Grammatical and Lexical Changes 1550 -1700

Today, like during the renaissance when it could be said that the English language developed the most, there is no shortage of people who comment and have opinions on the development of the English Language. In an essay entitled English our English John Marenbon (1987) talks of the necessity to include Latin in the national curriculum to aid the English student in their study, he also says that any Englishman who does not have a grasp of Latin is "(A) stranger to his own culture" (note the patriarchal ideological inscription in not including females who speak or study English in his comments!). The influence of Latin on the English Language is of course, not to be overlooked, not only do we have words which directly come from Latin such as the Latin Factum which has become the modern day word fact, to use one of many examples, but Latin has also affected the English language indirectly through the uptake of words from as many as 50 languages, many of which have Latin as their predominant influence.

It is important to note that during this renaissance period it was predominantly only lexical changes that occurred, the great grammatical development in English language had occurred before the renaissance, of course grammatical developments also occurred after this period too right up to recent times. The reason for these lexical changes, I will look at in greater detail later. So when we look at linguistic development during the period c 1550-1700 we generally only look at the addition of new words.

Having made these comments about the lack of grammatical developments, such was the massive ambiguity of how to spell words at the time that some people had made attempts at producing texts on how to spell. Even the cleverest intel...

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...ng since English was first starting to take its modern form. One good example is the use of negatives, as far back as c1155 it used to be customary that a double or triple negative was used to add more power to a comment, but eventually simplification occurred and it became the norm for only one negative to be used, this is another example of a rare grammatical change which I have previously drawn attention to, however this simplification occurred long before and continued long after the renaissance.

In conclusion, we see that not only were the major changes to the English Language during the renaissance mainly lexical but also were mainly due to social and economic factors.

References.

John Marenbon (1987) English our English (Centre for Policy Studies)

Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable (2002) A history of the English language, "The Renaissance." Routledge