Approaches to chronological division of the history of the English language

 

 

Periodization of the English language may be based on various grounds:

a) on purely linguistic data;

b) on the blend of historical and linguistic facts;

c) on the literary monuments which are marking this or that period.

According to purely linguistic data, researchers take into account the characteristics that may found in the language itself, its phonetics, lexicon and grammar. The traditionally accepted division of the history of the English language was formulated by Henry Sweet (1845-1912). The division into Old English, Middle English and New English reflects important points of difference in the phonetic system, morphology and vocabulary.

· The Old English language (700 AD (the earliest English writings) – 1100 A.D.) is characterized by full endings (which means that various vowels could be used in an unstressed position, a developed system of cases and the predominance of original (non-borrowed) words.

· The Middle English language (1100-1500 AD) is characterized by weakened and leveled endings (which means that the former variety of vowels in the unstressed endings was mainly reduced to two sounds – [e] and [i],), the degradation of the case system and the penetration of a great number of loan-words, chiefly from the Scandinavian dialects and French.

· The Modern English (1500-1600 – Early MnE period; 1600 – well into our own times – Late MnE period) is the period of lost endings. The period of the loss of grammatical morphemes.

This division is based both on phonetic features (weakening and loss of unstressed vowel sounds) and morphological (weakening and loss of grammatical morphemes).

The approach which is based on the blend of historical and linguistic facts suggests the same type of division: Old English, Middle English and New English. The transition from Old English to Middle English is usually associated with the date of the Norman Conquest (1066); the transition from Middle English to New English is often connected with the consolidation of the monarchy, the end of the Wars of the Roses 1455-1485 or with the introduction of printing in the country. The New English period is traditionally defined as starting with the 15th and lasting till now. Within it scholars specify the Early New English period (16th, 17th till the Epoch of Restoration) and the Late New English period.

Of course, one should not look upon those dates as absolute. It would be absurd to think that for instance in 1065 Old English was spoken in Britain and in 1067 – Middle English. It is only natural to admit that in the depth of Old English there appeared and developed the features that finally made Middle English; and in the structure of Middle English the features of Old English coexisted with the new phenomena.

It is not by chance that some scholars relegate the border between Old English and Middle English to a later period.

A.I. Smirnitsky is of opinion that 1075 should be considered, though relatively, as the date separating Old English and Middle English. B.A. Ilyish insists on 1100; A. Baugh and T. Cable put up this border as late as to 1150. M. Schlauch, though recognizing 1066 (the year of the Norman Conquest) as the conventional border between Old English and Middle English, still marks that in the Middle English language some principal features of Late Old English remained up to 1200. J. Fisiak introduces intermediate sub-periods into A. Baugh and T. Cable’s classification: 1150-1250 is regarded as a transitional sub-period between Old English and Middle English and 1450-1500 as a transitional sub-period between Middle English and New English.

A more detailed classification of the periods to a certain extent related to the traditional triple one is proposed in T.A. Rastorguyeva’s book. This classification reckons with more historical events and language characteristics. The author suggests seven periods:

· Early Old English (450-700), the prewritten period of tribal dialects;

· Written Old English (700-1066), when the tribal dialects were transformed into local, or regional, dialects, the period signified by the rise of the kingdom of Wessex (King Alfred) and the supremacy of the West Saxon dialect;

· Early Middle English (1066-1350), the period beginning with the Norman Conquest and marked with the dialectal divergence caused by the feudal system and by foreign influences – the Scandinavian and Norman French languages (Anglo-Norman);

· Classic Middle English (1350-1475) – Restoration of English to the position of the state and literary language. The main dialect is the London dialect. The age of Geoffrey Chaucer, the period of literary efflorescence. The pattern set by Chaucer generated a fixed form of language, we may speak about language stabilization. This period corresponds to H. Sweet’s “period of levelled endings”.

