THE PRONOUN 7 страница

The universities at Oxford and Cambridge (founded in the 12th c.) became the centres of new humanistic learning. Henry VIII assembled at his court a group of brilliant scholars and artists. Education had ceased to be the privilege of the clergy; it spread to laymen and people of lower social ranks. After the Reformation teachers and tutors could be laymen as well as clergymen.

As before, the main subject in schools was Latin; the English lan­guage was labelled as " a rude and barren tongue", fit only to serve as an instrument in teaching Latin. Scientific and philosophical treatises were written in Latin, which was not only the language of the church but also the language of philosophy and science. The influence of clas­sical languages on English grew and was reflected in the enrichment of the vocabulary.

§314. Of all the outstanding achievements of this great age, the in­vention of printing had the most immediate effect on the development of the language, its written form in particular. " Artificial writing", as printing was then called, was invented in Germany in 1438 (by Jo- hann Gutenberg); the first printer of English books was William Cax­ton,

William Caxton (1422—1491) was born in Kent. In 1441 he moved to Flanders, where he spent over three decades of his life. During a vis­it to Cologne he learned the method of printing and in 1473 opened up his own printing press in Bruges. The first English book, printed in Bru­ges in 1475, was Caxton's translation of the story of Troy RECUYELL OF THE HISTORYES OF TROYE. A few years later he brought his press over to England and set it up in Westminster, not far outside the city of London. All in all about one hundred books were issued by his press and about a score of them were either translated or edited by Cax­ton himself.

Among the earliest publications were the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, still the most popular poet in England, the poems of John Gower, the compositions of John Lydgate, the most voluminous poet of the age, Trevisa's translation of the POLYCHRONICON, and others. Both Caxton and his associates took a greater interest in the works of med­ieval literature than in the works of ancient authors or theological and scientific treatises published by the printers on the continent. About

The last page of MORTE D'ARTHUR as printed by William Caxton

one quarter of his publications were translations from French, e. g.: RECUYELL OF THE HISTORYES OF TROYE mentioned above, GAME AND PLAYEOFTHE CHESSE, the famous romance of knight­ly adventure MORTE D'ARTHUR (" Death of Arthur") by Thomas Malory, one of the last works in this genre.

In preparing the manuscripts for publication William Caxton and his successors edited them so as to bring them into conformity with the London form of English used by their contemporaries. In doing this they sometimes distorted the manuscripts considerably. Their correc­tions enable us to see some of the linguistic changes that had occurred since the time when the texts were first written. Here are some substi­tutions made by Caxton in Trevisa's POLYCHRONICON, written a hundred years before:

Trevisa: i-cleped, ich, steike, as me troweth¹, chapinge; Caxton: called, I, ascended, as men supposed, market.

§ 315. It is difficult to overestimate the influence of the first printers in fixing and spreading the written form of English. The language they used was the London literary English established since the age of Chaucer and slightly modified in accordance with the linguistic changes that had taken place during the intervening hundred years. With cheap print­ed books becoming available to a greater number of readers, the London form of speech was carried to other regions and was imitated in the written works produced all over England.

The greatest influence exerted by the printers was that on the writ- ^ten form of the word. Caxton's spelling, for all its irregularities and in­consistencies, was more normalised than the chaotic spelling of the man-

. 'An impersonal construction (lit. 'as me seems'), which was later replaced y personal, e.g. as / suppose (hire as then supposed).

uscripts. The written forms of many words perpetuated by Caxto_n were accepted as standard and have often remained unchanged to the present day in spite of the drastic changes in pronunciation. It should be noted that Caxton's spelling faithfully reproduced the spelling of the preceding century and was conservative even in his day.

In conclusion we may recall that so great was the effect of printing on the development of the language that the year 1475 — the date of the publication of the first English book — is regarded as a turning point in English linguistic history and the start of a new period — NE.

Foreign Contacts in the Early New English Period

§ 316. The Tudors encouraged the development of trade inside and outside the country. The great geographical discoveries (beginning with the discovery of the New World in 1492) gave a new impetus to (he progress of foreign trade: English traders set forth on daring journeys in search of gold and treasures. Under the later TudoTs England became one of the biggest trade and sea powers.

