New Sources of Information about the Language. Private Papers. Didactic Compositions.

In addition to the writings of a literary, philosophical, theological, scientific or official character, produced, copied or printed by professionals, there appeared new kinds of written evidence pertaining to the history of the language: private papers. With the spread of education more people could read and write; they began to correspond and to write diaries. Extant family archives contain papers written both by educated and by uncultivated persons. The significance of their evidence for the history of the language is obvious: the writers were not guided by written tradition and could not set themselves any literary aims; they recorded the words, forms and pronunciations in current use, putting their own English on paper and reflecting all kinds of dialectal and colloquial variants. The earliest collections of letters preserved in family archives are the PASTON LETTERS written between 1430 and 1470 by members of the Paston family in Norfolk (i.e. in the East Midland dialect of late ME) and the CELY PAPERS written in the same dialect a short time later.

The renewed interest in living languages in the 16th and 17th c, which came to be regarded as more important for practical purposes than the classical ones, led to the appearance of one more kind of printed matter: books of instruction for pupils, didactic works and various other compositions dealing with the English language.

Other kinds of publications dealing with language were lists of words and dictionaries. The swift development of international trade created a demand for dictionaries; bilingual dictionaries of classical and contemporary languages were produced in increasing numbers in the 16th and 17th c. (Dictionaries of dead languages had appeared before that time: glosses to Latin religious works, made since OE were later combined into dictionaries; in 1499 the printers published the first English-Latin Dictionary.)

The earliest dictionaries of the English language were selective lists of difficult words. In those days the most common English words were difficult to write, whereas the learned ones, usually Latin borrowings, which abounded in the writings of the Renaissance, were not only hard to spell but also hard to understand.

To cope with this difficulty, the first English-English explanatory dictionaries were compiled. Robert Cawdrey’s TABLE ALPHABETICALL CONTEYNING AND TEACHING THE TRUE WRITING, AND UNDERSTANDING OF HARD USUAL ENGLISH WORDS, BORROWED FROM THE HEBREW, GREEK, LATIN OR FRENCH-ETC. issued in 1604, is one of the early publications of this kind. Cawdrey’s dictionary was quite small, containing about three thousand words. A slightly larger book was produced by John Bullokar in 1616, ENGLISH EXPOSITOR TEACHING THE INTERPRETATION OF THE HARDEST WORDS USED IN OUR LANGUAGE where he attempted to explain “scholastic” words. The first book entitled ENGLISH-ENGLISH DICTIONARY, a small volume compiled by Henry Cockeram, appeared in 1623: it contained explanations of common “hard” words and of “vulgar” words defined with the help of their bookish equivalents.