The Renaissance and after

men in all spheres of activity. Few scruples stood in the way of ambition whether good or bad; of the period it has been said that the only crime of which Renaissance man was not guilty was the destruction of ancient manuscripts.s From this era of history dates the conception of the 'Middle Ages', a dark and inglorious period lying between antiquity and the new age. The achievements of mediaeval Europe, which have been noticed in the preceding chapter as far as they concerned linguistic scholarship. were gravely underestimated by the men of the Renaissance. Even as late as the nineteenth century Froude could write in his mellifluous prose as he contemplated the end of the Middle Ages: 'A change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passin.g away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires. beliefs, convictions of the old 'world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit in which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer . .' 3 Modern scholarship has done much to raise our estimation of the mediaeval period, and to soften the break between epochs that was formerly imposed. But changes there were, irreversible changes. and their effects were farreaching.

One direct consequence of these changes as far as linguistics is concerned is that the strands of history become more numerous and more complicated. Hitherto it has been not unreasonable to follow the course of linguistic studies by attending to the study of the Greek language by Greek scholars and the later study of Latin by Latin scholars, together with the theoretical developments built on the foundations of Latin grammar by the speculative grammarians. European work outside these confines was relatively small in extent and, with a few notable exc"t:ptions like the work of the' First grammarian', largely derivative in character. This is no longer true after the end of the Middle Ages. Not only were linguistic horizons widened and the work of nonEUropean linguists beginning to make its impact on the European tradition; but the living languages of Europe were from now on

Five

THE REro.: AISSANCB AND AFTER 9S

The Renaissance is traditio all

World and of d n Y regarded as the birth of the modern

. . . mo ern history' f ..., .

dn'lslons of hiatorl' al ti ' in so ar as such inevitably arbitrary

c irne can be . ..+:

characterize COnte . . meamn6"ul. Most of the features that

d· mporary hIstOry Can b .. . .,

an . contmuing with t b e seen emerging at this time

h d ou a reak u t th

a a direct effect 0 th di ?o e present day. Several of them

th n e IrectlOns tak bv li " , d

. ese. must be noticed· h'. en Y mgUlstJC studies, an

b k Ifl t IS chapter· b h R '

ac ward-lOOking . .., ut t e enaissance was also a

f movement, the f11' . . .

o the GreCO-Roman clasei u rediscovery and reapprecration

. 1 .. asslcal world T

re ahvely Contelnporaneous' . wo quite independent events,

fa f ··]n OCCurre

ces 0 the Renaissance I t, ,.. nce, may symbolize the Janus-like

backw . d • OOK,mg forwa d ' ,

. ar to a glorious past I . r to an excmng future and

World. . . .n 1492 Col b

' settmg in motionth . urn us discovered the New

globe and' e expansion f E

' m 1453 Constant'· I 0 urope over the whole

finally f II h mop e the c . 1

h .e to t e Turks; thus 'b' aplta of the Eastern Empire"

t e unmterr d Was rought to .

b upte sUccession of th an end the last survivor In

nu~, era of Greek scholars were. e classical Roman Empire, and sCnpts of classical texts Were br ImhPeIled westward to Italy. Manu-

grants and Were a1 ' aug t from C .

h I . , so actIvely Sought onsta. ntmople by erni-

sc 0 ars VISIt' . th' OUt and .

- . mg . at city and . earned home b I r .

years Greek schol SOIne others Al . Y ta Ian

Greek I . ars had come to the w . ready 10 the preceding

. . earnmg. At the end f . est and be h·"

loras IDYl·ted f C 0 the fourteenth . gun. t. e revival ot

,. rom onst . century 1\".

first mod' antmople asa tea h . H!anueI Chryso-

ern grammar f ha c er of G k

A heightened ,0 t t language in the w tee, produced the

.. conscIOusness of the ... . est. I

vigour in the present engend d clasSiCal past and

ere a tremendous .. an enhanced

Vitality

among leading

CHAPTER FIV!

systematicalIy stud' d d new Ii " ,

.. - tea, an new lines of linguistic thought, taken for

granted today as part f .. all' ". , ,

. . . 0 gener . mgursncs, made their appearance, fhe

study of Greek d L .

· .... an. atmgrammar continued, and the further refine.

ments and develop . t h "

dern , rnents t at earned It from the mediaeval. period to

mo ern "eachlng pt'. h . .

f '. rae Ice III t e classical langu ages are a proper object

o speclahst study' b t h . . .

hi tor .. f 1" .' u t ey can no more represent the course of the

s o~ 0 mgU1stlcs as a whole.

Dunng the late M'ddl A .,

j E· r leges ArabIc and Hebrew had been studied

n urope, and in the U' . f Paris !

I· . . ruverslty 0 Pans in the fourteenth century both

anguages were offici aU ...

Heb d k Y recogruzed. Roger Bacon wrote a grammar of

rew an new A bi I d

Heb. . .. ra IC. need, the necessity of some knowledge of

rew, as the langua f h

sporadt 11' .. ge 0 t e Old Testament, had been realized

ca y since the tim f J .

'often bee .d .. eo. erome (345-"20); but such studies had

.. n un ert k . ,. .

Christians f . a en lOa clandestine, half shamefaced manner,

carmg charges of a .. , h

and J.ews· t: ,. . SSOclahng with the enemies of the Chure

. !eanng the a .

Its bibli al . CCusatlOn of proselytizing.

ie status had' H

Greek as a I given . ebrew a place alongside Latin and

anguage worth . f . ,

along with y 0 attentIOn. ISIdore (seventh century)

many others rega d d .

fore the first Ia r e It as the language of God and there-

, . nguage to be spok . h .. . f

clerical bonds d·.h en on ea. rt .4 But with the loosening 0

· unng t e Ren ' .. . . .

and With greater . arssancs Hebrew was studied more widely

] penetratIOn. G k L ' .

anguages in the kn . I d ree, ann, and Hebrew were the three

'0W e ge of whi h h h .

sa. nee prided himself 5 A IC . u e omo tr£lillguis of the Renais-

E ' . number of H br . .

umpe, m particular R hlin' e rrew grammars were wntten In

al eue In s Ded'· . I·'

· so a great classical sch ] . ru tmentts Hebraicis,6 Reueh In,

· G . 0 ar and 0 f h

In ermany, drew th . . ne 0 te leaders of the Renaissance

d'ffi . . e attenhon f . .

I erenr word class svs . 0 western scholars to the radically

nou b ystem In Use b . ,

. n,. ver , and particle.7 The t· y natIve Hebrew grammarians:

tides mdecJinable. ReucW' ormer two are declinable and the par-

to the Lati di . In matches the II b

" n tra ition by subd' idi . . e rew grammatical tradition

partIciple a d h ' IVI ng the nou ' . · . ,n t e particles . . .. n mto noun pronoun and

mterJection' b h 1nto adverb c .' .' ,

. ' ut e goes on at ' onJunctIon, preposition, and

part of the ct·· once to Wa hi

apt . h aeg.ones (,accidents ') andr~ S readers that a great

p ~ to t .. e L~tln Word classes are .: th~lr associated theory that rdeqfiniul.r: no m.entlon.B In 1529 N. CI' m~pPhcable to Hebrew ~d so

e trve fur that 1 enard s gram

In th c' .anguage in western Eu . mar of Hebrew became

. .. etr mCreaslfig knowled e . rope.

their acquaintance with h. g and undel'Standi .

scholarship" h fi t e work of.native ll' b ng of Hebrew and

· .or t . e rst t' . . ne rew r .

Ime came Int'O intellect at Ingulsts, western

U COntact with a non-

THE RENAISSANCB AND AFTER

97

Indo-european language and a tradition of grammatical analysis not directly, if at all, derived from the Greco-Roman tradition.

Hebrew linguistic scholarship was developed under the influence of Arabic linguistic work. q This was due both to the structural similarities of these two Semitic languages and to the political power of the Arabs after the Islamic expansion over the Near East. north Africa. and Spain. Technical terms and categories were borrowed from Arabic linguists for the descriptive analysis of Hebrew, A good deal of this work centred on the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament. By the end of the twelfth century grammars of Hebrew were being written by Jews living in Spain and elsewhere for their co-religionists. Among these grammarians the Qimhi family are well known as the authors of linguistic treatises. Earlier, another Spanish Jew, Ibn Barun, had written a comparative

study of the Arabic and Hebrew languages;' 0 .

Arabic linguistic studies, the inspiration and model of Hebrew scholars, were concerned with the Koran, As the sacred book of Islam, the word of God revealed to the prophet Muhammad, the Koran was the bond of unity over the entire extension of the Arab dominions and the wider Islamic faith. from the seventh century onward. The Koran must not be translated, and therefore non-Arab converts had to learn Arabic to read and understand it (as non-Arab members of the faith still do in Iuslim schools in Malaya and elsewhere). Like other sacred texts the book gave rise to a tradition of linguistic exegesis and commentary.' there were too the needs of the bureaucracy in the

, " f

training of administrators and officials in the recognized language or

the Islamic empire. The teaching of Arabic thus took up a position analogous to that of Latin in the Western Empire.

Some rivalry developed between different philological schools in the Arab world, and, particularly in the school of Basra, Aristotelian influence was felt as part of the wider impact made on Arabic learning ~Y Greek philosophy and Greek science. Basra laid stress on the st~ct regularity and the systematic nature of language as a means of logtcal discourse about the world of phenomena; here it is possible that Aristotelian ideas on analogy made an impact (p. 22, above). A :ival group of linguistic scholars in Knfa gave more importance to the .dl:,ersity of language as it was actually found, including dialectal vaflatlO~s and textual occurrences as thev were accepted; in some ways this school maintained' anornalist ' views, The extent, if any, of the influence of Dionysius Thrax's Techne on Arab grammatical theory is disputed. The work had been translated into Armenian and Syriac early

98 CHAPTER FIVE

in the Christian era I [ d

is Certain that A. b ~ ~~ m.ay. have been studied by the Arabs, But it

systematization rfa thC . mgmsts developed their own insights in the

o t err language d J ,

models on it as the L ~ .. . .. an In no way Imposed Greek

0\ b' atrn grammanans had been led to do 12

• ra IC grammatical sch I h'. '

of the eighth . , oars lp reached its culmination at the end

century In the gra . f Sibawai , ,

not an Arab hi If . m~ar 0 1 awaih of Basra, significantly

rnse but a Perslan th '.' h ,. I

stimulus to r " , us Wltnessmg to t e perenma

. mgU[Stic research 1 . ·'1 llv i .

tacts, He was a . '1. . ymg in cu .tura ly imposed language con-

theory and I "PUPI of AI-Khalil, who had himself worked in metrical

ex!cography SOb 'h'

AI kitab. fixed' . h : I awan s work, known just as 'the book',

, In t e mam the . I

the Arabic Ian f . grammatlca description and teaching of

c guage rom then on SOb ih Iik T h

LOundations laid b hi .. lawai, J.e . hrax, rested on t e

, Y IS predecessors H h . at

ArabiC substantiall ~. . e set out t . e grammar ofclassic

classes, inflected y as. It IS known today, recognizing three word

, . noun and verb and ' fl d narri .

tion of the verb I' f1' . unrn ecte particle, The descrip-

~ '. a In eXlOns was m tI b d ..

lam!llar in such I ·os y ase on the' triliteral ' roots,

examp es as k t b ' h

wrote, kitiib book· - - , write, wr ence come kataba, be

• , etc. Arab Iexic h d

roots the basis of th ' di .·ograp ers rna e these consonantal

Add' ,. _ err IChonaryentries.

ltlonally Slbawaih achieved '

of the Arabic script '\'L'1 . an mdependent phonetic description

" . • III C not up to I di

It was ahead of pre di n ian standards (pp . .141-3 below)

H. . ce lUg and co . ' .

e and other Arab gra . ntemporary western phonetic science.

or f . rnmanans were bl .

. ~ans 0 speech and the ,a e to set out systematically the

Iatlon the i mechamsrn of utt ., . .

as e Interference "tl . erance, interpreting arncu-

confi' '\1 1 egressive '. ,

guratlOns of the 1 air In vanous ways by different

desig t d . VOca· tract. The d .

na e ma.\'1'aj, literal!' 1 rno es of Interference were

workin f Y out et ' by whi h he ai "

g rom back to f . IC t, e air made its exit: and

they W b rant, from the th ,.'

ere a Ie to expound in e '. roar to the bps and the nose,

me,ntal sounds of the Arab' I XplJClt technical terminology the segarticulation of the 'emph.a1te, :mguage. Features such as the velarized

palatal"· IC cons .

id '. fjlZ3t10n of Vowels in certa' °hnants. and the velarization and

rcenu ed Th " ui P onet'

the. h . err onlY serious obserYat' l:~ Contexts were correctly

mec antcs of h . . •. tona ladu· J '

thouglt th di " t e vOice-voiceless di t' ,re ay in not diagnosing

e nilSlon of th' IS mChon in th

and the .. .. em lTIto two elas. . e consonants,

consonants were co ses Was treated .

