Theory of language

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Theory of language is a topic from philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. It has the goal of answering the questions “What is language?”; "Why do languages have the properties they have?"; or "What is the origin of language?".

Even though much of the research in linguistics is descriptive or prescriptive, there exists an underlying assumption that terminological and methodological choices reflect the researcher's opinion of language. Linguists are divided into different schools of thinking, with the nature–nurture debate as the main divide. Some linguistics conferences and journals are focussed on a specific theory of language, while others disseminate a variety of views.

Like in other human and social sciences, theories in linguistics can be divided into humanistic and sociobiological approaches. Same terms, for example 'rationalism', 'functionalism', 'formalism' and 'constructionism', are used with different meanings in different contexts.

Humanistic theories

Humanistic theories consider people as having an agentive role in the social construction of language. Language is primarily seen as a sociocultural phenomenon. This tradition emphasises culture, nurture, creativity and diversity. A classical rationalist approach to language stems from the philosophy Age of Enlightenment. Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas and Antoine Arnauld believed that people had created language in a step-by-step process to serve their psychological need to communicate with each other. Thus, language is thought of as a rational human invention.

Cultural–historical approaches

During the 19th century, when sociological questions remained under psychology, languages and language change were thought of as arising from human psychology and the collective unconscious mind of the community, shaped by its history, as argued by Moritz Lazarus, Heymann Steinthal and Wilhelm Wundt. Advocates of Völkerpsychologie ('folk psychology') regarded language as Volksgeist; a social phenomenon conceived as the 'spirit of the nation'.

Wundt claimed that the human mind becomes organised according to the principles of syllogistic reasoning with social progress and education. He argued for a binary-branching model for the description of the mind, and syntax. Folk psychology was imported to North American linguistics by Franz Boas and Leonard Bloomfield who were the founders of a school of thought which was later nicknamed 'American structuralism'.

Folk psychology became associated with German nationalism, and after World War I Bloomfield apparently replaced Wundt's structural psychology with Albert Paul Weiss's behavioral psychology; although Wundtian notions remained elementary for his linguistic analysis. The Bloomfieldian school of linguistics was eventually reformed as a sociobiological approach by Noam Chomsky (see 'generative grammar' below).

Since generative grammar's popularity began to wane towards the end of the 20th century, there has been a new wave of cultural anthropological approaches to the language question sparking a modern debate on the relationship of language and culture. Participants include Daniel Everett, Jesse Prinz, Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson.

Structuralism: a sociological–semiotic theory

The study of culture and language developed in a different direction in Europe where Émile Durkheim successfully separated sociology from psychology, thus establishing it as an autonomous science. Ferdinand de Saussure likewise argued for the autonomy of linguistics from psychology. He created a semiotic theory which would eventually give rise to the movement in human sciences known as structuralism, followed by functionalism or functional structuralism, post-structuralism and other similar tendencies. The names structuralism and functionalism are derived from Durkheim's modification of Herbert Spencer's organicism which draws an analogy between social structures and the organs of an organism, each necessitated by its function.

Saussure approaches the essence of language from two sides. For the one, he borrows ideas from Steinthal and Durkheim, concluding that language is a 'social fact'. For the other, he creates a theory of language as a system in and for itself which arises from the association of concepts and words or expressions. Thus, language is a dual system of interactive sub-systems: a conceptual system and a system of linguistic forms. Neither of these can exist without the other because, in Saussure's notion, there are no (proper) expressions without meaning, but also no (organised) meaning without words or expressions. Language as a system does not arise from the physical world, but from the contrast between the concepts, and the contrast between the linguistic forms.

Functionalism: language as a tool for communication

There was a shift of focus in sociology in the 1920s, from structural to functional explanation, or the adaptation of the social 'organism' to its environment. Post-Saussurean linguists, led by the Prague linguistic circle, began to study the functional value of the linguistic structure, with communication taken as the primary function of language in the meaning 'task' or 'purpose'. These notions translated into an increase of interest in pragmatics, with a discourse perspective (the analysis of full texts) added to the multilayered interactive model of structural linguistics. This gave rise to functional linguistics.

