Early Modern English

Early Modern English is the stage of the English language that took place from 1476 until 1776 and developed the basis of our modern standard English. It began with the emergence of the middle class and the invention of the printing press in 1476. The printing press changed written texts by producing them quickly, easily, and cheaply, greatly increasing the availability of books. Because more people were exposed to reading and writing, a slow growth in literacy occurred. The first real dictionaries appeared in the 1700s, influencing a rise in prescriptivism. During this period, the lexicon expanded and developed dramatically.

Early Modern Lexicon

During the Early Modern period, the English vocabulary increased by around 10,000 words. Many of them were adopted from other languages, including reliable contributors like Latin and French as well as new donors like Spanish and Italian.
Greek, Latin, and French borrowing were somewhat intertwined. Some words were adopted directly from Latin, like emphasis. Some were taken from Latin through French, such as adapt. Words that were borrowed from Greek via Latin include parenthesis, alphabet, euphemism, hyperbole, hypothesis, and phrase.
During the sixteenth century, Spanish significantly influenced the English language for the first time with words such as banana, potato, avocado, barbecue, guitar and tobacco.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Italian also profoundly affected Early Modern English. The following words were all adopted during this time and all still current in today’s English: artichoke, balcony, carnival, discount, ghetto, granite, incognito, lottery, macaroni, pasta and volcano. Italian also provided terms for art (fresco, gesso, intaglio, miniature, and profile), architecture (cornice, cupola, rotunda, and stucco), music (madrigal, oratorio, and trill), and poetry (sonnet and stanza).

Although Early Modern English borrowed an enormous amount of words, affixation remained the most potent influence in expanding the English lexicon. Through affixation, English acquired many new prefixes and suffixes. Some had survived from Old English, including: be-, -hood, mid-, -ways, -dom, -ing, -ness, -wise, -er, -less, -ship, -worthy, for-, -like, -ster, fore-, -ling, un-, -ful, -ly, and -wards.
Others were borrowed from Latin and French, such as: -able, de-, -ity, proto-, -acy, dis-, -ive, re-, age-, en-, mal-, semi-, -ance/ence, -ery, -ment, sub-, -ancy/ence, -ess, mis-, super-, anti-, -et, mono-, uni-, -ate, -ette, multi-, -y, -ation, extra-, non-, bi-, hyper-, pre-, -cy, in-, and pro-.
The prefixes and suffixes that are most productive today became productive in this period. They may not have originated then, but very active use solidified their role in English morphology.

Early Modern English Grammar

There are five important morphosyntactic developments in Early Modern English.
The first is the rise of the periphrastic do, which is the auxiliary do used to form questions and negation. This do first appeared in questions and then in negative declaratives, such as “I do not doubt you” and “Do you not hear me?”
Second, the -s plural took over other plural inflections. Most nouns were reanalyzed to take the -s (like shoe/shoon to shoe/shoes and knee/kneen to knee/knees) until plurals were almost perfectly uniform. A few exceptions remain in English with plurals in which the singular form’s vowel changes, such as mouse/mice and foot/feet. A third change occurred in verbs, with the replacement of third-person indicative neuter -eth with -s: he comes and goes instead of cometh and goeth. A fourth innovation was the invention if its as the third-person genitive neuter personal pronoun, replacing his, which was identical to the third-person masculine genitive.