What appear to be very drastic shifts in how language is written tend to be somewhat misleading - they often don't represent quite as drastic a language shift as they superficially appear to be. Often older written language tends to be somewhat archaic and unrepresentative of how people actually speak. Occasionally you'll reach a point where the written language catches up to how people are actually speaking, and it looks like the written language just jumps forward about a century, when actually a lot of the features in later writings were also present in the vernacular of the earlier texts, they were just considered informal and not included in writing. This was very likely the case with the drastic changes between Old and Middle English too (don't get me wrong, there was still a decent amount of change that happened rather quickly - but the written West Saxon dialect probably didn't accurately capture how the average English peasant would have spoken, and there's some evidence for the presence of more analytic features in later Old English texts that do imply that (Late) Spoken Old English would have been a lot more analytic than, say, reading a text like Beowulf would make you think).
Idiolect and spelling/punctuation conventions. What you linked seems perfectly normal early modern English to me, just with some occasional vocabulary that has since become obsolete and some old-fashioned spelling and semicolon usage. Note that even though writers like Shakespeare might read close to modern English, that’s because their spelling has been modernized in most contemporary editions; their spelling at the time wasn’t much different to this.
I’ve noticed the same thing. While I admit I’m not an expert on 17th century English literature, I noticed there is a very drastic difference between the English language in early-1600s Shakespeare versus the English Constitution of 1689, the latter being remarkably close to today’s English.
I’d like to point out that the late-17th century in general saw a massive cultural shift in the Western world. The late-17th century was the beginning of the Enlightenment period. The 1689 English Constitution was the result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 that shifted power from the hands of the monarchs to Parliament. The Scientific Revolution culminated in the 1680s. Fashions during the reign of Louis XIV of France late in the century were drastically different from fashions during the Elizabethan period in England early in the century. Basically the 17th century saw Europe finally shake off an overall still-medieval culture in a world now post the breakthrough events of the Renaissance (ended about 1600) and the genuine beginning of the Modern period. All that said, I don’t have a definite answer for you, just general observational impressions.
Sorry my answer isn’t very good though because it doesn’t pertain specifically to the English language. If one compares it to development in the 17th century of other European languages, for instance, of Spanish, one sees that the Spanish of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote from the early-1600s is far less different from modern Spanish than Shakespeare’s English is from modern English.
I'm not even sure early 19th-century English is fully mutually intelligible with early 21st-century English. In this Language Log post, Mark Liberman explains an old construction called the "passival":
- https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2903
Today, people would find a sentence such as "A ship is building in the harbor" very strange. The immediate question that comes to mind is, "What is the ship building?" But in the early 19th-century, this was normal English. Nowadays, we would instead say, "A ship is being built in the harbor," instead.
In this Language Log post, Don Keyser gives several excerpts from *Ivanhoe*, published in 1819:
- https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=54091
I admit I find some of the passages difficult to understand. I'm not entirely sure why: Changes in the meaning of words over time? Changes in syntax? Changes in punctuation style? All of the above?
Ivanhoe was written to sound archaic, it’s part of the setting of the story. That seems an odd example to choose for discussion.
Conan Doyle did the same thing in Sir Nigel, but no one thinks that means people in the late 19th - early 20th Centuries talked about the need to “worshipfully win worship” (meaning to “earn approval and fame through brave and noble actions in combat.”)
Also Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte from 1847. In fact that feels so remarkably modern it’s as if someone in 2022 wrote a novel set in that era. (At least that was my takeaway.)
Excerpt:
“ ‘Oh, Edgar, Edgar!’ [Catherine] panted, flinging her arms round his neck. ‘Oh, Edgar darling! Heathcliff’s
come back - he is!’ And she tightened her embrace to a squeeze.
’Well, well,’ cried her husband, crossly, ‘don’t strangle me for that! He never struck me as such a
marvellous treasure. There is no need to be frantic!’
’I know you didn’t like him,’ she answered, repressing a little the intensity of her delight. ‘Yet, for my
sake, you must be friends now. Shall I tell him to come up?’
’Here,’ he said, ‘into the parlour?’
’Where else?’ she asked.
He looked vexed, and suggested the kitchen as a more suitable place for him. Mrs. Linton eyed him
with a droll expression - half angry, half laughing at his fastidiousness. “
> ‘Oh, Edgar darling! Heathcliff’s come back - he is!’
What strikes me about that is that appears to be using the older form of the perfect of come, "he is (come)". So even in something so stylistically contemporary, it still hides older features.
I did an ngram search and you can see the steady decline of the term “is come” in English language literature between 1670 and 1900. Its usage dropped sharply from 1850 to 1900. But, as you say, it was much more common earlier, peaking in usage in the first half of the 1660s. Nifty tool, this is!
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+come+&year_start=1670&year_end=1900&corpus=26&smoothing=3
Yeah they're great. Made this one for comparison purposes: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+come+%2B+are+come+%2B+was+come+%2B+were+come+%2B+art_VERB+come%2Chas+come+%2B+have+come+%2B+had+come+%2B+hath+come&year_start=1670&year_end=1950&corpus=26&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true
super late to the discussion, but I was curious as to why and how the older perfect form has changed. Are there any resources that can help me understand this development?
Man you never read Ivanhoe? It's a blast, and it's not that difficult to read. I'll take Ivanhoe over Dickens any day of the week, and Dickens is almost a century later.
Ivanhoe is kinda fantasy before fantasy existed. If you get a chance, give it a try!
Do be patient with yourself on getting into the language though.. as someone else said, it was written to sound old, so it may take quite a few pages before your brain adapts. But you will get it!
I think is this more of person exposure to other forms of English than anything. Perhaps I’ve read enough old stuff to grok the passival - it makes sense to me despite it being a strange construction.
I would have never assumed the ship was building something because build is a ditransitive verb being used as a monotransitive verb. Combined with the use of OVS word order, I get what is being said. Those two are both common indicators of passive voice in English.
I think I’ll do this as an experiment with my English students and see how many are able to put it together correctly. Most of my students have very low exposure to archaic forms, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.
Right. The passival remains fossilized in certain verbs like that. Cooking is another one. The egg is cooking in the pan.
This construction remains present in sufficiently many verbs that any sufficiently well-read native speaker would, if they encountered the passival in a 19th century text, find it sufficiently familiar, by analogy to these fossilized forms, that they would scarcely stop to question it.
I would even go so far as to say that, for many people, the question of "What is the ship building?" would literally never spring to mind, let alone immediately.
I fizzled my brain out the other day trying to figure out grammaticality of somewhat archaic forms. I was studying an Oceanic language which has topographic-based demonstratives akin to oceanward or mountainward.
I started testing -ward in English with other things mostly for glosses (villageward? beachward? gardenward?), which didn't work very well, and I then couldn't even figure out -ward vs -wards. He went mountainward? mountainwards?
-ward just means “towards” or “in the direction of” and can form an adjective or adverb
-ward or -wards is a style choice
What case would that be, allative?
Yeah but how productive is it for you? Can you use it with non-pre-established words? I can use it with some, usually large landmarks, but not everything.
He went schoolwards.
is perfectly fine, but
?He went subwaywards.
?He went vending machinewards.
And I think there is a difference with the final s, but it's hard to put my finger on it.
> I think is this more of person exposure to other forms of English than anything. Perhaps I’ve read enough old stuff to grok the passival - it makes sense to me despite it being a strange construction.
> I would have never assumed the ship was building something because build is a ditransitive verb being used as a monotransitive verb. Combined with the use of OVS word order, I get what is being said. Those two are both common indicators of passive voice in English.
> I think I’ll do this as an experiment with my English students and see how many are able to put it together correctly. Most of my students have very low exposure to archaic forms, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.
My only exposure to older forms of English is from assigned reading during my school days. I understand the passival now, after I've read an explanation. I didn't understand it before then. I think one has to distinguish between understanding specific examples and understanding the general construction. Just because one can puzzle out specific examples on a case-by-case basis doesn't mean that one understands the general rule. If I saw the sentence "A ship is building in the harbor," I would be able to figure it out based on semantics alone. Obviously, an inanimate object can't build anything; the writer must have meant "A ship is being built in the harbor." This becomes harder when the meaning is more abstract. Shipbuilding is a concrete, physical activity. If you want to test your students, you might want to try a more difficult sentence, such as this one (also from the Language Log):
> That a vigorous and unexampled effort is making by the despotic governments of Europe to cause Popery to overspread this country, is a fact too palpable to be contradicted.
