The Renaissance (1500-1650)

177.Shakespeare’s Pronunciation178.Changes Shown Through Corpus Linguistics179.Grammatical Features180.The Noun

Asiah Razali

Asiah Razali

177.Shakespeare’s Pronunciation

• Much more like ours.(than has always been realized)

• Alexander Pope pronounced tay for tea.

• Er, ir, ur have the same pronunciation

(e.g herd, birth, hurt)

Asiah Razali

• ME of ē was sometimes open and sometimes close.

• In 15th century attempt was made to distinguish them by spelling.

• Closer sound was written with -ee/ -ie (eg deep,field)

• Open sound was written with -ea (eg sea,clean)

• Not consistently carried out.

• The variation in spelling marked the different pronunciation long ago.

Asiah Razali

• ME of Ō [u:] (e.g. room , roof , root)

• Shortened and rounded in 15th century e.g. [blood] and [flood].

• In some words , retained it length until 1700.

• Shortened w/o unrounded e.g. [good] [stood] [book]

Asiah Razali

Much fluctuation in the pronunciation of words containing these ME vowels in Shakespeare’s day.

Asiah Razali

178.Changes Shown Through Corpus Linguistics

• The flourishing sociolinguistics and the availability of electronic database give fuller picture of English language.

• The computerized processing of language data has been in progress for period OE present.

Asiah Razali

Renaissance period benefited most from

this trend.

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179.Grammatical Features

• English Grammar in 16th and early 17th –marked more by the survival of certain forms and usages.

• Inflection of OE reduced.

• Retain some original inflection in the few parts of speech.

Asiah Razali

180.The Noun

• The only inflections retained in the noun are plural and possessive singular.

• -s plural generalized except for a few noun.

• Sheep , swine –unchanged plural

• Mice , feet –mutated plural

• Certain old weak plural in –n (e.g. oxen)

Asiah Razali

His-genitive

• In ME the –es possessive was written and pronounced as -is,-ys.( Identical to pronunciation of ‘his’ due to unstressed h.)

• In 18th century ,people were troubled by this usage.

Asiah Razali

• Dr. Johnson pointed out that ,

• E.g. a woman’s beauty ≠ a woman his beauty.

• However, he aware its true source was the OE genitive .

• The error left its trace in apostrophe which we still retain as a graphic convenience to mark the possessive. ‘s ≠ his ,but –es possessive

Asiah Razali

• Stonis genitive

• Ston is(his) pronoun

• Due to same pronunciation.

• -’s felt by many as a contraction of pronoun his.

The End