Modern English and Late Modern English

MODERN ENGLISH

This period falls into three stages:

Early Modern English: the 16^th and 17^th centuries

The 18^th century

Late Modern English: the 19^th and 20^h centuries  

1. Early Modern English

The beginnings of the modern period are, at the same time, the beginnings of the Renaissance in England: the 16^th century was the period of magnificent flourishing of science, art and literature.

In the 16^th century, the English language faced a number of problems, the most important of which was the struggle with Latin in science and literature, i.e. the struggle for recognition in the fields where Latin had, for centuries, been supreme.

Although towards the end of the Middle English period the English language had attained an established position as the language of literature, there was still a strong tradition according to which Latin was used in all fields of knowledge. This idea was strengthened by the revival of Greek and Latin learning. According to this tradition, it was considered that English was not fit to express serious thought and it was used only for light literature.

Here are a few examples of writers or scientists who thought that their writings would last only if they were written in Latin: Th. More wrote his Utopia in Latin in 1516, and the book was translated into English only 35 years later, long after his death. Fr. Bacon published his philosophical work De Augmentis in Latin. This work was an expanded version of The Advancement of Learning.

However, as we approach the end of the 16^th century we see that English had slowly won recognition as a language of serious thought. A number of factors contributed to this victory:

- the rising bourgeoisie defended the national language;

- the Reformation¹ contributed to the victory of English;

- the struggle between English and Latin had a commercial aspect, as well: the market for English books was much larger than the market for Latin books.

In the 16^th century there is a considerable body of literature defending the English language against those who compared it unfavourably to Latin or other modern tongues, patriotically recognizing its position as the national speech, considering that it was fit for literary use.

The proof that English was fit for literary use came from a large number of remarkable literary works, written in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. The works written by W. Wyatt, Surrey, E. Spenser, Ch. Marlowe, B. Jonson, W. Shakespeare – in the 16^th century; by J. Milton, J. Dryden, W. Congreve in the 17^th century show, indeed, that English has won recognition as a language of serious thought.

1.1. Spelling in Early Modern English

In the 16^th century, spelling was extremely complicated. It was no longer phonetic and it was not yet fixed. In Middle English the Norman scribes had introduced a great deal of confusion which was increased because certain spellings became conventional, while pronunciation went on changing. In a number of cases the discrepancy between sounds and their graphic representation became even more striking when certain etymologists inserted letters in words where they were not pronounced.

Thus, the Mi E dett, borrowed from F. dette was respelt in EME as debt, i.e. the consonant b was introduced, so that the word could be traced back to Latin debitum.

The Mi E dout, borrowed from F. doute(r) was respelt in EME as doubt, i.e. the consonant b was introduced, so that the word could be traced back to Latin dubitare.

Many of the new spellings were wrong even from the etymological point of view. Thus, many words were respelt on account of analogy. The Mi E sent (derived from L. sentire or F. sentir) was respelt in EME as scent, i.e. the consonant c was introduced on account of the analogy with words that were pronounced in the same manner (e.g. science). Therefore, the introduction of the consonant c was not correct from the etymological point of view.

In the first half of the 16^th century spelling was so unstable that it varied from one writer to another and, sometimes, one and the same writer spelt certain words in several ways. Thus, Matthew Green wrote: felow, felowe, fellow, fellowe. (cited from Iarovici, 1973: 151)

Therefore, the important problem in the 16^th century was to bring about greater agreement in the writing of English: numerous attempts were made to draw up rules and to simplify the very complicated spelling. As a result of these attempts:

- certain unnecessary letters were eliminated, such as final –e: e.g. faerie queene (Mod.E. fairy queen)

- or, it became the custom to use i initially and medially and –y finally. That accounts for the spellings: beauty – beautiful; dry – drier.

By 1650 English spelling, in its modern form, had been practically established. But pronunciation went on changing. The numerous and important phonetic modifications that occurred later are not reflected in spelling (which had become fixed by that time).

Therefore, the main causes of the discrepancy between spellings and pronunciation are: a) the arbitrary modifications brought about by certain etymologists and scribes; b) the fact that spelling had become fixed by 1650 but pronunciation went on changing.

1.2. Pronunciation in Early Modern English

The most striking changes undergone by the sounds of the English language were the following:

a) The complete alteration of most vowel sounds in stressed syllables. All long stressed vowels came to be pronounced with a greater raising of the tongue and closing of the mouth, e.g. e > i; o > u; those vowels in which the tongue could not be raised without becoming consonantal, i.e. i, u – became diphthongs: i > [ai], u > [au]. The major change in the history of English that resulted in new phonemic representations of words and morphemes took place approximately between 1500 and 1600. It is known as The Great Vowel Shift. Thus, the five long or tense vowels of Middle English underwent the following change:

Shift Example

Middle Modern Middle Modern

English English English English

[i:] → [ai] [mi:s] → [mais] mice

[u:] → [au] [mu:s] → [maus] mouse

[e:] → [i:] [ge:s] → [gi:s] geese

[o:] → [u:] [go:s] → [gu:s] goose

[ɑ:] → [e:] [nɑ:mǝ] → [ne:m] name

These changes are among the most dramatic examples of regular sound shift. The phonemic representation of many thousands of words changed. Today, some reflection of this vowel shift is seen in the alternating forms of the morphemes in English: please – pleasant, serene – serenity, sane – sanity, crime – criminal, sign – signal, and so on. Once, the vowels in each pair were the same. Then the vowels in the second word of each pair were shortened by a rule called the Early Middle English Vowel Shortening rule. As a result The Great Vowel Shift, which occurred later, affected only the first word in each pair. The second word, with its short vowel, was unaffected. This is why the vowels in the morphologically related words are pronounced differently today, as shown in the table below (Fromkin & Rodman, 1998: 456):

Effect of the Vowel Shift on Modern English

ai i divine divinity

au u profound profundity

i ε serene serenity

u o fool folly

a e æ sane sanity

The Great Vowel Shift is a primary source of many of the spelling inconsistencies of English because the spelling system still reflects the way words were pronounced before the Great Vowel Shift took place.

The vowels of unstressed syllables had a tendency to weaken and often to disappear in pronunciation:

different [`difrnt], medal [`medl], etc.

b) Among the changes that appeared in consonant sounds the most important are the partial or total silencing of certain consonants:

i. the gradual silencing of [r]; it had been rolled in Middle English (as it still is at present in Scotland); in EME it acquired a dull sound at the beginning of words and in the middle of words between two vowel sounds (e.g. rat, Mary); in the middle and at the end of words it has been completely silenced (e.g. arm, far).

ii. The weakening of consonant groups:

- [w] was silenced in the group wr; wrong, write, wring;

- [h] was silenced in the group wh: where, which, whip;

- [k] was silenced in the group kn: know, knife, knot;

- [l] was silenced in the group lk, lm, lf: walk, calm, half.

- Very often when a word ended in a combination of two consonants (mb, mn) the second one was dropped: climb, comb, autumn, column;

- When a word contained a combination of three consonants the one in the middle was sometimes droppe 525d36f d: bustle, castle, handsome, grandmother, handkerchief, etc.

Such phonetic changes widened even further the discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation.

1.3. Grammar in Early Modern English

After the essential grammatical changes that had occurred in Middle English, the evolution of Modern English grammar seemed rather uneventful. Grammar underwent few changes in Early Modern English. A very important characteristic of Early Modern English grammar was lack of stability; certain old forms survived while certain new ones came into use.

There were very few inflections left.

