Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature

John Milton composed polemical treatises in the language of Cicero. His younger contemporary Sir Isaac Newton lived long enough to bridge the gap.

• The one that nearly got away.
• Post navigation.
• Soccer Coaching Made Simple: Learn The Game, The Drills & The Skills You Need To Succeed With Your Team.
• Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature - Hannah Crawforth - Google Книги.
• Early Modern English.
• Threads of Hate (Mages of Tindiere Book 4)!
• Great Food, All Day Long: Eat Joyfully, Eat Healthily.

He wrote his Principia in Latin but his Opticks in English. With the restoration of the monarchy in , writers again looked to France. After the passionate controversies of the Civil Wars , this was an age of cool scientific nationalism. The committee, however, achieved no tangible result, and failed in its attempt to found an authoritative arbiter over the English tongue. Queen Anne died in Oxford and his fellow Tories, including Swift, lost power. No organized attempt to found a language academy on French lines has ever been made since.

Modern English

With Dryden and Swift the English language reached its full maturity. Their failure to found an academy was partly counterbalanced by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary published in and by Robert Lowth in his Grammar published in In the making of his Dictionary of the English Language , Samuel Johnson took the best conversation of contemporary London and the normal usage of reputable writers after Sir Philip Sidney —86 as his criteria.

He exemplified the meanings of words by illustrative quotations. Revised and enlarged editions of the unabbreviated version were made by Archdeacon Henry John Todd in and by Robert Gordon Latham in It was unfortunate that Joseph Priestley , Robert Lowth , James Buchanan, and other 18th-century grammarians Priestley was perhaps better known as a scientist and theologian took a narrower view than Johnson on linguistic growth and development.

As the century wore on, grammarians became more numerous and aggressive. They set themselves up as arbiters of correct usage. They compiled manuals that were not only descriptive stating what people do say and prescriptive stating what they should say but also proscriptive stating what they should not say. They regarded Latin as a language superior to English and claimed that Latin embodied universally valid canons of logic. In Richard Chenevix Trench, dean of St. He was succeeded by a lawyer named Frederick James Furnivall , who in founded the Early English Text Society with a view to making all the earlier literature available to historical lexicographers in competent editions.

Furnivall was subsequently succeeded as editor by James A. Later Murray was joined successively by three editors: Aside from its Supplements , the completed dictionary itself filled 12 volumes, had over 15, pages, contained , words, and was illustrated by 1,, citations. It sought to represent English in the British Commonwealth and the United States—a fact symbolized by the presentation of first copies in the spring of to King George V and President Calvin Coolidge —and to record the histories and meanings of all words known to have been in use since From to all five Middle English dialects, as has been seen, were of equal status.

They were therefore all included. After , however, dialectal expressions were not admitted, nor were scientific and technical terms considered not to be in general use. Otherwise, the written vocabulary is well represented. A revised edition of this dictionary, known as The Oxford English Dictionary , was published in , and a second edition was published in We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles.

You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind. Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval. Unfortunately, our editorial approach may not be able to accommodate all contributions. Our editors will review what you've submitted, and if it meets our criteria, we'll add it to the article. Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed.

Historical background Among highlights in the history of the English language, the following stand out most clearly: Variations in verb inflections Northern Midland Southern infinitive sing singe n singen present participle singand singende singinde present singular 1st person singe singe singe 2nd person singis singes t singst 3rd person singis singeth-es singeth present plural singis singen singeth past participle sungen y sunge n ysunge.

Page 2 of 3. Next page Varieties of English. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: English, a remnant of British colonial rule, is the most widely used lingua franca. Modern English is derived mainly from the Germanic dialects spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who all arrived in Britain in the 5th century ad and heavily influenced by the language of the Danes Vikings , who began raiding the British Isles about….

The language brought with it new literary forms that were gradually adapted to the old ones, producing new genres—without necessarily giving up the older ones—in the local languages and giving rise to an interesting literature…. Nevertheless, there are hundreds of Aboriginal languages, though many have become extinct since , and most of the surviving languages have very few speakers.

