same way, before writing, words do not have any external 
“sign,” reference or significance. The word “oak” is oak, says 
the nonliterate man; how else could it evoke the idea of oak? 
But print had just as far-reaching results in every aspect of 
language as writing had earlier. Whereas medieval vernaculars 
changed very much even from the twelfth to the fifteenth 
centuries, “from the beginning of the sixteenth century these 
matters were no longer thus. By the seventeenth century 
vernaculars everywhere begin to appear crystalized.”

     Febvre and Martin then point to the efforts made in 
medieval chancelleries to standardize verbal practices, and in 
the new centralist Renaissance monarchies to fix languages. 
The new monarch would gladly have passed Acts of Uniformity, 
in the spirit of the printing press to extend not only to religion 
and thought but to spelling and grammar. Today in the