Early Modern English (1500 - 1650/1700 CE)
William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in 1476 and the East
Midland dialect became the literary standard of English. Ten thousand words were
added to English as writers created new words by using Greek and Latin affixes.
The printing press helped to standardize the spelling of English in its modern
stages.
Characteristics of Early Modern English
-
Adjectives lost all endings except for in the comparative and superlative
forms. The neuter pronoun it was first used as well as who as a relative
pronoun.
- The Great Vowel Shift (1400-1600) changed the pronunciation of all the vowels.
- Several consonants were no longer pronounced, but the spelling system was in
place before the consonant loss, so they are still written in English today. The
consonants lost include:





Voiceless velar fricative lost in night; pronounced as f in laugh
[b] in final -mb cluster (dumb, comb)
[l] between a or o and consonant (half, walk, talk, folk)
initial clusters beginning with k and g (knee, knight, gnat)
[g] in -ing endings (more commonly pronounced [ɪn])
Pronouns
The King James Version of the Holy Bible intentionally preserved in Early Modern English
archaic pronouns and verb endings that had already begun to fall out of spoken use.
Personal pronouns in Early Modern English
Nominative Objective
singular
Genitive
Possessive
I
me
my / mine[1]
mine
we
us
our
ours
1st
Person
plural
thee
thy / thine[1]
thine
ye
you
your
yours
he / she / it
him / her / his / her / his
it
(its)[2]
his / hers / his
(its)[2]
they
them
theirs
singular informal thou
2nd
Person
plural or formal
singular
singular
3rd
Person
plural
their
Morphology
Nouns: only two cases (common and possessive), two numbers (singular and plural), no
grammatical gender.
Adjectives: adjectives had lost all inflections except comparative (-er) and superlative (-est)
by the end of Middle English.
Pronouns: most heavily inflected word class; development of separate possessive adjectives
and pronouns (my/mine, etc); 2nd person singular forms thou and thee disappeared in 17th c.
Verbs: development of verb phrases; transformation of strong verbs into weak; infinitive -n
ending disappeared; present indicative plural endings -n or -th disappeared.
Syntax of sentences
They use long sentences featuring subordination, parallelism, balanced clauses; 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; There were many Latin borrowings like
(camera/chamber); Greek loans were highly specialized, scholarly words (anarchy)
Other European Languages: French, many borrowings in specialized words (hospitable,
gratitude, sociable); Italian, terms in trade, architecture, the arts ( balcony); Spanish and
Portuguese, terms related to exploration, colonization, exotic products (Spanish: cigar, potato,
tomato,/ Portuguese: mango).
Non-Indo-European Languages: 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); back-formation (greedy > greed, difficulty > difficult, unity > unit);
blending (dumb + confound > dumfound); echoic words (boohoo, boom, bump, bah, blurt);
reduplication (so-so, mama, papa).