What is the difference between Elizabethan English and ours?

Answer 1

There are a number of small differences, despite which Elizabethan English is Modern English and so is ours. It's just a different dialect.

Some of the differences are:

1. There is one gramatical change which was in process during Shakespeare's time, which is the assimilation of the second person singular to the plural. Nowadays if someone says "You can keep your thoughts to yourself", it is impossible to tell except from context whether one or more than one person is being addressed. In Middle English you would know that it was more than one person because if it was only one you would have to say "Thou canst keep thy thoughts to thyself". In Shakespeare's time this was starting to break down and he uses "you" when there is only one person sometimes. But he also uses "thou", "thee" and "thy" and the verb forms ending in "-st" as well, especially when talking to lovers, or children, or pets. Over the years we have stopped using these forms altogether.

2. Some words were pronounced quite differently from the way they are today. Experts believe that people in Shakespeare's time sounded like Long John Silver. In particular, some vowels in word endings which have since become silent were still sometimes pronounced. For example, the word "furnished" might be pronounced "fur-ni-SHED" in three syllables. Nowadays we never say the "e" so it comes out in two syllables: "Fur-nisht". They said it that way in Shakespeare's time, too, and marked it with a special spelling using an apostrophe: "furnish'd"

3. There have been changes in vocabulary in the last 400 years: some words have been invented and some have becaome obsolete. Some of this is caused by technology: they had no words for cell phones because they didn't have any; we don't use the word "jesses" because nobody practices falconry any more. Some is caused by the natural constant change of language. The trickiest words are those which are still used, but with different meanings from those used in Shakespeare's day. For example, "silly" used to mean "innocent"

Many people have difficulty understanding Shakespeare, thinking the language is different, when it is his style that is causing the problem. This is because he wrote much of his dialogue in a particular rhythm and he sometimes had to do unnatural things to the syntax to make the words fit. For example, Romeo says "What light through yonder window breaks" when it would be more natural to say "What light breaks through yonder window". An examination of those parts of his plays written in prose (large parts of the two Henry IV plays, for example) show that this was as artificial in Shakespeare's day as our own. Also, he used metaphors and other stylistic devices which make his writing very rich but require the audience or reader to use their brains to understand it.