Though the language of Shakespeare in his work “Macbeth” is very difficult for us to understand at the moment, it is only one linguistic generation away from the English we use today and is regarded as ‘modern English’ or ‘early modern English’. Most of the sentences and sentence structures seem strange, but his creativity with language after understanding what Shakespeare meant is fascinating. What is even more interesting is that during Shakespeare’s time, there were no dictionaries, so no collection of words that he could look up and find better descriptive words. Despite this, while reading Macbeth from a different book where most words were defined, I understood that there were endless amounts of different words for every different situation. “His vocabulary, as culled from his works, numbers upward of 17,000 words (quadruple that of an average, well-educated conversationalist in the language).” So where did all these words come from? How could one become so dominant over a language without the help of dictionaries? “Shakespeare is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with the introduction of nearly 3,000 words into the language.” After looking for a word that seemed correct for a situation, I guess Shakespeare thought it would be best to use a new word in one of his plays and then define it afterwards in his works.
Friday, March 11, 2016
Language of Shakespeare:
Though the language of Shakespeare in his work “Macbeth” is very difficult for us to understand at the moment, it is only one linguistic generation away from the English we use today and is regarded as ‘modern English’ or ‘early modern English’. Most of the sentences and sentence structures seem strange, but his creativity with language after understanding what Shakespeare meant is fascinating. What is even more interesting is that during Shakespeare’s time, there were no dictionaries, so no collection of words that he could look up and find better descriptive words. Despite this, while reading Macbeth from a different book where most words were defined, I understood that there were endless amounts of different words for every different situation. “His vocabulary, as culled from his works, numbers upward of 17,000 words (quadruple that of an average, well-educated conversationalist in the language).” So where did all these words come from? How could one become so dominant over a language without the help of dictionaries? “Shakespeare is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with the introduction of nearly 3,000 words into the language.” After looking for a word that seemed correct for a situation, I guess Shakespeare thought it would be best to use a new word in one of his plays and then define it afterwards in his works.
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I think it's a very interesting point. When I searched a little bit about Shakespeare's way of using English language, I found out that he is writing with iambic pentameter.
ReplyDeleteIn this pentameter, plays and sonnets have ten syllables per line that are unrhymed. Beside the technical features, it is claimed that there is a meaning behind it. The rhythm of iambic pentameter is sounded like to a heartbeat, which means a series of stressed words, then unstressed words.