The Noun

The only inflections retained in the noun were those marking the category of number (the plural) and case (the possessive singular).

a) Number. The plural in –s has become the only regular form. Certain nouns, probably due to their frequent use maintained their old plurals. Some in –(e)n maintained their old weak (neuter) plural, e.g. ox – oxen, child – children; also, those based on internal vowel change, e.g. foot – feet, tooth – teeth, man – men, etc; the invariable nouns (with unchanged plurals) from the OE neuter ones: sheep, deer, swine.

Nouns which had been borrowed from other languages in Old English and Middle English had generally taken the inflections characteristic of English words. But loan - words belonging to the modern period often retain their original (foreign) plural: axes, phenomena, stimuli, etc. Nevertheless, in contemporary English there is a tendency to regularize some foreign plurals (e.g. symposia or symposiums) or to maintain the foreign plurals only as scientific terms (e.g. formulas used in everyday language while formulae is restricted to scientific usage).

b) Case. The system of declension which had gradually narrowed to two case forms by the 15^th century (Objective and Possessive), maintained itself in Early Modern English and it has survived down to our days. Nevertheless, an important change occurred little by little, namely the narrowing of the sphere of the inflected Genitive (in –es) to nouns denoting living beings. Towards the end of the 17^th century the Genitive singular ending in –es began to be replaced by ‘s and about a century later, the apostrophe came to be used for the Genitive plural.

The Adjective

By the end of the Middle English period, the adjective had already lost all its endings, so that it no longer expressed distinctions of gender, number and case.

The chief interest of this part of speech in the modern period is in the forms of the comparative and superlative degrees. The two methods commonly used to form the comparative and superlative (the synthetic and analytical comparison), with the endings –er and –est and with the adverbs more and most, had been customary since Old English times. But there was much variation in their use: in the sixteenth century these were not always precisely those now in use. Comparisons found in Shakespeare’s works like certainer, honester, famousest, honourablest, are now replaced by the analytical forms. On the other hand, monosyllabic adjectives often formed their comparative and superlative analytically, e.g. Ingratitude more strong than traitor’s arms.

Double comparatives or double superlatives were quite frequent in Early Modern English.

e.g. I’m more better than Prospero. (The Tempest)

Let not my worser spirit tempt you again. (K. Lear)

…in the calmest and most stillest night. (Henry IV)

The chief development affecting the adjective in modern times has been the gradual settling down of usage so that monosyllables take –er and –est while most adjectives of two or more syllables take more and most.

The Pronoun

The pronoun underwent certain rather important changes.

The personal pronoun

The sixteenth century saw the establishment of the personal pronoun in the form which it has had ever since.

In attaining this result three changes were involved: a) the disuse of thou, thy, thee; b) the substitution of you for ye as a nominative case; c) the introduction of its as the possessive of it.

a) The forms of the personal pronoun: ye, you, your(s) had begun to be used as a mark of respect in addressing a superior, maybe under the influence of French usage in court circles. The old forms thou, (Nom.), thee (Obj.), thy (poss. Adj.), thine (Poss. Pron.) were used as expressions of intimacy or for addressing social inferiors. Little by little, the forms ye, you, your(s) became the usual pronouns of direct address irrespective of rank or intimacy. It was only in the 16^8h century that the forms thou (Nom.), thee (Obj.), thy (Poss. Adj.), thine (Poss. Pron.) disappeared completely, they fell into disuse, except in certain dialects and in poetry.

b) At first, there had existed a clear distinction between ye (used only as Subject in the sentence = Nominative) and you (used as Object = Dative or Accusative). In the 16^th century the two forms began to be used rather indiscriminately, until ye eventually disappeared and you became generalized as the Nominative and Accusative form. Thus, we find in the literary works of the time examples of fluctuation between ye and you.

e.g. Therein, ye Gods, you make the weak most strong. (Shakespeare, J. Caesar)

Stand sirs, and throw us that you have about ye (Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen

of Verona

c) An interesting development in the pronoun at this time was the formation of a new possessive neuter, its. The personal pronouns of the third person singular, he, she, it, had a distinctive form for each gender in the nominative and objective cases. A need seems to have been felt for a distinctive form in the possessive case as well: his, her, its.

The personal pronoun they began to be used indefinitely (i.e. as the subject of an indefinite impersonal sentence) instead of the Old English and Middle English man, mon.

e.g. They say if ravens sit on hen’s eggs, the chickens will be black.

The reflexive pronoun

The reflexive pronouns appeared in the 16^th century and they began to replace the personal pronouns in those constructions in which the pronouns were co-referential. But in Early Modern English the reflexive pronouns were not consistently used; therefore, we still find personal pronouns in cases in which we would use reflexive pronouns in Contemporary English: e.g. How she opposes her against my will. (Shakespeare)

The relative pronoun

Another important development was the use of who as a relative pronoun. Refinements in the use of subordinate clauses are a mark of maturity in style. As the loose association of clauses (parataxis) gives way to more precise indications of logical relationship and subordination (hypotaxis), there is need for a greater variety of words effecting the union (Baugh: 244). Old English had no relative pronoun proper. It made use of the definite article sē (M), sēo (F), Tæt (N), which, however it was felt in Old English times, strikes us as having more demonstrative force than relative.

Early in the Middle English period Tæt (that) became the almost universal relative pronoun, used for all genders. In the fifteenth century which begins to alternate fairly frequently with that. At first it referred mostly to neuter antecedents, although occasionally it was used for persons, a use that survives in the Lord’s Prayer Our father, which art in heaven. But the tendency to employ that as a universal relative has never been lost in the language.

It was not until the sixteenth century that the pronoun who as a relative came into use. The earlier use of who as an interrogative in indirect questions appears to have been the important source of the new construction: the sequence Whom do you want? (direct question) , They asked whom you wanted (indirect question), I know the man whom you wanted (relative) is not a difficult one to assume. In any case, our present-day widespread use of who as a relative pronoun is primarily a contribution of the sixteenth century to the language (Baugh: 244).

Omission of the relative pronoun: In Early Modern English the relative pronoun was frequently omitted, even when it had the syntactic function of subject.

e.g. I have a brother is condemned to die. (Shakespeare, Measure for Measure)

There’s somebody wants to see you.

The indefinite pronoun

There were some old forms of indefinite pronouns that were used in Early Modern English. Aught (something, anything), which survives today only in phrases such as ‘for aught I know’, was frequently used during the Renaissance:

e.g. If thou remember’st aught ere thou comest here. (The Tempest)

Nought or Naught (nothing) was still in current use up to the middle of the 17^th century.

The compound indefinite pronouns somebody, anybody, nobody, something, anything, nothing appeared in Early Modern English.

The Verb

Some important changes occurred in the conjugation of the verb.

The inflection for the 3^rd person singular Present Indicative had been e)th in the South and South East of England all through the Middle English period. In the 15^th century, in the North, forms ending in –s had appeared from time to time and their number increased in the 16^th century, especially in colloquial use. During the first half of the 17^th century e)th continued to be used quite often in writing, but –s became universal in the spoken language. For a time, the two endings (in –eth and –s) were indiscriminately used, sometimes in one and the same text. It has been observed that in the prose parts of Shakespeare’s plays, -s prevails and –th generally seems to belong to solemn speeches rather than to everyday talk.

e.g. Lady Macbeth: He has almost supp’d: why have you left the chamber?

Macbeth: Hath he asked for me?

Lady Macbeth: Know you not he has?

