Landmarks in the History of the English Language 103222990X, 9781032229904

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LANDMARKS IN THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Landmarks in the History of the English Language identifies twelve key landmarks spread throughout the language’s history to provide a lively and interesting introduction to the history of English. Each landmark focuses on one individual associated with the key moment, which helps to engage the reader and provide the history of the language with a ‘human face.’ The landmarks range from Alfred the Great and his attempts to further English through its use in education, to the spread of English worldwide and the work of the linguist Braj Kachru. The final chapter takes a look into the future through the writings of David Crystal. Whilst focusing on specific events and people, the book includes a broad outline of the history of English so that the reader can locate each landmark within the language’s history. Written in a student-friendly style and with short activities available online, this book provides a brief introduction for those coming to the topic for the first time, as well as an engaging supplementary text for those studying modules on the history of English for degrees in English language, linguistics and literature. General readers with an interest in the English language and its history will also find the book engaging. Keith Johnson is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Language Education at Lancaster University, UK. He is author of The History of Early English and The History of Late Modern Englishes, both published by Routledge.

LANDMARKS IN THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Keith Johnson

Designed cover image: © Getty Images | Trifonov_Evgeniy First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Keith Johnson The right of Keith Johnson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Johnson, Keith, 1944- author. Title: Landmarks in the history of the English language / Keith Johnson. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Landmarks in the History of the English Language identifies twelve key landmarks spread throughout the language’s history to provide a lively and interesting introduction to the history of English”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023054540 (print) | LCCN 2023054541 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032229904 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032229898 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003275053 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: English language—History. Classification: LCC PE1072 .J64 2024 (print) | LCC PE1072 (ebook) | DDC 420—dc23/eng/20231211 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023054540 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023054541 ISBN: 978-1-032-22990-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-22989-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-27505-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053 Typeset in Galliard by Apex CoVantage, LLC Access the Support Material: www.routledge.com/9781032229898

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CONTENTS

Prefaceix   1 English, the ancestral trail: William Jones and the Indo-European family of languages

1

  2 Putting English on the map: Alfred the Great and the establishment of English

13

Interlude 1 What OE was like: The nun, the devil and a lettuce

23

  3 Simplifying English: Samuel Moore and the case of the disappearing inflections26   4 Standardising written English: Henry V and Chancery English 36 Interlude 2 What ME was like: A gat-toothed wife

46

  5 Enriching English: Thomas Elyot, Thomas Wilson and a proliferation of new words

50

  6 ‘Worshipping the English’: Richard Mulcaster and his Elementarie

61

viii Contents

Interlude 3 What EModE was like: Hands red with blood

70

  7 Fixing the language: Samuel Johnson and his dictionary

74

  8 Crossing the Atlantic: Noah Webster and American English

85

  9 Going beyond the standard: William Barnes and the Dorset dialect

99

10 A ‘dictionary of all English’: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary

109

11 The spread of English: Braj Kachru and his concentric circles 121 12 What next?: David Crystal and the future of English

133

References145 Index151

PREFACE

One of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of a landmark is: ‘a characteristic, a modification, etc., or an event, which marks a period or turningpoint in the history of a thing.’ Ask any group of historical linguists to list the twelve most important landmarks in the history of the English language, and you are bound to receive a variety of answers. Some will certainly differ from mine, though I feel confident that among them, a good number of the twelve that I have chosen will make an appearance. Each of the twelve chapters in this book identifies one key moment in the history of the language. When taken together, the moments provide a broad outline of the history of English as a whole. An important aspect of the book is that each chapter focuses on one central figure – an individual closely associated with the landmark. Usually these key figures were living at the time of the landmark. In a few cases, though, the figure is a scholar not living at the time but writing about it later. Focusing on key figures is intended to help give the history of English a ‘human face.’ Often the individual’s life and work are covered in quite some detail, going beyond their contribution to the language. I don’t apologise for this: the hope is that a little bit of biography will help to bring the landmarks and their contexts to life. Of course, one figure alone is rarely entirely responsible for a linguistic landmark. So although a single individual is given particular prominence in each chapter, the work of other important figures is also discussed. Three ‘interludes’ are included. They give the reader an impression of what English looked like in three past periods: Old English, Middle English and Early Modern English.

x  Preface

Landmarks is intended either as an introduction to the field – possibly as a ‘taster’ helping students (and sixth formers) decide whether to take up the subject – or as supplementary materials for those already following a history of English programme. I also hope that general readers who have an interest in the English language will find the content interesting, For students, there are activities for each chapter available on the internet as downloadable support material: www.routledge.com/9781032229898. They give readers an opportunity to follow up what has been mentioned in the text, and occasionally suggest issues for discussion. Thank you, Helen, for all your useful comments, both general and detailed, on each and every chapter as it was written. Thanks also to Nadia Seemungal, who, when the book was being planned, gave much support and encouragement. I’m grateful as well to the readers who reviewed the initial proposal, and whose comments helped to shape the book. My thanks also to Eleni Steck and Bex Hume, who competently nursed the book into production. I’m indebted to the Department of Linguistics, College of Literature, Science and the Arts, University of Michigan, for pointing me in the direction of information about Samuel Moore, the landmark figure of Chapter 3. Thanks also to Tom Birkett, of University College Cork, for help with my OE dedication.

1 ENGLISH, THE ANCESTRAL TRAIL William Jones and the Indo-European family of languages

Ancestors are an important part of history, so we’ll begin with the search for the ancestors of English. Our first landmark is a discovery associated with an eighteenth-century lawyer named Sir William Jones. In him, several diverse elements came together – a gift for languages, including knowledge of Latin and Greek; a lengthy stay in India, where he learned the ancient Indian language, Sanskrit; and a passion for seeking connections between different cultures and languages. All these elements helped lead William to suggest that there’s a large group of languages which form a single family, known now as the ‘Indo-European’ (I-E) family. Germanic languages, including English, are members of that family. This chapter describes what led to his discovery, and what came after it – the basis of what we know today about English’s family ties, and its ancestors.

A man with many nicknames

On 12 April, 1783, William Jones boarded the good ship Crocodile in Portsmouth harbour. It was bound for Kolkata. The last few months had been really memorable for the thirty-six-year-old William. In March, George III had made him a knight; it was ‘Sir William’ from now on. Then, just four days before boarding ship, he had married Anna Maria Shipley, daughter of the dean of Winchester. Now he was on his way to India, to take up a post that he’d had his eye on for five years but that had only been confirmed on 4 March. He was to be a judge in the Supreme Court of Bengal. Up to then he’d been a mere circuit judge in Wales. The India job would increase his prestige, and indeed his salary, tenfold. Though he didn’t know it at the time, Portsmouth harbour on that April day was the last he would ever see of Britain. DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-1

2  English, the ancestral trail

The journey to Kolkata took five months and was like a honeymoon for the newly-weds. The first stop was Madeira, where William spent time sketching the spectacular scenery. Then it was on to the Cape Verde Islands, whose fruits (particularly the guavas and melons) he enjoyed. The Crocodile rounded the Cape of Good Hope in July and headed northwards towards India, stopping for a while at the island of Anjouan, between Madagascar and the African mainland. The next stop was Chennai (called Madras in those days), where he had his first taste of India. Here, William and Anna Maria were ‘surrounded by a bewildering confusion of humanity – some virtually naked, some enveloped in muslin – horses, livestock, rickshaws, camels, cacophony, chaos.’ The final leg of the journey was up the Hooghli River, an arm of the Ganges, to Kolkata. Just to round off their exciting voyage, they espied an obliging tiger coming down to the river to drink.1 A journey of this sort, with its colourful introduction to India, would be enough to excite anyone. Its attraction to William must have been particularly strong, because he’d for many years been an earnest student of the Orient. He was born in 1746, to a father with a distinguished mathematical career  – William senior was the first person to use the symbol π for ‘pi’ in mathematics and had been a close friend of Isaac Newton, no less. Because of his work in the field of navigation, he was known as ‘Longitude Jones.’ The young Willian soon collected nicknames too. In 1753, aged seven, he went to Harrow School in London, and his nickname there was, simply, ‘Great Scholar.’ People talked of his ‘stupendous learning.’ He had started reading Latin grammar even before Harrow. Once there, he began learning Greek, translated several works of Ovid, wrote a play, and composed a collection of poems. In his last school year, he learned Hebrew and Arabic. This love of languages, and his great facility for learning them, lasted all his life. When he was thirty-three, he wrote a note to himself expressing his resolution ‘to learn no more rudiments of any kind, but to perfect myself in .  .  . twelve languages.’2 These were Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, German and English. By his death, he was said to be ‘thorough’ in eight languages, ‘fluent’ in another eight and ‘competent’ in twelve more. From Harrow, William went to University College, Oxford. At first, he didn’t enjoy it, finding the standard of lectures poor. But soon he came to love the scholarly atmosphere. He was, people said, ‘constantly reading, with a pen in his hand.’3 There, he developed a taste for things oriental, so much so that at the age of twenty-three, the King of Denmark asked him to translate, from Persian into French, a manuscript describing the Life of Nadir Shah  – the Persian emperor who invaded India in 1739. So there he was, at that early age, managing to translate from an ‘exotic’ language into a language not his own. No wonder that another of his nicknames was ‘Oriental Jones.’

English, the ancestral trail  3

After university, and in dire need of money, and took the post of tutor to the son of the peer Earl Spencer. But after four years, his ambition (as well as some disagreements with Earl Spencer about how his son should be educated) led him to move on. In 1770 he went to the Middle Temple to study law. Some years later, ‘Barrister Jones’ was elected a fellow to the Royal Society. He became a circuit judge in Wales, the land of his forefathers – William senior came from the island of Anglesey. Young William’s interests were wide, and sometimes rather curious. When he was about thirty, he invented what he called an ‘Andrometer.’ He described this as a ‘scale of human attainments and enjoyments’; it was a kind of ‘life plan’ on which a person could chart their aims and activities from birth to the age of seventy. The chart had spaces for a person to record their ‘performance’ throughout life. William’s knowledge of the law, of the Orient and of languages made him perfect – on paper – for the Indian post that he had set his heart on. But there was a problem: he was a libertarian and a republican by instinct (and indeed ‘Republican Jones’ was yet another of his nicknames). In 1782 he wrote a pamphlet entitled The Principles of Government, which argued against the despotic power of kings and aristocrats and in favour of democratic principles. The pamphlet was subject to a libel prosecution and revealed that William had an anti-establishment streak. People wondered whether perhaps he was not suitable, after all, for a post in Empire service. It was this doubt that led to the five-year delay in appointing him to the Bengal court. A ‘syncretist’ and a ‘monogeneticist’

Once there, with all doubts cast aside, William enjoyed India. During his time there, he came to stay in a thatched cottage with a veranda, on the banks of the river Jalangi, an arm of the Ganges. He and Anna Maria fell in love with the place. They had two pet sheep, saved from slaughter in England and transported as part of their luggage on the Crocodile. There was also a pet turtle called ‘Othello.’ For a while after arrival, Anna Maria enjoyed the comforts of an easy life; she mentions how on one occasion she stayed in bed until eleven in the morning. Not so her husband. He was said to rise at four, study until seven, walk five miles to work, stay at the office until late, and then walk home again. In the spirit of his Andrometer invention, his writings are full of lists of tasks he promised himself he would undertake. His interests remained as varied as they were in his younger days. High on the list was botany. He loved studying ‘plants, their classes, orders, kinds and species.’4 Not to mention Indian art, geography, literature, music and more besides. William was fascinated by Indian culture, and he turned his fascination to a purpose. Warren Hastings was governor-general of Bengal at the time, and the two men got on well together. Both believed that an imperial nation like

4  English, the ancestral trail

Britain should rule countries not just to squeeze money from them but also to absorb their culture. This was regarded as an important principle for efficient rule. Hastings knew that for a small number of Brits to be able to control a country as massive as India, something more than military force was required. You had also to understand the life and culture of the people. This motivated William, soon after his arrival in India, to found the ‘Asiatick Society of Bengal.’ It was closely modelled on London’s Royal Society and was set up to foster the study of Asian culture, enquiring (as William put it) ‘into the History, civil and natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature, of Asia.’5 The only boundaries were geographical – that the Society’s concerns should focus on Asia. William was the first president. The Society met regularly, and William took it on himself to produce a series of ‘short dissertations’ (lectures or articles) on relevant topics. The titles of some of William’s dissertations reveal the breadth of his interests and learning: On the Course of the Nile; On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India; On the Antiquities of the Indian Zodiac; On the Indian Game of Chess; On the Cure of Elephantiasis. William’s ‘dissertations’ reveal that he had a passion for making comparisons. You can see this in his approach to law: as a young man, he had studied – and compared – Greek, Roman and English law and had translated a number of texts dealing with foreign legal systems. Similarly, his ‘Discourses to the Asiatick Society’ show that he loved to compare different cultures in terms of their literature, arts, philosophies, religions, even architecture.6 A term used to describe someone with this passion is ‘syncretist’ – the Oxford English Dictionary definition is ‘one who attempts to unite diverse beliefs,’ especially in philosophy or religion. Though it was never used, another suitable nickname for William might have been ‘Syncretist Jones.’ Behind a search for similarities often comes a belief in common origins, and this too is found in William’s work. Thus, in one of his Society discourses, he sought the ‘solution of an important problem, whether the five nations, viz. the Indians, Arabs, Tartars, Persians, and Chinese . . . had a common origin.’7 His work often suggested that in many areas they did. His searches for common origins went beyond Asian cultures. In another of his Society dissertations he looked at the gods of the Greeks, Italians, Hindus and other cultures, including Persian, Chinese, Egyptian and Syrian. His conclusion was that they had ‘a resemblance, too strong to have been accidental’;8 keep this phrase in mind – as we shall see, he has something very similar to say about languages. Also with philosophy: it wasn’t possible, he thought, to consider the works of the Hindu scholars ‘without believing that Pythagoras and Plato derived their sublime theories from the same fountain with the sages of India.’9 If we wanted yet another nickname for William to capture this characteristic, it might be ‘Monogeneticist Jones.’ The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘monogenetic’ is ‘characterized by having the same origin or source.’

