Linguistic purism in English

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Purism in the linguistic field is the historical trend of languages to conserve intact their lexical structure of word families, in opposition to foreign influences which are considered 'impure'. Historically, English linguistic purism is a reaction to the great number of borrowings in the English language from other languages, especially Old French, since the Norman conquest of England, and some of its native vocabulary and grammar have been supplanted by features of Latinate and Greek origin. [1] Efforts to remove or consider the removal of foreign terms in English are often known as Anglish, a term coined by author and humorist Paul Jennings in 1966. [2]

Contents

English linguistic purism has persisted in diverse forms since the inkhorn term controversy of the early modern period. In its mildest form, purism stipulates the use of native terms instead of loanwords. In stronger forms, new words are coined from Germanic roots (such as wordstock for vocabulary) or revived from older stages of English (such as shrithe for proceed). Noted purists of Early Modern English include John Cheke, [3] Thomas Wilson, [4] Ralph Lever, [5] Richard Rowlands, [6] and Nathaniel Fairfax. [7] Modern linguistic purists include William Barnes, [1] Charles Dickens, [8] Gerard Manley Hopkins, [9] Elias Molee, [10] Percy Grainger, [11] and George Orwell. [12]

History

Middle English

English words gave way to borrowings from Anglo-Norman following the Norman Conquest as English lost ground as a language of prestige. Anglo-Norman was used in schools and dominated literature, nobility and higher life, leading a wealth of French loanwords to enter English over the course of several centuries—English only returned to courts of law in 1362, and to government in the following century. [13]

Notwithstanding, some texts of early Middle English engaged in linguistic purism, deliberately avoiding excessive Anglo-Norman influence. Layamon's Brut, composed in the late 12th or early 13th century, espoused several features of Old English poetic style and used a predominantly Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. [14] Ancrene Wisse , of the same era, allowed for French and Old Norse loans but maintained conservative spelling and syntax to keep with Old English. [15] Ayenbite of Inwyt , a Kentish translation of a French treatise on morality written about a century earlier, used calques to avoid borrowing from French. [16]

Early Modern English

Controversy over inkhorn terms—foreign loanwords perceived to be needless—persisted in the 16th and 17th centuries. Among others, Thomas Elyot, a neologiser, borrowed extensively from abroad in support of "the necessary augmentation" of English. [17] Linguistic purists such as John Cheke opposed this borrowing in favour of keeping English "unmixt and unmangled". [18] Thomas Wilson, a contemporary of Cheke, criticised borrowing from foreign languages as seeking an "outlandish English". [4]

Modern English

William Barnes, a 19th-century poet and linguistic purist William Barnes poet.jpg
William Barnes, a 19th-century poet and linguistic purist

With the influx of new industrial and scientific terms from Greek and Latin, linguistic purism saw renewed interest in the 19th century. [19] American statesman Thomas Jefferson observed in an 1825 letter that "a taste is reviving in England for the recovery of the Anglo-Saxon dialect". [20] Dorset poet, minister, and philologist William Barnes coined several words to promote "strong old Anglo-Saxon speech", including speechcraft for grammar, birdlore for ornithology, and bendsome for flexible. [21] Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins discussed Barnes in an 1882 letter to Robert Bridges, lamenting the "utter hopelessness" of Barnes's purism but nonetheless writing in support of it, claiming that "no beauty in a language can make up for want of purity". [9] [22] Charles Dickens emphasised the importance of Germanic elements of English during this period, stressing that a writer should not "seek abroad" for new words. [8]

The fifth rule of vocabulary in The King's English , published in 1917, suggests that writers should "prefer the Saxon word to the Romance". [8] In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language", George Orwell criticised the extensive use of "foreign" words in English. [12] Australian composer Percy Grainger, a contemporary of Orwell, invented a "blue-eyed English" that he perceived to be linguistically pure and preferred the use of English words in the place of traditional Italian music terms. [11] One year after Grainger's death, philologist Lee Hollander emphasised in his 1962 translation of the Poetic Edda —a collection of Old Norse poems—that "Germanic material must be drawn upon to the utmost extent ... because of the tang and flavor still residing in the homelier indigenous speech material". [23]

Paul Jennings coined the term "Anglish" in a three-part series in Punch commemorating the 900th anniversary of the Norman conquest of England. [2] Jennings's articles, entitled "1066 and All Saxon" and published in June 1966, envisioned an England in which the conquest had failed and included linguistically pure English passages; Jennings gave "a bow to William Barnes" as an inspiration. [24] In 1989, science fiction writer Poul Anderson released a similarly-written text about basic atomic theory called Uncleftish Beholding composed almost fully of Germanic-rooted words. In 1997, Douglas Hofstadter jokingly entitled the style "Ander-Saxon". [25]