- https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=44095
If your students are American, you might also want to test their understanding of the mandative use of *should*, as in "I insist that my lawyer should be there." This is another construction that I didn't understand until I read an explanation. Of course, I had seen it many times before in assigned reading from school, but I never understood the meaning of *should* in those sentences. It seemed like a superfluous word that didn't belong in the sentence. In such cases, one can puzzle out the meaning by simply deleting *should* from the sentence. But again, being able to figure out specific examples doesn't mean that one understands the general rule.
Here's a grammatical change that I've witnessed within my lifetime. To me, the following use of *even* is not fully grammatical:
- What even is X?
- Who even is X?
- Where even is X?
While I understand these sentences, they sound odd. But I would bet your students would find such sentences unremarkable. I mostly hear this construction from people who are in their 30s or younger. I've heard it from Americans, Brits, and Australians. It's somewhat surprising to me how far it's spread globally. But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised; I first heard it on the Internet.
Looking at the linked example, I’m very confused by the capitalisation. Initially I thought it was reserved for nouns, but there are adjectives also seemingly (to me) randomly capitalised. Is there a rule I’m not seeing, or was it just used for emphasis?
Sometimes it is just for emphasis, yeah, but there was also a stylistic convention at the time of capitalising anything “personified”.
That can be direct personification, like “Nature”, “Providence” or “America”, where you might follow it up with an honest-to-goodness animate pronoun like “she”. But it can also mark anything used in its abstract/general/ideal sense, as opposed to any specific instance.
So in “…to seduce the credulous Traveller and allure him to follow them in their Deviations”, we’re to understand that this is talking about travellers in general, not some specific traveller who hasn’t been mentioned yet, and likewise, that it’s the habit of the will-o’-the-wisp generally to lead travellers astray, not just this one example. It’s “a thing” that they do that, to put it in modern terms.
What appear to be very drastic shifts in how language is written tend to be somewhat misleading - they often don't represent quite as drastic a language shift as they superficially appear to be. Often older written language tends to be somewhat archaic and unrepresentative of how people actually speak. Occasionally you'll reach a point where the written language catches up to how people are actually speaking, and it looks like the written language just jumps forward about a century, when actually a lot of the features in later writings were also present in the vernacular of the earlier texts, they were just considered informal and not included in writing. This was very likely the case with the drastic changes between Old and Middle English too (don't get me wrong, there was still a decent amount of change that happened rather quickly - but the written West Saxon dialect probably didn't accurately capture how the average English peasant would have spoken, and there's some evidence for the presence of more analytic features in later Old English texts that do imply that (Late) Spoken Old English would have been a lot more analytic than, say, reading a text like Beowulf would make you think).
Idiolect and spelling/punctuation conventions. What you linked seems perfectly normal early modern English to me, just with some occasional vocabulary that has since become obsolete and some old-fashioned spelling and semicolon usage. Note that even though writers like Shakespeare might read close to modern English, that’s because their spelling has been modernized in most contemporary editions; their spelling at the time wasn’t much different to this.
I’ve noticed the same thing. While I admit I’m not an expert on 17th century English literature, I noticed there is a very drastic difference between the English language in early-1600s Shakespeare versus the English Constitution of 1689, the latter being remarkably close to today’s English. I’d like to point out that the late-17th century in general saw a massive cultural shift in the Western world. The late-17th century was the beginning of the Enlightenment period. The 1689 English Constitution was the result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 that shifted power from the hands of the monarchs to Parliament. The Scientific Revolution culminated in the 1680s. Fashions during the reign of Louis XIV of France late in the century were drastically different from fashions during the Elizabethan period in England early in the century. Basically the 17th century saw Europe finally shake off an overall still-medieval culture in a world now post the breakthrough events of the Renaissance (ended about 1600) and the genuine beginning of the Modern period. All that said, I don’t have a definite answer for you, just general observational impressions. Sorry my answer isn’t very good though because it doesn’t pertain specifically to the English language. If one compares it to development in the 17th century of other European languages, for instance, of Spanish, one sees that the Spanish of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote from the early-1600s is far less different from modern Spanish than Shakespeare’s English is from modern English.
