By 1500, a new force had begun to exert itself on the English language, this time the result of an intellectual movement rather than of a military conquest. The movement was the Renaissance or Revival of Learning, which was marked by the rapid advance of the sciences, a renewal of interest in the Greek and Roman classics, the rise of nationalism, and by such events as the Protestant Reformation, the invention of the printing press, and the discovery of the New World.
The growth of national consciousness brought with it a desire on the part of Englishmen and Frenchmen and Italians and others to write books in their native tongues rather than in Latin, which had been the universal language of learned men throughout the Middle Ages. Many English writers, however, felt that their own language was still not sufficiently developed to meet the demands of the new learning; therefore, to remedy what they considered deficiencies in vocabulary, they borrowed wholesale from Latin, which