Formalism: language as a mathematical–semiotic system

Structural and formal linguist Louis Hjelmslev considered the systemic organisation of the bilateral linguistic system fully mathematical, rejecting the psychological and sociological aspect of linguistics altogether. He considered linguistics as the comparison of the structures of all languages using formal grammars – semantic and discourse structures included. Hjelmslev's idea is sometimes referred to as 'formalism'.

Although generally considered as a structuralist, Lucien Tesnière regarded meaning as giving rise to expression, but not vice versa, at least as regards the relationship between semantics and syntax. He considered the semantic plane as psychological, but syntax as being based on the necessity to break the two-dimensional semantic representation into linear form.

Post-structuralism: language as a societal tool

The Saussurean idea of language as an interaction of the conceptual system and the expressive system was elaborated in philosophy, anthropology and other fields of human sciences by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and many others. This movement was interested in the Durkheimian concept of language as a social fact or a rule-based code of conduct; but eventually rejected the structuralist idea that the individual cannot change the norm. Post-structuralists study how language affects our understanding of reality thus serving as a tool of shaping society.

Language as an artificial construct

While the humanistic tradition stemming from 19th century Völkerpsychologie emphasises the unconscious nature of the social construction of language, some perspectives of post-structuralism and social constructionism regard human languages as man-made rather than natural. At this end of the spectrum, structural linguist Eugenio Coșeriu laid emphasis on the intentional construction of language. Daniel Everett has likewise approached the question of language construction from the point of intentionality and free will.

There were also some contacts between structural linguists and the creators of constructed languages. For example, Saussure's brother René de Saussure was an Esperanto activist, and the French functionalist André Martinet served as director of the International Auxiliary Language Association.

Sociobiological theories

In contrast to humanistic linguistics, sociobiological approaches consider language as a biological phenomena. Approaches to language as part of cultural evolution can be roughly divided into two main groups: genetic determinism which argues that languages stem from the human genome; and social Darwinism, as envisioned by August Schleicher and Max Müller, which applies principles and methods of evolutionary biology to linguistics. Because sociobiogical theories have been labelled as chauvinistic in the past, modern approaches, including Dual inheritance theory and memetics, aim to provide more sustainable solutions to the study of biology's role in language.

Language as a genetically inherited phenomenon

Strong version ('rationalism')

The role of genes in language formation has been discussed and studied extensively. Proposing generative grammar, Noam Chomsky argues that language is fully caused by a random genetic mutation, and that linguistics is the study of universal grammar, or the structure in question. Others, including Ray Jackendoff, point out that the innate language component could be the result of a series of evolutionary adaptations; Steven Pinker argues that, because of these, people are born with a language instinct.

The random and the adaptational approach are sometimes referred to as formalism (or structuralism) and functionalism (or adaptationism), respectively, as a parallel to debates between advocates of structural and functional explanation in biology. Also known as biolinguistics, the study of linguistic structures is parallelised with that of natural formations such as ferromagnetic droplets and botanic forms. This approach became highly controversial at the end of the 20th century due to a lack of empirical support for genetics as an explanation of linguistic structures.

More recent anthropological research aims to avoid genetic determinism. Behavioural ecology and dual inheritance theory, the study of gene–culture co-evolution, emphasise the role of culture as a human invention in shaping the genes, rather than vice versa. It is known, for example, that since early humans started developing their language, the process paved way for genetic changes that would affect the vocal tract.

Weak version ('empiricism')

Some former generative grammarians argue that genes may nonetheless have an indirect effect on abstract features of language. This makes up yet another approach referred to as 'functionalism' which makes a weaker claim with respect to genetics. Instead of arguing for a specific innate structure, it is suggested that human physiology and neurological organisation may give rise to linguistic phenomena in a more abstract way.

Based on a comparison of structures from multiple languages, John A. Hawkins suggests that the brain, as a syntactic parser, may find it easier to process some word orders than others, thus explaining their prevalence. This theory remains to be confirmed by psycholinguistic studies.

Conceptual metaphor theory from George Lakoff's cognitive linguistics hypothesises that people have inherited from lower animals the ability for deductive reasoning based on visual thinking, which explains why languages make so much use of visual metaphors.