· Early New English (1476-1660), the first date is marked by the introduction of printing as the first book was printed by William Caxton. This is the age of W. Shakespeare (1564-1616), of the literary Renaissance. The country is unified, so is the language. The 15th century – the period of lost endings and loss of freedom of grammatical construction (H. Sweet).

· Neoclassic period (1660-1800), the period of language normalization. Differentiation into distinct styles, fixation of pronunciation, standardization of grammar.

· Late New English (1800-the present time). The Received Standard of English appears. Within the latter period T.A. Rastorguyeva specifies Contemporary English – from 1945 to the present time.

MAIN PHASES IN THE HISTORY

OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

BEFORE ENGLISH (PREHISTORY – 500 AD)

The Iberians. Britain was part of the continent of Europe until the end of the last Ice Age (6000 BC). It became an island when the lower-lying land under the present-day English Channel was flooded. The island was covered by dense woods full of wild animals and birds. The early inhabitants of Britain were small groups of hunters, gatherers, and fishermen.

About 3000 BC tribes of dark-haired people called Iberians began to arrive from the territory of present-day Spain around. They were initially hunters and then also shepherds. Iberians were skilled riders and each tribe had a chivalry unit. Their main weapons were the bow and the arrows, the shield, the helmet and the large spear. The Iberians put up buildings of stone and wood and built the first roads. They built the burial chambers and huge temples (henges).

The earliest structures at Stonehenge were built about 3050 BC by the Iberian people, though there is still controversy as to who constructed the megalithic tombs (long barrows). The main structure of Stonehenge may date from the end of the Neolithic or the beginning of the Bronze Age. Stonehenge was probably a place of worship and a celestial calendar made of giant stones.

The Celts. The earliest inhabitants of Britain about which anything is known are the Celts (the name from the Greek keltoi meaning “barbarian”), also known as Britons, who probably started to move into the area after 800 BC. By around 300 BC, the Celts had become the most widespread branch of Indo-Europeans in Iron Age Europe, inhabiting much of modern-day Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, the Balkans, Eastern Europe and also Britain.

Parts of Scotland were also inhabited from an early time by the Picts, whose Pictish language was completely separate from Celtic and probably not an Indo-European language at all. The Pictish language and culture was completely wiped out during the Viking raids of the 9th century AD, and the remaining Picts merged with the Scots. Further waves of Celtic immigration into Britain, particularly between 500 BC and 400 BC but continuing at least until the Roman occupation, greatly increased the Celtic population in Britain, and established a vibrant Celtic culture throughout the land.

But the Celts themselves were later marginalized and displaced, and Celtic was not the basis for what is now the English language. Despite their dominance in Britain at an early formative stage of its development, the Celts actually had very little impact on the English language, leaving only a few little-used words such as brock (an old word for a badger), and a handful of geographical terms like coombe (a word for a valley) and crag and tor (both words for a rocky peak). Many British place names have Celtic origins, including Kent, York, London, Dover, Thames, Avon, Trent, Severn, Cornwall and many more. There is some speculation that Celtic had some influence over the grammatical development of English, such as the use of the continuous tense (e.g. “is walking” rather than “walks”), which is not used in other Germanic languages. The Celtic language survives today only in the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland, the Welsh of Wales, and the Breton language of Brittany.

The Romans first entered Britain in 55 BC under Julius Caesar, although they did not begin a permanent occupation until 43 AD, when Emperor Claudius sent a much better prepared force to subjugate the fierce British Celts. Despite a series of uprisings by the natives (including that of Queen Boudicca, or Boadicea in 61 AD), Britain remained part of the Roman Empire for almost 400 years, and there was a substantial amount of interbreeding between the two peoples, although the Romans never succeeded in penetrating into the mountainous regions of Wales and Scotland.

