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The "Ink-horn" Controversy |
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The Rise of the Prescriptive Movement |
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The Early Modern English
period was an age of linguistic awareness and anxiety
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"The language is in a mess
and needs sorting out" was a popular sentiment among the
educated speakers
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Printers, spelling
reformers, and biblical translators were uncertain and confused
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The main concern was
whether English
could
really carry out the range
of communicative functions that French and Latin had previously
performed
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English was seen as being
“symple and rude” whereas French would be described as “fayr”
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French and Latin were still
associated with high style, scholarship, and rhetorical
excellence
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It was widely felt that
English would improve its quality by adopting their properties,
such as their vocabulary, balanced sentence construction, and
features of rhetoric
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Copyrighted material |
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