There are several
important events before 1500 that when listed together show a series of steps
in the struggle for English language supremacy. These steps are mainly
governmental, legal and official events that pushed English usage. In 1356 The
Sheriff's Court in London and Middlesex were conducted in English for the first
time. When Parliament opened in 1362 the Statute of Pleading was issued
declaring English as a language of the courts as well as of
Parliament, but
it was not until 1413 that English became the official language of the courts
everywhere. Thirteen years later in 1423, Parliament records start being
written in English. 1400 marks date that English is used in writing wills, a
seemingly small step, but one that impacted many people and began a legacy of
record keeping in English. In 1450 English became the language used in writing town laws and finally 1489 saw all
statutes written in English. But it was not until 1649 that English became the
language of legal documents in place of Latin.
The formal rules
intended to keep the use of French in official capacities were not enough to
combat the effects of the Black Death and the Hundred Years War between France
and England, which both contributed greatly to the rise of English and fall of
French. By the fourteenth century, English was again known by most people,
although French was not forgotten,
and the people
who spoke French were generally bilingual. The
Statute of Pleading made it law that English and not French would be
used in the courts. However, it needs to be emphasized that at the end of this
statement, it says that after the pleadings, debates, etc. in English
were finished,
they should be entered and enrolled in Latin. English became the official
language of the court in 1413, but French was permitted until the eighteenth
century.
More than the
official bureaucratic changes in rules and law were the changes in the use of
the language by the everyday speakers. The changes that distinguish Early
Modern English from Middle English are substantial. The rules for spelling were
set down for the first time.
The key is the
new consistency used by teachers, printers and eventually by the general
populace. The sign of maturity for English was the agreement on one set of
rules replacing the spelling free-for-all that had existed.
Out of the
variety of local dialects there emerged
toward the end of the fourteenth century a
written language
that in course of the fifteenth century won general recognition and has since
become the recognized standard in speech and writing. The part of England that
contributed most to the formation of this standard was the East Midland type of
English that became itst basis, particularly the dialect of the metropolis,
London.
East Midland
district was the largest and most populous of the major dialect areas. There
were also two universities, Oxford and Cambridge. In the fourteenth century the
monasteries were playing a less important role in the spread of learning than
they had once played, while the two universities had developed into important
intellectual centers. So far as Cmbridge is concerned any ist influence was
exerted in support of the East Midland dialect. That of Oxford is less certain
because Oxfordshire was on the border between Midland and Southern and
its dialect shows
certain characteristic Southern features.
Written London
English of the close of the fourteenth century as used by a number of Middle
English authors, such as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, had not achived the
status of a regional standard but was soon to become the basis for a new
national literary standard of English. It was the language of the capital.
Geographically, it occupied a position midway between the extreme North and the
extreme South. Already by 1430, this new standard had assumed a relatively
mature form. It was spread throughout England by professional clerks in the
administrative apparatus of the country and also became the model for business
aand pri-vate correspondence in English. It was this Chancery standard, the
normal language for all official written communication by the time when Caxton
set up his Printing Press in West-minster (1476), which became the direct
ancestor of Modern Standard English.
As a result of
this developments, the use of regional dialects in writing receded more and
more in the course of the fifteenth
century until, in the Early Modern English period, writing came to be
exclusively done in the standard literary language.
The language of
Chaucer's late fourteenth century and of the fifteenth were often describe as
Late Middle English. It could as well be called Early Modern English. Ich and I
ran side by side in Chaucer's language, and the distinction between ye
and you was still that of
nomina-tive versus accusative. Northern they had replaced the earlier
Anglo-Saxon hie, but hem was still alive. Such became the preferred Chancery
form which had ousted sich, sych, seche and swiche. Which was replacing wich.
The auxiliary verbs appear more regularly in their modern forms: can, could,
shall, should and would. A standardised spelling was developing which was
divorced from the phonetic environment so that sound and spelling were becoming
two separete systems.
An important
linguistic change was also in syntax. Syntax governs the structure of a
sentence as well as the structure of verbs. Auxiliary verbs came into use, for
example the use of do and have which extended the capability of
expression for verbs. The subtle differences between I
walk, I do walk,
and I am walking are not available in
many other languages. This improvement assisted English in differentiating
itself from other languages. The use of
do as a "helping" verb led the way for a host of other helping
verbs: be, have, can, may, will and so forth. This significant innovation set
in motion a new way for verbs to be used.
