ABSTRACT
In the lines above, Shakespeare refers to one of the avenues through which language could be enriched: by recourse to the refurbishing and revival of the native word store. In this paper however, I shall look at the second and by far the most contentious path towards enrichment: that of borrowing. The war of words that the issue generated has left a colourful trail of broken insignia on a once teeming battlefield. Picking among the abandoned standards brandished in the confrontation, it is possible to identify the opposing theories of language growth and development which gave rise to the clash and relate them to the socioeconomic environment from which they gained much of their strength and rhetorical appeal. The two main bugbears of the late Tudor period, namely, the unstable coinage and the fluctuations in the cloth trade, furnished the debate on language with a series of tropes. The fact that linguistic usage was discussed in monetary and economic terms marks a fundamental shift in the conception of language, as it is analysed within the social framework, as a human institution, parallel in its operations to those of the marketplace and the mint - and of no less importance for national sovereignty.
