Texts in Context:
Wot Shall We Make of
ye Anglish Language?
By Gabriel Blanchard
As we proceed with whatever this is we're talking about, we once again pause to discuss how we're talking about it.
Old and Young English
We last addressed the topic of the English language in the same post in which we discussed the Norman Conquest. The century or so following that event were a period of dramatic development in English, some of which is not well understood—Norman French became the prestige language in the civic sphere in 1066 (as Latin already was in church affairs), so the tail-end of Late Anglo-Saxon and the beginning of Early Middle English are not dialects with a lot written in them; ergo, evidence about them is comparatively scant. But, having come to the Renaissance and the cusp of the Reformation—or more properly, the Reformations; we’ll get to that—this is a good juncture to say a little about the evolution of English, from Christopher Marlowe to Chappell Roan.
Late Medieval English—1362-1485
From the Pleading in English Act till the Tudor Accession
Our story begins in 1362, the year in which the thirty-sixth Parliament of King Edward III passed the Pleading in English Act. For nearly the past three hundred years, legal proceedings had been conducted in Anglo-Norman French, despite the fact most commoners could not speak French, Anglo-Norman or otherwise. This Act restored the English language to use in courts of law, so that their proceedings would be intelligible to all concerned, not just the nobility. It probably also indicates that an increasing proportion of the nobility were being raised with Middle English, not Anglo-Norman, as their first language. (This is slightly ironic, since we noted in our post of a month ago that Edward III was also the king who tried to claim the throne of France, igniting the Hundred Years’ War.) It was about twenty years after this that the Wycliffe Bible, a complete translation of the Vulgate into Middle English by Fr. John Wycliffe, was completed.1
Around the year 1400, we see another important innovation, that of the Chancery Standard. Middle English was highly dialectal; you could probably understand somebody from the next village, and maybe even from the next shire, but any further than that and things were apt to get dicey. (This was not unique to English, nor is it wholly a thing of the past. In modern Italy, for instance, though a standard form of Italian based on the dialect of Tuscany is taught in schools throughout the nation, regional varieties of Italian can diverge considerably, to the point that e.g. a Sicilian and a Venetian might not comprehend each other’s casual speech.) Chancery Standard was two things, a spoken dialect and a set form of writing, and therefore of spelling. A notable change from this period is the disappearance of the letter ƿ (called wynn), which had originally been the eighth rune of the futhorc, borrowed by English scribes for the w-sound; the digraph uu, which didn’t look confusingly similar to p, became usual instead. Chancery Standard became the ordinary spoken language of England’s legal administration, even while formal records were often kept in Latin; it was, accordingly, there to take over when the custom of officially recording things in Latin also became obsolete. Though modifications have been made, the spelling of English is based on Chancery Standard to this day—which is partly why the next big change we have to discuss has made English spelling such a ghastly mess.
Tudor English—1485-1594
From the Tudor Accession till the Death of Marlowe
It was in this period that the divergence of English from its most closely-related sister language, Scots,2 began. Also, incidentally, it is in this era that we reach Early Modern English—the kind of English most native speakers can read and correctly get the gist of without formal academic study (though maybe not without the help of a scholar, whether present or in the form of textual notes).
The aforementioned next big change comes to the fore here. That change is called the Great Vowel Shift. Now, English has lots of vowel sounds. Cross-linguistically, about five is common; some languages have as few as two or three (e.g., Classical Arabic has just a, i, and u). But English has—if we stick to General American, which has the smallest vowel inventory of the major English dialects—a ridiculous minimum of ten simple vowel sounds3 plus a minimum of four diphthongs. Which means that for vowel difficulty, our language ranks beside such tongue-twisters as Hungarian, Vietnamese, and even French. There are still a few worse than us, like the Nuer language (spoken in Sudan and Ethiopia) with its twenty-three vowels, or the twenty-six vowels of Danish (spoken by pastries), but English seems like it has some explaining to do!