English, the ancestral trail  5

It can be claimed that William’s ‘syncretic’ and ‘monogenetic’ perspectives were influential in changing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century attitudes towards different cultures. They helped coax people towards recognising underlying similarities between apparently dissimilar societies. Such thoughts were not always popular among those who regarded themselves as racially superior. William sees links, linguistic and cultural, between Europeans and Indians, and the socially conscious English of the day did not always like the connections. As Michael Franklin (a scholar who has written much about William) puts it: ‘To a Victorian British social elite the idea was .  .  . hardly decent; they had little desire to claim kin in Kolkata.’10 A ‘world-modifying’ statement about languages

This brings us to languages. Part of William’s suitability for the Indian job was his knowledge of Persian and Arabic. These were both important languages for India. In the sixteenth century, the Moghuls spread from Central Asia into India. Persian was one of their languages, and they brought it with them. It remained the language of the court (William’s work-place) for centuries. Another of William’s nicknames was ‘Persian Jones,’ because as well as translating that Persian text for the King of Denmark, he had also written a Grammar of the Persian Language. He knew Arabic, too, a language that came to India through its use in Islamic religious writings. The one language missing from William’s repertoire was Sanskrit. This very old language was used in the literature and religious writings mainly of the Hindus but also of the Buddhists and Jains. Today it is still counted among the official languages of India, and though it has no native speakers, it is widely taught in schools. Its role is restricted to scholarly, literary and official – ­including legal – documents. That was its role in William’s time too. William set about learning Sanskrit with a will. His motives were largely practical; in 1772, Warren Hastings had decided that native (as opposed to British) laws should be used in courts, and this involved judges having recourse to legal documents written in Sanskrit. A knowledge of the language would be invaluable to William in his work. Here’s how he puts it in a letter: ‘It is of the utmost importance that the stream of Hindu law should be pure; for we are entirely at the devotion of the native lawyers, through our ignorance of Sanskrit.’ As an example of a situation where Sanskrit was useful to William: a high-caste landowner left his land to a slave whom he had raised as his own child. Several lawyers argued that leaving money to a slave boy was against Hindu law. Once William had learned Sanskrit, he was able to consult ancient Sanskrit books which claimed the opposite. William argued the case and won.11 Learning Sanskrit was not easy to manage. Many of the pundits (wise men) who spoke it did not want to share its secrets, especially with Westerners,

6  English, the ancestral trail

regarded as unclean by devout Hindus who did not eat meat. William eventually found a teacher prepared to impart the language’s secrets to a meat-eating foreigner, as long as (the story goes) all the lessons took place when William had an empty stomach! Then there were numerous distractions. William found he spent too much time in Kolkata chatting to friends, so he retreated to the country for his Sanskrit studies. Bad health was also a hindrance: both he and Anna Maria were plagued by illness. But William battled on: ‘I would rather be a valetudinarian [invalid] all my life,’ he said, ‘than leave unexplored the Sanskrit mine which I have just opened.’12 When William turned his attention to languages, his approach was as much that of the ‘syncretist’ and a ‘monogeneticist’ as it was in all the other areas of learning which interested him. In 1786, after he had been learning Sanskrit for just a few months, William delivered the Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatick Society. It dealt with various similarities between the major nation groups of Asia: Indians, Chinese, Tartars, Arabs and Persians. One part considers language, and it contains this statement, which Michael Franklin describes as ‘world-modifying’:13 The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect that the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source. which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. Why so ‘world-modifying’? The answer is that his statement was the beginning of a trail linking together a large group of the world’s tongues into one family. It encompassed languages in both Asia and Europe, stretching from China in the east to the western extremities of Europe. The family came to be called ‘Indo-European.’ William also stimulated the search into origins: for a family source language, one which (as William says) perhaps ‘no longer exists.’ Since his time, linguists have attempted to ‘reconstruct’ this source, which they call ‘ProtoIndo-European’ (‘proto’ meaning ‘earliest’ or ‘original’). Because of his contribution, William is often regarded as the father of both historical linguistics and of comparative linguistics (where languages are compared to point up similarities and differences). William’s plan was to stay in India until the year 1800, the turn of the century, when he would then to retire to a ‘pleasant country house’ in Middlesex.

English, the ancestral trail  7

But he didn’t make it. His wife was suffering from ‘incessant ill health’ and was sent back to Britain in late 1793. In April 1794 – even before Anna Maria arrived back at Portsmouth – William was found to have inflammation of the liver. He died on 27 April. Without doubt, the most important thing he left behind was that paragraph in the Third Anniversary Discourse. Language families and trees

As well as being a syncretist (seeking similarities) and a monogenticist (seeking common roots), William was also a ‘taxonomist,’ who valued drawing up lists and classifications (taxonomies). His love of botany – with its division of plants into ‘classes, orders, kinds and species’ – shows this. In these ways he was very much a creature of his century, and of the nineteenth century following. You can clearly see the taxonomist – as well as the syncretist and the monogeneticist – in the work of Charles Darwin (1809–1882). He classified, compared and sought common origins for all living creatures, and the title of his most famous book – On the Origin of Species – shows you his monogenetic credentials. It’s important to appreciate that William’s contributions to historical linguistics fall within this context. At this stage, it’s worth spending some time exploring the context and the linguistic work that took place within it. Languages, like people, have relations – parents, siblings, ancestors – and linguistic relationships are often revealed by word similarities. Take the English word ‘good,’ for example. In Danish it is god, in Dutch goed, in German gut, in Icelandic gothur. The similarities suggest the languages are related: members of the same family. Compare these words with the Croatian for ‘good,’ which is dobro, and the Turkish iyi – words which look and sound different from our other examples, suggesting that these languages have other family ties. It’s unlikely that this example will surprise you – the languages with similar words for ‘good’ are all from geographically close, northern European languages, which you can well imagine to be connected. But with Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, it’s rather different. Here there are huge geographical differences, the first two being European languages, the third Asian. Finding connections there would suggest a very broad-based family. Before William, not many people had been interested in seeking common origins for languages. Views about the very first language were based on religious or nationalistic arguments. Christian countries had the biblical Babel story as an explanation. According to this, everyone once spoke the same language (generally regarded as Hebrew). But mankind overreached itself and tried to build a tower (Babel) up to heaven. God confounded their plan by making them speak mutually unintelligible tongues. Other contenders for the world’s first language have been Greek and Chinese, and there was one sixteenth-century Dutchman – Johannes Goropius Becanus – who claimed that it was, well, Dutch.

8  English, the ancestral trail

For a long time, the search for similarities between languages was largely a question of anecdote. An early account of the lexical links between Sanskrit and a European language came from a Florentine merchant, Filippo Sassetti, born in 1540. He travelled widely in India and noticed word similarities between Sanskrit and his native Italian. Some numerals, for example, are very similar. Thus the Italian for ‘seven’ is sette, and the Sanskrit is sapta, while Italian nove (‘nine’) is nava in Sanskrit. Two other similarities he observed were ‘god’ (Italian dio, Sanskrit devas) and ‘snake’ (Italian serepente, Sanskrit sarpa). William, and the nineteenth-century linguists that followed him, found many more lexical similarities. Here are some involving three languages which William knew: Sanskrit, Latin and Greek: Sanskrit damah navah matar bhratar padam

Latin domus novus mater frater pes/pedis

Greek   domos (house) neos (new) meter (mother) phreter (brother) pous/podos (foot)

So lexical similarities there certainly are. But we have to be careful about using a small selection of words to establish family connections. Here’s a rather far-fetched example to illustrate: in Present Day English (PDE for short), we have borrowed a few words from Japanese, like tsunami, karaoke, emoji and origami. Imagine that a Martian linguist (that’s the far-fetched bit) came to earth and set themselves the task of analysing English. If they were to use these words to argue that Japanese and English were languages coming from the same family, we terrestrials would regard them with ridicule. The existence of words borrowed into a language doesn’t tell you much about family relations. William was aware of this, which is why, in his ‘world-modifying statement,’ he mentions similarities in ‘the forms of grammar.’ Grammatical structures are much more stable than vocabulary and less open to borrowing. Hence they are more reliable indicators of family membership. Here’s an example which suggests grammatical connections: it involves the present-tense of the verb ‘to give’ in Sanskrit, Latin and Greek; (the Greek words are written in the Latin alphabet):14 Sanskrit dadami dadasi dadati dadamas dattha dadanti

Latin do das dat damus date dant

Greek didomi didos didosi didomen didote didoasi

English I give You give he/she it gives we give you give they give

English, the ancestral trail  9

In all three languages, the root of the word (‘give’) is similar: dada in Sanskrit, da and Latin, di in Greek: that’s a lexical similarity. But look at the way ‘the person who is giving’ is expressed. In English we use pronouns – separate words  – to signal this: I, you, we and so on. A common feature of Sanskrit, and many other Indo-European languages, is the use of inflections – ‘endings’ rather than separate words – to carry this information. As you see in the table, the inflections in Sanskrit for this verb are -mi (for ‘I’), -si (for ‘you’), -ti (for ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘it’), -mas, -tha and -anti. Look how similar these inflections are in Latin and Greek. This is the kind of grammatical information that makes William’s case about language connections particularly strong. Jacob Grimm and puzzles about family relations

William’s insight was to notice similarities between different languages and to suggest how they came together in one Indo-European family. Once you have identified one single family, several other linguistic puzzles rear their heads. One is: how do you explain the many differences which exist between the family members? Here’s an example: though William was mostly concerned with Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, a host of other languages have come to be included in the I-E family, including German and English. But take a look at the Latin, Greek, German and English words for ‘fish.’ The Latin is piscis, and the Greek psari. In German the word is Fisch, the Old English (OE) was fisc, and the PDE is fish. So the Latin and Greek words begin with a /p/, and the others with /f/. How does it happen that languages in the same family display such differences? Actually, this question is easy to answer once you accept the idea that all languages change, particularly when it comes to pronunciation. This may seem obvious, but throughout history a surprising number of people have viewed languages as monumental, unchanging edifices. It’s easy to show that this view is not true. You can find recordings on the internet of how British English was spoken seventy years ago, and if you compare it with pronunciation today, you will notice differences. Similarly if you make geographical comparisons: English as spoken in Britain, the United States and Australia have all developed their own characteristic pronunciations as the communities have evolved their own identities. So is it that surprising that some languages should pronounce an /f/ where others have a /p/? It may suggest that they come from different branches of the family tree, but it certainly doesn’t mean they aren’t related. Another puzzle is whether alternative forms and pronunciations follow any systematic pattern. This part of the I-E story was taken forward by a man whose life and interests had much in common with William’s. He was Jacob Grimm, born in 1785, nine years before William died, in the town of Hanau,

10  English, the ancestral trail

twenty-five kilometres from Frankfurt. Jacob’s father, like William’s, died when he was young, and he was brought up in some poverty by his mother. Also like William, Jacob studied law, at the University of Marburg. After graduation, he spent some time in Paris, where he developed a taste for the literature of the Middle Ages. For a while he worked as professor and librarian at the University of Göttingen, but he was dismissed because of political disagreements with powerful people and was banished from the Kingdom of Hannover in 1837. The incident is a little bit like what happened to William when his political outspokenness delayed his Indian appointment. In 1840, Jacob moved to the University of Berlin, where he wrote a number of books on German and linguistics. His 1819 German Grammar shows that he shared William’s interest in finding connections between other languages – the book is much more than a grammar of German and constantly explores relationships with other Germanic languages, including English. Similarly, his History of the German Language (1848) is full of references to other languages  – of south-east Europe, the Balkans and even the Russian steppes. Then, towering above all, is his monumental German Dictionary. It was left for others to finish, and the task wasn’t completed until 1961, with a supplement appearing in 1971. It now has thirty-three volumes with 330,000 headwords. It does for the German language what the Oxford English Dictionary (the topic of our Chapter 10) does for English. Both Jacob and William had wide interests, including folklore, mythology, law and literature. Jacob’s 1835 German Mythology looks at myths and superstitions and traces them back through time to their origins, much as William did with aspects of Indian culture. Then there’s the work that Jacob is most famous for – the collection of fairy tales which he and his brother Wilhelm produced. It’s known today as Grimms’ Fairy Tales – the original title was (in German) Children’s and Household Tales. It was published in 1812–15 and is still read widely today. Like William, Jacob loved botany, and it was a passion for taxonomy which led him to confront linguistic puzzles like that alternation between /p/ and /f/. Jacob noticed that the words for ‘fish’ were just one example of the /p/→/f/ alternation. There were others. For example, the Latin for ‘foot’ is pedem, and the Greek is pous. The German is Fuss, the Old English (OE) fot and the PDE foot. Then there’s Latin pater and Greek pateras, which are fæder in OE and father in PDE. The German word is Vater, and though it is written with a ‘V,’ this is pronounced /f/. It seems, Jacob suggested, that Germanic languages (like German, OE and PDE) underwent a sound change that sometimes turned /p/ into /f/. It’s a change, he also noted, that occurs in Germanic languages in general; so the word for ‘fish’ in Norwegian, Danish and Swedish is fisk, and in Icelandic it’s fiskur.

