inner dork: Elizabethan grammar

Hey boys and girls guess what day it is?!?!?! That's right, it's Inner Dork Thursday! YAH!!

Okay, I'm totally cheating. Well, kind of. I am currently working on a paper about the differences between Elizabethan grammar to modern grammar and the influences Shakespeare has had on the English language. It is actually pretty fascinating. Well, okay, I think it's fascinating and well, frankly that's all that matters. Okay, not really cause I want you guys to be all impressed and stuff with my vast and scary knowledge of all things useless and interesting.


So, did you know....

Elizabethan English is only one linguistic generation removed from the English we speak today. The principles between the two are generally the same. There are some dialect differences and some prepositional usage and verb agreement anomalies as well as some words that have dropped from use and many others where the meaning has changed completely. The Tudor/Elizabethan alphabet contained 24 letters opposed to today’s 26 letters. In the Tudor/Elizabethan alphabet the letters “u” and “v” were considered the same letter as were “i” and “j. The letter “j” was most commonly used as the capital form of the “i” in the alphabet. The letter “u” was commonly used only in the middle of a word, and the “v” was commonly used only at the beginning of a word. Another difference between the Tudor/Elizabethan alphabet to today’s alphabet is the letter “y” which was used to represent the “th” sound for example, the word, “the” was written as “ye”. Many words were also spelled using an additional “e” at the end and many numbers were represented by letters in the lower case when representing Roman numerals, with the last “i” in the number written as a “j” for example, viij March.

I know. It is fascinating, isn't it?