By the Early Modern Period (the
English "Renaissance"), spelling had become far more fixed, at
least in part because of the introduction of printing by William
Caxton in 1476. By 1640, over 20,000 titles in English--counting
pamphlet-sized works as well as hefty books--had appeared in
print: works that appealed to a broad range of social classes and
tastes (it is estimated that between one-third to one-half of the
population of London in Shakespeare's day were literate). The
availability of mass-produced literature contributed materially to
the education of the rising middle class, who demanded works
written in the vernacular.
Pronunciation, as today, continued to be variable,
and this is most dramatically in evidence in changes in the pronunciation
of English "long" (or "tense") vowels, changes known collectively as the Great
Vowel Shift. At the beginning of this
linguistic era, English is still perceived by many as an inferior language
as compared with Latin and French. Caxton apologizes for his "symple and rude
englissh" that translates the French of Le Fèvre's Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, the first book printed in English (but before Caxton
had relocated his shop from Bruges to England). In the prologue to his translation
of a French translation of the Æneid (Eneydos, 1490), Caxton
laments his inability to find appropriate and equivalent language in English
for the French he is translating, and worries that he will not be able to
construe the work in language widely accessible to his reading public:
And whan I had aduysed
me in this sayd boke. I delybered and concluded to translate it
in to englysshe And forthwyth toke a penne & ynke and wrote
a leef or tweyne / whyche I ouersawe agayn to correcte it / And
whan I sawe the fayr & straunge termes therin / I doubted
that it sholde not please some gentylmen whiche late blamed me
sayeng yt in my translacyons I had ouer curyous
termes whiche coude not be vnderstande of commyn peple / and
desired me to vse olde and homely termes in my translacyons.
and fayn wolde I satysfye euery man / and so to doo toke an
olde boke and redde therin / and certaynly the englysshe was so
rude and brood that I coude not wele vnderstande it. And also
my lorde abbot of westmynster ded do shewe me late certayn
euydences wryton in olde englysshe for to reduce it in to our
englysshe now vsid / And certaynly it was wreton in suche wyse
that it was more lyke to dutche than englysshe I coude not
reduce ne brynge it to be vnderstonden /
[And when I had thought
about this book (the French translation of the
Æneid), I deliberated and decided to translate it
into English. And directly I took a pen and ink and wrote a
leaf or two, which I looked over again to correct it, and when
I saw the fair and strange terms therein, I doubted that it
would please those gentlemen who recently blamed me, saying
that in my translations I had used obscure terms that could not
be understood by the common people, and they wished me to use
old and homely terms in my translations. And certainly, I would
rather satisfy every man, and in order to do so I took an old
book and read therein and certainly the English was so rude and
broad that I could not well understand it. And also my Lord
Abott of Westminster showed me recently certain documents
written in Old English in order to translate it into the
English we now use. And certainly it was written in such manner
that it was more similar to German that English, (and) I could
not make it comprehensible.]
George Pettie, in The ciuile
conuersation (1581), voices his concern that his work will not
be accorded a proper level of respect because it is written in
English:
There are some others
yet who wyll set lyght by my labours, because I write in
Englysh: and those are some nice Trauaylours, who return home
with such quæsie stomackes, that nothyng wyll downe with
them but Frenche, Italian, or Spanishe,
and though a woorke be but meanely written in one of those
tongues, and finely translated into our Language, yet they wyll
not sticke farre to preferre the Originall before the
Translation. (quoted in Barber
66)
Despite these kinds of sentiments,
English had by this time much in its favor: a sense of
nationalism, growing literacy, and the Reformation. The
Reformation contributed to the ascendancy of English because the
religious disputations were for the most part conducted in
English, and as a consequence of Reformation, translations of the
Bible into the vernacular now had government and Church sanction.
If English were good enough for the Bible then it could no longer
be relegated to an inferior status (Barber
71).