English, the ancestral trail  11

Nor is /p/→/f/ the only sound change Grimm found. There are more consonant differences between Latin and Greek on the one hand and German, OE and PDE on the other. Here are another three: • In Latin and Greek, the first sound in the word for ‘three’ is /t/ – tres and treis. In OE the word is þreo – the OE letter þ is pronounced with a ‘th’ sound, and the phonetic symbol is /θ/); in PDE three, the first sound is also /θ/. So the change is /t/→/θ/. • The word for ‘kin’ in Latin is genus, while the OE and PDE are cynn (pronounced with a /k/), and kin. Another example is the Latin granum, which in German and PDE has a /k/ sound: Korn and corn. The change is /g/→/k/. • The Latin and Greek for ‘ten’ are decem and deka, with an initial /d/. The OE and PDE words are tin and ten. This is /d/→/t/. Jacob was able to make generalisations about these, and other, sound changes and to explain them by a set of rules that came to be known as ‘Grimm’s Law.’ He suggested that the Latin and Greek pronunciations were as Proto-IndoEuropean had been and that the changes occurred to the Germanic language family. Hence Grimm’s Law is also described as a ‘Germanic Sound Shift.’ Others added to this work. The Danish linguist Karl Verner (1846–96) looked at exceptions found to Grimm’s Law and formulated ‘Verner’s Law’ to explain these, thus taking our knowledge of I-E sound changes a stage further.15 And English?

Where does English come in all of this? If you have ever worked on your own family tree, the idea of ‘branches’ will be familiar to you. As the family grows through time, more children have children; they grow up, marry, and have yet more children. The tree grows sub-branches, and these in turn develop further sub-branches. The I-E language tree is just like this. For example, there’s the ‘Balto-Slavic’ branch, which sub-branches into the Baltic tongues, Latvian and Lithuanian. Another branch, the Slavic tongues, contains Bulgarian, Polish and Russian, among others. The branch which concerns us most – because English hangs on it – is the Germanic one. In 98 AD, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote the Germania, describing the early Germanic peoples. They had blue eyes and reddish hair and were well built. They were also brave warriors, enjoyed eating and drinking, and could tolerate the cold (though not the heat of southern climes). They also had virtues which, Tacitus suggests, the Roman citizens would do well to copy: they tended to be monogamous, and adultery was rare. The Germans

12  English, the ancestral trail

were based in the north of Europe but over time spread out, so much so that, with their warlike nature, they became a threat to the Roman empire. They had their own branch on the IE language tree, and it developed a number of offshoots. One is the West Germanic language sub-branch, which includes Dutch and German. And one of this sub-branch’s sub-branches is called Anglo-Frisian. It has just two family members. Frisian is spoken in the area of coastal Netherlands and north-west Germany, known as Frisia. You can find spoken examples of Frisian on the internet.16 The other family member is English. We have, at last, arrived! As we have seen, the branches of a family tree will retain common characteristics, but there will be differences too. Sir William Jones is a landmark figure because he was among the first to see beyond the differences and show that there were connections between the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit and European tongues, including English. It was he who started to draw up the family tree of which English is a branch. Others, like Grimm and Verner, took things further, exploring regularities in the differences. All in all, by the end of the nineteenth century, the place of English in the I-E family had been well and truly charted. Notes 1 The description of Jones’ journey is based on Franklin (2011), Chapter 1, and the quotation is from the same source, p. 8. 2 Teignmouth (1815), p. 239. 3 Ibid., p. 41. 4 Ibid., p. 488. 5 The title of the first presidential address of the Society, given by William, included these words. 6 A ‘discourse’ is a debate or discussion. It may sometimes take the form of a lecture. 7 Teignmouth (1815), p. 466. 8 Ibid., p. 319. 9 Franklin (1995), p. 121. 10 Franklin (2011), p. 39. 11 The quotation in this paragraph is taken from Franklin (1995), p. 88, as is the highcaste landowner example. 12 Teignmouth (1815), p. 331. 13 The description is from Franklin (2011), p. 36. 14 The table is a modified version of the one found in Baugh and Cable (2013), p. 16. 15 You can find a slightly more detailed description of Grimm’s and Verner’s Laws in Chapter 2 of Baugh and Cable (2013). 16 For example, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZGyISJ3djo.

2 PUTTING ENGLISH ON THE MAP Alfred the Great and the establishment of English

From about 600 BC, Britain was inhabited by Celts, a people who had settled in many parts of Europe. The Romans came in AD 43 and stayed for over 350 years. They eventually left, in about AD 409, when they needed their troops elsewhere in Europe. England’s Celtic leaders had been used to calling on Roman troops for support. So when the Romans left, and tribes like the Picts and Scots from Scotland caused troubles, the Celtic king Vortigern asked for help from the Jutes, Saxons and Angles, who lived in Denmark and the German region of Schleswig-Holstein. They came to the rescue, bringing with them their Germanic languages. And they stayed, occupying most of England by about 700, driving the Celts into Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Wales and Brittany. The name of one of the groups – the Angles – became the country’s name: ‘Englaland’ was ‘the land of the Angles.’ There were seven kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia (the Midlands area), East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Sussex and Wessex. In the seventh century, Northumbria was dominant, and in the eighth Mercia. Wessex, the kingdom of the West-Saxons, came to prominence in the ninth. The best known of its kings was Alfred the Great.

As we saw in Chapter 1, William Jones was an inventive person. You’ll remember his ‘Andrometer’ idea  – the chart on which a person could plot their progression through life. King Alfred the Great, the landmark figure of this chapter, was similarly inventive. He wanted very much to measure time so that he could regulate how long he spent on various activities during a day. He was particularly concerned with ensuring that he spent sufficient time in religious worship. Sundials were fine when it was daylight (and sunny!), but they were no use in the dark. So Alfred invented a kind of ‘time machine.’ It used candles, made to a uniform size so that each would burn for four hours, with six

DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-2

14  Putting English on the map

candles measuring a day. They were kept together with the holy relicts which accompanied Alfred wherever he went. But there was a problem: sometimes draughts and winds would make the candles burn more quickly. Pragmatic and clever as Alfred was, he solved the problem by creating a lantern case made out of horn to protect the candle’s flame. Similar contraptions are still in use today, known as ‘horn lanterns.’ As well as illustrating Alfred’s inventiveness, this story also shows his devotion to spiritual matters. He was a truly devout Christian. It also indicates that he, very much like William Jones, was determined to make the most of his time on earth. Not a moment was to be wasted. This sense of purpose and determination gives a hint as to why Alfred is the only British monarch to be called ‘the Great.’ But what exactly were his achievements? The square of the small Berkshire market town of Wantage is dominated by a large statue of King Alfred the Great, who was born there in about 849.1 The statue was erected in 1877, and the inscription under it reads: Alfred found learning dead, and he restored it. Education neglected and he revived it. The laws powerless and he gave them force. The Church debased and he raised it The Land ravaged by a fearful enemy from which he delivered it. Alfred’s name will live as long as mankind shall respect the past. This inscription captures Alfred’s major achievements: he ravaged a fearful enemy, raised up a debased Church, gave force to powerless laws, revived education, restored learning. At the time of Alfred’s birth, Wessex was becoming the most powerful of England’s kingdoms. The land of the West Saxons centred round Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset, but it had also extended its influence and power over the southern counties of Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Essex, as well as East Anglia. Alfred was the youngest of five children born to Æthelwulf, king of Wessex, and his wife Osburh. With three older brothers, it must have seemed that Alfred’s chances of ever becoming king were very slim. In fact all three ­brothers  – Æthelbald, Æthelberht and Æthelred  – reigned before him, but none for more than six years, and they all died before they reached thirty.

Putting English on the map  15

Alfred suffered poor health for most of his life, possibly with Crohn’s disease, but he lived for fifty-one years and reigned for twenty-eight. We know little about Alfred’s childhood. It was rather a peripatetic life, moving from court to court. He was a keen hunter and enjoyed sports like running and wrestling. He also loved learning. In later life he complained that there had been a lack of tutors and that this held back his schooling – so much so that he didn’t learn to read until he was twelve, regarded as very late. There’s a story that his mother showed him and his brothers a book of Anglo-Saxon poems, and said that whichever son could learn the contents by heart fastest would be given it. Alfred, who was just five or six at the time, had his tutor read out the poems for him to learn, and won the competition hands down. From an early age he kept a personal handbook full of prayers and psalms which he carried around with him. His early loves for hunting and learning stayed with him all his life. Much of what we know of Alfred’s life comes from a biography written by a Welsh monk, Asser, whose Life of King Alfred was written while Alfred was still alive. According to Asser, the young prince ‘was extraordinarily beloved by both his father and mother.’2 Æthelwulf was a deeply religious man, and in 853 he sent son Alfred, who was just four, on a visit to Rome. The city held great importance for the Anglo-Saxons, who regarded it as their spiritual home. The perilous journey took Alfred two months – accompanied, Asser says, ‘with an honourable escort both of nobles and commoners.’3 When he arrived, the Pope (Leo IV) received him warmly and gave him a rite of confirmation. Alfred returned to Rome two years later, this time with his father, and they stayed there for almost a year. This trip had diplomatic as well as religious motives. It helped to seal relations between Rome and Wessex, with Alfred’s presence perhaps suggesting that Æthelwulf had a possible kingly role in mind for the young boy. On the way home, they stopped off in West Francia (the western part of what is now France), which was ruled by one Charles the Bald, a grandson of Charlemagne. Here Æthelwulf, now an elderly widow, married Charles’ teenage daughter, Judith. The marriage greatly strengthened links between Wessex and Francia. Æthelwulf died in 858, and his eldest son, Æthelbald, became king. He was something of a bounder and upset the Church by marrying his step-mother, the aforementioned Judith – ‘contrary,’ Asser says indignantly, ‘to God’s prohibition and the dignity of a Christian.’4 His two-year reign was rather lawless. After his death, brother Æthelberht became king, followed by Æthelred. When Æthelred died, in 871, it was Arthur’s turn. He was not yet twenty-five. We know nothing about the coronation ceremony. It took place at a time of mixed fortunes. The kingdom that the brothers had ruled in succession was growing; pacts were made with Mercia, East Anglia and the South-East, and slowly, a new country – England – was in the process of being formed. But there was one huge thundercloud hanging over the kingdom, and it was one

16  Putting English on the map

which made it unlikely that Alfred’s coronation was a festive affair. The atmosphere of the times was steeped in fearful apprehension. The Vikings were on the rampage. The Viking thundercloud

In Stockholm’s Maritime Museum, there’s a model of a Viking ship. It is twenty-one metres long. Its high bow and stern are decorated with woodcarvings showing fearful beasts. The ship has a large sail, and there are fifteen openings for oars on each side. Take this ship from the museum, place it on the Kent coast or on the River Thames, and multiply its number by several dozen. Exactly how many men each ship carried is uncertain, perhaps around sixty. Each man would have a large black and yellow shield, as well as a helmet with a nose piece. He also had formidable weapons: a sword, a spear, sometimes an axe and a bow and arrows. The men also carried with them a reputation as fierce, even cruel, fighters. The sight would be enough to strike fear into the hearts of the local inhabitants as they waited for the inevitable raid. Though often thought of as Danes, the Vikings were in fact from various countries in Northern Europe, sharing not a nationality but a desire to make themselves rich by plunder. They were like pirates with – at least in the ­beginning – a strategy of raiding and then disappearing. Hit and run. Battles with the Vikings dominated Alfred’s entire life. The first attacks had happened in the 780s, over fifty years before he was born, when three ships landed on England’s south coast, near Portsmouth. The initial raids were for plunder. In 793, Lindisfarne, a centre of Celtic Christianity on the north-east coast of England, was attacked, and many monks were slaughtered. In the next year, the monastery at Jarrow, some sixty miles south of Lindisfarne, was ransacked. It was the home of the Benedictine monk and author, the Venerable Bede. The south also suffered, with raids on Winchester, Canterbury and elsewhere. Nor were Viking attacks confined to England; many parts of Europe, particularly France, had to deal with them: ‘Normandy’ is the place where the ‘northmen’ – the Vikings – settled in the ninth century. Though in the early days, the Vikings were pirates, they came to pose a threat to the very existence of Anglo-Saxon England. With time, their interest turned from plunder to occupation. The small raiding parties amalgamated into what became known as the ‘Great Heathen Army,’ with perhaps five thousand soldiers. Rather than hitting and running, the army stayed in England, spending the winters preparing for attacks during the warmer months. In 867 they occupied York, and they also made inroads into Alfred’s Wessex. At one particularly low point for Alfred, he and his faithful troops had to hide in the Somerset marshlands, resorting to the same guerrilla tactics the Vikings themselves had initially used. It was in these marshlands that, according to a

