ABSTRACT
The study of English Language, like the study of English Literature, has developed only relatively recently at university level in the UK. Until the very end of the nineteenth century, there was no such subject as ‘English’ in universities, and students who wanted to study the language and literature of a culture took ‘Classics’ – the language and literature of Ancient Greece and Rome, civilisations that were much admired and imitated throughout the Western world. Early attitudes to what was deemed ‘respectable’ within the area of English study can be seen in a pamphlet produced in 1887 by Henry Nettleships, an Oxford University Professor of Classics. This pamphlet, entitled The Study of Modern European Languages and Literatures at the University of Oxford, rejected the study of English Literature as in any way comparable to Classics, but saw philology – the study of the history of language – as just about acceptable. However, philology, as conceived then, was not about the real language of contemporary English speakers or about any aspects of social history (such as language for new inventions or new experiences). It was described as a ‘science', looking at the history of specific language features. Think of philology as comparable to the classification of types of insect (entomology) or plants and flowers (botany), where scholars work to categorise and label types and sub-types.
