History of English, English written language

Characteristics of Early Modern English.

Adjectives lost all endings except for in the comparative and superlative forms. The neuter pronoun it was first used as well as who as a relative pronoun. The class distinctions between formal and informal you were decreasing, so that today there is no difference between them. More strong verbs became weak and the third person singular form became -(e)s instead of -(e)th. There was a more limited use of the progressive and auxiliary verbs than there is now, however. Negatives followed the verb and multiple negatives were still used.

The Great Vowel Shift (1400-1600) changed the pronunciation of all the vowels. The tongue was placed higher in the mouth, and all the verbs moved up. Vowels that were already high ([i] and [u]) added the dipthongs [aj] and [aw] to the vowels of English.

Several consonants were no longer pronounced, but the spelling system was in place before the consonant loss, so they are still written in English today. The consonants lost include:

• Voiceless velar fricative lost in night; pronounced as f in laugh
• [b] in final -mb cluster (dumb, comb)
• [l] between a or o and consonant (half, walk, talk, folk)
• [r] sometimes before s (Worcestershire)
• initial clusters beginning with k and g (knee, knight, gnat)
• [g] in -ing endings (more commonly pronounced [ɪn])

Finally, assibilation occurred when the alveolars [s], [d], [t], and [z] preceded the palatal glide [j], producing the palatal consonants: [š], [ǰ], [č], [ž]

Hamlet's famous "To be, or not to be" lines, written in Early Modern English by Shakespeare. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Late Modern English (18th Century).

A proposal for an Academy of the English Language was first brought forth by Jonathan Swift in 1712, but the Parliament voted against it. Nevertheless, several grammarians wrote dictionaries and grammar books in a prescriptive manner - telling people what to do or not to do with the language. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755 and Robert Lowth's Introduction to English Grammar appeared in 1762. Early grammarians felt that language should be logical, therefore, the double negative was considered incorrect (two negatives equal one positive) and should not be used. They also didn't like shortened or redundant words, borrowing words from other languages (except Latin and Greek), split infinitives, or prepositions at the end of the sentence.

A more scientifically minded attitude took hold by the 19th century when the Oxford English Dictionary was proposed in 1859. It was to be a factual account of every word in the English language since 1000 including its main form, pronunciation, spelling variations, part of speech, etymology, meanings in chronological order and illustrative quotations. The project was begun in 1879 under its first editor, James AH Murray. The first edition was published in 1928, with supplements in 1933 and 1972-6. The second edition was published in 1989 and it recognized American and Australian English, as the International Phonetic Alphabet for pronunciation.

The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English is vocabulary. Late Modern English has many more words, arising from two principal factors: firstly, the Industrial Revolution and technology created a need for new words; secondly, the British Empire at its height covered one quarter of the earth's surface, and the English language adopted foreign words from many countries. 
 
 
 
 

Beginnings of Modern English.

In England, several changes to English had occurred since 1700. These include a loss of the post-vocalic r (so that the r is only pronounced before a vowel and not after); an increase in the use of the progressive tenses; and a rise in class consciousness about speech (Received Pronunciation.) Since 1900, a very large amount of vocabulary words has been added to English in a relatively short period. The majority of these words are related to science and technology, and use Greek and Latin roots. 

The Great English Vowel Shift. 
 
From Old English to Middle English to Modern English, the vowels have obviously shifted.  This accounts for a great deal of the difference between English words and their Frisian and Dutch counterparts.  For better or worse, our spelling still reflects these earlier pronunciations.  The most dramatic changes occured between the late part of Middle English and the early part of Modern English, and didn't stabilize until about 1600.  This is known as the Great English Vowel Shift! 
 
Originally, the long vowels were literally long versions of the short vowels, that is, they were held longer, as they are still in Dutch.  These long vowels shifted "up," that is, they were pronounced with the tongue higher in the mouth, so that long e (like French é) shifted to its present ee position, and long o (like French eau) went to its modern oo position.  Long i (which was pronounced like ee today) and long ou (like oo in boot today) had no where higher to go, so they became the diphthongs they are today (as in bite and bout).  The short vowels, on the other hand, moved very slightly "down."  The original diphthongs ai (then pronounced like our long i in kite) and au (then like our ou in house) became our long a (as in bate) and aw sound.  In some positions, long u (our oo in boot) became our long u (as in mute).  Note also that the "silent e" was not originally silent!  It was originally pronounced like a short e, became the nondescript "schwa" (like the a in ago), and then finally disappeared, but not before defining the preceding vowel as long! 
 
Consonants also changed, but not as dramatically.  In fact, it was the Frisians and Dutch who changed their consonants more!  One change was the dropping of l's between vowels and consonants (so talk became "tawk").  Another is the way that gh -- originally pronounced like the ch in Bach -- became y after front vowels and w after back vowels (so night > niyt and through > throuw), and by the 1500's disappeared altogether.  One more is the silent k in words like know and knight, which was originally pronounced.  Knight, in fact, was originally pronounced as spelled, which makes it much closer to the Dutch knecht, meaning man-servant!  Finally, several dialects began to drop r's after vowels until, by the 1600's, r-dropping was the standard for the Queen's English. 
 