'Omission I d" rrectly assigned h as Important

, n ian mfluenc to t ern I . f 1:;'

dOUbted., thou h it . e 'On the Arabs' ho : n view 0 t:IS

of sound class7ficati has be~n suggested. Certai~l :etzc ;vork may be the front, :agree Wi.t~nJ a~~ the order of descrip~o~e ;nlculatory basis

. . n Ian practice and th .. • rom the back to

, e ~rabs'h'

ac levernent in

THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTER 99

this branch of linguistics was far more successful in terms of descriptive accuracy than thatof the Greeks and the Romans.O

Interest in the Arabic and Hebrew languages and the separate scholarly tradition in which they had been treated contributed to the loosening of the bonds that too exclusive an attention to Latin and Greek had imposed on linguistics hitherto. This was reinforced by :l powerful drive in the study of the vernacular languages of Europe as themselves worthy objects of intense scholarly effort. In this field too no sharp dividing line can be drawn. During the mediaeval period vernacular grammars of Provencal and Catalan had been written,14 and Dante, whom some regard as the prophet of the later Renaissance, had done much to foster the study of the spoken Romance dialects as against written Latin, and through his writings in the vernacular had done much to establish a variety of spoken Italian as the literary and later the official language of the peninsula. But the Renaissance itself saw the publication of many of the first grammars of European languages, thus inaugurating an application of linguistic science that has developed without interruption from then on.

The first known native grammar of Spanish appeared in the fifteenth century, and the first native French and Italian grammars at the beginning of the sixteenth. During the same period grammars were published of Polish and of Old Church Slavonic,"!

The conditions in which these grammars were written and studied were very different from those prevailing in earlier times. The rise of national states, patriotic feeling, and the strengthening of central governments made for the recognition of a single variety of a territorial language as official; men felt it a duty to foster the use and the cultivation of their own national language. From the end of the fifteenth century Castilian Spanish was so treated in Spain, and Charles V broke with the universalist Latin tradition in addressing the Pope in Spanish.P The invention of printing diffused knowledge at a vastly increased rate, and the rise of a commercial middle class spread literate education through wider circles of society and encouraged the study of modern foreign languages. The publication of dictionaries, both unilingual and bilingual, accompanied the publication of grammars, and has gone on. ever since. In England, because of the introduction of French as the language of the conquerors after the Norman invasion and its continued use by the upper classes for some centuries thereafter, a number of grammars and practical manuals of the French language were produced during the Middle Ages. But the systematic study and

100

CM~PTER FIVIl

teac~ing. of !rench in England can really be said to begin with the publication in 1530 of J. Palsgrave's L' esclarcissement de la langue francoyse, a work of more than a thousand pages, dealing with French orthography, pronunciation, and grammar, the last in very great detail. I?

Secular and humanis t need ' .' ~ d b h .' f

_ . . s were r,emlorce y tense III status 0_

~he vernacular languages, of Europe after the translation of the Bible ~to them, one aspect of the religious Reformation. Luther's German BJbletawas printed in 1534, and by this time the Scriptures had been

trans ted into a number, f E .

· -. . 0 western uropean languages. A widespread

~terest 10 the theory and the technique of translation is indicated by t e Frenchman E. Dolet's brief essay on the subject. 18

On the whole the ' 1

wntren ranguages of the educated classes were

made the centre of· " .

I grammatical study. But wntten languages were

a so spoken and w itt b· .' , medi at L'. n en to e pronounced. The pronunciation of

laev ann had bee I 0 I . .' ,

fi In re atrve y unimportant and vaned With the

rst anguage of thek hile t

d d h spea er, w lie the grammars mechanically repro-

uce t e not very sci ti fi h .

elas 'at . . en 1 c p onetic descriptions of Priscian and the

SIC grammanans The ne .. , '

great attention to the' r . w grammars of. modem la~guages paid

dized in pri ti d elations between spelling, now being standar-

n mg, an pronu '. P

speUing refo . k nClatlOn. roblerns of orthography and of

11 rm too on a fre h . ifi

equation of lette d k S slgn,l ca, nee, and, while the c,onfusing

r an spo en so d . .

of existing s,peUing' , un continued, phonemic inadequaCies

. s were noted and ' '" d T .

mars show new letter si s to' r~sen~e. hus early Italian gram-

(M and leI; /,;}j and IO/).I~ distmgmsh open and close e and Q

The serious study ofthe' neo L .

h - attn (Ro . ) I id

to ave been instituted b D' mance 'anguages can be S31

f . . Y ante s De oul. . I .. 1

ourteenth century wh . h gan e oqu. entia 10 the ear y

1 ' erein e extolled th .

earned unconsciously in earl h' ,e merits of spoken languages

. arlY C Ildho d d

w, nuen Latin consciously a . d 0 an contrasted them with

hh cquire 118 a -

t ,roug grammatical rules I . . second language at school

It'., ,n a celebrated

P ea ror the cultlvatlOn of a .' passage Dante made a

· " ,common Italia ' '

serve to unify the peninsula of I Iv i n vernacular which should

did ta y in the w h

Courts I for other peoples.w ay t ,at centralized royal

The relationship between th R

h h' , e " amance langu .

w at, t e a,nclent world had alw '1 :k' ages and Latin provided

k e ays ac ed a p .

wor lor dealing with language ch I' ., roper theoretical frame-

til t ' " ange. t might r

a It was In these studies that histori II' . _ . _ easonably be argued

· d . . - nCa mgulstl

It to ay, finds Its real beginning Th . di cs, as We understand

• e Fe lSCOvery of cia . I ' _

ssica antIqmty

THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTER

TOI

in all its glory as part of the revival of learning gave Renaissance man a historical perspective such as the Middle Ages had not had, The sound changes (expressed as changes of letters) by which Spanish, French, ami Italian words could be historically related to the corresponding' parent' Latin forms were systematically recorded and seriously studied; and, perhaps more significantly, the questions that arise from changes in grammatical systems were faced and answered. The Romance vernaculars ","ere not just corrupted Latin, but languages (If merit and standing, in their own right, sprung from Latin and

related to it in interesting ways." -

The causes of this linguistic change were discussed, and writers

referred to the factors of linguistic contacts and mixtures, and of the gradual independent changes that take place in the transmission of a spoken language from one generation to the next, Scholars recorded the origin of the Romance futures from Latin infinirives followed by forms of the verb habere, to have, and the fact that the caseless nouns of the modern Romance languages had replaced the paradigms of separate case forms found in Latin. This latter change provoked an important reappraisal of the role of prepositional constructions. While most of the Romance prepositions can be formally matched with their corresponding Latin originals, there is a marked difference between tho~e whose syntactic and semantic uses broadly continue those of the Latin forms, as with Italian in, in, and con, with, and those like French de and Italian di, which on the whole correspond semantically to Latin oblique case inflexions, usually the genitive, without any preposition. In 1525 Pietro Bembo raised the question whether these latter were prepositions properly speaking or rather just case-signs. segl,li di caso,;v and the matter was discussed by his contemporaries, one writer argUIng that di in padrone di casa, master of the house. is a seg7lo di caso, but th~t it is a preposition in sono partito di casa, I have left the house.:!.3 It is easy to say that historical and descriptive linguistics are not adequately distinguished here; but what is important is the beginning of the processof setting free the grammatical description and teaching of moder~ languages from categories imposed for no other reason than t~e1r relevance to Latin, a process to be seen at work also in the suc~esslO,n of grammars of English after the Renaissance, despite the lack m this case of a direct genetic relationship (p. 119, below). In like mann.er the Priscianic system of eight word classes was not left unquestIOned.

.. in his Systems of fewer and of more classes were proposed. Nebrija

G,amatica de la lengua castellana (1492) set up ten.~4 However the

THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTER

103

CHAPTER FIVE

definite separation of n d di . . .

wait .'1 he ei ouns an a Jectlves into distinct classes had to

untn t e eighteenth century.

Among the Renaissanc .' .

b . e grammanans Pierre Ramee (Petrus Ramus

om c. I5IS) IS wen kno ' d h ... '

m d .., wn, an .. ias been hailed as 8 precursor of

o ern structuralism 2S M . 11"

rhi k . h . ore .genera y he IS regarded as one of the

In ers W 0 marked the t " f

world H' ducati ransrtion rom the mediaeval to the modern

, IS e ucational reform idelv ]

Europe and . h hi s were WI ely influential in northern

, . WIt s celebrated . , f Ari "

degree disputati « rejection 0 ristotle In hIS master's

esse" hi Ion ,quaecumque ab Aristotele dictaessent commentitia

, everyt mg Anstotle said js t ,

study of the liberal arts in .' 15 wrong) he went on to revivify the

lianism and mod' ..: Pans, formerly the stronghold of Aristote-

• ., . ISuC grammar He' 1 h '

IStiC teaching of th 1 ' I' vigorous y e ampioned the human-

e c assrca languages thr h hei 1'·

than through schol ti A' ."., oug t err lterature rather

.. , .. as IC .ristotelianism Mt b ., 1 d i h

relIgIOUS strife of th times." . '.. .rter ecom. mg mvo ve 10 t e

e tmes he was . d d i

Bartholemew in 1572• Z6' mur ere 10 the massacre of St.

Ramus wrote grammars of G .'

his theory of grammar' hi reek, Latin, and French, and set down

grammar o.f French h . md d~ Schclae grammaticae.rt While in his e rna e id ti

mar, he showed a p ac C use of references to Latin gram-

roper app '.

Rather than follow phil hi recianon of each individual language.

id . . osop leal argu

Sat , did not save the sch lasti ments on grammar, which, he

d ' 0 astics from barb '

nee 10 the ancient 1 . ar ansms,zs he stressed the

1 ' . anguages to foll h

c. asslc.al authors and' h .. ouow t. e observed usage of the

f' ,10 t e modern 1

o native speakers. H' .. I anguages the observed usage

s: . ... IS grammatical d "'. . ..

are formal 10 today's . - escnpnons and classifications

th .. sense, relying , h

. e categories of loeic b neit er on semantics nor on

f ... ut on thel '

orms. . . re anons between actual word

Ramus's gramm f F

of . ,ar a rench contains

the pronuncianon of the I one of the earliest treatments

th d.iff. .anguage· d h

e. erences between Latin . &' an e took care also to point to

and Latin as 'I . as 10rmerly spok b '

. vanous Y pronounced b . en y Latin-speakers

own phonological patterns after learn?' th.ose who subjected it to their mar he preserved the Pri .. .. .. ng It at schoolzo In L ti

purely' f . al' scraruc elght word cl • a 10 gram. b orrnai cnteri. a for their id -tifi·· .. ' assea, but in demanding

num erand its b en cation he ad . -

. _ a sence the basic di ,.m e Inflexion for

nouns, pronouns, verbs and . .~ vision between them .'

ith all h ,PartICIples ( hi h ' contrasting

wi . . t e rest.30 This reli . W c he regarded .. for vrar ...., iance on number. ,aa nouns)

. gr~atlcal c~ass'fication was influential ~ the pnncipal cat.egory

on which the ancient gram' .• whereas case inft' - •

manans had relied exton

so much had largely

102

disappeared in the modern languages, number still remained as an inflexional category, Ramus made use of the same distinction in his French grammar,]l and it was taken up after him by some writers of

English grammars (p, 120, below).

In his account of Latin morphology he reorganized the traditiona~

system of declensions by making his basic criterion for classification the parisyllabicity or imparisyUabicity of the case forms of a noun or adjective (whether the different cases did or did not substantially agree in the number of their syllab1es),ll Latin verbs are distinguished primarily by whether their future tense is formed with -b- (amiibo, etc.) or not, thus largely corresponding to the traditional first and second conjugations on the one hand and the third and fourth on the other." Interestingly Ramus remarked that though Priscian and the other grammarians of Latin did not make use of this classification themselves, they none the less provided the material on which such a formal

classification could be made.I+

Ramus's syntax was also based on the distinction between words

with number inflexion and words without it, and was systematized by reference to the two categories of syntactic relation, concord and government (in this he was indebted to mediaeval grammatical theory)."

