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Model Englishers
Jan. 19th, 2023 10:18 pmSomething occurs to me. I found an account of a professor in the twentieth century settling a question of Classical Latin grammar by seeing what Cicero did, I assume because we have tons of surviving works of his and because he definitely spoke highly refined educated Latin. As such, will people of 5022 use Shakespeare as a model for proper English? It would be difficult, because we have basically zero prose that we know is written in Shakespeare's own voice. Bernard Shaw is a very famous English writer, we have enormous piles of his writing, much of it is in his own voice, and he had some very specific ideas about the language; but is his work really going to go down in history? Our modern US and UK really have no famous orators who write their own speeches. Possibly Churchill is the closest equivalent; we have tons of surviving writing by him, he was an educated native speaker, and he was very important to history. Dante successfully made himself a model for the Italian language, but most attempts to reform English have failed miserably (see: Bernard Shaw). However, Samuel Johnson's ideas actually largely took hold on the educated Anglosphere; will he be the model of the future classicists who try to reconstruct Early American English? (Even more enticing, we have huge piles of biographical information about the guy, thanks not least to the discovery of the ebony cabinet.) Or maybe future classicists won't need a model; they'll have so much of a surviving corpus, including prescriptivist manuals and descriptivist surveys, that they can say things like "In the 2010s, ending a sentence with a preposition was seen as permitted in the following circumstances and phrases…" and then launch on a ten-page examination of every detail of twenty-first-century English use.
"Ah, the Harbour of Dreamland. Wow, look, there's Cicero! Hey Marcus Tullius, did you know that modern linguists study your speeches to determine what qualifies as proper Latin?"
"One would expect as much."
"Ah, the Harbour of Dreamland. Wow, look, there's Cicero! Hey Marcus Tullius, did you know that modern linguists study your speeches to determine what qualifies as proper Latin?"
"One would expect as much."
