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Important Incident That Influenced The English Language

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I. The English writer Stephen Fry once said: “You have already achieved the English Language poet’s most important goal: you can read, write and speak English well enough to understand this sentence”. I may agree with this, but we have to admit English language had passed through many stages of complexities to occur such a simple and stable status. If we go back several centuries-early old English (450-c.850) to the late modern English (c.1950---) - we would list many changes that affected the English language. In this report, I will argue one important incident that had influenced the English language a lot; what had happened in the late seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century lead a major shifting from the complete authority of the grammarians on the English language to the lexicographers’ control and decision making of the language??!!

II. To start with, I have to mention the most important factor of our subject which is Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language”, that had been published on April 15, 1755. Samuel Johnson who was born in September 18, 1709 gave his dictionary its prestige and made it a part of history as it was first published after eight years of hard work. This distinctive job required six assistants to list 40,000 words and mark this work as “The English Language Dictionary” of the century. Later on, it gained much attention with its new approach and uniqueness as each word was well-defined in details and a wide

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