THE LANGUAGE OF EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE

A MONOGRAPH IN ENGLISH 508

Prepared by:
Ms. Jaenna Y. Omaña
Ms. Karen M. Bacsal
Ms. Marlea Jea Abarratigue
I. Introduction

The English language has drastically changed since the earliest times and this change can directly be reflected on the
different literary texts written during those times by several well-known authors. In this material, the major characteristics of
the language of early English literature will be discussed by giving emphasis on the changes and events in the “History of
the English Language”. This will also include a discussion on the continuities and differences between the linguistic
structures of the three periods (Old English, Middle English Period, Early Modern English Period) , the choices available to
authors, and the effects arising from such choices and the overview of some of the fashionable stylistic devices and trends
during these times. Other significant events in the field of literature which had major contribution to the major characteristics
of early English language will also be mentioned.

II. Objectives

Upon reading this learning material, you will be able to:

1. Determine the major characteristics of the “Language of the Early English Literature" specifically from the Old English to
the Modern English Period.
2. Have knowledge on the History of English Language and the interconnected events in the field of literature.
3. Figure out the some of the fashionable stylistic devices and trends mainly during the Old English Period even up to the
Early Modern English periods.

III. Topic Content:

HISTORY
 Old English to Early Modern English period (until the death of John Milton in 1674 - during this time the English language
changed dramatically in terms of both grammar and vocabulary.
 While it is impossible to establish exactly when a period of the English language starts and finishes, it is customary to take
1150 as the cut-off point between the Old English and the Middle English periods, and 1500 as the dividing line between
the Middle English and the Early Modern English periods
  The dates 1150 and 1500 are, of course, arbitrary, but they point to important changes and events in the history of the
English language.
 Mid-twelfth-century texts look very different from Old English texts: the case and gender system that characterizes Old
English nouns and adjectives is significantly reduced and texts record an increasing number of French loans as a result of
the Norman Conquest.
 The date 1500 reminds us that William Caxton introduced the printing press into England in 1476, a technological
innovation that promoted literacy and facilitated the standardization of the language
 With the Act of Supremacy of 1534, King Henry VIII became the Head of the Church of England, a political and religious
event that had important consequences for the English language
 English became firmly established as a language of prayer and religious activities, a role previously held by Latin, and both
The Book of Common Prayer (1549) and the King James version of the Bible (1611) in fluenced literary and non-literary
uses of the language .
 Simon Horobin’s Studying the History of Early English- a book which deals with the phonological, morphological and
lexical changes undergone by the English language.
 Traditional histories of the English language that are currently available: Hogg et al. (1992–9), Blake (1996), Singh (2005),
Smith (2005), Hogg and Denison (2006), van Gelderen (2006), or Baugh and Cable (2013). Each chapter of this book also
suggests further reading on the specific linguistic features it deals with.
 This volume overlaps more closely with Blake’s (1977), Lester’s (1996), and Ronberg’s (1992) studies on the language
of medieval and Early Modern English literary texts, as well as with the chapters on literary language published in the first
three volumes of The Cambridge History of the English Language
 There are also many studies on the language of individual authors and (groups of) texts. These can be placed in a long
continuum ranging from those that aim to describe the linguistic features per se, without making much reference to the
possible intentions behind the selection of those features , to those where stylistic and cultural concerns take over and
overshadow the analysis of the linguistic features present in the texts .
KEYPOINTS:
 It is important to bear in mind, though, that, when attempting to establish the reasons behind and the effects arising from
the use of particular linguistic structures, we have to contend with a very signi ficant problem: we hardly ever have an
author’s own copy for the texts written during the periods covered by a book. Instead, our access to the text is mediated
through the work of scribes and copyists, and the level of their carefulness and interference can vary tremendously.
 It is, for example, well known that medieval scribes often introduced features of their own dialect when copying texts
written in a different dialect, again, to differing degrees, ranging from the unconscious introduction of a few features to
complete ‘translations’
 Cursor Mundi: it was originally composed in a northern English dialect c.1300, but at some time during the late fourteenth
century someone from the Central Midlands made a version of it in his dialect, introducing signi ficant phonological,
morphological and lexical changes, as well as changing some theological ideas and completely revising the end of the
text. In effect, then, a different text was created (see Horrall et al., 1978–2000).
 Such changes, while invaluable for the study of near-contemporary interpretations of a text (see Windeatt, 1979), can
make studying the effects of particular linguistic features such as the northern dialectal features in Chaucer’s The
Reeve’s Tale very problematic.
 Tolkien (1934) assumed that Chaucer’s original representation of the students’ northern dialect would have been fully
