Some people feel that English is a confusing language. With regard to grammar it sometimes seems like there are several different unrelated rules for conjugated verbs and that irregular verbs which don’t seem to follow any of the rules are more frequent than regular verbs. And then there’s the issue of spelling. How can we ever make any sense out of the chaos of English? By the seventeenth century a number of scholars and others began searching for a way to bring order out of the chaos.
One of the first attempts at bringing about some order came in 1604 when Robert Cawdray published A Table Alphabeticall. This little book—120 pages in length—enabled those who studied it to convey an impression of learning. While the book is generally considered as the first monolingual dictionary of English, it is not considered a particularly useful work. It listed 2,543 words and provided brief (sometimes just a single word) definitions. Cawdray considered the purpose of the book to be—
"for the benefit and helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or other unskillful persons".
Cawdray also writes:
BY this Table (right Honourable & Wor-
shipfull) strangers that blame our tongue
of difficultie, and vncertaintie may heere-
by plainly see, & better vnderstand those
things, which they haue thought hard. Heerby
also the true Orthography, that is, the true
writing of many hard English words, borrowed
from the Greeke, Latine & French, and how to
know one from the other, with the interpretati-
on thereof by plaine English words, may be lear-
ned and knowne. And children heerby may be
prepared for the vnderstanding of a great num-
ber of Latine words: which also will bring much
delight & iudgement to others, by the vse of this
little worke.
This first dictionary proved to be relatively popular and by 1617 it was into its fourth edition. The full text of the 1604 edition can be found
here.
Robert Cawdray (also spelled Cawdrey) was a school teacher who had never been to college. He was ordained as a deacon and had been made a rector. While he was sympathetic to Puritan teachings, he was chastised for not reading the approved texts in his sermons. With many new words entering English, Cawdray worried that the wealthy were adopting foreign words and phrases. To lessen confusion and to help ensure that people would not lose their mother tongue, he began working on his dictionary as early as 1563 while teaching school.
For many the ideal model for order in a language was to be found in Latin. With its regular grammar, spelling convention and systematic style, Latin was an example of a language that had lasted. Would the next generation of English speakers be able to read the writings of the present generation? Without order English, many people felt, was destined for oblivion.
In 1697, Daniel Defoe proposed that there should be an academy to decide on right and wrong usage. According to Defoe, with an academy “it would be as criminal coin words as money.” In other words, with an academy, new words would have to be approved and simply introducing new words without approval would be the same as minting money with government approval. The idea of a language academy to bring order to the chaos of language was something that was being tried elsewhere in Europe. The idea of an English academy, however, never got off the ground, perhaps because the French had an academy.
Today Defoe (shown above) is better known for his novel about Robinson Crusoe than for his attempts to bring order to English.
Another voice for bringing order to English came from Jonathan Swift. Swift was born in Dublin in 1667 to a well-known Royalist family. Among the characteristics of eighteenth-century English which Swift deplored was the tendency to shorten words that should, he believed, retain their full dignified length: such as, rep for ‘reputation,’ incog for ‘incognito’.
A portrait of Jonathon Swift is shown above.
In 1712, Swift published A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. In this work, he proposed the only sure remedy against “Manglings and Abbreviations” and against the innovations of “illiterate Court Fops, half-witted Poets, and University Boys” would be an English Academy. His ideas, like those of Defoe, were never adopted.
Swift also took up a diatribe against the chaos of English spelling:
“Another Cause (and perhaps borrowed from the former) which hath contributed not a little to the maiming of our Language, is a foolish Opinion, advance of late Years, that we ought to spell exactly as we speak; which besides the obvious Inconvenience of utterly destroying our Etymology, which be a thing which we should never see an End of.”
The chaotic situation of English was further complicated by the work of bad scholars who, convinced by false etymologies, had changed words like
iland,
sissors,
sithe,
coud and
ancor into
island,
scissors,
scythe,
could and
anchor. With this, those who wished to write in English had an even greater need for a dictionary to show them correct spellings.
The dictionary which would help bring some order into the chaos of English was published in 1755. This work, which included some 40,000 definitions, was compiled by Dr. Samuel Johnson over a period of 9 years. Johnson viewed English as a living language, with many different shades of meaning. His definitions were based on precedents (a principle found in English common law). He describes his work as—
“Setting the orthography, displaying the analogy, regulating the structures, and ascertaining the significations of English word.”
Johnson indicated that work on his dictionary was done:
“with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconveniences and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow”
With Johnson’s dictionary, some standardization of English began; order began to emerge from the chaos.