The Greek Controversy The Lollards has expounded a sensitive and scholarly theory of translation, emphasizing the importance

of having a reliable original text to work from. Higher standards of accuracy in written texts were achieved following the introduction of the new printing technology. Caxton1 was criticized for the textual inaccuracy of his translations. Erasmus was worried about accuracy of text and attention to detail while working as professor of Greek at Cambridge from 1509 to 1524. Among his achievements was a Greek New Testament with a Latin version by 1516. Erasmus attention to the detail of Greek texts extended to the question of how they should be pronounced. After the Reformation, Roman canon law was abolished as a university subject, and Greek was introduced as an exciting new subject. At those times, Sir John Cheke taught Greek at Cambridge. Chekes efforts to introduce the reformed pronunciation at Cambridge were opposed by Stephen Gardiner, the university chancellor, and forbidden its use. It is difficult to believe that Gardiner was threatened by sounds and the study of pronunciation. What did present a threat was the precise study of texts. The Bible was at this time increasingly proclaimed by reformers as the ultimate authority, and, the more scholarly and accurate the written text, the more effectively it could be used to challenge the traditional oral authority of the church. Scholarly writing in English English, it was argued, was a barbarous language, unfit for Scripture or the great works of antiquity; to write in English is to cast pearls before swine. By the sixteenth century, there was a growing demand for books in English. If English was an impoverished language, this obviously presented the scholarly writer with a problem. In order to write on topics normally discussed in Latin, the writer had to find words to express concepts which had no conventional English equivalents. The means adopted (borrowing from Latin and French, and inventing new English words) were the same as those used in the fifteenth century by the Lollards and their opponents. But now it was on a bigger scale, in both the number of words, and the range of texts.

Caxton introduced the 1st printing press into England and made the first printings.

Inkhorn terms The new fashion for taking words wholesale from Latin and using them in English texts is usually associated with Sir Thomas Elyot, who borrowed words of the Latin tonge for the insufficiencie of our owne langage. Elyots approach was a compromise between traditional Latin writing, and a kind of writing which sought to be wholly English. It was subject to criticism both from conservatives who thought scholars2 should not be writing in English at all, and from radicals who thought it was not English enough. As a result, borrowing as a whole later came under attack, and the foreign borrowings were dubbed inkhorn terms. In the next decade, Sir John Cheke was equally sanguine about the sufficiency of native materials. The views of Cheke are directly opposed to those of Elyot. But Elyot was trying to get scholarly writing in English accepted, and by the 1550s that battle had long since been won. The written sentence In addition to individual words, scholars influenced the way in which words were grouped together to form sentences. In early printed texts, words were grouped according to the way they would be spoken aloud, perhaps by someone dictating to a scribe. Hay un ejemplo muy bueno para usar y mostrar las oraciones. If you read aloud youll have little difficulty in understanding it. If you try to divide the text into sentences, you will find it impossible. That is because it is not written in sentences. Some scholars have concluded that Caxton was not a good writer. By the 1530s we find word groupings remodeled according to the Latin sentence, and from this time texts can be divided into familiar sentences. The Latin sentence has never been socially contentious, and has never been challenged.

Scholar: a person who knows a lot about a particular subject because they have studied it in detail.