Early Modern English in the context of "Late Middle English"

Modern English, sometimes called New English (NE) or present-day English (PDE) as opposed to Middle and Old English, is the form of the English language that has been spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, which began in the late 14th century and was completed by the 17th century.

With some differences in vocabulary, texts that date from the early 17th century, such as the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible, are considered Modern English, or more specifically, Early Modern English or Elizabethan English. Through colonization, the British Empire spread English to many regions of the world, such as Anglo-America, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is the forms of the English language that were spoken in England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century, roughly coinciding with the High and Late Middle Ages. The Middle English dialects displaced the Old English dialects under the influence of Anglo-Norman French and Old Norse, and were in turn replaced in England by Early Modern English.

Middle English had significant regional variety and churn in its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and orthography. The main dialects were Northern, East Midland, West Midland, and Southern in England, as well as Early Scots and the Irish Fingallian and Yola.

The Christian cross, seen as symbolizing the crucifixion of Jesus, is a symbol of Christianity. It is related to the crucifix, a cross that includes a corpus (a representation of Jesus's body, usually three-dimensional) and to the more general family of cross symbols. The term cross is now detached from its original specifically Christian meaning, in modern English and many other Western languages.

The basic forms of the cross are the Latin cross with unequal arms and the Greek cross with equal arms; there are numerous variants, partly with confessional significance - such as the tau cross, the double-barred cross, triple-barred cross, and cross-and-crosslets - and many heraldic variants, such as the cross potent, cross pattée, and cross moline, cross fleury.

Irish literature is literature written in the Irish, Latin, English and Scots (Ulster Scots) languages on the island of Ireland. The earliest recorded Irish writing dates from back in the 7th century and was produced by monks writing in both Latin and Early Irish, including religious texts, poetry and mythological tales. There is a large surviving body of Irish mythological writing, including tales such as Táin Bó Cúailnge and Buile Shuibhne.

The English language was introduced to Ireland in the 13th century, following the Norman invasion of Ireland. The 16th and 17th centuries saw a major expansion of English power across Ireland, further expanding the presence of early Modern English speakers. One theory is that in the latter part of the nineteenth century saw a rapid replacement of Irish by English in the greater part of the country, largely due to the Great Famine and the subsequent decimation of the Irish population by starvation and emigration. Another theory among modern scholars is that far from being a sudden cataclysmic event the language shift was well underway much earlier. At the end of the century, however, cultural nationalism displayed a new energy, marked by the Gaelic Revival (which encouraged a modern literature in Irish) and more generally by the Irish Literary Revival.

The King James Version (KJV), also referred to as the King James Bible and the Authorized Version, is an Early Modern English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611, by sponsorship of King James VI and I. The 80 books of the KJV include 39 books of the Old Testament, 14 books of Apocrypha, and the 27 books of the New Testament.

Noted for its "majesty of style," the KJV has remained in continuous use for over four centuries, exerting more influence on English literature and Christian thought than any other English Bible translation. Its phrasing has been credited with shaping not only hymnody and liturgy, but also the idioms of everyday speech used in the English-speaking world. It is considered one of the important literary accomplishments of early modern England. The original KJV is a 17th-century translation and thus contains a large number of archaisms and false friends—words that contemporary readers may think they understand but that actually carry obsolete or unfamiliar meanings—making understanding the text difficult for modern readers, even pastors and preachers trained in formal theological institutes. While the 1611 text reflects Early Modern English usage, subsequent standardizations—most notably the 1769 Oxford edition and the more recent 1900 Pure Cambridge Edition—have made the KJV considerably more accessible to later generations. Many scholars note that its sentence structure is often clearer and more direct than some modern versions, despite occasional obsolete vocabulary.

The T–V distinction is the contextual use of different pronouns that exists in some languages and serves to convey formality or familiarity. Its name comes from the Latin pronouns tu and vos. The distinction takes a number of forms and indicates varying levels of politeness, familiarity, courtesy, age or even insult toward the addressee. The field that studies and describes this phenomenon is sociolinguistics.

Many languages lack this type of distinction, instead relying on other morphological or discourse features to convey formality. English historically contained the distinction, using the pronouns thou and you, but the familiar thou largely disappeared from the era of Early Modern English onward, with the exception of a few dialects. Additionally, British commoners historically spoke to nobility and royalty using the third person rather than the second person, a practice that has fallen out of favour. English speakers today often employ semantic analogues to convey the mentioned attitudes towards the addressee, such as whether to address someone by given name or surname or whether to use sir or madam. Under a broader classification, T and V forms are examples of honorifics.

The Great Vowel Shift was a series of pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), beginning in southern England and having influenced effectively all dialects of English today. Through this extensive vowel shift, the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels altered. Some consonant sounds also changed, specifically becoming silent; the term Great Vowel Shift is occasionally used to include these consonantal changes.

The standardization of English spelling began in the 15th and 16th centuries; the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often deviate considerably from how they represent pronunciations.