256D I E T E R K A S T O V S K Y

4.4Early Modern English

The individual character of early Modern English was recognised only in the second half of the twentieth century; see Gorlach¨ (1994) and Kastovsky (1994). The beginning of the period is usually associated with the introduction of printing by Caxton in 1476, its end in the second half of the seventeenth century with the end of the Stuart period and the accession of William of Orange to the throne (1689). The period thus starts out in the late Middle Ages, and includes the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment, i.e. periods of important cultural, political and intellectual upheavals. It also marks the rise of a written and spoken standard, it sees a substantial growth of literacy throughout the population, and the vernacular was extended to practically all contexts of speech and writing, i.e. also to the sciences, especially in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

These developments had one major consequence: we witness the greatest expansion of the vocabulary in the history of the English language, especially in the domain of learned and technical vocabulary, both through borrowing (primarily from Latin) and through word formation (with new Latin and French patterns, but also those having emerged in Middle English, becoming productive in English). The most typical example is Shakespeare, who is credited with around 1,700 neologisms or first attestations.

It is also during this period that the first dictionaries appear. The first are bilingual Latin–English dictionaries, followed by bilingual English–French dictionaries, e.g. Palsgrave (1530) Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse, and also multilingual ones. The first monolingual English dictionaries were published in the early seventeenth century, primarily providing glosses for the increasing stock of learned vocabulary, so-called ‘hard words’, but gradually they were expanded and also included ordinary everyday usage. The greatest milestone in this development was Samuel Johnson’s (1755) dictionary, which served as a model for dictionary makers throughout many generations, until work on the OED started in the nineteenth century.

At the beginning of the period, neither orthography nor patterns of word formations were tightly regulated. Both domains were gradually regulated only towards the end of the eighteenth century (see Chapter 5). In word formation we therefore often find rivalling forms having the same meaning. Subsequently, these were either subjected to semantic diversification, or only one of the rivalling forms survived, cf. frequency/frequentness, immaturity/immatureness, immediacy/immediateness, light/lighten/enlighten, length/lengthen/enlength, disthronize/disthrone /dethrone/unthrone /dethronize. The best tool for the investigation of the tremendous increase of the vocabulary is the Chronological English Dictionary (CED; Finkenstaedt, Leisi & Wolff, 1970), whose entries are based on the first attestations quoted in the Shorter OED, although there is a need for redating in view of more recent research.