Similar fluctuations can be seen in the form of the second person singular, Present Indicative ending in –st (or art for be). Such forms normally occurred with the pronoun thou:

e.g. If thou remember’st aught ere thou comest here. (Shakespeare – The Tempest)

The form in –st was gradually replaced by the form of the second person plural (without any ending) used with the pronoun you. Instances of both forms are sometimes found in one and the same text:

Thou art the truest friend in the world…You wrong her. (Congreve)

Such fluctuations illustrate the gradual disappearance of the category of number in the second person of the verb in Modern English.

In Early Modern English the tenses of the verb were generally the same as they are today.

However, intransitive verbs of motion usually formed the Present Perfect with the auxiliary be instead of have:

The deep of night is crept upon our talk. (Shakespeare - J. Caesar)

Whither are they vanished? (Shakespeare – Macbeth)

The present distinctions between the Past Tense and the Present Perfect were not yet very clear in Early Modern English, as one can see in:

You spoke not with her since. (Shakespeare –King Lear)

I have drunk poison while he utter’d it. (Shakespeare)

As far as the Future was concerned, we notice that the weakened lexical meaning of shall and will was more obvious than it had been in Middle English.

e.g. He that questioneth much, shall learn much. (F. Bacon)

The grammars written in the 16^th century do not mention any differences of use between shall and will for expressing future time.

The Continuous Aspect developed very slowly in Modern English. Its forms were more frequent in Shakespeare’s works than they had been in Chaucer’s but they were still very rare. Thus, addressing Hamlet, Polonius asks, ‘What do you read my lord?’ (and not ‘What are you reading?’). The extension of the progressive forms to the passive (The house is being built) was an even later development. It is only since the 19^th century that the Continuous Aspect has come into wide use.

The use of do as a dummy auxiliary in Interrogative and Negative sentences.

Towards the close of the 15^th century the verb to do had begun to be used as a dummy auxiliary in Interrogative and Negative sentences. This tendency grew stronger in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. It was probably due to the fact that to do was to be found quite often in affirmative sentences with an emphasizing function:

If you do meet Horatio and…bid them make haste (Shakespeare – Hamlet)

Although in Early Modern English we still find constructions of Interrogative and Negative sentences formed without the auxiliary do, from time to time we come across the new forms with do.

e.g. Goes the king hence today? (Shakespeare – Macbeth)

They perceive not how time moves. (Shakespeare - As You Like It)

What do you read my lord (Shakespeare – Hamlet)

Oh, my lord, dost thou lie so low? (Shakespeare – J. Caesar)

The number of verb – adverbial particle combinations began to grow in Early Modern English. The few verb – adverb combinations that had existed in Middle English had expressed a concrete, spatial meaning. In other words, they had preserved both the meaning of the verb and that of the adverb. The meaning of the phrasal verb is the fairly literal sense of the verb and the adverbial particle in combination, the particle merely implying a certain intensification of the idea conveyed by the verb, e.g. to climb up, to fall down. But in Early Modern English these combinations grew more and more numerous and their meaning became less and less self-evident.

e.g. Nor am I yet persuaded to put up in peace what already I have foolishly suffered.

(Shakespeare - Othello)

Thus the group put up was passing from the notion of space to the present-day meaning of ‘tolerate’. They suggest comparison with verbs having separable prefixes in German, and to a smaller extent with English verbs like withstand, overcome. The latter were much more common in Old English than they are today, their gradual disuse being one of the consequences of the Norman Conquest.

Syntax

In the sphere of syntax, we find certain important changes, some of which are connected with the evolution of the morphological structure of the language. Thus, the complete disappearance of agreement is due to the fact that the adjective has become an invariable part of speech, as well as to the loss of nearly all the personal inflexions of the verb.

In Early Modern English we still find instances of two or even more than two negations in one and the same sentence:

e.g. Yet, ‘t was not a crown neither. (Shakespeare – J. Caesar)

In the 16^th century impersonal sentences were still frequent, but they began to be superseded by personal sentences. Thus, we find sentences such as ‘It likes me well’. (Shakespeare – The Taming…), alongside of ‘I do not like this tune.’ (Shakespeare – The Two Gentlemen of Verona)

A phenomenon which belongs both to morphology and syntax, as well as to lexicology, and which became very frequent in Early Modern English is conversion or functional shift.

Conversion (or zero-morpheme derivation) is the process whereby one word is created from another without any change of form (Bolton, 1993: 257). Conversion became quite frequent in Early Modern English owing to the loss of most endings and inflections. Thus, the OE verb andswarian and the OE noun andswaru became in MiE answeren (v.) and answere (n.); In EME they merged into one and the same form answer (verb and noun). Also:

OE MiE EME

Verb lufian loven love

Noun   lufu love love

On the analogy of such examples there appeared in Early Modern English numerous shifts from verb to noun and from noun to verb.

The fact that the adjective had lost all its case, number and gender inflexions accounts for its being turned more and more often into a noun. This happened not only with words of Old English origin, but also with those borrowed from other languages (especially French and Latin), e.g. effective from French; abstract, from Latin.

Shakespeare resorted to conversion very frequently, for example, he often turned nouns into verbs: cudgelling one's brains; beggaring all description, etc.

The further loss of inflectional endings had as an important consequence a greater dependence on fixed word order. The main sentence pattern consists of Subject – Verb – Object. This has come to be regarded as the ‘natural’ word order in declarative sentences.

Stuart Robertson rightly points out that “through the function of inflection, the word was generally autonomous in Old English, while in Modern English grammatical autonomy has shifted to the word-group. We are more dependent upon context than King Alfred was; for us the order of words indicates more – indeed, sometimes everything – about their grammatical function, whereas in Old English that was implicit in the form of the word. Thus, as the language has changed from inflectional or synthetic structure to analytic structure, individual words have gained simplicity of form or flexibility of function; but within the sentence they have lost freedom of movement, and have become more dependent upon one another (1958: 145)

1.4. The Enrichment of the Vocabulary in Early Modern English

The Renaissance was a period of increased activity in all fields. The flourishing of classical studies, the extensive study of Latin and Greek authors, the ample use of Latin as the international language of science, introduced into English a large number of Latin and Greek borrowings.

The closer contact with Italian arts and literature, the connection with the New World – all these factors opened up new horizons, also bringing along large-scale borrowings from Italian, Spanish, Portuguese.

Many of the new words were absolutely necessary, for the vernacular was not adequate to meet the ever growing demand of the economic, political, scientific and cultural life of the time. New words were particularly needed in various technical fields in which English was poor. By far the greater part of the additions to the English vocabulary in the period of the Renaissance was drawn from sources outside of English.

Latin and Greek borrowings

It was particularly during the time of the Renaissance or the age of new learning that the influence of Latin and Greek reached unprecedented heights. Much more than French, Latin left its imprint not only on the vocabulary, but also on English grammar. Latin syntax is reflected in complex structures (absolute constructions) with participles, infinitives and gerunds as components. Certain writers of that time tried in an exaggerated manner, to imitate Latin patterns, e.g. Sydney in his Arcadia:

But then, Demagoras assuring himself, that now Parthenia was her own, she would never be his, and receiving as much by her own determinate answere, not more desiring his own happiness, […] the wicked Demagoras desiring to speak with her, with unmerciful force, rubbed all over her face a most horrible poison: the effect whereof was such that never leper looked more ugly than she did: which done, having his men and horses ready, departed away in spite of her servants.

Sydney used as many as four participial constructions in –ing before the main verb (‘rubbed’). The final part of the sentence begins with a Latinized passive absolute construction (‘which done’) with the personal pronoun ‘he’ omitted before ‘departed’ in the truly Latin fashion. (D. Giering, 1979: 14).

