其实在近代英语刚出现的时候,英文的拼写法仍然没有固定标准,比如 Julius Caesar 写成 Julius Cæſar, Ivlivs Cæſar, Jvlivs Cæſar, Iulius Cæſar 都可以。He 这个单词,在同一个句子里写成 he 或者 hee 都行,莎士比亚的戏剧中就存在此类现象。
my, mine, thy与thine在名词前被用作所有格形容词,亦可作为后面不加名词的所有格代名词。All four forms are used as possessive adjectives: mine and thine are used before nouns beginning in a vowel sound, or before nouns beginning in the letter h, which was usually silent (e.g. thine eyes and mine heart, which was pronounced as mine art) and my and thy before consonants (thy mother, my love). However, only mine and thine are used as possessive pronouns, as in it is thine and they were mine (not *they were my).
From the early Early Modern English period up until the 17th century, his was the possessive of the third-person neuter it as well as of the third-person masculine he. Genitive "it" appears once in the 1611 King James Bible (Leviticus 25:5) as groweth of it owne accord.
动词
时态与数量
在近现代时期,动词的屈折变化在向现代形式发展的过程中逐渐简化。
情态助动词
完成体与进行体
现代英语中的一些常用词是经过了语义缩小的。以动词 suffer 为例,字面上讲是“承受痛苦、困难”的意思。但自从十四世纪开始,这个词有了“允许”的意思。这一义项一直被保留到近代英语,例如《钦定版圣经》中的《Suffer the little children》。然而现代英语中已经没有这个意思了。
.W. Skeat, in Principles of English Etymology, claims that the o-for-u substitution was encouraged by the ambiguity between u and n; if sunne could just as easily be misread as sunue or suvne, it made sense to write it as sonne. (Skeat, Principles of English Etymology, Second Series. Clarendon Press, 1891. Page 99 (页面存档备份,存于互联网档案馆).)