Take note of how different Edward Taylor's language might seem from how we speak and write in the present day, yet we are still able to understand his poems, such as "Huswifery." Taylor spoke and wrote in a time where much transition and transformation was occurring in the English language. Taylor was born and educated in England but traveled to the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a grown man, and already the language in these two places would have been markedly different. England was still experiencing the aftermath of the Great Vowel Shift, but speakers in the Colonies were encountering a much wider variety of native tongues and accents, all of which have had a part in forming the American accent.
In this transitional period, English was transforming from Middle English (whose pronunciation found much more local particularities) to the more highly standardized Modern English. We call this in-between period Early Modern English. This language is really not so archaic at all, but it does demonstrate how much language can change in the space of three or four centuries.
The title, too, demonstrates the shift in language over time. Huswife is a term dating to at least the 13th century, but by the 18th, language had changed to prefer the pronunciation of housewife as having cleaner moral connotations than the older form.
https://public.oed.com/blog/early-modern-english-an-overview/
https://www.etymonline.com/word/housewife
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46133/huswifery
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
What is the archaic language of the poem "Huswifery"?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
Hello! This expression is already a sum of two numbers, sin(32) and sin(54). Probably you want or express it as a product, or as an expressi...
-
Macbeth is reflecting on the Weird Sisters' prophecy and its astonishing accuracy. The witches were totally correct in predicting that M...
No comments:
Post a Comment