The main events of the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1556- 1603) were connected with the rise of merchant capital. Ousting her rivals from many markets England became involved in the political struggle of the European countries for supremacy. Most complicated were her rela­tions with France, Spain and Portugal; in 1568 England defeated the Spanish fleet, the Invincible Armada, thus dealing a final blow to Spain, her main rival in overseas trade and in colonial expansion. In the late 16th c. England founded her first colonies abroad.

The contacts of England with foreign nations, although not neces­sarily friendly, became closer, which had an inevitable influence on the growth of the vocabulary.

Expansion of English over the British Isles

§ 317. As Britain consolidated into a single powerful state, it ex­tended its borders to include Wales, Scotland and part of Ireland.

As mentioned before, the partial subjugation of Wales was the last stage of the Norman Conquest. It was not until the 16th c., however, that the annexation was completed. Both during the wars and after the final occupation, the English language penetrated into Wales and partly replaced the native Celtic dialect; a large proportion of the abo­riginal population, however, did not give up their mother tongue and continued to speak Welsh. (It is noteworthy that to this day Wales has preserved a large number of old Celtic place-names and the Welsh dia­lect.)

§ 318. The attempts to conquer Ireland in the 13th and 14th c. ended in failure. In Ireland, only the area around Dublin was ruled direct from England, the rest of the country being Irish or Anglo-Irish. Ireland remained divided among innumerable chiefs and turned into one of the poorest and most backward countries. Despite the weak ties with Eng­land and the assimilation of English and Welsh invaders by the Irish, linguistic penetration continued.

§319. The repeated claims of the English kings to be overlords of Scotland were met with protest and revolt. In the early 14th c. Scot­land's independence was secured by the victories of Robert Bruce. Feu­dal Scotland remained a sovereign kingdom until the Ыет Tudors, but the influence of the English language was greater than elsewhere.

Scotland began to fall under English linguistic influence from the lith c., when England made her first attempts to conquer the territory. The mixed population of Scotland — the native Scots and Picts, the Britons (who had fled from the Germanic invasion), the Scandinavians {who had stayed on after the Scandinavian settlement), and the English (who had gradually moved to the north from the neighbouring regions)

_ was not homogeneous in language. The Scotch-Gaelic dialect of the

Scots was driven to the Highlands, while in Lowland Scotland the Northern English dialect gave rise to a new dialect, Scottish, which had a chance to develop into an independent language, an offshoot of Eng­lish. The Scottish tongue flourished as a literary language and produced a distinct literature as long as Scotland retained its sovereignty (see §307). After the unification with England under the Stuarts (1603), and the loss of what remained of Scotland's self-government, Scottish was once again reduced to dialectal status. In the subsequent centuries English became both the official and the literary language in Scotland.

Thus by the end of the Early NE period, the area of English had expanded, to embrace the whole of the British Isles with the exception of some mountainous parts of Wales and Scotland, the Isle of Man, Cornwall, and some parts of Ireland, — though even in most of these regions the people were becoming bilingual.

Flourishing of Literature in Early New English (Literary Renaissance)

§ 320. The growth of the national literary language and especially the fixation of its Written Standard is inseparable from the flourishing of literature known as the English Literary Renaissance.

The beginnings of the literary efflorescence go back to the 16th c. After a fallow period of dependence on Chaucer, literary activity gained momentum in the course of the 16th c. and by the end of it attained such an importance as it had never known before. This age of literary flour­ishing is known as the " age of Shakespeare" or the age of Literary Re­naissance (also the " Elizabethan age" for it coincided roughly with the ^feign of Elizabeth). The most notable forerunners of the literary Renais­sance in the first half of the I6th c. were the great English humanist Thomas More (1478-1535) and William Tyndale, the translator of the Bible. The chief work of Thomas More, UTOPIA was finished in 1516; it was written in Latin and was first translated into English in 1551. jn UTOPIA Th. More expressed his opposition to the way of life in con­temporary England, which he defined as " a conspiracy of the rich against the poor" and drew a picture of an ideal imaginary society in which equality, freedom and well-being were enjoyed by all. More's other works were written in English; most interesting are his pamphlets issued during a controversy with W. Tyndale over the translation of the Bible.