Unluckily, the Great Vowel Shift isn’t here to do that explaining—if anything, the vowel system of Middle English was worse. But it was more consistently spelled, and the Great Vowel Shift did ruin that, so we can get mad at it for that anyway.
The short version is as follows. In Middle English, the basic forms of a, e, i, o, and u were pronounced much as those letters are in Spanish today. If we’d stuck to that system, the vowels of the word “name” would be about the same as those of the word “calmest”; “beet” would sound like “bait”; “ice” would half-rhyme with “Lisa”; the vowel of “pot” would be the same as the one in “roll”; and “unify” would start with a simple oo (no initial y-sound). If we had altered our spellings with our pronunciation, on the other hand, we would write something like ném for “name,” bít for “beet,” ais for “ice,” and yunifai for “unify”; “pot” is harder to get across in that system, but we might perhaps use paat, or påt.
These changes only applied to stressed vowels. This is why the second vowel of “lovely” has an old-style ee-sound, even though the stressed vowel of “my” has the vowel-shifted igh-sound: “Lovely” is accented on the first syllable, so the unaccented second syllable got to keep its usual sound (in this case). But, besides these sound changes—old ah to ey, old ey to ee, etc.—other vowels and diphthongs also changed, some of them only in some environments (which might or might not depend on stress); this is why “bread,” “break,” and “beak” all have different vowel sounds, despite being nearly identical in spelling and stress.
Why did all this happen? Of course there is no academic consensus. That would be too easy. But one of the leading theories is that the prestige of French was a factor. Basically, the idea is that pronouncing “name” as ném instead of nah-meh sounded fancy and vaguely French, and that, probably in combination with other causes, this built up into an entire Great Vowel Shift.4 If this was a major factor, that has to be one of the most infuriatingly silly reasons behind such a substantial and inconvenient change in the history of language.
Though the claith were bad, blythly may we niffer;
Gin we get a wab, it makes little differ.
We hae tint our plaid, bannet, belt, and swordie,
Ha's, and mailins braid—but we hae a Geordie!
The Great Vowel Shift took some time; the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are generally seen as its core. The printing press was also introduced in the Tudor era, which, among other things, led to the letter þ being replaced with the digraph th. We also see the first dictionary around this time—a Latin-English “wordbook,” composed by Sir Thomas Elyot (an ancestor of T. S. Eliot). Our watershed moment can be pegged to 1594, the year William Shakespeare took the lead over Christopher Marlowe in English drama due to the latter’s untimely death.
The Short Seventeenth Century—1594-1662
From the Death of Marlowe to the Restoration Book of Common Prayer
This period—and, to some extent, the next period as well—is what we might call the classical age of English, equivalent in importance to the fifth century BC for Ancient Greek. Three of the most significant bodies of work in our language date to this “short seventeenth century”: first, the majority of Shakespeare‘s plays, including most of his finest and best-known work; second, the King James Bible, published in 1611; and third, marking the conclusion of this period, the 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. This Book of Common Prayer is significant not only because it did in fact influence written and spoken English, but because it remained substantially unchanged for almost three hundred years.6 A number of other celebrated writers also date to this period, such as John Donne (whose incomparable “Meditation XVII” from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions is with us still in the proverbs “No man is an island” and “Seek not to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”), Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes (whose best-known bequest is his description of life apart from civilization in Leviathan: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”).
Another noteworthy change in English comes in this era: the introduction of new vocabulary from the western shores of the Atlantic. Sustained colonization began at Jamestown in 1607, and words borrowed from indigenous American languages began appearing not long thereafter. Most were the names of animals or plants (occasionally influenced by Spanish as well): abalone, caribou, malamute, moose, ocelot, raccoon, skunk; avocado, cayenne, chili, chocolate, hickory, maize, pecan, petunia, sequoia, squash, tobacco, tomato. Several were proper names, or were turned into proper names, sometimes with dramatic changes from their original pronunciation or meaning: Appalachian, Dakota, Eskimo, Manitoba, Massachusetts, Missouri, Potomac, Sasquatch, Tennessee, Utah. And some denoted geographic or climatic features, or described technologies or customs of North America: bayou, cannibal, caucus, hammock, hurricane, igloo, moccasin, mukluk, powwow, shack, tobacco, toboggan, wigwam.
