Normalising Tendencies. Grammars and Dictionaries in the Late 17th and 18th c.

§ 333. The age of the literary Renaissance, which enriched the lan­guage in many ways and was marked by great linguistic freedom, was followed by the period of "normalisation" or period of "fixing the lan­guage". This age set great store by correctness and simplicity of expres­sion. The language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries struck the authors of the late 17th c. as rude and unpolished, though the neo-classicists (the term applied to the writers of this period) never reached the heights of the Renaissance writers. John Dryden (1631-1700), a ver­satile writer and competent stylist of the time, acknowledged "the wit of predecessors" but explicitly disapproved of their language, saying that "there was ever something ill-bred and clownish in it and which confessed the conversation of their authors" (ESSAYS ON THE DRA­MATIC POETRY OF THE LAST AGE). The great poet John Milton (1608-1674) noted "the corrupt pronunciation of the lower classes". Correct usage and protection of the language from corruption and change became the subject of great concern and numerous discussions. In 1664 the Royal Society appointed a special committee "for improving the English tongue". The fixed structures of dead languages — Greek and Latin — loomed in the mind of the neo-classicists and made them re­gard all linguistic change as corruption that ought to be checked.

§ 334. The 18th c. is remarkable for deliberate attempts to fix the language and interfere with its evolution. Among the exponents of this movement were the writer Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the founders of the first English newspapers R. Steele and J. Addison, the authors of prescriptive English grammars and the great 18th c. lexicographers.

The new journals issued at regular intervals, the TATLER and the SPECTATOR, published essays recommending simplicity in dress, in behaviour and particularly in discourse; language matters were among the most popular subjects. It was in the TATLER (N 230, 1710) that J. Swift published his first article on language followed by longer treat­ises: "A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the Eng­lish Tongue". J. Swift, like other purists, protested against careless and deliberate contractions and elisions in formal and informal speech. Leaving out vowels and consonants corrupted pronunciation; the persistent use of set words and fashionable phrases turned conversation into a string of cliches; affected imitation of "genteel" persons in speech spoiled the language. He drew up a detailed proposal that a body of well-informed persons — scholars and men of letters — should be set up in order to fix the correct rules of usage. He was concerned that con­temporary writings might become incomprehensible a hundred years hence, if the changes in the language were allowed to proceed at the same speed.

§ 335. Many new grammars of English were compiled in the age of "fixing the language". J. Wallis's GRAMMATICA LINGUÆ ANGLI­CANÆ, which was first published in 1653, won European fame and ran through many editions before the end of the century. He owed much to his predecessors, but was original in the treatment of most problems. He believed that "by reducing the English too much to the Latin norm the grammarians have taught too many useless things about the cases of Nouns, and about the Tenses, Moods and Conjugations of Verbs, about government of Nouns and Verbs, etc., matters absolutely foreign to our language, producing confusion and obscurity rather than serving as ex­planations. Why should we introduce a fictitious and quite foolish col­lection of Cases, Genders, Moods and Tenses, without any need, and for which there is no reason in the basis of the language itself?" (By that time the grammatical structure of the English language was very sim­ilar to that of present-day English.)

§ 336. The grammars of the 18th c. were influenced both by the descriptions of classical languages and by the principles of logic. They wished to present language as a strictly logical system (incidentally, it was at that time that many logical terms, such as "subject" and "pred­icate", entered grammatical description). The main purpose of these grammars was to formulate rules based on logical considerations and to present them as fixed and obligatory; grammars were designed to re­strict and direct linguistic change. This type of grammars are known as "prescriptive" or "normative" grammars.

§ 337. One of the most influential prescriptive grammars was A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH GRAMMAR produced in 1762 by Robert Lowth, a theologician and professor of poetry at Oxford. In the preface to his book R. Lowth agreed with the charge that "our language is extremely imperfect", that it "offends against every part of grammar" and remarked that the best authors commit "many gross improprieties, which... ought to be corrected"; he complained that in spite of great achievements in literature and style, the English language had made "no advance in Grammatical Accuracy". "The principal design of a Grammar of any Language is to teach us to express ourselves with propriety in that Language; and to enable us to judge every phrase and farm of construction, whether it be right or not. The plain way of doing this is to lay down rules and to illustrate them by examples."