William Tyndale was a student at Oxford and Cambridge and a priest in the church. In 1526 he completed a new English translation of the Bible. Both in his translations and original works Tyndale showed himself one of the first masters of English prose. He exerted a great in­fluence not only on the language of the Church but also on literary prose and on the spoken language. The later versions of the Bible, and first of all the Authorised Version — KING JAMES' BIBLE (produced by a body of translators and officially approved in 1611) was in no small measure based on Tyndale's translation.

§ 321. As elsewhere, the Renaissance in England was a period of rapid progress of culture and a time of great men. The literature of Shakespeare's generation proved exceptionally wealthy in writers of the first order.

Many of the great classics, both ancient and modern, were translated into English: Plutarch and Ovid. Montaigne and Thomas More. Religious prose flour­ished, not only in the translations ol the Bible but also in collections ol sermons and other theological compositions. Secular prose grew in the philosophical works of Francis Bacon (1561—1626), who wrote his chief work, NOVUM ORGANDM in Latin, but proved his mastery of the mother tongue in essays and other composi­tions.

In that age of poets and dramatists poetry penetrated everywhere. " Poetical prose" is the name applied to the romances of John Lyly and Ph. Sidney, to the novels and pamphlets of R. Greene, Th. Nash, Th. Deloney. It is often said that Shakespeare's achievement was largely made possible by the works of his imme­diate predecessors: the sonnets of Ph. Sidney and E. Spenser, the comedies of John Lyly, the famous tragedies of Th. Kyd, the drama of Christopher Marlowe and other playwrights.

The thirty years or less of Shakespeare's career as actor, poet and playwright were also the culminating years of Spenser's poetry, the years of Ben Jonson's versatile activity as dramatist and poet, the period of the blossoming of the drama represented by many other celebrated names: Thomas Heywood, John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont. The vitality of the theatre was due to its broad contact with pop­ular entertainment, national traditions and living speech.

§ 322. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was the chief of the Eliza­bethan dramatists as well as a genius whose writings have influenced every age and every country. Shakespeare's plays were greatly admired in the theatres but less than half of them were printed in his lifetime. The first collected edition of his plays was the Folio of 1623.

It is universally recognised that Shakespeare outclassed all his con­temporaries in all genres of drama and poetry (comedies, historical plays, tragedies and sonnets) and surpassed them all in his mastery of the English tongue. His works give an ideal representation of the liter­ary language of his day. His vast vocabulary (amounting to over 20, 000 words), freedom in creating new words and new meanings, ver­satility of grammatical construction reflect the fundamental properties of the language of the period.

Great literary men of the Elizabethan age

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 Norfoik (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 ol 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 olher words with spelling and pronunciation. The cur­rent ways of indicating sounds seemed inconsistent to many scholars and school­masters; they attempted to improve and regulate the graphic system of the language by designing better alphabets or by proposing rules to 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 before 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 ORTHOGRAPH1E (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 tried 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 plioneticians 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 ol 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 LO- GONOMIA 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 lol- lowed 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 puz2led 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 LlN- GU/E ANGLICAN/E 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 f words and dictionaries. The swiit development oi international trade Seated 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 rope 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 FRENCH- ETC. issued in 1604, is one of the early publications ol this kind. Caw­drey's dictionary was quite small, containing about three thousand words. A slightly larger book was produced by John Bullokar in 1616, ENGLISH EXPOSITOR TEACHING THE INTERPRETATION OF THE HARDEST WORDS USED IN OUR LANGUAGE where he attempted to explain " scholastic" words. The first book entitled ENG- LISH-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",

Establishment of the Written Standard

§328. Towards the end of Early NE, that is by the middle of the I7th c., one of the forms of the national literary language — its Written Standard — had probably been established. Its growth and recognition as the correct or " prestige" form of the language of writing had been brought about by the factors described in the preceding paragraphs: the economic and political unification of the country, the progress of culture and education, the flourishing of literature.

