The Development of English Dictionaries during the Period 1780-1900 - Coursework Example

The development of English dictionaries during the period 1780-1900 Most of the modern syntactic patterns of English were in place by the end of the 17th Century. The language of this time period could be read easily by English speakers today. The distinguishing characteristic between Early Modern (1500-1800) and Late-Modern English (1800-present) is the expansion of vocabulary. Grammar, spelling and pronunciations are basically the same but the Late-Modern English language includes many additional words. New territories colonized by Great Britain in the 1600 and 1700’s served to distribute English throughout many parts of the world and, in turn, imported words and terminologies from far-reaching communities which integrated into the language. During this time, English began to acquire differing dialectal varieties in varying regions of the world, some of which would result in the national standard for language usage in former colonies such as the United States, Australia, South Africa, India and many other British colonial settlements. By the 1800’s, a standard variety of American English was being developed based upon the dialect spoken in the original 13 colonies. Today, as the international language of business, science, air travel and popular culture, English has become the most significant language in the world. The focus of this discussion considers the essential beginnings of this blossoming of the English vocabulary during the late 18th and 19th Century. The additional words added to the English language largely resulted from two historical aspects. The first was the vast expansions of the British Empire. When Britain controlled one fourth of the world’s land masses at its pinnacle of power, it adopted many foreign words and incorporated them into the English language. The second influence on the language was the rise of the technological society during the Industrial Revolution which advanced the establishment of new words for things and ideas that had not previously existed – words such as oxygen, atmosphere and radiation (“English”, 2006). This industrial as well as scientific revolution necessitated descriptions for the new inventions and discoveries. The development of the English language borrowed heavily on Latin and Greek word usages. Words such oxygen, protein and vaccine were created from Greek and Latin roots as they were not present in the conventional languages. All new words were not created exclusively from Greek or Latin roots however. English roots were used as well – for example, terms such as typewriter and horsepower. Beside these originations of words, the growth of the British Empire and the subsequent global trade introduced many terms that today, English has adopted as its own. Languages of the Indian subcontinent, Hindi for instance, has provided many words, such as pajamas, shampoo, pundit and juggernaut. Practically every language in the world has contributed to the development of the English language. Words such as sauna (Finnish) and tycoon (Japanese) along with seemingly countless others have made vast contributions in addition to French and Latin. The British Empire was nautically influenced thus the impact of nautical terms on the English language has been substantial. Words and phrases such as ‘three sheets to the wind’ and ‘scuttlebutt’ had their genesis onboard the great sailing fleets. The inventory of words ‘borrowed’ from other cultures is massive which greatly contributed to the vocabulary of English being the most prolific of any language. Languages that have been a factor in developing words to English include Latin, Greek, French, German, Arabic, Hindi (India), Italian, Malay, Dutch, Farsi (Iran and Afganistan), Nahuatl (the Aztec language), Sanskrit (ancient India), Portuguese, Spanish, Tupi (South America) and Ewe (Africa) (Senior Scribe, 2006). Though English has borrowed from many sources over a long period of time, Anglo-Saxon linguistics of Old English remains the centerpiece of the language. Approximately 5,000 words from the Old English era have continued on unchanged and comprise the fundamental foundations of the language. They include familiar ‘everyday household’ words such as many parts of the body, natural elements, common animals, most pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and auxiliary verbs. Inserted onto this basic accumulation of words was an abundance of new contributions that created what has become the richest of the world’s languages. During this immense growth of the English Language, grammarians of the late 18th century such as Robert Lowth and James Buchanan continued the work to perfect the language from within though this aspect of change was relatively minor especially compared to the changes coming from outside traditional English language usages. Lowth, Buchanan and others took the analytical viewpoint and exhausted much time adjusting the inadequacies and the irregularities commonly used at that time in the English language. For example, “‘I had rather not,’ ‘a third alternative,’ ‘more perfect,’ and ‘you was’ etc. The ‘you was’ term was very commonly used among educated people in those days. It was changed to ‘thou wast’ and then to ‘thou wert’ and finally to ‘you were.’” (Saraswati, 1999). These grammarians were of the opinion that Latin remained a superior language. During this time, Lindley Murray published ‘Grammar’ in 1795 followed by ‘English Reader’ in 1799 and ‘English Spelling Book’ in 1804. Noah Webster produced his work ‘Spelling Book’ in 1783, the first edition of his American Dictionary of English Language in 1828 and an updated edition in 1840. The version of English transported to America during the seventeenth century was comprised of adaptations of the language used in Early Modern England. At the time that John Smith founded the township of Jamestown in1607, the language styles of the new colonies roughly coincided with similar manners of usage within Shakespeare’s writings and of the King James Bible published just four years later, in 1611. The colonies soon began to diverge onto their own path of English language evolution. Language scholars on either side of the Atlantic began to publicly acknowledge the language’s deviations as early as the mid-seventeenth century. This was evidenced by Samuel Johnson’s backhanded compliment to Lewis Evans, an American writer regarding his use of the English language in a review published in ‘Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays.’ “This treatise is written with such elegance as the subject admits, though not without some mixture of the American dialect, a (trace) of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed” (Mencken, 1919, p. 4). Johnson’s evaluation of the ‘colonised’ English was gentle in comparison to that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who declared in 1822 that “the Americans presented the extraordinary anomaly of a people without a language. That they had mistaken the English language for baggage and had stolen it” (Mencken, 1919, p. 28). Noah Webster credited the varied nuances of New England’s speech to a citizenry kept in relative isolation from the rest of the world. He referred to the colonists, stating that New Englanders (of which he was one) “have been sequestered in some measure from the world, and their language has not suffered material changes from their first settlement to the present time. Hence most of the phrases used by Shakespeare, Congreve, and other writers who have described English manners and recorded the language of all classes of people, are still heard in the common discourse of the New England yeomanry” (Dillard, 1992, pp. 32-3). One of the most significant, wide-reaching transformations concerning English grammar and vocabulary modifications occurred in America during the 1700 and 1800’s. The English language was mixed with Native American terms along with immigrant languages such as Dutch, German and French along with many others causing a need for the re-writing of dictionaries and grammars that served this branching of English. The ‘Americanisation’ of the English language can be readily catagorised and discerned by examining three distinctive phases of influences beginning with the English settlement of Jamestown in 1607 and the 1620 Massachusetts landing of the Puritans. As a side note, it was documented by the Pilgrims that the Native Americans they encountered already spoke a broken type of English. The American Revolution period sparked a fervent mentality of political separation and along with it a deep desire for a separate and individual linguistic identity. The resulting expansion westward following the Louisiana Purchase (1803), which was accelerated by the discovery of gold in California (1843), contributed much linguistic intermingling and a flattening, or normalizing of the dialect in areas west of the Mississippi River. The last stage of linguistic diffusions occurred during the period of massive European immigration to America following the Civil War (1865). “Since the vast majority of these immigrants settled in the North that is arguably the region where the greatest linguistic impact of immigration was also felt” (Carver, 1989, pp. 96-7). As the Colonials perceptions of their country as a nation separate from Great Britain was being realised, so too were their desires to acquire and secure a language at least somewhat distinctive and separate from their native England. “The English language has been greatly improved in Britain within a century, but its highest perfection, with every other branch of human knowledge, is perhaps reserved for this land of light and freedom,” John Adams said in 1774 in his proposal for a national academy published in the Royal American Magazine. “As the people through this extensive country will speak English, their advantages for polishing their language will be great, and vastly superior to what the people of England ever enjoyed.” In 1780 Adams wrote to the president of Congress from Amsterdam proposing that Congress establish an “American Academy for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English language” (Finegan, 1980, p. 43). During the first quarter of the eighteenth century an American expatriate living in England, Lindley Murray, essentially cornered the market with his ‘English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners.’ Murray’s 1795 grammar, first published in York, was re-printed in Boston in 1800 where it sold more than 2 million copies and included more than 100 editions. Murray had attended Franklin’s Academy in Philadelphia as a child. He immigrated to England as an adult after he had become sick and was forced to give up his very profitable law practice where he had amassed a small fortune. In England, he began what became a forty-year recuperation period during which he instructed the headmistress of a grammar school who persuaded him to write his popular grammar. Noah Webster, a descendant of John Webster, governor of Connecticut, and William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth Colony graduated in 1778 from Yale where he had studied law. Although admitted to the bar, he was unsuccessful in his attempts to draw a sufficient clientele to earn a living so he discarded the law practice for a more profitable profession as, incredible as it seems today, a school teacher. Disappointed by the lack of suitable textbooks, he produced ‘A Grammatical Institute of the English Language,’ his own grammar and then a speller first published in 1784. The speller, ‘The American Spelling Book’ alone sold more than 80 million copies providing Webster with adequate revenue to be able to focus his attention entirely towards linguistic interests. Webster’s language instruction style is typically of a descriptivist style which is defined as one who bases declaration on observations of language usage rather than on the analysis of grammatical structures. Webster was, however occasionally flexible with this position as he changed his mind on the who/whom question and also took other linguists to task for stigmatizing the word ‘you’ as a singular term only. Webster argued that “the introduction of you were in the singular was a good example of the silly over-refinement of late-eighteenth-century linguists” (Finegan, 1980, p. 43). Webster also made a case opposing the importance some put on the preserving of the few remaining English inflections. Webster published his two volume set ‘An American Dictionary of the English Language’ in 1828 at the age of 70. His declared intention was to demonstrate the individuality of American English yet he had not succeeded in making it as distinctive as he had originally desired. His first dictionary, ‘A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language’ published in 1806, had included the simplified spellings “ake, crum, fether, honor, iland, ile (for aisle), theater and wether” (Mathews, 1931, p. 45). But even these innovations constituted a compromise; in his ‘Essay on a Reformed Mode of Spelling’ he had advocated spellings such as “doctrin, medicin, examin, determin, disciplin, and opak” (Finegan, 1980, p. 44). In the 1806 dictionary, Webster used the spelling ‘bile’ to identify the word boil. Many of the Webster’s modifications introduced in the American Dictionary did indeed thrive and today comprise the principal differences between American and British spelling. These include the “simplification of the word-final -ck spellings (as in musick, magick) to -c; the -our spellings (e.g., colour, honour) to -or; and the -re spellings (inherited from French, in, e.g., centre, theatre) to -er” (Finegan, 1980, p. 44). In 1851, Goold Brown published ‘The Grammar of English Grammars.’ “More than any other grammarian, Brown frustrated part of his own design by parading before his readers a long, colorful line of the very usages he hoped to annihilate” (Finegan, 1980, p. 57). Richard Grant White, author of ‘Words and Their Uses’ (1870) and the 1880 ‘Every-Day English’ believed that Americans were not entitled to create their own standards of language. ‘Words and Their Uses’ was re-printed thirty-three times within thirty years and in 1927, was still in copyright. Among the words he condemned were “donate, jeopardize, resurrect, initiate, practitioner, photographer, pants, conversationalist, standpoint, presidential, gubernatorial, shamefaced, and reliable” (Finegan, 1980, p. 70). American English is considered as having preserved many antiquated language features which have, since that time, been altered in today’s British version of the English language. For example, the American dialect maintained aspects of seventeenth and eighteenth century English such as preserving the letter ‘r’ in most usages and the ‘flat a’ as in ‘grass.’ These features were discarded in southern England near the end of the 1700’s. In England the flat evolved to a ‘broad a,’ the sound heard in the word father. Americans generally pronounce both either and neither with a long ‘e’ sound in the same way they pronounce ‘bean’ while in England, the inflection has evolved to the ‘i’ sound as pronounced in the word ‘fight.’” (Senior Scribe, 2006). The American dialect has served as the means of induction for many Native American words into the English language. Generally, these were names of place including more than half the states of America including Mississippi, Michigan, Texas, Nebraska, Illinois and Iowa (Senior Scribe, 2006). Occasionally names that just sounded like Indian words were created that did not have Native-American origins such as Idaho. Native American names for many things besides places were also borrowed and added to the English language such as “raccoon, chipmunk, tomato, canoe, barbecue, savanna, and hickory avocado, cacao, cannibal, canoe, chocolate, chili, hammock, hominy, hurricane, maize, moccasin, moose, papoose, pecan, possum, potato, skunk, squaw, succotash, squash, teepee, terrapin, tobacco, toboggan, tomahawk, tomato, wigwam and woodchuck” (Kemmer, 2005). Spanish has also greatly influenced American English. The following are all examples of Spanish words that made their way into English through the settlement of the American West: “Armadillo, mustang, canyon, ranch, stampede, and vigilante are armada, adobe, alligator, alpaca, armadillo, barricade, bravado, cannibal, canyon, coyote, desperado, embargo, enchilada, guitar, marijuana, mesa, mosquito, mustang, ranch, taco, tornado, tortilla and vigilante” (Kemmer, 2005). French has played a major source of new words outside of very specialized vocabulary domains such as scientific and technical vocabulary which remains dominated by the classic languages, Latin and Greek. Cultural examples include “ballet, bouillabaisse, cabernet, cachet, chaise lounge, champagne, chic, cognac, corsage, faux pas, nom de plume, quiche, rouge, roulette, sachet, salon, saloon and savoir faire.” Names of military origin include “bastion, brigade, battalion, cavalry, grenade, infantry, palisade, rebuff and bayonet.” Other words of French origin include “bigot, chassis, clique, denim, garage, grotesque, jean(s), niche and shock” (Kemmer, 2005). The French language mixed with West African to become a regional dialect in southern Louisiana which has influenced American English in the forms of “Armoire, bayou, banjo, boogie-woogie, chigger, goober, gorilla, jazz, jitterbug, jitters, juke(box), voodoo, yam, zebra, zombie Goober, gumbo, and tote and jambalaya” (Kemmer, 2005). Italian, another language of much influence to the English vocabulary included “alto, arsenal, balcony, broccoli, cameo, casino, cupola, duo, fresco, fugue, gazette (via French), ghetto, gondola, grotto, macaroni, madrigal, mafioso, motto, piano, opera, pantaloons, prima donna, regatta, sequin, soprano, opera, stanza, stucco, studio, tempo, torso, umbrella, viola and violin.” Italian American immigrants brought new foods thus new words emerged such as “cappuccino, espresso, linguini, pasta, pizza, ravioli, spaghetti, spumante, zabaglione and zucchini” (Kemmer, 2005). From the Dutch language: freight, buoy, pump, onslaught, easel, etching, landscape, sketch, cookie, cranberry, crullers, gin, hops, stockfish and waffle amongst many others. The German language added words such as quartz, dachshund, pretzel and hamburger. These and many other languages have supplied the English language with a worldwide richness contributing to the rationale for English as the world’s language. In many respects, American English is nearer to the Shakespeare’s English than it is to modern British English. The English colonization of North America and the subsequent creation of a distinct American dialect effectively ‘froze’ pronunciations and grammar usages of the 17th Century British English when they landed on the American shore. Since that time, the English language of the ‘new world’ has evolved on its own path with its dictionaries having to be continually updated to keep pace with an exploding vocabulary. Works Cited Carver, Craig M. American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1989. Dillard, J. L. A History of American English. London & New York: Longman, 1992. “English.” Today Translations. (2006). London. 5 June, 2006 Finegan, Edward. Attitudes toward English Usage: The History of a War of Words. New York & London: Teachers College Press, 1980. Kemmer, Suzanne. “A Brief History of English, with Chronology.” Words in English. (2005). Rice University. 5 June 2006 Mathews, Mitford M. The Beginnings of American English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931. Mencken, H. L. The American Language, 4th ed. New York: Knopf, 1962. Saraswati, Prakashanand. “The Development of the English Language.” Encyclopedia of Authentic Hinduism. (1999). 5 June, 2006 Senior Scribe. “A Short History of the English Language.” Word Info. (26 May, 2006). Senior Scribe. 5 June, 2006 Read More