Inferiority Complexes and English Grammar
I just started a course in Advanced Grammar and the following is from our textbook:
English usage today is an area of discourse--sometimes it seems more like a dispute--about the way words are used and ought to be used. ... To understand how these opinions and rules developed, we have to go back in history, at least as far back as the year 1417, when the official correspondence of Henry V suddenly and almost entirely stopped being written in French and started being written in English. ... This restoration of English as the official language of the royal bureaucracy was one very important influence on the gradual emergence of a single standard dialect of English out of the many varied regional dialects that already existed. English now had to serve the functions formerly served by Latin and French, languages which had already assumed standard forms, and this new reality was a powerful spur to the formation of a standard in writing English that could be quite independent of variable speech.
... There was evidently a considerable amount of interest in things grammatical among men of letters [by the 1700s].... Public interest must have helped create a market for the grammar books which began appearing with some frequency about this time. And if controversy fuels sales, grammarians knew it; they were perfectly willing to emphasize their own advantages by denigrating their predecessors, sometimes in abusive terms.
... Pride of place must go to Bishop Robert Lowth's A Short Introduction to English Grammar, 1762. Lowth's book is both brief and logical.... and he did not doubt that he could reduce the language to a system of uniform rules. Lowth's approach was strictly prescriptive; he meant to improve and correct, not describe. He judged correctness from his own rules--mostly derived from Latin grammar--which frequently went against established usage. His favourite mode of illustration is what was known as "false syntax": examples of linguistic wrongdoing from the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne, Milton, Swift, Addison, Pope--the most respected names in English literature.
... Lowth's grammar was not written for children. But he did what he intended to do so well that subsequent grammarians fairly fell over themselves in haste to get out versions of Lowth suitable for school use, and most subsequent grammars ... were to some extent based upon Lowth's.
--Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage: A Brief History of English Usage
English usage today is an area of discourse--sometimes it seems more like a dispute--about the way words are used and ought to be used. ... To understand how these opinions and rules developed, we have to go back in history, at least as far back as the year 1417, when the official correspondence of Henry V suddenly and almost entirely stopped being written in French and started being written in English. ... This restoration of English as the official language of the royal bureaucracy was one very important influence on the gradual emergence of a single standard dialect of English out of the many varied regional dialects that already existed. English now had to serve the functions formerly served by Latin and French, languages which had already assumed standard forms, and this new reality was a powerful spur to the formation of a standard in writing English that could be quite independent of variable speech.
... There was evidently a considerable amount of interest in things grammatical among men of letters [by the 1700s].... Public interest must have helped create a market for the grammar books which began appearing with some frequency about this time. And if controversy fuels sales, grammarians knew it; they were perfectly willing to emphasize their own advantages by denigrating their predecessors, sometimes in abusive terms.
... Pride of place must go to Bishop Robert Lowth's A Short Introduction to English Grammar, 1762. Lowth's book is both brief and logical.... and he did not doubt that he could reduce the language to a system of uniform rules. Lowth's approach was strictly prescriptive; he meant to improve and correct, not describe. He judged correctness from his own rules--mostly derived from Latin grammar--which frequently went against established usage. His favourite mode of illustration is what was known as "false syntax": examples of linguistic wrongdoing from the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne, Milton, Swift, Addison, Pope--the most respected names in English literature.
... Lowth's grammar was not written for children. But he did what he intended to do so well that subsequent grammarians fairly fell over themselves in haste to get out versions of Lowth suitable for school use, and most subsequent grammars ... were to some extent based upon Lowth's.
--Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage: A Brief History of English Usage