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Shakespeare’s Command of English |
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Shakespeare had sparse formal education, and the curriculum of the day was very different from ours
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There were no dictionaries; the first such lexical work for
speakers of English was compiled by Robert Cawdrey as A Table
Alphabeticall in 1604
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Organized grammar texts would not appear until the 1700s
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Shakespeare is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with
the introduction of nearly 3,000 words into the language
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The size of Shakespeare's vocabulary is somewhere between 17,000
and 20,000 words
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Compare: in the whole King James version of the Bible there are
about 8,000 words
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This first type of
linguistic creativity can be exemplified by Shakespeare’s
neologisms: be-all, end-all, foregone, green-eyed,
appertainment, assassination
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In
other words, when we deal with Shakespeare's second type of linguistic creativity, what
counts is not what he uses, but the way that he uses it
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