History of the English language and Literature

Lecture # 4 : Early Modern English - part 2

Peter Brown - modified by : Arlène PY

 Early Modern English

Characteristics
• Those in power : The Tudors

• Historical context : The Renaissance

• Language change : The Great Vowel Shift

• Major Invention : Printing

• Literature : The Golden Age of English Literature

• Literature : Samuel Johnson’s dictionary
• Progress : Early Globalisation
 The Golden age of English Literature

From late 1500s to 1700, English Literature blossoms Francis Bacon

• Playwrights are revealed : W. Shakespeare, John Donne,
John Milton, Alexander Pope, Edmund Spencer, Philip
Sidney, Thomas Wyatt, John Dryden, Andrew Marvell
• Poets show their creativity : Christopher Marlowe,
William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Webster
• Francis Bacon served as Lord Chancellor of England
and was also a scientist, author and philosopher

Source: biography.com
 The Golden age of English Literature

John Donne – Meditation 17

John Donne
No Man Is an Island
No man is an island,
entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were.
as well as if a manor of thy friend’s
or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mfus7QCeWU
 The Golden age of English Literature

John Milton (1608-1674)

• Was a poet, statesman, civil servant
• Was educated at Cambridge
• Spoke Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish,
Italian, Dutch, Old English
• Sided with Oliver Cromwell and the Republic during Civil
War
• Was jailed at the Restoration of Charles II

Paradise Lost (1667) – dictated after Milton

went blind – published in 10 books, 10,000 lines of poetry –
covers the Fall of Man, temptation of Adam and Eve, Fall of
Satan
Satan - by Gustave Doré
Illustration for John Milton’s « Paradise Lost »
 The Golden age of English Literature

William Shakespeare
• William Shakespeare explained in five questions (3 min video) :

https://www.britannica.com/video/206456/facts-William-Shakespeare

• William Shakespeare’s plays adapted to the screen (12 min video) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_nsDWBYCOU

Source: britannica.com
 Early Modern English : A prolific period for the English language
From 1500 - 1650 up to 10,000 - 12,000 new words were “coined” or invented, about half of which are still in use today.
Here are a few examples along with the author they are attributed to :
• Scholar and classicist Sir Thomas Elyot:
animate, describe, dedicate, esteem, maturity, exhaust and modesty.

• Sir Thomas More:

absurdity, active, communicate, education, utopia, acceptance, exact, explain, exaggerate.
• John Milton (630 word coinages):
lovelorn, fragrance and pandemonium

• Ben Jonson:
damp, defunct, strenuous, clumsy and others

• John Donne:
self-preservation, valediction
• Sir Philip Sydney:
bugbear, miniature, eye-pleasing, dumb-stricken, far-fetched, conversation
• William Shakespeare:
bare-faced, critical, monumental, majestic, obscene, homicide, brittle, radiance, countless, submerged, premeditated,
assassination, courtship, eyeballs, laughable, accommodation, hint, hurry, lonely, gloomy, and hundreds of other terms still
commonly used today.
 English in Science

• Until 1600s, science was written in Latin or French

(by Thomas More, Isaac Newton, William Harvey
etc.)

• Sir Francis Bacon, however, decided to write many

of his works in both Latin and English and coined
several scientific words such as thermometer,
pneumonia, skeleton and encyclopaedia.

• 1704 – Isaac Newton, shifts to English for his book

on “Opticks” – introduces “lens, refraction”, etc.

• English becomes the language of science in

England

Source: britannica.com
 Dialect and Class
• In the 1600s : growing class differentiation – nobility, middle
class and commoners

• Differences in dialect from the “Standard English” of Middlesex

and Surrey began to be considered uncouth and an indication of
lower class.

• An East London Cockney accent was enough to identify the

speaker as a vagabond, thief or criminal

• Dialects provided good comic material for the burgeoning

theatre industry – Shakespeare ridiculed Welsh and Scottish
characters, and rural dialects

• But, as a result, many dialect words entered into Standard

English
 English Dictionaries

•1604: First English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall

published by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey

•1612: First Italian dictionary

•1639: First French dictionary

•But: ca. 600 AD – first Sanskrit (India) dictionary

Source: britishlibrary.com
ca. 800 AD – first Arabic dictionary

•1721: An Universall Etymological English Dictionary ,

compiled by Nathaniel Bailey in 1736 edition contained
about 60,000 entries
Source: britannica.com
 Samuel Johnson
1709 - 1784

• Son of a bookseller
• Leaves Oxford University after first year because
of funds
• Worked in London as a journalist, poet,
translator, biographer
• Starts compiling a dictionary in 1746
• Dictionary of the English Language published in
1755
• Académie Française produced its dictionary of French
over 40 years with 40 authors
• 1765 - The Plays of William Shakespeare
Source: britannica.com
• 1779 - 81 - Lives of the Poets
 Dictionary of the English Language

• was published in 1755

• counted 43,000 words

• was leading source until the Oxford English Dictionary in 1905

• contained “inkhorn” terms which have not survived including

digladation, cubiculary, incompossibility, clancular, ariolation, ataraxy,
deuteroscopy, disubitary, estuation, etc.

• words he disliked or considered vulgar were omitted (including

bang, budge, fuss, gambler, shabby and touchy)

• some definitions were deliberately jokey or politically motivated.

Source: britannica.com
 Samuel Johnson’s dictionary
1709 - 1784
Here are a few funny definitions from Samuel Johnson’s dictionary

BACKFRIEND : The Oxford English Dictionary calls a backfriend “a pretended

or false friend,” but Johnson was more straightforward and defined the word as
“a friend backwards”—or in other words, “an enemy in secret.”

LEXICOGRAPHER : Johnson seemingly didn’t think much of his own job: On

page 1195, he called a lexicographer “a harmless drudge” who “busies himself in
tracing the original and detailing the signification of words.”

LUNCH: Lunch wasn’t so much a time as a quantity in Johnson’s eyes: He

defined it as “as much food as one’s hand can hold.”

NIDOROSITY : If you ever needed a word for an “eructation with the taste of
undigested meat”—in other words, a really meaty burp—then here you are.

POLITICIAN : As well as “one versed in the arts of government,” Johnson

defined a politician as “a man of artifice; one of deep contrivance.”
Source: odt.co.nz
Globalisation and the English Language