The major part of Latin and Greek terms were and have remained learned words, but many of them are quite indispensable today. They have generally entered the language through the medium of writing. Here are some examples of Latin and Greek loan words (the latter having come in through Latin): allusion, animal, apology, apparatus, appropriate, atmosphere, autograph, axis, climax, conspicuous, crisis, drama, emphasis, exert, expensive, genius, insane, junior, omen, parenthesis, pathetic, pauper, pneumonia, scheme, skeleton, system, tactics, etc.

Words like anonymous, catastrophe, polemic, tantalize, thermometer, tonic, etc. were taken straight from Greek.

On penetrating into the English language some words maintained their original form, e.g. climax, appendix, axis, delirium.

Other words underwent changes:

a) Some words cut off their ending, e.g. to consult (< L. consultare), to permit (<L. permittere), exotic (< L. exoticus)

b) a great number of words changed their endings:

- the Latin ending –us in adjectives became –ous:

conspicuus > conspicuous

- the Latin ending –tas in adjectives became –ty:

brevitas > brevity

Sometimes the same word was borrowed more than once in the course of time:

a) Some words had been borrowed in Old English and again later in Early Modern English: e.g. Latin discus appeared in OE as disc > dish and was again borrowed later in EME as discus (in sports ‘discus throwing’ and disc ‘record’).

b) A large number of Latin words penetrated into the English language in Middle English (in a Norman French form) and they were reintroduced in Early Modern English (in a Latin form) sometimes with a different meaning. Two or more words that have come from the same source but that followed different routes of transmission are called doublets. Here are a few examples of such doublets:

As may be seen from these examples, the difference in meaning is sometimes a rather slight, insignificant one, the more recent borrowing merely having a more learned or more abstract character, e.g. in pairs like ray and radius, poor and pauper. But the difference in meaning is quite often a very important one, e.g. corps and corpse, mayor and major.

There were also cases of Greek doublets such as the following:

The abundance of French words borrowed during the Middle English period made the adoption of Latin words in Early Modern English easier and it is often very difficult to know whether a word introduced during the Renaissance was borrowed straight from Latin or through French. Verbs like consist or explore could have come either from the Latin consistere and explorare or from the French consister and explorer.

A certain number of Latin abbreviations penetrated into the English language: a.m. (L. ante meridiem = ‘before noon’); e.g. (L. exempli gratia = ‘for example’); i.e. (L. id est = ‘that is to say’); p.m. (L. post meridiem = ‘after noon’); viz. (L. videlicet = ‘namely’); etc. (L. et cetera = ‘and so on’).

Latin technical terms and phrases were also adopted, and some of them later passed into a wider circulation. Others have remained part of the special terminology of law, trade, medicine, etc. Here are some such words and phrases: ad hoc, alter ego, corpus delicti, in memoriam, non compos mentis, per annum, per diem, sine die, sine qua non, etc.

Other borrowings

During the Renaissance foreign borrowings were not limited to words taken from Latin and Greek. The major part of the loan - words adopted during the Renaissance were – besides Latin and Greek – French, Italian and Spanish.

In Early Modern English many of the French words were borrowed after 1600, especially after the Restoration². The Restoration brought back the feudal aristocratic culture alongside a new wave of French influence.

The French borrowings belonging to the Early Modern English period are different from those adopted during the Middle English period.

a) Most of them are restricted to particular categories of words, i.e. they reflect the preoccupations of the aristocracy and of the educated people, or else they are technical terms.

b) Unlike the French words borrowed during the Middle English period which were completely assimilated, the new loans were not fully assimilated and are still felt as aliens:

- They often have the stress on the last syllable, as in French (whereas the older borrowings had the stress on the first syllable): e.g. ambuscade [æmbəs`keid], bizarre [bi`zɑ:], genteel [dʒen`ti:l]

- They have frequently preserved the French pronunciation of their vowels and consonants: e.g. naïve [nɑ i:v], machine [mə`∫i:n], champagne [∫æm`pein], bourgeois [`buəʒwɑ:], prestige [pres`ti:ʒ] (pronunciation of the groups ch , ge); ballet (final t is not pronounced) [`bælei], debris (final s is not pronounced) [`deibri:],

-They keep the diacritic marks, e.g. café, cliché, fiancé.

A number of Italian words were adopted, mostly terms related to arts and literature: canto, cupola, fresco, sonnet, stanza, violin, etc.

The total number of words added to the English language during the Renaissance amounts to about 10,000. Many of them died out sooner or later, but about half of them became a permanent part of the English language. Although not all borrowings were absolutely necessary, they have contributed to the wealth of synonyms that we find in English. This wealth of synonyms enriches the language and helps writers to avoid repetition on the one hand, and to emphasize certain ideas, on the other. Thus, in Richard III Shakespeare speaks of “blind forgetfulness and dark oblivion”.

In conclusion, the Old English element (the Germanic words) forms the foundation and framework of the English language. The Latin and Greek element has improved and enriched the scientific terminology of the language, its power of expressing abstract thoughts, as well as its synonymy.

NOTES:

¹ The Reformation was a religious movement for reform of the Roman Catholic Church, resulting in the establishment of Reformed or Protestant Churches (The movement was begun by M. Luther in Germany, J. Calvin in France).

² The Restoration = the period of the reestablishment of the monarchy in England after 1660 when Charles II became king.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:

1. How do Early and Present-day English differ in the form and use of pronouns?

2. Cite a few adjectives that still fluctuate between inflectional and analytical comparison in current English, as they did in Early Modern English.

2. The 18^th century

From the linguistic point of view, the 18^th century was characterized by attempts made to standardize, improve (refine) and fix the English language. Such intellectual tendencies are seen quite clearly in the following directions.

a) The English made attempts to establish an English Academy (to follow the example of the French Academy) in the effort to set up a standard of correctness.

b) English lexicography made a substantial contribution towards standardizing the language. The earliest dictionaries were etymological dictionaries. It was Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that was the landmark in the development of English lexicography. In this dictionary, lexicographical technique approaches contemporary standards.

c) In the first treatises on English grammar the early grammarians had the following aims:

- To stabilize English by setting up certain rules which should govern the language. They did not recognize the importance of usage as the basis of correctness.

- To point out errors in order to correct and improve the language.

- They based their methods of approach on reason, etymology and the example of Latin.

The achievements of the 18^th century grammarians were enormous because they attempted to give order to a body of linguistic material which had not been systematized or arranged until then. They settled a large number of disputed points. On the other hand, their greatest weakness, drawback was their failure to recognize the importance of usage in language. In other words, they did not realize that changes in language could not be checked by linguistic decrees.

Many of the rules that are now accepted were first set down in the grammars of the eighteenth century, e.g.:

- The interdiction of the double negation. Robert Lowth¹ stated the rule that we are now bound by: “Two negatives in English destroy one another, or are equivalent to an affirmative.”

-The interdiction of the double comparative or the double superlative

- The use of the comparative rather than the superlative where only two things are involved (the larger, not the largest, of two)

- Non-gradable² adjectives, such as perfect, round, chief, should not be compared (more perfect, etc)

- The differentiation of between and among, etc.

- The proper case after than and as was a question that troubled the eighteenth century grammarians greatly (He is taller than I, or me). But Robert Lowth expressed the view that has since been accepted, that the pronoun is determined by the construction to be supplied or understood (He is older than she; He likes you better than me).

- It was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that the prescriptions governing the use of shall and will were explicitly defined: simple futurity is expressed by shall in the first person, by will in the second and third.

In the 18^th century the stream of English may be said to have become fixed in its permanent course. Writers beginning with Defoe, Swift, Steele, Addison, and Pope, continued by Johnson, Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith and Hume set down standards of clarity and ease of comprehension still respected today.

