The Renaissance ( ) 177.Shakespeare’s Pronunciation177.Shakespeare’s Pronunciation 178.Changes Shown Through Corpus Linguistics 179.Grammatical Features179.Grammatical Features 180.The Noun180.The Noun Asiah Razali

177.Shakespeare’s Pronunciation Much more like ours.(than has always been realized) Alexander Pope pronounced tay for tea. Er, ir, ur have the same pronunciation (e.g herd, birth, hurt) Asiah Razali

ME of ē was sometimes open and sometimes close. In 15 th century attempt was made to distinguish them by spelling. Closer sound was written with -ee/ -ie (eg deep,field) Open sound was written with -ea (eg sea,clean) Not consistently carried out. The variation in spelling marked the different pronunciation long ago. Asiah Razali

ME of Ō  [u:] (e.g. room, roof, root) Shortened and rounded in 15 th century e.g. [blood] and [flood]. In some words, retained it length until Shortened w/o unrounded e.g. [good] [stood] [book] Asiah Razali

Much fluctuation in the pronunciation of words containing these ME vowels in Shakespeare’s day. Asiah Razali

178.Changes Shown Through Corpus LinguisticsCorpus Linguistics The flourishing sociolinguistics and the availability of electronic database  give fuller picture of English language. The computerized processing of language data has been in progress for period OE  present. Asiah Razali

Renaissance period benefited most from this trend. Asiah Razali

179.Grammatical Features English Grammar in 16 th and early 17 th – marked more by the survival of certain forms and usages. Inflection of OE reduced. Retain some original inflection in the few parts of speech. Asiah Razali

180.The Noun The only inflections retained in the noun are plural and possessive singular. -s plural generalized except for a few noun. Sheep, swine –unchanged plural Mice, feet –mutated plural Certain old weak plural in –n (e.g. oxen) Asiah Razali

His-genitive In ME the –es possessive was written and pronounced as -is,-ys.( Identical to pronunciation of ‘his’ due to unstressed h.) In 18 th century,people were troubled by this usage. Asiah Razali

Dr. Johnson pointed out that, E.g. a woman’s beauty ≠ a woman his beauty. However, he aware its true source was the OE genitive. The error left its trace in apostrophe which we still retain as a graphic convenience to mark the possessive. ‘s ≠ his,but –es possessive Asiah Razali

Stonis  genitive Ston is(his)  pronoun Due to same pronunciation. -’s felt by many as a contraction of pronoun his. Asiah Razali

The EndThe End