New Sources of Information about the Language. Private Papers. Didactic Compositions

§ 323. The amount of written matter which has come down to us from the Early NE period is far greater than that of the OE and ME periods, for the simple reason that many more texts were produced and had a better chance to survive during the relatively short span of time which has elapsed since. In addition to the writings of a literary, philos­ophical, theological, scientific or official character, produced, copied or printed by professionals, there appeared new kinds of written evidence pertaining to the history of the language: private papers. With the spread of education more people could read and write; they began to correspond and to write diaries. Extant family archives contain papers written both by educated and by uncultivated persons. The significance of their evidence for the history of the language is obvious: the writers were not guided by written tradition and could not set themselves any literary aims; they recorded the words, forms and pronunciations in current use, putting their own English on paper and reflecting all kinds of dialectal and colloquial variants. The earliest collections of letters preserved in family archives are the PASTON LETTERS written be­tween 1430 and 1470 by members of the Paston family in Norfolk (i.e. in the East Midland dialect of late ME) and the CELY PAPERS written in the same dialect a short time later.

Numerous private letters of the 16th c. give a fair picture of collo­quial speech, so far as it is possible in a written document. Of greatest value is the DIARY of Henry Machyn, a London merchant with no particular education. This diary as well as other private papers, bear testimony to the existence of social differences in the regional dialects, e.g. the existence of Cockney, a lower class London dialect since the early 16th c.

§ 324. The renewed interest in living languages in the 16th and 17th c., which came to be regarded as more important for practical purposes than the classical ones, led to the appearance of one more kind of printed matter: books of instruction for pupils, didactic works and various other compositions dealing with the English language.

§ 325. A large number of early works concerned with the English language deal with "correct writing", in other words with spelling and pronunciation. The cur­rent ways of indicating sounds seemed inconsistent to many scholars and school masters; they attempted to improve and regulate the graphic system of the language by designing better alphabets or by proposing rules fo more consistent spell­ing. In the early 16th c. John Cheke, a scholar of Cambridge and a pioneer among spelling reformers, proposed that all letters should be doubled to indicate length — a practice very irregularly employed betore his time; his associate Thomas Smith in his DIALOGUE CONCERNING THE CORRECT AND EMENDED WRITING OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1568) set out a new alphabet of 34 letters to the same object. The greatest English phonetician of the 16th c., in the opinion of mod­ern philologists, was John Hart, who produced a number of works, especially AN ORTHOGRAPHIE (1569). Being a keen observer he noticed the changing values of the letters brought about by the change in the sounds. His reforms of the English spelling, however, were as unsuccessful as those of his contemporaries. Other prominent scholars made no attempt to reform the spelling but Iried to make it more consistent, or, conversely, to correct the pronunciation in accor­dance with the spelling.

For all their limitations and failures, the works of the early spelling reform­ers and phoneticians are important sources of information about the history of English sounds.

§ 326. Manuals of English were also concerned with matters of grammar and vocabulary.

Like many descriptions of other European languages the earliest books dealing with English grammar were modelled on Latin grammars. Thus one of the early guides used in teaching English was a Latin grammar, written by William Lily: ETON LATIN GRAMMAR; it was supplied with English translations and equiva­lents of Latin forms. The title of another English grammar published in the late 16th c. displays the same approach: A PERFECT SURVEY OF THE ENGLISH TONGUE TAKEN ACCORDING TO THE USE AND ANALOG IE OF THE LATIN.

The grammars of the early 17th c. were more original. Alexander Gill's LOGONOMIA ANGLICA published in 1619, written in Latin, contains English illust­rations from contemporary authors, e. g. Ph. Sidney, Ben Jonson.

A new approach was postulated in the English grammar composed by the dram­atist Ben Jonson, "for the benefit of all strangers out of his observation of the English language now spoken and in use" (1640). Although in the main he fol­lowed the traditional pattern of Latin grammars, he paid special attention to word order as an important feature of English grammatical structure, described the ar­ticle as a separate part of speech; he was puzzled by the lack of order in verb forms, in moods and adverbs; he grouped the nouns into two declensions and sub­divided the verbs into conjugations.

The first author to break with the Latin tradition was John Wallis, the most famous of all the 17th c. grammarians and phoneticians. His GRAMMAT1CA LlNGUÆ ANGLICANÆ was first published in 1653; it was translated into English and went into many editions in the second half of the 17th c. (see § 335 for Eng­lish grammars of the succeeding period).

§ 327. Other kinds of publications dealing with language were lists of words and dictionaries. The swift development of international trade treated a demand for dictionaries; bilingual dictionaries of classical and contemporary languages were produced in increasing numbers in the 16th and 17th c.

(Dictionaries of dead languages had appeared before that time: glosses to Latin religious works, made since OE were later combined into dictionaries; in 1499 the printers published the first English-Latin Dic­tionary.)

The earliest dictionaries of the English language were selective lists of difficult words. In those days the most common English words were difficult to write, whereas the learned one's, usually Latin borrow­ings, which abounded in the writings of the Renaissance, were not only hard to spell but also hard to understand.

To cope with this difficulty, the first English-English explanatory dictionaries were compiled. Robert Cawdrey's TABLE ALPHABETIC ALL CONTEYNING AND TEACHING THE TRUE WRITING, AND UNDERSTANDING OF HARD USUAL ENGLISH WORDS, BOR­ROWED FROM THE HEBREW, GREEK, LATIN OR FRENCHETC. issued in 1504, is one of the early publications of this kind. Caw­drey's dictionary was quite small, containing about three thousand words. A slightly larger book was produced by John Bullokar in 1615, ENGLISH EXPOSITOR TEACHING THE INTERPRETATION OF THE HARDEST WORDS USED IN OUR LANGUAGE where he attempted to explain "scholastic" words. The first book entitled ENG­LISH-ENGLISH DICTIONARY, a small volume compiled by Henry Cockeram, appeared in 1623: it contained explanations of common "hard" words, of "vulgar" words defined with the help of their bookish equi­valents, and stray bits of curious information about "Gods and God­desses,... Boyes and Maides,... Monsters and Serpents,... Dogges, Fishes, and the like".