Normalisation of the English Language

Normalisationis the fixing of the norms and standards of a language to protect it from corruption and change.

Type of Standard	Written Standard	Spoken Standard
Time Limits	by the 17^th c.	end of the 18^th c.
Sources	Language of Chaucer (the London Dialect)	· private letters; · speech of characters in drama; · references to speech be scholars.
Peculiarities	1. Less stabilised than at later stage; 2. Wide range of variation (spelling, gr. forms, syntactical patterns, choice of words, etc.); 3. Rivalry with Latin in the field of science, philosophy, didactics.	1. As spoken standard the scholars considered the speech of educated people taught at school as “correct English”. This was the speech of London and that of Cambridge and Oxford Universities.

Charles I, James I’s son, was not a popular king, and in 1642 civil war broke out between these who supported him and those who did not. Charles I was killed in 1649, and England, Wales and Scotland remained without a king until 1660, when Charles II (Charles I’s son) returned to England. Charles II died in 1685 and his brother, James II, became king. But James II was so unpopular that in 1688 he left England and he was replaced by his daughter and her husband, Marry and William of Orange.

All these political events make people dislike change and wish for order and regularity in their lives, and some people also wanted more regularity in their language. The great growth in new words between 1530 and 1660 (the fastest in the history of the language) had left people uncertain. In 1635 the Académie Française was created to control changes in the French language. Some people in England also wanted to create an official organization to control the English language. One of these people was the author Jonathan Swift, who wanted to ‘fix’ the language by making grammar rules, forbidding some words, making others correct and deciding on spelling. The normalisation of the English language started in the 17^th – 18^th c. In 1710 Jonathan Swiftpublished in his journal “The Tatler” an article titled “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue”. J. Swift was a purist (struggled for the purity of the language) and suggested that a body of scholars should gather to fix the rules of the language usage. One of the habits that Swift hated was that of shortening words. In the 17^th century people often shortened words, for example, extraordinary was shortened to extra. And we still do this today – telephone is shortened to phone.

The idea never succeeded, partly because other people realized that changes in a language were unavoidable. But it did make people think about the need for everyone to see the same spelling and grammar. As a result, different spelling guides dictionaries and grammar books began to appear.

Although printing had introduced some regularities in spelling, in the 16^th century spelling remained very varied, even for personal names. For example, there are six known examples of Shakespeare’s name that he wrote himself, and in each one he spelt his name differently. People invented their own spellings, which usually show their own pronunciation. Other variations were introduced show that words came from Latin; for instance, the c was added in scissors to follow the Latin spelling, cisorium. In the end, this freedom to change spelling led to confusion.

In the 17^th century, appearance of the first English dictionaries slowly brought about more regularity in spelling. During the 18^th century, ways of spelling that differed from these dictionaries were seen to be incorrect and a sign of stupidity or bad education. Even today, people do not like making spelling mistakes, and often use a spell-check tool on their computers. In the late 17^th century, capital letters were used for all or most nouns, but in the next century this was seen as unnecessary.

Dictionaries were not unknown in the seventeenth century, but they were Latin-English ones. The first English-English dictionary, which appeared in 1604, was a collection of about three thousand ‘Hard English Words’. Similar collection followed, and in 18^th century dictionary writers began trying to include more everyday words, not just difficult ones. In 1755 Samuel Johnson produced A Dictionary of the English Language, and it was an immediate success. Johnson worked on his dictionary for nine years, with the help of six others. He filled about eighty large notebooks with his explanations and examples. Johnson’s choice of words was wide, and he showed how each word was used by giving examples from literature. The dictionary is organised as follows:

- entry;

- pronunciation;

- definition;

- illustrations;

- notes on usage of the word;

- etymology of the word;

- stylistic comments.

The dictionary also contained a grammatical section describing the grammatical structure of the language. The dictionary was not perfect: sometimes Johnson’s explanations were harder to understand then the words themselves, some expressed his personal opinions, and some words were not included because he didn’t like them. Also he could not fit in all his examples, so there were not as many examples for the words at the end of the dictionary as there were for those at the beginning. However, it remained the most important English dictionary in Britain for more than a century.

Guidance with vocabulary and spelling came from dictionaries; guidance with grammar came from various ‘grammars’. These grammar books first appeared in the 17^th century, and in the 18^th century a huge number of them were produced. Many of them told the reader how to write and speak ‘correctly’, which really meant how to use language in the same way as in serious pieces of literature. They were widely used because people wanted to be seen as educated, and so be socially acceptable.

The grammarians writing these books considered the grammar of much ordinary spoken language and of regional dialects (especially Scots) to be wrong and believed that the grammar of English should be the same as that of Latin. For example, they thought that a sentence should not end with a preposition because in Latin it did not. Although some people continue to believe that there is only one ‘correct’ grammar of English, many others believe that all varieties of English are ‘correct’. Some grammarians write grammar books very differently today, they write descriptions of how English is actually used, instead of telling us how we should speak or write.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11