Languages as species

It was thought in early evolutionary biology that languages and species can be studied according to the same principles and methods. The idea of languages and cultures as fighting for living space became highly controversial as it was accused of being a pseudoscience that caused two world wars, and social Darwinism was banished from humanities by 1945. In the concepts of Schleicher and Müller, both endorsed by Charles Darwin, languages could be either organisms or populations.

A neo-Darwinian version of this idea was introduced as memetics by Richard Dawkins in 1976. In this thinking, ideas and cultural units, including words, are compared to viruses or replicators. Although meant as a softer alternative to genetic determinism, memetics has been widely discredited as pseudoscience, and it has failed to establish itself as a recognised field of scientific research. The language–species analogy nonetheless continues to enjoy popularity in linguistics and other human sciences. Since the 1990s there have been numerous attempts to revive it in various guises. As Jamin Pelkey explains,

"Theorists who explore such analogies usually feel obliged to pin language to some specific sub-domain of biotic growth. William James selects “zoölogical evolution”, William Croft prefers botanical evolution, but most theorists zoom in to more microbiotic levels – some claiming that linguistic phenomena are analogous to the cellular level and others arguing for the genetic level of biotic growth. For others, language is a parasite; for others still, language is a virus ... The disagreements over grounding analogies do not stop here."

Like many other approaches to linguistics, these, too, are collectively called 'functionalism'. They include various frameworks of usage-based linguistics, language as a complex adaptive system, construction grammar, emergent linguistics, and others.

Early Modern English

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Modern_English 

Early Modern English
Shakespeare's English, King James English
English
William Shakespeare's Sonnet 132 in the 1609 Quarto
Region	England, Southern Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British colonies
Era	developed into Modern English in the late 17th century
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic North Sea Germanic Anglo-Frisian Anglic Early Modern English
Early forms	Proto-Indo-European Proto-Germanic Old English Middle English
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
ISO 639-6	emen
Glottolog	None
IETF	en-emodeng
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Early Modern English or Early New English (sometimes abbreviated EModE, EMnE, or EME) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle English, in the late 15th century, to the transition to Modern English, in the mid-to-late 17th century.

Before and after the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603, the emerging English standard began to influence the spoken and written Middle Scots of Scotland.

The grammatical and orthographical conventions of literary English in the late 16th century and the 17th century are still very influential on modern Standard English. Most modern readers of English can understand texts written in the late phase of Early Modern English, such as the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare, and they have greatly influenced Modern English.

Texts from the earlier phase of Early Modern English, such as the late-15th century Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) and the mid-16th century Gorboduc (1561), may present more difficulties but are still obviously closer to Modern English grammar, lexicon, and phonology than are 14th-century Middle English texts, such as the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

History

English Renaissance

See also: English Renaissance

Transition from Middle English

Further information: Late Middle English

The change from Middle English to Early Modern English was not just a matter of changes of vocabulary or pronunciation; a new era in the history of English was beginning.

An era of linguistic change in a language with large variations in dialect was replaced by a new era of a more standardised language, with a richer lexicon and an established (and lasting) literature.

• 1476 – William Caxton starts printing in Westminster; however, the language that he uses reflects the variety of styles and dialects used by the authors who originally wrote the material.

Tudor period (1485–1603)

Further information: Tudor period and English Renaissance

• 1485 – Caxton publishes Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, the first print bestseller in English. Malory's language, while archaic in some respects, is clearly Early Modern and is possibly a Yorkshire or Midlands dialect.
• 1491 or 1492 – Richard Pynson starts printing in London; his style tends to prefer Chancery Standard, the form of English used by the government.

Henry VIII

• c. 1509 – Pynson becomes the King's official printer.
• From 1525 – Publication of William Tyndale's Bible translation, which was initially banned.
• 1539 – Publication of the Great Bible, the first officially-authorised Bible in English. Edited by Myles Coverdale, it is largely from the work of Tyndale. It is read to congregations regularly in churches, which familiarises much of the population of England with a standard form of the language.
• 1549 – Publication of the first Book of Common Prayer in English, under the supervision of Thomas Cranmer (revised 1552 and 1662), which standardises much of the wording of church services. Some have argued that since attendance at prayer book services was required by law for many years, the repetitive use of its language helped to standardise Modern English even more than the King James Bible (1611) did.
• 1557 – Publication of Tottel's Miscellany.