Although this first invasion had a profound effect on the culture, religion, geography, architecture and social behaviour of Britain, the linguistic legacy of the Romans’ time in Britain was, like that of the Celts, surprisingly limited. This legacy takes the form of less than 200 “loanwords” coined by Roman merchants and soldiers, such as win (wine), butere (butter), caese (cheese), piper (pepper), candel (candle), cetel (kettle), disc (dish), cycene (kitchen), ancor (anchor), belt (belt), sacc (sack), catte (cat), plante (plant), rosa (rose), cest (chest), pund (pound), munt (mountain), straet (street), wic (village), mil (mile), port (harbour), weall (wall), etc. However, Latin would, at a later time come to have a substantial influence on the language.

Latin did not replace the Celtic language in Britain as it had done in Gaul, and the use of Latin by native Britons during the period of Roman rule was probably confined to members of the upper classes and the inhabitants of the cities and towns. The Romans, under attack at home from Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Vandals, abandoned Britain to the Celts in 410 AD, completing their withdrawal by 436 AD. Within a remarkably short time after this withdrawal, the Roman influence on Britain, in language as in many other walks of life, was all but lost, as Britain settled in to the so-called Dark Ages.

OLD ENGLISH (500 – 1100)

The Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. More important than the Celts and the Romans for the development of the English language, was the succession of invasions from continental Europe after the Roman withdrawal. No longer protected by the Roman military against the constant threat from the Picts and Scots of the North, the Celts felt themselves increasingly vulnerable to attack. Around 430 AD, the ambitious Celtic warlord Vortigern invited the Jutish brothers Hengest and Horsa (from Jutland in modern-day Denmark), to settle on the east coast of Britain to form a bulwark against sea raids by the Picts, in return for which they were “allowed” to settle in the southern areas of Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.

But the Jutes were not the only newcomers to Britain during this period. Other Germanic tribes soon began to make the short journey across the North Sea. The Angles (from a region called Angeln, the spur of land which connects modern Denmark with Germany) gradually began to settle in increasing numbers on the east coast of Britain, particularly in the north and East Anglia. The Frisian people, from the marshes and islands of northern Holland and western Germany, also began to encroach on the British mainland from about 450 AD onwards. Still later, from the 470s, the war-like Saxons (from the Lower Saxony area of north-western Germany) made an increasing number of incursions into the southern part of the British mainland. Over time, these Germanic tribes began to establish permanent bases and to gradually displace the native Celts.

All these peoples spoke variations of a West Germanic tongue, similar to modern Frisian. The local dialect in Angeln is, at times, even today recognizably similar to English, and it has even more in common with the English of 1,000 years ago.

The influx of Germanic people was more of a gradual encroachment over several generations than an invasion proper, but these tribes between them gradually colonized most of the island, with the exception of the more remote areas, which remained strongholds of the original Celtic people of Britain. Originally sea-farers, they began to settle down as farmers, exploiting the rich English farmland. The rather primitive newcomers were if anything less cultured and civilized than the local Celts, who had held onto at least some parts of Roman culture. The Celts referred to the European invaders as “barbarians” (as they had previously been labelled themselves); the invaders referred to the Celts as weales (slaves or foreigners), the origin of the name Wales.

Despite continued resistance (the legends and folklore of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table date from this time), the Celts were pushed further and further back by the invaders into the wilds of Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Ireland, although some chose to flee to the Brittany region of northern France (where they maintained a thriving culture for several centuries) and even further into mainland Europe.

The Germanic tribes settled in seven smaller kingdoms, known as the Heptarchy: the Saxons in Essex, Wessex and Sussex; the Angles in East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria; and the Jutes in Kent. Evidence of the extent of their settlement can be found in the number of place names throughout England ending with the Anglo-Saxon “-ing” meaning people of (e.g. Worthing, Reading, Hastings), “-ton” meaning enclosure or village (e.g. Taunton, Burton, Luton), “-ford” meaning a river crossing (e.g. Ashford, Bradford, Watford) “-ham” meaning farm (e.g. Nottingham, Birmingham, Grantham) and “-stead” meaning a site (e.g. Hampstead).