Here are the changes in IPA:

The grammar of English is perhaps the most interesting story:  It went from a typical old Indo-European language, with many complex and irregular verb conjugations and noun declensions, to arguably the most isolating Indo-European language to date.  (Afrikaans - a close relative of Dutch spoken in South Africa - probably beats it by a smidgen.)  
 
Anglo-Saxon nouns, their articles, and even adjectives were complex.  There were three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter:

 
As in most Indo-European languages, gender had little to do with reality:

 
Anglo-Saxon verbs were a bit easier, as they had already evolved away from older Indo-European traditions along with the other Germanic languages.  There were only two tenses, a present and a past.  Here is the word for kiss:

 
Modern English only really has six grammatical affixes left:  -s for plural nouns, -'s for genitive nouns, -s for third person singular verbs, -ed for the past tense, -ed the past participle, and -ing for the present participle.  Unfortunately for learners of English, it still has several irregular verbs (e.g. to be and to have) and a large number of strong verbs (e.g. sing-sang-sung), plus a few irregular plurals (e.g. child-children, man-men...).  Nevertheless, people around the world find English relatively easy, with one huge exception:  English has the worst spelling of any language using the Latin alphabet!  Unlike most other European languages, we have not had any major updates in spelling since Shakespeare's time, despite dramatic sound changes and innumerable borrowings from other languages. 
 

A Changed and Changing Language.

Like other languages, English has changed greatly, albeit imperceptibly, so that an English speaker of 1300 would not have understood the English of 500 nor the English of today. Changes of every sort have taken place concomitantly in the sounds (phonetics), in their distribution (phonemics), and in the grammar (morphology and syntax). The following familiar words show changes of 1,000 years:

The changes are more radical than they appear, for Modern English ō and ā are diphthongs. The words home, stones, and name exemplify the fate of unaccented vowels, which became ə, then ə disappeared. In Old English important inflectional contrasts depended upon the difference between unaccented vowels; so, as these vowels coalesced into ə and this disappeared, much of the case system disappeared too. In Modern English a different technique, word order (subject + predicate + object), is used to show what a case contrast once did, namely, which is the actor and which the goal of the action.

Although the pronunciation of English has changed greatly since the 15th cent., the spelling of English words has altered very little over the same period. As a result, English spelling is not a reliable guide to the pronunciation of the language.

The vocabulary of English has naturally expanded, but many common modern words are derived from the lexicon of the earliest English; e.g., bread, good, and shower. From words acquired with Latin Christianity come priest, bishop, and others; and from words adopted from Scandinavian settlers come root, egg, take, window, and many more. French words, such as castle, began to come into English shortly before the Norman Conquest. After the Conquest, Norman French became the language of the court and of official life, and it remained so until the end of the 14th cent.

During these 300 or more years English remained the language of the common people, but an increasingly large number of French words found their way into the language, so that when the 14th-century vernacular revival, dominated by Chaucer and Wyclif, restored English to its old place as the speech of all classes, the French element in the English vocabulary was very considerable. To this phase of French influence belong most legal terms (such as judge, jury, tort, and assault) and words denoting social ranks and institutions (such as duke, baron, peer, countess, and parliament), together with a great number of other words that cannot be classified readily-e.g., honor, courage, season, manner, study, feeble, and poor. Since nearly all of these French words are ultimately derived from Late Latin, they may be regarded as an indirect influence of the classical languages upon the English vocabulary.

The direct influence of the classical languages began with the Renaissance and has continued ever since; even today Latin and Greek roots are the chief source for English words in science and technology (e.g., conifer, cyclotron, intravenous, isotope, polymeric, and telephone). During the last 300 years the borrowing of words from foreign languages has continued unchecked, so that now most of the languages of the world are represented to some extent in the vocabulary. English vocabulary has also been greatly expanded by the blending of existing words (e.g., smog from smoke and fog) and by back-formations (e.g., burgle from burglar), whereby a segment of an existing word is treated as an affix and dropped, resulting in a new word, usually with a related meaning. 
 
 
 
 
 

Countries where English is a major language.

English is the primary language in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia (Australian English), the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize (Belizean Kriol), Bermuda, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands, Canada (Canadian English), the Cayman Islands, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guam, Guernsey (Channel Island English), Guyana, Ireland (Hiberno-English), The Isle of Man (Manx English), Jamaica (Jamaican English), Jersey, Montserrat, Nauru, New Zealand (New Zealand English), Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Singapore, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

In some countries where English is not the most spoken language, it is an official language; these countries include Botswana, Cameroon, Dominica, the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines (Philippine English), Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Samoa, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, the Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

It is also one of the 11 official languages that are given equal status in South Africa (South African English). English is also the official language in current dependent territories of Australia (Norfolk Island, Christmas Island and Cocos Island) and of the United States (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands), and the former British colony of Hong Kong.

English is not an official language in either the United States or the United Kingdom. Although the United States federal government has no official languages, English has been given official status by 30 of the 50 state governments. Although falling short of official status, English is also an important language in several former colonies and protectorates of the United Kingdom, such as Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Malaysia, and the United Arab Emirates. English is not a de jure official language of Israel; however, the country has maintained official language use a de facto role for English since the British mandate.