NOTES:

¹ Robert Lowth, Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), quoted in A. Baugh: p. 278)

² Ungradable: in grammar, the term is used to refer to various items which do not show the ability to take comparison. See R. Quirk: 234

3. Late Modern English

The 19^th century and after (the first half of the 20^th century)

The events of the nineteenth century and twentieth centuries affecting the English-speaking countries have been of great political and social importance, but in their effect on the language they have not been of a revolutionary character. The success of the British on the sea in the course of the Napoleonic Wars, culminating in Nelson’s famous victory at Trafalgar in 1805, left England in a position of undisputed naval supremacy and gave her control over most of the world’s commerce.

The great reform measures – the reorganization of parliament, the revision of the penal code and the poor laws, the restrictions placed on child labour, and the other industrial reforms – were important factors in establishing English society on a more democratic basis.

The establishment of the first cheap newspaper (1816) and the improved means of travel and communication brought about by the railway, the steamboat and the telegraph had the effect of uniting more closely the different parts of England and of spreading the influence of the standard speech.

3.1. Spelling

Present-day spelling is very complicated. The causes of this situation may be summed up in the following way, now that the stages of the development of the English language have been studied in turn:

1. Present-day spelling generally represents the pronunciation of Late Middle English; therefore, it does not reflect the important sound changes that occurred in Early Modern English and even later.

2. Besides certain Old English spelling conventions which have been preserved, others have been adopted, especially French and to a certain extent, Latin and even Greek ones. That is why there are different spellings for one and the same sound and, on the other hand, one spelling for different sounds.

3.2. Grammatical tendencies

The several factors already discussed as giving stability to English grammar – the printing press, popular education, improvements in travel and communication, - have been particularly effective in the century just passed.

Very few changes in the grammatical forms are to be observed:

a) In colloquial speech there is a certain tendency towards an even further loss of inflections:

– The use of who instead of whom in the function of Object in the interrogative:

e.g. Who do you want to see? (in colloquial speech instead of: Whom do you want to see?

- This tendency is also seen in the fact that the Genitive (the Analytical genitive, in particular) is often replaced by the Implicit Genitive (the meaning of the Genitive is expressed just by word-order).

e.g. Cuts in Government expenditure; The United

Nations Organization; The 20^th century

literature; A ten per cent wage increase, etc.

In informal colloquial speech, the tendency to use me, him, her, us, them in emphatic position instead of I, he, she, we, they is even stronger than it was before. One frequently hears sentences like ‘Who’s there? It’s me. / It’s only us.’’ That’s him all right.’ According to S. Robertson, the phenomenon is due to the fact that “the sense of case has become so weakened in Modern English and the force of word order so dominant, that the latter overrides the former. […] The objectives of the personal pronouns have been gaining at the expense of the nominatives, which tend more and more to be used only when they are immediately followed by a predicate.” (1979: 295)

b) Among the major changes in the grammar of English are those concerning the comparison of adjectives. Referring to these, Ch. Barber writes “The tendency has been for more / most to encroach on –er/ -est, and it is now normal to say It’s more common than I thought, and He is the most clever of the three. Among the younger generation, it is even becoming normal to use more/ most with monosyllables, and you hear things like He was more rude than I expected. The trend from –er/ -est, to more/ most is in line with the broad development of English over the last thousand years: it is a change from the synthetic to the analytic, from the use of inflections to the use of grammatical words and word - order.” (: 283 - 4)

c) As far as the verb is concerned, the following tendencies can be mentioned:

i. The process of regularizing strong verbs, which has been going on for centuries, continues to replace ‘irregular’ forms by more ‘regular’ ones. The tendency of strong verbs to develop weak forms is to be seen in such recent formations as thrived (instead of throve, thriven); beseech has two forms in use now: the irregular form besought and the regular one: beseeched (Macmillan: 116).

Newly formed verbs (converted from nouns) have continued to join the weak conjugation.

e.g. to welcome: They welcomed us with open arms.

The announcement will be widely welcomed.

The forms broadcast and broadcasted are to be found side by side in Macmillan dictionary (2002: 170); also forecast and forecasted (op. cit.: 552)

ii. The Subjunctive Mood is not so extensively used as it was in Old English. The Present Subjunctive has been growing more and more obsolete, surviving only in poetry, high prose and official documents:

It was decided that the meeting be reconvened.

In many cases the Present Subjunctive is replaced by the Present Indicative or by a Subjunctive equivalent (auxiliaries such as should, may, might, would).

It was decided that the meeting should be reconvened.

There is an increasing tendency to replace the Subjunctive form were by the form was in the first and third person singular, on the analogy of all other verbs in which The Past Subjunctive is homonymous with the Past Indicative:

e.g. If I was not ill I should go to the concert. (instead of: If I were not ill…)

I wish I was instead of I wish I were …)

What was left of the Subjunctive Mood in occasional use has disappeared except in conditions contrary to fact: If I were you…

iii. There is a well-marked tendency to generalize the use of will (in the Future Indicative) and that of would (in the Present Conditional or Future in the Past) in the first person singular and plural, a tendency which is perhaps partly due to American influence.

e.g. I will / shall stay.

If I wanted your help I would / should come to you at once.

iv. A wide extension of the use of progressive forms is one of the most important developments of the English verb in the modern period. The chief factor in their growth is the use of the –ing form as a noun governed by the preposition on, e.g. He burst out on laughing - This weakened to

He burst out a-laughing - and finally to He burst out laughing.

In the same way, He was on laughing became He was a-laughing and finally: He was laughing.

Today such forms are used in all tenses (is laughing, will be laughing).

The extension of such forms to the passive (the house is being built) was an even later development. It belongs to the very end of the 18^th century. At first, the phrase ‘the house is being built’ for ‘the house is building’ was condemned, being considered “an awkward neologism” (cf. A. Baugh & T. Cable, 1978: 293),

v. A very important tendency in Late Modern English is the extension of Verb - adverb combinations.

An important characteristic of the modern vocabulary is the large number of expressions like set out, put off, bring in, made up of a common verb, often of one syllable combined with an adverb.

Unlike the Middle English Verb - adverb combinations, whose meaning clearly reflected both that of the verb and that of the adverb (e.g. climb up, fall down) many Modern English combinations have a meaning which cannot be derived from that of their component parts.

One of the most interesting features of such combinations in modern times is the large number of figurative and idiomatic senses in which they have come to be used. For example, bring about (cause or accomplish), come round (recover normal state), catch on (comprehend), give out (become exhausted), keep on (continue), hold up (rob), lay off (cease to employ), turn over (surrender), size up (estimate), let up (cease), put up with (tolerate), etc.

It will be noticed that many Verb - adverb combinations are substitutes for single verbs such as comprehend, continue, surrender, etc., of more learned or formal character. They often convey a shade of meaning that cannot be expressed in any other manner and they have greatly increased the flexibility of the English language.

The interesting observation has been made that the vocabulary has thus been pursuing a development similar to that which took place in English grammar at an earlier period and which changed the language from a synthetic to an analytic one (Baugh & Cable, 1978: 338).

c) Certain trends in the use of prepositions have become apparent in the last century and a half. The most important trend refers to the position of the preposition in the sentence. In spite of the protest of many 19^th century grammarians, prepositions are more and more frequently placed at the end of sentences in colloquial speech in interrogative sentences and in attributive clauses:

e.g. What are you speaking about?

The man I spoke to / about is a lawyer.

d) In the sphere of syntax there are two important characteristics of Late Modern English:

i. A rather striking phenomenon is the fact that, in the press and, to a certain extent, in colloquial speech, the rules concerning the sequence of tenses are not always observed.

