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of the same sound wch. has been the source of so many puns upon this. You will tell me that practice & custom are against me, & make an appeal to Johnson’s Dictionary, &c. Regardless, I think I am right, & believe I could give authorities: but if you contest ye. matter, I submit. (ed. Tierney, 1988: 304)
The early English grammars were bilingual grammars, for Frenchmen wanting to learn English and for Englishmen wanting to learn French. The first grammar of English proper was written by Bullokar. It was published in 1586, and for the next seventy years or so several more grammars were written, some in English (by Ben Jonson, for example), others in Latin. All early grammarians primarily resorted to Latin grammar to provide them with a model, describing the grammar of English as if it had eight parts of speech, three tenses, two moods and six persons. There was, again, no other model available. English grammar was not at first considered an object worthy of study for its own sake. Joshua Poole, for example, whose English Accidence was published in 1646, presented his grammar as ‘a short, plaine, and easie way, for the more speedy attaining the Latin tongue, by the helpe of the English’. It is not until Wallis published his Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae in 1653 that grammarians, though sparingly at first, began to have an eye for characteristics peculiar to English grammar itself. At first, English was treated like Latin, and the early grammarians therefore only paid attention to its morphology. What is more, the eighteenth-century grammarians saw it as their aim to ‘reduce the language to rule . . . to refine it . . . and to fix it permanently in the desired form’ (Baugh & Cable, 2002: 257). Only gradually – and this is a process which took place around the middle of the eighteenth century – did they come to realise that it was an illusion to think that a living language could forever be fixed. In this respect, they began to recognise an important difference between English and Latin. Subsequently, it was noticed that in a language which was poor in morphology, syntax was far more important, and the amount of space in a grammar devoted to syntax steadily grew from just over eight pages in Greenwood’s grammar (1711) to sixty pages in the one by Lowth (1762).
5.2.7 |
Prescription |
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Lowth’s Short Introduction to the English Language (1762) marks the beginning of the next stage in the standardisation process, the prescription stage. The grammar distinguishes itself from others produced around the same time in that in the footnotes to its section on syntax it provides an inventory of grammatical errors made by more or less contemporary authors as well as by those whose language was often upheld as representing the norm of good usage. Even ‘our best Authors . . . have sometimes fallen into mistakes’, Lowth wrote in his preface, and a grammar such as his own would be needed to remedy the defects he identified. Lowth, and others after him, presented his reading public with a norm of correct English. In formulating this norm, many eighteenth-century grammarians relied upon the codification attempts of their predecessors; a good
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example is Lindley Murray, who based much of his grammar (first published in 1795 and many times reprinted) on the one by Lowth, for reasons explained in his introduction:
When the number and variety of English Grammars already published . .
. are considered, little can be expected from a new compilation, besides a careful selection of the most useful matter, and some degree of improvement in the mode of adapting it to the understanding, and the gradual progress of learners. In these respects something, perhaps, may yet be done, for the ease and advantage of young persons. (Murray, 1795: iii)
And a compilation is what Murray provided, to the extent even that he was accused of plagiarism – upon which he at once corrected his failure to specify his sources. While Lowth’s grammar may be regarded as the epitome of normative grammar writing, Murray has been called the ‘father of English grammar’: the enormous number of reprints of the grammar, in England and America as well as in other countries, suggests that his grammar came to be looked upon as a handbook of English grammar. That his grammar was translated into many different languages – French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Russian and Japanese (Alston, 1965: 96) – indicates that it also provided an important tool in learning English as a foreign language. Though it was not the first of its nature (Lowth’s grammar, for example, had been translated into German in 1790), Murray’s grammar may be taken to mark the beginnings of the spread of English as a world language, used by speakers who did not already have English as their mother tongue.
According to Milroy & Milroy (1991: 69), the prescriptive stage in the standardisation process has not been very successful, particularly when applied to speech. A comparison between present-day handbooks of usage and eighteenthcentury grammars shows that modern writers are still largely concerned with the same issues as their eighteenth-century predecessors: whether it should be different to, different from or different than; whether it should be it is me or it is I, taller than me or taller than I and whether a sentence should be allowed to end with a preposition (cf. Ilson, 1985; Fowler, 1965). People even write to the media to expose a particular grammatical error made by a public speaker or writer; Milroy & Milroy refer to this practice as the ‘complaint tradition’, which arose as a consequence of a belief in the existence of a standard language which is invariable and the use of which is prescribed in the media as well as other formal contexts. These issues have even come to form a kind of set list of items which are constantly invoked by purists, but it is interesting to note that there is little difference between those which were commented on by eighteenth-century writers on language, such as Baker (1770), and those of today, such as Simon (1980). Such writers fail to see that language has to remain variable in order to be able to respond to all kinds of changes as a result of developments in technology, culture and global communication generally. To think that language could be fixed in the same way as, say, the metre or shoe sizes or video systems is an illusion. Even so, many speakers believe in the existence of a fixed linguistic norm which should be
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taught in schools and used in formal situations – a belief which Milroy & Milroy refer to as an ‘ideology’, an elitist point of view according to which education and social background are the backbones of society. Consequently, many speakers are shocked by what they perceive as the decline of the standard, which is attributed to a general decline in standards, particularly moral ones. What they are in fact reacting against is the constant adaptation of language to new developments, such as a greater tolerance of norms – linguistic and otherwise – other than those upheld by speakers of standard English. And the standard is responding to such changing attitudes, so that we can see a greater tolerance for forms of speech formerly banned with great zeal by schoolmasters and other language guardians. A survey conducted by Mittins et al. (1970) among schoolteachers, professional writers, administrators, doctors, clergymen and lawyers showed that even in the late 1960s a construction like I will be twenty-one tomorrow (instead of the historically more ‘correct’ form with I shall; see Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 1985) had reached an acceptance level of 56 per cent. In this day and age, students are indeed no longer obliged to use I shall in their essays.
5.2.8 |
Conclusion |
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According to some, there is no such thing as a standard language. And indeed, according to a strict interpretation of the word, to think that complete standardisation can be achieved is an illusion. Even so, to many people the notion of ‘a standard language’ is very real indeed, just as much as their concern at an apparent decline in norms of behaviour. While greater tolerance of non-standard dialects has led to a discussion of whether standard English still remains the appropriate medium of education, it would increase social disadvantages if this use of the standard were to be abolished altogether. As Shuman (1985: 317) points out, students ‘need to be taught about levels of usage and about appropriateness rather than about “correctness” and “incorrectness”’. To do so would allow nonstandard speakers to remain loyal to their native dialect while at the same time offering them a maximum of opportunities at learning to function in contexts which, rightly or wrongly, require ability in the standard.
The standardisation process, though described here chronologically, was not a straightforward process. It proceeded in fits and starts, mainly due to the fact that it was not a consciously monitored development, unlike the standardisation process taking place, for example, in Indonesia since the end of the Second World War or in the Basque Country since the late 1960s. The fits and starts of an unmonitored standardisation process, as in the case of English, are due to competing local standards and conscious standardisation attempts. At the same time, we must reckon with influential speakers or groups of speakers whose language was considered so important by those around them as to act as a norm independent of that of the incipient standards. One example is Dr Johnson, whose rather archaic usage of periphrastic do in the second half of the eighteenth century was copied by speakers who consequently deviated consciously from the general