Finally, certain key changes to our spelling system occur in this period—letters came into existence that, hitherto, had been treated merely as variants of other letters. The u/v distinction had begun to appear on the Continent long ago, but was still non-standard in the British Isles, or was purely positional, v appearing at the beginning of words and u elsewhere, regardless of the sounds they made—thus, they wrote vpon and loue for our “upon” and “love,” even though they pronounced these words essentially as we do. The i/j distinction also starts to peek coyly in around this time, though early on all j‘s were pronounced as in “hallelujah”;7 later sound changes introduced the “jar” function of j. And finally, it was around this time that that old digraph, uu, started to register as an independent letter, w, named after its origin, even though it tended to conserve the shape that, in the u/v split, got assigned to v.
Codification—1662-1755
From the Restoration Book of Common Prayer to Johnson’s Dictionary
After the Stuart Restoration, we enter a period of linguistic stability; this is somewhat ironic, since politically, things are as complex as ever. The very next king after Charles II, James VII and II, had his throne usurped by his own son-in-law, the thoroughly unlikable William of Orange; this set the British Isles up for a protracted succession controversy that lasts from 1688 until 1746, when the last important legitimist revolt in Britain (led by the famous Bonnie Prince Charlie) was decisively defeated at the Battle of Culloden in the Scottish Highlands. This was also the first major period of British imperialism, in competition especially with the Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish (the last of whom were Britain’s foes in the magnificently-named War of Jenkins’ Ear).
But changes to English as such, and even major influences upon it, are relatively few. John Milton, John Bunyan, John Locke and Isaac Newton all write in this period, and the careers of Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards also begin within it; they are great authors, certainly, but they do little to influence the English language—their excellence lies rather in using the linguistic tools crafted by others to magnificent effect. It is, accordingly, convenient to view this age as concluding with the completion of A Dictionary of the English Language by Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1755, which saw no serious rival to its authority for well over one hundred years.8
1Wycliffe’s was neither the first nor the only translation of the Bible prior to the English Reformation. Contrary to widespread belief, it violated neither civil nor canon law to translate the Bible into vernacular languages, and the Bible as such was never placed on the Index of Forbidden Books: Specific translations of it were, and for a long time there were efforts to discourage reading the Bible in the vernacular, the idea being to indirectly ensure that only the educated—in an age in which education was handled almost solely by the Church—would be likely to read the Bible in isolation. (An era which has a cottage industry of predicting the Second Coming, despite clear warnings in the text of the New Testament that this is impossible, can perhaps begin to see the point of this.)
2The Scots language should not be confused with either Scottish English or Scots Gaelic. Scottish English is simply the kind of English typically spoken in Scotland, with local differences in intonation (“an accent”) and certain words not found elsewhere. Scots Gaelic is a Celtic language, more closely related to Welsh than to English; it is no longer a common mother-tongue outside the Hebrides. Scots proper, like modern English, is a Germanic language, and both are descended from Middle English. However, English descends chiefly from the Middle English spoken in the center, east, and southeast of England; Scots derives instead from the Northumbrian dialect, which prevailed from the Antonine Wall to the southern borders of Yorkshire. After Scots, the next-closest living relatives of English are West Frisian and Dutch.
3Provided we also accept the, to linguists, barefaced lie that what we regard as long a and long o are simple vowels rather than diphthongs.
4Though ludicrous enough to be correct, this idea may be unduly complicated. Since Anglo-Saxon times, our language has shown a marked tendency for its vowels to mutate, break, and recombine on the very feeblest pretexts.
