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Great Vowel Shift
A major factor separating Middle English from Modern English is known as the
Great Vowel Shift, a radical change in pronunciation during the 15th, 16th and
17th Century, as a result of which long vowel sounds began to be made higher
and further forward in the mouth (short vowel sounds were largely unchanged).
In fact, the shift probably started very gradually some centuries before 1400, and
continued long after 1700 (some subtle changes arguably continue even to this
day).

The causes of the shift are still highly debated, although an important factor may
have been the very fact of the large intake of loanwords from the Romance
languages of Europe during this time, which required a different kind of
pronunciation. It was, however, a peculiarly English phenomenon, and
contemporary and neighbouring languages like French, German and Spanish
were entirely unaffected. It affected words of both native ancestry as well as
borrowings from French and Latin.

In Middle English (for instance in the time of Chaucer), the long vowels were
generally pronounced very much like the Latin-derived Romance languages of
Europe (e.g. sheep would have been pronounced more like “shape”; me as The Great Vowel Shift
“may”; mine as “meen”; shire as “sheer”; mate as “maat”; out as “oot”; house as (from ELLO)
“hoose”; flour as “floor”; boot as “boat”; mode as “mood”; etc). William the
Conqueror’s “Domesday Book”, for example, would have been pronounced
“doomsday”, as indeed it is often erroneously spelled today. After the Great Vowel Shift, the pronunciations of these and similar words
would have been much more like they are spoken today. The Shift comprises a series of connected changes, with changes in one
vowel pushing another to change in order to "keep its distance", although there is some dispute as to the order of these movements.
The changes also proceeded at different times and speeds in different parts of the country.

The Great Vowel Shift gave rise to many of the oddities of English pronunciation, and now obscures the relationships between many
English words and their foreign counterparts. The spellings of some words changed to reflect the change in pronunciation
(e.g. stone from stan, rope from rap, dark from derk, barn from bern, heart from herte, etc), but most did not. In some cases, two
separate forms with different meaning continued (e.g. parson, which is the old pronunciation of person). The effects of the vowel shift
generally occurred earlier, and were more pronounced, in the south, and some northern words like uncouth and dour still retain their
pre-vowel shift pronunciation (“uncooth” and “door” rather than “uncowth” and “dowr”). Busy has kept its old West Midlands spelling,
but an East Midlands/London pronunciation; bury has a West Midlands spelling but a Kentish pronunciation. It is also due to
irregularities and regional variations in the vowel shift that we have ended up with inconsistencies in pronunciation such as food (as
compared to good, stood, blood, etc) and roof (which still has variable pronunciation), and the different pronunciations of the “o”
in shove, move, hove, etc.
SOUND CLIP
Other changes in spelling and pronunciation also occurred during this period.  Great Vowel Shift pronunciation changes (35 sec)
(from National Science Foundation)
Click here for transcript
 The Old English consonant X - technically a “voiceless velar fricative”,
pronounced as in the “ch” of loch or Bach - disappeared from English, and the
Old English word burX (place), for example, was replaced with “-burgh”, “-
borough”, “-brough” or “-bury” in many place names. In some cases, voiceless
fricatives began to be pronounced like an “f” (e.g. laugh, cough). Many other
consonants ceased to be pronounced at all (e.g. the final “b” in words
like dumb and comb; the “l” between some vowels and consonants such
as half, walk, talk and folk; the initial “k” or “g” in words
like knee, knight, gnaw and gnat; etc). As late as the 18th Century, the “r” after
a vowel gradually lost its force, although the “r” before a vowel remained
unchanged (e.g. render, terror, etc), unlike in American usage where the “r” is
fully pronounced.

So, while modern English speakers can read Chaucer’s Middle English (with
some difficulty admittedly), Chaucer’s pronunciation would have been almost
completely unintelligible to the modern ear. The English of William
Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late 16th and early 17th Century,
on the other hand, would be accented, but quite understandable, and it has
much more in common with our language today than it does with the language
of Chaucer. Even in Shakespeare’s time, though, and probably for quite some
time afterwards, short vowels were almost interchangeable (e.g. not was often IMAGE
pronounced, and even written, as nat, when as whan, etc), and the
pronunciation of words like boiled as “byled”, join as “jine”, poison as
“pison”, merchant as “marchant”, certain as “sartin”, person as
“parson”, heard as “hard”, speak as “spake”, work as “wark”, etc, continued
well into the 19th Century. We retain even today the old pronunciations of a
few words like derby and clerk (as “darby” and “clark”), and place names
like Berkeley and Berkshire (as “Barkley” and “Barkshire”), except in America
where more phonetic pronunciations were adopted.
 
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The English Renaissance
The next wave of innovation in English vocabulary 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

Queen Elizabeth I presided over the English Renaissance

(from Wikipedia)
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.

Some scholars adopted Latin terms so excessively and awkwardly at this time that the derogatory term “inkhorn” was coined to
describe pedantic writers who borrowed the classics to create obscure and opulent terms, many of which have not survived.
Examples of inkhorn terms

The 17th Century penchant for classical language also influenced the spelling of words like debt and doubt, which had a silent “b”
added at this time out of deference to their Latin roots (debitum and dubitare respectively). For the same reason, island gained its
silent “s”, scissors its “c”, anchor, school and herb their “h”, people its “o” and victuals gained both a “c” and a “u”. In the same way,
Middle English perfet and verdit became perfect and verdict (the added “c” at least being pronounced in these
cases), faute and assaut became fault and assault, and aventure became adventure. However, this perhaps laudable attempt to bring
logic and reason into the apparent chaos of the language has actually had the effect of just adding to the chaos. Its cause was not
helped by examples such the “p” which was added to the start of ptarmigan with no etymological justification whatsoever other than
the fact that the Greek word for feather, ptera, started with a "p".

Whichever side of the debate one favours, however, it is fair to say that, 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.
 IMAGE

 
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Printing Press and Standardization
The final 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 The first book printed in English was “Recuyell of the Historyes
soon works in English became even more popular than books in of Troye” by Raoul Lefevre, translated by William Caxton in
Latin. 1473
(from John Rylands University Library)
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. For example, the word church could be spelled in 30 different ways, people in 22, receive in
45, she in 60 and though in an almost unbelievable 500 variations. The “-ing” participle (e.g. running) was said as “-and” in the north,
“-end” in the East Midlands, and “-ind” in the West Midlands (e.g. runnand, runnend, runnind). The "-eth" and "-th" verb endings used
in the south of the country (e.g. goeth) appear as "-es" and "-s" in the Northern and most of the north Midland area (e.g. goes), a
version which was ultimately to become the standard.

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, and modern spellings
of such, right, not, but, these, any, many, can, cannot, but, shall, should, could, ought, thorough, etc, 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.
 IMAGE

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
(e.g. booke and boke, axed and axyd) and his use of double letters and the final "e"
was haphazard at best
(e.g. had/hadd/hadde, dog/dogg/dogge, well/wel, which/whiche, fellow/felow/felowe/f
allow/fallowe, etc). 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 þe, 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 Early printing was a very labour-intensive
the word ye, which should therefore technically still be pronounced as “the”. It is only process
since the archaic spelling was revived for store signs (e.g. Ye Olde Pubbe) that the (from EHistLing)
"modern" pronunciation of ye has been used.

As the Early Modern period progressed, there was an increased use of double vowels (e.g. soon) or a silent final "e" (e.g. name) to
mark long vowels, and doubled consonants to mark a preceding short vowel (e.g. sitting), although there was much less consensus
about consonants at the end of words (e.g. bed, glad, well, glasse, etc). The letters "u" and "v", which had been more or less
interchangeable in Middle English, gradually became established as a vowel and a consonant respectively, as did "i" and "j". Also
during the 16th Century, the virgule (an oblique stroke /), which had been a very common mark of punctuation in Middle English, was
largely replaced by the comma; the period or full-stop was restricted to the end of sentences; semi-colons began to be used in
additon to colons (although the rules for their use were still unclear); quotation marks were used to mark direct speech; and capital
letters were used at the start of sentences and for proper names and important nouns. The grammarian John Hart was particularly
influential in these punctuation reforms.

