Late Modern English 17th century to 19th Flashcards
Major changes in Late Modern English period
> industrial revolution added new words to the language
English became an international language and the expansion of the British
Empire in the 19th Century which lead to many Americanisms.
English travels to other countries and imports many loanwords
> use of archaic words:
· Webster publishes American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828
· British Empire causes huge lexical growth
· Modern language science begins with Jakob Grimm and others
· James Murray begins to compile the New English Dictionary (which later
becomes the Oxford English Dictionary) in 1879
Industrial Revolution
This created a number of new words into the language
> Around six words fields each of which social changes created by the Industrial Revolution made prominent: fashion; food; leisure; medicine; chemistry; Psychology
> E.g. Lens, refraction, electron, chromosome, chloroform, caffeine, centigrade, bacteria, chronometer and claustrophobia are just a few of the other science-based words that were created during this period of scientific innovation.
Neologisms and coinages (new words)
> The word mackintosh (1836) was coined as a tribute to Charles Macintosh (1766-1843), who invented a waterproofing process.
The word pasteurize (1881) honored Louis Pasteur (1822-95), the French chemist and bacteriologist, who discovered of the germ-theory of illness and invented the process of heating food, milk and wine in order to kill most of the micro-organisms in them
The word marathon (1896) alludes to Marathon, a plain in Greece about 25 miles west of Athens, where an army of 10,000 Athenians defeated 100,000 Persians, at the Battle of Marathon.
The word hysteria (1801) - used to describe ‘fit of emotional outburst, imaginary illness and even real disability’ - comes from New Latin - which was borrowed from Middle French hystérique and originates from Greek hysterikós and hystéra meaning
‘womb’.
Expansion of the British Empire in the 19th century
> British colonialism had begun as early as the 16th Century - but gathered speed and momentum between the 18th and 20th Century. At the end of the 16th Century, mother-tongue English speakers numbered just 5-7 million, almost all of them in the British Isles; over the next 350 years.
At the height of the British Empire (in the late 19th and early 20th Century), Britain ruled almost one quarter of the earth’s surface, from Canada to Australia to India to the Caribbean to Egypt to South Africa to Singapore.
Britain’s dealings with these exotic countries led to the introduction of many foreign loan words - For instance:
Australia = boomerang, kangaroo, budgerigar, etc.
India = pyjamas, thug, bungalow, cot, jungle, loot, bangle, shampoo, candy, tank etc.
There was also a rise in “New Englishes”: such as Australian English, South African English, Caribbean English, South Asian English, etc).
