How We Might be Speaking a Different Language: The English Academy That Never Was
England’s attempt to control its language - and how its failure allowed English to flower freely into the global language it is today.
The English poet Edmund Waller wrote:
“Poets that Lasting Marble Seek,
Must carve in Latin or in Greek;
We write in Sand…”
Waller felt that Latin and Greek were eternal but the English language was so unruly it would never be fixed and therefore render his poetry unreadable to future generations.
In 1635, with similar concerns, Cardinal Richelieu had set up the Académie Francaise, that would “give definite rules to our language, and to render it pure, eloquent and capable of treating the arts and sciences.”
Richelieu designed the new academy to be a conservative, centralising force which would strengthen the French State and monarchy - standardising grammar, spelling and vocabulary. Part of the project was to create a dictionary, which it achieved in 1694.
The continental academy was regarded with interest in England. In 1664 a committee chaired by the pre-eminment English poet John Dryden, was appointed for the setting up of an English Academy to “improve the English tongue”.
Dryden, as well as being a poet, was a critic, translator, and playwright who later became England’s first Poet Laureate. Restoration England came to be known in literary circles as the “Age of Dryden”.
Dryden found English language “unruly” compared to the “polished” nature of Latin and Italian. The humble English language, a chaotic mishmash of German, Norse and Norman, had evolved via migration and conquest, picking up different rules from the inherited languages.
He said of English words: “To supply our poverty, we have trafficked with our neighbour nations, by which means we abound as much in words as Amsterdam does in religions.”
Dryden proposed setting up a Royal English Academy. It would “control” English like Richelieu had done with French. He called together a distinguished committee in 1665.
The members included Thomas Sprat, a churchman who later became the Bishop of Rochester, as well as John Evelyn, a diarist and landowner, and Abraham Cowley, who was considered one of the most eminent poets in England.
The group met on three or four occasions in the winter of 1665.
Sprat believed in removing “amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style” from English - to return to a “primitive purity”.
John Evelyn wanted a dictionary to filter out foreign “corruptions”. He also suggested leaving out superfluous letters from words. Another proposal was the production of a definitive book of grammar to be the sole arbiter of correctness.
Abraham Cowley wanted a more scientific approach to the rules of language.
To refine, purify, and standardise.
Dryden regarded the English tongue as barbaric. A collection of new “quaint or courtly expressions” would be introduced to improve courtly exchanges between people.
The great men wanted nothing less than to standardise all grammar and spelling, even to the extent that words would be examined and judged before being chosen or rejected.
“... I am desirous, if it were possible, that we might all write with the same certainty of words and purity of phrase to which the Italians first arrived, and after them the French. We are full of monosyllables, and those clogged with consonants ; and our pronunciation is effeminate: all which are enemies to a sounding language.”
It seems incredible to a contemporary observer, with English a world language, that the committee held it in such low regard - and thought it should be purged of foreign influence and completely reorganised.
It would, Dryden admitted, be a massive undertaking: “Neither is one man sufficient for such a work; it was the employment of the whole (French) Academy for many years. The court, the college, and the town must be joined in it.”
Dryden made a strong personal appeal to the King.
“Will your Lordship give me leave to speak out and to acquaint the world, that from your encouragement and patronage we may one day expect to speak and write a language worthy of the English wit, and which foreigners may not disdain to learn. The genius of the nation seems to call you out, as it were by name, to polish and adorn your native language, and to take from it the reproach of its barbarity.”
The committee met on three or four occasions in the winter of 1665.
Sadly, in the words of a member of the committee, “it crumbled away and fell to nothing”.
Even the poet Waller, despite his expressed worries about writing in sand, did not attend.
The opening of the Dutch War and the Great Plague hit London. A year later the capital was consumed by the Great Fire, causing an exodus.
The committee’s meeting place at Gresham College was turned back into a trading exchange.
Such grand attempts to shape English seem out of place. The language has thwarted any attempt at regulation.
John Evelyn was not alone. History is littered with plans for the improvement of the English tongue.
In fact grammar and standardisation of the language had begun much earlier. The arrival of Caxton’s printing press in 1472 promoted English over Latin and French, and popularized vernacular works like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The revival of ancient learning during the Renaissance brought thousands of Latin and Greek words into the language. The 1611 King James Bible standardized spelling and phrases.
The emergence of dictionaries and grammar books helped cement norms. One of those opposed to the idea of an Academy was the lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, who invoked “English liberty” against the prescription involved.
In 1746, a group of publishers approached Johnson with the idea of creating an authoritative dictionary of the English language.
Johnson claimed that he could finish the project in three years. In comparison, he noted, the Académie Française had 40 scholars spending 40 years to complete their dictionary, which prompted Johnson to claim, “This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.”
A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) played a big role in fixing spelling.
Even with a dictionary “Semantic drift” - the natural, often slow, evolution of word meanings over time, is as remorseless as the tides.
The faliure of the Academy did not stop people complaining.
In his 1712 “Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue” Jonathan Swift expressed dissatisfaction about the state of English, complained about the contraction of verbs like disturb’d (from disturbéd) and rebuk’d (from rebukéd). “By leaving out a vowel to save a syllable we form a jarring sound.”
Swift wrote a letter to the Tatler suggesting an annual “index expurgatorious” “to expunge all words and phrases that are offensive to good sense”. The shortening of polysyllabic words – for instance, “mob” for mobile, came in for particular criticism.
By the early nineteenth century the language had stabilised to the point that the author Jane Austen used a repertoire of deviant English usage to draw her characters.
Characters are defined by their vocabulary, idioms, and sentence structures; for example, Mrs. Elton’s repetitive speech reveals her shallow nature in “Emma”. Sir Walter Elliot’s complex, self-important phrasing highlights his vanity in “Persuasion”.
When Austen deploys “vulgarisms or low expressions,” they are generally in the mouths of her low, vulgar characters.
Four centuries later The Académie Française still thrives. 40 artists, known as “immortals”, labour to protect the language from appropriation by “Anglo-Saxon” words.
The Académie runs a website called “Dire, Ne pas dire” (“To say, Not to say”) which suggest French alternatives to invasive words. http://www.academie-francaise.fr/dire-ne-pas-dire
(A recent entry, for example, recommends readers to say “C’est trés bien” and not “C’est top.”)
In Britain the dream of regulation has not completely died. One of the latest attempts to tame the English tongue is “The Queen’s (now King’s) English Society,” founded in 1972, which the Times newspaper once dubbed the “pedant’s revolt”.
The King’s Society aims to “to promote the maintenance, knowledge... development and appreciation of the English language... to educate the public in its correct and elegant usage; and to discourage the intrusion of anything detrimental to clarity or euphony.” [Euphony is how a word sounds]
They dismiss new words - like “lol” - (I sympathise on that one) arriving in dictionaries -and champion disappearing rules, such as avoiding split infinitives.
It is sometimes argued that the “Queen’s English” - a term for someone who speaks well - reinforces class-based bias rather than promoting better communication.