What changed in the English language in the 17th century?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been reading lots of older literature lately, and works from the early 17th century (Shakespeare and his contemporaries) seems to be a more difficult read to me than early 18th century works (such as Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719). 17th c. spelling, vocabulary, and grammar look different, while 18th c. looks relatively modern to me, albeit written in a rather stilted style.

So, what happened to the English language in the 17th century? The language feels like it changed more in those 100 years than in the last 300. Am I just the subliterate product of the public school system (an answer I haven’t yet ruled out), or was there some sort of actual rapid evolution in that period? Or is it that the rate of evolution is constant, but that time period is just when it’s gotten far enough back that it starts to look different?

2

Several things happened to regularise the language, including printing (which took a while to stabilise things like spelling, but eventually did), dictionaries (such as Samual Johnson’s dictionary, which came to be accepted as a standard for spelling), and universal education.

3

Yeh, but also the whole Thee- Thou- Thy thing didn’t last beyond the 17th century. That’s a little more than a mere matter of standardization.

4

In some religious contexts, thou/thee/thy is still being used – and those words in 16th century (or earlier) texts are not the ones that make them hard to read.

5

Also, don’t forget that Shakespeare is verse, not prose. Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, written not long after, reads very easily. (Although spelling is still not standardized.)

6

When you say Shakespeare and his contemporaries, do you mean fellow playwrights and poets (Spenser, Marlowe, etc.)? Some of it may be that they’re writing predominately in verse, which is more difficult to read than prose, regardless of what era it was written in. Shakespeare and company also used references and allusions that are not as readily accessible to modern readers, as classics (Roman/Greek language and culture) aren’t the backbone of education anymore. There’s much less of that in nineteenth-century literature, though poetry is a different matter.

I don’t know, for the average reader (which the SDMB really is not representative of) thee/thou/thy can indeed be a stumbling block. When you combine it with unfamiliar grammar and vocabulary, then a lot of people declare anything more complicated than John Clancy to be impossible to read.

7

You might want to check to see if any of your writings are in a dilaect of English that didn’t become what is now considered the standard form.

8

Thee, thy, thou (along with tha and the more rarely used thine) re widely used around the area I live, and its used as stereotypical characters for this area by comedians.

Yorkshire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yorkshireisms

http://www.laufman.org/SongsTunes/IlkleyMoor.htm

The parent site to this link has various folk from around the Yorkshire region reading various dialect poems, the link following probably represent the local accent best.

http://www.yorkshire-dialect.org/authors/fred_hirst_b_c.htm#bonfire_neet

Something you also might need to understand, is that local accents around here can be recognisably differant, even within a distance of rather less than ten miles, for instance, Leeds, just up the road by 8 miles, is very differant to here, Castleford, and if you drive just another 5 miles or so to Featherstone, you’ll find they speak differantly there.

The, thou, thy etc are most commonly associated with South Yorkshire, especially around the Barnsley area.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/northyorkshire/voices2005/glossary/glossary.shtml#

Some words are recognised as being spoken in a way that would be called, medieval, and retain vowel sounds that have been lost eleswhere centuries ago, we might pronounce *speak, meat or eat * not with the double E sound, but extend and pronounce the a sound as well so your speak - speek, becomes our spee-ack meat - meet to us mee-at.

Other vowel extensions and changes, the classic would be for boots, we would say boo-its, or ‘get thee boo-it on, we’re off laikin’ meaning ‘Put on your boots, we are going out to play’, which should be taken to mean ’ Get yourself dressed up, we are going out and painting the town red’

Some of these local dialects are very old indeed, quite why we still use them and haven’t moved on I’m not sure, we seem to be a target for charicature, I think probably any region with strong dialect gets this treatment from the so-called, ‘correct’ English.