The September 2009 publication How We'd Talk if the English had Won in 1066 by David Cowley updates Old English words to today's English spelling, seeking mainstream appeal by covering words in five grades ranging from "easy" to "weird and wonderful" and giving many examples of use with drawings and tests. [26] Paul Kingsnorth's 2014 The Wake is written in a hybrid of Old English and Modern English to account for its 1066 milieu, [27] and Edmund Fairfax's 2017 satiric literary novel Outlaws is similarly written in a "constructed" form of English consisting almost exclusively of words of Germanic origin. [28] An online newsletter called The Anglish Times has regularly reported on current events without non-Germanic borrowed words since January 2021. [29]

See also

Related Research Articles

Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, was the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, English was replaced for several centuries by Anglo-Norman as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during the subsequent period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into what is now known as Middle English in England and Early Scots in Scotland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Barnes</span> English writer, clergyman and philologist (1801–1886)

William Barnes was an English polymath, writer, poet, philologist, priest, mathematician, engraving artist and inventor. He wrote over 800 poems, some in Dorset dialect, and much other work, including a comprehensive English grammar quoting from more than 70 different languages. A linguistic purist, Barnes strongly advocated against borrowing foreign words into English, and instead supported the use and proliferation of "strong old Anglo-Saxon speech".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Middle English</span> Stage of development of English, from the 12th to 15th centuries

Middle English is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the University of Valencia states the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English language roughly coincided with the High and Late Middle Ages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Loanword</span> Word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language

A loanword is a word at least partly assimilated from one language into another language, through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term that is well established in the linguistic field despite its acknowledged descriptive flaws: nothing is taken away from the donor language and there is no expectation of returning anything.

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, “to calque” means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language. For instance, the English word skyscraper has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example Wolkenkratzer in German, arranha-céu in Portuguese, grattacielo in Italian, gökdelen in Turkish, and matenrou(摩天楼) in Japanese.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Foreign-language influences in English</span>

The English language descends from Old English, the West Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons. Most of its grammar, its core vocabulary and the most common words are Germanic. However, the percentage of loans in everyday conversation varies by dialect and idiolect, even if English vocabulary at large has a greater Romance influence.

English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxons settled in the British Isles from the mid-5th century and came to dominate the bulk of southern Great Britain. Their language originated as a group of Ingvaeonic languages which were spoken by the settlers in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages, displacing the Celtic languages, and, possibly, British Latin, that had previously been dominant. Old English reflected the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established in different parts of Britain. The Late West Saxon dialect eventually became dominant. A significant subsequent influence upon the shaping of Old English came from contact with the North Germanic languages spoken by the Scandinavian Vikings who conquered and colonized parts of Britain during the 8th and 9th centuries, which led to much lexical borrowing and grammatical simplification. The Anglian dialects had a greater influence on Middle English.

The following are lists of words in the English language that are known as "loanwords" or "borrowings," which are derived from other languages.

Although English is a Germanic language, it has significant Latin influences. Its grammar and core vocabulary are inherited from Proto-Germanic, but a significant portion of the English vocabulary comes from Romance and Latinate sources. A portion of these borrowings come directly from Latin, or through one of the Romance languages, particularly Anglo-Norman and French, but some also from Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; or from other languages into Latin and then into English. The influence of Latin in English, therefore, is primarily lexical in nature, being confined mainly to words derived from Latin and Greek roots.

Neoclassical compounds are compound words composed from combining forms derived from classical languages roots. Neo-Latin comprises many such words and is a substantial component of the technical and scientific lexicon of English and other languages, via international scientific vocabulary (ISV). For example, Greek bio- combines with -graphy to form biography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linguistic purism</span> Preferring a language variety as purer

Linguistic purism or linguistic protectionism is a concept having a dual notion with respect to foreign languages and with respect to the internal variants of a language (dialects) The first meaning is the historical trend of every language to conserve intact its lexical structure of word families, in opposition to foreign influence which are considered 'impure'. The second meaning is the practice, possibly prescriptive, of determining and recognizing one linguistic variety (dialect) as being purer or of intrinsically higher quality than other varieties.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inkhorn term</span> Loan or constructed word deemed unnecessary or pretentious

An inkhorn term is a loanword, or a word coined from existing roots, which is deemed to be unnecessary or over-pretentious.

"Uncleftish Beholding" (1989) is a short text by Poul Anderson, included in his anthology "All One Universe". It is designed to illustrate what English might look like without its large number of words derived from languages such as French, Greek, and Latin, especially with regard to the proportion of scientific words with origins in those languages.

