Language

EVOLUTION OF THE LITERARY ENGLISH

PART III. LECTURE XII. THE NEW ENGLISH PERIOD

1. Introduction of printing.

2. The revival of learning in 16 c.

3. English as the all-purpose prose medium in 17, 18 c.c.

4. Latin borrowings in New English.

The border between the Middle English and New English Periods was the last decade of 15 c. when the end of the War of Roses signified the consolidation of absolute monarchy and the decay of feudalism. The first stage, the Early New English Period went on up to 1660, the year of the Restoration.

1. The last guarter of 15 c. witnessed introduction of Printing in England, a very important fact in the history of literary English. The printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1438. The first Englishman to master printing was William Caxton (1422-1491). A man of Kentish extraction Caxton went abroad to serve for the Duchess of Burgundy. He studied printing in Flanders and there he printed the first book in English "The Recuyeil of the Histories of Troye" in 1475. Next year Caxton came back to London and built his printing press. It was in 1476 that the first book "The Dictes and Sayinge of the Philosophers" was published in England. The importance of Caxton’s activity is tremendous. Till then books had been copied by hand, a private library could be afforded by very rich people only. Though first books might be issued in the number of 100 copes, it was against one book in a year copied by hand. While a copyist wrote his own dialect, the printing- pressers were bound to follow the norms of London dialect. Caxton stated in the preface to "The Histories of Troye" that he gave his manuscript to Princess Margaret and she handed it back with some corrections. Therefore there arose a feeling of correct and incorrect conformity to custom. The foundation of English spelling was laid in the first printed boobs and no subsequent phonetic changes have ever influenced it in any significant way. The written form was monopolized by the national language: state correspondence, documents, prose and poetry – all printed matter in England. The dialect became oral; natives of various parts of the country might speak their dialect but wrote standard English.

From this time on the national language is good, the dialect is not. As the national language gains in strength and importance the dialect occupies the background.

By the beginning of 16 c. the national language penetrated into most spheres of life.

2. The 16 century began as age of novelty. Sir Thomas More thought over his Utopian schemes in Chelsea where Erasmus of Roterdam found a warm welcome under his hospitable roof. The Great Discoveries had been made as that of the New World. English merchants were interested in exploration of overseas countries which demanded the knowledge of astronomy, languages, flora and fauna – the knowledge was Latin.

The Revival of Learning sent men directly to the classics. Books were translated from Latin. To learn to read was to learn to read Latin. Grammar was Latin grammar. Latin became a second vernacular to educated men. Not only was it the language of the learned professions, but it long served as a means of communication among all but the positively illiterate. Legal documents, even of the most ordinary type were written in that language. All important accounts were also in Latin. Queen Elisabeth talked Latin with foreign ambassadors; Cromwell had Milton for his Latin secretary. The classical Revival of 16 c. led to a wholesale importation of Latin words, it was the century of Latin borrowings, writers tried to use Latin words for every English word possible.

The purists headed by Sir John Cheke protested against the flood of Latin borrowings. Sir Thomas Wilson in "Art of Rhetorique" (1553) reprimanded those who "seeke so far for outlandish English that they forget altogether their mothers’ language…" The unlearned… wil so Latin their tongues, that the simple can not but wander at their talke, and think surely they speak by some revelation". At the same time Sir Thomas More wrote his "Utopia" in Latin (1516); Francis Bacon published his more important treatises in Latin; the poet Edmund Waller said that to express oneself in England is "to write in sand".

It was the time when English opposed Latin to assert itself as the language of science. The first person to write a scientific treatise in English was Sir Thomas Ellyot, the author of "The Covernour" (1531). The task was not easy and Ellyot said in the preface that it would have been easier to write in Latin but he wanted to prove that English might be used for the purpose. It was necessary to evolve terminology so he took Latin words and changed them in conformity to existing models, then explained or described the meaning.

The very fact of writing science in English was opposed by some and greeted by others. Some men of letters protested that people not belonging to gentry should learn so easily. Theological discussions taking place in Latin, the clergy feared that the use of English might spread heresies. The Reformation brought about the necessity to translate the Bible which was carried out by William Tyndale in 1525. He did much to create a simple all-purpose prose style. One third of the King James Bible of 1611, it has been computed, is worded exactly as Tyndale left it. This authorized version was translated by a group of scholars by the order of King James and expanded through out the country.

The Elisabethan age (reign of Queen Elisabeth 1558- 1603) was marked by the creative activity of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and his contemporaries Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), Benjamin Jonson (1573-1637), John Fletcher (1579-1625), etc.

The critic John Saintsbury in his "History of Elizabethan Literature" declared: "The plays of Shakespeare and the English Bible are, and ever will be, the twin monuments not merely of their own period, but of the perfection of English, the complete expressions of the literary capacities of the language…"

3. In the first half of the 17 century thought, literature and language were influenced by Puritanism. The puritans brought theology and biblical terms of phrase into the common speech, they used a great number of religious words and made constant appeal to the Bible, bringing to life archaic phraseology, it was supposed to make their speech sound solemn. The Restoration of 1660 was the end of puritan influence.

Coming back from France Charles II and his courtiers brought along many French words and expressions which entered various spheres of life. The influx of French borrowings caused position of those who considered it necessary to purify the language. The Royal Society for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy was founded in London, and in 1664 they elected committee of twenty two men "to improve the English tongue particularly for philosophic purposes", and this committee included Dryden, Evelyn, Sprat and Waller in its number. Dryden, for once, declared that it was a scandal that the English people had no prosody nor so much as a tolerable dictionary or a grammar. Sprat hoped to witness the establishment of an "impartial Court of Eloquence according to whose censure all books or authors should either stand or fall".

