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A literary language is a register of a language that is used in writing, and which often differs in lexicon and syntax from the language used in speech. English has such a register. Consider this sentence: few people would speak such a sentence aloud, unless they were reading from a prepared text. Now think about this --- there aren't hardly any real life situations where somebody's going to open their mouth, and the first thing that comes out is Consider this sentence. The second sentence attempts to mimic more closely the usage of a particular form of spoken English as it contrasts with written English.
Comparing the two, it is apparent that literary English differs from spoken English in a number of particulars.
- It is "formal;" which is to say, it is an acrolect. Contractions and similar spoken forms are avoided or are written out in full.
- It uses a different lexicon. The verb consider appears more often in writing than it does in casual speech; the noun phrase such a sentence is again something that is much likelier to be written than spoken impromptu. By contrast, a phrase like there aren't hardly any is far likelier to be heard spoken aloud than written down; in writing, one is drawn instead to there are no. . . Who actually uses one as an epicene pronoun in real life, anyways?
- It has a simplified syntax. This observation seems counterintuitive at first. Written documents may well contain complex sentences that contain multiple subordinate clauses and similar grammatical features. However, their basic structure tends to break down into simple subjects and predicates. Pronouns tend not to proliferate in writing as they do in speech; the methods of voice inflection and other disambiguating devices that clarify their referents are not available in writing. Long emphatic negatingNegation in its most basic sense, changes the truth value of a statement to its opposite. It is an operation needed chiefly in logic, mathematics, and grammar. Logic and mathematics In logic, logical negation is a unary logical operator that reverses the phrases like there aren't hardly any seldom occur in literary English, because while they seem more colloquial, they are syntactically complex. They too can be disambiguated in speech much easier than in writing.
Likewise, native readers and writers of English are often unaware that the complexities of English spellingEnglish spelling (or orthography), although largely phonemic, has more complicated rules than many other spelling systems used by languages written in alphabetic scripts. The English language contains many inconsistencies between spelling and pronunciatio make written English a somewhat artificial construct. The traditional spelling of English, at least for inherited words, preserves a late Middle EnglishMiddle English is the name given to an early form of the English language that was in common use from roughly the 12th to the 15th centuries— from after the Norman invasion by William the Conqueror in 1066 to before the introduction of the printing press. phonology that is no one's speech dialect; the artificial preservation of this much earlier form of the language in writing might make much of what we write intelligible to Chaucer, even if we could not understand his speech.
Other languages have similar traditions of literary language. The longer a literary tradition a language has, the likelier there is to be disconnection between speech and writing. In GreekThe Greek language ( /Elini'k{/) is an Indo-European language which has existed from around the 14th century BC in the Cretan inscriptions called Linear B. Mycenaean Greek of this period is distinguished from later Classical or Ancient Greek of the 8th ce, up until the middle of the twentieth century Greek writers wrote in a style that they called the katharevousaKatharevousa #x3ba;αθαρεύουσα /kaTa'revusa/ is a form of the Greek language, created during the early 19th century by Adamantios Korais ( 1748- 1833). A graduate of the university of Montpellier i, a style based on ancient Greek; and even when the katharevousa came to be relatively neglected as a norm, Greek writing still preserves old diphthongIn phonetics, a diphthong is a vowel combination usually involving a quick but smooth movement from one vowel to another, often interpreted by listeners as a single vowel sound or phoneme. While "pure" vowels, or monophthongs are said to have one target ts and other graphemeA grapheme designates the atomic unit in written language. Graphemes include letters, Chinese ideograms, numerals, punctuation marks, and other symbols. In a phonological orthography a grapheme corresponds to one phoneme. In spelling systems that are non-s which have been merged in spoken (or demotic) Greek. Likewise, written French continues to mark noun and verb forms that no longer affect the pronunciation. Through the centuries of a widely differing gulf between vulgar Latin and ultimately the Romance languages, Latin continued to be written, attempting to imitate the model of classical Latin; when you spelled your local Romance language correctly and used proper grammar, classical Latin was what came out, and that was what you put on paper. The fact that classical Latin was unintelligible to the populace, and should no longer be used in homilies, was not acknowledged by the Roman Catholic Church until the Council of Tours in 814.
In Javanese, Malay, and Japanese, special literary or formal words and grammatical constructions substitute for vernacular expressions in literary style. There are a number of explicit grades of formality in these languages, and moving from one to another is marked much more strongly in the grammar than it is in English. In Javanese, there are alphabet characters derived from the alphabets used to write Sanskrit, no longer in ordinary use, that are used in literary words as a mark of respect. Literary Chinese tends to a density of expression that is much greater than spoken Chinese. Literary Arabic, based on the standard of the Qur'an, continues to function as a lingua franca throughout the Arab world despite the often strongly differing varieties of local Arabic vernaculars.