Richard Mulcaster,
in "The Peroration" section of the Elementarie (1582),
defends his decision to write in English:
For som be of opinion,
that we should neither write of anie philosophicall argument,
nor philosophicallie of anie slight argument in our English
tung, bycause the vnlearned vnderstand it not, the learned
esteme it not, as a thing of difficultie to the one, and no
delite to the other. For both the penning in English
generallie, and mine own penning in this order, I haue this to
saie.
No one tung is more fine
then other naturallie, but by industrie of the speaker, which
vpon occasion offered by the kinde of gouernment wherin he
liueth, endeuoreth himself to garnish it with eloquence, &
to enrich it with learning. The vse of such a tung, so eloquent
for speche, and so learned for matter, while it kepeth it self
within the naturall soil, it both serues the own turn with
great admiration, and kindleth in the foren, which com to
knowledge of it, a great desire to resemble the like.
(253-54)
After arguing that all languages are
equally capable, given opportunity and application (as he does
above), he then disputes the absurdity of divided language
loyalties, as was the circumstance in Britain:
For is it not in dede
a meruellous bondage, to becom seruants to one tung for
learning sake, the most of our time, with losse of most time,
whereas we maie haue the verie same treasur in our own tung,
with the gain of most time? our own bearing the ioyfull title
of our libertie and fredom, the Latin tung remembring vs, of
our thraldom & bondage? I loue Rome, but
London better, I fauor Italie, but England
more, I honor the Latin, but I worship the
English. (54)
Barber, citing Jones's
argument in The Triumph of the English Language, summarizes
the situation succinctly: "Before 1575, nearly everybody agrees
that English is barbarous; after 1580 there is a whole chorus of
voices proclaiming that English is eloquent" (76-7).
The criteria used to assess a language's eloquence are
(Barber
77-8, again citing Jones):
- Important works are written in
it.
- The vocabulary is adequate to the
demands made on it (in the case of English, this meant that
it had to expand its lexicon).
- The language exhibits the
"devices of classical rhetoric."
- The language has a achieved a
"fixed," codified state. (For this, English would need
authoritative grammars
and dictionaries
to retard unruly change.)
In 1595, Philip
Sidney, near the end of The Defense of Poetry, sings the
praises of his English tongue, not least of which is its lack of
"grammar":
I know some will say
[English] is a mingled language. And why not so much
the better, taking the best of both the other? Another will say
it wanteth grammar. Nay truly, it hath that praise, that it
wanteth not grammar; for grammar it might have, but it needs it
not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome
differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which I think
was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man should
be put to school to learn his mother tongue. But for the
uttering sweetly and properly the conceit of the mind, which is
the end of speech, that hath it equally with any other tongue
in the world; and is particularly happy in compositions of two
or three words together, near the Greek, far beyond the Latin:
which is one of the greatest beauties can be in a
language.
The expansion of the English
lexicon (vocabulary) during this period was to generate
considerable controversy. Although the debate over the
appropriateness of introducing loanwords into English was usually
characterized as being about the purity of the language, it
really came down to disagreements over taste. The infusions of
Latin, Old Norse, and French words during the Old and Middle
English periods had already insured that a "pure" (i.e., limited
to Anglo-Saxon word stock) English had ceased to exist. In this
age, as throughout the history of English, words that are singled
out as "abominable" by some may subsequently come to be regarded
as intrinsically English.