Putting English on the map  17

probably apocryphal story, Alfred was so preoccupied with military matters that he burned the cakes in the house where he was lodging. As the Wantage inscription suggests, a significant part of what made Alfred ‘Great’ was that he delivered Wessex from the Vikings. The decisive battle came in 878 at Edington, a small village in the county of Wiltshire, twenty-five miles from Salisbury. Asser describes how Arthur ‘fought bravely and perseveringly by means of a close shield-wall against the whole army of the heathen, whom at length, with the divine help, he defeated with great slaughter, and pursued them flying to their stronghold.’5 A short time after the battle, a treaty was signed in the Somerset village of Wedmore. According to the Treaty of Wedmore, the Viking leader, Guthrum, consented to being baptised as a Christian. It was also agreed that Viking troops should leave Wessex. Further accords between Arthur and Guthrum led to the creation of the Danelaw, an area of northern and eastern England where the Vikings continued to hold sway. Or, to put it the other way round – they led to the creation of a Wessex in which the Vikings did not hold sway. Though problems with the Vikings continued through Alfred’s life and beyond, the Battle of Edington was a true turning point. During his reign, the areas of England outside the Danelaw moved towards unity. When Alfred became king, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – a book we shall have more to say about later – described the event like this: ‘then . . . Alfred, son of Æthelwulf, succeeded to the kingdom of Wessex.’ When he died, almost twenty-nine years later, the Chronicle described him as ‘king over all England except that part which was under Danish domination.’6 The change is from Wessex to England. It was left to his son and successor, Edward the Elder, to add Danish areas to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom. But much of the creation of the new country was Alfred’s achievement, and it’s one which had implications for the English language. Unifying large parts of a country helps to establish a language, to spread and stabilise its use and make possible the eventual emergence of a standard variant. Alfred’s military and political successes are part of the reason his reign was a linguistic landmark. Education and learning: ‘scholastic immigrants’

‘In the meantime,’ Asser says, the king, during the . . . invasions of the heathen, and his own daily infirmities of body, continued to carry on the government, and to practise hunting in all its branches; to teach his goldsmiths and all his artificers [craftsmen], his falconers, hawkers, and dog-keepers; to build houses, majestic and rich beyond all custom of his predecessors, after his own new designs; to recite the Saxon books, and especially to learn by heart Saxon poems, and to make others learn them, he alone never ceasing from studying most diligently

18  Putting English on the map

to the best of his ability. He daily attended mass and the other services of religion; recited certain psalms, together with prayers, and the daily and nightly hour-service; and frequented the churches at night,  .  .  . that he might pray in secret, apart from others. He . . . was most affable and agreeable to all; and was skilful in the investigation of things unknown.7 As Asser’s words suggest, Alfred was as good a ruler as he was a military strategist. The Wantage inscription draws attention to the significant changes he made to the legal system and to the status of the Church in Wessex. But at the very top of the inscription’s list come learning and education. Here Arthur achieved a veritable renaissance. His thoughts on these matters were expressed in a Preface he wrote to a book which he translated from Latin into English. It was written by one of the greatest of mediaeval popes, Saint Gregory the Great. He was pope from 590 to 604 and had a special place in the Anglo-Saxon heart. There’s a story which Bede tells, that walking one day in the Roman market place, Gregory saw a group of fairhaired slave boys. They were, he was told, ‘Angles’ from Britain. The name was appropriate, Gregory said, ‘because they have an angelic face, and it is fitting that such should be co-heirs with the angels in heaven.’8 In 597 he sent his friend Augustine as a missionary to bring Christianity to England. By the end of the seventh century, the religion had spread through the land, and England had become an important part of Christendom. Alfred’s two visits to Rome show just how much importance was given to religion, and to Rome. In about 590, Gregory wrote Cura Pastoralis (Pastoral Care in English). It’s a manual of instruction for members of the clergy, setting out their duties and how they should behave. The book was extremely influential in the Middle Ages, and in the 890s Alfred decided to provide an English translation, thus making it more accessible to the population. His Preface is in the form of a letter to bishops, explaining why he had made the translation. This Preface is a landmark document, laying out Alfred’s views on learning in England at the time and providing the outline of an educational manifesto for the country. The Preface begins by looking back to the ‘good old days’ – a time when England was known for its learning, and ‘people from abroad came here to this country in search of knowledge and instruction.’9 Alfred doubtless had in mind the end of the seventh century – the time which Bede calls the Northumbrian ‘golden age,’ when the monasteries at Lindisfarne and Jarrow were flourishing. Places in the south, like Canterbury, were also seats of learning, known for their collections of scholarly books. Since then, Alfred argued, things had gone seriously downhill, to the present time, when the country was, culturally, in a very bad state. Viking pillaging was partly to blame: learned men had been slaughtered and learned books destroyed. But even before the Viking raids,

Putting English on the map  19

Alfred says, the country had lost interest in learning. The pre-Viking churches were filled with books, but few knew how to read them. ‘So complete was learning’s decay among the English people,’ Alfred laments, ‘that there were very few [in holy orders] this side of the Humber who could understand their services in English.’ Alfred considers what he can do to rectify the situation. Part of his plan was to reinstate England’s reputation as a seat of learning. He did this by inviting learned individuals from around Britain and elsewhere to come to Wessex. One such individual was the Welsh monk Asser, who was to become a companion and confidant, as well as biographer, to the king. Part of Asser’s early duties was to help Alfred learn Latin. Another of the ‘scholastic immigrants’ was a Mercian hermit named Plegmund. He too helped Alfred with his Latin and later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Then there was the monk Grimbold from Flanders and John the Saxon from east of the Rhein. Alfred also peopled his court with scholarly short-term visitors, from Brittany, the Netherlands and Frisia. Educational reforms and teaching English

The problem, Alfred realised, was partly one of education. As we have seen, the young Alfred himself had experienced the lack of good teachers – and if a king’s son had such difficulties, imagine the problems met by his subjects. Hence one of Alfred’s solutions to the problem involves educational reform. We should arrange it, he says, that all the young freeborn men now among the English people who have the means to be able to devote themselves to it, may be set to study for as long as they are of no other use, until the time they are able to read English writing well. Afterwards one may teach further in the Latin language those whom one wishes to teach further to promote to holy orders. Alfred is setting out a highly ambitious programme by which all freemen should learn to read English, while others, like those taking holy orders, should be taught to read Latin as well. We do not know how much Alfred succeeded in putting his intentions into practice. There is evidence for the establishment of ‘court schools,’ and Alfred set aside funds annually to support them. Indeed, he arranged for his own children to be taught in this way. At school they learned to read both English and Latin and had to recite psalms and poems by heart. We simply do not know the extent to which the ‘teaching freeborn men to read English’ part was realised. But even if it is just a statement of intent, it’s a daring educational manifesto, which counts as a linguistic landmark because it established a framework for increasing literacy in English throughout Wessex and beyond.

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Increasing the stock of English prose

Alfred realised that his educational reforms, which required freemen to learn to read English, meant that they needed uplifting books to read. He resolved to help here through an ambitious programme of translation from Latin into English. In the Preface, he discusses the value of translation and how other nations have used it: so the Greeks translated books from Hebrew and the Romans from Greek. ‘Therefore,’ Alfred goes on, ‘it seems better to me . . . that we should also translate certain books which are most necessary for all men to know into the language that we can all understand.’ A little later in the Preface he adds: ‘Then when I remembered how the knowledge of Latin had previously decayed throughout the English . . . I began among other various and manifold cares of this kingdom to translate into English the book which is called Pastoralis in Latin.’ This was Gregory’s Pastoral Care. It was the first of a number of translations Alfred made. There’s no doubt that Alfred’s learned friends – Plegmund and the rest – assisted Alfred in his translations. It was always partly a question of ‘translation by committee,’ but it’s likely that Alfred always had the last word  – he was king, after all! We’re not sure in what order the translations were done, but possibly next on his list was a book written by the Roman priest and historian Orosius. His Seven Books of History against the Pagans was highly popular in the Middle Ages. It’s a historical account of pagan societies, showing how inferior they were to Christian ones – a message of great appeal to devout Alfred. Another of Alfred’s translations was of an equally popular work  – the Consolation of Philosophy written by the Roman senator and philosopher Boethius. It was a work which another monarch, Elizabeth the First, was also to translate, in the sixteenth century. Once an important and powerful figure in Rome, Boethius fell from favour, was accused of treason, imprisoned and executed in 524. He wrote his Consolation while awaiting execution. It’s a dialogue between himself and Philosophy, personified as a woman. Lady Philosophy consoles Boethius against the vicissitudes of fortune, arguing that true happiness and virtue come from within. Again, the book’s theme appealed to Alfred, whose life had its fair share of fortune’s vicissitudes. Alfred translated yet another book involving an internal dialogue, this time between the author, St Augustine, and Reason. The book was Augustine’s Soliloquies. He also translated a collection of psalms. Even though helped by a ‘committee’ of learned men, Alfred’s translations are by any account a considerable literary achievement for a man who was also ruling his country, as well as keeping a close eye on the Vikings. Equally important are other translations which Alfred encouraged, sometimes perhaps even commissioned. As king, he was in a position to create an environment in which the translation of scholarly texts was favoured. One was made by another of his ‘learned immigrants,’ the Mercian bishop Werferth. The book

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was Gregory’s Dialogues – yet another collection of conversations, this time between Gregory and a deacon named Peter. It’s a fascinating collection of stories of miracles and fairy tales, calculated to capture the interest of the ignorant and coax them towards religion; there’s an example of one of Gregory’s stories in Interlude 1, which follows this chapter. Another of the books Alfred regarded as ‘most necessary for all men to know’ was Bede’s Church History of the English People. This Latin text gives a historical account, in five volumes, of England’s history, starting from the time of Julius Caesar’s invasion. One of the best-known portions of the book is the ‘parable of the sparrow.’ Bede tells how King Edwin of Northumbria was considering whether to convert to Christianity. A councillor persuades him by making a comparison between human life and a sparrow flying into a warm and cosy hall. Outside the weather is bleak. The sparrow enjoys a short stay in the hall but eventually goes back into the bad weather. Such is life, the message runs – a brief sojourn in a cosy hall; unless, that is, you are a Christian, believing in a blissful after-life. Edwin was persuaded and converted in 627. The translation was Werferth’s, though perhaps Alfred was involved also. The translations which Alfred made himself or encouraged others to make provide us with a quantity of Anglo-Saxon prose produced during his lifetime. But not all the prose was translation, and another major work that Alfred was involved in is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This is a collection of annals of Anglo-Saxon life, starting with Caesar’s invasion of Britain and continuing until after the arrival of the Normans in 1066. There were four major versions kept by monks in various English towns: the Peterborough Chronicle, The Winchester or Parker Chronicle, the Abingdon Chronicle and the Worcester Chronicle. Alfred didn’t write any of this book, but perhaps he commissioned it. Given his desire to encourage written works in English, he certainly would have welcomed and supported the project. The Chronicle provides us with an extended example of written Anglo-Saxon, unconstrained by the need to translate from an original text written in another tongue. Alfred’s involvement in, and commitment to, the production of so much written English is another reason he is a landmark figure in the history of English. What was the English of Alfred’s time like? Interlude 1, which follows, offers you a chance to see. It contains a short extract taken from Werferth’s translation of Gregory’s Dialogues and draws attention to a small number of the language’s characteristics, one of which becomes the main topic of Chapter 3. Notes 1 Many of the dates in this chapter (and other calculations based on them), are approximations, because the exact dates are not known. 2 Cook (1906), p. 13. 3 Ibid., p. 5.

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4 Ibid., p. 11. 5 Ibid., p. 28. 6 Garmonsway (1953), pp. 72 and 91. 7 Cook (1906), p. 38. 8 The story is cited by Baugh and Cable (2013), p. 78. 9 All quotations from Alfred’s Preface are from Treharne (2010), pp. 15 and 17.

Interlude 1 WHAT OE WAS LIKE The nun, the devil and a lettuce

As we mentioned in Chapter 2, Gregory’s Dialogues is a collection of fairy tales and stories about miracles.1 One of the stories features a nun and a lettuce. It tells what happened when a nun took a stroll in her convent garden. Here’s the story, with a word-for-word translation underneath. You need do no more than read through the text and translation. We’ll use the passage to draw your attention to a few features of OE.2

Soðlice, sumum dæge hit gelamp þæt an nunne of þæm ilcan Truly, on a certain day it happened that a nun from the same



mynstre eode inn on hyra wyrttun. þa geseah heo ænne leahtric, and nunnery went in to her garden. There saw she a lettuce, and



hire gelyste þæs. Heo þa hine genam, and forgeat þæt heo hine mid to her pleased it. She then it took, and forgot that she it with



Cristes rodetacne gebledsode, ac heo hine freclice bat. þa wearð heo Christ’s sign of the cross should bless, but she it greedily bit. Then was she

5 sona fram deofle gegripen, and hrædlice nyðer afeoll. Þa þa heo swyðe immediately by the devil attacked, and quickly down fell. When she severely

wæs gedreht, þa wearð hit hraðe gecyðed þæm faeder Equitio, and he was tormented, then was it quickly called Father Equitius, and he

DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-3

24  What OE was like



wæs gebeden þæt he ofstlice come, and mid his gebedum hire gehulpe. was asked that he quickly come, and with his prayers to her helped.



Sona swa se halga fæder wæs inn agan on þone wyrttun, þa ongann As soon as the holy father was in gone to the garden, then began



se deofol, þe þa nunnan gegrap, of hire muðe clypian, swylce he dædbote the devil, that the nun attacked, from her mouth to call out, as if he amends

10 don wolde, and þus cwæð: ‘Hwæt dyde Ic hire? Hwæt dyde Ic hire? Ic make would, and thus spoke: What did I to her? What did I to her? I

sæt me on anum leahtrice, þa com heo and bat me!’ He þa, se Godes sat me on a lettuce, then came she and bit me.’ He then, the of God



wer, mid mycelre yrsunge him bebead þæt he fram hire gewite, and þæt man, with great anger him commanded that he from her come out, and that



he nane wunungstow e næfde on þæs ælmihtigan Godes þeowene. He he no dwelling place never have in the handmaiden of Almighty God. He

þǣrryhte aweg gewat, and ni leng syððan hire æthrīnan ne dorste. immediately away went and no longer thereafter her to touch dared. Perhaps the first thing you’ll notice is that there are some letters in OE that we don’t have in PDE. The ones in the passage are ‘þ’ (called ‘thorn’) and ‘ð’ (‘eth’). Both of these are used interchangeably for ‘th’ sounds: voiced as in PDE them and unvoiced as in thing. The passage also has the letter ‘æ,’ which is pronounced like the ‘a’ sound in PDE cat. As for words, there are a few in the passage which are exactly the same in PDE, like come (ln. 7) and he, in line 6 and elsewhere. Then there are a number of words that are just slightly different from modern ones. So forgeat (ln. 3) is ‘forgot,’ deofol is ‘devil’ (ln. 9), and ælmihtigan (ln. 13) is ‘almighty.’ The passage also contains words which, if you give them some thought, have connections with PDE. The passage’s first word, for example, is soðlice. The suffix -lice is equivalent to today’s -ly, used to make adverbs out of adjectives, and soð means ‘true,’ so soðlice is ‘truly.’ You may have come across – in Shakespeare, for example – the related word forsooth, meaning ‘in truth.’ We also have the word soothsayer in PDE  – literally ‘someone who speaks the truth.’ Another interesting word is wer (ln. 12). It means ‘man’ and comes from the Latin word for man, vir (which you find in our word virile). It may also suggest to you that ‘man-animal’ known as werewolf. As a final example, there’s

What OE was like  25

the word stow (ln. 13), part of the word wunungstow, meaning ‘dwelling place.’ A stow is a ‘place,’ and there are a number of English place names that include the word, like ‘Felixstowe’ (‘Felix’s place’); another example is ‘Bristol’ (‘the place of the bridge’), where the ‘w’ has become an ‘l,’ following local dialect pronunciation. There’s also a PDE verb to stow, meaning ‘to place,’ usually used in relation to storing objects (luggage on an aircraft, for example). Then there’s stowaway, of course. All these categories of words with connections to PDE suggest that OE is indeed a ‘version’ of English as we know it. When we look at word order in the passage, we again find that there are similarities and differences with PDE. Reading the word-for-word translation shows you that. As for slight differences, you find There saw she a lettuce (ln. 2), rather than ‘There she saw.’ You’ll also notice that verbs are sometimes put at the end of sentences: Then was she immediately by the devil attacked (ln. 4). If you know German, you’ll probably associate this ‘putting the verb at the end’ with that language. You may also find some similarities between some OE words and German ones. This confirms that despite all the features English has taken in its history from a variety of languages, it is basically a Germanic language. The passage also shows something which will become the topic of the next chapter. It’s that there are some words which have more than one form. One example is the word for ‘lettuce.’ In line 2 it is leahtric but in line 11 leahtrice. Then there’s ‘nun’: on one occasion (ln. 1) it is nunne and on another (ln. 9) nunnan. ‘Devil’ also has different forms in the passage: line 5 has deofle and line 9 deofol. This happens a little in PDE; we add ‘apostrophe “s”’ – devil’s – to mean ‘of the devil,’ and we add an ‘s’ to make the noun plural: devils. But the rest of the time it’s plain devil. OE has many more forms: as well as deofle and deofol, you also find (though not in the passage) deofles, deoflum, deofla, deoflas – six forms for one word! Why did OE have so many forms for the same word, and how did it happen that some of these disappeared in later versions of English? This takes us straight into Chapter 3. Notes 1 Werferth, who translated Gregory’s book into English, was from Mercia rather than Alfred’s Wessex. There were differences between the dialects of the two r­ egions, but they were small, and we can use Werferth’s language to characterise the OE of the time. 2 Werferth’s Old English text is taken from Ardern (1951), p. 33. The discussion of the ‘lettuce passage’ is based on Johnson (2016), Section 4.3.

3 SIMPLIFYING ENGLISH Samuel Moore and the case of the disappearing inflections

The exact point at which Old English (OE) became Middle English (ME) is the subject of debate. But 1066 was certainly an important date. This was when Normandy invaded England. The invaders brought their language with them, and over the next centuries, English saw a massive influx of French words. Another major consequence was that French came to be used by the upper classes, as well as in many social and administrative settings – in the courts, the Church and some areas of education. The use of English was relegated to the lower classes. It was not until the fourteenth century that English began a slow rise towards general use and acceptability in all areas of English society. But the incursion of French was not the only thing that happened to English. The early ME period is an important landmark because of the simplification to the language’s system of inflections that took place then. By the time the poet Chaucer died, in 1400, the language’s grammar had in some areas become simpler, and very much more like today’s, than it was in Alfred’s time. We take a look at these simplifications. The chapter has rather more linguistics, and rather less biography, than most in the book.

During the American War of Independence, the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was the capital of the United States for just one day, before the American leaders were chased further west by the British. That was in 1777. Exactly a hundred years later, in 1877, Samuel Moore was born there. He was to become a linguist who left his mark on the history of English. Samuel wanted to be a lawyer but was forced by ill health to give up his studies. This led him to spend a year ‘on the road,’ travelling in the far west and south of the United States. When he returned, with his health improved,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-4

Simplifying English  27

he took jobs working in ‘street railways’ – lines operating trams or buses. The work was not much to his taste, but he kept at it until he was thirty. His first degree had been at Princeton, and when he decided to give up street railways and become a teacher, Princeton was pleased to recommend him. He became an instructor in English at the University of Kansas, and in 1911 he finished his PhD on Middle English literature at Harvard. Posts at a number of other colleges followed, and in 1915 he went to the University of Michigan, which was in the process of establishing a strong reputation for linguistics. He helped strengthen that reputation and stayed there for the rest of his life. He became a professor in 1921, and was put in charge of linguistic studies, though his work and writings were also to do with Old and Middle English literature. ME dialects were another area of interest. In 1930 he was appointed editor of the comprehensive ME Dictionary being produced by the University of Michigan in collaboration with Oxford.1 This appointment led Samuel to spend some of his time travelling and studying in Europe. Little is known about his personal life. He was a devout Christian, a keen walker and had an interest in music. He married in 1903 and had six children. His death, at the age of fifty-seven, was unexpected, following an operation. The claim that Samuel’s work amounts to an English-language landmark revolves around a number of papers he wrote in the 1920s. One, written in 1927, is entitled ‘Loss of Final n in Middle English.’ You’ll remember from Interlude 1 that words in OE often had inflected forms, one example being the word for ‘nun,’ which in our ‘lettuce passage’ was on one occasion nunne and on another nunnan. That final -n on nunnan is the -n that Moore is concerned with. He looked at a number of texts written in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and noticed that the -n inflection was disappearing. So in Chaucer, who was writing at the end of the fourteenth century, the word for ‘nun’ is nonne, and never nonnan. A year later, in 1928, Samuel wrote another paper, looking at other OE inflections that disappeared in ME. His conclusion was that the period from 1050 to 1300, ‘was characterised by very extensive .  .  . changes that transformed English from a rather highly inflected language to one having the relatively few and simple inflections of late Middle English.’2 Moore’s work was followed up by a number of other scholars. In 1930, another American academic, Kemp Malone, went back further in time and found that there was evidence of a loss of inflections as far back as the second half of the tenth century, just fifty years after King Alfred died. At first sight you may find it difficult to believe that these rather obscure findings should add up to a landmark in the story of English. It’s true that the landmark was a particularly gradual one, taking several centuries to happen. But landmark it was. To explain why, we need to take a close look at inflections and what their role is. Why are they there?

28  Simplifying English

Noun and adjective inflections

In Interlude 1 we noted that there are only a few noun inflections in PDE. So ‘devil’ adds an ‘apostrophe s’ when it means ‘of the devil,’ ‘s apostrophe’ for ‘of the devils,’ and an -s in the plural. It was much more complex in OE, where, we saw, the word for ‘devil’ had six forms: deofol, deofle deofles, deoflum, deofla and deoflas. To show just how complex the OE situation was, here are some common patterns (called ‘declensions’) for nouns and adjectives. The first word in each phrase (se, þone and so on) is the OE definite article (‘the’). Eald is an adjective meaning ‘old’; stan is ‘stone,’ giefu is ‘gift’ and eage is ‘eye’:3 Number Case Masculine Sing N se eald stan A þone ealdne stan G þæs ealdes stanes D þæm ealdum stane Plur N þa ealde stanas A þa ealde stanas G þara ealdra stana D þæm ealdum stanum

Feminine þæt eald giefu þæt ealde giefe þæs ealdre giefe þǣm ealdre giefe þa ealda giefa þa ealda giefa þara ealdra giefa þæm ealdum giefum

Neuter seo eald eage þa eald eage þære ealdes eagan þære ealdum eagan þa eald eagan þa eald eagan þara ealdra eagena þæm ealdum eagum

The table shows that there are three factors which control what inflection to use. ‘Case’ is the first, and this indicates the function of a noun phrase in a sentence. There were four cases in OE, and the names were those that linguists used to describe Latin grammar: ‘nominative,’ ‘accusative’ ‘genitive’ and ‘dative’ – N, A, G and D in the table. The nominative is used for the subject of a sentence and the accusative for the object. You may initially find the idea of distinguishing nominative and accusative cases strange, because we never do it with nouns in PDE: the word ‘man’ stays the same when it’s the subject of a sentence (as in the man killed the dog) or the object (the dog killed the man). But it won’t seem so strange if you think about pronouns, because there we do use different forms: we say he killed the dog, but he becomes him when it’s the object – it’s not the dog killed he, but the dog killed him. He is the nominative form, him the accusative. We have already seen the function of the genitive (G), to express the idea ‘of,’ shown in PDE by ‘apostrophe s’ and ‘s apostrophe (the girl’s house and the girls’ house). The OE dative (D) is the most difficult to explain because it can express a number of ideas. Most commonly it’s associated with the word ‘to.’ So in The man gave the book to his friend, friend would be dative (man is nominative, and book accusative of course). As you can see from our table, in OE there are often different inflections for these cases. The table shows just how difficult it was to talk about ‘old stones’ in OE!

Simplifying English  29

The second factor is ‘number’ – whether the noun is singular or plural. As we have seen, we have an inflection -s in PDE which signals plural. In OE it was again more complex, because there were different inflections for the different cases, singular and plural. So stan had three plural forms: stanas, stana and stanum, according to case. Gender is the third factor. In PDE, we recognise ‘natural gender’ in our pronoun system – we show that something is masculine, feminine or neuter by using he, she or it. But perhaps you know other languages – like French, German, Russian or Latin – which have what is known as ‘grammatical gender.’ In these languages, all nouns are either ‘masculine,’ ‘feminine’ or (in some languages) ‘neuter,’ and it doesn’t always have much to do with natural gender. So in German a girl – in natural gender feminine – is grammatically neuter (das Mädchen), while inanimate objects can be masculine (‘box’ is ­masculine  – der Kasten) or feminine (‘thing’ is feminine  – die Sache). As our table shows, OE also had grammatical gender, and that too could cut across natural gender: so wifmann, hlaefdige and wif were common words for ‘woman’; the first is masculine, the second feminine, the third neuter.’4 As the name suggests, grammatical gender really is all a question of grammar and not biology. What we have said about nouns applies also to adjectives. Look at the different forms of the adjective eald in the table. It changes according to case – the masculine nominative is eald, and the accusative is ealdne, for example. There are different singular and plural forms too (the masculine nominative is eald in the singular and ealde in the plural). Gender differences are fewer, but they are there: in the genitive singular, the form is ealdes in the masculine and neuter but ealdre in the feminine. Now let’s do some mathematics. There are twenty-four slots in the table. If a language were to have different noun and adjective inflections for each case, number and gender, that would make twenty-four noun endings, and the same number for adjectives. A huge number. In fact there were old Germanic languages which approached that complexity. But if you look closely at the table, you can see that OE was not that bad. There are not twenty-four different noun inflections, because some inflections were used in more than one slot. For example, in the feminine singular of giefu, the form giefe is found throughout, except for in the nominative, and if you go through the table, you’ll find other similar overlaps. That said, the situation is complex enough, especially when you compare it with PDE, where adjectives would be the same in every single box, and the nouns would just have those ‘s’ forms we mentioned earlier. OE’s complex system was ripe for change. And change it did. Here’s another table for you to compare with the first. It stays with old stones, gifts and eyes and indicates how declensions were in Chaucer’s time:

30  Simplifying English

Sing N the olde stoon A the olde stoon G the olde stoones D the olde stoon(e) Plur N the olde stoones A the olde stoones G the olde stoones D the olde stoones

the olde yift(e) the olde yift(e) the olde yiftes the olde yift(e) the olde yiftes the olde yiftes the olde yiftes the olde yiftes

the olde eye the olde eye the olde eyes the olde eye the olde eyen the olde eyen the olde eyen the olde eyen

The table shows that the situation is roughly as it is today. The adjective, olde, stays the same for all cases, numbers and genders. The noun has an -s inflection for the genitive singular and for the plural.5 A complication is that instead of an -s in the plural of eye, we have eyen. But PDE too has a few such irregular plurals: nouns like child and ox, which have the plurals children and oxen. The OE plural eagan kept the -n plural in ME, and in fact in Scotland you sometimes hear the form een (for eyes) even today. Simplifying verbs

So far we’ve concentrated on nouns and adjectives. Verb inflections also became less complex, and there are other verb changes too. In PDE most verbs form the past tense by adding the inflection -ed: climb becomes climbed, help becomes helped. But today there are also quite a few verbs with irregular past tenses, often involving a change in the vowel: so it’s bring-brought, gowent, eat-ate. In OE these irregular (or ‘strong’) verbs were very much more common. For example, the OE verb ‘to climb’ was climban, and the past tense was clomb; the vowel changed from ‘i’ to ‘o’ – just as it does in our PDE riserose. Sometimes the change was from ‘a’ to ‘o:’ the past tense of acan ‘ache’ was ok. In the case of beornan (‘burn’), the past tense was barn – a change from ‘eo’ to ‘a.’ Almost a third of the OE irregular verbs became regular early in the ME period, and more followed over time; irregular became regular, strong became ‘weak’; today we have climbed, ached, burned. As you might expect, the change from irregular to regular was often a gradual one, and there were times of overlap, when both regular and irregular forms were in use. For example, the OE verb ‘help’ (helpan) was irregular, and one of its forms was holpen. You sometimes found this surviving in ME. So in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (written in the 1380s) there’s a description of Thomas Becket who helped pilgrims when they were sick: That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke. But the verb was in the process of becoming regular, so you also find an -ed form. In Wycliffe’s Bible, dated about 1382, you find: The erthe helpide the woman: ‘the earth helped the woman’; helpide is our helped. Even as late as Shakespeare you find both regular and irregular forms – helped and holp.

Simplifying English  31

So, taking all together – nouns, adjectives, verbs and much else – from a time soon after Alfred’s death until the end of the fourteenth century, we find a very considerable simplification of parts of the language as it moved towards the forms we have today. Inflections and word order

The loss of inflections in ME went along with another important change, to do with word order. As we saw in Interlude 1’s ‘lettuce passage,’ there were a number of different word orders found in OE. One reason is that inflections allowed you some freedom with word order. We can explore this by looking at the OE sentence: hunta abreoteð oxan – ‘the hunter kills the ox.’ Here, it is the inflections which tell you who did the killing and who was killed: hunta is nominative (for the subject of the sentence), oxan is accusative (for the sentence’s object). If we wanted to say ‘the ox killed the hunter,’ the inflections would be different: oxa abreoteð huntan. Because inflections tell you who killed and who was killed, word order doesn’t matter. So you could say hunta abreoteð oxan, oxan abreoteð hunta or even abreoteð oxan hunta. They all mean the same.6 In PDE we do not have the freedom to alter the word order in this situation. If you change it, the meaning changes rather drastically  – there is the world of difference between The hunter killed the ox and The ox killed the hunter – ­especially if you are a hunter! Without inflections to distinguish nominative and accusative, we have come to rely on a now well-established word order ‘rule’ to show who did the killing and who was killed. The ‘rule’ is that the noun before the verb is nominative and the one after it accusative. So as inflections disappeared, word order became more fixed. What caused the loss of inflections?7

Yes, but why did all these changes happen? Various explanations have been suggested: Sound changes Many of the inflection changes started as changes in pronunciation, which applied to all parts of the language, and not just to inflections. In other words, they were to do with pronunciation, not grammar. In OE, like other Germanic languages, the main stress on a word was generally on the first syllable. This tended to ‘draw attention away’ from word endings, which is of course where inflections dwell. To understand the significance of this, we need to look at what happens in English to vowels in unstressed syllables. In English (but not in all languages), vowels that are not stressed can change their pronunciation. You can see this at work in PDE. Think about the word but. If for some reason you wanted to emphasise this word – ­perhaps when saying ‘Yes, I agree with you. BUT, on the other hand

32  Simplifying English

. . . ,’ then you might pronounce the word [bʌt], with the same vowel found in ‘shut.’ Usually, though, but is unstressed, as in the sentence ‘The nun ate the lettuce, but she survived.’ Then the vowel is generally not [ʌ] but [ə] – like the first vowel in the word ‘afoot.’ This vowel [ə] is an interesting one. Technically it is known as ‘schwa,’ and it has also been called ‘the indeterminate vowel.’ Sometimes it is described as ‘weak,’ and we may say that in our but example, the [ʌ] is ‘weakened’ to [ə]. Schwa played its part in the ME loss of inflections. To see the process at work, let’s return to ‘old stones’ and the plural forms of the OE noun stan (‘stone’). As our table shows, these were stanas, stana and stanum. With the stress on the first syllable, the unstressed plural inflections became less distinct from each other. The final, unstressed vowel became weakened to schwa, written as an ‘e.’ In this way, the inflections took a step towards being merged. Educational influences There’s another, sociolinguistic, factor that contributed to the decrease in inflections. When the Normans invaded England in 1066, French became the language of the educated upper classes, and English was spoken by the lower classes. Their small amount of education did not expose them to teachers laying down prescriptive sets of rules about language use. They did not have grammar rules drummed into them at school, rules like ‘the dative singular of a masculine noun should end in -e, while for a neuter noun the inflection is -n.’ Prescriptive statements like these can help a lot to preserve some linguistic complexities, and when the statements disappear, the rules themselves often disappear with them. So it comes about that we have partially to thank lack of grammar lessons for the relative inflectional simplicity of English today. Word order Earlier we saw that word order rules partly took over the function of inflections. But there’s a ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ conundrum here. In 1894, the well-known Danish linguist, Otto Jespersen, wrote a book entitled Progress in Language: With Special Reference to English. In this exploration of the history of English, Jespersen says that ‘one of the questions of greatest importance’ is ‘what is the relation between freedom in word-position and a complicated system of inflexions? How is it that in historical times simplification of grammar always goes hand in hand with the development of fixed word order.’ He looks at the explanation we discussed earlier, that as inflections disappeared, ‘a fixed word order had to step in to make up for the loss.’ But, Jespersen says, this solution is unlikely, because it would mean that there might well be a long gap between the disappearance of inflections and word order rules becoming truly fixed to take their place. During that time, ‘speech would be unintelligible’; you would not know whether it was the hunter who killed the ox or the ox who killed the hunter! Far more likely, Jespersen argues, is that it happened the other way round; ‘that a fixed word order is the . . . cause, and grammatical simplification the . . . effect.’ In this view, the ‘rule’ about nominative nouns coming before the verb, and

Simplifying English  33

accusatives after it, became established, and this made nominative and accusative inflections redundant. But Jespersen’s view has been challenged by other linguists, who find evidence to suggest that inflections started to disappear before word order was fixed.8 Creolisation Yet another explanation is related to what happens when people who speak different languages are forced into a situation where they need to communicate regularly. One scenario in which this happens (which we’ll explore in greater detail in Chapter 11) is the colonial one. The colonisers will speak one language – English or French, for example – and those being colonised will have their own local language. In order to communicate, a new language, called a ‘pidgin,’ will be developed. Thus when the British colonised Nigeria, a Nigerian Pidgin was soon developed, based on British English. Often pidgins become separate languages in their own right; frequently there is intermarriage between speakers of the two ethnic groups involved, and for their offspring, the pidgin is a first language. When a pidgin becomes the first language for a significant part of a community, it’s known as a ‘creole.’ A main characteristic of pidgins and creoles is that they simplify some aspects of the colonisers’ language. Grammatical inflections are often the first things to go. This includes verb tense inflections like the -ed in English, and when this is dropped, time is expressed by the use of adverbs like ‘yesterday’ or ‘last week.’ For example, in Ghanaian Pidgin ‘I go to school every day’ is a go skuul everidey, while the past tense ‘I went to school last week’ is a go skuul las wik; the verb form stays the same and it’s the adverbs that indicate the time.9 Here’s another example from Ghanaian Pidgin. There are several ways of making nouns plural. One is to use a singular noun and to rely on some other word to suggest plurality. So ‘There were women who cooked for us.’ would be Wi get som wuman we de de kuk. Here it’s the word som (‘some’) that shows we are talking about several women (plural) rather than one woman (singular). Another method is to use what is called ‘reduplication,’ where a noun is repeated. ‘They come and open factories for us’ is dem de kam opi factory-factory fo os – one factory is factory, more than one factory-factory.10 A final example, this time about the genitive singular of nouns. In a number of pidgin languages, ‘of’ is expressed by a word like blong (derived from English ‘belong’). So in Solomon Island Pidgin, the way to say ‘Mary’s party’ is parti blong Mary. These examples show that pidgins and creoles often prefer to do without inflections where possible. But what has this to do with Old and Middle English? Well, in the historical period we are dealing with, there are two situations in which the English came into close contact with speakers of other languages. We looked at one extensively in Chapter 2, when the Vikings came and settled in Britain, eventually establishing their own separate area of the country, known as the Danelaw. The language the Vikings spoke was Old Norse (ON). It had similarities with English, and probably OE and ON

34  Simplifying English

speakers would have been able to communicate with each other using their own languages. But doubtless communication was made simpler by OE speakers modifying their speech in some ways, which might well have included dropping inflections, just as creole speakers do. The other situation follows the Norman invasion of 1066. French was not just the language spoken by the invaders; England’s nobility also spoke it, and as we have mentioned, it was the preferred language in many official settings. Again you have a situation in which English speakers needed to communicate with speakers of another language. ‘Creolisation’ – including simplifications of inflections – would have taken place. A number of linguists have put forward this creolisation explanation for the inflectional simplifications we have discussed in this chapter. But there have been counterarguments – linguists who say that the inflectional changes were taking place anyway, regardless of the need of the English to communicate with ON or French speakers.11 Simplicity: a defining feature

Throughout this chapter  – including in the last paragraph  – we have used the word ‘simplification’ to characterise the changes we have been describing. You have to be very careful when talking about simplifications in languages, because you very often find that a simplification in one area of grammar leads to a ‘complexification’ elsewhere. What we have said about inflections and word order is a case in point: when the system of English inflections simplified, it came at the price of losing the freedom of word order which OE enjoyed. Rules restricting word order use came into play, and in this one area, the language became just that much more ‘complex.’ Nevertheless, if we look just at inflections, we can indeed say that the process was one of simplification. The linguist Henry Sweet was, according to some, the person Bernard Shaw had in mind when he created the character of Henry Higgins in his play Pygmalion (and in My Fair Lady, the film based on it). In Sweet’s 1874 History of English Sounds from the Earliest Period, he makes a proposal for the names of the stages in the language’s history. Here is what he writes:12 I propose, therefore, to start with the three main divisions of Old, Middle and Modern, based mainly on the inflectional characteristics of each stage. Old English is the period of full inflections . . . Middle English of levelled inflections . . . , and Modern English of lost inflections. So the levelling out of inflections was, in Sweet’s view, not just a characteristic but a defining feature of ME. And Samuel Moore was among the first to explore how this happened.

Simplifying English  35

Notes 1 The Michigan ME Dictionary is available online today, at https://quod.lib.umich. edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary. 2 Moore (1928), p. 238. 3 The table is modified from Johnson (2016), p. 69. 4 The ‘woman’ examples are taken from Hogg (2002). 5 Sometimes there was an -e inflection for the dative singular. 6 The ox/hunter example is taken from Johnson (2016), p. 76. 7 Parts of this section are based on Johnson (2016). 8 The quotations in this paragraph are from Jespersen (1894), pp. 96 and 97. 9 These Ghanaian Pidgin sentences are taken from Amoako (1992). 10 The Ghanaian Pidgin examples here are from Huber (1999). 11 Among those exploring the creolization hypothesis are Domingue (1977), Bailey and Maroldt (1977) and Milroy (1984). 12 Sweet (1874), p. 160.

4 STANDARDISING WRITTEN ENGLISH Henry V and Chancery English

For a long time after the Norman invasion, all official communications in England, spoken and written, were in French or Latin. By the fourteenth century, English was spoken by the population at large, though French was still used at court. As for writing, French and Latin remained the main languages in use. French was the language of parliament, the law and commerce. Latin was the medium closely safeguarded by the Church, so much so that when John Wycliffe helped to translate the Bible into English, this was severely condemned by some church authorities. But in the fifteenth century thing began to change. English came to be used more and more for all kinds of written communications, from personal letters to official documents. An important figure who encouraged the move to written English was King Henry V.

