ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on lexis and looks at how Early Modern English (EModE) dramatically expanded its word stock, partly by borrowing and partly by using native resources, including affixation and compounding. Some societies, and some people in them, have strong views about taking words from other languages. Excessive borrowings of this sort led to a debate that goes under the name of the Inkhorn Controversy. An inkhorn is an inkwell, and inkhorn terms were strange and obscure words, often used by scholars, and generally borrowed into English from foreign tongues. Borrowed words must have been extremely unsettling for the Elizabethans to find their language suddenly flooded with masses of new words. Affixation, a common means of word formation in both Old English (OE) and EModE, remains popular today. Thomas Bedingfield specialization was a genre popular at the time, called courtesy literature books which taught skills and good manners to courtiers: self-improvement books for Renaissance gentlemen.