What was wanted was a fixed standard in English. Here started the development of orthoepists. Many grammarians and orthoepists, people studying the customary pronunciation, worked in 17 c. 18 c. to normalize the language. One of the first books in orthoepy "Logonomia Anglica" was published by Alexander Cill in 1021. Charles Butler issued his "English Grammar" in 1634 where he suggested that spelling should be reformed and uniform. William Lily’s "Introduction to Grammar" was written in 1645. The aim of the grammarians was to reduce the English language to rules, to improve it. English grammarians worked under the influence of Latin grammar, applied Latin patterns to the English language that is why their books show a mixture of traditional Latin grammar and observations of characteristic features.

Of great interest was “Grammatica Anglicana” by the orthoepist Christopher Cooper (1685) who presented a serious study of English sounds. The Oxford professor of geometry John Wallis in his “Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae” (1653) tried to break entirely with the Latin tradition. He was the first to state the rule of use of the auxiliaries “shall” – “will”.

John Brightland’s English Grammar (1711) followed Wallis’s principles. He introduced four parts of speech and rejected traditional Latin terms using instead of them: “names”, “qualities”, “affirmations” and “particles”.

Along with the activities of the grammarians there was another sphere of studies: lexicography. First English dictionaries were English-Latin, English-French, etc. In the 17 century one-language dictionaries began to appear. They embraced some special spheres: difficult words, quotations, etc. Nathaniel Bailey published “A Universal Etymological English Dictionary” in 1721. It was an attempt to include all the words existing in English.

The first really important “Dictionary of the English language” was compiled by Dr. Samuel Johnson “The Lexicographer” (1709-1784). Dr. Johnson was not interested in the improvement of English orthography; he did his best to abolish inconsistencies, but his attitude towards traditional spelling was one of conservation and piety. Still the great one-man Dictionary was not entirely free from inconsistencies itself: e.g. “moveable but immovable, downhil but uphill, deceit but receipt”, etc., some of which remain to this day.

It was in 17, 18 c. that the English language may be said to attain full maturity. Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe in their different ways, showed the powers of a mature and well-balanced English style. Since then the English language has grown in a hundred ways but its fundamental and structural features, the patterns of its sentences and the forms of its words, have not materially changed.

As it was stated above the third layer of Latin borrowings came into English in the time of the classical renaissance. Such groups might be pointed out as:

a) Verbs in – ‘ate’ from participle II in – ‘atum’ of the first Latin conjugation: dedicate, incarnate, frustrate, accumulate, translate, exaggerate, create, associate, and many others.

b) Verbs in ‘ute’ from participle II in – ‘utum’ of the 3-d Latin conjugation: distribute, prosecute, attribute, constitute, execute, etc.

c) Verbs formed from the infinitive of the 3-d Latin conjugation: permit, admit, expel, impel, produce, exclude, delude, etc.

d) Adjectives in –‘ant’, - ‘ent’ from Latin participle I: arrogant, reluctant, obedient, patient. There are some nouns with these suffixes: accident, incident, occident, orient, etc.

e) Words taken from Latin with no change of the form: superior, inferior, exterior, interior, minimum, maximum, bonus, stimulus, animal, folio, item, recipe, veto, inertia, alibi, memorandum, via, pauper, simile, etc.

Since French is a Romance language it is often impossible to determine if a particular word is taken directly from Latin or from French. Thus, the word ‘figure’ is ultimately derived from Latin ‘figure’, though it is probable that it was taken directly from the French ‘figure’. The same might be stated about words: e.g. consolation, gravity, infernal, infidel, position, solid, etc.

Some words were borrowed both directly from Latin and thought French. These resulting doublets seldom remained synonymous: e.g. assoil-absolve, blame-blaspheme, chapter-capital, count-compute, frail-fragile, poor-pauper, ray-radius, reason-ration, strait-strict, sure-secure, treason-tradition, etc.

Some words were reshaped on Latin models: e.g.

Middle English New English

descryve describe

parfit perfect

verdit verdict

peyture picture

avys advice

avantage advantage

avance advance

aventure adventure

dette debt

doute doubt

vittles victuals

Some of the new spellings were based on misconceptions. Middle English ‘iland’ was erroneously associated with Latin ‘insula’ and was written and printed as “island”. “Sissors” from French and ‘sithe’ from OE were wrongly connected with Latin ‘scindere’ – ‘to cleave’ and respelt ‘scissors’ and ‘scythe’.

Many Greek words came through Latin. The names of the seven liberal arts of the medieval trivium and quadrivium had all been Greek derived words: grammar, logic, and rhetoric; arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. There are such Greek words in English as: theatre and amphitheatre; comedy and tragedy; catastrophe, climax, episode, scene, dialogue, prologue, epilogue; gnostics, agnostics, diagnostics, prognosis; acrobat, atom, crisis, encyclopedia, cycle, etc.

Some Latin abbreviations are used in English: ‘l’, ‘s’, ‘d’ clippings of “librae”, “solidi”, “denarii”, mean “pounds”, “shillings” and “pence”. “Pp.” (paginas) means “pages” “i.e.” (id est) is read “that is”; “e.g.” (example gratia), “for example”; “viz” (videlicet) “namely, to wit”; “etc”.stands for “et cetera” and is read “and so forth”.

The extent of the second layer of Latin borrowings is difficult to understanding. Its characteristic feature is that it served to be the foundation of English scientific terminology, English scientific prose.

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