ENG501 Assignment 2 Solution and Discussion

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Q1. In 1635, Cardinal Richelieu offered a royal charter to a small group of men, who for several years had been meeting once a week to talk about books and to exchange views on literature. The original group was composed of only six or eight; the maximum membership was set at forty. It was named as ‘French Academy.’

Write the THREE major aims of French Academy. (3 Marks)
Keeping in mind those three aims, what is your opinion about the contribution of French Academy for French language? (7 Marks)

Note: Please go through topic 131 of the handouts for guidance.

Q2. Unlike Italian and French language academies, no academy was built for English language. The idea further died down with the publication of A Dictionary of the English Language, by Samuel Johnson, A.M. in 1755. Write a note on the role the above mentioned dictionary played for English language in the 18th century. Also, write down the ‘defects’ and ‘strengths’ of the dictionary.

Note: Please go through topic 135 of the handouts for guidance.(10 Marks)

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ENG501 Assignment 2 Solution and Discussion

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• Major Aim of the French Academy

'The principal function of the Academy shall be to labor with all possible care and diligence to

Give definite rules to our language, and to render it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and sciences.’

Three major aims were:

1. To cleanse the language of impurities, both in writing and spoken language.

2. To establish a certain usage of words.

3. To compile a dictionary, a grammar, a rhetoric, and a treatise on the art Of Poetry

B. it contribution of the more usage the words of the French languageof English because more understanding of the English and French. It also include of languageof impurities because it add in speaking and writine .it should be contribute of the French language. French language IS mixture 0T the English and

To compile a dictionary, a grammar, a rhetoric, and a treatise on the art Of poetry

• zans . Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary on the English Language is one of the most word was defined in detail. the definitions • ustrated with quotatienscovering every branch of learning. It was a huge scholarly achievement, a more extensive and complex dictionary than anyofits predecessors- the com arable French Dictionaries had taken 55 years to compile and requireå the dedication of 40 scholars.

• A group of London booksellers first commissioned Johnson’sdictionary, as English\fluage. In the preface to the book, ohnson explains how he had found the language to be ‘copious without order, and energetic without rules’. In his view, English was in desperate need of some discipline: 'wherever I turned my view there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated. However, in the process of compiling the dictionary, Johnson recognised that language is impossible to fix because of its constantly changing nature. and that his role was to record the language of the day, rather than to form it.

• Defects

It had defects. Judged by modern standards, it was painfully inadequate. Its etymologies are often ludicrous. It is marred in places by prejudice. It includes a host of words with a Very questionable right to be regarded as belonging to the language.

• Strengths

It had positive aspects and virtues as well. It exhibited the English vocabulary much more fully than had ever been done before. It offered a spelling, fixed, even if sometimes badly, that could be accepted as standard. It supplied thousands of quotations tillustrating the use of words. Johnson himself remarked in his preface, for instances where his own explanation is inadequate ‘the sense may easily be collected entire from the examples.’ 'Every language: he says in the preface, ‘has its anomalies, which, though inconvenient, and in themselves once unnecessary, must be tolerated among the imperfections of human things, and which require only to be registered, that they may not be increased, and ascertained, that they may not be confounded: but every language has likewise its improprieties and absurdities. which it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe.’

• The chief intent of it is to preserve the purity, and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom.’

He sums it up:

• The pronunciation of the language may be fixed.

• Its attainment facilitated.

• Its purity preserved.

• Its use ascertained.

• Its duration lengthened.

• In 1756 Sheridan wrote, 'if our language should ever be fixed, he must be considered by all posterity as the founder, and his dictionary as the corner stone.