English in the Fifteenth Century

Soon after Chaucer's death, in the fifteenth century, there was a renewed drift towards simplification in English. Final unaccented vowels, by 1400 already reduced to a very slight number, were entirely lost. Still more nouns were shifted to the majority declension (with plurals in -s) out of the small group left in the minority declensions. More and more verbs shifted to the weak conjugation from those still retaining the internal vowel change. For a time, of course, there was a choice of forms: for example, between 'he clomb' and 'he climbed'; 'he halp' and 'he helped'. Some of the quaint surviving constructions out of Old English, such as impersonal verbs with the dative, the inflected genitive case for nouns denoting things, and the double negative, began to fall into disuse. They persist in the fifteenth century, indeed even into the sixteenth, but they are increasingly felt to be archaic survivals.

Another important usage became increasingly prevalent in the fifteenth and early sixteenth: the bolstering of verbs with a number of auxiliaries derived from 'do' and 'be'. In Middle English a question was asked with the simple form of the verb in inverted position: 'What say you? What think you?' For a couple of centuries after 1400 this was still done habitually, but more and more people fell into the habit of saying 'What do you say? What do you think?' The 'do' was colourless and merely brought about a deferment of the main verb. In effect it makes our English usage somewhat like Russian, which says 'What you say? What you think?' without any inversion of the verb before the subject. In simple statements the 'do' forms were used for situations where we no longer feel the need for them. An Elizabethan would say 'I do greatly fear it' (an unrestricted statement). We should use the less emphatic 'I fear it greatly.'

During the same period there began the gradual spread of the so-called progressive conjugation, with forms of 'to be': ' I am coming; he is sitting down.' These two special forms of English conjugation have developed an intricate etiquette, with many modifications of usage, which cause great trouble to the foreign student. One of the last distinctions he masters is the one between 'I eat breakfast every morning' and 'I am eating breakfast now'; between 'I believe that, and 'I do indeed believe that.'

One of the most fateful innovations in English culture, the use of the printing press, had its effects on the language in many ways. The dialect of London, which for over a century had been gaining in currency and prestige, took an enormous spurt when it was more or less codified as the language of the press. As Caxton and his successors normalized it, roughly speaking, it became the language of officialdom, of polite letters, of the spreading commerce centres at the capital. The local dialects competed with it even less successfully than formerly. The art of reading, though still a privilege of the favoured few, was extended lower into the ranks of the middle classes. With the secularizing of education later on, the mastery of the printed page was extended to still humbler folk. Boys who, like William Shakespeare, were sons of small-town merchants and craftsmen, could learn to read Latin literature and the Bible even if they had no intention of entering the Church. Times had distinctly changed since the thirteenth century. It may be added that changes in society-the gradual emergence of a mercantile civilization-gave scope to printing which it would never have had in the earlier Middle Ages. The invention was timely in more than one sense.

All this may have been anticipated by the early printers. Their technological innovations may have been expected to facilitate the spread of culture. But they could not have foreseen that the spelling which they standardized, more or less, as the record of contemporary pronunciation, would have been perpetuated for centuries afterwards. Today, when our pronunciation has become quite different, we are still teaching our unhappy children to spell as Caxton did. Respect for the printed page has become something like fetish-worship. A few idiosyncrasies have been carefully preserved, although the reason for them is no longer understood. When Caxton first set up the new business in London he brought with him Flemish workers from the Low Countries, where he himself had learned it. Now the Flemish used the spelling 'gh' to represent their own voiced guttural continuant, a long-rolled-out sound (y) unlike our English (g). English had no such sound at the time, but the employees in Caxton's shop were accustomed to

combining the two letters, and continued to do so in setting up certain English words. In words like 'ghost' and 'ghastly' it has persisted, one of the many mute witnesses to orthographical conservatism.

(From The Gift of Tongues, by Margaret Schlauch.)