Early modern English
vocabulary: Latin & layers
Principal
source for Latin:
Nevalainen,
Terttu. “Lexis and semantics.” Volume III 1476-1776,
ed. Roger Lass. The Cambridge history of the
English Language. Cambridge UP, 1999.
Of
all periods in English, EmodE demonstrates the fastest growth in vocabulary
§
objective need to express new ideas (or ideas new to English)
o English competing with Latin
in fields like medicine (uterus, testicle) or law (a mensa et
thoro ‘judicial separation’) and various highly specific discourses now
handled by English (species: characteristic visible form / appearance of
things in e.g. logic, theology, mathematics, zoology...)
o new discoveries and
inventions, new words
§
science
§
travel/colonization
·
but
of course you can use old words too: switch, robin
§
subjective need to enrich the potential of the vernacular
o do we really need squalid
and squalor ‘dry, rough, dirty’ -> ‘dingy or miserable in any way’?
§
“prestige
words used by the educated to describe the less fortunate”?!
o people were conscious of
lower status of English relative to Latin
§
OED
is biased towards C16th rather than 18th texts, but the growth is
still real
Source
of new words
§
unusually,
loanwords more influential than wordformation
o by C18th it’s back to
wordformation
§
from
about the 1520s to about 1670, about 40-50% of the loanwords were from Latin
o ‘specialist’
o some ‘general’
Latin
wasn’t a dead language (read Andrea DG’s article)
§
international
language of education and scholarship
As
well as ‘functional’ Latin was prestigious (and to some pretentious)
§
Thomas
Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric (1553) complains that “some seke so farre for
outlandishe English, that they forget altogether their mothers langage”
o epitomizes such people with
a man from Lincolnshire (=boonies) writing to a man in the Lord Chancellor’s
service begging a favour
o and epitomizes their
language with
§
words
like fatigate, revolute
§
words
like invigilate, contemplate, verbosity
§
in
Ben Jonson’s play The Poetaster a character is purged (literally) of his
latinate words
Hor. A bason, a bason, quickly; our physic works.
Faint not, man
Cris. O --- retrograde – reciprocal – incubus
...
..Hor: ... inflate, turgidous, and ventosity
are come up.
Tib. O terrible windy words. ...
Is
it possible to get an impression of the impact of latinate loanwords at this
period? The OED online has an ‘advanced search’ function
§
overhead:
first cited date = 1600 + language names = Latin
§
overhead:
first cited date = 1626 + author = Bacon
Observations
§
Bacon
did ?introduce some non-latinate words
o dwarf as a verb
o dragon-fly as a noun
§
most
words in the ‘1600/Latin’ list look pretty unfamiliar to us now!
§
some
of the less unfamiliar words must have competed unsuccessfully with related
forms (defining them!), e.g.
o anglicized apparate
‘apparatus’
o benefic ‘beneficient’
o annexion ‘annexation’
o aversation ‘aversion’
Much
redundancy (or redundancy in EmodE lexis
§
there
are different ways of adapting or adopting Latin forms
§
and
the results don’t show consistency
o we’ve kept Latin apparatus
rather than the anglicized apparate (but have kept both state and
status)
o we’ve kept annexation
but rejected aversation
More
examples (Romance derivations) ...
§
heritable,
haereditary, heriditable, hereditarious
§
venereal,
venerial (when does a different spelling = different word?), venereous,
venerious, venerous, veneral
And
of course many of these words weren’t truly ‘integrated’. How can one tell?
§
how
many exx in the OED? (or MED)
§
is
it glossed? (e.g 1646 Insects
that have antennæ, or long hornes to feele out their way, as
Butter-flies and Locusts.)
§
is
it italicized? antennae
§
does
its form become anglicized?
o e.g. aesteem -> esteem,
heros -> hero, antennae -> antennas
§
does
it move from specialist texts to more general ones?
o insect antennae,
electronic antennas?
§
or
get used figuratively?
o bad 19th poem: 1855 HOLMES
Poems 214 Go to yon tower, where busy science plies Her vast antennæ,
feeling thro' the skies.
o but some technical terms are
always going to stay technical
Let’s
look at loanwords that have integrated
Importation
of Latin medical terminology
§
put
overhead: OED entry for testicle, uterus
o testicle:
§
notice
that the first two contexts are translations
§
notice
that early sources ‘gloss’ it with what we infer is the more familiar native stones:
·
1634:
“Testicles or Stones, and especially stones of fatte Cockes”
·
1646:
“bites off his testicles or stones”
o uterus:
§
notice
that plural form isn’t ‘naturalized’ (||)
§
notice
that on its first appearance the word is ‘marked’
·
italics,
capitals
·
“properly”:
implies other, less correct terms
§
notice
its contexts: anatomy, encyclopedias
Can
you ascertain ‘native’ vs ‘learned’ layers in EmodE?
o if a learned word is
‘marked’ (capitalized, italicized) or ‘glossed’ (defined)
o early dictionaries were
dictionaries of ‘hard’ words (the sorts of headwords we see from the
1600/Latin/OED search!)
o the words that define those
words would be ‘familiar’
o Ian Lancashire’s LEME is a
database of those dictionaries and contemporary texts (e.g. medical books)
o if you search for ‘womb’ in
the monolingual dictionaries, the headwords it helps to define include: filme,
matrix, mother (a
disease called), secondine, umbilical vein, vterine
§
these
are from Blount’s 1656 Glossographia
o if you search for yard
(?!) you get headwords like prepuce, priapism, suture
Effects
in PDE of learned medical terms (handout: The language of doctor and patient)
§
considerable
social gulf between those who know the technical terms and those who don’t
o micturate vs do a number one
o Canadian Oxford Dictionary has a long definition for womb,
but defines uterus as ‘the womb’
§
lack
of morphological transparency within semantic fields
o coronary thrombosis = heart
attack
§
technical
terms more ‘clinical’? (when would a layperson use uterus vs womb?)
