Changes in English

Language During
the Renaissance
Nylvie Loire Aviles Collamat
 • In Renaissance, English language took
changes mainly in pronunciation,
Grammar, Spelling and in the field of
vocabulary.
• The English language has been gradually
departing from its original Teutonic
What character and reach the modern status.
happened? • England likewise there were many
defenders of English against those who
wished to discriminate against it, among
them influential names like Elyot and
Ascham, Wilson, Puttenham, and
Mulcaster.
 • Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek and
French) was still very much considered the
language of education and scholarship at this
time, and the great enthusiasm for the
classical languages during the English
What Renaissance brought thousands of new words
into the language, peaking around 1600.
happened? • A huge number of classical works were being
translated into English during the 16th
Century, and many new terms were
introduced where a satisfactory English
equivalent did not exist.
English Language
• The English language is the richest
language of the world.
• It is accepted as the international
language.
• Language is not static, it got changes
with the passing time
• English got the modern stage by
changing and developing its origin.
 Changes in Grammar
● The Renaissance period gave the existence to modern grammar.
● It helps in the development of Synonyms and the use of classical derivation to correspond to a
native noun.
● Examples: King-Kingly
• Hand-Manual Nasal-Nosey
 Changes in Pronunciation

•The letter a was pronounced before the consonants [k], [f],

• The pronunciation of word with the letter a became [ei] in

•By the end of the sixteenth century the long [i ] had completed the
process of diphthongization to [ai].
• Example: fire, write, light, life, blind, etc.
• The Middle English long [u] had become the diphthong [au].
• Examples: house, mouse, cow, etc.
The Great Vowel Shift
Middle English vs Renaissance English
• In Middle English (for instance in the time of Chaucer), the long
vowels were generally pronounced very much like the Latin-
derived Romance languages of Europe (e.g., sheep would have
been pronounced more like “shape”; me as “may”; mine as
“meen”; shire as “sheer”; mate as “maat”; out as “oot”; house as
“hoose”; flour as “floor”; boot as “boat”; mode as “mood”; etc). 
Middle English vs Renaissance English
• Chaucer’s word lyf (pronounced “leef”) became the modern word life,
and the word five (originally pronounced “feef”) gradually acquired its
modern pronunciation. Some of the changes occurred in stages:
although lyf was spelled life by the time of Shakespeare in the late 16th
Century, it would have been pronounced more like “lafe” at that time,
and only later did it acquire its modern pronunciation. It should be
noted, though, that the tendency of upper-classes of southern England
to pronounce a broad “a” in words like dance, bath and castle (to sound
like “dahnce”, “bahth” and “cahstle”) was merely an 18th Century
fashionable affectation which happened to stick, and nothing to do with
a general shifting in vowel pronunciation.
Changes Before Renaissance After Renaissance
Dette
in Doute
Debt
doubt
Spelling Indite
Quire
Indict
(Orthography) Choir
Faute Fault
Growth of Vocabulary
● During the English Renaissance, (1500–1650), some 10,000 to
12,000 words entered the English lexicon, including lexicon.
● Examples: aberration, allusion, anachronism, democratic, dexterity,
enthusiasm, imaginary, juvenile, pernicious, sophisticated.
● Many of these words were borrowed directly from Latin, both in its
classical and medieval forms. In turn, Late Latin also included
borrowings from Greek..
 Growth of Vocabulary
● Words from Latin or Greek (often via Latin) were imported wholesale during this
period, either intact
(e.g. genius, species, militia, radius, specimen, criterion, squalor, apparatus, 
focus, tedium, lens, antenna, paralysis, nausea, etc.) or, more commonly, slightly
altered (e.g. horrid, pathetic, illicit, pungent, frugal, anonymous, dislocate, explain, 
excavate, meditate, adapt, enthusiasm, absurdity, area, complex, concept, 
invention, technique, temperature, capsule, premium, system, expensive, 
notorious, gradual, habitual, insane, ultimate, agile, fictitious, physician, 
anatomy, skeleton, orbit, atmosphere, catastrophe, parasite, manuscript, 
lexicon, comedy, tragedy, anthology, fact, biography, mythology, sarcasm, 
paradox, chaos, crisis, climax, etc.).