Although the various different kingdoms waxed and waned in their power and influence over time, it was the war-like and pagan Saxons that gradually became the dominant group. The new Anglo-Saxon nation, once known in antiquity as Albion and then Britannia under the Romans, nevertheless became known as Anglaland or Englaland (the Land of the Angles), later shortened to England, and its emerging language as Englisc (now referred to as Old English or Anglo-Saxon, or sometimes Anglo-Frisian). It is impossible to say just when English became a separate language, rather than just a German dialect, although it seems that the language began to develop its own distinctive features in isolation from the continental Germanic languages, by around 600 AD. Over time, four major dialects of Old English gradually emerged: Northumbrian in the north of England, Mercian in the midlands, West Saxon in the south and west, and Kentish in the southeast.

The Coming of Christianity and Literacy. Although many of the Romano-Celts in the north of England had already been Christianized, St. Augustine and his 40 missionaries from Rome brought Christianity to the pagan Anglo-Saxons of the rest of England in 597 AD. After the conversion of the influential King Ethelbert of Kent, it spread rapidly through the land, carrying literacy and European culture in its wake. Augustine was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 601 AD and several great monasteries and centres of learning were established particularly in Northumbria (e.g. Jarrow, Lindisfarne).

The Celts and the early Anglo-Saxons used an alphabet of runes, angular characters originally developed for scratching onto wood or stone. The first known written English sentence, which reads “This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman”, is an Anglo-Saxon runic inscription on a gold medallion found in Suffolk, and has been dated to about 450-480 AD. The early Christian missionaries introduced the more rounded Roman alphabet (much as we use today), which was easier to read and more suited for writing on vellum or parchment. The Anglo-Saxons quite rapidly adopted the new Roman alphabet, but with the addition of letters such as  (“wynn”), Þ (“thorn”) and others.

The Latin language the missionaries brought was still only used by the educated ruling classes and Church functionaries, and Latin was only a minor influence on the English language at this time, being largely restricted to the naming of Church dignitaries and ceremonies (priest, vicar, altar, mass, church, bishop, pope, nun, angel, verse, baptism, monk, eucharist, candle, temple and presbyter came into the language this way). However, other more domestic words (such as fork, spade, chest, spider, school, tower, plant, rose, lily, circle, paper, sock, mat, cook, etc) also came into English from Latin during this time.

Old English literature flowered remarkably quickly after Augustine’s arrival. This was especially notable in the north-eastern kingdom of Northumbria, which provided England with its first great poet (Caedmon in the 7th century), its first great historian (the Venerable Bede in the 7-8th century) and its first great scholar (Alcuin of York in the 8th century), although the latter two wrote mainly in Latin. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is usually considered to be C aedmon’s Hymn, composed between 658 and 680. Northumbrian culture and language dominated England in the 7th and 8th centuries, until the coming of the Vikings, after which only Wessex, under Alfred the Great, remained as an independent kingdom. By the 10th century, the West Saxon dialect had become the dominant, and effectively the official, language of Britain. The different dialects often had their own preferred spellings as well as distinctive vocabulary (e.g. the word evil was spelled efel in the south-east, and yfel elsewhere; land would be land in West Saxon and Kentish, but lond further north; etc).

About 400 Anglo-Saxon texts have survived from this era, including many beautiful poems, telling tales of wild battles and heroic journeys. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is C aedmon’s Hymn, and the longest was the ongoing Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. But by far the best known is the long epic poem Beowulf.

The Vikings. By the late 8th century, the Vikings (or Norsemen) began to make sporadic raids on the east cost of Britain. They came from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, although it was the Danes who came with the greatest force. Notorious for their ferocity, ruthlessness and callousness, the Vikings pillaged and plundered the towns and monasteries of northern England – in the year 793 they sacked and looted the wealthy monastery at Lindisfarne in Northumbria – before turning their attentions further south. By about 850, the raiders had started to over-winter in southern England and, in 865 there followed a full-scale invasion and on-going battles for the possession of the country.

