half of the total number have become a permanent part of the language.

172. The Movement Illustrated in Shakespeare.

It is a well-known fact that, Shakespeare had the largest vocabulary of any English writer.

Some of the words Shakespeare uses must have been very new indeed, because the earliest instance in which we find them at all is only a year or two before he uses them (e.g., exist, initiate), and in a number of cases his is the earliest occurrence of the word in English (accommodation, apostrophe, assassination, obscene, pedant, premeditated, reliance, submerged, etc.).

173. Shakespeare’s Pronunciation.

Shakespeare’s pronunciation, though not ours, was much more like ours than has always been realized.

He pronounced [e] for [i] in some words just as Pope could still say tay for tea.

In some words the vowel was shortened in the fifteenth century and was unrounded to the sound in blood, flood. In still other words, however, it retained its length until about 1700 but was then shortened without being unrounded, giving us the sound in good, stood, book, foot.

In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the vowels of Middle English, especially the long vowels, underwent a wholesale but quite regular shifting.

174. The Importance of Sound-changes.

The subject of sound-changes is just as important in the history of languages as the changes in grammar and vocabulary.

Any treatment of even the vowels, must proceed by examining each of the vowel sounds individually, tracing its source in the preceding period, and following its subsequent development both independently and under the influence of neighboring sounds and varying conditions of accent, often noting significant differences in its development in different dialects, etc.

175. From Old to Middle English.

In considering the changes in pronunciation that English words underwent in passing from Old to Middle English we may say that qualitatively they were slight, at least in comparison with those that occurred later.

Changes in the consonants were rather insignificant, as they have always been in English. Some voiced consonants became voiceless, and vice versa, and consonants were occasionally lost.

176. From Middle English to Modern.

All Middle English long vowels underwent extensive alteration in passing into Modern English, but the short vowels, in accented syllables, remained comparatively stable.

If we compare Chaucer’s pronunciation of the short vowels with ours, we note only two changes of importance, those of a and u. By Shakespeare’s day (i.e., at the close of the sixteenth century) Chaucer’s a had become an [æ] in pronunciation (cat, thank, flax).

177. The Great Vowel Shift.

The situation is very different when we consider the long vowels.

In Chaucer’s pronunciation these had still their so-called “continental” value—that is, a was pronounced like the a in father and not as in name, e was pronounced either like the e in there or the a in mate, but not like the ee in meet, and so with the other vowels.

All the long vowels gradually came to be pronounced with a greater elevation of the tongue and closing of the mouth, so that those that could be raised were raised, and those that could not without becoming consonantal (i, u) became diphthongs.

178. Weakening of Unaccented Vowels.

A little observation and reflection shows us that in unaccented syllables, too, the spelling does not accurately represent the pronunciation today. This is because in all periods of the language the vowels of unstressed syllables have had a tendency to weaken and then often to disappear.

Misguided purists often try to pronounce the final syllable of Monday, with the full quality of the diphthong in day. But even when the vowel has been restored in standard speech the weakened form is generally apparent in informal speech and in the dialects.

179. Grammatical Features.

English grammar in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century is marked more by the survival of certain forms and usages that have since disappeared than by any fundamental developments.

The reader of Shakespeare is conscious of minor differences of form and in the framing of sentences may note differences of syntax and idiom that, although they attract attention, are not sufficient to interfere seriously with understanding.

180. The Noun.

The only inflections retained in the noun were, those marking the plural and the possessive singular.

In the former the s-plural had become so generalized that except for a few nouns like sheep and swine with unchanged plurals, and a few others like mice and feet with mutated vowels, we are scarcely conscious of any other forms.

181. The Adjective.

Because the adjective had already lost all its endings, so that it no longer expressed distinctions of gender, number, and case, the chief interest of this part of speech in the modern period is in the forms of the comparative and superlative degrees. In the sixteenth century these were not always precisely those now in use.

For example, comparatives such as lenger, strenger remind us that forms like our elder were once more common in the language. The two methods commonly used to form the comparative and superlative, with the endings -er and –est and with the adverbs more and most, had been customary since Old English times. But there was more variation in their use.

182. The Pronoun.

The sixteenth century saw the establishment of the personal pronoun in the form that it has had ever since.

In attaining this result three changes were involved:

1.-The disuse of thou, thy, thee.   2.-The substitution of you for ye as a nominative case.

3.-The introduction of its as the possessive of it.  

Originally a clear distinction was made between the nominative ye and the objective you.

In the early part of the sixteenth century some writers were careful to distinguish the two forms.

In the Authorized Version of the Bible (1611) they are often nicely differentiated: No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you (Job).

While Shakespeare says A southwest wind blow on ye And blister you all over!

It was perhaps inevitable that the possessive of nouns (stone’s, horse’s) should eventually suggest the analogical form it’s for the possessive of it. (The word was spelled with an apostrophe down to about 1800.)

Finally, mention should be made of one other noteworthy development of the pronoun in the sixteenth century. This is the use of who as a relative.

183. The Verb.

A very noticeable difference is the scarcity of progressive forms. Polonius asks, What do you read, my Lord?—that is, What are you reading? The large increase in the use of the progressive is one of the important developments of later times.

Impersonal uses of the verb were much more common than they are today. It yearns me not, it dislikes me, so please him come are Shakespearian expressions which in more recent English have been replaced by personal constructions.

Certain differences in inflection are more noticeable, particularly the ending of the third person singular of the present indicative, an occasional -s in the third person plural, and many forms of the past tense and past participle, especially of strong verbs.

Another feature of the English verb in the sixteenth century, is the occurrence of this -s as an ending also of the third person plural. Normally at this time the plural had no ending in the language of literature and the court.

During the Middle English period extensive inroads were made in the ranks of the Old English strong verbs. Many of these verbs were lost, and many became weak.

184. Usage and Idiom.

Language is not merely a matter of words and inflections. We should neglect a very essential element if we failed to take account of the many conventional features—matters of idiom and usage—that often defy explanation or logical classification but are nevertheless characteristic of the language at a given time and, like other conventions, subject to change. Such a matter as the omission of the article where we customarily use it is an illustration in point.

Nothing illustrates so richly the idiomatic changes in a language from one age to another as the uses of prepositions.

185. General Characteristics of the Period.

1.- A conscious interest in the English language and an attention to its problems.

2.- The effect of the Great Vowel Shift was to bring the pronunciation within measurable distance of that which prevails today. The influence of the printing press and the efforts of spelling reformers had resulted in a form of written English that offers little difficulty to the modern reader.

3.- English in the Renaissance, at least as we see it in books, was much more plastic than now. People felt freer to mold it to their wills.

4.- There still existed a considerable variety of use—alternative forms in the grammar, experiments with new words, variations in pronunciation and spelling.

A certain latitude was clearly permitted among speakers of education and social position, and this latitude appears also in the written language.

Read and answer correctly.

1.- General conditions in the Modern Period that were favorable to the spread of ideas and stimulating to the growth of vocabulary.

2.- Three great problems that the Modern languages faced at the sixteenth century.

3.- One of the three major problems confronting the modern languages in the sixteenth century.

4.- Characteristics of the earliest dictionairies.

5.- Changes in pronunciation from Old to Middle English.

6.- Changes in pronunciation from Middle English to Modern.

  

Karina Spíndola Rodríguez.