Elizabethan English

Title page of Gorboduc (printed 1565). The Tragedie of Gorbodvc, whereof three Actes were written by Thomas Nortone, and the two laste by Thomas Sackuyle. Sett forthe as the same was shewed before the Qvenes most excellent Maiestie, in her highnes Court of Whitehall, the .xviii. day of January, Anno Domini .1561. By the Gentlemen of Thynner Temple in London.

Elizabethan era (1558–1603)

• 1582 – The Rheims and Douai Bible is completed, and the New Testament is released in Rheims, France, in 1582. It is the first complete English translation of the Bible that is officially sponsored and carried out by the Catholic Church (earlier translations into English, especially of the Psalms and Gospels existed as far back as the 9th century, but it is the first Catholic English translation of the full Bible). Though the Old Testament is ready complete, it is not published until 1609–1610, when it is released in two volumes. While it does not make a large impact on the English language at large, it certainly plays a role in the development of English, especially in the world's heavily-Catholic English-speaking areas.
• Christopher Marlowe, fl. 1586–1593
• 1592 – The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd
• c. 1590 to c. 1612 – Shakespeare's plays written.
  See also: Chronology of Shakespeare's plays and Shakespeare's influence

Further information: Elizabethan literature and Elizabethan theatre

17th century

Jacobean and Caroline eras

Jacobean era (1603–1625)

Further information: Jacobean era

• 1609 – Shakespeare's sonnets published
• Other playwrights:
  • Ben Jonson
  • Thomas Dekker
  • Beaumont and Fletcher (Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher)
  • John Webster
• 1607 – The first successful permanent English colony in the New World, Jamestown, is established in Virginia. Early vocabulary specific to American English comes from indigenous languages (such as moose, racoon).
• 1611 – The King James Version is published, largely based on Tyndale's translation. It remains the standard Bible in the Church of England for many years.
• 1623 – Shakespeare's First Folio published

Caroline era and English Civil War (1625–1649)

Further information: Caroline era and English Civil War

• 1630–1651 – William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony, writes in his journal. It will become Of Plymouth Plantation, one of the earliest texts written in the American Colonies.
• 1647 – Publication of the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio.

Interregnum and Restoration

The English Civil War and the Interregnum were times of social and political upheaval and instability. The dates for Restoration literature are a matter of convention and differ markedly from genre to genre. In drama, the "Restoration" may last until 1700, but in poetry, it may last only until 1666, the annus mirabilis (year of wonders), and in prose lasts until 1688. With the increasing tensions over succession and the corresponding rise in journalism and periodicals, or until possibly 1700, when those periodicals grew more stabilised.

• 1651 – Publication of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.
• 1660-1669 – Samuel Pepys writes in his diary, which will become an important eyewitness account of the Restoration Era.
• 1662 – New edition of the Book of Common Prayer, largely based on the 1549 and subsequent editions. It long remains a standard work in English.
• 1667 – Publication of Paradise Lost by John Milton and of Annus Mirabilis by John Dryden.

Development to Modern English

Main article: Modern English

The 17th-century port towns and their forms of speech gain influence over the old county towns. From around the 1690s onwards, England experienced a new period of internal peace and relative stability, which encouraged the arts including literature.

Modern English can be taken to have emerged fully by the beginning of the Georgian era in 1714, but English orthography remained somewhat fluid until the publication of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, in 1755.

The towering importance of William Shakespeare over the other Elizabethan authors was the result of his reception during the 17th and the 18th centuries, which directly contributes to the development of Standard English. Shakespeare's plays are therefore still familiar and comprehensible 400 years after they were written, but the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, which had been written only 200 years earlier, are considerably more difficult for the average modern reader.

Orthography

Shakespeare's writings are universally associated with Early Modern English

The orthography of Early Modern English was fairly similar to that of today, but spelling was unstable. Early Modern English, as well as Modern English, inherited orthographical conventions predating the Great Vowel Shift.

Early Modern English spelling was similar to Middle English orthography. Certain changes were made, however, sometimes for reasons of etymology (as with the silent ⟨b⟩ that was added to words like debt, doubt and subtle).