Historical background

However, English is dominant throughout most of the country; only one province, New Brunswick, is officially bilingual, and French is the official provincial language only in Quebec, where French is the first language of four-fifths of the population. From Classical times to influence on Hindi language In Hindi language: Languages Australia In Australia: Languages Canada In Canada: Languages Europe In Europe: Lingua francas Singapore In Singapore: Ethnolinguistic composition View More.

Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.

• Squeeze (Blue Fate 4).
• The History of English - Early Modern English (c. - c. )!
• English language - Historical background | www.newyorkethnicfood.com.

Help us improve this article! Contact our editors with your feedback. You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered. Any text you add should be original, not copied from other sources. A New Companion to Milton. Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency. The Renaissance of emotion.

A Concise Companion to Milton. Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture. A Companion to Renaissance Poetry. The Catholic Imaginary and the Cults of Elizabeth, — The Anatomy of Tudor Literature: Religion and Drama in Early Modern England. The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan.

Shame and Guilt in Chaucer. The Cambridge Companion to Spenser. William Langland's Piers Plowman.

A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus. Reformations of the Body. Torture and Truth Routledge Revivals. Tottel's Songes and Sonettes in Context. The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism. Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton. English Literature in the Age of Chaucer. Reading Humility in Early Modern England. Early Modern Drama and the Bible. Critical Essays on Roman Literature.

Hellenistic Science at Court. But his own work was far from consistent e.

Early Modern English - Wikipedia

Many of his successors were just as inconsistent, particularly as many of them were Europeans and not native English speakers. Sometimes different spellings were used for purely practical reasons, such as adding or omitting letters merely to help the layout or justification of printed lines. A good part of the reason for many of the vagaries and inconsistencies of English spelling has been attributed to the fact that words were fixed on the printed page before any orthographic consensus had emerged among teachers and writers.

Printing also directly gave rise to another strange quirk: It is only since the archaic spelling was revived for store signs e. Ye Olde Pubbe that the "modern" pronunciation of ye has been used. As the Early Modern period progressed, there was an increased use of double vowels e. The letters "u" and "v", which had been more or less interchangeable in Middle English , gradually became established as a vowel and a consonant respectively, as did "i" and "j". The grammarian John Hart was particularly influential in these punctuation reforms. Standardization was well under way by around , but it was a slow and halting process and names in particular were often rendered in a variety of ways.

But, in , William Tyndale printed his New Testament, which he had translated directly from the original Greek and Hebrew. By the time of his death he had only completed part of the Old Testament, but others carried on his labours. It appears to be deliberately conservative, even backward-looking, both in its vocabulary and its grammar, and presents many forms which had already largely fallen out of use, or were at least in the process of dying out e.

The "-eth" ending is used throughout for third person singular verbs, even though "-es" was becoming much more common by the early 17th Century, and ye is used for the second person plural pronoun, rather than the more common you.

Matthew in the Wycliffe, Tyndale and Authorized versions respectively gives an idea of the way the language developed over the period:. Much of its real power, though, was in exposing the written language to many more of the common people. Several other dictionaries, as well as grammar, pronunciation and spelling guides, followed during the 17th and 18th Century. Johnson also deliberately omitted from his dictionary several words he disliked or considered vulgar including bang , budge , fuss , gambler , shabby and touchy , but these useful words have clearly survived intact regardless of his opinions.

Several of his definitions appear deliberately jokey or politically motivated. Since the 16th Century, there had been calls for the regulation and reform of what was increasingly seen as an unwieldy English language, including John Cheke's proposal for the removal of all silent letters, and William Bullokar's recommendation of a new letter alphabet including 8 vowels, 4 "half-vowels" and 25 consonants in order to aid and simplify spelling. There were even attempts similarly unsuccessful to ban certain words or phrases that were considered in some way undesirable, words such as fib , banter , bigot , fop , flippant , flimsy , workmanship , selfsame , despoil , nowadays , furthermore and wherewithal , and phrases such as subject matter , drive a bargain , handle a subject and bolster an argument.

