Here is the Lord’s Prayer in Early Modern English (from the Geneva Bible of 1587):
Our father which art in heauen,
halowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdome come.
Thy will be done
euen in earth, as it is in heauen.
Giue vs this day our dayly bread.
And forgiue vs our dettes,
as we also forgiue our detters.
And leade vs not into tentation,
but deliuer vs from euill:
Amen.
Early Modern English (1474-1660) is English from about the time of Caxton in the late 1400s, when he printed the first book in English, to Milton in the middle 1600s. It is the English of Shakespeare and the Authorized King James Bible, of Hobbes, Bunyan, Marlowe, Spenser, Bacon and Donne. It was considerably different from the English of Chaucer in the late 1300s, yet it was easily understood up until the late 1800s.
It was when English had become a respectable language, like French. It was taking in huge numbers of Latin words. Shakespeare showed its beauty and power. Even so, it was not the giant world language it is now – only about 5 million people in a corner of Europe spoke it. English was just beginning to spread its wings.
It was the English that was brought to America. The American use of –ize instead of -ise and mad in the sense of angry, for example, go back to this time.
It was during this period that English spelling became more or less fixed. This started with Caxton in the late 1400s, who pretty much wrote words the way they sounded. Most of what makes English hard to spell comes from the Great Vowel Shift that came soon after in the 1500s: that was when the silent e became silent, as did the k in knife, the w in wrong, the t in listen, the l in half and so on. It is when words like food and good or sweat and meat stopped rhyming in spite of how they were spelled.
The most noticeable difference between our English and theirs are all those thous and -eths. But even in the early 1600s they were already falling out of use. They are more common, for instance, in the King James Bible, which preserves an older English from the middle 1500s, than they are in Shakespeare. By the 1600s -eth was probably said as -es regardless of how it was spelled.
Some notes:
- My became mine before a vowel: “mine apple”.
- Is could still sometimes take the place of has in the perfect tense: “He is come”.
- Its was just coming into use in the 1600s: before then his and whereof were used instead: “the weight whereof was an 130 shekels.”
- Ye was used instead you when it was the subject of a sentence: “But be ye doers of the word.”
- Thou was the familiar form of “ye”, but it was falling out of use.
- Instead of using do to make a question you could just put the main verb first: “Have ye three apples?”
See also:
Somebody’s been reading “Word on the Street.” Fascinating read, no?
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Yes! My mother gave it to me for Christmas. It was on my Amazon wishlist based on your recommendation in one of your comments. Thanks!
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People are sometimes quick to excoriate McWhorter, but if one reads his books, especially “Word on the Street” and “Losing the Race,” I think that, even if one disagrees with his conclusions, one would agree that he considers his issues carefully and generally does not say things in a glib or cheap manner.
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“Word on the Street”, about English, is good. I have not read any of his books on race.
I would be interested to know what you think of what McWhorter said in “Racism In America Is Over”:
http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/30/end-of-racism-oped-cx_jm_1230mcwhorter.html
which I posted on here:
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I think his headline belies his discussion. The headline is clearly intended to be controversial and thus attention-grabbing. It works, too, as evidenced by threads on this blog and countless others.
I’ve noticed this trend with McWhorter as he has shifted his life’s economic model from “linguistics professor who sometimes writes books” to “popular author and media talking head who sometimes teaches linguistics.”
Under the second model, any publicity is good publicity. At the end of the article, I noticed a plug for McWhorter’s book “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue” and made a mental note to read it. Thus, from the perspective of McWhorter, the article worked.
By the way, I do think that race certainly played a role in the votes of many voters. Among whites, there were certainly whites who voted for Obama because he is black, just as there were whites who voted against Obama because of his race.
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I live in London and if anyone says to me “everyone speaks English” my answer is “Listen and look around you”. If people in London do not speak English then the whole question of a global language is completely open.
The promulgation of English as the world’s “lingua franca” is impractical and linguistically undemocratic. I say this as a native English speaker!
Impractical because communication should be for all and not only for an educational or political elite. That is how English is used internationally at the moment.
Undemocratic because minority languages are under attack worldwide due to the encroachment of majority ethnic languages. Even Mandarin Chinese is attempting to dominate as well. The long-term solution must be found and a non-national language, which places all ethnic languages on an equal footing is essential.
An interesting video can be seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
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Just like English, Esperanto is a European language with a particular worldview built into it. It would be just as much of a threat to dying languages as English. That Esperanto belongs to no one country means little except maybe in the West.
English is now taught in countries that were never part of the British Empire. Why? Because, like Latin in Europe in the Middle Ages, there is just too much of value that is written in it – like most of the world’s knowledge, for example. Esperanto does not have that advantage. That is why hundreds of millions of people go to the trouble of learning English even though Esperanto is at least ten times easier to learn.
If you believe in the dream of one language for the whole world, then you should give up on Esperanto and, say, teach English in Africa or the Middle East. English is way closer to being that than any language in history and way way closer than Esperanto can ever hope to be.
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Blanc2: It is hard for me not to think that McWhorter has become a sell-out, a rented Negro like our dear Miss Amy Holmes.
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