A History of English Language

A history of the english language 218
Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine,
Whose weakness married to thy stronger state
Makes me with thy strength to communicate,
that is, she shares his strength with him. When Lorenzo in the Merchant of Venice says
“let’s in and there expect their coming,” he is using expect in its original sense of ‘to
await’. In the sixteenth century, when the verb to atone was first used, it did not have its
modern meaning, ‘to make amends’ but simply ‘to set at one, reconcile’, as when
Desdemona says, “I would do much to atone them.” Enlargement meant freedom from
confinement (“take this key, give enlargement to the swain”) and humorous might mean
‘damp’ (as in “the humorous night” of Romeo and Juliet) or ‘capricious’, ‘moody’,
‘peevish’, that is, showing the effect of the various bodily humors which, according to
medieval belief, determined one’s disposition. The word did not acquire its present
meaning until the time of Addison. It would be easy to multiply examples from almost
any page of Shakespeare. The few that have been given will suffice to show that the new
words often remained close to their etymological meaning.
173. Shakespeare’s Pronunciation.
Shakespeare’s pronunciation, though not ours, was much more like ours than has always
been realized. He pronounced [e] for [i] in some words just as Pope could still say tay for
tea. 36 The falling together of er, ir, ur (e.g., herd, birth, hurt) was under way but not yet
completed. As explained in § 175, ME ē was sometimes open, sometimes close [ε: e:]
and the two sounds were still distinct in Shakespeare’s day, [e:] and [i:] respectively.
Consequently sea [se:] does not normally rhyme with see [si:],
36
Cf. page 19.