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.. whilst interest in problems of language was keen, little or no attention was given to questions of grammatical correctness; criticism previous to the eighteenth century seems to have been concerned with matters of vocabulary chiefly. | Leonard, Sterling Andrus (1929, p.9) |
The idea that language was instituted by the deity directly was held during a great part of the eighteenth century.... It was understood that the perfect primitive language was much affected by the dispersal at Babel ..... And hence arose the necessity for grammarians to remold languages, especially so remote and barbarous a dialect as English, nearer to the original perfectly logical pattern. | Leonard, Sterling Andrus (1929, p.19) |