Many words that existed in Old English did not survive into Modern English. There are also many words in Modern English that bear little or no resemblance in meaning to their Old English etymons. Some linguists estimate that as much as 80 percent of the lexicon of Old English was lost by the end of the Middle English period, including many compound words, e.g. bōchūs, yet the components 'book' and 'house' were kept. Certain categories of words seem to have been more susceptible. Nearly all words relating to sexual intercourse and sexual organs as well as "impolite" words for bodily functions were ignored in favor of words borrowed from Latin or Ancient Greek. The Old English synonyms are now mostly either extinct or considered crude or vulgar, such as arse/ass.

Legal English, also known as legalese, is a register of English used in legal writing. It differs from day-to-day spoken English in a variety of ways including the use of specialized vocabulary, syntactic constructions, and set phrases such as legal doublets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law</span> Sound change law in some West Germanic languages

In historical linguistics, the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law is a description of a phonological development that occurred in the Ingvaeonic dialects of the West Germanic languages. This includes Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon, and to a lesser degree Old Dutch.

References

  1. 1 2 R.L.G. (28 January 2014). "Johnson: What might have been" . The Economist . Retrieved 31 July 2020.
  2. 1 2 Bidwell, Lili (25 March 2017). "Anglish: A Brexiteer's lingua franca?". The Cambridge Student . Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  3. ↑ Encyclopædia Britannica. "Sir John Cheke" . Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  4. 1 2 Rhode Island College. "Texts from the Inkhorn Debate, c. 1560–1640" . Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  5. ↑ Sgarbi, Marco (2013). "Ralph Lever's Art of Reason, Rightly Termed Witcraft (1573)". Bruniana & Campanelliana. 19 (1): 149–163. JSTOR   24338444 . Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  6. ↑ Morsbach, Lorenz (1910). Studien zur englischen Philologie. Halle a.S., Max Niemeyer. p. 123.
  7. ↑ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). "Fairfax, Nathaniel" . Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/9088. ISBN   978-0-19-861412-8 . Retrieved 25 January 2021.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  8. 1 2 3 Lynne, Murphy (2018). The Prodigal Tongue. Penguin Books. ISBN   978-1524704889.
  9. 1 2 Roper, Jonathan (April 2012). "English Purisms". Victoriographies. 2 (1). Edinburgh University Press: 44–59. doi:10.3366/vic.2012.0059 . Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  10. ↑ Molee, Elias (1890). Pure Saxon English, Or, Americans to the Front. Rand McNally.
  11. 1 2 Gillies, M. (2019). "Percy Grainger: How American was He?". Nineteenth-Century Music Review. 16 (1). Cambridge University Press: 9–26. doi:10.1017/S1479409817000568. S2CID   187266648 . Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  12. 1 2 Poole, Steven (17 January 2013). "My problem with George Orwell". The Guardian . Retrieved 8 January 2021.
  13. ↑ Kay, Christian; Allan, Kathryn (2015). "A brief history of the English lexicon". English Historical Semantics. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 6–24. ISBN   978-0748644773.
  14. ↑ Ackerman, Robert W. (1966) Backgrounds to Medieval English Literature. 1st. New York: Random House, Inc.
  15. ↑ Tolkien, J.R.R. (1929). "Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad". Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association. 14: 104–126.
  16. ↑ Herman, Louis Jay (8 January 1989). "Remorse From Dan Michel to James Joyce". The New York Times . Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  17. ↑ Vos, Alvin (October 1976). "Humanistic Standards of Diction in the Inkhorn Controversy". Studies in Philology. 73 (4). University of North Carolina Press: 376–396. JSTOR   4173916 . Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  18. ↑ Simkin, John (September 1997). "John Cheke". Spartacus Educational . Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  19. ↑ Langer, Nils; Davies, Winifred (2005). Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages. De Gruyter. p. 103. ISBN   3-11-018337-4.
  20. ↑ "From Thomas Jefferson to J. Evelyn Denison, 9 November 1825". founders.archives.gov. National Archives and Records Administration . Retrieved 28 January 2021.
  21. ↑ Barnes, Williams (1878). An Outline of English Speech-Craft. C. Kegan Paul & Co.
  22. ↑ Langer, Nils; Davies, Winifred (2005). Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages. Walter de Gruyter. p. 328.
  23. ↑ Hollander, Lee M. (1986). The Poetic Edda. University of Texas Press. p. xxviii. ISBN   0292764995.
  24. ↑ Jennings, Paul (June 1966). "1066 and All Saxon". Punch . London.
  25. ↑ Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1997). Le Ton beau de Marot . Basic Books. ISBN   0465086454.
  26. ↑ "How We'd Talk if the English Had Won in 1066: New Edition 2020". Barnes & Noble . Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  27. ↑ Thorpe, Adam (2 April 2014). "The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth review – 'A literary triumph'". The Guardian . Retrieved 8 January 2021.
  28. ↑ Fairfax, Edmund (2017). Outlaws. Bokos. ISBN   978-0995296503.
  29. ↑ "News Written In Anglish". theanglishtimes.com. Retrieved 15 November 2022.
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