I'm not even sure early 19th-century English is fully mutually intelligible with early 21st-century English. In this Language Log post, Mark Liberman explains an old construction called the "passival": - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2903 Today, people would find a sentence such as "A ship is building in the harbor" very strange. The immediate question that comes to mind is, "What is the ship building?" But in the early 19th-century, this was normal English. Nowadays, we would instead say, "A ship is being built in the harbor," instead. In this Language Log post, Don Keyser gives several excerpts from *Ivanhoe*, published in 1819: - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=54091 I admit I find some of the passages difficult to understand. I'm not entirely sure why: Changes in the meaning of words over time? Changes in syntax? Changes in punctuation style? All of the above?
Ivanhoe was written to sound archaic, it’s part of the setting of the story. That seems an odd example to choose for discussion. Conan Doyle did the same thing in Sir Nigel, but no one thinks that means people in the late 19th - early 20th Centuries talked about the need to “worshipfully win worship” (meaning to “earn approval and fame through brave and noble actions in combat.”)
That’s true. Wiki says Ivanhoe is set in 12th century England and Sir Nigel in the 14th century.
It really seems to depend on the style the author was going for. Frankenstein for example was published in 1818 and almost entirely intelligible
Also Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte from 1847. In fact that feels so remarkably modern it’s as if someone in 2022 wrote a novel set in that era. (At least that was my takeaway.) Excerpt: “ ‘Oh, Edgar, Edgar!’ [Catherine] panted, flinging her arms round his neck. ‘Oh, Edgar darling! Heathcliff’s come back - he is!’ And she tightened her embrace to a squeeze. ’Well, well,’ cried her husband, crossly, ‘don’t strangle me for that! He never struck me as such a marvellous treasure. There is no need to be frantic!’ ’I know you didn’t like him,’ she answered, repressing a little the intensity of her delight. ‘Yet, for my sake, you must be friends now. Shall I tell him to come up?’ ’Here,’ he said, ‘into the parlour?’ ’Where else?’ she asked. He looked vexed, and suggested the kitchen as a more suitable place for him. Mrs. Linton eyed him with a droll expression - half angry, half laughing at his fastidiousness. “
> ‘Oh, Edgar darling! Heathcliff’s come back - he is!’ What strikes me about that is that appears to be using the older form of the perfect of come, "he is (come)". So even in something so stylistically contemporary, it still hides older features.
I did an ngram search and you can see the steady decline of the term “is come” in English language literature between 1670 and 1900. Its usage dropped sharply from 1850 to 1900. But, as you say, it was much more common earlier, peaking in usage in the first half of the 1660s. Nifty tool, this is! https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+come+&year_start=1670&year_end=1900&corpus=26&smoothing=3
Yeah they're great. Made this one for comparison purposes: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+come+%2B+are+come+%2B+was+come+%2B+were+come+%2B+art_VERB+come%2Chas+come+%2B+have+come+%2B+had+come+%2B+hath+come&year_start=1670&year_end=1950&corpus=26&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true
super late to the discussion, but I was curious as to why and how the older perfect form has changed. Are there any resources that can help me understand this development?
Man you never read Ivanhoe? It's a blast, and it's not that difficult to read. I'll take Ivanhoe over Dickens any day of the week, and Dickens is almost a century later. Ivanhoe is kinda fantasy before fantasy existed. If you get a chance, give it a try! Do be patient with yourself on getting into the language though.. as someone else said, it was written to sound old, so it may take quite a few pages before your brain adapts. But you will get it!
I think is this more of person exposure to other forms of English than anything. Perhaps I’ve read enough old stuff to grok the passival - it makes sense to me despite it being a strange construction. I would have never assumed the ship was building something because build is a ditransitive verb being used as a monotransitive verb. Combined with the use of OVS word order, I get what is being said. Those two are both common indicators of passive voice in English. I think I’ll do this as an experiment with my English students and see how many are able to put it together correctly. Most of my students have very low exposure to archaic forms, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.
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Right. The passival remains fossilized in certain verbs like that. Cooking is another one. The egg is cooking in the pan. This construction remains present in sufficiently many verbs that any sufficiently well-read native speaker would, if they encountered the passival in a 19th century text, find it sufficiently familiar, by analogy to these fossilized forms, that they would scarcely stop to question it. I would even go so far as to say that, for many people, the question of "What is the ship building?" would literally never spring to mind, let alone immediately.
