How the letter E almost ruined English poetry
Time erodes all things, even Chaucer
The history of English poetry is dominated by one metre: iambic pentameter.
This template of five successive sequences of weak and strong syllables guided Shakespeare in writing Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? It lay behind Milton’s Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit… It gave birth equally to Marlowe’s Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? and Pope’s The proper study of mankind is man.
So many memorable lines have been written with this metre that it feels like a permanent fixture of English poetry. Imagine, then, that iambic pentameter very nearly died along with its creator, Geoffrey Chaucer.
The blame for this lies squarely on one letter of the alphabet, or more accurately, with one sound: the little -e that comes at the end of so many words found in Chaucer’s late medieval English.
We still have a folk memory of this medieval spelling practice: think of the extra -e’s you find in phrases like ye olde shoppe1 or renaissance faire. And while these -e endings may look like gratuitous additions meant to make things look old-fashioned, they actually had a function.
And it may surprise you further to learn that the -e added to the end of olde, shoppe, and faire are being used entirely correctly, even if, these days, it’s used purely for the aesthetic.
This little ending was not only grammatically important, but it also played a crucial role in the rebirth of English poetry that occurred at the end of the Middle Ages: it almost made the whole thing collapse just as it was getting started.
This is the story of the Middle English -e ending: where it came from, where it went, how it worked when it was around, and how its untimely disappearance nearly killed iambic pentameter in its infancy.
But all that happened later. For now, we need to start back at the beginning.
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Why pot pourri is different from Popery
The English language once had a panoply of grammatical endings used to indicate the grammatical properties of the language.
Nouns distinguished gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter), number (there were many different ways to make nouns plural), and case (distinguishing subjects from direct objects, indirect objects, and possessors).
Adjectives agreed with their nouns in all three of these ways. They also made a distinction between so-called strong and weak forms of the adjective, which we’ll talk about in great detail later.
Verbs, too, had different endings when their subjects were I, singular you, and he/she/it; and plural subjects had separate endings; there were also different endings in the present and past tenses, as well as a separate set of subjunctive and imperative endings. These are the things that make students of French and Spanish quiver, and yet they once existed in English too.
Part of the difficulty of learning Old English is having to learn all of these grammatical forms that no longer exist in the English language today. But the set of Old English endings was nothing compared to its ancestor language, Proto-Germanic, and its more distant ancestor, Proto-Indo-European.
These earlier languages packed an enormous amount of grammatical information into the endings of words. Linguists call this situation rich inflection. Other old Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, hold on to this richness, although students of these languages usually experience this richness as pain.
Fairly early on in its history, the shared ancestor of all Germanic languages underwent a change, which had to do with the accent of the word. That’s accent in the sense of where the emphasis falls in the word, not in the sense of a particular regional way of saying things.
In modern English, words are accented on different syllables, and there’s no foolproof way to predict where the accent will fall. There are even words which differ in meaning depending on where you place the accent. This situation is called free accent, since the accent is free to occur in different places depending on the word.
For example, to convért ‘to change, e.g., one’s religion’ is different from a cónvert ‘someone who has changed religion,’ which are only distinguished by the position of the accent in the word.2
The accent in Proto-Indo-European was like that of Modern English: free. In other words, it fell in an arbitrary and unpredictable position in the word. One of the innovations of Proto-Germanic was to make the stress come to rest in a fixed position: on the initial syllable of the root.
Along with this change in the position of the accent came a change in the nature of the accent. It is thought that the accent in Proto-Indo-European was a pitch accent: this means that the accented syllable was said with a higher pitch, but wasn’t necessarily said any longer or more forcefully than any other syllable.
Compare this with how accented syllables work in Modern English: they’re usually said with a higher pitch, yes, but they’re also typically louder and longer than other syllables in a word.
This is why you can vaguely understand what people mean when they speak while brushing their teeth. You can hear the pattern of pitch, length, and loudness that the accent of the words provides. For example, can you tell whether I’m saying banána or Pánama below?
In addition to being quieter, shorter, and lower in pitch, the unaccented vowels in a Modern English word tend to be indistinct in their quality, with most of them pronounced like uh. This uh vowel, that is, the vowel in the first and third syllables of banana, linguists call schwa.
So stressed vowels are longer, louder, higher in pitch; unstressed vowels are the opposite of all these things, and tend to be pronounced as schwas. This strong distinction along multiple axes between accented and unaccented syllables is typical of languages that have a system called stress accent.
Compared to Proto-Indo-European, the accent system as it developed in Proto-Germanic was a revolution: free pitch accent was replaced by fixed stress accent. And this had far-reaching consequences.
Here are vowels fleeting, here are consonants fleeting
As any Latin student, eyes bleary from staring at verb conjugation charts, will tell you, most of the grammatical information in old Indo-European languages was conveyed by the endings of words. This fact interacted with the Germanic revolution in accent in a particularly destructive way, at least as far as the system of endings is concerned.
In stress accent systems, stressed syllables are pronounced clearly, but the farther away a syllable is from the stress, the weaker it sounds, and the harder it becomes to distinguish the different vowels it might have in it.3 And because the stress in Germanic languages became fixed at the beginning of words, initial syllables kept on being pronounced clearly, but final syllables became less and less distinct over time.