§
native
terms more ‘emotional’?
o womb: “the organ in the body of
a woman or female mammal in which offspring are carried, protected, and
nourished before birth; the uterus”
§
native
terms more ‘rude’: balls, etc.
§
but
words from either layer can be used euphemistically if they’re not semantically
transparent
o learned terms: costive,
alopecia, menopause
o idiomatic native
expressions: do a number, the change of life
Loanwords
have “been an important factor in the stylistic versatility of the modern
language” (Crystal 124)
o rise, mount, ascend
o ask, question, interrogate
o Are “the later [borrowed]
forms more formal, careful, bookish, or polite”?
The layered literary lexicon
Sources:
Adamson,
Sylvia. “Literary language.” Volume III 1476-1776, ed. Roger
Lass. The Cambridge history of the English
Language. Cambridge UP, 1999.
Adamson,
Sylvia. “The grand style.” Reading Shakespeare’s dramatic
language: a guide. Ed. Sylvia Adamson, Lynette Hunter, Lynne
Magnusson, Ann Thompson and Katie Wales. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001.
The
latinate vocabulary and “the grand style”
Technical
genres
§
new
(latinate) words often really needed (uterus, etc.)
Literary
genres
§
new
(latinate) words often synonymous with old words
o “The motive for borrowing in
this case is purely stylistic”
o look at how latinate
vocabulary functions in “the grand style”
|
Cicero |
Wilson |
|
the
simple style for proving |
|
|
the
middle style for pleasing |
|
|
the
vehement style for persuading |
the
great or mightie kinde, when we vse great wordes, or vehement figures |
Ex:
Milton,
Paradise Lost:
What in me is dark
Illumine,
what is low raise and support.
Native words like dark or low
§
“typically
learned early”
§
“learned
through speech”
§
“context
of physical experience”
o “Hence no one needs to be
told the meaning of light or strong: they consult their memories
of all the experiences with which the word is connected”
o “associated with private and
intimate discourse”
o “their semantic range is
characteristically experiential: they encode perceptions, emotions,
evaluations”
Latinate words like illumine (14th) or support (14th)
§
“learned
late”
§
“learned
through education”
§
“interpreted
by reference to explicit definition”
§
“associated
not only with a formal public style but also with a range of meaning that is
primarily abstract and ideational”
We need
both
§
“Any
discourse aiming to encompass both kinds of meaning is likely to incorporate
both kinds of word”
§
“Perhaps
because the grand style was so clearly defined in functional terms ..
and because its function was so clearly understood to be persuasion or moving,
most renaissance writers ground the magniloquent latinate in the homely Saxon.”
C16th
cultural obsession with ‘copiousness’ of language
§
not
just for its own sake but as a persuasive tool
§
Erasmus,
De copia: hundreds of ways of saying “Your letters have delighted me
very much”
o Thy Letter hath affected me
with a singular Pleasure
o I am affected with an
incredible Pleasure by thy Letter.
o Thy letter was no small Joy
o Thy writings have been
sweeter than either Ambrosia or Nectar. (etc.)
§
I’m
getting this from an c18th English translation!
What in me is dark
Illumine,
what is low raise and support.
(Milton, Paradise Lost)
Illumine,
support
§
describe
and epitomize “the epic qualities Milton desires”
Dark, low
§
their
negative counterparts”
Shakespeare
(Hamlet urging Horatio not to commit suicide):
Absent
thee from felicitie a while,
And
in this harsh world draw thy breath in paine.
Absent, felicity
§
words
“used to convey an intellectual apprehension of a state of stoical endurance,
which they simultaneously dignify by their own stylistic formality
And
in this harsh world draw thy breath in paine:
§
“turns
to the physical reality of living on and expresses it in predominantly Saxon
vocabulary” (pain isn’t native, but is old and monosyllabic!)
(How)
can you distinguish seriousness from pomposity or bombast?
Agamemnon
in Troilus and Cressida “persuades his despondent allies to continue the
war against Troy, arguing that the setbacks in their seven-year campaign should
be regarded as (1) knots in a piece of wood, or (2) trials of stamina imposed
by the gods:”
Checks and
disasters
Grow
in the veins of actions highest reared,
As
(1) knots, by the conflux of meeting sap,
Infects
the sound pine, and diverts his grain
Tortive
and errant
from his course of growth ...
Why then, you
princes,
Do
you with cheeks abashed behold our works,
And
think them shames which are indeed naught else
But
(2) the protractive trials of great Jove
To
find persistive constancy in men?
This
is an insistently latinate passage
(1)
Synonymia:
§
glosses
one Latinate hard word not with a native word but with another latinate word: tortive and errant
(2) Paradiastole (restatement in other terms)
§
restates
shames in increasingly obscurer terms: protractive trials, persistive
constancy
Effect
of all this latinity characterizes the speaker as a
§
“pompous
nonentity, divorced from the rude realities of military stalemate”?
§
“crafty
politician, who uses rhetoric for purposes of deceit, disguising unpalatable
facts so as to cheer the troops and prolong a shameful war”?