Early Modern English orthography had a number of features of spelling that have not been retained:

• The letter ⟨S⟩ had two distinct lowercase forms: ⟨s⟩ (short s), as is still used today, and ⟨ſ⟩ (long s). The short s was always used at the end of a word and often elsewhere. The long s, if used, could appear anywhere except at the end of a word. The double lowercase S was written variously ⟨ſſ⟩, ⟨ſs⟩ or ⟨ß⟩ (the last ligature is still used in German ß). That is similar to the alternation between medial (σ) and final lower case sigma (ς) in Greek.
• ⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ were not considered two distinct letters then but as still different forms of the same letter. Typographically, ⟨v⟩ was frequent at the start of a word and ⟨u⟩ elsewhere: hence vnmoued (for modern unmoved) and loue (for love). The modern convention of using ⟨u⟩ for the vowel sounds and ⟨v⟩ for the consonant appears to have been introduced in the 1630s. Also, ⟨w⟩ was frequently represented by ⟨vv⟩.
• Similarly, ⟨i⟩ and ⟨j⟩ were also still considered not as two distinct letters, but as different forms of the same letter: hence ioy for joy and iust for just. Again, the custom of using ⟨i⟩ as a vowel and ⟨j⟩ as a consonant began in the 1630s.
• The letter ⟨þ⟩ (thorn) was still in use during the Early Modern English period but was increasingly limited to handwritten texts. In Early Modern English printing, ⟨þ⟩ was represented by the Latin ⟨Y⟩ (see Ye olde), which appeared similar to thorn in blackletter typeface ⟨𝖞⟩. Thorn had become nearly totally disused by the late Early Modern English period, the last vestiges of the letter being its ligatures, y^e (thee), y^t (that), y^u (thou), which were still seen occasionally in the 1611 King James Version and in Shakespeare's Folios.
• A silent ⟨e⟩ was often appended to words, as in ſpeake and cowarde. The last consonant was sometimes doubled when the ⟨e⟩ was added: hence manne (for man) and runne (for run).
• The sound /ʌ/ was often written ⟨o⟩ (as in son): hence ſommer, plombe (for modern summer, plumb).
• The final syllable of words like public was variously spelt but came to be standardised as -ick. The modern spellings with -ic did not come into use until the mid-18th century.
• ⟨y⟩ was often used instead of ⟨i⟩.
• The vowels represented by ⟨ee⟩ and ⟨e_e⟩ (for example in meet and mete) changed, and ⟨ea⟩ became an alternative.

Many spellings had still not been standardised, however. For example, he was spelled as both he and hee in the same sentence in Shakespeare's plays and elsewhere.

Phonology

Consonants

Most consonant sounds of Early Modern English have survived into present-day English; however, there are still a few notable differences in pronunciation:

• Today's "silent" consonants found in the consonant clusters of such words as knot, gnat, sword were still fully pronounced up until the mid-to-late 16th century and thus possibly by Shakespeare, though they were fully reduced by the early 17th century. The digraph <ght>, in words like night, thought, and daughter, originally pronounced [xt] in much older English, was probably reduced to simply [t] (as it is today) or at least heavily reduced in sound to something like [ht], [çt], or [ft]. It seems likely that much variation existed for many of these words.
• The now-silent l of would and should may have persisted in being pronounced as late as 1700 in Britain and perhaps several decades longer in the British American colonies. The l in could, however, first appearing in the early 16th century, was presumably never pronounced.
• The modern phoneme /ʒ/ was not documented as occurring until the second half of the 17th century. Likely, that phoneme in a word like vision was pronounced as /zj/ and in measure as /z/.
• Most words with the spelling ⟨wh⟩, such as what, where, and whale, were still pronounced [ʍ] (listen), rather than [w] (listen). That means, for example, that wine and whine were still pronounced differently, unlike in most varieties of English today.
• Early Modern English was rhotic. In other words, the r was always pronounced, but the precise nature of the typical rhotic consonant remains unclear. It was, however, certainly one of the following:
  • The "R" of most varieties of English today: [ɹ̠] (listen)
  • The "trilled or rolled R": [r] (listen)
  • The "retroflex R": [ɻ] (listen).
• In Early Modern English, the precise nature of the light and dark variants of the l consonant, respectively [l] (listen) and [ɫ] (listen), remains unclear.
• Word-final ⟨ng⟩, as in sing, was still pronounced /ŋɡ/ until the late 16th century, when it began to coalesce into the usual modern pronunciation, [ŋ].
• H-dropping at the start of words was common, as it still is in informal English throughout most of England. In loanwords taken from Latin, Greek, or any Romance language, a written h was usually mute well into modern English times, e.g. in heritage, history, hermit, hostage, and still today in heir, honor, hour etc.
• With words originating from or passed through ancient Greek, th was commonly pronounced as t, e.g. theme, theater, cathedral, anthem; this is still retained in some proper names as Thomas, Anthony and a few common nouns like thyme.

