A History of English Language

The renaissance, 1500-1650 193
well.” Statements such as these, which could be multiplied many times from the literature
of the period, show that the recognition of English was achieved in spite of a rather
persistent opposition.
As we approach the end of the century and see that English has slowly won
recognition as a language of serious thought, we detect a note of patriotic feeling in the
attitude of many people. They seem to have grown tired of being told that English was
crude and barbarous. This is apparent in the outburst of George Pettie in his book on
Civile Conversation (1586): “There are some others yet who wyll set lyght by my
labours, because I write in Englysh: and…the woorst is, they thinke that impossible to be
doone in our Tongue: for they count it barren, they count it barbarous, they count it
unworthy to be accounted of.” “But,” he adds, “how hardly soever you deale with your
tongue, how barbarous soever you count it, how litle soever you esteeme it, I durst my
selfe undertake (if I were furnished with Learnying otherwyse) to wryte in it as
copiouslye for varietie, as compendiously for brevitie, as choycely for woordes, as pithily
for sentences, as pleasauntly for figures, and every way as eloquently, as any writer
should do in any vulgar tongue whatsoever.” Mulcaster goes so far as to say: “I take this
present period of our English tung to be the verie height therof, bycause I find it so
excellentlie well fined, both for the bodie of the tung it self, and for the customarie
writing thereof, as either foren workmanship can give it glosse, or as homewrought
hanling can give it grace. When the age of our peple, which now use the tung so well, is
dead and departed there will another succede, and with the peple the tung will alter and
change. Which change in the full harvest thereof maie prove comparable to this, but sure
for this which we now use, it semeth even now to be at the best for substance, and the
bravest for circumstance, and whatsoever shall becom of the English state, the English
tung cannot prove fairer, then it is at this daie, if it maie please our learned sort to esteme
so of it, and to bestow their travell upon such a subject, so capable of ornament, so proper
to themselves, and the more to be honored, bycause it is their own.” In 1595 Richard
Carew wrote a discourse on The Excellency of the English Tongue, and about 1583 Sir
Philip Sidney could say, “But for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceit of the
minde, which is the end of speech, that [English] hath it equally with any other tongue in
the world.”
156. The Problem of Orthography.
Spelling is for most people a pedestrian subject, but for the English, as for the French and
the Italians, in the sixteenth century the question of orthography or “right writing,” as
Mulcaster preferred to call it, was a matter of real importance and the subject of much
discussion. The trouble was not merely that English spelling was bad, for it is still bad
today, but that there was no generally accepted system that everyone could conform to. In
short, it was neither phonetic nor fixed. Speaking generally, the spelling of the modern
languages in the Middle Ages had attempted with fair success to represent the
pronunciation of words, and this is true of English in spite of the fact that Norman scribes
introduced considerable confusion when they tried to write a language that they
imperfectly knew and carried over habits that they had formed in writing French. The
confusion was increased when certain spellings gradually became conventional while the