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!
 
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The Bible
Two particularly influential milestones in English literature were published in the 16th and early 17th Century. In 1549, the “Book of Common
Prayer” (a translation of the Church liturgy in English, substantially revised in 1662) was introduced into English churches, followed in 1611 by
the Authorized, or King James, Version of “The Bible”, the culmination of more than two centuries of efforts to produce a Bible in the native
language of the people of England.

The “King James Bible” was compiled by a committee of 54 scholars and clerics, and published in 1611, in an attempt to standardize the
plethora of new Bibles that had sprung up over the preceding 70 years. It appears to be deliberately conservative, even backward-looking, both
in its vocabulary and its grammar, and presents many forms which had already largely fallen out of use, or were at least in the process of dying
out (e.g. digged for dug, gat and gotten for got, bare for bore, spake for spoke, clave for cleft, holpen for helped, wist for knew, etc), and several
archaic forms such as brethren, kine and twain. The "-eth" ending is used throughout for third person singular verbs, even though "-es" was
becoming much more common by the early 17th Century, and ye is used for the second person plural pronoun, rather than the more
common you.

The comparison below of the famous Beatitudes from Chapter 5 of the Gospel According to St. Matthew (in the Wycliffe, Tyndale and
Authorized versions respectively) gives an idea of the way the language developed over the period:

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 (even the word words was spelled in two different ways on the title page alone, as wordes and words).

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. Johnson’s dictionary included many flagrant examples of inkhorn terms which have not survived,
including digladation, cubiculary, incompossibility, clancular, denominable, opiniatry, ariolation, assation, ataraxy, deuteroscopy, disubitary, esurine, estuatio
n, indignate and others. Johnson also deliberately omitted from his dictionary several words he disliked or considered vulgar
(including bang, budge, fuss, gambler, shabby and touchy), but these useful words have clearly survived intact regardless of his opinions. Several of his
definitions appear deliberately jokey or politically motivated.

Since the 16th Century, there had been calls for the regulation and reform of what was increasingly seen as an unwieldy English language, including John
Cheke's 1569 proposal for the removal of all silent letters, and William Bullokar's 1580 recommendation of a new 37-letter alphabet (including 8 vowels, 4
"half-vowels" and 25 consonants) in order to aid and simplify spelling. There were even attempts (similarly unsuccessful) to ban certain words or phrases
that were considered in some way undesirable, words such
 as fib, banter, bigot, fop, flippant, flimsy, workmanship, selfsame, despoil, nowadays, furthermore and wherewithal, and phrases such as subject
matter, drive a bargain, handle a subject and bolster an argument.

But, by the early 18th Century, many more scholars had come to believe that the English language was chaotic and in desperate need of some firm rules.
Jonathan Swift, in his “Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue” of 1712, decried the “degeneration” of English and sought
to “purify” it and fix it forever in unchanging form, calling for the establishment of an Academy of the English Language similar to the Académie Française.
He was supported in this by other important writers like John Dryden and Daniel Defoe, but such an institution was never actually realized. (Interestingly, the
only country ever to set up an Academy for the English language was South Africa, in 1961).

In the wake of Johnson’s “Dictionary”, a plethora (one could even say a surfeit) of other dictionaries appeared, peaking in the period between 1840 and
1860, as well as many specialized dictionaries and glossaries. Thomas Sheridan attempted to tap into the zeitgeist, and looked to regulate English
pronunciation as well as its vocabulary and spelling. His book “British Education”, published in 1756, and unashamedly aimed at cultured British society,
particularly cultured Scottish society, purported to set the correct pronunciation of the English language, and it was both influential and popular. His son,
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, later gave us the unforgettable language excesses of Mrs. Malaprop.

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.
 
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Golden Age of English Literature
All languages tend to go through phases of intense generative activity, during IMAGE
which many new words are added to the language. One such peak for the
English language was the Early Modern period of the 16th to 18th Century, a
period sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of English Literature (other Newton's “Opticks” was published in English
peaks include the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th (from Wikipedia)
Century, and the computer and digital age of the late 20th Century, which is still continuing today). Between 1500 and 1650, an
estimated 10,000-12,000 new words were coined, about half of which are still in use today.
 Up until the 17th Century, English was rarely used for scholarly or scientific works, as it was not considered to possess the precision
or the gravitas of Latin or French. Thomas More, Isaac Newton, William Harvey and many other English scholars all wrote their works
in Latin and, even in the 18th Century, Edward Gibbon wrote his major works in French, and only then translated them into English.
Sir Francis Bacon, however, hedged his bets and wrote many of his works in both Latin and English and, taking his inspiration mainly
from Greek, coined several scientific words such as thermometer, pneumonia, skeleton and encyclopaedia. In 1704, Newton, having
written in Latin until that time, chose to write his “Opticks” in English, introducing in the process such words as lens, refraction, etc.
Over time, the rise of nationalism led to the increased use of the native spoken language rather than Latin, even as the medium of
intellectual communication.

Thomas Wyatt’s experimentation with different poetical forms during the early 16th Century, and particularly his introduction of the
sonnet from Europe, ensured that poetry would became the proving ground for several generations of English writers during a golden
age of English literature, and Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, John Dryden, Andrew Marvell,
Alexander Pope and many other rose to the challenge. Important English playwrights of the Elizabethan era include Christopher
Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster and of course Shakespeare.

The English scholar and classicist Sir Thomas Elyot went out of his way to find new words, and gave us words
like animate, describe, dedicate, esteem, maturity, exhaust and modesty in the early 16th Century.

 
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William Shakespeare
Whatever the merits of the other contributions to this golden age, though, 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. Skakespeare took advantage
of the relative freedom and flexibility and the protean nature of English at the time, and played free and easy with the already liberal
grammatical rules, for example in his use nouns as verbs, adverbs, adjectives and substantives - an early instance of the
“verbification” of nouns which modern language purists often decry - in phrases such as “he pageants us”, “it out-herods Herod”, dog
them at the heels, the good Brutus ghosted, “Lord Angelo dukes it well”, “uncle me no uncle”, etc.

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, including, but by no means limited to, bare-
faced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, aerial, gnarled, homicide, brittle, radiance, dwindle, puking, 
countless, submerged, vast, lack-lustre, bump, cranny, fitful, premeditated, assassination, courtship, eyeballs, ill-tuned, hot-blooded, l
aughable, dislocate, accommodation, eventful, pell-mell, aggravate, excellent, fretful, fragrant, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedan
t, gloomy, and hundreds of other terms still commonly used today. By some counts, almost one in ten of the words used by
Shakespeare were his own invention, a truly remarkable achievement (it is the equivalent of a new word here and then, after just a
few short phrases, another other new word here). 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.

He also introduced countless phrases in common use today, such as one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, brave new world, in my
mind’s eye, laughing stock, love is blind, star-crossed lovers, as luck would have it, fast and loose, once more into the breach, sea
change, there’s the rub, to the manner born, a foregone conclusion, beggars all description, it's Greek to me, a tower of
strength, make a virtue of necessity, brevity is the soul of wit, with bated breath, more in sorrow than in anger, truth will out, cold
comfort, cruel only to be kind, fool’s paradise and flesh and blood, among many others.

By the time of Shakespeare, word order had become more fixed in a subject-verb-object pattern, and English had developed a
complex auxiliary verb system, although to be was still commonly used as the auxiliary rather than the more modern to have (e.g. I
am come rather than I have come). Do was sometimes used as an auxiliary verb and sometimes not (e.g. say you so? or do you say
so?).