History English Have Many Movements and Counter Movement

The history of English since 1700 is filled with many movements and countermovements, of which we can notice only a couple. One of these is the vigorous attempt made in the eighteenth century, and the rather half-hearted attempts made since, to regulate and control the English language. Many people of the eighteenth century, not understanding very well the forces which govern language, proposed to polish and prune and restrict English, which they felt was proliferating too wildly. There was much talk of an academy that would rule on what people could and could not say and write. The academy never came into being, but the eighteenth century did succeed in establishing certain attitudes which, though they haven’t had much effect on the development of the language itself, have certainly changed the native speakers feeling about the language.

In part, a product of the wish to fix and establish the language was the development of the dictionary. The first English dictionary was published in 1603; it was a list of 2,500 words briefly defined. Many others were published with gradual improvements until Samuel Johnson published his English Dictionary in 1755. This, steadily revised, dominated the field in England for nearly a hundred years. Meanwhile, in America, Noah Webster published his dictionary in 1828, and before long dictionary publishing was big business in this country. The last century has seen the publication of one great dictionary: the twelve-volume Oxford English Dictionary, compiled in the course of seventy-five years through the labors of many scholars. We have also, of course, numerous commercial dictionaries which are as good as the public wants them to be if not, Indeed, rather better.

Another Product of the eighteenth century was the invention of "English grammar." As English came to replace Latin as the language of scholarship, it was felt that one should also be able to control and dissect it, parse and analyze it, as one could Latin. What happened in practice was that the grammatical description that applied to Latin was removed and superimposed on English. This was silly because English is an entirely different kind of language with its own forms and signals and ways of producing meaning. Nevertheless, English grammar on the Latin model was worked out and taught in the schools. In many schools, they are still being taught. This activity is not often popular with school children, but it is sometimes an interesting and instructive exercise in logic. The principal harm in it is that it has tended to keep people from being interested in English and has obscured the real features of English structure.

But probably the most important force on the development of English in the modern period has been the tremendous expansion of English-speaking peoples. In 1500 English was a minor language, spoken by a few people on a small island Now it is perhaps the greatest language of the world, spoken natively by over a quarter of a billion people and as a second language by many millions more. When we speak of English now, we must specify whether we mean American English, British English, Australian English, Indian English, or what, since the differences are considerable. The American not go to England or the Englishman to America It ident that he will always understand and be understood. It is only because communication has become fast and easy that English in this period of its expansion has not broken into a dozen mutually unintelligible languages.