The transition from Middle English to Modern English began in the sixteenth century when several factors came together to produce a period of extraordinary vitality and progress in the development of the language. During this period-the Renaissance-a great revival of interest in learning swept over England and much of Europe, leading people to become more aware of the importance of language as they studied the writings of the past. Furthermore, many words from other languages (especially Latin and Greek) were introduced into English as a result of this growing interest in the writings of antiquity. We have already seen that the growing availability of printed books made more and more people aware of the need for clarity and consistency in spelling and usage.
Until the sixteenth century, French continued to be the prestigious literary language, and Latin remained the international language for serious scholarly work well into the seventeenth century. However, the influence of other languages gradually diminished as the English language continued to develop. A sense of literary nationalism swept over England as an increasingly large reading public came to realize that English could assume its place among the major languages of the world.
The work of the poet John Skelton (1460-1529) shows how important the English language had become and how rapidly its vocabulary was expanding in the sixteenth century. Skelton is credited with introducing about 1500 new words into the English language, many of them derived from his study of Latin.
An era of linguistic change in a language with large variations in dialect was replaced by a new era of a more standardised language with a richer lexicon and an established 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 main difference between Chaucer's language and our own is in the pronunciation of the "long" vowels. The consonants remain generally the same, though Chaucer rolled his r's, sometimes dropped his aitches, and pronounced both elements of consonant combinations, such as "kn," that were later simplified. And the short vowels are very similar in Middle and Modern English. But the "long" vowels are regularly and strikingly different. This is due to what is called The Great Vowel Shift.
Beginning in the twelfth century and continuing until the eighteenth century (but with its main effects in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) the sounds of the long stressed vowels in English changed their places of articulation (i.e., how the sounds are made).
Old and Middle English were written in the Latin alphabet and the vowels were represented by the letters assigned to the sounds in Latin. For example, Middle English "long e" in Chaucer's "sheep" had the value of Latin "e" (and sounded like Modern English "shape" [/e/] in the International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA]). It had much the same value as written long e has in most modern European languages. Consequently, one can read Chaucer's long vowels with the same values as in Latin or any continental European language and come pretty close to the Middle English values.
The Great Vowels Shift changed all that; by the end of the sixteenth century the "e" in "sheep" sounded like that in Modern English "sheep" or "meet" [IPA /i/]. To many it seemed that the pronunciation of English had moved so far from its visual representation that a new alphabet was needed, and in the sixteenth century we have the first attempts to "reform" English spellings, a movement still active today. In 1569 John Hart (in his Orthographie) went so far as to devise a new phonetic alphabet to remedy what he considered a fatal flaw in our system of language. (His alphabet and the work of other language reformers provides us with our best evidence for the pronunciation of English in his time).
To understand how English changed one must first note that vowels are articulated in particular parts of the mouth; we make the sound in Modern English "deep" [/dip/] with our tongue forward and high in the mouthr, and the sound in Modern English "boat" [/bot/] with our tongue lowered and drawn toward the back of the mouth and the jaw relatively low (open). Say "ee" (or "beet") and "o" (or "boat") in succession and you may be able to feel the movement of your tongue from front to back.
The Great Vowel shift involved a regular movement of the places of articulation: The front vowels each moved up a notch, except for /i:/, which formed a dipthong. Likewise the back vowels moved up, except for /u:/, which formed another dipthong:
The orthography in Early Modern English was fairly similar to that of today, but spelling was unphonetic and unstable; for example, the word acuity could be spelled either <acuity> or <acuitie>. Further, there were a number of features of spelling that have not been retained:
- The letter <S> had two distinct lowercase forms: <s> as today, and <ſ> (long s). The former was used at the end of a word, and the latter everywhere else, except that double-lowercase-S was variously written <ſſ> or <ſs>. This is similar to the alternation between normal (σ) and final lower case sigma (ς) in Greek.
- <u> and <v> were not yet considered two distinct letters, but different forms of the same letter. Typographically, <v> was used at the start of a word and <u> elsewhere; hence vnmoued (for modern unmoved) and loue (for love).
- <i> and <j> were also not yet considered two distinct letters, but different forms of the same letter, hence "ioy" for "joy" and "iust" for "just".
- The letter <Þ (thorn(letter)) was still in use during the Early Modern English period, though increasingly limited to hand-written texts. In print, <Þ> was often represented by <Y>.
- A silent <e> was often appended to words. The last consonant sometimes was doubled when adding this <e>; hence ſpeake, cowarde, manne (for man), runne (for run).
- The sound /ʌ/ was often written <o> (as in son); hence ſommer, plombe (for modern summer, plumb)
Nothing was standard, however. For example, "Julius Caesar" could be spelled "Julius Cæſar", "Ivlivs Cæſar", "Jvlivs Cæſar", or "Iulius Cæſar" and the word "he" could be found being spelled "he" or "hee" in the same sentence in Shakespeare's plays.
