成瀬講義録 “Style—Toward Clarity and Grace”（26）英語の歴史　文体の抽象化ーーその行為を誰が誰に対して行ったのかの情報を文章から削除する

These nouns alone make a style more abstract, but they encourage more abstraction: once a writer express actions in nouns, she can then eliminate whatever (usually concrete) agents perform those actions along with those whom the actions affect:
 
こうした抽象名詞は文体を抽象化するだけでなく、より高い抽象性も文体にもたらすことになる。書き手がさまざまな行為を名詞化して表現すると、その行為を（具体的に）誰が誰に対して行ったのかという情報をすべて文章から削除することができるからだ。

The proposal would provide for certification of the safety of new substances in requests for exemption. These abstract Romance nouns result in a prose that we variously call gummy, turgid, obtuse, prolix, complex, or unreadable. An early example:
 
そしてこうした抽象的なロマンス語系名詞を利用することで生み出された文体は、gummy（くどい）、turgid（仰々しい）、obtuse（鈍重な）、prolix（冗長な）、complex（複雑な）、unreadable（読みにくい）などと評されることとなる。こうした傾向が顕著となった16世紀の文章を例としてひとつ挙げておこう。

”If use and custom, having the help of so long time and continuance wherein to [re]fine our tongue, of so great learning and experience which furnish matter for the [re]fining, of so good wits and judgments which can tell how to [re]fine, have griped at nothing in all that time, with all that cunning, by all those wits which they will not let go but hold for most certain in the right of our writing, that then our tongue ha[s] no certainty to trust to, but write all at random. But the antecedent, in my opinion, is altogether unpossible, wherefore the consequent is a great deal more th[a]n probable, which is that our tongue ha[s] in her own possession and writing very good evidence to prove her own right writing; which, though no man as yet by any public writing of his seem[s] to have seen, yet the tongue itself is ready to show them to any whosoever which is able to read them and withal to judge what evidence is right in the right of writing.”　―　 Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementary, 1582

Other sixteenth-century writers were able to write prose not wholly free of
abstraction, but not burdened by it either, a prose that we would judge today to be clear, direct, and still readable (I have changed only the spelling and punctuation):
 
ただ、抽象化から完全に抜け出すことはできなかったにしても、これほどまでには抽象化されない文章を書くことができた16世紀の書き手もいる。たとえば、次の文章は今日の判断基準からいっても明晰かつ直截であり、読みやすいとさえいえるものである（スペリングと句読法のみ手を加えてある）。

”Among all other lessons this should first be learned, that we never affect any strange inkhorn terms, but to speak as is commonly received, neither seeking to be over-fine, nor yet living overcareless, suiting our speech as most man do, and ordering our wits as the fewest have done. Some seek to far for outlandish English that they forget altogether their mother’s language. And I dare swear this, if some of their mothers were alive, they [would] not [be] able to tell what they say. And yet these fine English clerks will say they speak in their mother tongue, if a man should charge them for counterfeiting the King’s Enlgish.”　-- Thomas Wilson, Art of Rhetoric, 1553