Modern English Essay

691 Words2 Pages

GRAMMAR

During Early Modern English period, English language developed excellently. At that time, English has richer lexicon, less complicated grammar, monosyllabic characters, and euphonious pronunciation. Due to these developments, the influence of Latin is declining. English is made compulsory to learn in the school for its own language rather than a device to learn Latin, before. Regarding this situation, the demand for translated piece from Latin and Greek increased rapidly since reading become a trend at that time.
Still, some grammar notes about English are written in Latin in desire to spread the English grammar knowledge. The last English grammar written in Latin was in 1685. The writer described English grammar using Latin-derived categories but did not label some forms or structures as ‘correct’ and dismiss others as incorrect.

Vocabulary Expansion

Loanwords
During late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, borrowing from Latin reached its summit in terms of absolute numbers of new words recorded in a prodigious dictionary such as Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but new borrowing had nothing like the long-term effect on the high-frequency or basic vocabularies of English that earlier ones had. A lot of the new loanwords are circumscribed in register, since the formal and technical registers of English that ripen in this period are largely categorized by their use of Latinate vocabulary.
The emergence of the age of scientific discovery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries formed the need for new words to describe brand-new knowledge (science, medical, mathematics etc…). Many words were borrowed from Latin. Some of the Latin words that borrowed are : apparatus,...

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Analogy
In addition, analogy sometimes affected the form of a Latin loan. For example, delinquish which means ‘to fail in duty’ is actually a Latin délinquere but has been modelled on relinquish. The other example is latitudinarian is derived from Latin noun látitúdo, on the analogy of trinitarian.

Spelling

Spelling became fairly fixed during this period, with the increase in use of the printing press. Latin wielded its influence on the spelling of some words of Latin origin, further separating spelling from its phonetics origins. Words such as Middle English ‘isle’ (from Latin ‘insula’), influenced the spelling of Middle English ‘iland’, creating Early Modern English ‘island’. ‘Debt’, originally Middle English ‘dette’ (from Latin ‘debita’) added the current ‘-b’ despite the fact that is was never pronounced in English.

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