Contacts between European linguistic scholarship and the work of Jewish and Arabic grammarians during the later Middle Ages have been mentioned already. These were by no means the only non·European languages with which Europeans became acquainted in the Renaissance. Colonization of the New World and voyages of discovery round the globe, the establishment of trading stations and expatriate settlements, and the despatch of missionaries all played their part in awakening scholars to the hitherto undreamed wealth of linguistic diversity in the world. This process continued unchecked. and indeed is still in progress, with missions playing a leading part. Appropriately Firth referred to the linguistic aspect of the expansion of Europe as the

'discovery of Babel' .36

From the New World, grammars of Nahuatl (Mexico), Quechua

(Peru), and Guarani (Brazil) were published in 1571, 1560• and 1640 respectively; in Europe .8 Basque grammar appeared in 1587 and the seventeenth century saw gr.ammars of Japanese and Persian published. Among the linguistic work done under the control of missionary activities, mention should be made of the achievements of the PropagandaFide department of the Roman Church and of Jesuit missionaries during the sixteenth, seventeenth. and eighteenth centuries. India, south-east

l04CHA PTER PI VI!

Asia, and the Far East were 11" d

encounte . d fi a visited, and sever. al of the languages there

. re were rst subjected t . .. ' .

missionaries f th .. ' . 0 a roman transcnpnon by Catholic

by these rni .or ' .~ translation of the Scriptures. The alphabets devised

issionanes for so f h 1

the phonetic . b ' me 0 t, e ianguages of India and Burma, and

. 0 servanons accom ' h h .

linguists of rh panymg t em ave been p.ralsed by

. e present century 37 . d h ' .

Alexander d Rl d "an t e transcrrptton made by

e 10 es for V ietn ' .. 6 . . . '

alterations the ffici I ,. . .. amese m I 51 IS stili, with mmor

S. ' 0 era wntmg system of Vietnam

orne study of Sanskrit w . '. '

were made on ce t ' as undertaken,. and Isolated observatlons

Italian G k r am a~parent resemblances between that language and Trad ree, and Latin (p, 135, below).

e routes had linked Chi d

through central A iav and na an the R. oman Empire overlarid

. sia, an the western ld di .'

qmty of the Sere (f . n wor was limly aware III anti-

Marco Polo hadS t . arl1awd'ay to the. east). Early in the fourteenth century

rave e throu h A' . far as Chi '

a number of ~. I g sia as ar as C. hina and had studied

Asian anguages duri .

direct contacts betw E urIng hIS resi.dence. But prolonged

.... een uropean hI'

started with th . al . sc 0 ars and the Chinese reallv

Fe arrrv of traders . d ., . • rancis Xavier h db' an rrussionarres in the Far East,

a esta hshed J.' ,. .

the time of his d I' esuit rmssions m China and Japan by

cat 1 m 1552 and al

became masters of diff . t.. sever members of these missions

f h erent varteties of Chi

o t e best known, . mese. Of them Ricci is one

Trigault, who translated R' :'

the salient differences b ICC I S famous diary into Latin recorded

'E etween the Chi I. '

'" estern r: urope that trik . inese languages and those of

I s n e the first ye d

a most complete lack f rr ' ar stu ent of Chinese today: the

so h . 0 morphological .di .'

rnuc attentIOn in Lt"· para gms such as had received

gra . . a m and Greek a d

:nmattcal structure th di . .n were seemingly essential to

lexical h ' e IstmctlOn of h

omophones by diff '. w at would otherwise be

a common w-i erences In pitch (t )

. on written language [Chi ones, and the existence of

h1terate persons irrespective ofthtnde~ffe. characters) readily intelligible to

pete bani' e 1 erences .

ers to mtercomm . .' • amountmg often to corn-

the varieties of spoken Chi umcatlOn, that existed betwee . 1 f

Chi h . . nese.os .. n severa 0

na ad developed . .

the tir . an lIIdlgenous t diti

I .Ime western scholars made COn ra t1O.n of linguistic studies by

anguages. ~ character writin s 'st. tact With the countr: and its ~epresentatlon of individual ~o ) hem, properly defined as t~e . hi m use since 2000 Be. rp emes by separate s grap c ficial similariti . h and was of native origin d ~mbols, had been

In d f· ies to c aracter systems in oth ' espue certain super~

o e 0 representi hi· er parts of h .

",ng t e ianguage in writ" .. t e world. This

. mg. together with th . .

e isola-

THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTER lOS

ting, analytic structure of Chinese grammar. determined the course taken by linguistic studies in Chinese civilization.

From the end of the sixteenth century the nature of the Chinese

writing system was known in Europe and it played an important part in some directions oflinguisticresearch(pp.1I3-4,below), besides making European scholars aware of the existence of a group of languages whose phonological, grammatical, and lexical organization differed markedly from those of languages with which earlier generations had been familiar. The first grammars of Chinese published in European languages, by Francisco Varo and by J. H. de Prernare. appeared at the beginning

of the eighteenth century. 39

The virtual absence of morphological paradigms in Chinese did not

encourage early grammatical study, apart from some attention to the class of particles" A distinction was made between' full words', those capable of standing alone and bearing an individual lexical gloss, and 'empty ,,,'-ords' or particles, serving grammatical purposes within sentences containing full words but scarcely having a statable meaning in isolation. This passed through Premare into general linguistic usage."? Full words were further divided into' living words'. verbs, and' dead words', nouns. But the main linguistic efforts of the Chinese were

turned on to lexicography and phonology.

Dictionaries were produced in China from the second century A.D.

onward. As elsewhere the stimuli were the linguistic changes in the lexicon of the literary language. These made some characters obsolete and altered the meanings of others, thus increasing the difficultie~ of studying the ancient classics of Chinese literature, One of the earhest known Chinese dictionaries, the Shuo well (c. A.D. 100), making use of the revised writing system that had been standardized three centuries earlier, arranged the characters in the manner employed ~ver since, by 'radicals', though the number of the • radicals' has slfi~e been reduced. Each character is analysed into tWO components III lexicography, a 'radical', which in part correlates with the gen~r~l meaning of some of the characters containing it, and the' phonetic, which sometimes gives an indication of the pronunciation of the character, though semantic and phonetic changes have made :hes~ indications very patchy and at best only approximate. The • radlcal~ are ordered serially starting with those containing onestrok7'. 111 ascending order of numbers of strokes; and the characters contam~ng each • radical' and so listed under it are likewise arranged in ascendlng order of numbers of strokes in the' phonetic ' (certain characters con-

sist of 'radical' only; these come first in the lists).

106

CHAPTER PI VI!

THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTER

Later dictionaries attempted to deal with the probJem of indicating the pronunciation of characters, in view of phonetic changes that had taken place in the language since the classical literary era. This provided the. matrix for the development of the phonological study of literary Clunese.. The character represented the morpheme rather than the word, though in classical Chinese especially many words were monomorphemic; and, broadly speaking, the morpheme was phonologically repr~ented by a single syllable, falling within a limited number of possible syllable structures, There was no segmental representation of the components of the syllable in Chinese character writing, and the focus of Chinese phonological thinking was on the isolated monosyllable and on the means of indicating the pronunciation of characters that had become ?bsolete or had formerly had different phonetic values.

At first the only method available Was the citation of a homonym of the character concerned, but from the third century A.D. onward the syllable was analrsed into initial and final components, the final being taken as everythmg coming after the initial consonant, and including the t~ne: The pronunciation of a character could now be indicated by the crtation of two oth ha . . , , d

b er c racters whose pronunciation was assume

to e known the i iti 1 f h fi ~ ., h

' ' ru ia 0 t erst and the final of the second gIvmg t e

syllable composit' n d h' ,

, ~. 10 an so t e pronunCIation of the character III

questlOn. Thus the ch

th h ~ aracrer read Ikol with a rising tone followed by

e c aracter read Ih' ith I

't' . f· we wit ·a eve! tone would indicate the pronun-

Cia Ion 0 a character read /kwe! with a J

By the ti hi ' ~ r Ievel tone,

irne t s techn.,que' '.,.

alreadyact'lv 'Ch' . '. was 10 use BuddhIst .mlsslOnanes were

~ e In ina and t' ~. bI

logical anal' f he , 1 IS pOSsle that even this limited phone-

YS1S 0 t e syllabI '.

alien alphabetic sc ' t C ' e ,,:as mspll"ed by acquaintance with an

that in A.D. 489 th:l~hm ertamly It was with the aid of Buddhist monks defined as integral co . ese tones Were for the first time systematically

mponents of k .

had been a tone langua f . , spo. en syllables, although Chinese

ge rom tl' .

The next advance in pho 1 . me munemQnal.41

Sanskrit linguistic studies (P:O OglCal analysis Was directly influenced by weU~known rhyme tables set' 141- 3, below). In the eleventh century the

l' . , out: the total f h

.lterary Chmese, represented b h. 0 t e OCcurrent syllables of

• ..1 Y c aractel's

verucsr columns held the 'l!l't'a} .. ,On a chart in which the

11 8 and th h '

fin~, now further analysed so as t di ~ O~lZontal rows listed the

seouvowels such as l-w-/finaI vo . 1° ~ stmgulsh medial (post-initial)

TL:- , • We or VOwel I

tone. ...., two~dimensiona.l classifi . . P us consonant, and the

di '. - h . . . catlonenabled Chin

snnguis ,as the StOICS had aIread d' ese scholars to

Y one In th

e west (p. 24. above),

between non-occurrent but phonologically possible fo~ms. and fomos excluded by the rules of Chinese syllable structure, In~lan lnfluen~e IS marked in the ordering of the initials by their articulation ; the plosives and nasals were arranged in groups of four by place and m,anner of articulation, jk/, fkhJ, Jg/, IfJJ, It/, Ithl, /d/. In!, etc" and articulatory terminology was used to differentiate them. These rhyme tables are of the greatest importance in the reconstruction of the spok:n f?rm~ of Chinese syllables in this period of the language, but their luston,c~1 significance lies in their evidence of the development under Sanskritic influence of a segmental analysis in the face of the tradition engendere,d by a morphemic-syllabic script, which had first suggested an analysis into initials and finals much more like Firthian prosodic phonology than segmental phonemics.t=

V arious modifications and elaborations were made in this system of phonological analysis during the mediaeval and modern periods of Chinese linguistic scholarship, The emphasis changed from the stu~y of the language of classical literature to the contemporary colloquial northern Chinese of Peking, along with other varieties of sp?~en Chinese. In the seventeenth century Pan-lei, an excellent phon~tl~lan and dialectologist, travelled allover China studying the ?ialect vanations of the different regions, But little of further general Importance to~k place before European scholarship began seriously to interest itself tn the linguistic problems presented by the Chinese language (or languages), including the transcription of Chinese syllables in roman letters,

an interest very much to the fore at the present time, '.' ,

It has been seen how important a part was played by hngUl~uc contacts from outside in the development of Chinese phonological analysis. But China herself was the source of a linguistic prdblem and of its SOlution, the adaptation of the Chinese character writing system to an unrelated language of very different structure.

The Japanese language is genetically unrelated to Chinese, but from the fifth century A.D, onward there was considerable contact bet~veen Japan and China, and the Japanese borrowed freely from Chinese li .. . f Chi'· . l·t with large numbers of

.iterature and other aspects 0 . nese cu ure, .. ~

. .• W ." . as introduced

Chinese words being taken into the language. ntmg w

from China, and the problem at once arose of adapting the charac~ers

bat l . h . . llables to the reqUlre-

t at in Chinese represented une angmg monosy ... . ~.~

f ' h ' 1" deri tions and Inflexions. At

ments 0 a language nc in agg utmanve envau .

fir bv i . '. h agglutinated elements

st the problem was solved y 19nonng It, t e . .

of words were left unrepresented and the characters were used as they

107

108

THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTER

109

eRA PTER FIVB

would have been' Chi

.. n m nese sentences. Ultimately the situation still in

use today was evol d h .

. . . . ve , w erem the characters are used to represent

invariable words and th " ..

h d ' .' . . e constant root element of variable words, while

t e· erivational and' fl ~ I· '

I k " . In exrona parts of word structures are written in

t re . ana syllabary a t f 'II bi ,

chara . . ,se, or sy a rc signs derived from bits of particular

~ers used for their phonetic value alone,

An intermediate st h' "

I . age, owever, IS worthy of notice, In this the

c taracter represent d th . .