As the demand for
translations of classical and foreign-language texts grew, English
writers succumbed to the attraction of the ready-made terminology
available in the source text, resulting in the wholesale
importation of Latin and Greek rhetorical, scientific, and
technical terms. Thomas Eliot, for instance, the author of The
boke named the Gouernour (1531), which was a treatise on
humanist education, produces the earliest attestations in English
for the words animate, education,
encyclopedia, frugality, metamorphosis,
obfuscate, and persist, among others
(Barber
79). William Shakespeare probably introduced more words into the
language than anyone, but he was sensitive to the inclination to
over-neologize. He is surely satirizing those with less
finely-tuned ears than his own in the character of Holofernes, the
schoolmaster, in Loves' Labours Lost
(5.1.15-24):
- HOLOFERNES
- He draweth out the
thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his
argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such
insociable and point-devise companions; such rackers of
orthography, as to speak 'dout', sine 'b', when he
should say 'doubt'; 'det', when he should pronounce
'debt'--'d, e, b, t', not 'd, e, t': he clepeth a calf,
'cauf'; half, 'hauf'; neighbour vocatur 'nebor';
'neigh' abbreviated 'ne'. This is abhominable--which he
would call 'abominable': it insinuateth me of
insanire --ne intelligis, domine? to make
frantic, lunatic.
Holofernes, as Biron says of Armado in
the same play, is "A man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight"
(1.1.176). He exemplifies those who 'black their mouths with ink,'
to paraphrase George Pettie, who himself defends the practice that
generated what is known as the Inkhorn
Controversy:
Wherefore I marueile
how our english tongue hath crackt it credite, that it may not
borrow of the Latine as well as other tongues; and if it haue
broken, it is but of late, for it is not vnkowen to all men how
many woordes we haue fetcht from thence within these fewe
yeeres, which if they should be all counted inkepot termes, I
know not how we should speake any thing without blaking our
mouthes with inke. (Preface to The ciuile conuersation,
cited in Barber
86)
Pettie may here have been responding to
John Cheke, who in a letter to Thomas Hoby, printed along with
Hoby's 1561 translation of Castiglione's Courtier,
articulates clearly the belief of the Purists that English was
being corrupted by its reliance on borrowings from other
tongues:
I am of this opinion
that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, vnmixt and
vnmangeled with borowing of other tunges, wherein if we take
not heed bi tijm, euer borowing and neuer payeng, she shall be
fain to keep her house as bankrupt. (Quoted
in Barber
91)
As Barber points out, Cheke's own
sentence "includes no less than five non-Germanic words, one of
them (bankrupt) not recorded before 1533; moreover, Cheke
uses the Latin form of this word, which also existed as
bankrout." Sir Thomas Chaloner (1549), whose own prose is
replete with loanwords, exemplifies the critics of such
borrowing:
Such men therfor, that
in deede are archdoltes, and woulde be taken yet for sages and
philospohers, maie I not aptelie calle theim foolelosophers?
For as in this behalfe I have thought good to borowe a littell
of the Rethoriciens of these daies, who plainely thynke theim
selfes demygods, if lyke horsleches thei can shew two tongues,
I meane to mingle their writings with words sought out of
strange langages, as if it were alonely thyng for theim to
poudre theyr bokes with ynkehorne termes [emphasis
added], although perchaunce as unaptly applied as a gold
rynge in a sowes nose. That and if they want suche farre
fetched vocables, than serche they out of some rotten pamphlet
foure or fyve disused woords of antiquitee, therewith to darken
the sence unto the reader, to the ende that who so
understandeth theim maie repute hym selfe for more cunnyng and
litterate: and who so dooeth not, shall so muche the rather yet
esteeme it to be some high mattier, because it passeth his
learnyng.
Certainly one of the more extreme
positions in the Purist movement is illustrated in Ralph Lever's
treatise on logic, The Arte of Reason, rightly termed
Witcraft, in which he constructs English compounds to
substitute for the classical terminology usually favored in such
contexts. The table below illustrates some of these coinages, none
of which have survived (from
Barber
92):
|
Latin
|
Lever's English compounds
|
|
logic
|
witcraft
|
|
conclusio
|
endsay
|
|
negatio
|
naysay
|
|
propositio conditionalis
|
ifsay
|
|
definitio
|
saywhat
|
|
propostio
|
shewsay
|
|
affirmatio
|
yeasay
|
|
preface
|
forespeache
|
