A History of English Language

A history of the english language 200
boke treateth of the education of them that hereafter may be demed
worthy to be governours of the publike weale under your hyghnesse… I
dedicate it unto your hyghnesse as the fyrste frutes of my studye, verely
trustynge that your moste excellent wysedome wyll therein esteme my
loyall harte and diligent endevour…Protestinge unto your excellent
majestie that where I commende herin any one vertue or dispraise any one
vice I meane the generall description of thone and thother without any
other particular meanynge to the reproche of any one persone. To the
whiche protestation I am nowe dryven throughe the malignite of this
present tyme all disposed to malicious detraction…
In this passage we have an early example of the attempt to improve the English language.
The words printed in italics were all new in Elyot’s day; two of them (education,
dedicate) are first found in the English language as he uses them in this dedication. Two
others (esteem and devulgate) are found in the sense here employed only one year earlier.
Several others could be instanced which, although recorded slightly earlier, were not yet
in general use. 9 In so short a passage these new words are fairly numerous, but not more
numerous than in the rest of his book, and, what is more important, they are not the
innovations of a pedant or an extremist. Other writers who could be cited were less
restrained in their enthusiasm for words drawn from Latin, Greek, and French. Nor are
these new words in Elyot the result of chance. They are part of a conscious effort to
enrich the English vocabulary.
We have already indicated that enlarging the vocabulary was one of the three major
problems confronting the modern languages in the eyes of men in the sixteenth century.
And it is not difftcult to see why this was so. The Renaissance was a period of increased
activity in almost every field. It would have been strange if the spirit of inquiry and
experiment that led to the discovery of America, the reform of the church, the Copernican
theory, and the revolution of thought in many fields should have left only language
untouched. The rediscovery of Latin and Greek literature led to new activity in the
modern languages and directed attention to them as the medium of literary
9
Benevolent, enterprise, studious, endeavor, protest, reproach, malignity. The statements in the
text are based upon the dated citations in the OED. An earlier occurrence of any word is always
possible. For example, in a translation by Skelton (c. 1485) of the History of the World by Diodorus
Siculus, more than 800 Latin innovations occur, many earlier than the first instance recorded in the
OED. But the work exists in a unique MS and has never been published. While its influence on the
English language was probably negligible, it shows that the attitude of the sixteenth-century
innovators was not without precedent. See F.M.Salter, John Skelton’s Contribution to the English
Language (Ottawa, 1945; Trans. Royal Soc. of Canada). The purpose of this and the following
paragraphs, of course, is to record the efforts of Elyot and others to enrich the English language by
the conscious importation of words that they believed were needed.