Authorities in many countries have had a misguided belief that the best way to protect their language was to place it in the care of an academy. Italy’s Accademia della Crusca was founded as early as 1582, Richelieu established the Académie Française in 1635, and, closer to home, the Real Academia Española was founded in 1713. The idea of these organizations, and of many more which were to spring up over the years has been to “protect” the language and its grammar.
Grammar, in the words of Cardinal Richelieu, is “the art of speaking and writing correctly [...
] it describes good usage and defends this from all causes of corruption “. (My bold letters, and I shall return to the theme in a moment). Now this never happened in England or the United States.
But proposals for an English Academy were made in the 17th Century, supported by such literary stalwarts as Daniel Defoe and John Dryden, and again by Jonathan Swift in 1712 in his Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue . In that proposal, Swift complained that “our language is extremely imperfect; that its daily improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily corruptions; that the pretenders to polish and refine it have chiefly multiplied abuses and absurdities; and that in many instances it offends against every part of grammar.” But one of the earliest recorded writers in English to complain about language change was William Caxton.
He was born in approximately 1422 .
