WARS OF WORDS QUESTIONS

1. What does ‘elocution’ means? What are ‘elocution lessons’?

Elocution is the study of formal speaking in pronunciation, grammar, style and tone.

Elocution lessons are lessons where people train on proper speaking.

2. What do ‘polyglossia’ and ‘monoglossia’ mean?

Polyglossia: the coexistence of multiple languages in the same area.

Monoglossia: the predominance of a language in an area.

3. What kind of English does Puttenham recommend?

He recommends the natural, pure, and most usual language. People shall take that usual speech from the court and that from London and the shires lying about London.

4. What does ‘copious’ mean?

Copious: /’kəupɪəs/, abundant, plentiful in number.

5. What does ‘trope’ mean?

Trope: A figure of speech which is not used in a literal manner.

6. Why does Crowley call the standardization process a war?

Because the linkage of language and war was a very common trope in the eighteen century.

7. What does ‘ecomium’ mean?

A formal or high expression of praise.

8. Who wrote ‘The Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue’?

Jonathan Swift (1712)

9. Do Johnson and Swift agree that the English language has degenerated?

Yes, because as Johnson says ‘tongues like governments have a natural tendency to degeneration […] let us make some struggles to our language’. With reference to Swift, his work intends to reform the language in order to create a proper vehicle of communication. So both agree in changing the language, therefore, they agree that the English language has degenerated.

10. Swift proposed an academy, who else?

Dryden, Daniel Defoe, Addison and Wilson.

11. Why were the Whigs against an academy?

Firstly, because the academy was identified with France and thus with the Stuart Claimants to the Monarchy; and secondly, because it had been instituted by Cardinal Richelieu who was an aristocratic Catholic.

12. What does Sheridan means by the ‘genius of our people’?

It means that people in England have no idea of submitting to any laws to which they don’t give their own conseil, so they have genius.

13. What reason does Swift give about the ‘decay of Latin’?

The change of their government into a Tyranny.

There being no further use of Encouragement for popular orators.

Freedom of the city, but capacity for employment which brought a great number of foreign pretenders into Rome.

The Invasion from Goths and Vandals.

Summing up, heteroglossia brings about the imperial downfall.

14. What does ‘suffer’ in the line 2 of page 66 mean?

Writers were worried that if they wrote in English, in the future, people would not be able to understand their texts because the language was constantly changing.

15. Who was the first person, involved in German Cultural Nationalism, to make the link between language and nation?

Herder.

16. What does Sheridan’s solution to the problem of divergence in pronunciation?

He proposed that the clergy should be taught pronunciation in order that they could then act as the medium by which it could be propagated.

17. How did several authors describe other European languages?

Italian: It is pleasant, but without sinews, like a still fleeting water.

French: It is delicate, flimsy.

Spanish: It is majestical, but runs too much on the ‘o’, and is therefore very guttural and not very pleasant. It’s grave.

Dutch: It is manlike, but withal very harsh as one ready at every word to pick a quarrel.

18. In which novel did Daniel Defoe capture the ‘Colonial fantasy’?

In ‘Robinson Crusoe’.

19. Locke thought that learning Latin was not necessary, for which group of people?

For the Tradesmen.

20. How did learning to speak English using Standard English empower people?

The languages are directly related to political and social factors. Standard English became the prestigious accent in society. It distinguished different social classes. For example, the burgoise started to take interest in the vernacular in order to be admitted within the social and political life.

21. What kind of English is deemed to be ‘proper’ English?

That which is found in the upper and middle ranks, over the whole British. (Universities and Court)

22. How was the inculcation of linguistic patterns carried out with middle class children?

By means of discipline, punishment and education. For example, dividing the class in groups of children to the lengths of words they could spell, rewarding them if they do properly into a better group.

23. What was the purpose of training women linguistically in the 18^th century according to Crowley?

To fulfill the role of the mother passing on pure language to the child and to act as a companion to the male in the public sphere.

24. Why did Locke warn against children talking to servants?

Because of the contagion of these ill precedents, both in civility and virtue and owing to their language full of untowardly tricks and vice, as otherwise they possibly would be ignorant of all their lives.

25. What was the difference between the mistakes made by the working classes and those made by the gentry according to Sheridan?

The difference was that the gentry’s mistakes are not structural.