Pure vowels and diphthongs

The following information primarily comes from studies of the Great Vowel Shift; see the related chart.

• The modern English phoneme /aɪ/ (listen), as in glide, rhyme and eye, was [ɘi] and later [əi]. Early Modern rhymes indicate that [əi] was also the vowel that was used at the end of words like happy, melody and busy.
• /aʊ/ (listen), as in now, out and ploughed, was [əu ~ əʊ] (listen).
• /ɛ/ (listen), as in fed, elm and hen, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today or perhaps a slightly higher [ɛ̝] (listen), sometimes approaching [ɪ] (listen) (as it still retains in the word pretty).
• /eɪ/ (listen), as in name, case and sake, was a long monophthong. It shifted from [æː] (listen) to [ɛː] (listen) and finally to [eː] (listen). Earlier in Early Modern English, mat and mate were near-homophones, with a longer vowel in the second word. Thus, Shakespeare rhymed words like haste, taste and waste with last and shade with sad. The more open pronunciation remains in some dialects, notably in Scotland, Northern England, and perhaps Ireland. During the 17th century, the phoneme variably merged with the phoneme [ɛi] (listen) as in day, weigh, and the merger survived into standard forms of Modern English, though a few dialects kept these vowels distinct at least to the 20th century (see pane–pain merger).
• /iː/ (listen) (typically spelled ⟨ee⟩ or ⟨ie⟩) as in see, bee and meet, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today, but it had not yet merged with the phoneme represented by the spellings ⟨ea⟩ or ⟨ei⟩ (and perhaps ⟨ie⟩, particularly with fiend, field and friend), as in east, meal and feat, which were pronounced with [eː] (listen) or [ɛ̝ː]. However, words like breath, dead and head may have already split off towards /ɛ/ (listen)).
• /ɪ/ (listen), as in bib, pin and thick, was more or less the same as the phoneme represents today.
• /oʊ/ (listen), as in stone, bode and yolk, was [oː] (listen) or [o̞ː] (listen). The phoneme was probably just beginning the process of merging with the phoneme [ou], as in grow, know and mow, without yet achieving today's complete merger. The old pronunciation remains in some dialects, such as in Yorkshire and Scotland.
• /ɒ/ (listen), as in rod, top and pot, was [ɒ] or [ɔ] (listen).
• /ɔː/ (listen), as in taut, taught and law, was [ɔː] or [ɑː] (listen).
• /ɔɪ/ (listen), as in boy, choice and toy, is even less clear than other vowels. By the late-16th century, the similar but distinct phonemes /ɔɪ/, /ʊi/ and /əɪ/ all existed. By the late-17th century, only /ɔɪ/ remained. Because those phonemes were in such a state of flux during the whole Early Modern period (with evidence of rhyming occurring among them as well as with the precursor to /aɪ/), scholars often assume only the most neutral possibility for the pronunciation of /ɔɪ/ as well as its similar phonemes in Early Modern English: [əɪ] (which, if accurate, would constitute an early instance of the line–loin merger since /aɪ/ had not yet fully developed in English).
• /ʌ/ (listen) (as in drum, enough and love) and /ʊ/ (listen) (as in could, full, put) had not yet split and so were both pronounced in the vicinity of [ɤ] (listen).
• /uː/ (listen) was about the same as the phoneme represents today but occurred in not only words like food, moon and stool but also all other words spelled with ⟨oo⟩ like blood, cook and foot. The nature of the vowel sound in the latter group of words, however, is further complicated by the fact that the vowel for some of those words was shortened: either beginning or already in the process of approximating the Early Modern English [ɤ] (listen) and later [ʊ] (listen). For instance, at certain stages of the Early Modern period or in certain dialects (or both), doom and come rhymed; this is certainly true in Shakespeare's writing. That phonological split among the ⟨oo⟩ words was a catalyst for the later foot–strut split and is called "early shortening" by John C. Wells.^[20] The ⟨oo⟩ words that were pronounced as something like [ɤ] (listen) seem to have included blood, brood, doom, good and noon.
• /ɪʊ̯/ or /iu̯/ occurred in words spelled with ew or ue such as due and dew. In most dialects of Modern English, it became /juː/ and /uː/ by yod-dropping and so do, dew and due are now perfect homophones in most American pronunciations, but a distinction between the two phonemes remains in other versions of English.