I . - e e root of the word, but other grammatical

e ements, as well as certai , 'I' ,,' ,

't . ' di er am partie es In close syntactic relationship with

I , were in icated gra hi 11 b

cliff ., , p ca y y means of diacritical marks written at

erent posmons rou d h h '

to fea . ld b n t e c aracter Itself. Thus the verb kasikom,-'

r, wou e represe t db' .

meanin '. Chi ,. n e y a particular character bearing a similar

g In mese and a . II' I "

would f th ' " . smai eire e at Its lower left hand corner

ur ier indicate the d k 'k" .

stroke at the " ,.,', wor an omite, fearing, and a diagonal

tori (h . t)op right-hand cor,ner would indicate the word kasikomi-

> e, etc.: feared 43 Th' hozranhi , . .

use but it i f ' " IS ort ographic system did not remain 10

, IS 0 mterest m 't . 'I .

and expe ' . 1 II Simi anty t.o certain lin,guistic. speculations

nments m Eur duri

centuries (p II b lope unng the sixteenth and seventeenth

. 7, e ow),

To many thinking peo le ] h

Europe the revi al f P, In t e first phase of the Renaissance .in

" IV 0 ancient I ' .

glones of the Gr R earning and the new awareness of the

eco- oman 1 'at

significant charact . . c aSSIC . world were probably the most

, . . ' .. enShcs of th· I '. .,

and revival of le " . e age. ndeed, the words' Renaissance

ammg testify t this c ' '. ,

num, bers of early Re '. ,0 IS conception. It JS noticeable how

, , nalssance writers . f

to justify and illustrat thei . quote reely from classical sources

I e eir arguments I ki di , '

no longer under any 'taO t f .' 00 mg irectly to antiquity.

I in 0 pagarus b .

exa ted humanism with which • ~n, ut rather seen as a period of

worth and dignity of rna ' h~enIDssance thinkers, in stressing the

1 ki . n in IS ow . h J:

mara msiup. Such me f h n ng t, felt an intellectual and

b .. n or t e Rena'

e contlnumg the work of . , .Issance considered themselves to

abl ' E . ancient cIvIlj·· T .

, e I,nurope .we.re now appr ' ,. zation. he classical texts avail-

study f '., oxunately tho 'I

, 0 ancient hterature took h se aVID able today, and the

age an til 1 ' __ 1 • on t e fonns r ' .

, e ciassi ...... ,cumc:ula of h. 1 ecogmzable m the present

The Greek and Latin das' sc 00 s and universities.

tl . " SICS Were re d f

ie onglnal languages not 'by ,a, or their own merits an d in

ffi ial ' ,> m.eans of t l'

a CI mterpretatlOns of sch I' rans abons or th h h

, . . 0 astrc the.olo . , ,roug t e

conception may' be said t h . .g1ans. In the Re issance th

, ,0 ave been for naissance te

literature as the basis of a lib al .' med of the stud f 1· . ical

Till ' er ·educatlOn y 0 c asSIC

s changed attitude towards Lat" d'

III an Greek h d '

a Its effect on the

linguistic study of these languages, especially of Latin. The emphasis was set on Latin as the language of Cicero and Vergil, the language of the ancient world, not on mediaeval Latin as a lingua franca of education and intellectual intercourse, Latin as an elegant language enshrining a. great literature was the proper object of study, Some scholarly works continued for a time to be written in Latin, but the rise in status of European vernaculars and the spread of secular learning in secular states fostered national languages as proper media for scholarly and scientific publication. Indeed, the very standards of correctness and elegance now insisted on militated against the use of Latin as an international language, As we find with English today, the acceptance of the role of an international or a world language entails an acceptance of regional variations of all kinds and the relaxation of standards of correctness from those enjoined in metropolitan literature,

Many of the technical advances in descriptive efficiency realized during the Middle Ages were retained, and in places mediaeval didactic grammars like that of Alexander of Villedieu continued in use; but the general conceptions of the speculative grammarians were severely attacked by Renaissance grammarians as being philosophically pretentious, educationally undesirable, and couched in a barbarous degeneration of the Latin language, H The return to preeminence of the auctores foretold in the Battle of the seven arts had indeed come to pass.

Scholastic grammarians had done little more than copy Priscian's account of Latin pronunciation, and the actual speaking of Latin largely depended on the phonetics of the first language of the persons concerned, This feature of Latin ,speaking continued as it still does today; but concern for what was considered to be the correct pronun~ elation, that is to say the pronunciation of the time of Cicero and t~e other golden age authors, was expressed in writings on the Lat,lll language even if their practical effect on most pupils was, as it still is,

relatively small.

Erasmus (1466-1536) wrote on the correct pronunciation of La~n

and Greek, and his system of Greek pronunciation was accepted In northern Europe.v Among other observations on Latin, he establis,hed along with others that the Latin letters c and g represented velar articulations in all positions i.n classical Latin,although the currently spoken Romance languages with only a few exceptions (Illyrian and Sardinian) had sibilant or affricate pronunciations of these letters before front vewels, The orthographers, whose work on the phonetic interpretation of current spelling systems has already been noticed (po 100, above),

ItO

THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTER

III

CHAPTER FIVE

also turned the' attenti hi'

h ] . ' ~. ir ention to ts hitherto neglected aspect of classical

lie 0 arship in Europe 46 I . he writi f '

1 ' . . n t e wntmg 0 Latin, Ramus introduced the

etters} and 'V to repre . t th '. . .

'. sen, ne semivowel pronunciations (in words such

as Jam (lam) now and " t -' ae) ..

" '. ' ctrtus, virtue], as distinct from the vowel pro-

nu ncranons [1] and [ ]. h d . .

Th .. .. u, U . a previously been the cursive form of J',

e two letters J and ~, k ,f· . .

• . . v "ere now n or a tune as the' Ramist conso-

nants ; one notices th t 'II .

. , . . a v sti survives but not j in the usual way of

writing Latm.47 .

The teaching of L ti d G

f .. , , a In an reek grammar gradually took on the

orm in which It is k ' d .

Essential! . hi n~", n to ay ill the standard school textbooks.

y t IS process m vol d th . , ,

t t';' ve e incorporanon of mediaeval syn-

ac IC nonons Into the . hi'

, . morp 0 ogical systematization of the late Latin

grammanans ultirnatelv . ' h f 1

sep t,' ) wit . urt ier developmcnts such as the final

. . ara Ion of the ad'ccti f

:.\1 d ., L' J ve rom the noun class (though as late as

- a vig s ann grammar th • .

ad' . ,. " e terms noun substantive' and 'noun

jecnve remained m use4S) d h .'

inflexio f h ,an t e mergmg of the participle into the

.. ns 0 t e verb,

By the sixteenth centur ' ,

based gramm .. ,y a reaction against exclusively literature-

. ars was seen 10 cert " ,

Sanctius wh "l am writers, notably J. C. Scaliger and

, 0 were again 10 ki f '

gr. ammatical rules S I' ,0 109 or a philosophical justification for

, ca iger s De ' r "

along earlier schol ti I". causts mguae Latinae sought to renew,

as IC mes t hI'

to Aristotelian phil hical e exp ananon of grammar by reference

f 10S0p ical coricepts ; h bi 1 ~

or showing an ex' , ' e itter y attacked Erasmus

cesstve devotion t Ci

for Latin prose ~9 S ,. 0 icero as the only proper model

. . ancnus devot d L •. " ,

de mum linguae Latinae to a I " e mUCII space In his Mineroa seu

In England W Lilv' L o.glcal theory of syntax,50

b ' . . t y s atm grammar ' d h disti . f

emg Officially prescribed f enjove t e stmctron 0

(the official version in factor scho?1 use by King Henry VIII in 1540

, , can tamed c t ib '

t.emporary gramrnarian, 11) on n utions from other con-

. , .. as We . .5 I Lil ' .

the Priscianic system with . h Y s grammar In the main follows

, elg t word c1

severely practical and did' . asses or parts of speech. It is

h'l c • actIc, and does· ,,' ,

P I osophical theory or specularl A not engage in linguistic or

r h d hi • . Ion. . cent I

IS e IS E .. S.SG)' on the rational'l "11 . ury ater B. assett Jones pub-

1 1 Y OJ teart 0'" pL'

suppement to Lily's grammar H.. laid ! .. $ =«: expressly as a

A' I .. . e la!. daltn t h

. nstot e and of Francis Bacon b ·h' 0 u e support both of

, ., ut IS allegedl '

some gram. matical facts are mostlv ith " ~ ratlOnal explanations of

Thlr-' - er er unongm 1

e enects on linguistic studies b . h .3. or absurdly fanciful.

, " roug t abo t b

Ism, ~tlOnahsmJ and secular governm U y the rise of human-

expansion of E h . ent, along with h

urope, ave been noticed. The R . . t e overseas

enalSsance period was

also the first age of printing in Europe (independently China had invented paper in the first century A.D. and block printing in the tenth). From then on literacy and the demand for education grew steadily, even though universal education was not achieved in Europe before the nineteenth century. Knowledge travelled faster and spread more widely. The study of foreign languages as wen as that of the classical lan~uages was immeasurably enlivened by the multiplicity and availability of printed texts, grammars, and dictionaries. These same factors made the exchange of knowledge and theoretical discussion between scholars in different lands much easier and more speedy. and as time went on some of the features of the present-day world of learning began to take shape. Learned societies, sometimes fostered by national governments, came into being as centres for scholarly debate and scientific research. In Britain the Royal Society was founded in 1662 and its early years were much concerned with linguistic research; and in France Cardinal Richelieu established the Acadlmiefranfaise in 1635 to keep permanent watch and ward on the literary and linguistic standards of the French language. Learned and specialized journals, such as now play so great a part in the development of linguistics, and the other branches ~f knowledge, grew up around the societies and institutions, though this process was not fully achieved before the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries.

It was seen in earlier chapters how the course of linguistic science in

antiquity and the Middle Ages was in part. determined by its invo:ve• ment in controversies between opposing points of view on questIOns wider in extent than the study of language itself. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries the philosophical world was preoccupied with the debate between empiricists and rationalists, and the views held by each group of thinkers produced their effects on the

treatment of linguistic questions. .

Empiricism had arisen as part of the challenge to the accepted ideas

of mediaeval scholasticism. The rise of a modern scientific outlook ready to confound authority with observed fact and to remodel t~eory toiaeorporate newly discovered data was famously exemplified in ~he work of Galilee, Copernicus, and Kepler. Empiricism asa philosophical standpoint was a particularly British contribution; Francis ,Bacon had stressed the observational origin of all knowledge and the unportance of induction as opposed to deduction. and Locke, Ber~eley. and Hume wrote what are now the accepted expositions of this phase of

philosophy.

112

CHAPTER FIV'!

The centrepiece of empiricism was the thesis that all human knowJedge is derived externally from sense impressions and the operations of the mind upon them in abstraction and generalization. Its extreme form appears in Hume"s total rejection of an a prIori component of knowledge. Opposed to this in many ways was the rationalist position, expounded by Descartes and his followers. The rationalists sought for the certainty of knowledge not in the impressions of the senses but in the irrefutable truths of human reason. In some respects the Cartesian position was the more traditional, but both schools of thought agreed in their reliance on mathematics and Newtonian science in place of scholastic Aristotelianism as the foundation of philosophical reasoning,

A celebrated aspect of the empiricist-rationalist controversy turned on the question of' innate ideas'. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume denied the existence of any ideas implanted in the human mind prior to experience; the Cartesian rationalists regarded certain innate ideas as the basis of any certainty in Our knowledge; these included the ideas of number and figure, and logical and mathematical conceptions. To some extent the two sides Were nearer in fact than in terminology, Experience of the world and knowledge are not mereLy sense impressions, and the part pta)'cd by the rationalist innate ideas corresponds somewhat to that of Locke's admitted 'operations of our minds within'. The question cent~ally at iss~e is the extent to which the human mind plays an active role 10 _perceptl?n and! in the acquisition of knowledge.53

Dunng the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a number of separate hut, re~ated movements made their appearance in linguistic research, sp?ngJ.~g from the intellectual condition of the times, In them both ratlOnahstand' .. ,

.. .. empmclst influences may be seen at work.

The bre~down of Latin as the international language of learning

and authonty the em f th . .

. .' ergence 0 e European vernaculars mto full

recogmtlon and the d' '.

11 h 1 d' new lScovenes In the field of languages overseas

a . epe. to create the feeli h·" .,

d . mg t at It Was in men's power to Improve

an even to create languages to suit the ne d f I

Francis Bacon had de Ide sot ie age, .

h '·d· . pore. the unnecessary controversies caused by

t e lOa equacies of existing Ian .. , '

P· lace' and ' d guages, part of th .. e Idols of the market

.." . enVIsage a vast' .

words with thin~ ., . l~provement based on the -analogy. of

"'-, not Just with one anoth I di ishi h

descrip· live gra ...... ~~ £ •... . er, . n IstlllgUlsmg t e

. ..u ..... r Oa particular lang f ' •

general grammar he seems t h h . u~ge rom a philosophical or

o ave ad the Idea f . , . I

language for the commu . t'f . . 0 constructing an Idea

. ruca Ion 0 knowl d f h

features of a number of existing Ian cHge ro~ t e ,best parts and

guages, The mventton. of printing

Il3

THB RENAISSANCB AND AFTER

, . t d in turning attention

made standardized spellings more importan ,an I ,

, ". d . iati on aroused interest,

to the relations between wntmg an pronuncl ,

, "bl f 11'· reform, One gets the

since then perennial m the pro em 0 spe ing ..

