Early Modern English

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Sat Jan 14 20:03:46 CET 2012


Michael Everson <everson at evertype dot com> wrote:

> Doug, what are your further thoughts about "Tudor"?

Personally I can live with the subtag value 'tudor' so long as the
Description field still says "Early Modern English" and not "Tudor
English".

I understand your concern with 'earlymod', that careless users might
ignore the Description and the Prefix, and use it for Early Modern Na'vi
or whatever. But I also agree with Sean's point that a lot of EModE was
written outside the Tudor historical period, and calling it "Tudor
English" would appear to exclude some of the best-known, most commonly
cited examples.

I'm not as worried as Sean about the tag "en-tudor" applying to "Hamlet"
but not to Bacon or Donne. On the one hand, the subtag value should be
meaningful, but on the other hand, it is just a code element; the
Description field is what describes. I do think 'tudor' beateth, sorry,
beats the hell out of '1611kjv' or '1623shak' or '1590spen', all of
which would seem even more limiting.

> I can say that if this were acceptable for your purposes then the
> subtag could also be useful for Cornish. In cornish we have
>
> Old Cornish (which is a different language)
> Middle Cornish c. 1500
> Tudor Cornish c. 1600 (Jordan's Creacyon an Bës 1611)
> Late Cornish c. 1700

You need to help me out here. I don't understand why this use of 'tudor'
would be acceptable to you while the use of 'western' to mean "Western"
varieties of diverse languages would not. I'm not familiar with Cornish;
were the changes from the Tudor to Late periods similar to the changes
from EModE to Modern English?

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