Learn English – Why did English change so much between Chaucer and Shakespeare

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My inexpert perception of things is that the distance between The Canterbury Tales (end 14th century) and Romeo and Juliet (end 16th), from a language perspective, is vast, and vastly greater than the distance between Romeo and Juliet and today's English.

The Canterbury Tales reads like a different language. I can't make much sense of it at all. Romeo and Juliet is broadly intelligible without outside help.

If this is right… why did English change so much in the space of 200 years, and comparatively little in the next 400?

Best Answer

The printing press changed everything.

Prior to Gutenberg, English was primarily a spoken language and stories were often passed on in the oral tradition. The introduction of printed works in the mid-15th century had two major effects:

  1. Standardization, as printed works were distributed beyond the reach of the local authors. This led to standardization of the language from what had been myriad local dialects to a more common single lexicon.
  2. Stabilization, as the shift from an oral tradition for recording stories to a printed one fixed the form of the tales being written. As you can imagine, passing a story verbally for a century leads to many slight alterations of the story and even of the language in which the story is told. Once printed, however, its form is essentially fixed and will change very little - and the same is true of its language.

It is this second effect which results in what you've noticed: prior to the mid-15th century, the English language changed much more rapidly than afterwards.

Example of some research into this effect: http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6361dickens.htm

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