'.. ' . 1 'E· I nd and on thecontment

impression of numbers of scho ars in ng a .

. d ·1" alry on various aspects

working, partly in collaboration an part y 10 rolV ,

of language improvement and language planning,

the invention of a new

The most radical proposal of the age was . h

. f l .' d mmerce throughout t e

language for the advancement 0 earmng an co d '

, , , . hi! I' franca was dead or ymg,

civilized world, L. ann as the erstw e tngua . d th

,. . , B b I had been reveale ; t ese

and the extent of the world s linguistic a e .' .' ,

ts at 'debabehzatlon

projects of new universal languages were attcmp. h

or a restoration of the situation, 5) At this time people did not so muhc

lik d E peranto created from t e

envisage a universal language I .e mo ern s·. f

material of existing languag. es.; ra. th. er, they had the bo~dder. schem1de bOe

. h ht and 1 eas COl.! .

devising a system in which knowledge, t oug , .

directly and universally e. xpressed in. symbols create~ f~r t(h168 p6-urpos6e)

, Le bniz I 4- 171

and for which pronunciations could be given, 1 1 eel b . h

. -ould be reso v Y t e

looked forward to the day when controversies wo . d

1 b ns of a newly devise

mere invitation to sit down and calcu ate y mea ,

f f gueness and uncertam-

universal symbolization of thought, fee rom va , ' ,

, , I· Z'" rsalis antlClpates some

ties of natural language, HIS Specimen ca eu i umoe ., li

' h h i b sed on the Anstote an

features of modern symbolic logic, t oug It IS a .

syllogism,.s6 . .. l' clums human

If such symbol systems were not to be hopeless y . y,.

d d ordered conspectus.

knowledge. must be classified and re uce to an. bl

. f this kind was practlca e

The inspiration that a universal language 0 .1 f h un an

. t f ith in the power 0 . urn.

sprang from a number of sources, grea ai ," 1

. . "f h . idly expandmg empmca

rationality, the classifications 0 te now rapi , b r

h f mathematlcal sym 0 Ism

sciences the appreciation of t e power a " . d i

, 1 ' h unctanon appeare In

(Arabic numerals as written symbo s wit apron . f

. . . , d t nding of the nature 0

some projected languagesS7), and a rrusun ers a. ' . h

.. - , , ich h d b k own in Europe smce t e

Chinese character wntmg, which . a een n

end 'of the sixteenth century. . d f. .bolization,

Mathematics is a. g,enuinely language-free moe 0 ., symower of a

.. . h . . ge or expresswe P ,

though rt has not got t csemannc ran . • (. the-

"lans f mathematlcs OT rna

natural language (to speak of the .. guage 0 aloz: hould not be

matical language I is to use a metaphor, and the ~n agyh s ht to be the

inese ch e at the tune t aug

pressed too far). Chinese c aracters wer . " . 1 term for a

, id '( id. '<hh IS still a popu ar .

direct representation of I eas ,eOlJTar, . e of Chinese

Chinese character), This is not so; the written languag

114 CHAPTER FIVE

literature can be read and d· '

uninteUigible . " f un c.rstoo. d by educated speakers of mutually

. vanetres 0 spoken Chi b I"

like other Ian .. b . . nese, ut lor all that it is a language

guages, elonging to d evolved b .

communi! f an evorve y .a particular speech

yor set 0 speech co .. ' ~ . .

morphemes wh h . . mmuruties, and Its characters represent

, IC Can be given p' ..

in different di I . ' ronunciatrons, though different ones

, ra ect areas This _. 1

and grammatt'cal l' written anguage has grammatical classes

ru es as any other .

b.e understood 0 t . 1 ' d er written language does, and cannot

b r rans ate except f h d

o vious sentences without a' or very sort an transparently

grasped by sixtee~th- and se:nowledge of the grammar. This was not of the Chinese type f 1 enteenth-century Europe; the real study nineteenthcenturies~ anguage began only later in the eighteenth and

I? the seventeenth centurx vari .', .

or real characters' h Y ous people devised universal languages

M as t ey Were so t' all d

rersenne probabl . fl ' ,me imes co. In France M.

he l Y in uenced by D

t e best of all possibl 1 . escartes, suggested the creation of

put into the same wor~ an?u1abges ~y which all men's thou,ghts could be

h . s WIt 1 revity and I' , '. ,

e recognized the rather cer canty; anticipatmg Jespersen

vowels with thinnesss erdgI~nleral phonaesthetic associations of [i)-like

ad an itt eness 58 In E L d .. .

va, need by such men G . ng an similar projects were

to h as eorge Dalg d B'

. w om l\1:ersenne's k arno, an ishop John 'Wilkins,

to . ds ' Wor was kno d

war a real character and ~ . ,:n, an of these Wilkins's Essay

It ,;as published with th a p 1I1osophzcaZIanguage is the most famous, 59

S~clety, and is mentioned: sRupport of the recently founded Royal

Ius Tkesau Y oget as one of th . _ . .

, •. TUS nearly two hund. . n e main msprranons of

Wdkms's project was ' red years later.61)

worked nothing less than th .

d 'out and universally ap r b ,e c. reation of systematical, lv

an spoken t: pica le prinei 1 f _ •

h ' ror comrnunicaf b Ip es 0 a language written

t e world Th E . IOn etween b ,.

h .. essay, Which mem ers of all nations of

s ortcomtngs f '. runs to 454 p f .

t b ,0. eX1stmg natural I ages, a ter cnncizmg the

o ne a complete h anguages set

abstract]" sc ematization of h s out what purports

re attons actio ,uman knowl d . 1 di

genera and ' .' ns, processes and I.. e ge,' inciu lng.

specree of thi _ , . togtcal co I

and institutionalized . ~gs animate and inani ncepts, natura

in societv, relatIons between hum. b ~ate, and the physical

~'J' ' , . an elngs' h

AU these c1 .' ' in t . e family and

1, ' asses and their subdl ..

re anODS and modif . IVlSlOns and th

. ' l cations inv 1 d .' e vario '

wntten shapes, built'. 0 _ve with tbem ar us semantic

'real c,haracters j eachmto sdie.mantlcaUy self-sufficie te represented by

f' ,stan ng fo' nand pe .

rom the words fran Ideal word rsplCUOUS

, 0 a natural language A . ' translatable . - . sunple example may belll~O or grven:

THE RBNAISSANCE AND AFTER 115

:>

'father'is represented by the character ~,which consists of the

basic sign -3-, for the genus 'economical' (interpersonal) relation. to which are added aright oblique line on the left, indicating the first subdivision, in the case of economical relations that of eonsanguinity, an upright line on the right indicating the second subdivision, in the case of consanguinity marking the relation of direct ascending, and a semi-circle above the middle of the character, indicating male. Should the character be used metaphorically, this can be specified by the addition of a short vertical line over the left end of

the character: ~.

In order to provide a spoken form corresponding to each such character, Wilkins set out a system of universal phonetics, or of 'letters' standing for the major categories of articulation such as were said to be found in thekr-own languages of the world. Each component ofa character had its own syllable or single letter assigned to it, from which an equally perspicuous spoken word form could be built up. Thus in the spoken word for the character • father', Co stands for economical relation, b and a for the two subdivisions, consanguinity and direct ascendant, respectively, giving Coba, parent, and the further addition of ra for male gives Cobara (probably [kobara]), father.

A universal grammar was proposed, consisting of word classes valid for all communicative needs. Syntact.ic rules were to be kept to a minimum, and the class membership and grammatical relations of words were to be indicated graphically by special signs affixed to or interposed between the characters, and phonetically by additions and

modifications to the pronounced words.

In a final chapter Wilkins compared his • philosophical language 1 with

Latin as the nearest existing approach to a universal language, and the 'real character' aspect of it with Chinese character writing. He condemned the unnecessary lexical redundancy, grammatical complexity, and the irregularities of Latin as contrasted with his own proposed

l ,.

anguage, and the formal complications of Chinese characters and then lack of semantic analysability and perspicuity, though he approved of the tendency to group characters for semantically related concepts

under the same radical (p. lOS, above).61

The efforts of men like Wilkins show how far linguistic theory and

linguistic thought had moved since the Middle Ages. They also show

116 CHAPTER FIVE

a deep and subtle penetration into the way languages mus,t in fact be naturally organized in order to fulfil the tasks successfullY,lmposed on them, Nothing practical came of these suggestions for artlficla~ly constructed universal languages, and it is easy to perceive t,he n:uvety of Wilkins's attempts at the componential analysis and classification of all human knowledge and experience, But the current work of some gene-

, " ine to f I' tl int itive knowledge

ranve grammanans m attemptmg to orma rze re 1 u

that native speakers have of the correct usc of their language and the semantic interpretation of the words in it seems to proceed on somewhat similar lines and has been described as an effort directed towards the 'atomizatio~' of meaning,6z The successful employment and und,crstanding of the lexical resources of our native language is something that is performative1y given to us while we are yet children, but the full explication of it seems still to be hidden from the wisest,

The notion of a universal thought structure possessed by mankind, or at least by all civilized mankind, basically independent of any particular language and therefore expressible in a universal language, was a conception perhaps natural to the rationalists, Similar attitudes towards the grammar of actual languages are found in the work of, the rationalist Port Royal grammarians (p, 123, below), and repeat in a different form the older universalism of the scholastic speculative grammarians. The interdependence of thought and language and the signi,ficance of linguistic as well as of cultural relativity were more read1ly

appreciated in the climate of the later Romantic era. ,

Apart from the advancement of knowledge, the avoidance of sterile controversies. and the ease of communication between men of education in all lands, other considerations were in men's minds when the) pondered the creation of universal languages: the facilitation of trade, the unity of the Protestant churches, and the science of cryptography, The possession of a new <real character' serving Protestantism as Latin had once served the formerly universal Roman Church may have been only a minor factor; its extent is a matter for debate, During the English Civil War the codes and cyphers of each side attracted attention to certain structural Features and frequencies of Occurrence in the English language, and in 16,tI Wilkins had written a work on secret communication. 63

The cryptography of the time was intimately associated with another application of linguistics that flourished in England from the reign of Elizabeth I, the devising of systems of.shorthand Or • characterie' as they were then called. Stenographic methods had been in use in ancient

THE RENAISSANCE ANO AFTER h ve been lost during the Rome, but like much else they appear to a

mediaeval period'h of phonetic symbols

d d dinz both on t e use . . ifi

Modern shorthand, epen ing .·.d d roots b. y spec. I c

, f '. lar wor s or war

and on representations 0 partIcu., .... ork in the sixteenth century.

outlines, may be traced back .. to. Bn~.l sh ,w. h B. 'ght who worked out

, ' h hi Timot y n, .

The name most associated Wit u IS 1S, ,. . tit signs andcharac-

, b th individual et er .

systems of shorthand employing .0 . f bi ts Interest in short-

. . di f classes 0 0 Jec , .

ter-like signs for words stan mg or ... d the same rnotrves

t together an f

hand and universal languages wen.. I d 'deographic nature 0

were adduced, Brig~t referred to. the al ae!cul~ language, and~omChinese characters, independent of any p , 1 means of wrrtten

. •. , .. both a umversa

mended his system of characterie as. . 64

d ' f . reserving secrecy.

communication and a evice or p ... lik that ap. plied atone

, ·1 ' d a process very Ie.. . '

In one respect Bright exp oite . . , f h Chi ese character script

stage by the Japanese in their adaptation 0 t e1 lt~·ons to basic word

. , I dditi ns or a tera • ,

(p, 108, above), Grammatica a 11:10 , .bs and comparison

, , . past tense lfl ver , If

forms, such as plurality m nouns, • ,. k • on the right or e t

indi d b marks or pnc s , di d

in adjectives, were In reate y. , 'I forms were in reate

, S th r gramrnatlca ,

of the word sign itself. orne 0 e . h 'c and homophoruc

. nt a hornograp 1 . 'call

by the use of a word SIgn to represe 'ally and gramrnatty.

