Early Modern English II

(1650-1800)
 The Historical Context

The traces of Renaissance on Society and Language

1. The impact of the seventeenth century

- The most obvious crisis was the English Civil War of the
1640, followed by the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.

- Radical Nonconformists, Dissenters, and other perceived

fanatics were lumped together under the pejorative label
“Enthusiasts” by writers and scientists connected with
the Royal Society, as well as by more conservative
Anglicans.
Learned discourse was no longer confined to elite circles.

It was now being extensively published, in English.

English

The practitioners of natural science seemed to glory not

only in condemning the Enthusiasts and the old authorities
but also in open disputation.
disputation

The regarded science as a cooperative enterprise which

required disagreements.
 In the seventeenth century, however, it was still very
difficult for people to conceive that open controversy was
either safe or beneficial to society.

Thomas Hobbes proposed-that all power, even over

knowledge-must reside in a single political authority.

In the 1660s the Royal Society, which served as

coordinator and clearing house for English Scientific
endeavors, proposed a solution in which the English
language would play a crucial role.
 They argued that the English prose of scientists should be
stripped of ornamentation and emotive language. It should
be plain, precise, and clear.

The style should be non-assertive.

In this way English prose could facilitate a national unity

built around scientific honesty and social utility.

This proposal became a credo of the Royal Society, and its

principles influenced efforts to design universal languages.
2. The temper of the Eighteenth century.

The first half of the eighteenth century is commonly

designated in histories of literature as the Augustan Age
in England.

The principal characteristics of this age which affected the

course of the English language emerged early and
maintained their influence throughout the century.

Not only in literature but also in language Latin was looked

upon as a model, and classical precedent was often
generalized into precept.
3. Its Reflection in the Attitude Toward the Language

Previously interest had been shown chiefly in such

questions as:

3.1 Whether English was worthy of being used for writings

in which Latin had long been traditional.

3.2 Whether the large additions made to the vocabulary

were justified.

3.3 Whether a more adequate system of spelling could be

introduced.
 Now attention was turned to grammar.

In its effort to set up a standard of correctness in language

the rationalistic spirit of the eighteenth century showed
itself in the attempt to settle disputed points logically,
often arriving at entirely false conclusions.

The respect for authoritative example, especially for

classical example, takes the form of appeals to the analogy
of Latin.

A manifestation of the respect for authority account for the

repeated demand for an English Academy.

It was desired in the eighteenth century to give the English

language a polished rational, and permanent form.
 4. Ascertainment

Eighteenth-century attempts to codify the English language

and to direct its course fall under three main heads:

4.1 To reduce the language to rule and set up a standard

of correct usage.

4.2 To refine it—that is, to remove supposed defects and

introduce certain improvements.

4.3 To fix it permanently in the desired form.

 Dryden sums up this attitude in words:

“We have yet no prosodia, not so much as a tolerable

dictionary, or a grammar, so that our language is in a
manner barbarous.”

In his dedication of Troilus and Cressida to the earl of

Sunderland (1679) he says:

“how barbarously we yet write and speak, your lordship

knows, and I am sufficiently sensible in my own
English. For I am often put to a stand in considering
whether what I write be the idiom of the tongue, or
false grammar.”
The Restoration: Society and
Language
The lack of a standard to which all might conform was
believed to have resulted in many corruptions that were
growing up unchecked.

Various periods in the past were supposed to represent the

highest perfection of English.

Johnson says in his Dictionary: “I have studiously

endeavoured to collect examples and authorities from the
writers before the restoration, whose works I regard as the
wells of English undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine
diction.”
 Dean Swift

The things that specifically troubled Swift in his reflections

of the current speech were chiefly innovations.

1. One of these was the tendency to clip and shorten

words that should have retained their full polysyllabic
dignity. He objected to rep, mob, penult and others.
A second innovation that Swift opposed was the tendency
to contract verbs like drug’d, disturbed, rebuked,
fledg’d.

A third innovation that aroused Swift’s ire has to do with

certain words then enjoying a considerable vogue among
wits and people of fashion: sham, banter, mob, bubble,
bully, cutting, shuffling and palming.

All of these faults that Swift found in the language hi

attacked in a letter to the Tatler in 1710, and he called
attention to them again two years later in his Proposal for
Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English
Tongue.
 An English Academy

The suggestion of an academy in England came from the

example of France and Italy.

With the Restoration, discussion of an English Academy

became much more frequent.

Shortly thereafter the idea of an academy received support

from several influential persons, notably from Dryden and
John Evelyn.
 In 1697, Defoe in his Essay upon Projects devoted one
article to the subject of academies. In it he advocated an
academy for England.

In 1697, Defoe in his Essay upon Projects devoted one

article to the subject of academies. In it he advocated an
academy for England.

Eighteenth century:

Swift addressed a letter in 1712 to the earl of Oxford, Lord

Treasurer of England: A Proposal for Correcting, Improving
and Ascertaining the English Tongue.
The publication of Swift’s Proposal marks the culmination
of the movement for an English Academy.

This was the nearest England ever came to having an

academy for the regulation of the language.

Johnson’s views apparently had a decided influence. After

the publication of his Dictionary, advocacy of an academy
becomes less frequent. Instead we find his views reflected
in the opinions expressed by other writers.
Substitutes for an academy

We could not be imposed by authoritative edict might still

win adoption through reason and persuasion.

Individuals sought to bring about the reforms that they

believed necessary and to set up a standard that might
gain general acceptance.

In 1724 there appeared an anonymous treatise on The

many advantages of a Good Language to any Nation: with
an Examination of the Present State of Our Own.
 The two greatest needs still felt and most frequently
lamented, were for a dictionary and a grammar.

