What differences can you identify between Caxtons English and modern standard English?

Whilst studying The Preface of Eneydos by William Caxton I have compared two language features (Lexis and Grammar) to compare to modern Standard English.

In early modern English V and U were not considered as two distinct letters, they were different forms of the same letter. For example in the text the word ‘vnderftonden’ meaning understood the V is in the place of the U. the V was used at the beginning of the word however and the U was used elsewhere.

Inflections such as the silent ‘e’ were used in this period at the end of words. When this inflection took place the consonant before this were sometimes present. An example of this in text would be ‘englysshe’ the ‘s’ has been duplicated with the inflection ‘e’ added on the end. Inflections began to simplify as they moved towards their modern forms.

In terms of orthography and lexis in early modern English it remains quite similar to English today, however the spelling in early modern English was non phonetic as well as being unstable. This is shown in the text where is says ‘ded do’ actually meaning ‘did do’.

In early modern English there were two main second person personal pronouns 'thou' which was an informal singular pronoun and 'ye' which was the plural pronoun as well as the formal singular pronoun. Despite ' thou' being one of the main personal pronouns the use of it was beginning to die down and was mainly used to address God. Many of the pronouns used in early modern English are the same as they are today with 'my' and 'our' which are both present in Caxton’s text.

Commas are used quite often in this text which is unusual as there is supposedly a lack of them in early modern English however they are used several times within the text for example ‘certaynly, it is harder’.

In comparison to early modern English and Modern standard English the main differences are lexical changes with orthographic features such as inflections, and spelling.