' ther semantic 'h· th

morpheme, and by extension 0, • . be written WIt e

. 11 Th [riendship was to ,

related morphemes as we, us J' h' hbour sign this same

, d' b t below t e nelg

ship sign below the frien . sign, u. d

., . h h d f neighbourhoo . . the

Shl.P· . sign stood for t e - 00 0 .." tic "'tudies during .n

' , .. ill linguis 1 " ,

One aspect of English emp1r1c~sm .. h b ginning of systematIC

sixteenth and seventeenth centunes was Et e u eh language, and of the

, intion of h nds of the ng IS h 11 e

phonetic description 0 t e sou. h n felt free to c. a eng

, h ar now t at me t

formal analysis of Enghs grammar, hri d in Priscian and Dona us,

and modify the grammatical ~odel :n~nl~:nd in the atte~tion t~med Phonetic studies began seriously In ,~ th ugh the mventlon of .., '1' to pr~nunclauon ro , F the

on speUmg and Its re atlOn. . the contment, rom

•. ti d the diffusion of literacy, as on, d on around pho-

pnn mg an, . work was carne .

sixteenth to the eighteenth century .. hy and orthoepy (the term

netic questions under the tides of ~rthog7: century}; but the researCh phonetics is first recorded in thel~;et~:~etics and phonology. and t~: was on what today wou~~ be ca, eo P from Francis Bacon to D,a~ empirical attitude in Bntish p~l~OP~\ spelling. fostered. a tra~1u,06~ Hume, as well as the nat~re 0 f .;:e l~nglish school of phone~lcs ~d that has been given the title 0_ Robinson, C. Butler, J. Wallis, a

1. Hart. W. Bullokar, A, Hume, R. ..

117

lIS

CHAPTER FIVE

W. Holder= are among those who wrote on English pronunciation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in some cases as part of a fullscale grammar of English. The formative influences of the times are shown by the fact that 'Vallis, besides his work on English, held the chair of geometry at Oxford University and was also a natural scientist. It is interesting to see, in addition to questions of spelling, modern objectives already in close association with phonetic studies, such as English language teaching for foreigners, teaching speech to the deaf, and the cultivation of standard English or 'the King's Ianguage'.67

The work of these orthographers and orthoepists has been much used in the reconstruction of the English pronunciation characteristics of their times6B; in the history of linguistics their importance lies rather in the stage they had reached in phonetic theory and practice, and in the work they bequeathed to their better known nineteenth-century successors.

Among them W. Holder was perhaps the most successful. After some delay due to jealousy on the part of rivals such as Wallis, Holder's Elements of speech was published in 1669 by the Royal Society, of which he was a member. Holder was an observational 'phonetician and he achieved remarkable succinctness and accuracy in describing the artic.ulation of speech sounds, He set down a general. theory of pronuncianon, referring consonantal differences to differences of "appulse ' bet~ee~ one organ a~d another, total in the case of stops and partial in fricatives and contmuants; he referred vocalic differences to different degrees of aperture, with the further distinctions of front and back ~ongue :aising and of lip rounding.69 His conception of speech as

detenm~ed by the alt-:mation of appulse and aperture' has a very modem ring.

Holder ~me ne~rer than any other western scholar before contact

was made with Indian phoneti . k . ' .

, ,. ..' ..• IC. won , to a correct articulatory diagnosis

of the voice-voiceless d.lstmCtlon in cans H' . . h

d. the attenti . - onants. IS correct IflSlg t

escape .. ., e atten. uon of his Contemporan'es d I f r rk d

_. .. an Was e t unremar··e

for over a century. He wrote using' voice' . . " I , .. "Th 1 ,> . e In its modern technica

sense. .. e arynx both gIves passage to the b 1 _

1 b hr. reat 1, and also, as often

as we p esse, y t e rorce of muscles to bear th id '

d . th ·h· ' .. e si ea of the larynx stiff

an near toge er, as t e breath passeth thrall h h . . .

vibration of those .cartilaginous bodies which f~rm~ ~~~ula, m~es a vocal sound or voice.' The excellence of his ph ' breath Into. a

. " oneue theory and the

conciseness of his expression are shown in hiss"..... .

...... mary statement on

THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTER

119

, ,- - 1 ade bv a free passage

the nature of English vowels: The vowe s are m . .

, . f th mouth without any

of breath vocalized through the cavity 0 e .' . h

h id itv's b ,. differently shaped by t e

appulse of the organs; t e sal' cavity s emg, '

1· ·V Is . being differ-

postures of the throat, tongue and lPS.... owe .,. .

enced by the shape of the cavity uf the mouth' .70 . • r'l

In the next century A. Tucker noted the prevalence of [~] in English

... ' 'ak f ' f words unstressed JU

as a hesitation form and in the we orms 0 ,

11 k d in orthographiC

connected speech, forms almost who y unmar e

writing.t 1 •

, . .. ' tion were the OCca5lOn

Problems of spelling m relation to pronuncla . .. f

· 1 b is f r particular sorts 0

for the invention of new typographlca sym 0 0 . ..

, bols used today In the Inter-

sound and several of the phonetic sym 0 s use .. ' .• s.:

, d . ented dunng Ul15

national Phonetic Alphabet were first suggeste or mv . " I

. .. . . E I' h t ggest mternauona

period, Some writers went beyond ng IS .0 SU d

1· k d : . h terns of shorthan .

alphabets, such work being often in e W1t sys . . h

. . . d' ersal alphabet 111 t e

F.Lodwtek published an Essay touiar s a U1UV "f

, , Roval Boci . 1686 consIstmg 0

Philosoplncal transactions of the Roy. ociety 111 • ' diff

, di t articulatory L er-

invented symbols systematically correspon mg 0 . b

ences; and Wilkins included in his Essay a sound chart w.hlcAhl chanbe:

" " . f hI· t' nal PhonetiC .. P a ,

compared with early editions 0 t e ntema 10 'f . ht

. .' f the articulatIOn 0 elg·

and an • orgamc alphabet' With pictures 0 "

. neral phonetlc cate-

vowels and twenty-six consonants, representmg ge .

.. . . .. f h .lips and by a cut-away

ganes, In which were shown the pOSItiOnS ate 1. I

section the positions of the tongue a!' welI.7~ . ki: . of

' .' I w the rewor mg .

The sixteenth and seventeenth centunes a so sa d d f 0 ....

· f k hande own r ....

English grammar. Men started with the ramewor . . . bl tor

d b Ae1fne as suita ie l'

the late Latin grammarians and suggeste Y b he i tellectual

• ( I above)' ut t ie 111

Old English as well as for Latin . pp. 70- , '. 1 uage

. . ld . 1 of their own ang ,

climate of the post-RenaIssance wor , a ave th cate-

, all . ed them to test e

and English empiricist attitudes encourag 'rr d ees to

'. . . b e the dmerent egr

gones against observation, and we can 0 serv.. h 11 tion of words

which this testing and reappraisal took place 111 u e a oca

to word classes or parts of speech. . h d early eight~

English grammarians of the sixteen. tb,seventeent ,afn h· .,. ht Pris· h L ti system 0 t e eig

eenth. centuries usually started from tea.m. h ·ther followed

. , . d i L'l' - mrnar 1D that t ey ei

ctaruc classes enshrine m 1 Y s gra , . . ts with it.

. 'fy th 'r dlsagreemen

it or felt the need to express and justa ei . and assigned

k the Latin system .

Some, for example Bullo ar,'J set up. . n and the, having

English words to each class. The Enghsh artlcle~, a( ) rt of speech, but no Latin counterpart were not giyen the statuS 0 a pa

120

CHAPTER FIVE

merely referred to as notes or signs set before nouns to identify them as nouns. Others treated the articles as a subclass of nouns adjective, H and Ben Jonson assigned them to a class of their own."!

A rearrangement of til L' . . . , .,

, e . atin system 10 which the influence of Ramus

may be seen is fou d i I",' .

. '. n In t .ose grammarians such as A. Gill, who made

number inflexion verst s it b .....,.

, lIS a sence a major binary distinction, setting

off nouns and verbs from tl ' hi I h d . '. .

· .. . le rest, w IC 1 e eSlgnatcd dictiones CO/l-

Stgllificatwae in refcrc t I' .. .' '

I . nee 0 t icir principal functions III subordinate

rc auons with nouns d v b . " . .

, an VCr s, a distinction also made by the ancient

grammarians (pp z6 b· ) -6 '

1 " ·,37, a me .' Butler linked nouns and verbs more

c osely in his systc bv : di

" m y regar mg them both as having number and

case inflexion: no' I ,. 1

, , rruna case IS II ustratcd by such forms as num and

man S ,and past tense d ..,

desi d . an. past participle inflexions (loved, fallen) are

eSlgnate as obliq f h

h . ' ue Cases 0 tt e verb the present tense form being

t e : rect ' 77 This usaec l '

S . IS usage harks back to that of Aristotle.

orne other rrrammari . ' .

( ..' b iarrans "ere influenced by Port Royal theories

p, 124, belo\\") to divide th 'I L .

held d . e elg It atm classes according as they were

to enote objects of th h ( . J,

tion a 1. b (d'- oug t noun, pronoun., participle, preposl~

,t \er . an article)) . . '

interjecrio ) Th'. ' '" manners of thought (verb, conJunctlOO,

a grammanr' . tt 'bls ",adS applied. to English by the writer (or writers) of a n ute to J B' h 1

is not very 1 I kedo ng t and,78 though the systematization

c ear y war ed out.

More radically, Wilkins and .". .

classes on semanti ,C. Cooper distinguished two marn

.' IC grounds integral d ' "., d d

his system to b f : .'. s an , particles; Wilkins mtence

e c universal a li hili

a definite meaning of thei . ppl:a 1 rty, Integrals were said to have

err own while p ~ 1 I ,. '

or modifying the mea . f', artie es on y consignify, relating

rungs a the" I

grals; in Wilkins's sy t '. mtegra s. Nouns and verbs are inte-

s ematlzatlon whi h i ..

out as part of his philos hi I ,lIC IS more explicit and worked

, op ICa gramma 79 b

class, but are regarded a r, ver s are not given a separate

· s nouns ad' e ti ( . '

(mtransitive)) always in as . . J ~ IVe active, passive or neutral

€ SOclatlOn With '.,

rorm a copula (e g 11'~,~S _' /. • or contaming III their own

· '. ' ,.. ,,~-I$ wing' hit -' ..

Similar to that of the Port Ro al . ,1 $~lS lit trmg), This analysis is

noun,s adjective, like badly) ar~ als~:rmmanans, Derived adverbs (from ded mto essential (the copula verb tegrals. The particle class is divi-

. I d er , to be) and 0 ,. I •.

group mcu .es pronouns article .' .. ccaSlOoal; this latter

d '" ,s, prepOSitIOns deri

an conjunctions, and also mode d ' non- erived adverbs,

Thia freatment s an tenses {

s treatment of the verbal au ili . . can, may, will, etc.).

E I· h . h " Xl arn:s. which C

ng IS , tough lOexplicitly 80 b ooper follo .. vs for

, . ' ears some analo '

of English verbs current today. gy With some analyses

THB RENAISSANCB AND AFTER

121

The Latin tradition is seen in the retention of the adjective within the noun class, though formally this has less to commend it in English than in Latin, and in the preoccupation of most of the grammarians with the participle, treated either (purely traditionally) as 3. class in its own right, or as a noun adjective having particular derivational as·mciations with the verb, Perhaps because Wilkins was framing a system of universal or philosophical grammar, applicable to English but not based simply on English, he was the most radical in revising the PriscianicLilyan tradition. Certainly he went further than his closest follower among grammarians of the English.language, Cooper.

Grammars of English were written in great numbers from the sixteenth century up to the present day. Their main historical interest lies in the continuing process of testing and revising the grammatical framework handed down in the Latin-based system of description, in the light of actually observed English forms and structures, Such developments were not necessarily achieved in chronological order. Wallis (seventeenth century) was one of the most radical reformers of English descriptive grammar in his assertion that the language had only two tenses. present (burn) and past (burned), all other temporal and aspectual distinctions being effected by auxiliary verbs.St

Two early nineteenth-century grammars are well known, by Lindley Murray and by William Cobbett. Though they are similar. and fairly ~onservative, in theory and presentation, their social settings are interestingly dissimilar and. reflect the different contexts in which English grammar has been and is taught and studied. Murray was an American citizen who settled in England after the War of Independence, Established near York, he wrote his celebrated English grammar, primarily with the needs of young students in mind, First published in 1795. it achieved very wide acceptance and ran into numerous reprintings during the first half of the nineteenth century. Somewhat conservative in theory. it may be taken as an example of a successful teaching grammar of English during this period. It is divided into four parts: Orthography, with an account of the various pronunciation values of the letters of the English alphabet, 'Etymology' (i,e, morphology, the parts of speech, their forms and inflexions), Syntax. and Prosody and punctuation, Prosody is divided into the rules of versification and the description of those features such as length. stress, pause, and intonation (,tone'), to which the term 'prosody' had been applied in antiquity (p. 38, above) in a manner in several ways anticipatory of its use by Firthians (po 218. below).

122

CHAPTER FIVE

In his grammar lVI 'J

. ., urray consr ered that three cases should be

recogmzed in English n .. '

cusative 82 H' d ~uns: norrunati ve, genitive, and objective or ac-

. . e argue this on the al f L ' , ,

s.. an ogy a ann, wherein despite the

ameness of form betwee '.

th oerween normnatrve and accusative in many nouns

e cases were separatel '. ,

"mod ' , .' y recognized, One does see In Murray the

mo ern traclltlOnal' set f d· .'

ad" " 0 woru classes for English: article, noun,

jective, pronoun verb d . b "

jection with " ' a ver , preposition, conjunction, and inter-

, I no sUggestlOn of me '. h di , f

treating th ' , rgmg tea jective with the noun or 0

M ,e partICiple as a separate word class,

urray s style is clear d, " , ,

unoriginal Hi an. s} sternano, If rather unexcinng and

• IS concern for th 1 .

appears throu h h' . e genera well-bewg of his young readers

g out IS book I h f ' .

young student' h d. ' ,n t ,.e pre ace and m a final' address t.o

s .e cclares Ins \' h ' .

as well as of 1 .' , \ IS . to promote the cause of virtue

eammg and the [

1 will respect J' .. ,'. . ex amp es chosen display a gentle piety:

um, t laugh he chid D

indulgences' Idl . e me;uty and interest forbid sncious

. , eness produces U'(] t' I f

differences of tl hi ,!1 , utce, OIl( misery,8l Quite apart rom

leory, IS choice fl· ,

a ,-ery different 0 examp es puts him and his work 111

f contc:,:t from that f d ' h

avoured examples like I' " 0 some mo ern writers who ave

ill the lab conside } J. m go.t.ng tv get one for Bert, and All the people

, r 0. in a fool 84 1\ ' f .

necessarily the bett fi ,1 CIt icr the one nor the other style IS

d " cr cld for the C' lif ' ' 1

. es. cnpnon or a ling" ic th xcmp 1 catron of a grammallca

, UIStJC t cory' I

wah puerile obsce ' , • , one must rope that examples filled

fi cmtres and P olitical

gured some recent J' .' , propaganda, such as have dis-

mgursne br' ,

world, will prove a transi--, pu Icatlons In the English-speaking

The rc. ansrem phase,

pute of :'\lurray's ra

:\lrs. Jadey, the wa x works ~ Ill,mar ~ay be seen in the prudence of

when her audience Was t P OPfl:tor In Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop

sch 1 ' , 0 comprise vou I, I' f '

00 s, in altering t L f • ng ac res rom select boardinz

ne ace and c( t e-

represent :.\1r. Lindlc}':\1 ' . )S lime of :\ Ir, Grimaldi as clown to

corn " ' urrav as he a [

posuion of his Eng!" I· ppearcc when engaged in the

TL I IS 1 grammar'

nougn the thea 'I ..

"o'er ' , retJca framework a d

Y sirnilnr the contemporar. les . 11 the categories employed are

lmwlloge b C bb y, ess \\"el1-kno' C •

/' ." y 0 etr, the radical I'" wn.. rammer ofthe E1/alislz

ceived III quit diff po ULClan (Lo d <>

I . . e. a I crcnt settin'" \,. . n on, 18(9), was con-

etters to his so J o· "fItten in th J: 'f on ames, it was '" d e rorrn of a series or

use of sold' " Jnten ed

. lud ,"lers, sailors, apprenticcs a d lo mOre especially for the

inc U es SIX lessons intended to ' n P oughbo)'s '. A later edition

~7m~r, and from writing in anP:~~~nt ~tatesmen from using false

e [cation to Queen Caroline in "'ruch \\,~rh man., ncr', and contains a

, \ It radical 1

e oquence Cobbett

THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTER

123

presses the case for the literary education of the 'labouring classes': 'The nobles and the hierarchy have long had the arrogance to styie themselves the pillars that support the throne. But, as your Majesty has now clearly ascertained, Royalty has, in the hour of need, no efficient supporters but the people'.

In doctrine so alike, in style so different, these two English grammars

embody two themes that had been prominent in the teaching of English ever since the Renaissance had ushered in an epoch of social mobility in English society: the careful maintenance of the linguistic standards appropriate to superior social status, and the acquisition of

such standards as a vital step in any social advancement. .

Jllstas empirical attitudes fostered descriptive phonetics and the t:rammatical independence of different languages, so did the rationalist movement make itself felt in the production of philosophical grammars, especially those associated with the French Port Hoyal schools, These religiou~ and educational foundations were set up in 1637, an.d disbanded in 1661 owing to political and religious strife ;85 but the.If influence was longer lasting in educational ideas, and their work m

. . 'and

~rammar can be seen continuing in the grarnmtlzres rmsonnees

'general grammars' of the eighteenth century, The Port Royal grammar

was reprinted as late as 1830,86

The rationalist grammars were in se\'eral ways the successors of the

mediaeval scholastic grammars. Though the educational system of port Roval included sound classical instruction, one or two of its members de~tared a prejudice against the pagan literature of classical an~iquit'l:' Port Royal numbered among its company writers on logic, and in their

h ' . I' .' , strongest Thev were

crarnrnar t e influence of logic on mgUlstlcs \\ as . . .'

" . h sense as either the

writers of universal grammars, but not m t e same ,

, '1 . -ians Unhke the

universal language planners or the rnedlaeva grammatl '

I . . ~7 systems of com~

anguage planners they were not Invenung nev

, . 1 h f grammar through the

rnumcation but expounding a genera t eory 0 .. 1

, . d F I Unlike the seho as-

medium of such languages as Latin an rene 1, . . d

, .' h n above authonty an

tics they asserted the claims of uman reaso , , .'

. 1 h b is of their teaching,

the", made Descartes rather than Atistot e. t e asi . f II 1

~ . 1'1 atJOn 0 a t ie

They did not seek a. philosophical UOlve. rsa 1st. exp a. nan b I

' ," h I ges . ut rney

det.ails of Priscian's Latin grammar, 19nOrlng ot er .aln~ua ·h· eparate

, f mar under ymg t e s

did attempt to reveal the unrty 0 gram '" thought

. hei le of commu!llcaung ,

grammars of difIerentlanguages 111 t err ro "

, .. " dgment and reasonmg,

Itself cornpnsmg perceptton, JU , R ,1 h lars took the

On the basis of this general grammar Port op sc 0

124 CHAPTER FI VE

THE RENAISSANCE AND A}-TER

. .. belon not to the words com-

active and passive) are said properly ~~ .. '. al,g lement in them.oz.

, th 'adJecnv e. .

monly called verbs but Just to e . 11 . d historical explana-

This an.alysis, it should be no. ted., IS not an. a egeh 1 . . as Bopp.."vas

, ' . descripti f verbal morp 0. ogy,

non nor 15 It a surface escnptlOn o· at a deep. er

, . " he no .' in modern terms,

later to try to make It; It was t e posrung, . were represented

f 1 t th t in actual sentences

structural level, a e emen s . a •. R al rammarians might

conjointly with other elements.v' The Port dOY gd of languages in

f . der knowle ge to ay

have claimed support rom our WI.. bali ed by an appro-

. . . b rrunaltzed or ver lZ

which virtually any root can. e no. . . d i th surface grammar

. h di . ma.mtame In e ,

pnate affix so that t e istmcnon . . d Peter lioes

, b . Peter IS a man an

of European languages, at least, etween

disappears. 9~ . _.' f relative pronouns

The embedding or subordma:mg functlho~ho tc.) is described in

. 'E 1 sh 'Who W lC , e . .

(Latin and French .qut, etc., < ng 1 ., ant'lcipation of their

, r t lay stress as an .

terms on which transformatlOna,l~ s . . . 'bl God has created the

own theories. A single proposltlon the. t~v;n e God 'Who is invisible, '1}isible world is related to the more exphclt .orm '11 ~o.re elementary ho: created the world, which is visible, and, in a st.1. s or J'udgrnents

. h th ee propoSltiOn .

representation, is said to umte t e. r d the world and the

G d i . . Me God create " d

(underlying sentences), 0 ss msns: , . ..h first and the thn.

: .. . 1 d' embeddlOg t e . QS

'World u vtnble, by me u m~ ~r nd. ro osition as the matrix-

in the 'principal and cs.sentlal seco P P h worked in other

, ns seem to ave ,f

However the Port Royal grammana. . iti . the valour oJ

, b . e the propoSl ion

than purely formal terms, ecaus . "d unlike the other

. h kin, 0' Troy IS sal,

Achtlles has been the cause of t e ta ing 'J. ' dgment or affirma-

. , . I 0 more than one JU ..

proposmon, to be a. Simp e o~e, n , as in transformational terms

don. It is hard to follow this reasomng, . '1 'ly to the other.

, .' Id b t ted very Simi at .'

this latter sentence wou . e rea , attempt to wnte a

. . made a genume d

The Port Royal grammanans . L' Greek, Hebrew, an

. 'les from atm, d .

general grammar, Drawmg examp . f them to allege urn-

they su.1ght to re er kn 1 d e

modern European languages, .... them A wider ow e g

1 . .,. fl· guage under1ymg . . d hem or

versa characteristics or ian '. have intereste t. ,

of non-European languages does not appear to rk .... ore radically. They

. I' . al framewo. . u. f all

they might have revised their casslc. lvi the actual make-up 0" . ,

,. . 1 ar as under ymg . . but as

envisaged genera gramm. . iified in anyone, ..

articularly exemp . and

languages, rather than as P 'd' the perspicuity, elegance, .;

scholartypatriots they. took pn:c: language,96 a testimony to the beauty that they saw in the FrEe. an vernaculars wrought by the

• it de to the . urope .

change in men s am u .

Renaissance.

nine classical word classes, noun, article, pronoun, participle, preposition, adverb, verb, conjunction, and interjection, but redivided them semantically, the first six relating to 'the objects' of our thought and the last three to the 'form or manner' of our thought. The basic aounverb dichotomy survived, but the repartition of the other classes around it was a different one. There was no attempt to follow the grammar of Donatus and Priscian as they had set it out, but a good deal of the tradition of Latin grammar was thought to underlie all languages and to find expression in various ways. Thus the six cases of Latin are, at least operationally, assumed in other languages.O though some of them were expressed by prepositions and word order in the 'vulgar languages' (i.e. modern European languages; the term is not pejorative); and Greek Was said to have an ablative case always alike in form to the dative. This last statement is misleading; the translation equivalence of the Latin ablative is divided between the Greek dative and the Greek genitive. Collectively cases and prepositions were intended too express relations, BB but the two categories were kept theoretically distinct despite their common exponence in the I vulgar languages', and the purely case-like usage of French de and a was contrasted with their genuinely prepositional functions, as had been done in earlier comparative studies of the classical and modern Romance languages (p. 101, above),

Despite some similarities with the modistae and a like stress on the universal necessary features of all languages being variously manifested, there are striking differences in attitude, The universalist foundation envisaged by Port Royal was human reason and thought. The elaborate lnterrelations of the modi essendi of the external 'world and the modi intelligendi by which they Were perceived and interpreted in the mind have no place in the Port Royal system, and the somewhat modistic explanatio~ of the essential difference between noun and verb given by J. C. Scallger, based on the categories of permanence and transience, Was expressly, criticized ,as both irrelevant and inadequate.sv

Structural mterpretattons of the functions of certain classes of word ma~ ,be noticed, Adver.bs are n~ more than an abbreviation of a prepositIonal phrase (saptenter, Wisely, = cum sapietlfi.a with wisdom). Verbs are properly words that' signify affirmation' ~ nd ' in oth ds·

, .' '''u . , In ot er moo ,

desire, command, etc. n This returns the Port Royal . t

' . _. . grammanans 0

an analysts suggested by Anstotle91 of all verbs other j] h t

. hi' . .' er t ran t e copu.a,

to e, as ogically and grammatJcaIly equivalent to this . b l

- , 1 aki 1· aU) ver p us a

particip e, m . ng Peter lVes (Peter is living) structurall l

.ith D . , y ana ogous

\.1 refer IS a mall; the categones of intransitiyc and t •. { I

ranSltlVe am

126

CHAPTER FlV!!

