Events
STANDARDISATION: 1476 Caxtons Printing Press1755 Samuel Johnsons Dictionary = first major effort to impose order on langauge1551 John Hart wrote a text on how to use punctuation.1586 William Billokar began a series of texts giving rules on grammar.Periods
1600-1700 Early Modern EnglishGreat Vowel Shift caused a change of pronunciation
- Dialects mixing because of people moving south escape the black death.
- Increasing number of French loan words in the English language (make them sound less French)
- Vowels pronounced higher up in mouth
eg "route" can rhyme with "boot" or with "out"
eg décider In English we say dee-side, but in French the letter i is pronounced /i/ (with an ee sound).EME FEATURES
- Non standard and inconsistent authography eg intire (entire)
or sickness - sicknesse
- Anglo Saxon endings to indicate tense eg sayest, lacketh
- Non Standard syntax (sentence structure)
- Random capitalisation to indicate significant lexis
- Archaic lexis eg Maine (mainland)
- Absence of apostrophes
- Non Standard punctuation17th Century Latin Revival
Scholars became interested in classical texts
which introduced sophisticated Latinate words in an attempt to impress.
More than 1/2 modern English is from Latin.
Eg Encyclopedia, Temperature, Conspicuous, DignifiedMODERN ENGLISH 1700 - Present
Features:
- Acronyms eg UCAS
- Coinage - filling up a lexical gap with a new word. eg Grudge, Jazz
- Borrowing - tomato, potato, spaghetti, curry
- Affixation - (prefixes) IMmortal, OVERdone, SUBway, UNDERpants
- Compounding - combined morphemes eg Microwave, internet
- Blends eg Heliport, Brunch, Frenemy, Bromance
- Clipping - shortening a word to make it easier to say eg quote, maths, dorm
- Neologisms - new words eg hype, plonker, chatline
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