Discussion Groups / British English / December 2003

Apex wrote...

What about Elvish and Machine Code?

Apex ha scritto nel messaggio ...

That's nice:)

There are many more "invented" languages, but Esperanto is by far the
most successful one.

So does Esperanto. If it wouldn't, how could I talk about the Internet
in Esperanto? It didn't exist back in 1887 ...

Yours,
Robert

I suspect that your last point in an illusion caused by the fact that
most people (even many quite literate people) never read anything that
predates Shakespeare & the AV. There are reasons for that  -  it was
(and had been for a time) a period when a high level of literacy was
fashionable, so that nobody was surprised at Phlip Sidney being
important simultaneously in the literary and military fields of
endeavour.  The result was probably the greatest collection of really
good writers in English that have ever been alive at one time.  I think
that the effects lasted will into the 17th century.

But if you do look at earlier translations of the Bible, for example
those of Tyndale and Coverdale, both about a generation before
Shakespeare, then ther English doesn't appear much different, which is
hardly surprising as the AV took over whole chunks of them as they stood
(and, even later, the Book of Common Prayer of the 1660s adopted
Coverdale's translation of the Psalms in its entirety). Nor is the
English of More's "Utopia" (the only work of his that I've read)
noticeably different -  More died 29 years before Shakespeare was born.
So I don't think there was any sudden change over that period.  There
was, of course, a great bout of invention of new vocabulary, much of it
by Shakespeare himself.  But all of that comes within the flourishing of
the Tudor literary age, when Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were themselves
important role-models and writers of the first importance.

Looking earlier, the works of Chaucer look very different, but that's
very largely a matter of orthography.  If you hear them read, they sound
much the same as stuff of the Shakespearean period, which would probably
not be the case for Anglo-Saxon texts.  That's a personal subjective
judgement of how difficult I find it to understand these writers on the
page and in speech  -  others may differ.

The work of Thomas Malory, at a date between the two, is also not
far-distant from Shakespearean English.  There were changes to English
in the two centuries between Chaucer and Shakespeare, but they had been
gradual and seem to have affected the written language more than the
spoken one.  Perhaps the biggest change was the fading out of inflected
word endings  -  or was that even earlier?

If there is a period when (written) English did suddenly become much
more unified and formalised, it's in the 18th century, through the work
of Samuel Johnson and his contemporaries, which brought the idea of
"correct" spelling into being.  Before then people, even highly literate
people, felt free to spell a word as they felt suitable to its context.
Think how many ways Shagsberd / Shakeshaft had of spelling his own
surname!