English now uses
subject-verb-object (SVO), which was not always true, nor must it be true.
Other languages use SOV and some do not require a particular order. These
languages use words such as particles, case endings or emphasis for order
selection criteria. In the year 1000, the beginning of the Middle English
period, the direct object appeared before the verb in 52% of the sentences. By 1500, it appeared
before the verb in only 2% of the sentences. The biggest change was between
1300 (40%) and 1400 (14%). The result is that today we use
the sentence
order established at that time. The
important point was the establishment of the convention of word order that
helped to structure the language for general use. The significant change in
English sentences was the level of complexity with new structures to support
it. Science did not so much create the complexity, but rather used the
available capability.
The changes in
grammar during the early modern period were more far reaching the examples
given. In fact, they were so far reaching that the grammar of English has
changed very little since then. What changes have happened have been slight,
gradual and not significant. The English language experienced a major upheaval
in grammar followed by a stability for many centuries. The changes were
fundamental and powerful enough to sustain tremendous change in science,
literature, technology and all other facets of human existence.
Besides grammar,
an unusual change in the 1300s occurred called the Great Vowel Shift. For no
obvious reason the pronunciation of most vowels changed. There is a clear
pattern of how they shifted, but not why. There is also no clear benefit to the
language, only that it was part of the overall, dramatic metamorphosis of
English. Every known aspect of the language experienced change and growth.
The Great Vowel
Shift had also cosiderably increased the discrepancies between spelling and
proununciation. Therefore were the "spelling-reformers" first to
appear on the scene, beginning with a book in Latin by Sir Thomas Smith,
entitled: De recta et emendata Linguae Anglicanae Scriptione (1568). Soon
followed on the same subject by John Hart An Orthographie
(1569), William
Bullokar and Richard Mulcaster's book The right writing of our English tung
(1582), Simon
Daines Orthoepia Anglicana (1640). However, none of these achived anything like
the stabilizing effect on orthography which ultimately proceeded from Samuel
Johnson's
Dictionary of the
English Language (1755) whose spelling has become the 'normal' spelling of Present-Day British Standard English.
The orthographical
reformers of the seventeenth century were soon joined by grammarians.
Aims at
'regularizing grammar' became more and more pronounced in the latter part of
the seventeenth century and completly dominated grammatical thinking in the
century to follow,
and not
'grammatical thinking' in the narrow sense only. The laying down of rules about
acceptable usage was now, and especially in the latter half of the eighteenth
century, extended to all components of Standard English.
In the latter
part of the fifteenth century the London standard had been accepted in most
parts of the country. By the middle of the century a fairly cosistent variety
of written English in both spelling and grammar had developed. With the
introdution of printing in 1476 a new influence
of great importance in the spread of London English came into play.
From the
beginning London has been the centre of book publishing in England. Caxton the
first English printer, used the current speech of London in his numerous
translations, and the books the issued from his press and from the presses of
his successors gave a currency to London English that assured more than
anything else its rapid adoption. In the sixteenth century the use of London
English had become a matter of precept as well as practice.
From the time of
Caxton on, English is not merely a series of related oral dialects, which are
occasionaly written. It is a fully developed cultural tongue, the equal, in its
own fashion, of the Latin and Greek of Classical antiquity. It is a language
with a numerous body of unified speakers and writers, a language with a vast
potential and actual market.
The modern
English that emerges from the era of Chaucer and Caxton is a tongue that still
possesses vast possibilities of change, channeled in the direction of
vocabulary rather than of sounds or grammatical structure.
Bibliography :
1. Baugh, A. and
Cable Thomas, A History of the English Language ( London, 1978 )
2. Berndt, Rolf, History
of the English Language ( Leipzig, 1982 )
3. Blake, Norman,
The Cambridge History of the English Language ( Cambridge, 1992 )
4. Burnley,
David, The Language of Chaucer ( London, 1989 )
5. Pei, Mario,
The Story of the English Language ( New York, 1967 )
6. Strang,
Barbara, A History of English ( London, 1970 )
----------
back
No comments:
Post a Comment