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Expansion
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Words > Expansion
Deliberate Development of English English is a hungrily acquisitive language. From its earliest beginnings, it has wrapped itself around foreign words and made them its own. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, this stopped being a casual tendency of the language and became a mission for scholars, poets, and men-on-the-street alike. Language development was a hot-button social issue, and even poor players had an opinion to voice. Exploration Explorers needed a word for the critters who snuffled around their New World corn cribs (they ended up adopting raccoon, skunk, and opossum from the Algonquians). The language grew, adding names of New World plants (persimmon and pecan both have their origins among the early residents of Virginia; squash comes to our language from the Narragansett people), vices (tobacco comes from the word used by native Haitians to describe the pipe one uses to smoke it) and weather (hurricane also comes to us from the native Haitians). Even our modern Podunk, slang for a small, out-of-the-way town, comes from an Algonquian village name. Roanoke is a Powhatan word for an inferior kind of wampum. As they explored around the world, Elizabethans also acquired words from Persian, several African, Chinese, and Hindi languages, to name a few. Medicine The world was expanding and changing, and suddenly doctors found there were not words in English to discuss new medical techniques or diseases that they were classifying. Pneumonia, a common diagnosis in modern medicine, first appeared in print in 1603. In 1650, pathology first appeared as a specific branch of science. (Even psychology, generally associated with Freud's Vienna, is first described) in 1653 as "a doctrine which searches out mans Soul, and the effects of it" (OED, "Psychology"). English was becoming a global language, largely by adopting words from explorations around the world. Theology Reformation theologians needed new religious language that was not already the property of the Catholic church. Instead of discussing the cleansing power of baptism, they talked about its mundation, which meant roughly the same thing. They developed new words to use in their description of God, words like omniscient, and beneplacit. Most of their coinages served to distance themselves from and denigrate the Catholics (who practiced misreligion). They talked about the acceptability of various forms of worship (Protestant prayer, of course, being much more acceptable to God than Papist idol worship). They closed their ranks against amateurs, coining theologaster as a term for those who dared to pretentiously dabble in theology. Deliberate development of English Thomas Elyot and other scholars set out to "enrich" the language by adding and disseminating new words at every opportunity. They felt that their duty was "enabling the new learning to be brought within the reach of the English public" (Crystal Cambridge Encyclopedia 60). Printers & standardization Language slowly began to stabilize with the advent of English printing in 1474. Spelling did ultimately move toward some standardization, if not phonetic reliability. Printers took the language toward uniform spelling; although early printed materials seem chaotically spelled to modern eyes, they are quite reliable when compared with contemporary casual writing (Pyles 168). Capitalization and spelling began to move in the direction of consistency in the end of the 16th century, because people started publishing dictionaries, notably Richard Mulcaster's Elementarie, which had a table with spellings for almost 9,000 words (Crystal Cambridge Encyclopedia 67). By the sixteenth century, conformity in language had developed class connotation. George Puttenham, in his 1589 The Art of Poesie advises poets to model their language on
Puttenham also warns against nobles using old-fashioned speech, like that of Piers Plowman or Gower "for their language is now out of use with us," or regional dialects, like "the terms of Northern-men, such as they use in daily talk, whether they be noble men or gentlemen...nor in effect any speech used beyond the river of Trent" (110). In other words, even by the 1580s, London's speech was gaining a sense of correctness. Even if noble men used familiar regional dialects in their daily interactions, written English was developing a sense of standardization, and London set the standard. How do you spell English anyway? As spelling was developing some standards, orthographers attempted to impose phonetic spelling. Many scholars developed phonetic systems to more accurately represent the language, but these systems failed to catch on. Spelling eventually standardized, but that happened more by consensus than any imposed order. Some spelling innovations that scholars introduced, particularly ones that indicated etymology, managed to become standard, and eventually influenced pronunciation. These are words like debt, from the Latin debitum, literally, "that which is owed," and abhominable, which was assumed to come from ab homine, "away from the man." Although modern scholars disagree with the etymology here, and the extraneous "h" has since been dropped, many seventeenth century scholars insisted on pronouncing the "h." Shakespeare parodies such pendants (most specifically Richard Mulcaster) in his Holofernes character in Love's Labours Lost: What language is acceptable? Not everyone was thrilled with the unchecked growth of the English lexicon. Spenser may be the most famously opposed writer. He insisted on using Chaucerian language, which by then was considerably outdated. John Cheke was another scholar opposed to the adoption of foreign words, using Anglo-Saxon-sounding language as much as he could, "such as crossed for "crucified," and gainrising for "resurrection" (Crystal Cambridge Encyclopedia 60). Because the people at large refused to bend to their antiquarianism, Cheke and Spenser were ultimately overruled, as proven by the fact that one can intelligibly use the word "ultimately," itself Latinate. Through the telescopic distancing of time, the debate seems almost irrelevant, but in the seventeenth century, the future of the language was a major concern for politicians and scholars. Even the translators of the King James Bible, itself considered a linguistically conservative document, remark unapologetically on their lexicographical inconsistencies. They report having been attacked by other scholars who argued "That [they] should expresse the same notion in the same particular word; as for example, if we translate the Hebrew or Greeke word once by Purpose, neuer to call it Intent; if one where Iourneying, neuer Traveiling...Thus to minse the matter, wee thought to savour more of curiositie then wisedome" (qtd in Crystal Encyclopedia 64). The people as ultimate arbiters The state of the English language must have boggled the poor pedants, because even at its earliest stages it was an untamable beast. Language change cannot come from the top down, as mandates from the educated and ruling classes to their inferiors: rather, it grows organically. Words live or die in people's minds and voices. No pedant or king can require those at the bottom of the social pyramid to use some words and abandon others. The words that the people rejected are lost and obscure to our modern ears. Others, like eyeball (a Shakespeare original) are so much part of our language that we scarcely think about their origins. |
The stabilization began with spelling, which informed pronunciation, which cyclically informed spelling. Spelling did not start out with any set standards at all, and although Caxton tried, it wasn't until over a hundred years after his death that any sense of standardization really developed (Crystal Cambridge Encyclopedia 57). One of the major difficulties in developing any standardized spelling was that English was such a regionally-diverse language. The same country, after all, produced both The Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Caxton attempted consistency, but he had many choices for each word, so he frequently changed his mind, as did many other printers (Crystal Cambridge Encyclopedia 57). These other printers further complicated matters. Most early typesetters were from the Continent, where the moveable type press was developed, so they were setting type in a foreign language. Often words sounded different to these foreigners than they did to native English speakers. Caxton himself spoke a dialect far removed from that of London, which ultimately became the standard (Crystal Stories 255-262). 