Once the di

] . e· Iversity of 1

. ars were anguages was I

classical recognized as equaUy worth p:oper y accepte~, and veroaClJ'

Iangua eall~ages, linguistic .schOl: or study and cultivation with the I. . .. g. unIversals. The • . .. r8 had to face the question of

ern, being 0 lv i . anciem world had at .

practi. . n Y mterested in Greek .. .. . ,. most Ignored the prob.

fact ce assumed that Latin. dfee an.. d Latm; the scholastics had in

represe t d .38 . escnbed d

Rena' n e the universal inf an analysed by Priscian in

ti 1 ISsance, the empiric' 1 rastructure of all languages' after the

ICU ar lang rsts stressed th indivi '

light f . uages and the n d ,e in VIdual variations of par·

com 0 observation, while .eteh to ~dJust categories and classes in the

mon to all I . . e rationali t till

is 8":11 . anguages below £ . IS S s looked for what was

u very .. SUr ace cliff,

g.bZl!rale d much alive. Hjelmsl . . erences, The whole question

available te~anded a universal ete; l~ hIS. early Prindpes de grammaire particular 0 . anguages and diffe' featl a str~Jt comprising the possibilities

. one' f ·'1' n y real d i

The des ' "al Ing this lingul' tic th rze In. the 'tats concre. ts of each

cnpttvist f ,. S lC teary w ld 1

duced th s or what is ou apse into 'nihllism',91

e assum ti now called the 'B! fiel ..

descriptio f P IOn of unive I . oom eldian.' epoch reo

n 0 the b . rsa s to a "

categories ado served form nurumum and made the

having little n. classes devised f, . s P3hramount, by.means of ad hoc

la m com . or eae Ian '

c red that' th mon between diff guage mdependently and

generaIizationse, O~ly ~seful genera1iz /rent languages; Bloomfield deremained ve .9. LIkewise Fl' thi a ions about language are inducti\'e

!\II ry caud ,r iana s k

: . ore recently Ch IOUS of general cat .. P? e 'Of general theory, but

In. terms strik' O~sky and th a egones or universal srammar-"

gra . 'ngly sUlI'1 e transform ti ali to·

. ,mmanans and f 1 ~r to those both f a Jon, rsts have reasserted,

~m1VersaIs. suggest? HJelmslev in 1928 0 ~he .ratronalist philosophical . anguages will b !ng that in the d ' t· e Importance 'Of language

human e louod t bar eeper levels f r .'

ages' . POssession realized 0 ~. e Upects of f, 0 Inguisric structure

do ' mdeed they clai d1iferentIyat th arm that are a common

.omed to co f aun that· e surface' d'a

sign,'fi n nement . . 'WIthout th'. m luerent langu-

I cance 100 I WlthJn a IS concept' J' .' .

"'roble . n linglil' ti narrowemp·. " Ion mguisncs IS

r- ms Con • . s ~CS.' IrlClsm d .

diff tmue to p as in othe an . relative lack of

. erenr g . resent tt. r realm f

'I'h .eneration!l . uemselves th S 0 thought the old

e author Of .1 • , . ough in d'a ..

slmi1ar to th. . ·.a ater general . luetent ways to

., at 'of th p. gr·ammarB

pnnciples., thos .. e . ort Royal s . ,. eauzee, e -'

thought d e. of uoJVtrsa} val. • • cholars; gr . Xpresses an attitude

, an ' tho e .. ldlty a . , llllUnar h

that constitUt h resUlting from th ~lng from th . as two sorts of

which are the e ~, e gnlmmars of e ar?ltraty and rn e nature of human a ~ects of general grparhCUlar langu utable conventions ammar. are logjC:~es, The former, Y anterior to any

THB RENAISSANCE AND AFTER 127

given language and concern the very possibility and necessary conditions of the existence of any language,IOl

Though Beauzee's doctrine is in agreement with Port Royal, his

grammatical system is somewhat different in its organization, and despite tributes to Descartes and Arnauld (a major Port Royal grammarian) in his preface, there are some explicit criticisms of certain Port Royal statements. in the text, Beauzee'sword classes are more modern in that the adjective is taken as a quite separate class, and the specific Port Royal bipartition of the classes is not mentioned. As in any general grammar. the classes must be defined in terms applicable to any language. and appeal is made to general semantic notions, Typical is the distinction between noun and pronoun on the one hand and verb and adjective on the other: nouns and pronouns express individual things, persons, and abstractions; adjectives and verbs express the qualities, states, and relations with which they are associated.,ol In some respects Beauzee, though a universalist, is less rigid, No attempt is made by him to impose a single system of cases on all languages, and the Port Royal scholars are reproved for insisting on their six cases in Greek in defiance of the forms actually observable in Greek nominal

inflexions.'?'

The empiricist-rationalist debate in its relations with language study

was reflected. to some extent in the contrasts d.rawn between the investigation of languages from the outside on the basis of observed usage, whether of acknowledged writers or of socially accepted speakers. and research into human language from within, as part of man's endowment and as a manifestation of his rationality. The Italian Campanella (seventeenth century) distinguished these two types of grammatical study as grammatica civilis and grammatica philosophica, and the Port Royal grammarians themselves contrast their search for consistent rules of grammar with their older contemporary Vaugelas's observations on

good usage, tQ4

During the period, and to some extent even in the later years of the

Middle Ages, ways of thought about language began to emerge on topics which had eirher not been considere d before or. if they had ~een, had fallen into terms that ,could not lead to any very useful conclUSIOns. This has already been noticed in the beginnings of the historical linguistics of the Romance language.s (pp. 100-1, above), Towards the end of the eighteenth century the historical approach to languages deepened and was enriched by new insights. Historical study was linked with typoiogical comparison, and both found new and significant

128 CHAPTER FIVE

hol hi and in specially material in the languages then known to sc 0 ars Pd.'.d fields

. . . . , I unstu Ie w;.

collected vocabularies and texts from previous Y .. ' trans.

'1' .. . t arion was quite

From the end of the century the mguistrc SI U " .. Hnguistics

£0· rmed by one of the most important events in the blstor~ 0 t lSanskriti~

.. . . hi f ancien

the full discovery of the language and scholars ,IP 0 . h. d the twen-

f hi bit the runeteent an

India. But as the effects 0 t .. I.S e 0. ng.o . . b. nt chapters.

I . I h m tn su seque tieth centuries, it will be well to dea Wit 1 t e

FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION

D. ABERCROMBIE, • Forgotten phoneticians', TPS 1948, 1~.H'b ckground~ R, w. ALBRIGHT, 'The International Phonetic Alphabet: Its a

and development', IJAL 24·1 (1958), part 3· der Anlike

.H. ARENS, Spracl1wisse:nschajt: der Gangihrer Entwi_c~lung 'Vo: 62~80. bis eur Gegeml.!art, Freiburg/Munich (second edition), I~ '~ge I9S4.

R. N, BOLGAR, The classical h~ritage and its be~eJactors, Ca~8 r~. '

F. CADET, Port Royal educatton (tr, A. D. JON. irs), London, ·l 9B ne 1967,

. " '. d, P rt Roya erne,

R. DONzt, La grammmre generale et ratsonnee e 0 - , . 2

G. B. DOWNER, <Traditional Chinese phonology', TPS 1963, ~~7-4 . J. R. FIRTH, The tongues of men, London, 1937, chapters 5 and . --, 'The English school of phoneti.cs', TPS 1946, 9Z-132.

o, FUNKE, Die Friihzeit der .engUschen Grammatik, Berne, 1941. . tenth

F. P. GRAVES, Peter Ramus and the educationa.l reformation oj the SIX e

cent!lry, New York, 1912. d

traditions an D. HYMES (ed.), Studies in the history of tingu£stics:

paradigms, Bloomington, 1974. . _

L KUKENHl!LM, Contributions a l'histoire de la grammaire italienne, espa gnole, et Irancaise d l'iPoque de La Renaissance, Am:oterdam, 1932• --, Contributions a l'histoirll de la grammaire grecque, latine, et ittbraUjIU a l'epoque de la Renaissance, Leiden, 19Sr.

-- -, Esquisse histopque de 14 linguistique fra1lfaise, Leiden, 1962.

c. LA..'1CELOT and A. ARNAULD, Grammaire gemfrale et raisonnee; Paris, 1660 (reprinted Scolar Press, l\lenton, 1967).

I. MICHAEL, English g"a1rmuuical categories and the tradition to 1800, Cambridge, 1970.

G. 1\. PAI)LF.Y, Gram'1loticallbeory in western EZ1Tope J Soo-r700, Cambridge, 1976.

V. G. SALMO (ed.), The ~~orks of Francis Lod~~ick, IAlndon, 197:4.

J. E. SANDl'S, History oj classr·cal scholarShip (third edition), Cambridge, I9~I, volume 2.

T. A. SEBEOK, Historiography oj linguistics, 231-382.

E. VORL T, Englisl! g,·ammatical theory IS86-I.737, Louvain, 1975.

AND AFTER

RENAISSANCE THE

129

NOTES

17-21• . London, 1946,523. ofi

L SANDYS, 1921,. . of western philosophy, ... if f,Vo!S(}' to f111' defat

2. B. RUSSELL, H,st.ory 1 E1'I<'lal1d from th~ fall 0 1 61-2. On the

3· J. A. 1'F.oUDF."H!S10rYa~a London. 1875, volum:e'Renaissance in

of the Spamsh Arm , M.· ddle Ages and t I ht Boston,

, t of the ' I . p. lar t.Wllg ,

historical concep s The Renaissance m po U

I W K FERGUSON, genera, . .

1948.

4· Origines, 1.3·4· , 06' L. GEIGER,

5· KUKE:--;HEIM, 1951, 8~. tis Hebraic1s, PforzhelID, 15 ,

6. r. REUCHLIN, D~ r~dlmen I

J. Reuchlin, Leipzig, 187 .

it 551 . '

7· REUCHLlN, op. CI " • . a7ld lexico-

. ... 8 l._ grammarians , The

8, ibid., 552, .5.5·. history of Rev.ew W.<\LPM.<\N,

9· n. HIRSCHFELD, Ltterary S further N. M. 8 3- 30' w.

26 7· ee . h 12 5-1 ,

graphers, London, I? ' Histonograp y, _ (Amsterdam

.. , m SEBEOI<, tik 19'7;>

Hebrew tradition", ,,' hen Gramtlla t ,

' .• " der hebrmsc " e 4)' d

BACHER. Die Alljange " oi lin.guistlc scteTIC b grammar an

.. hand history 'J k He reui

studies m the t eory 'Arabic ~()or s Otl

10. P. WECHTER, Ibn Earun_ s 6 , Abhandlrmg

Phil delphia 19 4· ud Svros '.

lexicography, l,a . , ' . rammaticae ap . ..'

... x 'lhs.tona artis g ( 889 LeiPZig).. . 1. me 1,

II. E. 0. A. MER, , . [andes 9.2 I ., ... t X961, vo u ..

fur die Kunde des M_o;g;n philologie arabe, Belru i in history, Min'12. cp. H.FLEISCH, TrmtTh: Arabic language: its t~l:e Arabs', SEBEOK,

1-49; A. G. 'CHE]NE, 'Linguistics among .

j' 69' H BLANC, rectlOns

neapo IS, 19 , . (several cor. .

Historiography, I 26~;~3Lautlehre. Leiden, .1? I ~ study of the rz:

3 A SCHAADE Sibascai It S . R:\ .. N A Cntlca. . UniverSity 0

1,. 'b M. n. A. £L S.'1- ""." (Ph.D. theSIS, A.RTER,

are su~gesh:d Y .ab grammanans . method, :'>1. c. C )

observations of tile A1 _ . ih's grammatical , 'lAOS 93 (1973 ,

)) On Slbav. ai h ntury. .

London, 1951, .. of the eight ce

'A'n Arab grammarIan

, in

6 ranunars ,

14 -57· century g

14 KUKENHEIM,I·932, 95· h d seventeenth

. 'S' teent an

IS· ]. H. ROWE, • IX language

HTh1ES, 1974, 361-79. . if the French

' . ~ d cultivatIon 0

IU, ibid., 20:,. The teaching. an nchester, 192.0. . . t 45.

17· K. L,.,"1fiLEY, d Stuart UnU'$, 1a en aulrl'e, Pat'IS, 5.

during Tudor an. adttire d'lme lalfgue

.. de bien tr

IS. La malllere· 2 :\7-8.

19· lm~HEll\t. 193 '.' hapters 1:8--19-

k chapter I , c 20. Boo I,