A History of English Language

The renaissance, 1500-1650 201
expression. The result was a healthy desire for improvement. The intellectual aspect of
the Revival of Learning had a similar effect. The scholarly monopoly of Latin throughout
the Middle Ages had left the vernaculars undeveloped along certain lines. Now that this
monopoly was being broken, the deficiencies of English were at the same time revealed.
English was undoubtedly inadequate, as compared with the classical languages, to
express the thought that those languages embodied and that in England was now
becoming part of a rapidly expanding civilization. The translations that appeared in such
numbers convinced people of the truth of this fact. The very act of translation brings
home to the translators the limitations of their medium and tempts them to borrow from
other languages the terms whose lack they feel in their own. For writers to whom Latin
was almost a second mother tongue the temptation to transfer and naturalize in English
important Latin radicals was particularly great. This was so, too, with French and Italian.
In this way many foreign words were introduced into English. One may say that the same
impulse that led scholars to furnish the English mind with the great works of classical and
other literatures led them to enrich the English language with words drawn from the same
source. New words were particularly needed in various technical fields, where English
was notably weak. The author of a Discourse of Warre justifies his introduction of
numerous military terms by an argument that was unanswerable: “I knowe no other
names than are given by strangers, because there are fewe or none at all in our language.”
It is not always easy, however, to draw the line between a word that is needed because
no equivalent term exists, and one that merely expresses more fully an idea that could be
conveyed in some fashion with existing words. We can appreciate the feeling of scholars
for whom a familiar Latin word had a wealth of associations and a rich connotation; we
must admit the reasonableness of their desire to carry such a word over into their English
writing. The transfer is all the more excusable when one is convinced that English would
be better for having it and that it is a patriotic duty to employ one’s knowledge in so
worthy a cause as that of improving the national speech. This motive actuated many
people who were both earnest and sincere in their desire to relieve English of the charge
of inadequacy and inelegance. Thus Elyot apologizes for introducing the word maturity:
“Wherfore I am constrained to usurpe a latine worde…, which worde, though it be
strange and darke [obscure], yet…ones brought in custome, shall be facile to understande
as other wordes late commen out of Italy and Fraunce…. Therfore that worde maturitie is
translated to the actis of man,…reservyng the wordes ripe and redy to frute and other
thinges seperate from affaires, as we have nowe in usage. And this do I nowe remembre
for the necessary augmentation of our langage.” In another place he says, “I intended to
augment our Englyshe tongue, wherby men shulde as well expresse more abundantly the
thynge that they conceyved in theyr hartis,…havyng wordes apte for the pourpose: as
also interprete out of greke, latyn or any other tonge into Englysshe as sufficiently as out
of any one of the said tongues into an other.” In any case, whether “of pure necessitie in
new matters, or of mere braverie to garnish it self withall”—to quote a phrase of
Mulcaster’s—English acquired in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries thousands
of new and strange words.
The greater number of these new words were borrowed from Latin. But they were not
exclusively drawn from that source. Some were taken from Greek, a great many from
French, and not a few from Italian and Spanish. Even the older periods of English and