Language Change Flashcards
William Caxton
- Put together a 700-page history of Troy - the first book to be printed in English
- The press allows one form of English to spread across the country
- There were no real negative views on Caxton at the time, though we know that his decisions would isolate certain social groups
William Caxton’s necessary choices
- Foreign words without translation
- Variety of English
- Literary style
- The spelling of unstandardised words
The influence of Shakespeare
-Not the first to use certain words, but the first to popularise them
Mainly influenced the areas of:
- vocabulary
- lexis
- grammatical conversation
- idiomatic expressions
Mulcaster
Wrote one of the first grammars:
- Vowels spelt more predictably, eg. “oo” in “soon”
- “u” and “v” phonetically fixed
- short vowels followed by consonants, eg. “full”, “well”, “glass”
- school books begin to contain lists of homophones
Orthography
- Another term for spelling
- Renaissance - no standard writing form
- Blamed on the idiosyncrasy of printers
- Printers often added “-e” if they wanted to justify a line of text (to justify the length of a sentence in a frame or page)
John Hart
Suggested that capitals should be used at the start of sentences
Use of capital letters
- John Hart suggests the use of capitals at the start of sentences
- By early 17th century, capital letters were used in titles and personified nouns
- Emphasised words and phrases were also capitalised, though 18th century grammarians later put a stop to this
Inkhorn Controversy
- Increasing the influx of borrowed words vs stopping it
- First example of academic groups attempting to standardise and halt language change (prescriptivism)
Theorists involved in the Inkhorn Controversy
- Thomas Elyot - went out of his way to “enrich” the language
- Edmund Spencer - preferred to revive obsolete and old English terms
Borrowed foreign terms - Latin and Greek
- adapt
- agile
- delirium
- pathetic
- relevant
Borrowed foreign terms - French
- alloy
- anatomy
- duel
- shock
- grotesque
Borrowed foreign terms - Italian
- balcony
- cameo
- lottery
- carnival
- concerto
Robert Cawdrey
- Wrote the first dictionary
- Standardised spelling
Samuel Johnson
- Wrote a dictionary stabilising word meanings and spellings
- Idiosyncratic
Bishop Robert Lowth
- “A Short Introduction to English Grammar”
- Still used in the modern day
Origin of The age of Bibles
- 16th century - England experiences religious controversy
- Many wanted the Bible printed in their own languages
Miles Coverdale
1535 - Translates the Bible to German
King James Bible
- Appointed to every church in the land
- Composed by a team of scholars that looked at other versions
- Idioms - “the apple of his eye”, “the straight and narrow”, “the signs of the times”
- Second person pronoun
- “An” used before words starting with “h”
Great Vowel Shift
- Not entirely uniform - inconsistencies across the country where some changed and some didn’t
- The speed and cause of the shift still have no real explanation as to why the happened
Theories behind the cause of the Great Vowel Shift
- The Black Death resulted in accent levelling as people around the country in attempts to escape it
- Accents levelled and pronunciation became similar to that of France as it was considered to be more “in fashion”
- Accents and pronunciation moved away from the French style due to anti-French sentiment and Francophobia of the time
