Ранний новоанглийский период: от Среднеанглийского к Современному английскому

Stage of development of English, starting c. 16th century

the stage of the language

Early Modern English (sometimes abbreviated EModE, or EMnE) or Early New English (ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle English, in the late 15th century, to the transition to Modern English, in the mid to late 17th century. Before and after the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603, the emerging English standard began to influence the spoken and written Middle Scots of Scotland. The grammatical and orthographical conventions of literary English in the late 16th century and the 17th century are still very influential on modern Standard English. Most modern readers of English can understand texts written in the late phase of Early Modern English, such as the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare, and they have greatly influenced Modern English. Texts from the earlier phase of Early Modern English, such as the late 15th century Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) and the mid 16th century Gorboduc (1561), may present more difficulties but are still closer to Modern English grammar, lexicon and phonology than are 14th century Middle English texts, such as the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

The change from Middle English to Early Modern English was not just a matter of changes of vocabulary or pronunciation; a new era in the history of English was beginning. 1557 – Publication of Tottel's Miscellany.

The 17th century port towns and their forms of speech gained influence over the old county towns. From around the 1690s onwards, England experienced a new period of internal peace and relative stability, which encouraged the arts including literature. Modern English can be taken to have emerged fully by the beginning of the Georgian era in 1714, but English orthography remained somewhat fluid until the publication of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, in 1755. The towering importance of William Shakespeare over the other Elizabethan authors was the result of his reception during the 17th and the 18th centuries, which directly contributes to the development of Standard English. Shakespeare's plays are therefore still familiar and comprehensible 400 years after they were written, but the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, which had been written only 200 years earlier, are considerably more difficult for the average modern reader.

The r sound (the phoneme /r/) was probably always pronounced with following vowel sounds (more in the style of today's General American, West Country English, Irish accents and Scottish accents, although in the case of the Scottish accent the R is rolled, and less like the pronunciation now usual in most of England.) Furthermore, at the beginning of the Early Modern English period there were three non open and non schwa short vowels before in the syllable coda: , and (roughly equivalent to modern , and ; had not yet developed). In London English they gradually merged into a phoneme that became modern /ɜr/. By the time of Shakespeare, the spellings , and perhaps when they had a short vowel, as in clerk, earth, or divert, had an a like quality, perhaps about or .

Early Modern English had two second person personal pronouns: thou, the informal singular pronoun, and ye, the plural (both formal and informal) pronoun and the formal singular pronoun. "Thou" and "ye" were both common in the early 16th century (they can be seen, for example, in the disputes over Tyndale's translation of the Bible in the 1520s and the 1530s) but by 1650, "thou" seems old fashioned or literary. It has effectively completely disappeared from Modern Standard English. The translators of the King James Version of the Bible (begun 1604 and published 1611, while Shakespeare was at the height of his popularity) had a particular reason for keeping the informal "thou/thee/thy/thine/thyself" forms that were slowly beginning to fall out of spoken use, as it enabled them to match the Hebrew and Ancient Greek distinction between second person singular ("thou") and plural ("ye"). It was not to denote reverence (in the King James Version, God addresses individual people and even Satan as "thou") but only to denote the singular. Over the centuries, however, the very fact that "thou" was dropping out of normal use gave it a special aura and so it gradually and ironically came to be used to express reverence in hymns and in prayers. Like other personal pronouns, thou and ye have different forms dependent on their grammatical case; specifically, the objective form of thou is thee, its possessive forms are thy and thine, and its reflexive or emphatic form is thyself. The objective form of ye was you, its possessive forms are your and yours and its reflexive or emphatic forms are yourself and yourselves. The older forms "mine" and "thine" had become "my" and "thy" before words beginning with a consonant other than h, and "mine" and "thine" were retained before words beginning with a vowel or an h, as in mine eyes or thine hand.

The modal auxiliaries cemented their distinctive syntactical characteristics during the Early Modern period. Thus, the use of modals without an infinitive became rare (as in "I must to Coventry"; "I'll none of that"). The use of modals' present participles to indicate aspect (as in "Maeyinge suffer no more the loue & deathe of Aurelio" from 1556), and of their preterite forms to indicate tense (as in "he follow'd Horace so very close, that of necessity he must fall with him") also became uncommon. Some verbs ceased to function as modals during the Early Modern period. The present form of must, mot, became obsolete. Dare also lost the syntactical characteristics of a modal auxiliary and evolved a new past form (dared), distinct from the modal durst.

The perfect of the verbs had not yet been standardised to use only the auxiliary verb "to have". Some took as their auxiliary verb "to be", such as this example from the King James Version: "But which of you will say unto him when he is come from the field, Go and sit down " [Luke XVII:7]. The rules for the auxiliaries for different verbs were similar to those that are still observed in German and French (see unaccusative verb). The modern syntax used for the progressive aspect ("I am walking") became dominant by the end of the Early Modern period, but other forms were also common such as the prefix a ("I am a walking") and the infinitive paired with "do" ("I do walk"). Moreover, the to be + ing verb form could be used to express a passive meaning without any additional markers: "The house is building" could mean "The house is being built".

A number of words that are still in common use in Modern English have undergone semantic narrowing. The use of the verb "to suffer" in the sense of "to allow" survived into Early Modern English, as in the phrase "suffer the little children" of the King James Version, but it has mostly been lost in Modern English. This use still exists in the idiom "to suffer fools gladly". Also, this period includes one of the earliest Russian borrowings to English (which is historically a rare occasion itself); at least as early as 1600, the word "steppe" (rus. степь) first appeared in English in William Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is believed that this is a possible indirect borrowing via either German or French. The substantial borrowing of Latin and sometimes Greek words for abstract concepts, begun in Middle English, continued unabated, often terms for abstract concepts not available in English.