Viking expansion was finally checked by Alfred the Great and, in 878 a treaty between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings established the Danelaw, splitting the country along a line roughly from London to Chester, giving the Norsemen control over the north and east and the Anglo-Saxons the south and west. Although the Danelaw lasted less than a century, its influence can be seen today in the number of place names of Norse origin in northern England (over 1500), including many place names ending in “ -by”, “-gate”, “-stoke”, “kirk”, “-thorpe”, “-thwaite”, “-toft” and other suffixes (e.g. Whitby, Grimsby, Ormskirk, Scunthorpe, Stoke Newington, Huthwaite, Lowestoft, etc), as well as the “-son” ending on family names (e.g. Johnson, Harrison, Gibson, Stevenson) as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon equivalent “-ing” (e.g. Manning, Harding, etc).

The Vikings spoke Old Norse, an early North Germanic language not that dissimilar to Anglo-Saxon and roughly similar to modern Icelandic (the word viking actually means “a pirate raid” in Old Norse). Accents and pronunciations in northern England even today are heavily influenced by Old Norse, to the extent that they are largely intelligible in Iceland.

Over time, Old Norse was gradually merged into the English language, and many Scandinavian terms were introduced. In actual fact, only around 150 Norse words appear in Old English manuscripts of the period, but many more became assimilated into the language and gradually began to appear in texts over the next few centuries. In all, up to 1,000 Norse words were permanently added to the English lexicon, among them, some of the most common and fundamental in the language, including skin, leg, neck, freckle, sister, husband, fellow, wing, bull, score, seat, root, bloom, bag, gap, knife, dirt, kid, etc.

Old Norse often provided direct alternatives or synonyms for Anglo-Saxon words, both of which have been carried on (e.g. Anglo-Saxon craft and Norse skill, wish and want, sick and ill, etc). Unusually for language development, English also adopted some Norse grammatical forms, such as the pronouns they, them and their, although these words did not enter the dialects of London and southern England until as late as the 15th century. Under the influence of the Danes, Anglo-Saxon word endings and inflections started to fall away during the time of the Danelaw, and prepositions like to, with, by, etc became more important to make meanings clear, although many inflections continued into Middle English, particularly in the south and west (the areas furthest from Viking influence).

Old English after the Vikings. By the time Alfred the Great came to the throne in 871, most of the great monasteries of Northumbria and Mercia lay in ruins and only Wessex remained as an independent kingdom. But Alfred, from his capital town of Winchester, set about rebuilding and fostering the revival of learning, law and religion. Crucially, he believed in educating the people in the vernacular English language, not Latin, and he himself made several translations of important works into English, include Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He also began the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which recounted the history of England from the time of Caesar’s invasion, and which continued until 1154.

He is revered by many as having single-handedly saved English from the destruction of the Vikings, and by the time of his death in 899 he had raised the prestige and scope of English to a level higher than that of any other vernacular language in Europe. The West Saxon dialect of Wessex became the standard English of the day (although the other dialects continued nonetheless), and for this reason the great bulk of the surviving documents from the Anglo-Saxon period are written in the dialect of Wessex.

 

MIDDLE ENGLISH (1100 – 1500)

 

Norman Conquest. The event that began the transition from Old English to Middle English was the Norman Conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror (Duke of Normandy and, later, William I of England) invaded the island of Britain from his home base in northern France, and settled in his new acquisition along with his nobles and court. William crushed the opposition with a brutal hand and deprived the Anglo-Saxon earls of their property, distributing it to Normans (and some English) who supported him.

The conquering Normans descended from Vikings who had settled in northern France about 200 years before (the very word Norman comes originally from Norseman). However, they had completely abandoned their Old Norse language and wholeheartedly adopted French (which is a so-called Romance language, derived originally from the Latin, not Germanic, branch of Indo-European), to the extent that not a single Norse word survived in Normandy.

However, the Normans spoke a rural dialect of French with considerable Germanic influences, usually called Anglo-Norman or Norman French, which was quite different from the standard French of Paris of the period, which is known as Francien. The differences between these dialects became even more marked after the Norman invasion of Britain, particularly after King John and England lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France in 1204 and England became even more isolated from continental Europe.

