The prescriptive tradition

As new standard languages began to replace Latin in the nations of Europe, a flourishing market emerged for manuals of ‘good’ speech and writing. This prescriptive tradition, over which Latin cast a long shadow, was especially strong in France and Great Britain. In France, battle lines were drawn from the sixteenth century between those who equated good usage with that of a social elite (the Royal Court) and members of an intellectual elite, trained in Classical languages, who saw themselves as the proper arbiters of linguistic correctness. The interests of the former largely prevailed, and Vaugelas’ Remarks on the French Language (Remarques sur la langue française), published in 1647, became a veritable bible for social climbers anxious to learn the secrets of the ‘good’ courtly speech.

The book’s preface is very revealing of the nature of prescriptivism. The usage of even a narrow social elite is found to be heterogeneous: not all courtly usage is acceptable, and Vaugelas is interested only in the ‘healthiest part’ (la plus saine partie) of the Court, which he does not define. His prescriptions are therefore based on circularity (good speech is to be found in the healthiest part of the Court, which itself is recognized by…good speech) and are both arbitrary and idiosyncratic. In a country hungry for prescriptive rules, this mattered little, and many of Vaugelas’ strictures have been accepted as ‘correct’ French ever since.

The Latin model

As nation states emerged in Europe, the need to develop national standard languages became keenly felt. Prescriptive linguistic works condemned all but the usage of a narrow social elite. Grammars of European languages generally followed the Latin model of Priscian, for which in many cases they were unsuited. Many modern prescriptive rules of English derive ultimately from Latin grammar.

From the sixteenth century onwards, prescriptive works in Britain largely follow Priscian’s Latin model. Bullokar’s Bref Grammar for English (1586), for example, takes the eight Priscianic word classes set out in William Lily’s Grammar of Latin in English (c.1540) and applies them to English; the prescriptions of Robert Lowth’s Introduction to English Grammar (1762) are likewise informed by Latin, and even by 1795, Lindley Murray’s English Grammar was arguing for three nominal cases (nominative, genitive, accusative), justified on the model of Latin, in spite of the fact that English – then as now – only regularly distinguishes nominative and accusative in pronouns (he saw me vs. I saw him). While prescriptive grammarians of English are no longer as in thrall to Latin as they once were, many complaints about ‘bad’ English, as we saw, start from assumptions about Latin grammar. Simon Heffer’s Strictly English: The correct way to write… and why it matters, published in 2011, still condemns the use of split infinitives, though its author seems more relaxed than his predecessors about ending sentences with prepositions (p. 89).