R. Lowth's INTRODUCTION appeared in twenty-two editions be­fore the end of the century and was most effective in propagating the doctrine of correctness. R. Lowth distinguished nine parts of speech and made a consistent descriptions of letters, syllables, words and sen­tences. On logical grounds he condemned double negation as equivalent to the affirmative and "double comparison" (e.g. more better)as illog­ical; he objected to the confusion of who and whom, whose and which, adjectives and adverbs. Lowth believed in a universal logical grammar, and thought that English was reducible to a system of logical rules. Thus natural usage was abandoned in favour of order, logic and system.

§ 338. Another prominent grammarian of that age, J. Priestley, deviated from the prescriptive aims of grammar and the dominance of Latin. He emphasised cus­tom as the just criterion for correctness and maintained that the business of Academies for the preservation of national languages had never been to arrest what is always in the process of evolving. Nevertheless, like Lowth and other prescrip­tive grammarians, in his RUDIMENTS OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR (1761) and other works J. Priestley advocated not only correctness based on acceptable usage but also laid down regular rules in preference la what looked less regular and systematic.

§ 339. One of the most popular grammars in the prescriptive trend was an ENGLISH GRAMMAR ADAPTED TO THE DIFFERENT CLASSES OF LEARNERS written by Lindley Murray, an American, in the late 18th c. (1795). It ran fifty editions in its original form and over one hundred and twenty in an abridged version. For many years Murray's grammar was the most widely used manual at schools; no new grammars were produced unless they repeated Murray.

§ 340. The role of English dictionaries in this period of normalisa­tion was equally significant.

English lexicography made outstanding progress in the 18lh c. Works concerned primarily with the explanation of "hard words" continued to be brought out in great numbers, e.g. DICTIONARY OF HARD WORDS by E. Coles in 1676. In 1730 Nathaniel Bailey compiled DICTIONARIUM BRITANNICUM, A MORE COMPLEAT UNIVERSAL ETYMOLOGICAL ENGLISH DICTIONARY THAN ANY EXTANT, which was a distinct improvement on its predecessors. Bailey's diction­ary contained about 48,000 items, which is more than Samuel Johnson included in his famous work. Through Johnson, who used Bailey's DICTIONARIUM as the basis of his own, N. Bailey influenced all subsequent lexicographical practice. But the greatest achievement of the 18th c. English lexicography is certainly connected with the name of Dr. Samuel Johnson.

§ 341. Samuel Johnson was one of those 18th c. scholars who be­lieved that the English language should be purified and corrected. With this object in view he undertook to compile a new dictionary based upon the usage of recognised authorities. In the two volumes of his DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1755) he included quotations from several hundred authors of the 17th and 18lh c. The entries of his dictionary contain definitions of meaning, illustrations of usage, etymologies, and stylistic comments. He regulated current usage by giving precise definitions, which, as a rule, were noticeable improvements upon those given by his predecessors. For illustration read the definitions of the word husband:

HUSBAND n (etymology and quotations follow)

1. The correlative to wife, a man married to a woman.

2. The male of animals.

3. An economist, a man that knows and practises the method of frugality and profit. Its signification is always modified by some epithet implying bad or good.

4. A tiller of the ground, a farmer.

Alongside such full definitions with the principal meanings accu­rately explained, Johnson's DICTIONARY gives some naive descriptions, which are often quoted as illustrating his prejudices, e.g.:

OATS — a grain which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people.

PENSION — an allowance made to any one without equivalent in England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.

His DICTIONARY contained a special section devoted to grammar, which deals with orthography and accidence. He distinguished between two pronunciations of English words: "one cursory and colloquial, the other regular and solemn". His well-known recommendation on pronun­ciation runs as follows: "For pronunciation the best general rule is to consider those the most elegant speakers who deviate least from written words." The grammatical part proper is very short, since he confines his description to inflections (hence, e.g. the verbs for him have only two tenses, past and present).

The weight of Johnson's authority was so great that later writers did not dare to deviate from the spellings and meanings prescribed by the DICTIONARY; even today some authors blame him for fixing Eng­lish spelling and thus making it conservative. The Dictionary passed through many editions and revisions and was drawn upon freely by nu­merous successors.

The grammars and dictionaries of the 18th c. succeeded in formulat­ing the rules of usage, partly from observation but largely from the "doc­trine of correctness", and laid them down as norms to be taught as pat­terns of correct English. Codification of norms of usage by means of conscious effort on the part of man helped in standardising the language and in fixing its Written and Spoken Standards.

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