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Modern English. The Modern-English Period is dated from A.D. 1500 to the Present. The Modern English period began in 1500 and lasts until the present day. The complex inflectional system of Old English had been simplified during the ME period.
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The Modern-English Period is dated from A.D. 1500 to the Present
The Modern English period began in 1500 and lasts until the present day. • The complex inflectional system of Old English had been simplified during the ME period. • Modern English is often called the period of lost inflections.
Invention of the Printing Press • The invention of the printing press expanded education, communications, and the awareness of social problems which resulted in new universal knowledge and interests. • The invention of the printing press also marked the division from Old English to Modern English as books became more widespread and literacy increased. • Soon publishing became a marketable occupation and books written in English were often more popular than books in Latin. • The printing press also served to standardize English.
The written and spoken language of London already influenced the entire country, and with the influence of the printing press, London English soon began to dominate. • Indeed, London standard became widely accepted, especially in more formal context. • Soon English spelling and grammar were fixed and the first English dictionary was published in 1604.
Development from Middle English • The change from Middle English to Early Modern English was not just a matter of vocabulary or pronunciation changing: it was the beginning of a new era in the history of English. • An era of linguistic change in a language with large variations in dialect was replaced by a new era of a more standardized language with a richer lexicon and an established (and lasting) literature. • Shakespeare’s plays are familiar and comprehensible today, 400 years after they were written, but the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, written only 200 years earlier, are considerably more difficult for the average reader.
The next wave of innovation in English came with the Renaissance • The revival of classical scholarship brought many classical Latin and Greek words into the Language. • These borrowings were deliberate and many bemoaned the adoption of these "inkhorn" terms, but many survive to this day. • Shakespeare's character Holofernes in Loves Labor Lost is a satire of an over enthusiastic schoolmaster who is too fond of Latinisms.
Early Modern English (1500-1800) • The Renaissance brought with it widespread innovation in the English language. • The rediscovery of classical scholarship created an influx of classical Latin and Greek words into the language. • While Latin and Greek borrowings diversified the language, some scholars adopted Latin terms awkwardly and excessively, leading to the derogatory term “inkhorn.”
It was from the beginning a term of "gentlemanly abuse", referring to words which were being used by scholarly writers but which were unknown or uncommon in ordinary speech. • The word derives from the then standard name for the container in which ink was stored, originally made from a real horn; later, when this term had itself become obsolete, it was sometimes rendered as "inkpot term".
Inkhorn Terms • The phrase “inkhorn term” came into English in the early to middle sixteenth century, with the first attested usage dating from 1543 and referred to "invented words" almost exclusively from classical Latin and Greek origins • A great invasion of England was accomplished by Greek and Latin words which have become a permanent part of the English language. Some English "purists" called this classical invasion "Inkhorn Terms". • In fact, some of them strongly expressed: "Down with inkhorn terms, up with good old Anglo-Saxon English!"
The Renaissance • The Renaissance was a revival of classical literature; the purifying of Latin diction and grammar, the revival of Greek, and a return from Middle Age compilation to the old classical texts. • Italian humanists from 1393 onward went to Constantinople to learn Greek and brought Greek manuscripts back with them.
Shakespeare • Many students having difficulty understanding Shakespeare would be surprised to learn that he wrote in "modern English • Many familiar words and phrases were coined or first recorded by Shakespeare, some 2,000 words and countless catch-phrases are his.
Two other major factors influenced the language and served to separate Middle and Modern English • The first was the Great Vowel Shift. • This was a change in pronunciation that began around 1400. • In the fifteenth century, the Great Vowel Shift--a series of changes in English pronunciation--further changed the English language. • These purely linguistic sound changes moved the spoken language away from the so-called “pure” vowel sounds which still characterize many Continental languages today.
Great Vowel Shift • An important phonological change of English vowels took place between 1450 and 1650, when all long vowels changed their quality to a great extent. • This development is called the Great English Vowel Shift.
Great Vowel Shift • Each long vowel came to be pronounced with a greater elevation of the tongue and closing of the mouth. • Those vowels that could be raised were raised and those that could not be raised became diphtongs. • Diphtongs are sounds where two vowels are pronounced after another so closely that they become one acoustic phenomenon, like in German "Eule" or "Auto". "Raising" here refers to the position of the tongue in the mouth.
While modern English speakers can read Chaucer with some difficulty, Chaucer's pronunciation would have been completely unintelligible to the modern ear. • Shakespeare, on the other hand, would be accented, but understandable. • Long vowel sounds began to be made higher in the mouth and the letter "e" at the end of words became silent. • Chaucer's Lyf (pronounced "leef") became the modern life.
In Middle English "name" was pronounced nam-a, "five" was pronounced feef, and "down" was pronounced doon. • In linguistic terms, the shift was rather sudden, the major changes occurring within a century. • The shift is still not over, however, vowel sounds are still shortening although the change has become considerably more gradual.
Great Vowel Shift • This movement is commonly illustrated with the help of the following graphic, which shows where the vowels are produced in the mouth. • The top left corner, for example, corresponds to the upper front space in the mouth, where the tongue moves when you pronounce the i.
Consequently, the phonetic pairings of most long and short vowel sounds were lost, resulting in the oddities of English pronunciation and obscuring the relationship of many English words and their foreign roots. • The Great Vowel Shift was rather sudden and the major changes occurred within a century, though the shift is still in process and vowel sounds are still shortening, albeit much more gradually.
The Great Vowel Shift • The causes of the shift are highly debated. • Some scholars argue that such a shift occurred due to the “massive intake of Romance loanwords so that English vowels started to sound more like French loanwords. • Other scholars suggest it was the loss of inflectional morphology that started the shift” (Bragg 2003).
Development to Modern English • The 17th century was a time of political and social upheaval in England, particularly the period from about 1640 to 1660. • The increase in trade around the world meant that the English port towns (and their forms of speech) would have gained in influence over the old county towns. • England experienced a new period of internal peace and relative stability, encouraging the arts including literature, from around the 1690s onwards. • Another important episode in the development of the English language started around 1607: the British settlement of America. By 1750 a distinct American dialect of English had developed.
The second was the Renaissance which resulted in a demand for translations of Greek and Latin literature. • The translators could not find sufficient words in English to express the deeper literary and philosophical concepts of the classical writers.
Late-Modern English (1800-Present) • The pronunciation, grammar, and spelling of Late-Modern English are essentially the same as Early-Modern English, but Late-Modern English has significantly more words due to several factors.
First, discoveries during the scientific and industrial revolutions created a need for a new vocabulary. • Scholars drew on Latin and Greek words to create new words such as “oxygen,” “nuclear,” and “protein.”
Scientific and technological discoveries are still ongoing and neologisms continue to this day, especially in the field of electronics and computers.
Just as the printing press revolutionized both spoken and written English, the new language of technology and the Internet places English in a transition period between Modern and Postmodern.
Second, the English language has always been a colonizing force. • During the medieval and early modern periods, the influence of English quickly spread throughout Britain, and from the beginning of the seventeenth century on, English began to spread throughout the world.
Britain’s maritime empire and military influence on language (especially after WWII) has consequently been significant. • Britain’s complex colonization, exploration, and overseas trade both imported loanwords from all over the world (such as “shampoo,” “pajamas,” and “yogurt”) and also led to the development of new varieties of English, each with its own nuances of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.
Significantly, one of England’s colonies, America, created what is known as American English and, in some respects, American English is closer to the English of Shakespeare than the modern Standard British English(or the modern Queen’s English) because many Americanisms are originally British expressions that were preserved in the colonies while lost at home (e.g., “trash” for “rubbish”).
Global English • Recently, English has become a lingua franca, a global language that is regularly used and understood by many countries where English is not the first/native language. • In fact, when Pope John Paul II went to the Middle East to retrace Christ’s footsteps and addressed Christians, Muslims, and Jews, the Pope didn’t speak Arabic, Italian, Hebrew, or his native Polish; instead, he spoke in English.
In fact, English is used in over 90 countries, and it is the working language of the Asian trade group ASEAN and of 98 percent of international research physicists and chemists. • It is also the language of computing, international communication, diplomacy, and navigation. • Over one billion people worldwide are currently learning English, making it unarguably a global language.
According to the Ethnologue, there are over 508 million speakers of English as a first or second language as of 1999, a number dwarfed only by the Chinese language in terms of the number of speakers. • However, Chinese has a smaller geographical range and is spoken primarily in mainland China and Taiwan and also by a sizable immigrant community in North America. • In contrast, English is spoken in a vast number of territories including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, the United States of America, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, and Southern Africa. • Its large number of speakers, plus its worldwide presence, have made English a common language for use in such diverse applications as controlling airplanes, developing software, conducting international diplomacy, and business relations.
