The Prescriptive Period
The period of time when prescriptive grammar evolved in England was the second half of the 17th century and the early 18th century. It was known as the Prescriptive Period. England had been through many problems both politically and socially. There were three major forces that affected the intellectual climate of this period:
1. A desire to control and regulate society and language.
2. An increased interest in English rather than Latin.
3. A look to the past as a time of linguistic"purity".
Four literary figures went about the regulatin of language: John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swife and Samuel Johnson. They had three goals:
1. To standardize English
2. To refine English
3. To ascertain English (to fix the language once and for all)
They felt the best way to do this was with an authoritative dictionary that could be used as a standard by which to judge usage. They planned to open an academy and through it the dictionary would be written and published. After numerous attempts were tried without success, the idea was dropped.
In 1755, however, Samuel Johnson did publish a dictionary that he hoped would fix the pronunciation of the English language. During this period, many grammar books were also published establishing rules of grammar.
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4 comments:
I thought this chapter was kind of interesting, but it seemed to me like they kept on talking about the Greeks, the greeks, the greeks! I acknowledge and understand that they are the first people to develop the alphabet and things like that, but a lot of the theory about arbitrary and irregular words and things like that, those are debates that are still going on today, perhaps they could have used a more modern spin to add some interest.
After reading this chapter thought it was somewhat interesting, but just reading about all these people who are trying to fix the enlgish language is more intresting. Then for all of them to fail was not a surpise, because you really can not change or fix the english language because it is changing all the time new words more slang everything in the english language is changing even more so than it did during the time when all these people tried to fix it. It is going to continue to change as time goes buy which makes it even harder to "fix" so people are speaking correctly.
language changes because society changes, and this change is inevitable and most of the time not predictable..I'd consider trying to plan our language's future and the changes that are going to take place are a waste of time. Now a days, there is a need in developing a greater linguistic awareness and tolerance of change, especially in a multi-ethnic society. Therefore schools should have the knowledge and resources to teach a common standard, while becoming familiar with linguistic diversity.
I agree with the group on this one. I thought it was pretty interesting, but funny that they were trying to fight such a losing battle. One reason much of changes in language occur is that words become identified by younger generations as old words, and so they find new words to express the same idea, but in a fresh, young way. Another change often occurs when one generation does not fully understand he meaning of the word as he older generation uses it, and so they unknowingly change the meaning.
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