Anglo-Norman French became the language of the kings and nobility of England for more than 300 years (Henry IV, who came to the English throne in 1399, was the first monarch since before the Conquest to have English as his mother tongue). While Anglo-Norman was the verbal language of the court, administration and culture, though, Latin was mostly used for written language, especially by the Church and in official records. For example, the Domesday Book, in which William the Conqueror took stock of his new kingdom, was written in Latin to emphasize its legal authority.

However, the peasantry and lower classes (the vast majority of the population, an estimated 95%) continued to speak English – considered by the Normans a low-class, vulgar tongue – and the two languages developed in parallel, only gradually merging as Normans and Anglo-Saxons began to intermarry. It is this mixture of Old English and Anglo-Norman that is usually referred to as Middle English.

Normans bequeathed over 10,000 words to English about three-quarters of which are still in use today.

 

Resurgence of English. It isestimated that up to 85% of Anglo-Saxon words were lost as a result of the Viking and particularly the Norman invasions, and at one point the very existence of the English language looked to be in dire peril. In 1154 even the venerable Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which for centuries had recorded the history of the English people, recorded its last entry. But, despite the shake-up the Normans had given English, it showed its resilience once again, and, two hundred years after the Norman Conquest, it was English not French that emerged as the language of England.

There were a number of contributing factors. The English, of necessity, had become “Normanized”, but, over time, the Normans also became “Anglicized”, particularly after 1204 when King John’s ineptness lost the French part of Normandy to the King of France and the Norman nobles were forced to look more to their English properties. Increasingly out of touch with their properties in France and with the French court and culture in general, they soon began to look on themselves as English. Norman French began gradually to degenerate and atrophy. While some in England spoke French and some spoke Latin (and a few spoke both), everyone, from the highest to the lowest, spoke English, and it gradually became the lingua franca of the nation once again.

The Hundred Year War against France (1337-1453) had the effect of branding French as the language of the enemy and the status of English rose as a consequence. The Black Death of 1349-1350 killed about a third of the English population (which was around 4 million at that time), including a disproportionate number of the Latin-speaking clergy. After the plague, the English-speaking labouring and merchant classes grew in economic and social importance and, within the short period of a decade, the linguistic division between the nobility and the commoners was largely over. The Statute of Pleading, which made English the official language of the courts and Parliament (although, paradoxically, it was written in French), was adopted in 1362, and in that same year Edward III became the first king to address Parliament in English, a crucial psychological turning point. By 1385 English had become the language of instruction in schools.

Chaucer and the Birth of English Literature. Texts in Middle English (as opposed to French or Latin) begin as a trickle in the 13th century, with works such as the debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale (probably composed around 1200) and the long historical poem known as Layamon’s Brut (from around the same period). Most of Middle English literature, at least up until the flurry of literary activity in the latter part of the 14th century, is of unknown authorship.

Geoffrey Chaucer began writing his famous Canterbury Tales in the early 1380s, and crucially he chose to write it in English. Other important works were written in English around the same time, if not earlier, including William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But the Canterbury Tales is usually considered the first great works of English literature, and the first demonstration of the artistic legitimacy of vernacular Middle English, as opposed to French or Latin.

In the 858 lines of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, almost 500 different French loanwards occur, and by some estimates, some 20-25% of Chaucer’s vocabulary is French in origin. However, the overall sense of his work is very much of a reformed English, a complete, flexible and confident language, more than adequate to produce great literature. Chaucer introduced many new words into the language, up to 2,000 by some counts – these were almost certainly words in everyday use in 14th century London, but first attested in Chaucer’s written works.

