Name : Jocelyn E.

Montajes Year & Course : BEED -2

The English Language in the 18th Century
In keeping with the spirit of the Age of Reason, the movement in language in the
eighteenth century was toward greater regulation of expression and greater
precision in word usage and pronunciation. By the beginning of the century there
had already grown up among those in fashionable society a disdain for the
extravagant flourishes and conceits of seventeenth-century speech; emphasis came
to be placed on refined, polite discourse based on "common sense". Those caught
in the surge toward refinement - among them Swift, Steele, Addison, Johnson, and
Lord Chesterfield - tended to disparage what they called "cant" or "low speech" with
an assurance in the rightness of their judgements which today strikes us as
immodest. However, these arbiters of language realised, as did many of their time,
that the English language was in a muddle that the disputes over grammar of the
previous centuries had failed to solve: words still had widely variant meanings,
spellings, and pronunciations, and the general instability of the language was a
barrier to clear communication. In the mishandling of the language the educated
and well to do seem to have been as guilty as any. Defoe complained in one of his
works that "gentlemen of fortunes and families . . . can hardly write their own
names" and when they can write they "can't spell their mother tongue". A favourite
point made by satirists of the day was that the one member of a great household
most likely to read and write the King's English was either the butler or the serving
woman.
The urge to bring the language more into accord with Natural Law is evident in
hundreds of projects typified by this statement of Lord Chesterfield's published
in The World in 1754, a year before the appearance of Johnson's Dictionary:
It must be owned that our language is, at present, in a state of anarchy, and
hitherto, perhaps, it may not have been the worse for it. During our free and open
trade, many words and expressions have been imported, adopted, and naturalised
from other languages, which have greatly enriched our own . . . The time for
discrimination seems to be now come. Toleration, adoption, and naturalisation have
run their lengths. Good order and authority are now necessary. But where shall we
find them, and at the same time, the obedience due to them? We must have
recourse to the old Roman expedient in times of confusion, and choose a dictator.
Upon this principle, I give my vote for Mr. Johnson to fill that great and arduous
post . . ."
Johnson's ponderous two-volume Dictionary, great achievement though it was,
offered only a partial solution to the problems of normalising the language, and
before the century ended there were many other attempts. The efforts at
standardisation spilled over into literary texts. One mid-eighteenth-century editor
announced that Shakespeare's works were an "unweeded Garden grown to Seed",
and confidently set about the cultivation and pruning he thought necessary.
Another over-earnest reformer named Bentley tackled Milton's poetry, and got for
his pains Pope's ridicule for being a scribbler "whose unwearied pains / Made
Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains". If there was widespread agreement that
the English language needed polishing, there was little agreement about how it
should be done, and the controversy continued throughout the century.
One characteristic of the many arguments for purification of English was a sort of
intellectual elitism that rejected the living language of the mob (the word mob is
itself an eighteenth-century coinage used by those who wished to emphasise their
social exclusivity). The more commons words of Anglo-Saxon derivation were
frowned upon as low, slangy, or imprecise, and in their place many Latinisms were
substituted, largely because words derived from Latin were supported by the
"authority" of classical writers, and also because they were suited for expressing
the abstractions that dominated eighteenth-century thinking.
While neo-classicism did much to tone down the bizarre and freakish aspects of
seventeenth-century speech, it did not, in spite of its insistence on rules and
rigidity, stamp out the rich variety which makes English a vital instrument of
communication. Although both Johnson and Swift objected to the use of such words
as hubug, prig, doodle, bamboozle, fib, bully, fop,banter, stingy, fun, prude, they
continued in use then as they are today, evidence of the fact that people, not
grammar books or dictionaries, make and perpetuate language.
Contributed by Gifford, Katya
10 June 2002

Eighteenth century prescriptive grammars[edit]
Robert Lowth, Bishop of Oxford and thereafter of London, scholar of Hebrew poetry, and for a short
time professor of poetry at Oxford, was the first and the best known of the widely emulated
grammarians of the 18th century. A self-effacing clergyman, he published his only work on English
grammar, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, with critical notes, in 1762, without the author's
name on the title page. His influence extended through the works of his students Lindley
Murrayand William Cobbettwould last well into the late 19th century. He would also become,
among prescriptive grammarians, the target of choice for the criticism meted out by later descriptivist
linguists. Lowth wrote against preposition stranding, using "whose" as the possessive case of
"which", and using "who" instead of "whom" in certain cases.
The eighteenth century was a key period in the development of the English language, in which the
modern standard emerged and many dictionaries and grammars first appeared. This book is divided into
thematic sections which deal with issues central to English in the eighteenth century. These include
linguistic ideology and the grammatical tradition, the contribution of women to the writing of grammars,
the interactions of writers at this time and how politeness was encoded in language, including that on a
regional level. The contributions also discuss how language was seen and discussed in public and how
grammarians, lexicographers, journalists, pamphleteers and publishers judged on-going change. The
novel insights offered in this book extend our knowledge of the English language at the onset of the
modern period.