The Grammarians And Their Influence On The English Language

The Grammarians were a prescriptivist movement of people who believed they had the best interests of the English Language at heart. There was an approximated total of 57 men and women (mostly men as a result of the gender biases that existed at the time) who set about trying to standardise the language. It was about this time that the industrial revolution was beginning to take effect, so language was becoming an even more important part of life as it was needed in the workplace. People from the time peroid were using different spellings for words, different phonetic pronounciations etc so it was often ambiguous as to whether two different people were refering to the same thing. For example, some people used the spelling 'ageing' wheras others used 'aging'. They also wanted the English Language to hold the same status as that of Greek and Latin.

The standardisation of the language was first triggered by 'The Pamphlet Of Grammar' by William Bullokar, written with the seeming goal of demonstrating that English was quite as rule-bound as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534). Lily's grammar was being used in schools in England at that time, having been 'prescribed' for them in 1542 by Henry VIII. These interlinking efforts contunued right through to more modern forms of standardisation. They implimented the use of dictionaries to create standardised meanings and spellings of words that people could refer to if ever there was any queries relating to words.

They clearly succeeded in their efforts as today English is an internationally well respected language that is spoken in most professional environments.

Child Language Acquisition

In their early years, children’s mouths are not fully developed and are unable to form the majority sounds as a result. This is due to the fact that the larynx is in a raised position; in order to allow the baby to breathe whilst suckling on the mother’s breast. It also significantly reduces the likelihood of choking as the larynx is pushing on the throat, thus reducing it’s diameter and the likelihood of allowing solid objects through. As the child ages, the larynx will drop by 3cm and the full vocal range will become available. The child will have to learn how to use its vocal chords to make the sounds necessary for speech. This is something that, as adults, we take for granted but is a very complex task. It takes 30 muscles operating in a specific way to produce a single sound.

As the child enters the toddler stage, they are learning a staggering 10 words every day. They will also gain the concept of self-awareness. They start to use the words ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘my’ to refer to themselves. This is a very complex abstract concept to grasp for children and one that most other animals never will. Communication is often a lot easier at this stage as the child automatically knows how to construct sentences with proper grammar as they have picked up the proper methodology from those around them. However, they are not completely immune to making errors. One more common example of an error made by children at this stage is over-generalisation. This is where a child will apply what they believe to be a grammatical rule (such as pluralising by adding an ’s’) but they do not realise that there are exceptions to these rules like the word ‘mouse’; an irregular verb that in its plural form is mice. Gleason devised a test to prove this phenomena called ‘The Wug Test’. During the test, children were first shown a picture of a made up creature which they were told was a ‘Wug’. They were then shown a picture of two of these creatures and indirectly asked to complete the sentence “There are two …”. Every child would answer the same; “Wugs”, thus proving this theory.

18th Century Text Analysis

Link to text: http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/texts/cook/1700s2/1700s2.html

This text, from the 18^th century, is an informative text aimed at housemaids. It clearly outlines the method that should be used to remove insects from the house. As such, the text generally consists of complex sentences, polysyllabic words and an overall high register. Throughout the text, there are examples of archaic language and terminology such as ‘Earthen-pan’ (a large pot made of earth/clay) and ‘mixt’ (the past tense of mix). There are also language features that are a characteristic of the time such as the fact that all nouns are capitalised and the use of the archaic ‘s’ throughout the text. There are some other examples of words used to describe objects from the time, that would not be used today such as ‘Chaffindish’ (an upper class serving dish), ‘Brimstone’ (used to start fires as it burns better than charcoal) and ‘boiling Lee’ (a substance used for cleaning).

There are examples throughout this text that, today, would be considered grammatically incorrect. Some such examples include ‘Don't open the door under six hours’ (don't open the door until six hours have passed), ‘Shut your door close’ (close your door), ‘it will take away your breath’ (it will take your breath away) and ‘it will be well’ (it would be beneficial). In these examples, the words used in the modern day equivalents are generally present but in a different order. There are other examples of where the spellings of words have changed. Examples such as ‘effectual’ (effective), ‘buggs’ (bugs), ‘mixt’ (mixed) and ‘finis’ (finish).

Interestingly, there are also some more complex examples of language change that have occurred. The first example is of semantic shift. This is where a word has changed in meaning. The word ‘about’ has gone through this process from meaning around (an area) to mean a preposition indicating an estimation or a subject matter. The word ‘anoint’ has gone through the process of narrowing. It was used in the text to mean ‘wipe clean’ but now it has changed in meaning to smear/rub and is more commonly used regarding a religious ceremony. These points highlights the language change that has occurred over the course of 250 years.


Graphologically, the text utilises a clear typeface with italic writing used for the title of each paragraph. After the title there is always a bold first letter and the rest of the word is capitalised. This is a characteristic of texts from this time and is sometimes still found in books today. All the nouns throughout the text are also capitalised (which today would be considered incorrect as we would only capitalise proper nouns and the starts of sentences).