accurate, as that pertaining to a philologist. In his view, later copyists ‘corrupted’ Chaucer’s achievement by
introducing other dialectal alternatives. The current view among Chaucerian scholars, though, is that the Hengwrt
manuscript of The Canterbury Tales (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392), where the representation
 of the students’ northern dialect is not fully consistent, appears to be a very close copy of the actual text produced by
Chaucer.
 However, even Norman Blake, who advocated the primacy of this manuscript for years and based his edition of The
Canterbury Tales on it, tells us that we should not simply accept the readings in this manuscript at face value, as others
could prove to be closer to Chaucer’s original text in particular contexts and, indeed, he includes in his edition the whole
of The Canon Yeoman’s Tale and its Prologue, which are not recorded in the Hengwrt manuscript (see Blake, 1980; and
Robinson, 1999).
 Other manuscripts vary in their level of ‘northernising’ and ‘southernising’ of the students’ dialect (see Horobin,
2000, 2001), and it is therefore hard to be completely certain about the speci fic northern features that Chaucer included
in their speech .
 The easiest (albeit, obviously, not the most accurate) solution is to rely on reputable editions of the texts and assume that
they represent authorial choices as closely as possible
 However, the reader needs to be aware that editions often present hybrid texts, constructed on the basis of what editors
think to be the best readings for particular passages. For example, the Riverside text of The Canterbury Tales, , is based on
the Ellesmere manuscript (San Marino, California, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C 9), as was the edition upon which it
relies (namely, Robinson, 1957), but it incorporates readings from other manuscripts when the editor has deemed it
appropriate to do so (Benson, 1987, pp. 1117–22).
 Even editions that are based on the same texts and are relatively close can differ somewhat signi ficantly. For example,
both Weis’s (2012) new edition of Romeo and Juliet for the Arden Shakespeare and the previous edition (by Brian
Gibbons), included in the latest edition of The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (Proudfoot et al., 2011), are based on
the Second Quarto of the play (1599) and incorporate some readings from the other quartos, mainly the First Quarto
(1597).2 While, as one would expect, they agree in the terms they choose for most of the play, they differ in how they
handle a case of wordplay based on homophony (see Chapter 2).
 The two editions also differ in their use of italics. Gibbons does not tend to mark a term or phrase as foreign, even when
the characters acknowledge that what they are saying is not English: for example, ‘Signor Romeo, bonjour.
 Weis, on the other hand, frequently marks out some structures as examples of code-switching (the alternate use of two or
more languages): for example, ‘Benedicite’ in II.iii.27, the salutation that Friar Laurence uses to address Romeo; or ‘Ah,
the immortal passado, the punto reverso, the hay!’ (II.iv.25–6), where we find different types of thrusts that Mercutio
refers to when disparaging the way Tybalt fights.
 By doing so, Weis makes some assumptions about the lack of integration of these terms into the language of the
characters (and, more widely and significantly, Shakespeare’s contemporary audience). We, as readers, are to interpret
them as foreign technical terms the characters are familiar with as a result of their roles (that is, as clearly belonging to
particular technolects other members of society might not know or, at least, use with any regularity; see Chapter 9)
 Furthermore, we need to remember that during the Early Modern period the English lexicon changed to an
unprecedented degree, which would have contributed towards making what is and is not English even more dif ficult to
define than it is now (see Chapter 3; on the implications of using italics in editions of medieval texts, see Blake, 1979, pp.
57–60).
STYLISTIC DEVICES
 To gain a better understanding of an author’s linguistic choices it is also important to know the stylistic milieu within
which he was working. Accordingly, this section presents a (necessarily very short!) overview of some of the fashionable
stylistic devices and trends from the Old English to the Early Modern English periods.
 When one thinks about Old English poetry, there are a number of stylistic features that immediately come to mind.
 1. Alliteration: whereas much of Middle English poetry had syllabic count and rhyme as its two main
structural devices, based on French and Italian models, Old English poetry relied instead on alliteration, or sound
similarity at the beginning of a word.
2. . An abundance of poetic compounds and the use of poetic vocabulary:
Kennings ( a type of poetic expression) can be seen as compressed riddles, and riddles, as Chapter 2 shows, were
much appreciated by Anglo-Saxon and Anglo- Scandinavian audiences; after all, the term kenning itself has been taken over
from Old Norse literature, where it refers to much more complex structures. English kennings are figurative circumlocutions
(commonly involving metaphor or metonymy) which have the structure of a compound or a phrase: for example, the
Beowulf poet calls swords OE beadoleoma ‘battlegleam’ (l. 1523) and hildeleoma ‘battle-gleam’ (ll. 1143 and 2583),
while religious texts use the second member of the compound to refer to the sun: OE fyrleoma ‘fi re-gleam’ (Christ and
Satan, l. 27) and heofonleoma ‘ heaven- gleam’ (Andreas, l. 838).7
3. Variation: it is very common in Old English poems to find various elements in apposition; thus, the same entity is
referred to by different terms, which focus on one or a number of its traits (see section 7.3.1 for various examples in Beowulf).
