1. Baugh and Cable,Chapter 8
The Renaissance,
Pars

2. The timeline of the history of the English language

3. 8-152 Changing conditions in the Modern period
The new factors
The printing press
The rapid spread of popular education
The increased communication and means of communication
The growth of specialized knowledge
The emergence of various forms of self-consciousness about language

4. 8-171 Nature and extent of the movement
The importance of the Renaissance in enriching English vocabulary – above 12,000 words;
Calculation is based upon the data available in the Oxford Dictionary;
A large majority of words – from Latin;
Not all of the additions filled gaps in the existing vocabulary, but they gave the language a wealth of synonyms.
Most of the new words entered the language by way of the written language.
They are a striking evidence of the new force exerted by the printing press.

5. William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 –23 April 1616)

6. 8-172 The movement illustrated in Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Shakespeare had the largest vocabulary of any English writer (35,000 words). This is due to
his daring and resourceful use of words
and his ready acceptance of new words of every kind
Among Shakespeare’s words: agile, antipathy, catastrophe, critical, demonstrate, meditate, modest, armada, mutiny – all new to English in the 16th c.
He was familiar with inkhorn terms - excessive neologisms, strange and obscure Latin words when adequate English equivalents already existed

7. 8-172 Shakespeare ( )
Shakespeare’s use of the new words illustrates an important point – they were often used, upon their first introduction, in a sense closer to their etymological meaning in Latin
Communicate – now means ‘to exchange information’, but in Sh’s times it meant ‘to share or make common to many’
Expect – meant ‘to await’,

8. 8-172 Shakespeare ( )
Atone – now means ‘to make amends’, earlier it meant ‘to reconcile’
Enlargement – meant ‘freedom from confinement’
Humorous – meant ‘damp, capricious, moody’ (cf. ‘in bad humour’)

9. 8-173 Shakespeare’s pronunciation
Shakespeare’s pronunciation was much more like ours than has always been realized
Tay for tea
Ē  e: or i:, e.g. sea [se:] - see [i:], heap [e:] – keep [i:]
ME ō 
[u:], as in room, food
[^], as in blood, flood (shortened in the 15th c.)
[u], as in good, stood (unrounded)

10. 8-173 Shakespeare’s pronunciation
In Shakespeare’s days there was much fluctuation in the pronunciation of words containing this ME vowel
Consequently, we find in the poetry of the period a word like FLOOD rhyming not only with BLOOD but also with MOOD and GOOD

11. 8-173 Shakespeare’s pronunciation
In addition to differences in the quality of vowels, there were some differences of ACCENT (a manner of pronunciation of a language).
Shakespeare said persev’er, demon’strate, aspect’, envy’, se’cure, welcome’
On the whole, we should probably have more difficulty with the language of Chaucer.
The reason is that in the course of 15th and 16th centuries the (long) vowels of Middle English underwent regular shifting.

12. 8-174 The importance of sound-changes
Sound-changes are as important as changes in grammar and vocabulary, but they are more difficult to be presented briefly.
Some sounds in English have been less subject to change
E.g., the short [e] OE bĕdd is still bed today

13. 8-174 The importance of sound-changes
The Great Vowel Shift – 15-16th c. the long vowels of Middle English underwent a wholesale regular shifting
However, exceptions occur, the transitions were not always complete, and there were sometimes accompanying changes in orthography.
The GVS - the principal changes are roughly as follows:

15. The Great Vowel Shift

16. The Great Vowel Shift The GVS happened in eight steps.
Otto Jespersen (1860 –1943)
The GVS happened in eight steps.
It is very important to remember that each step did not happen overnight.
At any given time, people of different ages and from different regions would have different pronunciations of the same word.

17. The Great Vowel Shift
The spelling of English had become fixed before the shift and therefore did not change when the quality of the long vowels changed.
Consequently, the vowel symbols no longer correspond to the sounds they once represented in English.

18. 8-178 Weakening of unaccented vowels
In all periods of the language the vowels of unstressed syllables have had a tendency to weaken and then often to disappear (breakfast, Monday)
The weakening is especially noticeable in words from French where an accented vowel came to be unaccented in English (cf. French mouton, raisin, bonté with English mutton, raisin, bounty)

19. Schwa In linguistics,schwa means :
An unstressed neutral vowel sound in any language, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel.
Such vowels are often transcribed with the symbol <ə>, regardless of their actual phonetic value.

20. 8-179 Grammatical features
English grammar in the 16th c. and early 17th c. was marked more
by the survival of certain forms and usages that have since disappeared than by any fundamental developments

21. 8-180 The noun
In the 16th c. the only inflections retained in the noun were those marking the plural and the possessive singular.
Only a few exceptions (sheep, swine, mice, feet) are present.
An interesting peculiarity of the period is the his-genitive, a linguistic phenomenon in the syntax of the English language.

