Made In America - Bill Bryson [12]
Generally, words containing ea combinations – tea, meat, deal and so on – were pronounced with a long a sound (and of course many still are: great, break, steak, for instance), so that, for example, meal and mail were homonyms. The modern ee pronunciation was just emerging, so that Shakespeare could, as his whim took him, rhyme please with either grace or knees. Among more conservative users the old style persisted well into the eighteenth century, as in the well-known lines by the poet William Cowper:
I am monarch of all I survey ...
From the centre all round to the sea.
Different as this English was from modern English, it was nearly as different again from the English spoken only a generation or two before in the mid-1500s. In countless ways, the language of the Pilgrims was strikingly more advanced, less visibly rooted in the conventions and inflections of Middle English, than that of their grandparents or even parents.
The old practice of making plurals by adding -n was rapidly giving way to the newer convention of adding – s, so that by 1620 most people were saying knees instead of kneen, houses instead of housen, fleas instead offlean. The transition was by no means complete at the time of the Pilgrims – we can find eyen for eyes and shoon for shoes in Shakespeare – and indeed survives yet in a few words, notably children, brethren and oxen, but the process was well under way.
A similar transformation was happening with the terminal -th on verbs like maketh, leadeth and runneth, which also were increasingly being given an -s ending in the modern way. Shakespeare used -s terminations almost exclusively except for hath and doth.*6 Only the most conservative works, such as the King James Bible of 1611, which contains no -s forms, stayed faithful to the old pattern. Interestingly, it appears that by the early seventeenth century even when the word was spelled with a -th termination it was pronounced as if spelled with an -s. In other words, people wrote ‘hath’ but said ‘has’, saw ‘doth’ but thought ‘does’, read ‘goeth’ as ‘goes’. The practice is well illustrated in Hodges’ Special Help to Orthographie, which lists as homophones such seemingly odd bedfellows as weights and waiteth, cox and cocketh, rights and righteth, rose and roweth.
At the same time, endings in -ed were beginning to be blurred. Before the Elizabethan age, an -ed ending was accorded its full phonetic value, a practice we preserve in a few words like beloved and blessed. But by the time of the Pilgrims the modern habit of eliding the ending (except after t and d) was taking over. For nearly two hundred years, the truncated pronunciation was indicated in writing with an apostrophe – drown’d, frown’d, weav’d and so on. Not until the end of the eighteenth century would the elided pronunciation become so general as to render this spelling distinction unnecessary.
The median t in Christmas, soften and hasten and other such words was beginning to disappear (though it has been re-introduced by many people in often). Just coming into vogue, too, was the sh sound of ocean, creation, passion and sugar. Previously such words had been pronounced as sibilants, as many Britons still say ‘tissyou’ and ‘iss-you’ for tissue and issue. The early colonists were among the first to use the new word good-bye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled ‘Godbwye’, and were among the first to employ the more democratic forms ye and you in preference to the traditional thee, thy and thou, though many drifted uncertainly between the forms, as Shakespeare himself did, even sometimes in adjoining sentences, as in 1 Henry IV: ’I love thee infinitely. But hark you, Kate.’*7
They were also among the first to make use of the newly minted letter j. Previously i had served this purpose, so that Chaucer, for instance, wrote ientyl and ioye for gentle and joy. At first,