The Quest for "English English"
It may be stating the obvious that the differing stylistic
properties of native and borrowed words make them more suitable
for some functions and unfit for others. However, there have
always been debates about the merits of the two lexical layers,
and changing linguistic attitudes have affected the balance of
the two elements in certain registers. In the course of these
debates two related concepts have emerged: those of Pure English
and Plain English.
We have seen how in the seventeenth century
the Protestant antiquarians asserted a patriotic preference of
native Saxon stock. This was by no means the first instance of
Saxonism, a name applied to attempts “to raise the
proportion borne by the originally and etymologically English
words in our speech to those that come from alien sources” (Gowers,
Modern English Usage, 1965). As far back as the fifteenth
century Reginald Pecock, a theologian, tried to restore the
power of creating new words which Old English had before the
Norman Conquest by using such words as ungothroughsome
for “impenetrable” and coining the term not-to-be-thought-uponable.
“Bouts” of Saxonism have usually followed periods of vocabulary
expansion and may, in part, be attributed to a reaction against
excessive borrowing. Few critics on language could stay impartial in
the matter. Samuel Johnson, for instance, was seriously concerned
about the Gallicizing trend introduced during the Restoration and
made a call for the return to the native purity of English in the
preface to his Dictionary:
Our language, for almost a century, has, by the concurrence of many
causes, been gradually departing from its original Teutonick
character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and
phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recal it, by
making our ancient volumes the groundwork of stile.
In the nineteenth century the Dorset poet William Barnes, the author
of The Speechcraft of the English Language, was one of the
adherents of Saxonism. In his zeal for “English English” he
advocated, with little success, the replacement of the Latin term
adjective by his own creation markword of suchness and
the word omnibus (also of Latin origin; later abbreviated to
bus) by folk-wain.
William Morris was another
prominent poet who did his best to promote the native element in the
language. However, his artificial coinages like, for example,
faith-heat (enthusiasm), fore-ween (anticipate),
sundersome (divisible), and word-strain (accent) failed
to uproot their Romance derived equivalents.
Occasionally, the attempts to promote a “native” coinage have met
with some success: foreword (first recorded in 1842) has
joined preface (first recorded in Chaucer, c. 1386);
betterment and forebear have been given some amount of
currency beside their Romance counterparts improvement and
ancestor. But generally, the quest for Saxonism has proved to be
an unrealisable nationalistic dream. As has been noted by
Burchfield, one cannot remove all words of alien origin from modern
English speech without destroying the fabric of the language.