Roots
The global language
Deepti

The Bournemouth Council of UK recently banned its staff from using Latin words and phrases, not realising that English no longer belongs to the UK alone. Protests globally articulated what Mary Beard of the University of Cambridge describes as, “absolute bonkers and the linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing. English is and always has been a language full of foreign words. It has never been an ethnically pure language”. The council had issued the ban in the interest of “plain, appropriate and easily understood language”.

In the 16th and early 17th century when English was in the transition phase from Middle to Modern, a group of scholars took up cudgels against foreign loanwords. An inkhorn term is any foreign borrowing English, deemed to be unnecessary. Usually, the anger was directed at words from Latin or Greek. At this point of time, English was replacing Latin as the main language of science and learning. Many new words were being introduced into the language by writers, often borrowed from Classical literature. Critics regarded these words as useless because first, they felt that one required a knowledge of Latin or Greek to understand them and second, in their opinion, there were words with identical meaning already in English. The inkhorn, an inkwell made out of horn, was an important item for many scholars and soon came to stand for writers, in general. Later, it became a byword for fussy or pedantic writers like William Barnes, who created a whole lexicon of words such as ‘starlore’ for astronomy and ‘speechcraft’ for grammar.

Words such as these neologisms were not widely accepted. Etymology reveals that at times these inkhorn words did fill a semantic gap by giving words for new concepts. Sometimes additional words were created, giving synonyms for words that were already in the language. Some instances of such pairs are lamb/mutton, castle/chateau, regal/royal and abbreviate/abridge. But one must not forget that the phenomenal growth of English from a small group of islands to the whole world is due to its flexibility and large heartedness.