There are certain situations in which, to the speaker’s mind, the main clause does not express the min idea, which – in fact – is to be found in the subordinate clause. Thus, in

He made it plain yesterday that he accepts the agreement.

what is essential is the acceptance of the agreement, and not the fact that it was made plain.

Also, in:

It was not disclosed when the test will be conducted.

the carrying out of the test is far more important than the disclosure of the time at which it will take place. Therefore, the speaker or the writer bears in mind, first and foremost, the main idea, not the tense of the predicate in the main clause. What is essential and significant is not the fact of reporting somebody’s words, but the contents of the latter (E. Iarovici, 1973: 255).

ii. Another striking characteristic of the period we are dealing with is the growing importance of word order. It does away with the difficulties caused by the reduction of inflexions, by the rapid development of conversion, and by the concentrated, often elliptical way of expressing ideas both in everyday speech and in the press (especially in headlines).

In conclusion, present-day grammatical trends seem to point to certain new synthetic features such as the frequent formation of compounds, but especially to an accentuation of the analytical character of the English language, and this tendency is expressed first of all by the ever growing importance of word order. There are certain factors which entitle us to speak about the progress achieved by the English language. This is reflected in the formation - by internal means – of many new words, including numerous general and abstract terms which enable the speakers to express even the most complex ideas; the strengthening of the systematic character of the English language; its tendency towards simplification and economy of effort.

3.3. The enrichment of the vocabulary

The events of the 19^th and 20^h centuries (the two world wars, the growth in importance of some of England’s larger colonies, their eventual independence, the rapid development of the United States) have exerted a certain influence upon the development of the English language, especially on its vocabulary. The vocabulary has been considerably enriched owing to the modifications of the economic, social, political, cultural life. In the past century and a half, numberless new terms have appeared in every field of science and technology. Most of the terms are known only to specialists, but a comparatively large number have passed into general use and have gained a more general currency, like gene, oxygen, molecule, metabolism, etc.

Most of the new words coming into English since 1800 have been derived from the same sources or created by the same methods as those that have long been familiar. It should be remembered that the principles are not new, that what has been going on in the last century and a half could be paralleled from almost any period of the language.

Thus, the word stock has been expanded by means of the inner resources of the language and by means of borrowings from other the languages.

3.3.1. Inner resources of the language

New words have been mainly formed by means of affixation, conversion, composition and changes of meaning (of existing words).

i. Affixation

Word building by means of affixation (the making of words by the use of prefixes and suffixes) has been important throughout the history of English. It is still predominant in coining new words in Later Modern English.

Some of the most active prefixes are anti-, de-, dis-, mis-, out-, over- pre-, pro-, un-, Recent additions to the list include post-. super-, trans-. For example, anti-hero, counter-attack, decode, misprint, output, overact, preview, postgraduate, superstructure, transcontinental.

Some active suffixes are: -ize, -tion, -er, -eer, -ee, -ist, -ism, For example, industrialize, mechanization, cutter, profiteer, nominee, capitalism, etc.

ii. Conversion

Conversion, the process of transferring a word from one grammatical category to another, now seems to be the most frequently used method of forming new words. The most frequent types of conversion are:

- From Noun to Verb. Quite a large number of nouns are converted into verbs: to feature, to audition, to park, to process, to service. Little by little, most parts of the body have come to be used as verbs: to head (a group of people, a list), to eye (a person with dislike or suspicion), to elbow (one’s way through a crowd), to finger (a knick-knack), to face (a danger), etc.

- From Verb to Noun. A comparatively large number of verbs have been converted into nouns. People who are energetic and acquisitive are said to be ‘on the go’ and ‘on the make’. Those who are well-informed are ‘in the know’. Verbs of motion such as jump, leap, run, stroll, walk can be used as nouns. Some nouns converted from verbs have a rather colloquial colouring, e.g. catch, find, hit, kick, buy, must, etc. Thus, a bargain is a good buy; articles of food are eats; technical skill is the know-how; A good dictionary is a must for a student.

There are more and more numerous the cases of conversion from verb + adverbial particle. These combinations are frequently used as nouns, especially in colloquial speech. Thus, a place of concealment is a hide-out; an economic recession is a slow-down; any arrangement or establishment is a set-up; a re-shuffle of staff is a shake-up; a meeting of any kind is a get-together; a quick escape is a get-away.

Such cases of conversion are very numerous, probably because the nouns thus obtained are concise and expressive.

iii. Composition

The practice of making self-explaining compounds is one of the oldest methods of word-formation in the language. Composition is, therefore, another widely used means of forming new words in English, although the proportion of compounds to the mass of the vocabulary is far smaller than it was in Old English.

Nevertheless, there are certain types of compounds that are still very productive:

The type Noun + Noun: spaceman, season - ticket, identity - card, fingerprint, jet lag, life-style, fire-extinguisher, steam-roller, etc.

The type of Adjective formed of a Noun + Adjective: colour –blind, snow – white, pitch – black, life - long

The type of Adjective formed of a Noun / Adjective + V-ing: peace-loving, breath-taking, skydiving, good- looking, etc.

Many of these betray their newness by being written with a hyphen or as separate words. They give unmistakable testimony to the fact that the power to combine existing words into new ones expressing a single concept, a power that was so prominent a feature of Old English, still remains in the language.

Long, compound adjectives are extremely numerous now (Composition + Conversion), e.g. all-the-year-round programme, ban-the-bomb march.

iv. Changes of meaning (see Changes of Meaning in Middle English)

As a rule, the changes of meaning are due to the ever-growing need of denominations for new objects, phenomena, abstract notions. When words develop new meanings they sometimes lose their old meaning. For instance, when the word wan came to mean ‘pale’ it did not retain its earlier meaning of ‘dark’ and the reason for this is obvious, since the co-existence in one word of such contradictory meanings could lead to misunderstandings. In other cases, however, the old meaning continues to co-exist with the new one and we get the phenomenon of multiple meaning or polysemy.

It has been observed that in their sense development, words often pursue certain well-marked tendencies. The chief trends of semantic change are extension of meaning, narrowing of meaning, elevation / regeneration of meaning, degradation / degeneration of meaning.

a) Extension of meaning (or Generalization) refers to the phenomenon when the meaning is widened, generalized from some narrow field to a wider one: e.g.

season first meant ‘sowing time’; now it is used with the meaning of a period of the

year’.

journey: The original meaning of journey was ‘a day’s walk or ride’, but now we can speak without incongruity of ‘a week’s journey’. It implies a widening of the scope of reference.

b) Narrowing of meaning (or Specialization) refers to the case when the word acquires a more restricted, specialized sense. It implies a narrowing of the scope of reference. cf. meat in Middle English.

Also: to starve, like German sterben simply meant ‘to die’ but in Modern English (E.M.E. – 16^th century) it became specialized in the sense of ‘to die of hunger’. In Modern Yorkshire dialect one can hear ‘to starve of cold’.

Room once meant ‘space’. This old meaning is preserved in phrases like: to make room, plenty of room, no room for, etc. Since the 16^th century this word has come to have the modern narrow meaning ‘section of space in a building’.

Deer used to mean ‘animal, wild beast’ as its German cognate Tier still does. This meaning is found in Shakespeare’s “mice and rats and such small deer”. Latin animal and French beast have taken its place as the general words and the meaning of deer has been narrowed to denote a particular kind of animal ‘wild ruminant of a particular (antlered) species ‘.

Similarly, the word hound used to be the general term for ‘dog’, like the German Hund. Today hound means a special kind of dog, one used for hunting.

