Development of the National Literary English language.

Plan:

1. Economic and political unification.

2. Expansion of English over the British Isles.

3. Flourishing of literature.

4. Grammar and Dictionaries in the late 17^th – 18^th c.

5. Growth of the Spoken English.

1. In early 13^th c. new economic relations began to take shape. With the growing interest in commercial profits, feudal oppression grew and the conditions of the peasants deteriorated.

Peasants traveled about the country looking for a market for their production. They settled in the old towns and founded new ones near monasteries, on the rivers and along the roads.

In the 15^th and 16^th c. feudal relations were decaying, but the bourgeois and capitalists relations were developing. Trade had extended beyond the local boundaries, so, Britain began to export woolen clothes produced by the manufactures. The new nobility, who traded in wool, fused with the rich towns-people to form a new class, the bourgeoisie.

Economic and social changes were accompanied by political unification. In the later 15^th c. England became a centralized state. At the end of the Hundred Years’ War, life in Britain became more violent than ever. The thirty-year contest for the possession of the crown ended in the establishment of a strong royal power under Henry 7, the founder of the Tudor dynasty.

The absolute monarchy of the Tudors was based on a new relation of class force: the crown had the support of the middle class. Henry 7 reduced the power of the old nobles and created a new aristocracy. The next step in the creation of an absolute monarchy was to break the monopoly of the medieval Papacy. This was achieved by his successor, Henry 8.

All over the world the victory of capitalism over feudalism was linked up with the consolidation of people into nations, the formation of national languages and the growth of super dialect forms of language to be used as a national Standard. The rise of capitalism helped to join people and to unify their language.

2. As Britain consolidated into a single powerful state, it extended its borders to include Wales, Scotland and the part of Ireland.

During the wars and after the final occupation, the English language penetrated into Wales and practically replaced the native Celtic dialect; a large proportion of the native population did not give up their mother tongue and continued to speak Welsh.

The attempt to conquer Ireland in the 13^th and 14^th c. ended in failure. In Ireland only Dublin was ruled from England.

The claims of English kings to be overlords of Scotland were met with protest. In the early 14^th c. Scotland’s independence was secured by the victories of Robert Bruce. Feudal Scotland stayed a sovereign kingdom until the later Tudors, but the influence of the English language was huge. So that, Scotland began to fall under this influence in the 11^th c., when England tried to conquer its territory. The mixed population of Scotland – the native Scots and Picts, the Britons, the Scandinavians and the English were not homogeneous in language. The Scottish tongue flourished as a literary language and produced a distinct literature as long as Scotland retained its sovereignty.

After the unification with England under the Stuarts English became both the official and the literary language of Scotland.

3. The first works in English, written in the Anglo-Saxon dialect now called Old English, appeared in the early Middle Ages. Epic poems were very popular and many, including Beowulf, have survived to the present day. The first written literature dates to the early Christian monasteries founded by St. Augustine of Canterbury and his disciples (!) and it is reasonable to believe that it was somehow adapted to suit to needs of Christian readers.

England's first great author, Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 -1400), wrote in Middle English. His most famous work is The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories in a variety of genres, ostensibly told by a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. Remarkably, they are from all walks of life, which are reflected as much in the language they use as in the content of their stories.

English Renaissance.

Following the introduction of a printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476, vernacular literature (!) flourished. The Reformation inspired the Production of Vernacular Liturgy which led to the “Book Of Common Prayer”, a lasting influence on literary English language. The poetry, drama, and prose produced under both Queen Elizabeth I and King James I constitute what is today labeled as early modern (or Renaissance).

The Elizabethan Era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the field of drama. The Italian Renaissance had rediscovered the ancient Greek and Roman Theatre. The Italians were particularly inspired by Seneca. It is also true that the Elizabethan Era was a very violent age and that the high incidence of political assassinations in renaissance Italy did little to calm fears of popish plots. Following earlier Elizabethan plays such as and “The Spanish Tragedy” by Kyd that was to provide much material for “Hamlet”, William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright. His greatest plays: “Hamlet”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “Othello”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth”, “Anthony and Cleopatra”.

Other important figures in Elizabethan theatre include Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe's subject matter is different: it focuses more on the moral drama of the Renaissance man than any other thing. Marlowe was fascinated and terrified by the new frontiers opened by modern science. His famous work is: “Helen of Troy”. In the later 16th century English poetry was characterized by elaboration of language and extensive allusion to classical myths. The most important poets of this era include Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney.