● A whole category of words ending with the Greek-based suffixes “-ize” and “-ism”
were also introduced around this time.
Translation of the Bible
 The “King James Bible” was
1384 1539 compiled by a committee of
54 scholars and clerics, and
published in 1611
 • The first English dictionary, “A Table
Alphabeticall”, was published by English
schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604.
Cawdrey’s little book contained 2,543 of what
he called “hard words”, especially those
borrowed from Hebrew, Greek, Latin and
French, although it was not actually a very
reliable resource (even the word words was
Dictionary spelled in two different ways on the title page
alone, as wordes and words).
• Several other dictionaries, as well as
grammar, pronunciation and spelling
guides, followed during the 17th and 18th
Century. The first attempt to list ALL the
words in the English language was “An
Universall Etymological English Dictionary”,
compiled by Nathaniel Bailey in 1721 (the
1736 edition contained about 60,000 entries).
 William Shakespeare
• He had a vast vocabulary (34,000 words by some
counts) and he personally coined an estimated 2,000
neologisms or new words in his many works, including,
but by no means limited to, bare-
faced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, 
majestic, obscene, frugal, aerial, gnarled, homicide, 
brittle, radiance, dwindle, puking, countless, submerged
, vast, lackluster, bump, cranny, fitful, premeditated, 
assassination, courtship, eyeballs, Ill-
tuned, hotblooded, laughable, dislocate, 
accommodation, eventful, pell-
mell, aggravate, excellent, fretful, fragrant, gust, hint, 
hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, gloomy, and hundreds of
other terms still commonly used today. 
 William Shakespeare
• He also introduced countless phrases in
common use today, such as one fell
swoop, vanish into thin air, brave new world, in
my mind’s eye, laughing stock, love is
blind, star-crossed lovers, as luck would have
it, fast and loose, once more into the
breach, sea change, there’s the rub, to the
manner born, a foregone conclusion, beggars all
description, it's Greek to me, a tower of
strength, make a virtue of necessity, brevity is
the soul of wit, with bated breath, more in
sorrow than in anger, truth will out, cold
comfort, cruel only to be kind, fool’s
paradise and flesh and blood, among many
others.
More Changes
• word order had become more fixed in a subject-verb-object pattern
• English had developed a complex auxiliary verb system, although to be was still commonly used as
the auxiliary rather than the more modern to have (e.g., I am come rather than I have come). Do was
sometimes used as an auxiliary verb and sometimes not (e.g., say you so? or do you say so?).
• Past tenses were likewise still in a state of flux, and it was still acceptable to use clomb as well
as climbed, clew as well as clawed, shove as well as shaved, digged as well as dug, etc.
• Plural noun endings had shrunk from the six of Old English to just two, “-s” and “-en”, and again
Shakespeare sometimes used one and sometimes the other.
• The old verb ending “-en” had in general been gradually replaced by “-eth” (e.g., loveth, doth, hath,
etc), although this was itself in the process of being replaced by the northern English verb ending “-es”,
and Shakespeare used both (e.g., loves and loveth, but not the old loven).
• Even over the period of Shakespeare’s output there was a noticeable change, with “-eth” endings
outnumbering “-es” by over 3 to 1 during the early period from 1591-1599, and “-es” outnumbering “-
eth” by over 6 to 1 during 1600-1613.