The result: many of the originally distinct grammatical endings had blended into one another by the time Old English came around.
So, even though there were many different categories expressed by the endings of Old English, there weren’t actually that many separate endings, considered in terms of their form.
Many endings served to express several different grammatical meanings: for example, the ending -a was used for the genitive plural of all strong nouns, the nominative and accusative plural of the strong feminine nouns, the nominative singular of the weak masculine nouns, and the imperative singular of second conjugation weak verbs… among other things.
(Yes, Old English has strong and weak nouns, strong and weak verbs, and strong and weak adjectives. And yes, strong vs weak means something different in each of these cases. It’s a horrible nomenclature. I can’t do anything but apologize.)
In fact, the list of endings used by Old English is pretty short, as far as these things go. I can even list them all for you here: -e, -est, -eþ, -aþ, -iaþ, -iġe, -de, -don, -den, -ed, -ode, -odest, -odon, -oden, -on, -ian, -enne, -iġenne, -ne, -es, -a, -um, -re, -an, -ena, -ra…4 all right, not that short, but if you’ve learned Latin or Ancient Greek, you’ll know that this is a comparatively restrained set.
This process, by which the last syllable of the word became pronounced more weakly over time, did not stop in Old English. In fact, it continued over the centuries, eroding away the phonetic distinctness of the endings of words like the battering winds and rain carve away a sea-cliff.
And, like the physical forces of erosion, the effects of this wearing away of endings became more obvious as the Old English period continued. By the early 11th century, it was common for Anglo-Saxon scribes to mix up endings that their ancestors would have kept separate, such as -on, -en, and -um.
From these mix-ups, we conclude that these formerly separate endings were no longer being pronounced very differently at all: likely they were all pronounced as schwa followed by an n-sound, more or less how the ending -en sounds today in broken (itself a descendant of one of these endings!).
One way to think of this is through the idea of linguistic contrasts. If a variety of sounds can appear in a given context, linguists say that position allows for a high degree of contrast. If, on the other hand, only a few sounds can appear in a given position, that position allows for a lower degree of contrast.
Consider this difference in Modern English: the sound h (as in hand) can only appear at the beginning of a syllable. It cannot appear anywhere else. In that way, the beginning of the syllable allows for a higher degree of contrast than, say, the end of a syllable.5
In languages with stress accent, vowels in stressed syllables often show more contrasts than vowels in unstressed syllables. Old English was no different, and late Old English was a particularly good example of a language with a low degree of contrast in unstressed syllables.
What I mean is this: by the 11th century, stressed syllables could feature almost any vowel possible in the language. But unstressed syllables could play host to only two: either the unstressed schwa vowel (spelled variously, but most often as e) or the vowel i (pronounced something similar to Modern English eat or it).6
So, seen from this perspective, the story of English can be told as the story of a gradual reduction in contrasts possible in unstressed syllables, as the forces of phonetic erosion have worn away what was once a formidable system of grammatical signals.
I’m reminded of the lament of The Wanderer:
Her bið feoh læne, her bið freond læne,
her bið mon læne, her bið mæg læne.
Eal þis eorþan gesteal idel weorþeð.‘Here riches are fleeting, here a friend is fleeting,
Here a man is fleeting, here a kinsman is fleeting,
And all this earthly frame becomes empty.’ (Wanderer, 108–110)
Add “grammatical endings” to that list and you’ll have an accurate picture of what happened to the English language over the millennia: the endings gradually slipped away until there was nothing left.
Or, rather, almost nothing.
The twilight of the -e’s
By the 14th century, these same processes of erosion had caused many of the once-separate endings of Old English to converge on a single form: a simple -e at the end of a word, pronounced as a schwa vowel (remember the uh sound in banana?).
These -e endings had several sources. They came not only from endings spelled -e in Old English, but also from Old English -a, and, in some cases, from Old English endings -an, -en, -on, -um, as some of the final nasal sounds like -n and -m dropped out of the language. This is a phenomenon I touched on when discussing the word eve, whose older form had an -n, which you can still see in the word even-ing.
Wherever they originally came from in Old English, we’ll refer to all these endings as -e endings when talking about how they appear in Middle English and beyond.
Middle English, by the way, is the form of the language that Geoffrey Chaucer (c1343–1400) spoke. Chaucer is often considered the father of English poetry, or even of English literature altogether. He’s interesting for a thousand different reasons, but I want to focus on his unique position not only as a late medieval author but also as a model for writers (and, in particular, poets) in the centuries following his death.
Chaucer’s medieval pedigree is important because he wrote in the twilight years of the Middle English period. And, from the perspective of the story of the decline and fall of contrasts in unstressed syllables, Chaucer writes to us from the middle of the final chapter.
By the year 1400 — the year of Chaucer’s death — all of the -e endings had also passed out of the language, at least in pronunciation, if not in spelling. (In fact, many survive in spelling to this day: for example, the -e in name).
Even in Chaucer’s own, slightly earlier variety of English, the -e endings were also probably silent in normal speech. But they were possible to pronounce in verse. And Chaucer’s great innovation in poetry is impossible to understand without them.
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