After Shakespeare's Death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era. His characters embody the theory of humors (теория жидкостей тела). According to this contemporary medical theory, behavioral differences result from a prevalence of one of the body's four "humors" (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) over the other three; these humors correspond with the four elements of the universe: air, water, fire, and earth. This leads Jonson to exemplify such differences to the point of creating types. Jonson is a master of style, and a brilliant satirist. Others who followed Jonson's style include Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote the brilliant comedy, “The Knight of the Burning Pestle”(рыцарь пылающего пестика), a mockery of the rising middle class and especially of those nouveau riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much literature at all.

4. The age of the literary flourishing was followed by the period of “normalization” or period of “fixing the language”. This age set great store by correctness and simplicity of expression. The great poet John Milton (1608 – 1674) noted “the corrupt pronunciation of the lower classes”. In 1664 the Royal Society appointed a special committee “for improving the English tongue”.

The 18^th c. was remarkable for attempts to fix the language. Among the representatives of this movement were the writer Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), the founders of the first English newspapers R. Steele and J. Addison, the authors of prescriptive English grammars. It was in the “Tatler” (the first newspaper) that J. Swift published his first article on language followed by the title: “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue”.

Many new grammars of English were compiled in the age of “fixing the language”. J. Wallis’a “Grammatica Linguǽ Anglicanǽ”, which was first published in 1653. The author believed that: “by reducing the English to the Latin norm the grammarians have taught too many useless things about the cases of nouns, and about the Tenses, Moods and Conjugation of Verbs”.

The grammars of the 18^th c. were influenced both by the descriptions of classical languages and by the principles of logic. They wished to present language as a strictly logical system. One of the most influential grammars was “A Short Introduction to English Grammar” produced in 1762 by Robert Lowth, a theologician and professor of poetry at Oxford. R. Lowth distinguished nine parts of speech and made a consistent description of letters, syllables, words and sentences.

One of the most popular grammars was an “English Grammar Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners” written by Lindley Murray, an American, in the late 18^th c. Murray’s grammar was the most widely used manual at schools.

The role of English dictionaries in this period of normalization was rather important. Works concerned with the explanations of “hard words” were published. E.g. “Dictionary of Hard Words” by E. Coles in 1676. In 1730 Nathaniel Bailey compiled “Dictionarium Briyannicum, A more Compleat Universal Etymological English Dictionary than Any Extant”. This dictionary contained about 48, 000 items.

Samuel Johnson was one of those 18^th c. scholars who considered that the English language should be purified and corrected. He compiled a new dictionary based upon the usage of recognized authorities. In the two volumes of his “Dictionary of the English Language” (1755) he included quotations from several hundred authors of the 17^th and 18^th c., definitions of meaning, and illustrations of usage, etymology and stylistic comments.

E.g. HUSBAND 1. The correlative to wife, a man married to a woman; 2. The male of animals; 3. An economist, a man that knows and practices the method of frugality (экономия) and profit; 4. A tiller (земледелец) of the ground, a farmer.

5. In the 18^th c. the speech of educated people differed from that of common, uneducated people – in pronunciation, in the choice of words and in grammatical construction. Compositions of language gave some recommendations to improve the forms of written and oral speech. Some authors advised people to form their speech on Latin patterns; others objected borrowings and vulgar pronunciation.

The earliest date of the emergence of the Spoken Standard suggested by historians was the end of the 17^th c. The concept of Spoken Standard did not imply absolute uniformity of speech throughout the speech community. It was the uniformity, which implied a more or less uniform type of speech used by educated people and taught as “correct English” at schools and Universities. The spoken forms of the language were never as stable and fixed as the Written Standard. Oral speech changed under the influence of sub-standard forms of the language. Many new features coming from professional jargons, lower social dialects first entered the Spoken Standard, and after that passed into the writing language. The Written Standard had the tendency to restrict the colloquial innovations labeling them as vulgar and incorrect and was enriched by elements of different styles: poetry, scientific style, official documents.

The language of London and Universities appeared in the 17^th c., at the age of English revolution. By the end of the 18^th c. the formation of the national literary English language was completed, so, it possessed both a Written and a Spoken Standard.

Lecture 13