A History of English Language

A history of the english language 242
As pointed out in the preceding section, one of the chief defects of English that people
became acutely conscious of in the latter part of the seventeenth century was the absence
of a standard, the fact that the language had not been reduced to a rule so that one could
express oneself at least with the assurance of doing so correctly. Dryden sums up this
attitude in words: “we have yet no prosodia, not so much as a tolerable dictionary, or a
grammar, so that our language is in a manner barbarous.” 3 That is, the language did not
possess the character of an orderly and well-regulated society. One must write it
according to one’s individual judgment and therefore without the confidence that one
might feel if there were rules on which to lean and a vocabulary sanctioned by some
recognized authority. It was a conviction of long standing with him. In his dedication of
Troilus and Cressida to the earl of Sunderland (1679) he says: “how barbarously we yet
write and speak, your lordship knows, and I am sufficiently sensible in my own English.
For I am often put to a stand, in considering whether what I write be the idiom of the
tongue, or false grammar.” And he adds: “I am desirous, if it were possible, that we might
all write with the same certainty of words, and purity of phrase, to which the Italians first
arrived, and after them the French; at least that we might advance so far, as our tongue is
capable of such a standard.” The ideal was expressed many times in the earlier part of the
eighteenth century, perhaps nowhere more accurately than in the words “we write by
guess, more than any stated rule, and form every man his diction, either according to his
humour and caprice, or in pursuance of a blind and servile imitation.” 4
In the eighteenth century the need for standardization and regulation was summed up
in the word ascertainment. The force of this word then was some-what different from that
which it has today. To ascertain was not so much to
3
Discourse concerning Satire (1693).
4
Thomas Stackhouse, Reflections on the Nature and Property ofLanguage in General, on the
Advantages, Defects, andManner oflmproving the English Tongue in Particular (1731), p. 187.