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friends. The “ye” forms (ye, your, you) were used as a sign of
respect. It was either a social error or a form of rudeness

accidentally to use “thou” in a formal situation: It either marked you

as a boor [bʊə] (брутальна, невихована людина) or as being

deliberately rude to an inferior. Eventually the “thou” forms
disappeared from polite speech and then from all speech (though

they persisted longer in America among the Quakers than they did
in England).

The ending of the third person singular verb was consistently “-

eth” in Middle English. In Shakespeare’s time it is becoming “-s,”
but Shakespeare actually uses “-eth” and “-s” in the same line,

indicating that the two are interchangeable. By the first half of the

eighteenth century, “-eth” had almost certainly been lost from all
speech, but it continued to be written for many years afterwards,

particularly in formal prose. There are still some minor changes
from Shakespeare’s English to today, but when you compare, say,

Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and Hamlet, you see that
Shakespeare was far closer to Modern English. English would

continue to be enriched by new words – there was a massive influx

of Greek and Latin terms into English in the sixteenth through
eighteenth centuries as these languages became standards of a

widespread school curriculum – but the basic structure and
pronunciation of English was now set. As we will see, there was

great growth in English, but not as much change.
In one technical sense, once we get past the Great Vowel Shift,

almost everything interesting has already happened in the history of

English. After 1600, when the Shift was basically complete, there
were no major developments in the phonology or grammar. The

English lexicon kept expanding as English adopted new words from

a variety of sources, but it was nothing compared to what had
already happened with Scandinavian, Latin, and especially French.

There have been no more Norman Conquests or Great Vowel Shifts
in the past four hundred years, and we can read Shakespeare’s

English almost as well as we read our own. The closest English has

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