By Jason Pickett
Modern English is considered to be within the time period from around 1600 to now. It is consider so, because of reasons mentioned above (the stabilization of the language) and so forth. Another factor not mentioned is that Modern English arrived shortly after the Renaissance. In order to understand the significance on English of the Renaissance one must know a little about the Renaissance first.
The Renaissance was a result of the collapse of the Byzantium Empire in 1453, with the collapse of Constantinople to the Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II. The collapse of the empire caused Greek scholars to seek refuge in the West, namely in Italy. These migrating scholars brought with them unvisited knowledge of the ancients. This wonderful phenomenon did not happen in England until the Northern Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. The Renaissance itself did not hit England until nearly two hundred years after it hit Italy. This knowledge set off an intellectual rebirth (which is what renaissance means translated into English) of ancient texts and philosophy from the Romans and Greeks. With this new interest in the Greeks and Romans a multitude of new Latin and Greek words were adopted into English. The people of the Renaissance adopted the Latin and Greek vocabularies in an attempt to describe words of their new interests, words such as education or contemplation etc. Furthermore the Protestants from the Reformation attempting to distance themselves from the Roman Catholic Church, tried to adopt more Greek words, in place of Latin ones.
Whole words were not the only Latin and Greek being adopted, but prefixes and suffixes were also being added on. From Greek, for instance, we get the suffix ‘ism’. At first English tried to keep these suffixes on their original languages’ roots, such as the Greek word ‘mystic’ and with the suffix ‘mysticism’. Eventually though, English started mixing the original languages’ roots and prefixes and suffixes, and came to have hybrid words such as ‘truism’ which is the crossing of the German word ‘true’ and the Greek suffix ‘ism’ (Carruth p1217)
Another addition that Modern English brought was the absence or loss of inflection (word endings). What this means is that before Modern English, the English language depended on a word to have a certain ending on it, in order to understand its function. Take for instance nouns and verbs, in Old English the word ‘luf’ meant ‘love’. ‘Lufu’ was the noun form of the word ‘love’, but ‘lufian’ was the verb form of the infinitive, which meant ‘to love’. In Modern English, this means that one can take a noun and turn it into a verb, and vice versa. For an example, take the word ‘target’ a noun, if one were to say “teachers target problem students”. Conversely if one were to say, “I am going for a run” they would change the verb ‘run’ into a noun (Carruth p1217).
A final addition to the contribution to Modern English is the worldwide colonization and imperialism that the British Empire started after the year 1600. The British colonized Australia, New Zealand, India, lots of Africa, bits of Asia, and the Majority of North America. In fact the British Empire was said to be so large at one time that “The Sun never sets over the British Empire” and even today the Commonwealth still holds an immense amount of that great landmass. This allowed English to adopt new words from foreign products such as tobacco and potatoes. A further relevance of the British imperialism is that with the rising amount of power and influence the British wielded, the more power and influence their language wielded as well. English is the most predominant language today, perhaps not in numbers of speakers, but as far as commerce, diplomacy and science go, English is definitely predominant.