How English Has Changed

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 fallen out of use. Nowadays, we prefer to use 'you'. It's simpler, don't you think? Some linguists bemoan the lack of distinction between second-person singular and plural, however. 'You both' or 'you all' often denotes more than one person; in certain parts of England, 'youse' is the preferred word. We're also frequently seeing 'they' used as a singular pronoun to refer to people who identify as non-binary.

3. Pronunciation

When teaching English as it is spoken today, I encounter many mispronunciations, partly due to the language's inconsistencies. The word 'knife' is one example of a word whose pronunciation has changed over the centuries but its spelling hasn't, so students often pronounce the k when, in fact, it is silent. I believe the Norwegian 'kniv' is pretty close to how 'knife' used to sound. Why don't we change the spelling? That's a nice suggestion, but it's never going to happen. You just have to accept that words often don't look the way they sound and vice versa.

4. Spelling

Dictionaries have only been around for a few hundred years, so before the first bold attempts to standardise written English, various spellings of words existed. Even William Shakespeare didn't always spell his own name the same way when he signed documents. Here is one of his sonnets from 1609:

Three beautious springs to yellow Autumne turn’d,
In processe of the seasons haue I seene.
Three Aprill perfumes in three hot Iunes burn’d,
Since first I saw you fresh which yet are greene.

There are several differences, most notably the extra e in 'Autumn', and 'have' spelt with u instead of v.

Many nouns in English were once capitalised, like in German. This fashion died out in the 19^th century, though, something which President Trump appears not to have noticed – his social media posts are littered with capital letters!

I've presented here just a handful of ways in which the English language has evolved in the last five hundred years or so. If you go any further back than that, you will find quite a different language, as the following video shows.