To be honest, you if you play some of those sound files in that second link, you will most probably notice a lot of things I wouldn’t, simply because its the way I talk, and its just normal, the accents dont seem all that strong to me (one or two do sound like they are putting it on a bit thick to me, and making more of their speech than is natural for them)

I would be interested in what you make of the way we speak from those soundfiles, you will probably notice far more than I would, I guess you don’t realise you have an accent at all until you speak to someone from outside your area, but then, it is everyone else what speaks odd!

9

Interesting! We’ve lost thou/thee/thine in Merkin, but I noticed more than one expression in your list that are universally understood in America.

Pushing up daisies
Put a sock in it
Let sleeping dogs lie

to name only three. Are these not widely used in the UK outside of Yorkshire?

10

There are a goodly few things that are not exclusive to Yorkshire in those dialect word lists and phrases, and quite a few span more than one region, so you have ultra local suff, then some that applies across the North East of England, some that applies to the whole Northern region, and some which would be recognisable nationally but only widely used in common speech in this area.

Many items listed might well be familiar elsewhwere, my guess though, is that it was first documented in the region and has spread out.

‘Put a sock in it’ etc are the sort of phrases that would be turned by English character actors putting on a Northern front back in the '40’s and '50’s and especially personalities such as George Formby who was from across the Pennines in Lancashire.This would be a regional saying and not really a Yorkshire thing, it would apply across the whole of the North of England.

These may or may not be very much older than this period, but they would have spread dramatically with the advent of mass media and its not really a surprise that this would be associated with the popular stars of the day.

11

Some of those expressions are wrong,

‘Put a sock in it’ would not be said that way, the correct Yorkshire usage would be, ‘Sock it!’

‘pushing up daisies’ is correct but is doesn’t scan properly, it should be a contraction of ‘Pushing up the daisies’, and this is then spoken as ‘Pushin oop t’ daisies’, often the short ‘t’ sound is left out completely but the pause where it should appear becomes a glottal stop, but the pause is noticeable.

The word ‘the’ is normally contracted to a hard ‘t’, as in the way the first two letters of Tutenkhamun, and if you want to comment on someone who thinks they have a higher station in life than they actually possess, we’d say

'Ooos ‘e think ee is, King Tut ?’

We lose our ‘h’ letters especailly at the start of a word such as house, we lose most of the pronounced 't’s to replace with a glottal stop, even the word glottal loses its 't’s in this manner !, but we compensate for pinching them 't’s and put them everywhere else.

You would be better off listening to those soundfiles, and comparing them against the written prose, and comparing how you would say the same thing, you will notice that we pronounce our vowels very differantly, we don’t drag them on forever like they do in the South, so that the ‘a’ in mast is the same as you would pronounce the ‘a’ in apple.

The song ‘Illkley Moor’ is an almost national stereotype of what everyone else thinks Yorkshire folk speak like, its true to some extent, but it only represents part of Yorkshire, the Northern part.Oddly enough, the areas of Yorkshire that use ‘thee’ ‘thine’ ‘tha’ etc are not from that part of Yorkshire, mostly in the South Yorkshire coalfields.

Other parts of words have dissappeared completely, and the word order has changed, so to tell someone to come down to the pub was once,

‘Draggeth thesen down ter’t pub’

Noone uses the 'eth on the ends of words that I know of.

We would probaby say,

'Get thesen down ‘t pub’

12

Not necessarily. Although some of what I read is in verse (which does add another layer of difficulty), I mean writings of the same time period in general. Take, for example, the opening paragraph of A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco by King James I, 1609:

Compare with the opening paragraph of Robinson Crusoe, 1719:

The former is understandable, but takes more work to read than the latter.

13

Well, to be fair, that’s James I. So there’s a hearty dollop of royal pretension mixt in with the pre-standardised spellings & run-on style. I think it is fair to say that for modern ideas of good English writing style really to take root took the advent of publishing–& thus a sea of available writing through which one had to slog. As you can see from that sentence, many of us still write badly.