But, by the early 18th Century, many more scholars had come to believe that the English language was chaotic and in desperate need of some firm rules. He was supported in this by other important writers like John Dryden and Daniel Defoe, but such an institution was never actually realized.

Interestingly, the only country ever to set up an Academy for the English language was South Africa, in Thomas Sheridan attempted to tap into the zeitgeist , and looked to regulate English pronunciation as well as its vocabulary and spelling. His son, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, later gave us the unforgettable language excesses of Mrs. In fact, some works on grammar and rhetoric were published between and , and no less than during the 19th Century. Lowth was the main source of such "correct" grammar rules as a double negative always yields a positive, never end a sentence with a preposition and never split an infinitive.

One such peak for the English language was the Early Modern period of the 16th to 18th Century, a period sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of English Literature other peaks include the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th Century, and the computer and digital age of the late 20th Century, which is still continuing today. Between and , an estimated 10,, new words were coined, about half of which are still in use today.

Up until the 17th Century, English was rarely used for scholarly or scientific works, as it was not considered to possess the precision or the gravitas of Latin or French.

Download PDF by Hannah Crawforth: Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern

Thomas More, Isaac Newton, William Harvey and many other English scholars all wrote their works in Latin and, even in the 18th Century, Edward Gibbon wrote his major works in French, and only then translated them into English. Sir Francis Bacon, however, hedged his bets and wrote many of his works in both Latin and English and, taking his inspiration mainly from Greek, coined several scientific words such as thermometer , pneumonia , skeleton and encyclopaedia.

Over time, the rise of nationalism led to the increased use of the native spoken language rather than Latin, even as the medium of intellectual communication. The English scholar and classicist Sir Thomas Elyot went out of his way to find new words, and gave us words like animate , describe , dedicate , esteem , maturity , exhaust and modesty in the early 16th Century. His near contemporary Sir Thomas More contributed absurdity , active , communicate , education , utopia , acceptance , exact , explain , exaggerate and others, largely from Latin roots.

Milton was responsible for an estimated word coinages, including lovelorn , fragrance and pandemonium. Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, is also credited with the introduction of many common words, including damp , defunct , strenuous , clumsy and others; John Donne gave us self-preservation , valediction and others; and to Sir Philip Sydney are attributed bugbear , miniature , eye-pleasing , dumb-stricken , far-fetched and conversation in its modern meaning.

It was really only in the 17th Century that dialects or at least divergence from the fashionable Standard English of Middlesex and Surrey began to be considered uncouth and an indication of inferior class. The word class itself only acquired its modern sociological meaning in the early 18th Century, but by the end of the century it had become all-pervasive, to the extent that the mere sound of a Cockney accent was enough to brand the speaker as a vagabond, thief or criminal although in the 19th Century, Charles Dickens was to produce great literature and sly humour out of just such preconceptions, explicitly using speech, vocabulary and accent for commic effect.

He had a vast vocabulary 34, words by some counts and he personally coined an estimated 2, neologisms or new words in his many works, including, but by no means limited to, bare-faced , critical , leapfrog , monumental , castigate , majestic , obscene , frugal , aerial , gnarled , homicid e, brittle , radiance , dwindle , puking , countless , submerged , vast , lack-lustre , bump , cranny , fitful , premeditated , assassination , courtship , eyeballs , ill-tuned , hot-blooded , laughable , dislocate , accommodation , eventful , pell-mell , aggravate , excellent , fretful , fragrant , gust , hint , hurry , lonely , summit , pedant , gloomy , and hundreds of other terms still commonly used today.

By some counts, almost one in ten of the words used by Shakespeare were his own invention, a truly remarkable achievement it is the equivalent of a new word here and then, after just a few short phrases, another other new word here. However, not all of these were necessarily personally invented by Shakespeare himself: