Group : 305 a name : Xidirova Mahliyo

Group : 305 A

Name : Xidirova Mahliyo

7th seminar

1 Phonetic peculiarities of Early Modern English

We know that most consonant sounds of Early Modern English have survived into Modern 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 presumably by Shakespeare, though they were fully reduced by the early 17th century. The digraph , 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.

In Early Modern English, the precise nature of the light and dark variants of the l consonant, respectively [l] and [ɫ] 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.

The modern English phoneme /aɪ/ , 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.

2 Dialects of Early Modern English

In actual fact that there are 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.

3 Development of vocabulary in Early Modern English period

Early modern english has a huge impact on modern englis. hA 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.

4 Grammar peculiarities of Early modern English: the development of nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. As in modern English, the only regular noun inflection was the -s ending of the genitive and plural: irregular plurals were mostly the same as those that have survived into recent English. The use of an apostrophe in the genitive singular was optional in the sixteenth century; it was frequent in the seventeenth, but only became established around 1700. In the genitive plural the apostrophe was not used in this period.

An alternative form of the genitive singular throughout the period was the so-called ‘possessive dative’ as in ‘Job’s Patience, Moses his Meekness, Abraham’s Faith’ (Richard Franck, 1694). This was most commonly used after nouns ending in -s referring to masculines, perhaps because it was practically identical in sound with the regular genitive ending in -(e)s. A parallel use with her, e.g. ‘The Excellency of our Church her burial office’, and with their, also occurred.

The present tense. The second person singular inflection –est naturally declined in importance as the use of thou declined, giving rise to the current arrangement whereby in the present tense only the third singular is marked and all other persons take the base form. At the start of the period, the normal third person singular ending in standard southern English was –eth. The form -(e)s, originally from Northern dialect, replaced –eth in most kinds of use during the seventeenth century. A few common short forms, chiefly doth, hath, continued often to be written, but it seems likely that these were merely graphic conventions. Forming the past tense and past participle. The class of ‘strong’ verbs (those which indicate tense by a vowel change and do not have a dental segment added) included a number of verbs which are now only ‘weak’ An implication of this view of grammar change is the notion that the process of acquisition of the grammar of the native language is the main locus of change. Data from language change are of particular interest to this approach because, as Paul Kiparsky first put it, they provide a window on the form of linguistic competence . Instances of change can show something about the grammars of languages, because we can get a clearer view of a partially hidden abstract system when it changes from one state tob another. This in turn may throw light on the precise way the theory of grammar should be formulated.

5 Development of Syntax in Early Modern English

The changes in English were characterized as a swinging back and forth between more synthetic or analytic stages. In the current chapter, I will look at specific characteristics of the syntax that can be linked to those changes, for instance, in word order and the use of grammatical words. I also provide tables with endings for the case on nouns and pronouns and endings on verbs of the English in its most synthetic stage. As mentioned, Old English is synthetic in its copious use of nominal and verbal endings. As a result,the word order in Old English can be freer than that of later English. Compare the first lines of the Old English (Northumbrian) version of Caedmon’s Hymn with its translation into a Modern English word‐by‐word gloss underneath and then its free translation.