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Robert Lowth: A short introduction to English grammar: with critical notes. [36] 1763. John Ash: Grammatical institutes: or, An easy introduction to Dr. Lowth's English grammar. [37] 1765. William Ward: An Essay on English Grammar. [38] 1766. Samuel Johnson: A dictionary of the English Language...: to which is prefixed, a Grammar of the English ...
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
William Bullokar was a 16th-century printer who devised a 40-letter phonetic alphabet for the English language. [1] Its characters were presented in the black-letter or "gothic" writing style commonly used at the time and also in Roman type.
Most native English speakers today find Old English unintelligible, even though about half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots. [12] The grammar of Old English was much more inflected than modern English, combined with freer word order , and was grammatically quite similar in some respects to modern German .
Traditional grammar (also known as classical grammar) is a framework for the description of the structure of a language or group of languages. [1] The roots of traditional grammar are in the work of classical Greek and Latin philologists. [2] The formal study of grammar based on these models became popular during the Renaissance. [3]
The term grammar can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writers rather than individuals. Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, English grammar could describe those rules followed by every one of the language's speakers. [2]
During the second half of the 20th century, the prescriptivist tradition of usage commentators started to fall under increasing criticism. Thus, works such as the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, appearing in 1993, attempt to describe usage issues of words and syntax as they are actually used by writers of note, rather than to judge them by standards derived from logic, fine ...
English words gave way to borrowings from Anglo-Norman following the Norman Conquest as English lost ground as a language of prestige. Anglo-Norman was used in schools and dominated literature, nobility and higher life, leading a wealth of French loanwords to enter English over the course of several centuries—English only returned to courts of law in 1362, and to government in the following ...