27. Sound changes in early modern English.

By the sixteenth century English spelling was becoming increasingly out of step with pronunciation owing mainly to the fact that printing was fixing it in its late Middle English form just when various sound changes were having a far-reaching effect on pronunciation.

Chief among these was the so-called ‘Great Vowel Shift’.

• long i became a diphthong (probably in the sixteenth century pronounced [əi] with a first element like the [ə] of the first syllable in ago)

• long e took its place with the value [i:]

• long a became a front vowel, more like that of air to begin with, but later [e:].

Numerous conditioned changes (i.e. changes in the sound of a vowel or consonant when in the vicinity of another sound) also contributed to the mismatch. When long vowels were shortened in certain positions a given spelling could show either on the one hand a long vowel or diphthong or on the other a short vowel that would normally be spelt another way.

At the start of the sixteenth century the main systematic differences in spelling from present-day English were as follows.

i). u and v were graphic variants of a single letter. The form v was used at the beginning of a word and u in all other positions, irrespective of whether the sound was a vowel or a consonant.

ii). Similarly, j was only an extended form of i. i was generally used for both the vowel and for the consonant sound (as in jam) in most positions in a word: its capital form, which resembles J, was beginning to be used in initial position for the consonant sound.

iii). The final ‘silent’ -e was much more commonly found, not only as a marker of a ‘long’ vowel in the preceding syllable (as in take), but with no phonetic function, and sometimes after an unnecessarily doubled final consonant.

iv). The letter y was commonly used for the vowel i, especially in the vicinity of ranging or ‘minim’ letters such as m, n, and u.

v). Double e (ee) or e..e was used for two different long front vowels

vi). Similarly o (oo) or o..e were often used for two different long back vowels: the ‘close’ vowel of moot and the ‘mid’ vowel of moat, mote. o..e was gradually restricted to the latter and, during the 16th century, oa was introduced on the analogy of ea.

28. The expansion of English.

As Britain consolidated into a single powerful state, it extended its borders to include Wales, Scotland and part of Ireland.

As mentioned before, the partial subjugation of Wales was the last stage of the Norman Conquest. It was not until the 16th c., however, that the annexation was completed. Both during the wars and after the final occupation, the English language penetrated into Wales and partly replaced the native Celtic dialect; a large proportion of the aboriginal population, however, did not give up their mother tongue and continued to speak Welsh. (It is noteworthy that to this day Wales has preserved a large number of old Celtic place-names and the Welsh dialect.)

The attempts to conquer Ireland in the 13th and 14th c. ended in failure. In Ireland, only the area around Dublin was ruled direct from England, the rest of the country being Irish or Anglo-Irish. Ireland remained divided among innumerable chiefs and turned into one of the poorest and most backward countries. Despite the weak ties with England and the assimilation of English and Welsh invaders by the Irish, in- penetration continued

The repeated claims of the English kings to be overlords of Scotland were met with protest and revolt. In the early 14th c. Scotland’s independence was secured by the victories of Robert Bruce. Feudal Scotland remained a sovereign kingdom until the later Tudors, but the influence of the English language was greater than elsewhere.

Scotland began to fall under English linguistic influence from the 11 century, when England made her first attempts to conquer the territory. The mixed population of Scotland — the native Scots and Picts, the Britons (who had fled from the Germanic invasion), the Scandinavians (who had stayed on after the Scandinavian settlement), and the English who had gradually moved to the north) from the neighboring regions) was not homogeneous in language. The Scotch-Gaelic dialect of the Scots was driven to the Highlands, while in Lowland Scotland the Northern English dialect gave rise to a new dialect, Scottish, which had a chance to develop into an independent language, an offshoot of English. The Scottish tongue flourished as a literary language and produced a distinct literature as long as Scotland retained its sovereignty. After the unification with England under the Stuarts (1603), and the loss of what remained of Scotland's self-government, Scottish was once again reduced to dialectal status. In the subsequent centuries English became both the official and the literary language in Scotland.

Thus by the end of the Early NE period, the area of English had expanded, to embrace the whole of the British Isles with the exception of some mountainous parts of Wales and Scotland, the Isle of Man, Cornwall and some parts of Ireland, though even in most of these regions people were becoming bilingual.