A History of the English Language by van Gelderen Elly;

Author:van Gelderen, Elly;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2019-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

From the 13th century on, the choice between a and an and the forms of the possessive (e.g. my or mine) depend on the word that follows. If that word starts with a vowel (or h in earlier English), an is used: an eager ayre and mine owne eyes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Otherwise, a or my is used: A most auspitious starre and my Magick garment in the Tempest. This system remains more or less in place until the 18th century for possessives and until the present for articles.

As a last point in this section, we will briefly consider the stress of words. As Lass (1999: 128–9) points out, the Germanic stress rules characteristic of Old and Middle English change in the Early Modern English period. Germanic stress is typically on the first syllable (certain prefixes excluded); due to the introduction of many multi-syllable French and Latin words that have the stress on the antepenultimate syllable this general rule changes and the stress is on a later syllable. Thus, words such as academy, acceptable, corruptible, and abbreviation would all have the stress on the first syllable according to the Germanic rule, unlike in Modern English; according to contemporary sources, in some words the stress remains on the first syllable until the 18th century. Kökeritz (1953: 332–9) devotes some time to the issue and cites some Shakespearean words with a stress different from that in Modern English: antique with the stress on the first syllable.

By the end of the Early Modern English period, English pronunciation is more recognizable to Modern English speakers than Old or Middle English because of the completion of the GVS. Even though the GVS is mostly complete by 1700, there are exceptions: Alexander Pope (1688–1744) rhymes survey and sea and away and tea (Bolton 1982: 248), which indicates that sea and tea still have an [e]. The pronunciation of Early Modern English is discussed in a lot more detail in Dobson (1957); Jespersen (1909); Kökeritz (1953); and Wyld (1920).

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