14

I agree. My comments about the language snippets presented here are:
[ul]
[li]Shakespeare wrote poetry for plays. Even today, what you would write for speech is (or should be) much different than what you write to be read.[/li][li]I venture to guess that Shakespeare also used street slang that his audience would understand. Read a Shakespeare play first and then watch it performed, and you’ll burst out laughing at lines most other people don’t even understand. Between knowing what the actor is saying, and seeing how he or she says it, you get a lot more meaning.[/li][li]Written English evolved not only after publishing but also after the switch from Latin to English. The King James Version is a radical departure for serious literature, but it’s still stuck in the formal grammar and rhetoric of Latin.[/li][li]By the early 1700s, I venture to guess that the Revolution and Restoration had molded English into the organized and formal form we know, devoid of the flowery rhetoric and complexity that characterize classical Latin literature.[/li][li]It’s also individual variation. Defoe is a good writer even by modern standards; so is Swift. But try to read Hobbes’ translation of Thucydides, and your brain will try to claw itself out of your head![/li][/ul]

So it’s more good writing versus bad writing than grammar, style, or word use. My favorite example is the Declaration of Independence. The preamble is stirring and memorable, but the “reasons” are either dry or so convoluted they sound like a modern lawyer’s brief!

15

Update the spelling, and it becomes a lot more understandable.

16

If I further modernize the punctuation, spelling, and capitalization, I get this:

> That the manifold abuses of this vile custom of tobacco-taking may the better
> be espied, it is fit that first you enter into consideration both of the first original
> thereof and likewise of the reasons of the first entry thereof into this country.
> For certainly, as such customs, that have their first institution either from a
> godly, necessary, or honorable ground and are first brought in by the means of
> some worthy, virtuous, and great personage, are ever and most justly held in
> great and reverent estimation and account by all wise, virtuous, and temperate
> spirits, so should it, by the contrary, justly bring a great disgrace into that sort
> of customs which, having their original from base corruption and barbarity, do in
> like sort make their first entry into a country by an inconsiderate and childish
> affectation of novelty, as is the true case of the first invention of tobacco-taking
> and of the first entry thereof among us. For tobacco being a common herb
> which, (though under diverse names) grows almost everywhere, was first found
> out by some of the barbarous Indians to be a preservative or antidote against
> the pox, a filthy disease, whereunto these barbarous people are (as all men
> know) very much subject, what through the uncleanly and adust constitution of
> their bodies, and what through the intemperate heat of their climate, so that as
> from them was first brought into Christendom that most detestable disease, so
> from them likewise was brought this use of tobacco, as a stinking and unsavory
> antidote for so corrupted and execrable a malady, the stinking suffumigation
> whereof they yet use against that disease, making so one canker or venim to
> eat out another.

This is absolutely terrible writing. I couldn’t straighten out this first part of a sentence at all:

> For tobacco being a common herb which, (though under diverse names) grows
> almost everywhere, was first found out by some of the barbarous Indians to be
> a preservative or antidote against the pox, a filthy disease, whereunto these
> barbarous people are (as all men know) very much subject, what through the
> uncleanly and adust constitution of their bodies, and what through the
> intemperate heat of their climate . . .

What does the “which” [the seventh word of the sentence] match with in its phrase? Is this saying “which (though under diverse names) grows almost everywhere” or is it saying “which was first found out by some of the barbarous Indians . . .” so that “though under diverse names) grows almost everywhere” is just a parenthetical addition? I can’t make the sentence work right either way. Note that I respelled “Christiandom” as (the semi-common modern word) “Christendom”, since it appears to me that “Christiandom” was always an extremely rare version of the considerably more common word “Christendom” and was probably always pronounced like “Christendom”.

17

Agreed. Much of the writing from that period looks the same. I do not know why, but I have a guess, which is:

The English uses grammatical and rhetorical forms that were common in Latin and Greek.

I know nothing about Greek, but I do know that Latin has a very exact positional grammar that allows huge sentences, complex grammatical constructions, and rhetorical devices that simply don’t work in English.

Moreover, formal Latin and Greek writing uses rhetorical forms that, when translated into modern English, seem excessively flowery and overdone.

