Early Modern English

[Doug Ewell]

John Cowan <cowan at mercury dot ccil dot org> wrote:

> I'd use the tag 'emode' based on the standard abbreviation "EModE".

Exactly what I was thinking.  For those new to the game, who might
suggest alternatives: 'eme' is syntactically too short; 'earlymod' is
to be avoided as it looks generic but isn't; and 'shakes' or 'kjvbible'
would appear to constrain the subtag to a particular Late Early Modern
English author or work.

I think it's unfortunate that 'emode' in all-lowercase (as recommended
for variant subtags) looks like an abbreviation for "electronic mode" or
something, but that can't be helped.

Michael Everson <everson at evertype dot com> wrote:

> Are you using a standard dictionary or other description as we have
> for earlier French?

Sort of.  There are several online EModE dictionaries, some with
reasonably authoritative backing, but of course not compiled
contemporaneously.  Robert Cawdrey's "Table Alphabeticall" (1604) is
useful, but not a complete dictionary in today's sense; it focused on
"hard vsuall English wordes" rooted in other languages, defined in terms
of "plaine English words", and is thus more like a technical lexicon or
glossary.  Johnson's 1755 dictionary is in Modern English, and out of
scope.

I'd like to get at least temporary hold of a copy of Charles Barber's
"Early Modern English".

Sean B. Palmer <sean at miscoranda dot com> wrote:

> It is common to describe English after EModE as Late Modern English or
> LModE. Should there also be a code for that?

There is a school of thought that any subtag registered for "Language X,
variant Y" needs to be accompanied by a subtag for "Language X, not
variant Y".  I don't agree with this, but if someone else wants to
propose a subtag for LModE, I won't try to block it.  I do think such a
subtag would be exceptionally redundant, what with the immense amount of
available LModE material (including this post), and inconsistent with
the often-stated goal of keeping tags short.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14
www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell ­