Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 542):
This discourse first appears in English in the work of Chaucer, for example his "Treatise on the Astrolabe", written about 1391. Here we find the same linguistic resources brought into play: nouns as technical terms, and extended nominal groups. The former are partly technological (to do with the construction and operation of the astrolabe), generally Anglo-Saxon or Norman French, like plate, ring, turet (eye, or swivel), riet (from rete 'net', i.e. grid), moder ('mother', body of the instrument); and partly theoretical (from astronomy, mathematics or general methodology), mainly borrowings from Latin like altitude, ecliptik, clymat (climatic zone), degree, equation, conclusioun, evidence. The latter do not attain any spectacular length but involve the expected mixture of clauses and prepositional phrases, as in the same number of altitude on the west side of this line meridional as he was caught on the east side. This is clearly the discourse of organised knowledge; but it is not sharply set off from the language of everyday life.
It is with the "new learning" of the Renaissance that a distinct language of science begins to emerge, with a vastly greater dependence on grammatical metaphor. The earlier exercises in nominalisation had been abstract but only minimally metaphorical; there is a trace of grammatical metaphor in expressions like conclusion and the same number of altitude, but no more than is found in the language of daily life.