5This text handily illustrates both the close relation, and the clear distinction, between English and Scots. The grammar is, in this case, as close as makes little differ; the Scots vocabulary of the verse—in sequential order and with (approximate) pronunciations—is as follows:
• claith [kle͡yth]: cloth
• blythly [blo͡ið-lē]: blithely, i.e. gladly
• niffer [nĭ-fêŕ]: to haggle; to exchange, trade
• gin [gĭn]: if ever, by the time (not to be confused with English gin [jĭn], the type of liquor)
• wab [wäb]: length of cloth, bolt of fabric (cognate with Modern English “web”)
• differ [dĭ-fêŕ]: difference; dissent
• hae [hā]: to have, take; to think, believe
• tint [tĭnt]: lost (past tense of tine [tīn], “to lose”)
• plaid [plīd]: twill cloth (borrowed into English as the name for the patterns we call “plaid”—more properly “tartan” when the insignia of a Highland clan—which this cloth is often used for)
• bannet [bå-nĕt]: bonnet, i.e. the Balmoral cap, also a traditional element of Highland dress
• swordie [såŕ-dē]: (diminutive for) sword
• ha [hä]: hall, house (pluralized as ha’s [häz])
• mailin [me͡y-lĭn]: farmland, (agricultural) estate, smallholding
• braid [bŕād]: broad
• Geordie [jyåŕ-dē]: (diminutive for) George, “Georgie”
6This was remarkable in itself. The Book of Common Prayer was first promulgated in 1549 under King Edward VI, the son and successor of Henry VIII. (Henry’s permission for ritual alterations to the Church’s practice had been minuscule; the Litany, the first Anglican service conducted in English, did not appear until ten years after the Act of Supremacy.) The 1549 book was superseded in 1552; the next year, Edward died and Queen Mary I restored Catholicism, which was in turn reversed on the accession of Elizabeth I. She introduced a new book in 1559, and this too was revised in 1604. After the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell banned the Book of Common Prayer in 1653, a law that remained in place until the Stuart Restoration of 1660. The 1662 revision took place under the ægis of Charles II, and was not significantly tampered with until 1928.
7It may be four hundred years too late for this to matter, but the present author finds this downright exasperating. “Oh no, English doesn’t need þ, a letter for a sound that’s fairly rare cross-linguistically and would therefore benefit from being denoted by a unique symbol; but you know what it could use, since it currently has two ways of spelling the y-sound (i and y)? A third way of spelling that exact same sound—yes, brilliant, clearly this is the squeaky wheel in English that needs to be greased!”
8The rival in question would be the Oxford English Dictionary, whose first edition was released in 1884, a hundred and twenty-nine years after Johnson’s.
Gabriel Blanchard (who lived in Scotland from 1987 to 1990) is CLT’s editor at large. He now lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy our series The Brain, A User’s Manual, which gives the reader a crash course in basic deductive logic. We begin from the ground up, with defining words, and proceed from there to constructing sentences; we then go over Aristotelian logic (in three parts) and Stoic logic (also in three parts), and conclude with a topical index of both the Brain Manual and our series on informal fallacies. Thank you for reading the CLT Journal!
Published on 7th July, 2025. Page image of the offending folio from a rare extant copy of the “Wicked Bible,” a flawed edition of the King James from 1612: In Exodus 20:14, it reads “Thou shalt commit adultery” (incorrectly). This is difficult to make out in the page image, but a close, careful look at the text beside 14 in the left-hand column should show that the word “not” is missing. The printers were fined £300—today worth almost $98,000—and a vast majority of copies of the Wicked Bible were destroyed, hence their status today as collector’s items. This is one of several famous Bible errata, like the Fool’s Bible (Psalm 14:1, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is a God”), the Owl Bible (I Peter 3:5, “in subjection unto their owl husbands”), or the Standing Fishes Bible (Ezekiel 47:10, “the fishes shall stand upon it from Engedi even unto Eneglaim”). The present writer’s favorite, which encompasses all errata, is the Printers Bible: Its Psalm 119:161 has the arguably true but unorthodox text, “Printers have persecuted me without a cause.”