Remember, though, that in the 17th Century one’s ability to use these forms was a mark of sophistication, intelligence, and erudition. Using “simple” English marked you as a dimwit! Thus writers deliberately piled on the words.

I should add that I use rhetoric in its “linguistic” sense, to refer to the application of constructs to reinforce a point.

For example, starting a sentence with a infinitive phrase and then using the imperative in the main clause is a common rhetorical style in technical writing:

To close the window, select File > Close.

This is a rhetorical construct that attempts to guide the reader.

I have just finished reading an article entitled “Chinese and American Technical Communication: A Cultural Perspective” in Technical Communication, the main research journal of the Society for Technical Communication. It points out that translation from Chinese to English is not sufficient to provide useful technical works to American audiences.

Similarly, writing from a different culture (17th Century England) will not simply translate into 21st Century America.

I believe the change came from these influences:
[ul]
[li]Rejection of Latin-based rhetoric, grammar, and style as part of the outright rejection of the Catholic church by the Calvinists.[/li][li]A increased need for clear communication throughout all classes of society for the purpose of trade and technological advancement.[/li][li]A more egalitarian view of society propagated by the English Revolution, The 1688 Revolution, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution (which, IMHO, are various aspects of a large-scale change in Western culture).[/li][li]The influx of ordinary street speech into formal English as part of the printing boom. With the economic boom in England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, printing was not only available but cheap. The audience for printed works exploded, and writers wrote for a more widespread and less-educated audience.[/li][/ul]

18

Under more modern punctuation, and leaving out the parenthetical note, it would be “For tobacco, which grows almost everywhere, was first found out by some of the barbarous Indians…”

19

[quote=Jet Jaguar]
Not necessarily. Although some of what I read is in verse (which does add another layer of difficulty), I mean writings of the same time period in general.

Have you tried reading Phillip Stubbes’ Anatomie of Abuses? (There are some more modernized excerpts here.) He was a sixteenth-century pamphleteer who decried excesses of his contemporaries. He was, of course, Puritan. The main obstacles to his writing, I think, are just puzzling out the spelling (quite the fan of the terminal e) and a bit of the vocabulary. The style is not quite as elevated as King James, being aimed at the general public (as opposed to King James’ educated and royal peers), and the Stubbes is not trying to do much more than shock people with their own excesses and allowing himself to vent. It can be amusing at times, if you imagine Stubbes as a large, squawking chicken.

You could also try reading Samuel Pepys’ diary. The link leads to a blog that posts transcriptions from a late nineteenth-century transcription, as the original was written in shorthand. I’m not sure how the transcription influences the meaning/structure of the text, but the cadence of the language is different enough to make me think that it’s probably a fairly faithful transcription.

I’d be interested to know how the language in pamphlets pre-18th-century compares to more formal language (such as wee Jimmie’s counterblast) in regards to grammar and structure. The only one I have any real (and very limited at that) experience with is Stubbes.

20

I’m still not sure what the structure of the sentence is. Suppose, as you claim, that “which, (though under diverse names) grows almost everywhere” is a parenthetical expression. It should be possible to delete it then, leaving a grammatical sentence. That would leave the following:

> For tobacco being a common herb was first found out by some of the barbarous
> Indians to be a preservative or antidote against the pox, a filthy disease,
> whereunto these barbarous people are (as all men know) very much subject,
> what through the uncleanly and adust constitution of their bodies, and what
> through the intemperate heat of their climate . . .

“was found out” is the verb in this sentence, but where’s the subject? My best guess is that “For tobacco being a common herb” is not an initial parenthetical expression, as I was guessing before. I’m now guessing that “For” introduces the sentence and just means “Well, as we all know”. So this sentence says, “Well, as we all know, tobacco (a common herb), was first found out by some of the barbarous Indians to be a preservative or antidote against the pox, a filthy disease, where unto these barbarous people are (as all men know) very much subject . . .”