Disease: earlier ‘discomfort’, ‘absence of ease (dis-ease)’, later ‘malady’, ‘morbid physical condition’.

Fowl, like German Vogel, denoted ‘bird in general’, as in biblical ‘fowls of the air’. Now fowl normally means ‘barnyard fowl’.

Ghost: earlier ‘soul, spirit’, later ‘soul of a dead man as manifested to the living’.

c) Elevation of meaning (amelioration) implies the process by which the new meaning of a word acquires a higher status in comparison with the initial one. It implies a raising of value judgements involved in the reference.

See knight in Middle English.

Also: minister once meant ‘a servant’, ‘an attendant’; now it means ‘person at the head of a department of State’, ‘government official’.

d) Degradation of meaning (degeneration) refers to the process when a neutral word becomes deprecating, less favourable in meaning. It implies a lowering of value judgements involved in the reference.

cf. knave (OE cnafe) in Middle English.

Other words which have undergone this type of change:

Villain initially meant ‘a farm labourer’; later on it became a term of contempt in the speech of the noblemen ‘one who did not belong to the gentry’, and in later use ‘a scoundrel’. Churl initially meant ‘a peasant’, ‘a serf’; today it means one who is rude in manners’.

Boor (< G. Bauer) originally meant ‘a farmer’, and gradually came to mean ‘an ill-mannered, ill- bred person’.

Impertinent: earlier ‘not pertinent, unrelated’, later ‘presumptuous, insolent’.

Crafty: earlier ‘skilful, clever’, later ‘cunning, wily’.

Smirk: earlier ‘smile’, later ‘simper’, ‘smile in a way that looks silly and is not sincere’.

Notorious: earlier ‘widely known’, later ‘widely and unfavourably known’.

v. Slang

All the types of semantic change discussed in the preceding paragraphs could be illustrated from that part of the vocabulary which at any given time is considered slang.

Slang is an important source of the enrichment of the vocabulary. David Crystal defines slang as follows: “Informal, non-standard vocabulary, usually intelligible only to people from a particular region or social group; also, the jargon of a special group, such as doctors, cricketers, or sailors. Its chief function is to mark social identity – to show that one belongs – but it may also be used just to be different, to make an effect, or to be informal. Such ‘in-group’ language is subject to rapid change.” (1994: 355-6)

While at an earlier period slang was very coarse and sometimes limited, being generally confined to nicknames and to terms connected with stealing, the sphere of the influence of slang has been growing at an ever-increasing rate since the 18^th century.

Naturally, most slang words do not pass into the literary language. They are adopted by the latter – being taken over from colloquial speech - only when they fill a real gap and when they are more expressive than their synonym existing in it.

Thus, many slang words have lost their vulgar and disreputable character, gradually becoming part of the literary language: kid (child), fun (amusement), shabby

(much worn, poorly dressed), etc. Also, words such as dwindle, freshman, glib and mob are former slang words that in time overcame their ‘unsavoury’ origin.

On the other hand, some slang words seem to hang on and on in the language, never changing their status from slang to ‘respectable’. Shakespeare used the expression beat it to mean scram (or more politely, ‘leave’), and beat it would still be considered by most English speakers to be a slang expression. Similarly, to use of the word pig for ‘policeman’ goes back as far as the 18^th century (V. Fromkin, R. Rodman, 1998: 427).

There are two large groups of slangy words:

a) general slang, i.e. universally understood words and phrases, e.g. nuts (‘crazy’, ‘insane’), dough (‘money’), etc.

a)      special slang is represented by:

- words and phrases belonging to a certain professional vocabulary, e.g. the slang of sailors, soldiers, students, etc.

- words belonging to certain social groups, e.g. cockney (the speech characteristic of a native of the East End of London). Referring to this type of slang, Simeon Potter points out that “it is sometimes confined to a particular geographical community and thus acquires features which are local and regional. That is why boundaries between slang and dialect are often uncertain and vague. Slang and dialect meet and mingle in London Cockney, that racy, spontaneous, picturesque, witty, and friendly English spoken not only by Londoners ‘born within the sound of Bow Bells’ [.] but also by millions of Londoners living within a forty-mile radius of ‘the mother of cities’. (1990: 134)”

Slang words are frequently based on metaphor. We shall illustrate the numerous metaphorical slang creations by means of several examples, most of them taken from S. Robertson (1958: 261). Some of these examples belong to American slang which is even more prolific than British slang.

For the word head there are several slang creations: block, upper storey, nut, as in:

I’ll knock your block off; to be wrong in the upper storey (‘be mentally disturbed’); to be off one’s nut (‘be insane’)

For money: dough, bean(s), bread (old fashioned) e.g. not to have a bean (‘without any money’).

For nonsense: bilge, tripe, stuff, bullshit (vulg.).

For drunk: three sheets in the wind, stewed, tanked up, loaded (mainly A.E), pie-eyed, tight, pickled.

Slang often consists of ascribing totally new meanings to old words. Grass and pot widened their meaning to ‘marijuana’; pig is used as an insulting word for a ‘police officer’. Other slang words - rap, cool, dig, stoned, bread, split – have all extended their semantic domain.

Slang results from an instinctive desire for freshness and novelty of expression. To criticize seems to the man in the street tame and colourless, if not stilted, so he substitutes to bad-mouth. Since novelty is a quality which soon wears off, slang has to be constantly renewed. Vamoose, skedaddle, beat it, scram, buzz off have all had their periods of popularity as expressions of roughly the same idea, usually in imperative form (Fromkin & Rodman, 1998: 427).

Many slang words have been introduced by journalists, writers who want their style to be interesting, racy, striking, vivid.

3.3.2. Borrowings

Borrowing of words from other languages is still an important method of enriching the vocabulary. As is to be expected in the light of the English disposition to borrow words from other languages in the past, many of the new words have been taken over ready-made from the people from whom the idea or the thing designated has been obtained. Thus, a large number of words have been borrowed without changing their sound and spelling. There are many loan words of French, Italian, Russian, German origin.

French has remained the most popular source for borrowings, especially for words connected with the following fields: the arts (critique, connoisseur, montage), clothes and fashion (rouge, blouse, chiffon, suede, haute couture), cooking (soufflé, consommé, aperitif), social life (etiquette, parvenu, elite), and more recently, motoring and aviation (garage, hangar, chauffeur, fuselage).

From Italian come words connected with the arts: studio, replica, scenario, fiasco, etc.

Russian loan words are: borsch, vodka, samovar, troika, steppe, tundra, sputnik, intelligentsia, etc.

German has given the words rucksack, zeppelin, zither, blitz, pretzel, etc.

In the present-day technical and scientific language Latin and Greek are the source of numberless new coinages. As Simeon Potter rightly points out, “The language of science and technology is now being constantly extended and enriched by the creation of numerous compounds and derivatives that soon become part of the so-called international scientific vocabulary. […] If you examine these words you will find that they are nearly all made up of Greek and Latin components. Far from being dead or dying, the languages of Demosthenes and Cicero are thus promised immortality in this future world vocabulary of science.” (: 177)

Thus, the loan words that English has borrowed from Latin can be conveniently divided into four periods: 1. Words borrowed during the Roman conquest; 2. Words borrowed during the Old English period; 3. Words borrowed in Middle English times; 4. Words borrowed in Modern English.

The cosmopolitan character of the English vocabulary, already pointed out, is thus being maintained, and we shall see in the next chapter (Chapter 6) that America has added many other foreign words, particularly from Spanish and the languages of the American Indian.

In conclusion, the basic word-stock has remained Germanic, but the mass of the vocabulary now contains only about 35 per cent Germanic elements, the Romance element amounting to approximately 55 per cent and the rest of 10 per cent coming from various other languages. Of these, the Old English element is the most important (an Englishman can express most of what he wants to say by means of the Old English vocabulary). Yet, the vocabulary borrowed from the other languages has contributed to what might be termed ‘specialization’, i.e. shades of meaning, synonymy, technical terms.

4. Dialects

4.1. General characteristics

All speakers of English can pretty much understand each other; yet no two speak exactly alike. Some differences are due to education, age, sex, personality and personal idiosyncrasies. The unique characteristics of the language of an individual speaker are referred to as the speaker’s idiolect. Beyond these individual differences, the language of one group of people may show regular variations from that used by other groups of speakers of that language. When the language spoken in different geographical regions and social groups shows systematic differences, the groups are said to speak different dialects of the same language. The dialects of a single language may thus be defined as mutually intelligible forms of a language that differ in systematic ways from each other (Fromkin & Rodman, 1998: 400).

Regional dialects develop and are reinforced because languages change, and the changes that occur in one group or area may differ from those that occur in another.

4.2. English Dialects

In addition to the educated standard in each major division of the English-speaking world there are local forms of the language known as regional dialects.

In the newer countries where English has spread in modern times these are not so numerous or so pronounced in their individuality as they are in the British Isles. The English introduced into the colonies was a mixture of dialects in which the peculiarities of each were fused in a common speech. Except perhaps in the United States, there has scarcely been time for new regional differences to grow up, and although one region is sometimes separated from another, the improvements in transportation and communication have tended to keep down differences which might otherwise have arisen.

But in Great Britain such differences are very great. They go back to the earliest period of the language and reflect conditions which prevailed at a time when travel was difficult and communication was limited between districts.

There were four dialects in Old English: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, West Saxon. The same number of dialects was preserved in Middle English: Northern (from the OE Northumbrian dialect), East Midland, West Midland (both coming from the OE Mercian dialect) and Southern (from the OE West Saxon).

In the course of the Modern English period local dialects have been gradually superseded by the literary language: dialects are said to undergo rapid changes under the pressure of standard English taught at school and the speech habits cultivated by radio, television, cinema. However, dialects have not disappeared altogether and they still are a means of communicating in the respective territories.

Dialect differences include phonological or pronunciation differences (often called accents) and vocabulary distinctions. The grammar differences between dialects are not as great as the similarities that are shared, thus permitting speakers of different dialects to communicate with each other.

There are six groups of dialects in Modern English: Scottish, Northern, Western, Central, Eastern and Southern. The Scottish and the Northern dialect correspond to the Middle English Northern dialects; the Western, the Central and the Eastern dialects correspond to the Middle English Midland dialects; the Southern dialect corresponds to the Middle English Southern dialect.

Each group has its peculiarities, mainly in the phonetic and lexical spheres.

A. The Phonetic characteristics of English dialects:

i. The Scottish dialect:

a) Middle English [u:] has not been subjected to the Great Vowel Shift, i.e. it has remained unchanged: house [hu:s], now [nu:].

b) Long [ɑ:] developed only before m and f (calm, half), but in all other cases [æ] is pronounced: chance, dance, glance.

c) The postvocalic [r] is pronounced: pour, sort, bird.

d) The guttural spirant [χ] is preserved in the Scottish dialect: sought, brought, loch.

ii. The Northern dialect:

a) and b) The first two pronunciation characteristics of the Scottish dialect are also found in the Northern dialect

c) The consonant [h] is dropped at the beginning of a word,

e. g. He helps her [i `elps ər]

d) In Northhumberland, Lancashire, Yorkshire, short u has not become [∧] but it has been maintained in words such as cut, must, much.

iii. The Western, iv. Central, v. Eastern dialects

a) The consonant [h] is dropped in initial position

b) Middle English short a has not become [æ]. Words like hat, cat, hand are pronounced: [h∧t], [k∧t], [h∧nd].

c) Short u has not become [∧] but it has been maintained in words such as cut, must, much. (See d) in the Northern dialect)

vi. The Southern dialect:

The consonant [h] is dropped in initial position

B. The Vocabulary of English Dialects

The vocabulary of English dialects is extremely rich. The best proof of this is the fact that Joseph Wright’s “English Dialects Dictionary” (6 volumes) contains 100,000 entries. The dialect vocabulary is remarkable for its conservatism: many words that have become obsolete in Standard English are still kept in dialects. Quite a number of dialectal words and phrases reflect the life and the activities of the respective places: thus, there are many names for different kinds of animals, plants, clothing (spud, kilt, tartan, etc).

There is sometimes a difficulty in distinguishing dialectal words from colloquial words. Some dialectal words have become so familiar in colloquial English that they are universally accepted as recognized words of standard colloquial English. For example, lass ‘girl’ or ‘beloved girl’, lad ‘a young man’, daft ‘silly’, aye ‘yes’, nay ‘no’, bonny ‘attractive’, wee ‘very small’, bairn ‘child’ (dialectal words in the Scottish dialect).

Still, dialectal words have not lost their dialectal associations and are used in literary English with the stylistic function of characterization: e.g. dialectal words are meant to characterize a speaker as a person of a certain locality, breeding, education.

Dialectal elements are to be found in certain well-known literary works. Thus, the characteristics of the Scottish dialect are known to most people through the novels written by W. Scott and the poetry of Robert Burns.

The Northern dialect is found in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (Yorkshire) as well as in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. The poet Alfred Tennyson wrote several poems in the Northern dialect, such as The Northern Cobbler.

Elements of the Southern dialect (that of Dorset) are to be found in the novels written by Th. Hardy. One of the best known Southern dialects is Cockney, the regional dialect of London. G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion renders some features of this dialect in point of pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

4.3. Multilingual Britain – Wales, Scotland and Ireland

Britain (or The British Isles) is a multilingual society within which several indigenous languages are in use today, and which, as we have seen have existed for many hundreds of years. The living languages of The British Isles - Gaelic, Irish and Welsh - operate as markers of ethnic identity, surviving in the face of competition from English. They are referred to as ‘older mother tongues’ because they pre-date English. (N. Townson, 1995: 53)

In Ireland, the Irish–speaking communities are known as the Gaeltacht. The area covered by the Gaeltacht is scattered over the West coast of Ireland. Language comprehension is more widespread because of school language programmes and the status of Irish as the first official language of the country.

Gaelic is used to refer to the Celtic language spoken in Scotland, more precisely in the Highlands and Western Isles (for instance, the Isle of Man). Figures show that Gaelic is spoken by only 80,000 out of a population of just over 5 million.

In Wales, figures are considerably higher: in 1981 there were still half a million speakers of Welsh, representing almost 20% of the population. The highest concentration of

Welsh speakers is in the north of the country, although there are speakers of the language spread throughout most of the regions. After having once declined, the speaking of Welsh is now re-gaining ground (N. Townson, 1995: 55).

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:

1. Old English spelling was a reasonably good representation of the sounds of the language while Modern English spelling is notoriously bad in this respect. What causes for the widened gap between English sound and spelling can you suggest?

2. What is the basis for determining the ‘gender’ of a noun in Modern English, and how many genders are there? How would you explain the gender relationship between noun and pronoun in these sentences?

‘That’s a lovely baby. What’s its name?

‘Somebody telephoned you.’ ‘What did they want?’

‘I saw his new boat. She’s a beauty.’

3. Which of the processes of word making described in this chapter seem to have been the most productive in English?

4. What language has had an influence on the English vocabulary over the longest period of time? Why has that language, more than any other, had such an influence?