In 1384 John Wycliffe (Wyclif) produced his translation of The Bible in vernacular English. This challenge to Latin as the language of God was considered a revolutionary act of daring at the time, and the translation was banned by the Church in no uncertain terms (however, it continued to circulate unofficially). Although perhaps not of the same literary calibre as Chaucer (in general, he awkwardly retained the original Latin word order, for instance), Wycliffe’s Bible was nevertheless a landmark in the English language. Over 1,000 English words were first recorded in it, most of them Latin-based, often via French.

By the late 14th and 15th century, the language had changed drastically, and Old English would probably have been almost as incomprehensible to Chaucer as it is to us today, even though the language of Chaucer is still quite difficult for us to read naturally. William Caxton, writing and printing less than a century after Chaucer, is noticeably easier for the modern reader to understand.

EARLY NEW ENGLISH (1500 – 1800)

The English Renaissance. The next wave of innovation in English came with the revival of classical scholarship known as the Renaissance. The English Renaissance roughly covers the 16th and early 17th century (the European Renaissance had begun in Italy as early as the 14th Century), and is often referred to as the “Elizabethan Era” or the “Age of Shakespeare” after the most important monarch and most famous writer of the period. The additions to English vocabulary during this period were deliberate borrowings, and not the result of any invasion or influx of new nationalities or any top-down decrees.

Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek and French) was still very much considered the language of education and scholarship at this time, and the great enthusiasm for the classical languages during the English Renaissance brought thousands of new words into the language, peaking around 1600. A huge number of classical works were being translated into English during the 16th Century, and many new terms were introduced where a satisfactory English equivalent did not exist.

By the end of the 16th century, English had finally become widely accepted as a language of learning, equal if not superior to the classical languages. Vernacular language, once scorned as suitable for popular literature and little else – and still criticized throughout much of Europe as crude, limited and immature – had become recognized for its inherent qualities.

Printing Press and Standardization. Thefinal major factor in the development of Modern English was the advent of the printing press, one of the world’s great technological innovations, introduced into England by William Caxton in 1476 (Johann Gutenberg had originally invented the printing press in Germany around 1450). The first book printed in the English language was Caxton’s own translation, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, actually printed in Bruges in 1473 or early 1474. Up to 20,000 books were printed in the following 150 years, ranging from mythic tales and popular stories to poems, phrasebooks, devotional pieces and grammars, and Caxton himself became quite rich from his printing business (among his best sellers were Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Thomas Malory’s Tales of King Arthur). As mass-produced books became cheaper and more commonly available, literacy mushroomed, and soon works in English became even more popular than books in Latin.

At the time of the introduction of printing, there were five major dialect divisions within England – Northern, West Midlands, East Midlands (a region which extended down to include London), Southern and Kentish – and even within these demarcations, there was a huge variety of different spellings.

The Chancery of Westminster made some efforts from the 1430s onwards to set standard spellings for official documents, specifying I instead of ich and various other common variants of the first person pronoun, land instead of lond, all of which previously appeared in many variants. Chancery Standard contributed significantly to the development of a Standard English, and the political, commercial and cultural dominance of the “East Midlands triangle” (London-Oxford-Cambridge) was well established long before the 15th century, but it was the printing press that was really responsible for carrying through the standardization process. With the advent of mass printing, the dialect and spelling of the East Midlands (and, more specifically, that of the national capital, London, where most publishing houses were located) became the de facto standard and, over time, spelling and grammar gradually became more and more fixed.

Some of the decisions made by the early publishers had long-lasting repercussions for the language. One such example is the use of the northern English they, their and them in preference to the London equivalents hi, hir and hem (which were more easily confused with singular pronouns like he, her and him). Caxton himself complained about the difficulties of finding forms which would be understood throughout the country, a difficult task even for simple little words like eggs. But his own work was far from consistent and his use of double letters and the final “e” was haphazard at best (e.g. had / hadd / hadde, d og / dogg / dogge).

Many of his successors were just as inconsistent, particularly as many of them were Europeans and not native English speakers. Sometimes different spellings were used for purely practical reasons, such as adding or omitting letters merely to help the layout or justification of printed lines.

