Early Modern English

This article is about the stage of the language. For the historical period, see Early Modern Britain.

Early Modern English
Shakespeare's English, King James English
English
William Shakespeare's Sonnet 132 in the 1609 Quarto
Native to	England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and English overseas possessions
Era	Early modern period; developed into Modern English in the late 17th century
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic North Sea Germanic Anglo-Frisian Anglic English Early Modern English
Early forms	Proto-Indo-European Proto-Germanic Proto-West Germanic Proto-English Old English Middle English
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
ISO 639-6	emen
Glottolog	None
IETF	en-emodeng

Early Modern English (sometimes abbreviated EModE or EMnE) or Early New English (ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle English, in the late 15th century, to the transition to Modern English, in the mid-to-late 17th century.

Before and after the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603, the emerging English standard began to influence the spoken and written Middle Scots of Scotland.

The grammatical and orthographical conventions of literary English in the late 16th century and the 17th century are still very influential on modern Standard English. Most modern readers of English can understand texts written in the late phase of Early Modern English, such as the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare, and they have greatly influenced Modern English.

Texts from the earlier phase of Early Modern English, such as the late-15th-century Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) and the mid-16th-century Gorboduc (1561), may present more difficulties but are still closer to Modern English grammar, lexicon and phonology than are 14th-century Middle English texts, such as the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

History

English Renaissance

See also: English Renaissance

Transition from Middle English

Further information: Late Middle English

The change from Middle English to Early Modern English affected much more than just vocabulary and pronunciation.

Middle English underwent significant change over time and contained large dialectical variations. Early Modern English, on the other hand, became more standardised and developed an established canon of literature which survives today.

• 1476 – William Caxton started printing in Westminster; however, the language that he used reflected the variety of styles and dialects used by the authors who originally wrote the material.

Tudor period (1485–1603)

• 1485 – Caxton published Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, the first print bestseller in English. Malory's language, while archaic in some respects, was clearly Early Modern and was possibly a Yorkshire or Midlands dialect.
• 1491 or 1492 – Richard Pynson started printing in London; his style tended to prefer Chancery Standard, the form of English used by the government.

Henry VIII

• c. 1509 – Pynson became the king's official printer.
• From 1525 – Publication of William Tyndale's Bible translation, which was initially banned.
• 1539 – Publication of the Great Bible, the first officially authorised Bible in English. Edited by Myles Coverdale, it was largely from the work of Tyndale. It was read to congregations regularly in churches, which familiarised much of the population of England with a standard form of the language.
• 1549 – Publication of the first edition of the Book of Common Prayer in English, under the supervision of Thomas Cranmer (revised in 1552, 1559, 1604, and 1662), which standardised much of the wording of church services. Some have argued that since attendance at prayer book services was required by law for many years, the repetitive use of its language helped to standardise Modern English even more than the King James Bible (1611) did.
• 1557 – Publication of Tottel's Miscellany.

Elizabethan English

Title page of Gorboduc (printed 1565). The Tragedie of Gorbodvc, whereof three Actes were wrytten by Thomas Nortone, and the two laste by Thomas Sackuyle. Sett forthe as the same was shewed before the Qvenes most excellent Maiestie, in her highnes Court of Whitehall, the .xviii. day of January, Anno Domini .1561. By the Gentlemen of Thynner Temple in London.

Elizabethan era (1558–1603)

• 1560 – The Geneva Bible was published. The New Testament was completed in 1557 by English Reformed exiles on the continent during the reign of Mary, and the complete Bible three years later, after Elizabeth succeeded the throne. This version was favoured by the Puritans and Pilgrims due to its more vigorous and forceful language. Its popularity and proliferation (due in large part to its copious notes) over the following decades sparked the production of the King James Bible to counter it.
• 1582 – The Rheims and Douai Bible was completed, and the New Testament was released in Rheims, France, in 1582. It was the first complete English translation of the Bible that was officially sponsored and carried out by the Catholic Church (earlier translations into English, especially of the Psalms and Gospels, existed as far back as the 9th century, but it was the first Catholic English translation of the full Bible). Though the Old Testament was already complete, it was not published until 1609–1610, when it was released in two volumes. While it did not make a large impact on the English language at large, it certainly played a role in the development of English, especially in heavily Catholic English-speaking areas.
• Christopher Marlowe, fl. 1586–1593
• 1592 – The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd
• c. 1590 – c. 1612 – Shakespeare's plays written
  See also: Chronology of Shakespeare's plays and Shakespeare's influence

Further information: Elizabethan literature and English Renaissance theatre

17th century

Jacobean and Caroline eras

Jacobean era (1603–1625)

Further information: Jacobean era

• 1609 – Shakespeare's sonnets published
• Other playwrights:
  • Ben Jonson
  • Thomas Dekker
  • Beaumont and Fletcher (Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher)
  • John Webster
• 1607 – The first successful permanent English colony in the New World, Jamestown, is established in Virginia. Early vocabulary specific to American English comes from indigenous languages (such as moose, racoon).
• 1611 – The King James Version was published, largely based on Tyndale's translation. It remained the standard Bible in the Church of England into the latter half of the twentieth century.
• 1623 – Shakespeare's First Folio published

Caroline era and English Civil War (1625–1649)

Further information: Caroline era and English Civil War

• 1630–1651 – William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony, wrote his journal. It will become Of Plymouth Plantation, one of the earliest texts written in the American Colonies.
• 1647 – Publication of the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio

Interregnum and Restoration

The English Civil War and the Interregnum were times of social and political upheaval and instability. The dates for Restoration literature are a matter of convention and differ markedly from genre to genre. In drama, the "Restoration" may last until 1700, but in poetry, it may last only until 1666, the annus mirabilis (year of wonders), and in prose lasts until 1688. With the increasing tensions over succession and the corresponding rise in journalism and periodicals, or until possibly 1700, when those periodicals grew more stabilised.

• 1651 – Publication of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.
• 1660–1669 – Samuel Pepys wrote his diary, which will become an important eyewitness account of the Restoration Era.
• 1662 – New edition of the Book of Common Prayer, largely based on the 1549 and subsequent editions. It long remained a standard work in English.
• 1667 – Publication of Paradise Lost by John Milton and of Annus Mirabilis by John Dryden.

Development to Modern English

Main article: Modern English

The 17th-century port towns and their forms of speech gained influence over the old county towns. From around the 1690s onwards, England experienced a new period of internal peace and relative stability, which encouraged the arts including literature.

Modern English can be taken to have emerged fully by the beginning of the Georgian era in 1714, but English orthography remained somewhat fluid until the publication of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, in 1755.

The towering importance of William Shakespeare over the other Elizabethan authors was the result of his reception during the 17th and the 18th centuries, which directly contributes to the development of Standard English. Shakespeare's plays are therefore still familiar and comprehensible 400 years after they were written, but the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, which had been written only 200 years earlier, are considerably more difficult for the average modern reader.

Orthography

Shakespeare's writings are universally associated with Early Modern English.

The orthography of Early Modern English is recognisably similar to that of today, but spelling was unstable. Early Modern and Modern English both retain various orthographical conventions that predate the Great Vowel Shift.

Early Modern English spelling was broadly similar to that encountered in Middle English. Some of the changes that occurred were based on etymology (as with the silent ⟨b⟩ that was added to words like debt, doubt and subtle). Many spellings had still not been standardised. For example, he was spelled as both he and hee in the same sentence in Shakespeare's plays and elsewhere.

Certain key orthographic features of Early Modern English spelling have not been retained:

• The letter ⟨S⟩ had two distinct lowercase forms: ⟨s⟩ (short s), as is still used today, and ⟨ſ⟩ (long s). The short s was always used at the end of a word and often elsewhere. The long s, if used, could appear anywhere except at the end of a word. The double lowercase S was written variously ⟨ſſ⟩, ⟨ſs⟩ or ⟨ß⟩ (the last ligature is still used in German ß). That is similar to the alternation between medial (σ) and final lowercase sigma (ς) in Greek.
• ⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ were not considered two distinct letters then but as still different forms of the same letter. Typographically, ⟨v⟩ was frequent at the start of a word and ⟨u⟩ elsewhere: hence vnmoued (for modern unmoved) and loue (for love). The modern convention of using ⟨u⟩ for the vowel sounds and ⟨v⟩ for the consonant appears to have been introduced in the 1630s. Also, ⟨w⟩ was frequently represented by ⟨vv⟩.
• Similarly, ⟨i⟩ and ⟨j⟩ were also still considered not as two distinct letters, but as different forms of the same letter: hence ioy for joy and iust for just. Again, the custom of using ⟨i⟩ as a vowel and ⟨j⟩ as a consonant began in the 1630s.
• The letter ⟨þ⟩ (thorn) was still in use during the Early Modern English period but was increasingly limited to handwritten texts. In Early Modern English printing, ⟨þ⟩ was represented by the Latin ⟨Y⟩ (see Ye olde), which appeared similar to thorn in blackletter typeface ⟨𝖞⟩. Thorn had become nearly totally disused by the late Early Modern English period, the last vestiges of the letter being its ligatures, y^e (thee), y^t (that), y^u (thou), which were still seen occasionally in the 1611 King James Version and in Shakespeare's Folios.
• A silent ⟨e⟩ was often appended to words, as in ſpeake and cowarde. The last consonant was sometimes doubled when the ⟨e⟩ was added: hence manne (for man) and runne (for run).
• The sound /ʌ/ was often written ⟨o⟩ (as in son): hence ſommer, plombe (for modern summer, plumb).
• The final syllable of words like public was variously spelt but came to be standardised as -ick. The modern spellings with -ic did not come into use until the mid-18th century.
• ⟨y⟩ was often used instead of ⟨i⟩.
• The vowels represented by ⟨ee⟩ and ⟨e_e⟩ (for example in meet and mete) changed, and ⟨ea⟩ became an alternative.

Phonology

Consonants

Early Modern English consonants

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m		n			ŋ
Stop	p • b		t • d	tʃ • dʒ		k • ɡ
Fricative	f • v	θ • ð	s • z	ʃ • ʒ	(ç)	x	h
Approximant			r		j	ʍ • w
Lateral			l

Most consonant sounds of Early Modern English have survived into present-day English; however, there are still a few notable differences in pronunciation:

• Today's "silent" consonants found in the consonant clusters of such words as knot, gnat, sword were still fully pronounced up until the mid-to-late 16th century and thus possibly by Shakespeare, though they were fully reduced by the early 17th century.
• The digraph ⟨gh⟩, in words like night, thought and daughter, originally pronounced [x] in much older English, was probably reduced to nothing (as it is today) or at least heavily reduced in sound to something like [ht], [ç], [h], or [f]. It seems likely that much variation existed for many of these words. Upon its disappearance, it lengthened the previous vowel.
• The now-silent l of would and should may have persisted in being pronounced as late as 1700 in Britain and perhaps several decades longer in the British American colonies. The l in could, however, first appearing in the early 16th century, was presumably never pronounced.
• The modern phoneme /ʒ/ was not documented as occurring until the second half of the 17th century. Likely, that phoneme in a word like vision was pronounced as /zj/ and in measure as /z/.
• Most words with the spelling ⟨wh⟩, such as what, where and whale, were still pronounced [ʍ] , rather than [w] . That means, for example, that wine and whine were still pronounced differently, unlike in most varieties of English today.
• Early Modern English was rhotic. In other words, the r was always pronounced, but the precise nature of the typical rhotic consonant remains unclear. It was, however, certainly one of the following:
  • The "R" of most varieties of English today: [ɹ̠] or a further forward sound [ɹ]
  • The "trilled or rolled R": [r] , perhaps with one contact [ɾ] , as in modern Scouse and Scottish English
  • The "retroflex R": [ɻ] .
• In Early Modern English, the precise nature of the light and dark variants of the l consonant, respectively [l] and [ɫ] , remains unclear.
• Word-final ⟨ng⟩, as in sing, was still pronounced [ŋɡ] until the late 16th century, when it began to coalesce into the usual modern pronunciation, [ŋ]. The original pronunciation [ŋɡ] is preserved in parts of England, in dialects such as Brummie, Mancunian and Scouse.
• H-dropping at the start of words was common, as it still is in informal English throughout most of England. In loanwords taken from Latin, Greek, or any Romance language, a written h was usually mute well into modern English times, e.g. in heritage, history, hermit, hostage, and still today in heir, honor, hour etc.
• With words originating from or passed through ancient Greek, th was commonly pronounced as t, e.g. theme, theater, cathedral, anthem; this is still retained in some proper names as Thomas and a few common nouns like thyme.

Vowels

Early modern English vowels

		Monophthongs		Diphthongs
		Short	Long	+/j/	+/w/
Close	Front	ɪ	iː		ɪw
	Back	ʊ	uː
Close-mid	Front		eː
	Back		oː
Mid		ə		əj	əw
Open-mid	Front	ɛ		ɛj
	Back	ɤ	ɔː	ɔj	ɔw
Near-open	Front
	Back	ɒ
Open		a	aː

The following information primarily comes from studies of the Great Vowel Shift; see the related chart.

• The modern English phoneme /aɪ/ , as in glide, rhyme and eye, was [əi], and was reduced word-finally. Early Modern rhymes indicate that [əi] was similar to the vowel that was used at the end of words like happy, melody and busy.
• /aʊ/ , as in now, out and ploughed, was [əu] .
• /ɛ/ , as in fed, elm and hen, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today, sometimes approaching [ɪ] (which is still in the word pretty).
• /eɪ/ , as in name, case and sake, was a long monophthong. It shifted from [æː] to [ɛː] and finally to [eː] . Earlier in Early Modern English, mat and mate were near-homophones, with a longer vowel in the second word. Thus, Shakespeare rhymed words like haste, taste and waste with last and shade with sad. The more open pronunciation remains in some Northern England English and rarely in Irish English. During the 17th century, the phoneme variably merged with the phoneme [ɛi] as in day, weigh, and the merger survived into standard forms of Modern English, though a few dialects kept these vowels distinct at least to the 20th century (see pane–pain merger).
• /iː/ (typically spelled ⟨ee⟩ or ⟨ie⟩) as in see, bee and meet, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today, but it had not yet merged with the phoneme represented by the spellings ⟨ea⟩ or ⟨ei⟩ (and perhaps ⟨ie⟩, particularly with fiend, field and friend), as in east, meal and feat, which were pronounced with [eː] or [ɛ̝ː]. However, words like breath, dead and head may have already split off towards /ɛ/ ).
• /ɪ/ , as in bib, pin and thick, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today.
• /oʊ/ , as in stone, bode and yolk, was [oː] or [o̞ː] . The phoneme was probably just beginning the process of merging with the phoneme [ow], as in grow, know and mow, without yet achieving today's complete merger. The old pronunciation remains in some dialects, such as in Yorkshire, East Anglia, and Scotland.
• /ɒ/ , as in rod, top and pot, was [ɒ] or [ɔ] , much like the corresponding RP sound.
• /ɔː/ , as in taut, taught and law was more open than in contemporary RP, being [ɔː] or [ɑː] (and thus being closer to Welsh and General American /ɔː/)
• /ɔɪ/ , as in boy, choice and toy, is even less clear than other vowels. In the late 16th century, the similar but distinct phonemes /ɔi/, /ʊi/ and /əi/ all existed. By the late 17th century, they all merged. Because those phonemes were in such a state of flux during the whole Early Modern period (with evidence of rhyming occurring among them as well as with the precursor to /aɪ/), scholars often assume only the most neutral possibility for the pronunciation of /ɔɪ/ as well as its similar phonemes in Early Modern English: [əɪ] (which, if accurate, would constitute an early instance of the line–loin merger since /aɪ/ had not yet fully developed in English).
• /ʌ/ (as in drum, enough and love) and /ʊ/ (as in could, full, put) had not yet split and so were both pronounced in the vicinity of [ʊ] .
• /uː/ occurred not only in words like food, moon and stool, but also all other words spelled with ⟨oo⟩ like blood, cook and foot. However, the vowel for some of those words was shortened at an early stage: either beginning or already in the process of approximating the Early Modern English [ʊ] . That phonological split among the ⟨oo⟩ words was a catalyst for the later foot–strut split and is called "early shortening" by John C. Wells. The ⟨oo⟩ words that came to be pronounced with the shortened vowel [ʊ] included, for example, good and blood. They, like other words with /ʊ/, were subsequently subject to the foot–strut split and many of them, like drum and love, came to be pronounced with the vowel [ɤ] and eventually /ʌ/ . However, the words with a shortened vowel also seem to have included, at least in some pronunciations such as Shakespeare's and at certain stages, some words that are pronounced with the original non-shortened vowel /uː/ in Present-Day English - e.g. brood, doom and noon. For example, doom and come rhyme in Shakespeare's writing for this reason.
• /ɪw/ or /iw/ occurred in words spelled with ew or ue such as due and dew. In most dialects of Modern English, it became /juː/ and /uː/ by yod-dropping and so do, dew and due are now perfect homophones in most American pronunciations, but a distinction between the two phonemes remains in other versions of English. There is, however, an additional complication in dialects with yod-coalescence (such as Australian English and younger RP), in which dew and due /dʒuː/ (homophonous with jew) are distinguished from do /duː/ purely by the initial consonant, without any vowel distinction.