Rhotic vowels

The r sound (the phoneme /r/) was probably always pronounced with following vowel sounds (more in the style of today's General American, West Country English, Irish accents and Scottish accents; although in the case of the Scottish accent the R is rolled, and less like today's typical London or Received Pronunciation). Furthermore, /ɛ/, /ɪ/ and /ʌ/ were not necessarily merged before /r/, as they are in most modern English dialects. The stressed modern phoneme /ɜːr/, when it is spelled ⟨er⟩, ⟨ear⟩ and perhaps ⟨or⟩ (as in clerk, earth, or divert), had a vowel sound with an a-like quality, perhaps about [ɐɹ] or [äɹ]. With the spelling ⟨or⟩, the sound may have been backed, more toward [ɒɹ] in words like worth and word. In some pronunciations, words like fair and fear, with the spellings ⟨air⟩ and ⟨ear⟩, rhymed with each other, and words with the spelling ⟨are⟩, such as prepare and compare, were sometimes pronounced with a more open vowel sound, like the verbs are and scar. See Great Vowel Shift § Later mergers for more information.

Particular words

Nature was pronounced approximately as [ˈnɛːtəɹ] and may have rhymed with letter or, early on, even latter. One may have been pronounced own, with both one and other using the era's long GOAT vowel, rather than today's STRUT vowels. Tongue derived from the sound of tong and rhymed with song.

Grammar

Pronouns

Beginning of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the 1611 King James Version. God who at sundry times, and in divers manners, spake in times past unto the Fathers by the Prophets, Hath in these last dayes spoken unto us by his Sonne, whom he hath appointed heire of all things, by whom also he made the worlds, who being the brightnesse of his glory, and the expresse image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when hee had by himselfe purged our sinnes, sate down on ye right hand of the Maiestie on high, Being made so much better then the Angels, as hee hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent Name then they.

Early Modern English had two second-person personal pronouns: thou, the informal singular pronoun, and ye, the plural (both formal and informal) pronoun and the formal singular pronoun.

"Thou" and "ye" were both common in the early-16th century (they can be seen, for example, in the disputes over Tyndale's translation of the Bible in the 1520s and the 1530s) but by 1650, "thou" seems old-fashioned or literary. It has effectively completely disappeared from Modern Standard English.

The translators of the King James Version of the Bible (begun 1604 and published 1611, while Shakespeare was at the height of his popularity) had a particular reason for keeping the informal "thou/thee/thy/thine" forms that were slowly beginning to fall out of spoken use, as it enabled them to match the Hebrew and Ancient Greek distinction between second person singular ("thou") and plural ("ye"). It was not to denote reverence (in the King James Version, God addresses individual people and even Satan as "thou") but only to denote the singular. Over the centuries, however, the very fact that "thou" was dropping out of normal use gave it a special aura and so it gradually and ironically came to be used to express reverence in hymns and in prayers.

Like other personal pronouns, thou and ye have different forms dependent on their grammatical case; specifically, the objective form of thou is thee, its possessive forms are thy and thine, and its reflexive or emphatic form is thyself.

The objective form of ye was you, its possessive forms are your and yours and its reflexive or emphatic forms are yourself and yourselves.

The older forms "mine" and "thine" had become "my" and "thy" before words beginning with a consonant other than h, and "mine" and "thine" were retained before words beginning with a vowel or an h, as in mine eyes or thine hand.