A good part of the reason for many of the vagaries and inconsistencies of English spelling has been attributed to the fact that words were fixed on the printed page before any orthographic consensus had emerged among teachers and writers. Printing also directly gave rise to another strange quirk: the word the had been written for centuries as þ e, using the thorn character of Old English, but, as no runic characters were available on the European printing presses, the letter “y” was used instead (being closest to the handwritten thorn character of the period), resulting in the word ye, which should therefore technically still be pronounced as “the”. It is only since the archaic spelling was revived for store signs (e.g. Ye Olde Pubbe) that the “modern” pronunciation of ye has been used.

Standardization was well under way by around 1650, but it was a slow and halting process and names in particular were often rendered in a variety of ways. For example, more than 80 different spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been recorded, and he himself spelled it differently in each of his six known signatures, including two different versions in his own will.

Dictionaries and Grammars. The first English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall, was published by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604 (8 years before the first Italian dictionary, and 35 years before the first French dictionary, although admittedly some 800 years after the first Arabic dictionary and nearly 1,000 after the first Sanskrit dictionary). Cawdrey’s little book contained 2,543 of what he called “hard words”, especially those borrowed from Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French, although it was not actually a very reliable resource.

Several other dictionaries, as well as grammar, pronunciation and spelling guides, followed during the 17th and 18th century. The first attempt to list ALL the words in the English language was An Universall Etymological English Dictionary, compiled by Nathaniel Bailey in 1721 (the 1736 edition contained about 60,000 entries).

But the first dictionary considered anything like reliable was Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, over 150 years after Cawdrey’s. An impressive academic achievement in its own right, Johnson’s 43,000 word dictionary remained the pre-eminent English dictionary until the much more comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary 150 more years later, although it was actually riddled with inconsistencies in both spelling and definitions.

In addition to dictionaries, many English grammars started to appear in the 18th century, the best-known and most influential of which were Robert Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) and Lindley Murray’s English Grammar (1794). In fact, some 200 works on grammar and rhetoric were published between 1750 and 1800, and no less than 800 during the 19th century. Most of these works, Lowth’s in particular, were extremely prescriptive, stating in no uncertain terms the “correct” way of using English. Lowth was the main source of such “correct” grammar rules as a double negative always yields a positive, never end a sentence with a preposition and never split an infinitive. A refreshing exception to such prescriptivism was the Rudiments of English Grammar by the scientist and polymath Joseph Priestley, which was unusual in expressing the view that grammar is defined by common usage and not prescribed by self-styled grammarians.

The first English newspaper was the Courante or Weekly News (actually published in Amsterdam, due to the strict printing controls in force in England at that time) arrived in 1622, and the first professional newspaper of public record was the London Gazette, which began publishing in 1665. The first daily, The Daily Courant, followed in 1702, and The Times of London published its first edition in 1790, around the same time as the influential periodicals The Tatler and The Spectator, which between them did much to establish the style of English in this period.

William Shakespeare. Whateverthe merits of the other contributions to the golden age of English literature (the 16th to 18th century), it is clear that one man, William Shakespeare, single-handedly changed the English language to a significant extent in the late 16th and early 17th century. Shakespeare took advantage of the relative freedom and flexibility of English at the time, and played freely and easily with the already liberal grammatical rules.

He had a vast vocabulary (34,000 words by some counts) and he personally coined an estimated 2,000 neologisms or new words in his many works. By some counts, almost one in ten of the words used by Shakespeare were his own invention, a truly remarkable achievement. However, not all of these were necessarily personally invented by Shakespeare himself: they merely appear for the first time in his published works, and he was more than happy to make use of other people’s neologisms and local dialect words, and to mine the latest fashions and fads for new ideas.

International trade. While all these important developments were underway, British naval superiority was also growing. In the 16th and 17th century  international trade expanded immensely, and loanwords were absorbed from the languages of many other countries throughout the world, including those of other trading and imperial nations such as Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. Among these are: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Basque, Norwegian, Icelandic, Finnish, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Polynesian and others.