Languages evolve over time, and English is no exception. Indeed, a native speaker of English might struggle to understand someone speaking the language as it was spoken in England five hundred years ago. In this post I look at four ways in which this lingua franca of the globalised world has changed since the days it was largely confined to the island known as Great Britain. 1. Word order The order of words in a sentence typically follows a subject-verb-object pattern; however, this hasn't always been the case. Whereas now you hear people say 'She picked the flowers', for example, some Middle English texts placed the object before the verb, so 'She the flowers picked' would not have sounded unusual in the 16 th century. This shift in word order sometimes happens today, when people exchange traditional wedding vows, the phrase 'With this ring I thee wed' being one well-known example. 2. Pronouns The pronouns 'thou' and 'thee' have fall...
The words of an English language teacher & proofreader