The Written Standard can be traced to definite geographical and social sources.

§329. As stated above (§303) the literary form of English used by Uiaucer and his immediate successors arose from the dialect of 14th c. London, which was a mixed regional dialect combining Southern and bast Midland types. In the 15th and 16th c. the speech of London became |till more mixed owing to increased intermixture of the population: the capital attracted newcomers from different regions of the country.

Elements of various provincial dialects were incorporated in the spoken and written forms of London speech.

§ 330. The social source of the Written Standard is s more problematic issue. H. C. Wyld, a prominent English linguist, maintains that in the course'of the 15th and)6th c. the basis of the written foim ol English shifted from a regional dia­lect to largely a social one.

H. Wyld believes that the language of literature and writing In the 16th c. was identical to what could be termed " colloquial Court English", learnt either by personal experience or from books; it was a class d ialect restricted to a very narrow social group — the highest nobility at the King's Court.

These views can be contested. It is true that by the end of the 16th c. social differentiation oi English musk have grown. Social divergencies in the language in­creased not so much owing to the growth of the population as to the new class dis­tinctions in the bourgeois society. Yet it was at that very time that people of dit- ferent rank5 easily intermixed. The age of the Renaissance gave ample opportunity for individual ambition; distinguished sailors, successful merchants and manufac­turers, as well as outstanding men-of-letters came from different walks of life. It is known, for instance, that Christopher Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker, Ben Jonson — the son ol a town clerk, William Shakespeare —the son of a trad­er in gloves from Stratford. After the Relcrmation education had lost its purely clerical character and was spreading to an increasing number of people. It follows that though the Written Standard originated from the speech ol educated people, those educated people should not be identified with tbe nobility at the King's Court. The social basis of the written form of language in the early 17th c. was less restricted than that of the literary language of Caxton's day, just as its geo­graphical basis was not restricted to the city of London.

§331. The Written Standard of the early 17th c. was, however, far less stabilised and normalised than the literary standards of later ages. The writings of the Renaissance display a wide range of variation at all linguistic levels: in spelling, in the shape of grammatical forms and word-building devices, in syntactical patterns and in the choice and use of words. Variants are employed as equivalents or " near-equiva­lents" without any noticeable dialectal or stylistic connotations, al­though they may have originated from different localities, social groups or literary genres. This linguistic " freedom" is accounted for by the wide social and geographical foundations of the literary language, by the bToad contacts of the literary language with folklore and oral speech, and by the increased amount of written matter produced: scientific and philosophical compositions, letters and diaries, poetry and literary prose, drama and official papers.

§332. The existence of a prestige form of English in Early NE, which may be regarded as a sort of Standard, is confirmed by some state­ments of contemporary scholars. The victory of English over French in the sphere of belles-lettres was already a matter of the past; but its rivalry with Latin in the sphere of science, philosophy, and didactics continued during the Renaissance period. It is noteworthy that writers used to preface their works with explanations why they chose to write in English instead of Latin. R. Ascnam, the tutor of the Royal family and a well-known author of didactic books, wrote: " If any man would blame me, eyther for takynge such a matter in hande, or els for writting it in the Englysche tongue, thisanswerel maye make hym, that whan the beste of the realme think it honest for them to vse, I one of the mean­est sorte ought not to suppose it vile for me to write" (R. Ascham, TOXO- pHJLUS, 1545). In books written by school-masters we find the first references to a form of speech superior to other forms, which testifies to the recognition of a language Standard. John Hart, a phonetician and spelling reformer, looked upon Court English as the " flower" of the English tongue (ORTHOGRAPHIE, 1569); R. Puttenham recommended for the use of writers the best form of English: " the vsual speach of the Court, and that of London within IX myles and not much above" (THE ARTE OF ENGLISH POESIE, 1580). Incidentally, the latter definition does not restrict the best spoken English to the form of speech used at the Court.

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-clas- sicists (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 lime, 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 Ihe 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 persist­ant use of set words and fashionable phrases turned conversation into a string of clichfa, 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.