The difference between the transcription of the EME diphthong offsets with ⟨j w⟩, as opposed to the usual modern English transcription with ⟨ɪ̯ ʊ̯⟩ is not meaningful in any way. The precise EME realizations are not known, and they vary even in modern English.

Rhoticity/rhotic vowels

The r sound (the phoneme /r/) was probably always pronounced with following vowel sounds (more in the style of today's General American, West Country English, Irish accents and Scottish accents, although in the case of the Scottish accent the R is rolled, and less like the pronunciation now usual in most of England.)

Furthermore, at the beginning of the Early Modern English period there were three non-open and non-schwa short vowels before /r/ in the syllable coda: /e/, /i/ and /u/ (roughly equivalent to modern /ɛ/, /ɪ/ and /ʊ/; /ʌ/ had not yet developed). In London English they gradually merged into a phoneme that became modern /ɜːr/. By the time of Shakespeare, the spellings ⟨er⟩, ⟨ear⟩ and perhaps ⟨or⟩ when they had a short vowel, as in clerk, earth, or divert, had an a-like quality, perhaps about [ɐɹ] or [äɹ]. With the spelling ⟨or⟩, the sound may have been backed, more toward [ɒɹ] in words like worth and word.

In some pronunciations, words like fair and fear, with the spellings ⟨air⟩ and ⟨ear⟩, rhymed with each other, and words with the spelling ⟨are⟩, such as prepare and compare, were sometimes pronounced with a more open vowel sound, like the verbs are and scar. See Great Vowel Shift § Later mergers for more information.

Specific words

Nature was pronounced approximately as [ˈnɛːtəɹ] and may have rhymed with letter or, early on, even latter. One may have been pronounced own, with both one and other using the era's long GOAT vowel, rather than today's STRUT vowels. Tongue derived from the sound of tong and rhymed with song.

Grammar

Pronouns

Early Modern English had two second-person personal pronouns: thou, the informal singular pronoun, and ye, the plural (both formal and informal) pronoun and the formal singular pronoun.

"Thou" and "ye" were both common in the early 16th century (they can be seen, for example, in the disputes over Tyndale's translation of the Bible in the 1520s and the 1530s) but by 1650, "thou" seems old-fashioned or literary. It has effectively completely disappeared from Modern Standard English.

The translators of the King James Version of the Bible (begun 1604 and published 1611, while Shakespeare was at the height of his popularity) had a particular reason for keeping the informal "thou/thee/thy/thine/thyself" forms that were slowly beginning to fall out of spoken use, as it enabled them to match the Hebrew and Ancient Greek distinction between second person singular ("thou") and plural ("ye"). It was not to denote reverence (in the King James Version, God addresses individual people and even Satan as "thou") but only to denote the singular. Over the centuries, however, the very fact that "thou" was dropping out of normal use gave it a special aura and so it gradually and ironically came to be used to express reverence in hymns and in prayers.

Like other personal pronouns, thou and ye have different forms dependent on their grammatical case; specifically, the objective form of thou is thee, its possessive forms are thy and thine, and its reflexive or emphatic form is thyself.

The objective form of ye was you, its possessive forms are your and yours and its reflexive or emphatic forms are yourself and yourselves.

The older forms "mine" and "thine" had become "my" and "thy" before words beginning with a consonant other than h, and "mine" and "thine" were retained before words beginning with a vowel or an h, as in mine eyes or thine hand.

Personal pronouns in Early Modern English

		Nominative	Oblique	Genitive	Possessive
1st person	singular	I	me	my/mine	mine
	plural	we	us	our	ours
2nd person	singular informal	thou	thee	thy/thine	thine
	plural informal	ye	you	your	yours
	formal	you
3rd person	singular	he/she/it	him/her/it	his/her/his (it)	his/hers/his
	plural	they	them	their	theirs

Verbs

Tense and number

During the Early Modern period, the verb inflections became simplified as they evolved towards their modern forms:

• The third-person singular present lost its alternate inflections: -eth and -th became obsolete, and -s survived. (Both forms can be seen together in Shakespeare: "With her, that hateth thee and hates us all".)
• The plural present form became uninflected. Present plurals had been marked with -en and singulars with -th or -s (-th and -s survived the longest, especially with the singular use of is, hath and doth). Marked present plurals were rare throughout the Early Modern period and -en was probably used only as a stylistic affectation to indicate rural or old-fashioned speech.
• The second-person singular indicative was marked in both the present and past tenses with -st or -est (for example, in the past tense, walkedst or gav'st). Since the indicative past was not and still is not otherwise marked for person or number, the loss of thou made the past subjunctive indistinguishable from the indicative past for all verbs except to be.

Modal auxiliaries

The modal auxiliaries cemented their distinctive syntactical characteristics during the Early Modern period. Thus, the use of modals without an infinitive became rare (as in "I must to Coventry"; "I'll none of that"). The use of modals' present participles to indicate aspect (as in "Maeyinge suffer no more the loue & deathe of Aurelio" from 1556), and of their preterite forms to indicate tense (as in "he follow'd Horace so very close, that of necessity he must fall with him") also became uncommon.

Some verbs ceased to function as modals during the Early Modern period. The present form of must, mot, became obsolete. Dare also lost the syntactical characteristics of a modal auxiliary and evolved a new past form (dared), distinct from the modal durst.

Perfect and progressive forms

The perfect of the verbs had not yet been standardised to use only the auxiliary verb "to have". Some took as their auxiliary verb "to be", such as this example from the King James Version: "But which of you... will say unto him... when he is come from the field, Go and sit down..." [Luke XVII:7]. The rules for the auxiliaries for different verbs were similar to those that are still observed in German and French (see unaccusative verb).

The modern syntax used for the progressive aspect ("I am walking") became dominant by the end of the Early Modern period, but other forms were also common such as the prefix a- ("I am a-walking") and the infinitive paired with "do" ("I do walk"). Moreover, the to be + -ing verb form could be used to express a passive meaning without any additional markers: "The house is building" could mean "The house is being built".

Vocabulary

A number of words that are still in common use in Modern English have undergone semantic narrowing.

The use of the verb "to suffer" in the sense of "to allow" survived into Early Modern English, as in the phrase "suffer the little children" of the King James Version, but it has mostly been lost in Modern English. This use still exists in the idiom "to suffer fools gladly".

Also, this period includes one of the earliest Russian borrowings to English (which is historically a rare occasion itself); at least as early as 1600, the word "steppe" (rus. степь) first appeared in English in William Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is believed that this is a possible indirect borrowing via either German or French.

The substantial borrowing of Latin and sometimes Greek words for abstract concepts, begun in Middle English, continued unabated, often terms for abstract concepts not available in English.

See also

• Early modern Britain
• English literature
• History of English
• Inkhorn term
• Elizabethan era, Jacobean era, Caroline era
• English Renaissance
• Shakespeare's influence
• Middle English, Modern English, Old English

External links

• English Paleography: Examples for the study of English handwriting from the 16th–18th centuries from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University