Реферат: Standardization Of The English Language Essay Research

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

К-во Просмотров: 278
Бесплатно скачать Реферат: Standardization Of The English Language Essay Research