22. 8-180 The noun
The practice developed of marking the genitive case by inserting the word "his" between the possessor noun, especially where it ended in -s, and the following possessed noun, as in Ben Johson’s Sejanus His Fall (1603).
In Middle English the –es of the genitive, being unaccented, was frequently written and pronounced –is, -ys.

23. 8-180 The noun
The ending was thus often identical to the pronoun his, which commonly lost its h when unstressed.
Until well into the 18th c. people were troubled by the illogical consequences of this usage.
The "his" genitive had a brief literary existence; having only appeared around 1680, it was exceptionally rare by 1700.

24. 8-180 The noun
As printing became more widespread, and printed grammars informally standardized written English, the "-s" genitive (also known as the Saxon genitive) with an apostrophe (as if an "his" had been contracted) had gone to all nominal genders, including nouns that previously had an unmarked genitive (such as "Lady" in “Lady day")
This remains the general form for creating possessives in English.

25. 8-181 The adjective
The adj has already lost all its endings by the modern period.
The chief interest – the forms of the comparative and superlative degrees.
The two methods (-er and -est, more and most) had been customary since Old English, but there was more variation in their use.

26. 8-181 The adjective Shakespeare had the forms honester, violentest
A double comparative / superlative is also frequent, e.g. more larger
The chief development affecting the adj in modern times has been the gradual settling down of usage

27. 8-182 The pronoun
In Early Modern English, there were two second-person personal pronouns:
thou, the informal singular pronoun, and
ye, which was both the plural pronoun and the formal singular pronoun
like modern French tu and vous, the German du and sie, Lith tu and jūs.

28. 8-182 The pronoun
Thou was already falling out of use in the Early Modern English period, but remained customary for addressing God and certain other solemn occasions;
Like other personal pronouns, thou and ye had different forms depending on their grammatical case;
Specifically, the objective form of thou was thee, its possessive forms were thy and thine, and its reflexive or emphatic form was thyself,

29. 8-182 The pronoun
The objective form of ye was you, its possessive forms were your and yours, and its reflexive or emphatic forms were yourself and yourselves.
The plural forms ye, your, you became to be used as a mark of respect
In the 14th c. you began to be used as a nominative

30. 8-182 The pronoun The formation of a new possessive neuter, its
OE neuter hit: hit his him hit
ME: hit his hit
In unstressed position hit weakened to it
His, however, remained the proper form of the possessive
But towards the close of the 17th c. its appeared as a neuter form of it.
In the 16th c. WHO became to be used as a relative pronoun.

31. 8-183 The verb Differences in usage:
No auxiliary: Macbeth, Goes the King hence today?
‘Is’ instead of ‘has been’: is execution done on Cawdor?
The scarcity of progressive forms: What do you read, my Lord?
Impersonal uses of the verb much more common
By the end of the 16th c. the form ‘tells’ predominates (cf. telleth)

32. 8-184 Usage and idiom Omission of the article
Shakespeare: creeping like snail; with as big heart as thou; but: at the last
A double negative: nor never none shall mistress be of it, save I alone (“it is a pity we have lost so useful an intensive”)
The use of prepositions: Our fears in Banquo stick deep (in = about)

33. 8-185 General characteristics of the period
A conscious interest in the English language and an attention to its problems are widely manifested
The 15th c. witnessed attempts by individual writers to embellish their style with “aureate terms”, desire to improve the language
The 16th c.- defence of the language, recognition of it as the national speech

34. 8-185 General characteristics of the period
Efforts to standardize the language, books describe the proper pronunciation
The effect of the GVS and the efforts of spelling reformers
The existence of a standard literary language (Spenser and Shakespeare)
English in the Renaissance was much more plastic than now – any part of speech can appear as another (Uncle me no uncle; He dukes it well in my absence)
However, a good many features of the language still unsettled

35. TECHNICAL TERMS Accent - a manner of pronunciation of a language
Elizabethan English - an early form of modern English, most often associated with the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible.
The Great Vowel Shift (GVS) - a series of changes in the quality of the long vowels between Middle and Modern English as a result of which all were raised. The GVS that took place in the south of England between 1200 and The GVS was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860 –1943), a Danish linguist, who coined the term.

36. TECHNICAL TERMS
Idiom 1. [countable] a group of words that has a special meaning that is different from the ordinary meaning of each separate word. For example, 'under the weather' is an idiom meaning 'ill'.
2. [uncountable and countable] formal or technical a style of expression in writing, speech, or music that is typical of a particular group of people
Inkhorn terms - excessive neologisms, strange and obscure Latin words when adequate English equivalents already existed
Orthography - the way in which words are spelled
Phonetic spelling - representing the sounds of speech