A comparison of a passage from "King Lear" in the 1623 First Folio
with the same passage from a more familiar modern edition below gives
some idea of some of the changes that were still underway in
Shakespeare's time:
 General Characteristics of the Period
• First, a conscious interest in the English language and an attention to its problems are now widely
manifested. The fifteenth century had witnessed sporadic attempts by individual writers to embellish their
style with “aureate terms.” These attempts show in a way a desire to improve the language, at least along
certain limited lines. But in the sixteenth century we meet with a considerable body of literature—books
and pamphlets, prefaces and incidental observations—defending the language against those who
were disposed to compare it unfavorably to Latin or other modern tongues, patriotically recognizing
its position as the national speech, and urging its fitness for learned and literary use. At the same
time, it is considered worthy of cultivation, and to be looked after in the education of the young. Whereas
a century or two before, the upper classes seemed more interested in having their children acquire a
correct French accent and sometimes sent them abroad for the purpose, we now find Elyot urging that
noblemen’s sons should be brought up by those who “speke none englisshe but that which is cleane,
polite, perfectly and articulately pronounced, omittinge no lettre or sillable,” and observing that he
knew some children of noble birth who had “attained corrupte and foule pronunciation” through the
lack of such precautions. Numerous books attempt to describe the proper pronunciation of English,
sometimes for foreigners but often presumably for those whose native dialect did not conform to the
standard of London and the court. Along with this regard for English as an object of pride and
cultivation went the desire to improve it in various ways—particularly to enlarge its vocabulary and
to regulate its spelling. All of these efforts point clearly to a new attitude toward English, an attitude that
makes it an object of conscious and in many ways, fruitful consideration.
• In the second place, we attain in this period to something in the nature of a standard, something
moreover that is recognizably “modern.” The effect of the Great Vowel Shift was to bring the
pronunciation within measurable distance of that which prevails today. The influence of the printing
press and the efforts of spelling reformers had resulted in a form of written English that offers little
difficulty to the modern reader. And the many new words added by the methods already discussed
had given us a vocabulary that has overall survived. Moreover, in the writings of Spenser and
Shakespeare, and their contemporaries generally, we are aware of the existence of a standard
literary language free from the variations of local dialect. Although Sir Walter Raleigh might
speak with a broad Devonshire pronunciation, and for all we know Spenser and Shakespeare may
have carried with them through life traces in their speech of their Lancashire and Warwickshire
ancestry, yet when they wrote they wrote a common English without dialectal idiosyncrasies.
This, as Puttenham (1589) reminds us, was to be the speech of London and the court. It is not without
significance that he adds, “herein we are already ruled by th’ English Dictionaries and other
bookes written by learned men, and therefore it needeth none other direction in that behalfe.”
However subject to the variability characteristic of a language not yet completely settled, the written
language in the latter part of the sixteenth century is fully entitled to be called Standard English. The
regularization of spellings in this written standard can be seen as early as the midfifteenth century in
the official documents of Chancery.
• Thirdly, English in the Renaissance, at least as we see it in books, was much more
plastic than now. People felt freer to mold it to their wills. Words had not always
distributed themselves into rigid grammatical categories. Adjectives appear as
adverbs or nouns or verbs, nouns appear as verbs—in fact, any part of speech
as almost any other part. When Shakespeare wrote stranger’d with an oath he was
fitting the language to his thought, rather than forcing his thought into the mold of
conventional grammar. This was in keeping with the spirit of his age. It was in
language, as in many other respects, an age with the characteristics of youth—
vigor, a willingness to venture, and a disposition to attempt the untried. The
spirit that animated Hawkins and Drake and Raleigh was not foreign to the language
of their time.
• Finally, we note that in spite of all the progress that had been made
toward a uniform standard, a good many features of the language were
still unsettled. There still existed a considerable variety of use—
alternative forms in the grammar, experiments with new words,
variations in pronunciation and spelling. A certain latitude was clearly
permitted among speakers of education and social position, and the
relation between the literary language and good colloquial English was so
close that this latitude appears also in the written language. Where one
might say have wrote or have written with equal propriety, as well as
housen or houses, shoon or shoes, one must often have been in doubt over
which to use. One heard service also pronounced sarvice, and the same
variation occurred in a number of other words (certain—sartin, concern—
consarn, divert—divart, clerk—clark, smert—smart, etc.). These and
many other matters were still unsettled at the close of the period. Their
settlement, as we shall see, was one of the chief concerns of the next age.
The vast impact of Renaissance carried out a flood
of new thoughts and knowledge. It helps in
artificiality and made a distinction between literary
and spoken English.