Personal pronouns in Early Modern English

		Nominative	Oblique	Genitive	Possessive
1st person	singular	I	me	my/mine[# 1]	mine
	plural	we	us	our	ours
2nd person	singular informal	thou	thee	thy/thine[# 1]	thine
	singular formal	ye, you	you	your	yours
	plural
3rd person	singular	he/she/it	him/her/it	his/her/his (it)[# 2]	his/hers/his[# 2]
	plural	they	them	their	theirs

1. 
   

2. From the early Early Modern English period up until the 17th century, his was the possessive of the third-person neuter it as well as of the third-person masculine he. Genitive "it" appears once in the 1611 King James Bible (Leviticus 25:5) as groweth of it owne accord.

Verbs

Tense and number

During the Early Modern period, the verb inflections became simplified as they evolved towards their modern forms:

• The third-person singular present lost its alternate inflections: -eth and -th became obsolete, and -s survived. (Both forms can be seen together in Shakespeare: "With her, that hateth thee and hates us all".)
• The plural present form became uninflected. Present plurals had been marked with -en and singulars with -th or -s (-th and -s survived the longest, especially with the singular use of is, hath and doth). Marked present plurals were rare throughout the Early Modern period and -en was probably used only as a stylistic affectation to indicate rural or old-fashioned speech.
• The second-person singular indicative was marked in both the present and past tenses with -st or -est (for example, in the past tense, walkedst or gav'st). Since the indicative past was not and still is not otherwise marked for person or number, the loss of thou made the past subjunctive indistinguishable from the indicative past for all verbs except to be.

Modal auxiliaries

The modal auxiliaries cemented their distinctive syntactical characteristics during the Early Modern period. Thus, the use of modals without an infinitive became rare (as in "I must to Coventry"; "I'll none of that"). The use of modals' present participles to indicate aspect (as in "Maeyinge suffer no more the loue & deathe of Aurelio" from 1556), and of their preterite forms to indicate tense (as in "he follow'd Horace so very close, that of necessity he must fall with him") also became uncommon.

Some verbs ceased to function as modals during the Early Modern period. The present form of must, mot, became obsolete. Dare also lost the syntactical characteristics of a modal auxiliary and evolved a new past form (dared), distinct from the modal durst.

Perfect and progressive forms

The perfect of the verbs had not yet been standardised to use only the auxiliary verb "to have". Some took as their auxiliary verb "to be", such as this example from the King James Version: "But which of you... will say unto him... when he is come from the field, Go and sit down..." [Luke XVII:7]. The rules for the auxiliaries for different verbs were similar to those that are still observed in German and French (see unaccusative verb).

The modern syntax used for the progressive aspect ("I am walking") became dominant by the end of the Early Modern period, but other forms were also common such as the prefix a- ("I am a-walking") and the infinitive paired with "do" ("I do walk"). Moreover, the to be + -ing verb form could be used to express a passive meaning without any additional markers: "The house is building" could mean "The house is being built".

Vocabulary

A number of words that are still in common use in Modern English have undergone semantic narrowing.

The use of the verb "to suffer" in the sense of "to allow" survived into Early Modern English, as in the phrase "suffer the little children" of the King James Version, but it has mostly been lost in Modern English.

Also, this period reveals a curious case of one of the earliest Russian borrowings to English (which is historically a rare occasion itself); at least as early as 1600, the word "steppe" (rus. степь) first appeared in English in William Shakespeare's comedy "A Midsummer Night's Dream". It is believed that this is a possible indirect borrowing via either German or French.

The substantial borrowing of Latin and sometimes Greek words for abstract concepts, begun in Middle English, continued unabated, often terms for abstract concepts not available in English.

The genitives my, mine, thy, and thine are used as possessive adjectives before a noun, or as possessive pronouns without a noun. All four forms are used as possessive adjectives: mine and thine are used before nouns beginning in a vowel sound, or before nouns beginning in the letter h, which was usually silent (e.g. thine eyes and mine heart, which was pronounced as mine art) and my and thy before consonants (thy mother, my love). However, only mine and thine are used as possessive pronouns, as in it is thine and they were mine (not *they were my).