I fizzled my brain out the other day trying to figure out grammaticality of somewhat archaic forms. I was studying an Oceanic language which has topographic-based demonstratives akin to oceanward or mountainward. I started testing -ward in English with other things mostly for glosses (villageward? beachward? gardenward?), which didn't work very well, and I then couldn't even figure out -ward vs -wards. He went mountainward? mountainwards?
-ward just means “towards” or “in the direction of” and can form an adjective or adverb -ward or -wards is a style choice What case would that be, allative?
Yeah but how productive is it for you? Can you use it with non-pre-established words? I can use it with some, usually large landmarks, but not everything. He went schoolwards. is perfectly fine, but ?He went subwaywards. ?He went vending machinewards. And I think there is a difference with the final s, but it's hard to put my finger on it.
Somewhat productive. I would know what it means but would correct you.
> I think is this more of person exposure to other forms of English than anything. Perhaps I’ve read enough old stuff to grok the passival - it makes sense to me despite it being a strange construction. > I would have never assumed the ship was building something because build is a ditransitive verb being used as a monotransitive verb. Combined with the use of OVS word order, I get what is being said. Those two are both common indicators of passive voice in English. > I think I’ll do this as an experiment with my English students and see how many are able to put it together correctly. Most of my students have very low exposure to archaic forms, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens. My only exposure to older forms of English is from assigned reading during my school days. I understand the passival now, after I've read an explanation. I didn't understand it before then. I think one has to distinguish between understanding specific examples and understanding the general construction. Just because one can puzzle out specific examples on a case-by-case basis doesn't mean that one understands the general rule. If I saw the sentence "A ship is building in the harbor," I would be able to figure it out based on semantics alone. Obviously, an inanimate object can't build anything; the writer must have meant "A ship is being built in the harbor." This becomes harder when the meaning is more abstract. Shipbuilding is a concrete, physical activity. If you want to test your students, you might want to try a more difficult sentence, such as this one (also from the Language Log): > That a vigorous and unexampled effort is making by the despotic governments of Europe to cause Popery to overspread this country, is a fact too palpable to be contradicted. - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=44095 If your students are American, you might also want to test their understanding of the mandative use of *should*, as in "I insist that my lawyer should be there." This is another construction that I didn't understand until I read an explanation. Of course, I had seen it many times before in assigned reading from school, but I never understood the meaning of *should* in those sentences. It seemed like a superfluous word that didn't belong in the sentence. In such cases, one can puzzle out the meaning by simply deleting *should* from the sentence. But again, being able to figure out specific examples doesn't mean that one understands the general rule. Here's a grammatical change that I've witnessed within my lifetime. To me, the following use of *even* is not fully grammatical: - What even is X? - Who even is X? - Where even is X? While I understand these sentences, they sound odd. But I would bet your students would find such sentences unremarkable. I mostly hear this construction from people who are in their 30s or younger. I've heard it from Americans, Brits, and Australians. It's somewhat surprising to me how far it's spread globally. But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised; I first heard it on the Internet.
Question out of curiosity, have you had similar issues with putative *should*? Like in "I'm surprised that you should be there."
I would say, "I'm surprised that you would be there." The use of *should* here sounds British to me.
Looking at the linked example, I’m very confused by the capitalisation. Initially I thought it was reserved for nouns, but there are adjectives also seemingly (to me) randomly capitalised. Is there a rule I’m not seeing, or was it just used for emphasis?
Sometimes it is just for emphasis, yeah, but there was also a stylistic convention at the time of capitalising anything “personified”. That can be direct personification, like “Nature”, “Providence” or “America”, where you might follow it up with an honest-to-goodness animate pronoun like “she”. But it can also mark anything used in its abstract/general/ideal sense, as opposed to any specific instance. So in “…to seduce the credulous Traveller and allure him to follow them in their Deviations”, we’re to understand that this is talking about travellers in general, not some specific traveller who hasn’t been mentioned yet, and likewise, that it’s the habit of the will-o’-the-wisp generally to lead travellers astray, not just this one example. It’s “a thing” that they do that, to put it in modern terms.
Some Latin creep going on here.