A History of English Language

The nineteenth century and after 325
and completely new entries under the title Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series.
Three volumes were published between 1993 and 1997.
The influence of this great publication—the greatest dictionary of any language in the
world—has been far-reaching. Its authority was recognized from the appearance of the
first installment. It has provided a wealth of exact data on which many questions relating
to the history of the language have been resolved. But it has had a further important effect
that was scarcely contemplated by the little committee of the Philological Society to
which it owed its inception. It has profoundly influenced the attitude of many people
toward language, and toward the English language in particular. By exhibiting the history
of words and idioms, their forms and various spellings, their changes of meaning, the
way words rise and fall in the levels of usage, and many other phenomena, it has
increased our linguistic perspective and taught us to view many questions of language in
a more scientific and less dogmatic way. When historians of English a century or two
hence attempt to evaluate the effect of the Oxford Dictionary on the English language
they may quite possibly say that it exerted its chief force in making us historically
minded about matters of English speech.
235. Grammatical Tendencies.
The several factors already discussed as giving stability to English grammar (§ 152)—the
printing press, popular education, improvements in travel and communication, social
consciousness—have been particularly effective during the past two centuries. Very few
changes in grammatical forms and conventions are to be observed. There has been some
schoolmastering of the language. The substitution of you were for you was in the singular
occurs about 1820, and it is I is now seldom heard. What was left of the subjunctive
mood in occasional use has disappeared except in conditions contrary to fact (if I were
you). Some tendency toward loss of inflection, although we have but little to lose, is
noticeable in informal speech. The nonstandard he don’t represents an attempt to
eliminate the ending of the third person singular and reduce this verb in the negative to a
uniform do in the present tense. Likewise the widespread practice of disregarding the
objective case form whom in the interrogative (Who do you want?) illus-trates the same
impulse. Though some people are shocked by the latter “error,” it has a long and
honorable history. Shakespeare often commits it, and historically the reduction of case
forms in this pronoun is as justifiable as that in the second person (you for ye; cf. §
182). 52 Occasionally a new grammatical convention may be seen springing up. The get
passive (he got hurt) is largely a nineteenth-century development, called into being
because he is hurt is too static, he became hurt too formal. This construction is noted only
from 1652 53 and is unusual before the nineteenth century. One other tendency is
sufficiently important to be noticed separately, the extension of verb-adverb
combinations discussed in the following paragraph.