Both variation and alliteration tend to give prominence to nouns and adjectives over finite verbs, which makes Old
English poetry, generally speaking, rather slow-moving (see section 5.1).
4. Formulaic structures: Old English poems include a fairly high number of formulas, that is, recurrent phrases that usually make
up a half-line on their own and that admit some variation
 Though the features mentioned above are characteristically poetic, we have plenty of evidence that prose writers,
particularly homilists, also found them very appealing and helpful to make their own message more memorable .
 Thus, most of the compositions of both Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham and Archbishop Wulfstan II of York, the best-known
Anglo-Saxon homilists, are written in rhythmical prose characterised by the presence of alliteration and poetic vocabulary,
to the extent that some scholars have suggested that some of their compositions should be understood as poems.
 The language of these authors might have been very signi ficant for the literary style of the Middle English period, as they
might have provided a model not only for alliterative religious prose (for example, the St Katherine Group and Richard
Rolle’s texts), but also for the somewhat looser alliterative patterns we can find in poems such as La ȝamon’s Brut (see
Bethurum, 1935; Blake, 1969, 1992, pp, 509–13; and Bredehoft, 2005, ch. 4.1).10
 Whatever the actual model behind these texts, even early Middle English alliterative texts, whether written in poetry or
prose, show that stylistic tastes have moved forward.
 Instead of variation we find repetition, which is now used as an important cohesive device (see Shepherd, 1959, p. lxviii;
and Blake, 1992, p. 512). Repetition can work at word level, in the form of anaphora (the same word is repeated at the
beginning of various structures), antistrophe (the same word is repeated at the end of various structures), anadiplosis
(repetition of the final word at the beginning of the next structure), diacope (the same word is repeated with one or a few
words in between) or ploce (similar to diacope, but the word has different meanings), or at root level, a type of repetition
known as polyptoton.
 Clergial style - Includes the co-ordination of (near-)synonyms and use of repetition from the Early and Late Middle
English period. These two features, together with the use of Latinate syntactic structures (for example, absolute
participles; see section 8.3) and the extensive use of clausal modi fiers and anaphoric reference, characterise the so-called
curial or clergial style.
 Despite already being present in English literary texts in the fourteenth century (for example, Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee),
this style, which remained strongly associated with prose texts, became much more common a century later.
 Fifteenth-century authors such as William Caxton and John Lydgate incorporated into their works a very large quantity of
doublets and triplets, as their use has a long tradition, which saw them as a means of elevating diction and making a text
sound more authoritative (see Schlauch, 1967, pp. 1758–60), as well as a relatively new tradition closely associated with
issues of prestige and authority
 Another feature that distinguishes Old English from (particularly Late) Middle English style is the conscious use in the
latter of French and Latin loanwords to elevate the style of a text.
 The stylistic reliance on French and Latin loan-words arose from the sociolinguistic situation of multilingual England. Until
the fourteenth century, French and Latin had been the two languages associated with knowledge and power, both secular
and religious, but from that time onwards English slowly regained some of the functional uses that had made it such an
important vernacular during the Old English period
 Some Late Middle English texts, then, already exhibit some of the features that we encounter in Early Modern English
compositions, such as the significant presence of loans and synonymy, and the increasing complexity of syntactic
structures
 Synonymy, together with highly elaborate noun phrases with plenty of pre- and post-modi fication as well as rhetorical
figures aimed at extending the topic of discourse, is typical of the so-called copious style
 Concerns about the expressiveness and adequacy of English were fundamental to the development of the fi rst pieces of
literary criticism in English during the sixteenth century. George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) and
Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1560) are key texts in understanding not only contemporary stylistic tastes but
also perceptions of the status of the English language and its dialects
 The absence of works of literary criticism written in English during medieval times does not mean that people were not
aware of an increasingly important literary tradition.
 Chaucer, the author of highly mannered and rhetorically elaborate texts, was seen as the father of a new phase in the
history of English literature. William Dunbar, one of Chaucer’s admirers in Scotland, called him ‘rose of rhetoris all [...]
[t]hat raise in Britaine ewir’ (‘the rose of all rhetoricians that ever rose in Britain’
 It is likely to be the case that, when Dunbar calls Chaucer ‘rhetorician’, he does not mean an expert in rhetoric, as we
would understand the term nowadays, but rather ‘writer’ or ‘poet’ more generally, a usage recorded in Chaucer’s
own texts
 Indeed, medieval English authors up to the very late fourteenth century do not seem to have been particularly familiar
with rhetorical treaties per se,13 but there is plenty evidence that they knew about rhetorical figures through grammatical
works such as Priscian’s De grammatica and Donatus’s Ars maior and Ars minor.14
 it is rather difficult to identify the rhetorical figures that go back to a native Germanic tradition and those that were
borrowed from Latin models.