The one was supplied in 1755 by Johnson’s Dictionary, the

other in the course of the next half-century by the early
grammarians.
 The Eighteenth-century Grammarians and Rhetoricians.

What Dr. Johnson had done for the vocabulary was

attempted for the syntax by the grammarians of the
eighteenth century.

Treatises on English grammar had begun to appear in the

sixteenth century.

But not until the eighteenth century, generally speaking,

was English grammar viewed as a subject deserving of
study in itself.
 The decade beginning in 1760 witnessed a striking
outburst of interest in English grammar.

In 1761 Joseph Priestley published The Rudiments of

English Grammar.

It was followed about a month later by Robert Lowth’

Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762).

The British Grammar by James Buchanan appeared in the

same year.
More important for the history of the English language are
the works of more practical and often less gifted
grammarian who turned philosophical concerns into
linguistic prescriptions.

With them belongs another group that may be called the

rhetoricians.

Thomas Sheridan.

British Education (1756)

 There was undeniably a coherent prescriptive tradition,
within which eighteenth-century grammarians aimed to do
three things:

(1) To codify the principles of the language and reduce it

to rule;

(2) To settle disputed points and decide cases of divided

usage;

(3) To point out common errors or what were supposed to

be errors, and thus correct and improve the language.
The Expansion of the British Empire and its
Effects on the Language

England entered the race for colonial territory late.

The English settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth

were the beginning of a process of colonization in North
America that soon gave to England the Atlantic seaboard.

Although the American Revolution deprived England of one

its most promising colonies, it did not prevent the
language of this region from remaining English.

Meanwhile England was getting a foothold in India.

 Meanwhile England was getting a foothold in India.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the two great

rivals in India, as in America, were England and France.

Largely through the accomplishments of a young

Englishman named Robert Clive, the struggle that ensued
ended in a series of triumphs for the English, and in the
course of another century an area almost equal to that of
European Russia became part of the British Empire.

The beginnings of the English occupation of Australia also

occurred in the eighteenth century.
 In 1768 the Royal Society persuaded the king to sponsor
an expedition into those parts of the Pacific to observe the
transit of Venus across the sun.

The American Revolution had deprived them of a

convenient place to which to deport criminals. The prisons
were overcrowded, and in 1787 it was decided to send
several shiploads of convicts to Australia.

The colonizing of Africa was largely the work of the

nineteenth century, although it had its start likewise at the
close of the eighteenth century.
Contact with native Americans resulted in a number of
characteristic words such as:

Caribou, hickory, hominy, moccasin, moose,

opossum, papoose, raccoon, skunk, squaw,
terrapin, toboggan, tomahawk, totem, wampum and
wigwam.

From other parts of America, especially where the

Spanish and the Portuguese were settled, we have
derived many more words, chiefly through Spanish:

Mexican words: Chili, chocolate, coyote, tomato.

 Cuban and West Indies: barbecue, cannibal, canoe,
hammock, hurricane, maize, potato, tobacco.

Peru: Alpaca, condor, jerky, llama, pampas, puma,

quinine.

Brazil and other South American regions: buccaneer,

cayenne, jaguar, petunia, poncho, tapioca.

British contact with the East has been equally productive of

new words.
 India: bandana, bangle, Brahman, bungalow, calico,
cashmere, cheroot, china, chintz, coolie, cot, curry, dinghy,
juggernaut, jungle, jute, loot, mandarin, nirvana, pariah,
polo, punch (drink), pundit, rajah and verandah.

Australia: boomerang and kangaroo.

Development of Progressive Verb
Forms

The Verb

1. The development of progressive verb forms

Where French says je chante or German ich singe, English

may say I sing, I do sing, or I am singing.

In Old English such expressions as he wæs lærende (he

was teaching) are occasionally found in translations from
Latin.
 In early Middle English, progressive forms are distinctly
rare, and although their number increases in the course of
the Middle English period, we must credit their
development mainly to the period since the sixteenth
century.

The chief factor in their growth is the use of the participle

as a noun governed by the preposition on:

he burst out on laughing

he burst out a-laughing

he burst out laughing

he was on laughing

he was a-laughing

he was laughing
2. The development of the progressive passive

This development belongs to the very end of the

eighteenth century.

The man is loved, feared, hated

The man is killed

 The man is on laughing

The house is on building

There is nothing doing at the mill this week

The dinner is cooking

The coffee is brewing

 There’s a new barn a-building down the road.

When the preposition was completely lost:

on building > a-building > building

The house is building

The wagon is making The wagon is making a noise

 The subject of the sentence is
animate or capable of performing
the action, the verb is almost certain
The man is building a house
to be in the active voice

With some verbs the construction

He is always being called
was impossible in a passive sense

He is always calling

In the last years of the eighteenth century we find the first

traces of our modern expression The house is being built.
The combination of being with a past participle to form
a participial phrase had been in use for some time.

Shakespeare:

which, being kept close, might move more grief to hide (Hamlet)
 Auxiliary do

The frequency of do use increased dramatically in the period 1550-

1600 in questions, both negative and affirmative.

In the period 1650-1700 for negatives.

The functional restriction of do becomes the particular concern of the

eighteenth century.

As the demands for a simpler style emerge towards the end of this
period with the Puritans and others, the use of do as a stylistic
marker decreases and allows it to become restricted to certain
grammatical functions.
 In both interrogative and negative clauses there may have been
features of word order which helped to promote the adoption of do
forms.

In interrogatives the preference for do may have been motivated by

the wish to avoid inversion and to keep the subject + verb order
intact.

In negatives there was a trend to push the negator forward in the

sentence and by using the do auxiliary the negator could remain
before the verb but follow the auxiliary.