Casualness of usage and style was a hallmark of the Middle and early modern
English periods. Chaucer sometimes used doughtren for the plural of daughters
and sometimes doughtres, sometimes yeer and sometimes yeres. Like other
writers of the period, he appeared to settle on whichever form first popped into
his head, even at the risk of being inconsistent from one paragraph to the next.
But, I must quickly interject, a problem with interpreting Chaucer is that none of
his original manuscripts survive. Everything we have of his was copied by medieval scribes,
who sometimes took extraordinary liberties with the text,
seeing themselves more as editors than as copyists. At the same time, they were
often strikingly careless. For example, the Clerk's Tale contains the line "They
stood a throop of site delitable," but in various manuscripts site is rendered as
sighte, syth, sigh, and cite. It is impossible at this remove to know which was the
word Chaucer intended. Literally scores of such confusions and inconsistencies
clutter the manuscripts of most poets of the age, which makes an analysis of
changes in the language problematic. It is often noted that Chaucer's spelling
was wildly inconsistent: Cunt, if you will forgive an excursion into crudity (as
we so often must when dealing with Chaucer), is spelled in at least five ways,
ranging from kent to quainte. So it isn't possible to say whether the
inconsistency lies with Chaucer or his copyists or both.
Other forms, such as plural pronouns, had yet to settle. Chaucer used hi, hem,
and her for they, them, and their (her for their survived up to the time of
Shakespeare, who used it at least twice in his plays). Similarly his, where we
now use its, was the usual form until about i600, which is why the King James
Bible is full of constructions like "If the salt has lost his savour, wherewith shall
it be salted?" Similarly which was until about the same time often used of
animate things as well as inanimate, as in the form of the Lord's Prayer still used
in England: "Our Father which art in heaven."
In Old English there were at least six endings that denoted plurals, but by
Shakespeare's time these had by and large shrunk to two: -s and -en. But even
then the process was nowhere near complete. In the Elizabethan Age, people
sometimes said shoes and sometimes shoen, sometimes house and sometimes
housen. It is interesting to reflect that had the seat of government stayed in
Winchester, rather than moved the sixty miles or so to London, we would today
very probably be talking of six housen and a pair of shoen. Today there are just
three of these old weak plurals: children, brethren, and oxen. However, even
though -s (or -es after an -sh spelling) has become the standard form for plurals,
there are still traces of the complex Old English system lurking in the language
in plurals such as men, women, feet, geese, and teeth.
Similarly verbs have undergone a long and erratic process of regularization.
Chaucer could choose between ached and oke, climbed and clomb, clew or
clawed, shaved and shove. In Shakespeare's time forgat and digged were
legitimate past tenses. In fact, until well into the seventeenth century digged wasthe more common (as in Shakespeare's "two kinsmen digg'd their grave with
weeping"). As recently as 1751, Thomas Gray's famous poem was published as
"Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard." Seventy years later the poet John Keats
could write, "Let my epitaph be: here lies one whose name was writ on water."
So the invariable pattern we use today—write, wrote, written—is really quite recent.
The common pattern in these changes was for the weak verbs to drive out the
strong ones, but sometimes it worked the other way, so that today we have torn
instead of teared and knew rather than knowed. Many of these have become
regularized, but there are still 250 irregular verbs in English, and a surprising
number of these are still fluid—so that even now most of us are not always sure
whether we should say dived or dove, sneaked or snuck, hove or heaved, wove
or weaved, strived or strove, swelled or swollen.
Other words underwent changes, particularly those beginning with n, where
there was a tendency for this letter to drift away from the word and attach itself
to the preceding indefinite article. The process is called metanalysis Thus a
napron became an apron, a nauger became an auger, and an ekename became
(over time) a nickname. By a similar process, the nicknames Ned, Nell, and Nan
are thought to be corruptions of "mine Edward," "mine Ellen," and "mine Ann."
But there were losses along the way. Today we have two demonstrative
pronouns, this and that, but in Shakespeare's day there was a third, yon (as
Milton line "Him that yon soars on golden wing"), which suggested that a
further distance than that. You could talk about this hat, and yon hat. Today the
word survives a colloquial adjective, yonder, but our speech is fractionally
impoverished for its loss. Similarly Shakespeare in The Two Gentlemen of
Verona was able to make a distinction between hair and hairs that is effectively
lost to us today when he wrote, "Shee hath more haire than wit, and more faults
than hairs."
( Other languages possess even further degrees of thatness. As Pei notes, "The
Cree Indian language has a special that [for] things just gone out of sight, while
Ilocano, a tongue of the Philippines, has three words for this referring to a visible
object, a fourth for things not in view and a fifth for things that no longer exist.")
Some of the changes since Shakespeare's time are obvious. Thee and thou had already begun a long decline (though they still exist in some dialects of northern England). Originally thou was to you as in French tu is to vous.
Thou signified either close familiarity or social inferiority, while you was the mroe impersonal
and general term. In European languages to this day choosing between the two
forms can present a very real social agony. As Jespersen, a Dane who appreciated these things, put it: "English has thus attained the only manner of address worthy of a nation that respects the elementary rights of each individual."