There was a serious kerfuffle at the Church’s Council of Constance, held in March 1417. The French argued that the English were not fit to be regarded as a nation in their own right but should be considered part of Germany and hence should not have full status at the Council. Violent clashes followed. When the dust had settled, an English cleric, Thomas Polton, put forward a lengthy argument that there were ways in which England had more of a claim to be a nation than France. There were, for example, only 6,000 parish churches in France, while England had no fewer than 52,000. But when talking about nationality, he said, ‘the chief and surest proof of being a nation’ is language. And England has its own language – indeed more than one if you counted the languages of Scotland, Wales and Ireland. In medieval times, as indeed often today, language was regarded as an important symbol of nationality. On at least four occasions – in 1295, 1344, DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-5

Standardising written English  37

1346 and 1375 – The English parliament argued for support in wars against the French by claiming that the foreigners were out to destroy the English language. Similar claims were made about other attacks. In 1400, Henry Percy demanded that folk should take up arms against the Scots, who proposed ‘to make war against the language and people of England.’ There was also a document which, in 1407, claimed that the Welsh were trying to ‘destroy the English tongue as far as they can and turn it into the Welsh tongue.’1 Henry V, king of England between 1413 and 1422, was acutely aware of the political significance of language as a symbol of nationhood. He was born in 1386 in Monmouth Castle, a favourite residence of his father, Henry Bolingbroke. He was not, at birth, in line to be king, and how he became so is a fascinating and long story, told in Shakespeare’s cycle of plays (with suitable fictional elements added) from Richard II, through Henry IV, Parts I and II, to Henry V. In the Henry IV plays, Prince Hal, the future Henry V, is portrayed as an irresponsible and profligate youth whose ways angered his father but who in the end came good. In real life, he enjoyed falconry, hunting and fishing in his youth, and perhaps for a time learned to play the harp. He was taught to read, write and speak French and Latin and was a voracious reader. His mother Mary died in 1394, when he was just eight, and thereafter he spent much time in the company of his grandmother. His father was absent for much of the time, and although Shakespeare doubtless fictionalised the father and son disagreements a touch, there’s no doubt that the relationship between the two was cool. Shakespeare’s version was not entirely fictional. As a young man, Prince Hal lived in a house called Coldharbour, in the London area of Eastcheap, where events such as midnight brawls were not unknown. As someone said of him: ‘he was the fervent soldier of Venus [the goddess of love] as well as Mars [the god of war]; youthlike, he was fired by her torches.’2 The ‘fervent soldier of Mars’ side came to the fore because his father’s reign was beset by rebellions and conflicts. Prince Hal played a valiant part and had plenty of opportunities to learn about the cruelty and hardness of war. In one battle, early in his career, Hal was severely wounded by an arrow close to his nose, and this left him scarred. If you look on the internet for pictures of his father as king, you’ll see that most of them (as indeed for most kings) are faceon, while for Henry V they tend to be profiles, probably to hide the scar. Hal was growing up to be a hard military man. But there were other sides to him. A monk at Westminster Abbey described him as ‘devout, abstemious, liberal to the poor, sparing of promises – but true to his word, once given; a quick, wide-awake man, though at times reserved and moody . . . chivalrous towards women and rigid in repressing riot and crime.’3 A far cry from his dissolute early days. Henry IV died in 1413, and Prince Hal became King Henry V. You’ll remember from Chapter 2 that King Alfred’s life was dominated by warfare against the Vikings. Henry’s was too, in his case the enemy being the French. A

38  Standardising written English

hundred years of conflict was in progress when Henry came to the throne (the dates of the ‘Hundred Years’ War’ were 1337–1453). In Henry’s time, France was in turmoil; there was a civil war in progress between the ‘Burgundians’ (followers of the Duke of Burgundy) and the ‘Armagnacs,’ supporters of King Charles’ brother, Louis d’Orléans, led by the Count of Armagnac. The English added fuel to the flames. Henry firmly believed that he had a God-given right to the French throne. Though the Burgundians at times sided with Henry, the French were in general, understandably, opposed to Henry’s claim. War became inevitable, and the English were fired up for it: now all the youth of England are on fire, is what is said in Shakespeare’s play Henry V.4 In 1415 a fleet of 1500 ships was assembled near Southampton, together with 11,000 soldiers – a force twelve times the size of the Spanish Armada of 1588. As the fleet set sail, it’s said that a group of swans accompanied it, and this was taken as a good omen.5 The destination was Harfleur, a strategically important port in Normandy, close to the mouth of the Seine river, and just six miles from where Le Havre stands today. It was here that, according to Shakespeare, Henry urged on his soldiers with the celebrated Once more unto the breach, dear friends speech. Battle commenced, and the English were successful. They left a contingent of soldiers to hold Harfleur, while the ­majority – tired and sick – decided to return to England by the most direct route, from Calais. The French put together a large force to confront them on the way. The armies met on the road between Harfleur and Calais, near the village of Agincourt. The English were severely outnumbered but were again victorious. The French were routed. Henry’s reputation was much enhanced throughout Europe, and he was not yet thirty. But as with Alfred and the Vikings, the conflict persisted. Flushed with Agincourt success, Henry  – still convinced that in God’s eyes he was King of France – decided to cross the Channel again. A new army of 42,000 men left for France in 1417, determined to settle the ‘French question’ once and for all. In August 1417, they landed near the small coastal castle of Touques (in Normandy, forty kilometres from today’s Le Havre). The castle promptly surrendered, and Henry wrote a letter home to the Mayor and Aldermen of London, telling them what had happened. Here is part of it. Sauely is ‘safely,’ yolden is ‘yielded,’ and therle is ‘the earl.’ Notice that the use of the letters ‘u’ and ‘v’ are not as today (we’ll look at this later in Interlude 3):6 By the Kyng  – Trusty and wel-beloued, We grete yow often tymes wel, Doying yow to vnderstande for youre confort that by the grace of god we ben sauely arryued into oure lond of Normandie, . . . and this day, the Euen of Seint Laurence, aboute midday was yolden vn-to vs the Castell of Touque, a-boute the whiche our wel-beloued cosyn therle of Huntyngdon lay, and the keyes of the sayd Castell deliuered vnto vs with-oute shedyng of cristen blood, or deffense mad by oure enemys . . .

Standardising written English  39

From Touques, Henry’s army moved to Caen, which was besieged and fell. By 1418 all of lower Normandy was English. We won’t report on all the twists and turns of the war with France. In 1419 there was a peace conference held at the town of Meulan, forty kilometres west of Paris. Nothing much came of it, except that there Henry met Catherine de Valois. He found her a ‘very handsome’ girl of ‘most engaging manners’7 and immediately fell for her. But though she was handsome and engaging, her parentage had its dubious elements. Her father was Charles VI of France, whose bouts of mental illness were legendary – on occasions ‘he believed he was made of glass and ordered that iron rods be inserted into his clothes to prevent him from breaking.’8 As for Catherine’s mother, Isabeau of Bavaria, she had a reputation as a spendthrift and a flirt. But the meeting was a happy one. In May 1420, a peace agreement was made between England and France, the Treaty of Troyes, and Charles acknowledged Henry as his heir. The agreement was that Charles would continue as king until his death, after which Henry would take over. Catherine and Henry were married at Troyes in June 1420. When Henry returned to England he was de facto ruler of Normandy and heir to the French throne – a hero ‘as if he had been an angel from God.’9 He brought with him Catherine, who was crowned queen in Westminster Abbey in February 1421. Henry did not stay in England for long, and by June 1421, he was back in France continuing the military campaigns. But now he was seriously ill, probably with dysentery. After one battle south of Paris, he was so weak he had to be carried back to the city. He died in Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris, on 31 August, 1422, aged just 35. His body was taken back to Westminster, and all England mourned. The opening lines of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1, begin with his funeral: Hung be the heavens with black. Yield day to night . . . England ne’er lost a king of so much worth. Though Henry’s son was still just a child, he succeeded to the English throne as Henry VI. He became a timid and passive man, beset with mental illness (possibly inherited from his maternal grandfather). By the end of his reign, France had gained a heroine, and a martyr, in the figure of Joan of Arc . . . and England had lost France. Henry’s letter

There’s nothing very remarkable about the contents of Henry’s letter from Touques to the Mayor and Aldermen of London. What is remarkable is that it was written in English. It is in fact one of the earliest written communications by a king in the language. Though French and Latin had been dominant in official communications, English was making inroads. On several occasions in the latter part of the fourteenth century, English was used to open parliament, and parliamentary

40  Standardising written English

records began to appear in the language. When Henry IV came to power, his reign was very insecure, with barons looking to grab the throne. Henry IV knew that the way to the hearts of the common folk, and indeed of parliament, was to support the use of the vernacular, English. Henry V saw things in the same way, and though he was not the first person to advocate the use of English in writing, his role was a key one. A major motive was to gain support for his wars against the French, by claiming that – just as, we saw, others had done – the enemy were trying to kill off English. He also doubtless felt that Latin and French really had had their day; it was time that the language of the people should be used for written communication. When Henry was Price Hal, and for the first few years of his reign, he wrote letters in French. His change to English was sudden, suggesting that it was a deliberately made decision rather than a question of whim. And decisions made by a monarch on such matters had huge influence. This is why the American scholar John Fisher claims that ‘the use of English by Henry V marks the turning point in establishing English as the national language of England.’10 There are various pieces of evidence to show how Henry influenced others in this respect. The one most quoted is from 1422, when the Brewers Association decided to change their record keeping from Latin to English. It’s true that this statement was initially written in Latin – old habits die hard – but it was later translated into English. It reads: Whereas our mother-tongue, to wit the English tongue, hath in modern days begun to be honorably enlarged and adorned, for that our most excellent lord, King Henry V, hath in his letters missive and divers affairs touching his own person, more willingly chosen to declare the secrets of his will, and for the better understanding of his people, hath with a diligent mind procured the common idiom (setting aside others) to be commended by the exercise of writing: and there are many of our craft of Brewers who have the knowledge of writing and reading in the said English idiom, but in others, to wit, the Latin and French, before these times used, they do not in any wise understand. For which causes with many others, it being considered how that the greater part of the Lords and trusty Commons have begun to make their matters to be noted down in our mother tongue, so we also in our craft, following in some manner their steps, have decreed to commit to memory the needful things which concern us.11 Partly because of Henry’s influence, there was a veritable flurry of written English documents in the fifteenth century. Many of them were official – legal and commercial papers, for example – but there was private correspondence too. There’s a celebrated collection of more than a thousand letters produced by a Norfolk family, the Pastons, starting in 1418 and continuing to

Standardising written English  41

the beginning of the sixteenth century. These ‘Paston Letters’ deal with both personal and official affairs. They’re very useful to us as a source of information about the social history of the period, as well as about the language of the time. Written communication: what language, which English?

So, during the first half of the fifteenth century, the battle for English to be accepted as the ‘language of writing’ was in the process of being won. But English had another battle to face, particularly where writing was concerned – the need for an accepted standard variety. Which variety of English should become the standard? There were five major dialects in ME: Kentish, Southern, Northern, West Midlands and East Midlands, and the users of these dialects did not always understand each other. Many were aware of, and concerned by, the lack of a standard form of English. One was a person we’ll talk more about in a moment: William Caxton. There’s an anecdote he tells about the fact that there were two words for ‘eggs’ in use at the time: eggs and eyren. Here’s what he says: commyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother. In so moche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a shippe in tamyse [Thames], for to have sayled over the see into zelande, and for lacke of wynd thei taryed atte forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them. And one of theym named Sheffelde, a mercer [textile dealer], cam in-to an hows and axed for mete; and specially he axyd after eggys. And the goode wyf answered, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges, and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd, that he wolde have eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understod hym wel. Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren? Certaynly it is harde to playse every man by cause of dyversite & chaunge of langage.12 Eggs, or eyren? As is often the case with languages, the issue of which variety should become the standard was a question of power. And power resided in Westminster . . . The Signet Office and the Chancery

Though writing English was becoming a common activity, skilled writers were in the minority. In fact only about half of the Paston Letters were written in the handwriting of their authors, and when it came to official correspondence, the actual writing process would certainly have been passed on to chosen

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individuals who would act as ‘scribes.’ As for the king, he had his own group of scribes whose job it was to write the letters he dictated. These individuals made up what was called the Signet Office. The signet in question was the personal royal seal which identified and authenticated the letter and its contents – rather like a signature on a letter does today. Signet Office clerks followed the king wherever he went, dealing with all the royal correspondence, private and official, on matters both important and trivial. The king’s personal secretary was in charge of the office. Over time, the Signet Office, which initially looked after just the king’s correspondence, became part of a much larger body. It first met in a small chapel or ‘chancel,’ which is where the name ‘Chancery’ came from. Today’s Chancery is a legal institution, but in the fifteenth century it was almost the entire governmental bureaucracy, apart from the Treasury. Located in Westminster, ‘the Chancery contained the largest, the best trained, and the most prestigious body of civil servants in England.’13 The person who ran it, the Chancellor, was an important and powerful person. The Chancery was responsible for many governmental documents, dealing with a variety of topics, in all parts of the country. Because its remit was so wide, it was important that it should use a ‘dialectless’ version of English, one that did not change according to what clerk was using it, where he came from and what his personal linguistic habits were. This standard version is just what the Westminster Chancery developed, and it became known as ‘Chancery English’ (CE). As well as royal signet letters – from Henry V, and later from his son, Henry VI – the fifteenth-century Chancery produced documents associated with all aspects of the governance and bureaucracy of the country. Public records of all sorts were written in CE, as were legal agreements (indentures), and other court documents. ‘Proclamations’ (formal orders to the public) were also made in English. Here’s an example, dated 1411. It’s a short proclamation informing the public that wrestling was not permitted within the area of St Paul’s (Poules) or the City. The punishment was imprisonment and a fine (fyn:)14 That no manere man ne child, of what estate or condicion that he be, be so hardy to wrestell, or to make ony wrestling within the seintuary ne the boundes of Poules, ne in non other open place within the Citee of London, vp peyne of emprisonement of fourty days, & making fyn vn-to the chaumbre after the discretious of the Mair and Aldermen. Some characteristics of CE

