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.
No comments:
Post a Comment