IV. Conclusion:
 The major characteristics of the language of early english literature was embedded in the linguistic features, structures
and even linguistic choices of the some of the most notable literary texts and other writer’s adaptations. Some of the
mentioned texts were the Cursor Mundi, Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale, Hengwrt manuscript of The Canterbury Tales,
Norman Blake’s edition of The Canterbury Tales, Riverside text of The Canterbury Tales, and Weis’s and Brian
Gibbons’s edition of Romeo and Juliet. Alliteration, an abundance of poetic compounds and the use of poetic
vocabulary, variation, and formulaic structures were considered trendy stylistic features in the Old English Poetry. Clergial
style was famous during the Early and Late Middle English period and the conscious use in the latter of French and Latin
loanwords to elevate the style of a text was also another feature that distinguished the Old English from (particularly Late)
 Middle English. The significant presence of loans and synonymy, and the increasing complexity of syntactic structures was
seen in Late Middle English texts as well as in Early Modern English compositions.

V. Evaluation:

 TRUE OR FALSE:
Direction: Read each statement below and identify whether it is TRUE or FALSE.

___________1. It is impossible to establish exactly when a period of the English language starts and finishes.
___________2. After King Henry VIII’s throne as the Head of the Church of England, English became firmly established as a
language of prayer and religious activities.
___________3. It is easy to attempt to establish the reasons behind and the effects arising from the use of particular linguistic
structures even though we hardly ever have an author’s own copy for the texts written during
particular periods.

___________4. Medieval scribes often introduced features of their own dialect when copying texts written in a different dialect.

___________5. A reader needs to be aware that editions often present hybrid texts, constructed on the basis of what editors
think to be the best readings for particular passages. Even editions that are based on the same texts and are
relatively close can differ somewhat significantly

___________6. During the Middle English period the English lexicon changed to an unprecedented degree, which would have
contributed towards making what is and is not English even more difficult to define than it is now.

___________7. To gain a better understanding of an author’s linguistic choices it is also important to know the stylistic milieu
within which he was working.

___________8. Old English poetry relied on antithesis, or sound similarity at the beginning of a word.

___________9. English kennings are figurative circumlocutions (commonly involving metaphor or metonymy) which have the
structure of a compound or a phrase.
___________10. Though stylistic features such as alliteration, an abundance of poetic compounds and the use of poetic
vocabulary, variation, and formulaic structures were considered characteristically poetic, prose writers,
particularly homilists, also found them very appealing and helpful to make their own message more memorable.

 ESSAY

Write a short summary (10-15 sentences would do) about the "Language of the Early English Literature”.

VI. Reference:

A copyrighted material (9780230291423) on “The Language of Early English Literature”