What was CE like, and where did it come from? In some ways it was a conservative variety. We have perhaps to thank the Chancery for the odd spellings

Standardising written English  43

we find today in words like though and right. The ‘gh’ represents earlier pronunciations (one being like the ’ch’ in loch). Some varieties of ME used more phonetic (and sensible!) spellings like thow and rite. But the Chancery preferred the ‘gh’ forms, and so they have remained. In fact, we have to thank CE for many forms that have become standard today, and CE really is similar to standard modern-day written English. Apart from the odd strange word, you probably understood all of the wrestling proclamation . . . and hence have no excuse at all for wresting in the grounds of St Paul’s, however much you may feel like it! There are some differences, though. You may have noticed in Henry’s letter from France the word therle, meaning ‘the earl’; it was common in CE to lose the final ‘e’ of the when the next word began with a vowel. Then there’s the third person present tense verb form; today we write he goes, while Chancery English had he goeth, as in fact did Chaucer; more about that in Interlude 2. Also, in CE the present plural form of the verb be was ben, while today it is are. It was important for CE to be ‘dialectless,’ but because many Chancery staff members were from London and the Midlands, it’s not surprising that CE contained elements of the dialects from these places. CE wasn’t ‘London English,’ though. The British linguist Michael Samuels studied the various forms of written English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.15 He gives examples of how London English and CE English differed. These examples show that CE was a little closer to today’s standard English than was the London version. So CE had not, such(e) and but, while the London English spellings were nat, swich(e) and bot. CE also partly came from Henry’s own personal English, and his own way of writing played a role in shaping the standard. As king, he was regarded as a suitable model for others to follow. His contribution has been plotted by the American linguist Malcolm Richardson, who looks at examples of Henry’s writing style in some detail, identifying characteristic spellings and such matters as pronoun, verb and adverb usage. He finds that many of Henry’s language habits made their way into CE, more than from any of the other sources he looks at. His conclusion: ‘Given the evidence available, it is apparent that the language of Henry’s documents corresponds in virtually every important respect to Chancery Standard.’16 So Henry’s landmark status is based on two achievements. He used, and encouraged the use of, written English. But he also played a part in shaping the nature of the variety which became standard. Caxton and printing

We’ve already mentioned William Caxton. He was responsible for something which played a major part in consolidating CE’s role. For a standard to become established, it needs to be widely disseminated. William, born in Kent in around

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1422, was the man for the job. He started his working life as apprentice to a cloth dealer in London. Then, before the age of thirty, he moved to Bruges in Belgium and became a wealthy businessman. William also had an interest in literature and set about translating a French work entitled Recueil des histoires de Troye – recueil is a ‘compilation,’ and the book describes various aspects of the siege of Troy story. He found translating hard work and tells how his ‘pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed’17 as he progressed. So William turned for help to a recent invention made by the German trader, Johannes Gutenberg – the printing press. William set up his own press in Bruges. Then, in 1476, he returned to England. His Troy book was doing well there, and he opened up a printing press and shop in the precincts of Westminster Abbey (which was, as we mentioned earlier, CE territory). William’s press saw the production of over a hundred printed works, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Malory’s romance, Le Morte d’Arthur. William himself made twentysix translations, including the first in English of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Printing had a huge effect on the development of a standard written norm. It suddenly became possible to produce multiple copies of a document, all exactly the same, without reflecting any idiosyncrasies of language use by particular scribes. The production process was also cheap, and copies could be made available to a massive audience at small cost. The result was well-­ disseminated standardisation. It was CE’s good fortune that William chose it as his model. But also, with time, his press made changes to that model. Take the use of -th instead of -s (goeth instead of goes). It is one of the ways in which CE’s grammar differed from today’s. Another was the use of ben for our are. Within a few years of printing, both -s and are became the norms. The changes which occurred in CE made the language even closer to today’s. English: written, but not yet fully cherished

The use of written English may have increased dramatically in the fifteenth century, but the language’s battles were not yet over. English still had its enemies. One was the Catholic Church, whose authority was based on clerics acting as intermediaries between the word of God (written in Latin) and the people. Some educators, particularly in universities, likewise had vested interests in maintaining the use of classical languages which, they argued, were the proper medium for scholarship. William Caxton himself felt it necessary to apologise more than once for writing in English. In relation to one translation, he talks about putting the text into ‘rude and simple English’ and for another into ‘rude and comyn [common] englyshe.’18 He was one of many who felt that English was inferior not just to the classical languages but to some other European vernaculars as well. Terms commonly used to describe English were ‘vile,’ ‘base’

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and ‘barbarous.’ Here’s what the poet John Skelton (1465–1529) says: ‘Our natural tonge is rude . . . Oure language is so rustye, so cankered and so ful of frowardes [unruliness]’ that if one wanted to ‘write ornately’ it would be difficult.19 As for comparisons with other tongues, here’s what Andrew Borde said in 1542: ‘the speche of Englande is a base speche to other noble speches, as Italian, Castylion, and Frenche.’20 What could be done to improve the status of English? In the next chapter we’ll explore one way in which this was done. Notes 1 The information and quotations are taken from Allmand (1992). 2 The quotation is from Taylor and Roskell (1975), p.  13. It is cited in Matusiak (2013), p. 74. 3 Cited in Matusiak (2013), p.  78. The original quotation is from Wylie (1884), p. 195. 4 Henry V, Act 2 Chorus. 5 According to Allmand (1992), p. 79. 6 The passage is taken from Chambers and Daunt (1931), p. 67. 7 Matusiak (2013), p. 191. 8 Ibid., p. 63. 9 Ibid., p. 217. 10 Fisher (1992), p. 1171. 11 The passage is taken from Chambers and Daunt (1931), p. 139. 12 This version is taken from Baugh and Cable (2013), p. 191. 13 Richardson (1980), p. 742. 14 The Proclamation is part of the Guildhall collection of letters, 1411. It is taken from Chambers and Daunt (1931), p. 93. 15 Samuels (1963). 16 Richardson (1980), p. 734. 17 In his Epilogue to Book 3 of his translation of Recueil. 18 From Jones (1953), p. 5. 19 In Skelton’s poem, The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe. 20 From Borde (1548). The quotations from Skelton and Borde are taken from Jones (1953), pp. 11 and 13, a book which describes ‘the triumph of the English language’ in fascinating detail.

Interlude 2 WHAT ME WAS LIKE A gat-toothed wife

The Canterbury Tales is probably the best-known poem written in ME. Chaucer started work on it in about 1387.1 His plan was highly ambitious, and the work was unfinished; the completed part is some 17,000 lines long. The poem is about a storytelling contest. A group of pilgrims are travelling from London to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, a popular destination for pilgrimages. The Host of the Tabard Inn in Southwark proposes that each pilgrim should tell four stories, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. The prize for the best story will be a free supper at the Tabard on their return. In fact only twenty-four stories are told. The book starts with a General Prologue containing pen portraits of the pilgrims. One is the Wife of Bath, a lady of strong character and an amorous disposition – the passage says she had been married five times, as well as having ‘company’ in her youth. Here is part of Chaucer’s description of her, with a word-for-word translation underneath. Read through the passage and translation; we’ll use it to draw attention to a few features of ME.2

A Good WIF was ther OF biside BATHE, A good wife there was from just outside Bath,



But she was somdel deef, and that was scathe. But she was somewhat deaf, and that was a pity.



Of clooth-makyng she hadde swich an haunt Of cloth-making she had such a skill

DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-6

What ME was like  47



She passed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt. She surpassed them of Ypres and of Ghent.

5 In al the parisshe wif ne was ther noon In all the parish wife there was none

That to the offrynge bifore hire sholde goon; That to the Offering before her should go;



And if ther dide, certeyn so wrooth was she And if there did, certainly so angry was she



That she was out of alle charitee. That she was out of all charitable feelings.



Hir coverchiefs ful fyne weren of ground; Her head coverings very fine were of texture;

10 I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound I dare swear they weighed ten pounds

That on a Sonday weren upon hir heed. That on Sunday were on her head.



Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed, Her stockings were of fine scarlet red,



Ful streite yteyd, and shoes ful moyste and newe. Very tightly laced, and shoes very soft and new.



Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe. Bold was her face, and fair, and red of hue.

15 She was a worthy womman al hir lyve; She was a respectable woman all her life;

Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve, Husbands at the church door she had had five,



Withouten oother compaignye in youthe; Not counting other companins in youth;

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But therof nedeth nat to speke as nowthe. But of that there is no need to speak now.



And thries hadde she been at Jerusalem; And thrice has she been to Jerusalem;

20 She hadde passed many a straunge strem; She had crossed many a foreign river;

At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne, At Rome she had been, and at Boulogne,



In Galice at Seint Jame, and at Coloigne. In Galicia and St James, and at Cologne.



She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye. She knew much about wandering by the way.



Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye. Her teeth were set wide apart, to tell the truth.

25 Upon an amblere esily she sat . . . Upon a saddle horse she comfortably sat . . . In Chapter 3 we discussed word order and how rules about the position of subject and object were becoming fixed. But you will still find aspects of word order different from PDE. Of course, most of The Canterbury Tales was written in verse, and poetry often allows itself more license to vary word orders than prose, but in ME overall you do find some variations in word order that aren’t in PDE. For example, the passage has some sentences beginning with an adjective, immediately followed by the verb, as in Boold was her face (ln. 14) and gat-tothed was she (ln.  24). This word order reveals the preference that English, like many Germanic languages had (and in some languages still has) for making the verb the second item in a sentence.3 Incidentally, having gaps between the teeth (being ‘gat-toothed’) was regarded by some as a sign of an amorous disposition. The passage contains some examples of the mass of French words that entered English after the Norman invasion. One is charitee (ln. 8) from Old French charité; then in line 17 there’s compaignye from Old French compainie. Amblere (ln. 25) is from the Old French word ambleeur and means a ‘horse that likes ambling’ – rather than exerting itself by keeping up a brisk pace. As far as inflections are concerned, there are plenty of words carrying an -e ending. This would often have been pronounced, using the schwa sound [ə]

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that we discussed in Chapter 3. So there’s scathe (ln. 2), parisshe (ln. 5), moyste and newe (ln. 13). The passage is mostly written in the past tense, and you can see that the plural past inflection was -en, an ending that came from OE. There are some instances of weren (for PDE were) in the passage (in lines 11 and 12, for example), and there is weyeden (for our weighed) in line 10. There’s just one example of the third person present tense inflection -th (nedeth in line 18). Chaucer uses it nearly all the time. We mentioned it in Chapter 4 as a form which Chancery English eventually replaced with the -s ending we use today. This -s inflection has an interesting history. It came into English from old Scandinavian forms used by the Viking invaders. It slowly spread from the north to the south of the country and didn’t become common in London until after Chaucer. In Shakespeare you find both forms – loves and loveth, goes and goeth – though by then the -th form was very much on the way out. Perhaps your overriding impression of this passage is how much closer it is to PDE than the ‘lettuce passage’ in Interlude 1. You may have used the wordfor-word translation to find the meaning of some words – scathe, for example, meaning ‘pity’ (related to our PDE word scathing). But the overall sense of the passage will probably have been clear to you without the translation. ME really is well on the way towards PDE. Notes 1 It’s mostly written in verse, though there are some parts in prose. 2 The text is taken from Robinson (1957), p. 21. 3 Languages that have a preference for putting the verb second are called ‘verbsecond languages.’

5 ENRICHING ENGLISH Thomas Elyot, Thomas Wilson and a proliferation of new words

The period following Middle English is known as Early Modern English (EModE). One view is that it started when the Tudor monarchs came to power in 1485, and Henry VII became king. 1660 is sometimes given as the finishing date  – the so-called ‘Restoration,’ when Charles II  returned from exile in continental Europe. The Tudor age, especially the reign of Elizabeth I, was a time of great expansion and development in England, and this had its effect on the language. Foreign exploration brought new vocabulary, ‘borrowed’ from various foreign languages. But even greater sources of new words were the classical languages: this was the Renaissance, a time when classical values and learning were ‘reborn.’ All in all, English language underwent huge, sprawling growth, especially as regards its wordstock. It emerged from the EModE period a much enriched tongue, and a more appreciated one also. This chapter and the next describe this enrichment and what it did for the way that the language was regarded by its users.

Looking for new words1

Thomas Bedingfield translated books from Italian into English. He specialised in a genre popular at the time, called ‘courtesy literature’ – books which taught skills and good manners to courtiers. In 1584 he translated a book about horse riding written by a famous Italian equestrian, Claudio Corte. In those days, book titles were like film trailers today. They were advertisements rather than just titles, and short pithy names were not at all the order of the day. The full title of Bedingfield’s translation was: The art of riding containing diverse necessary instructions, demonstrations, helps, and corrections appertaining to horsemanship, not heretofore expressed by any other author: written at large in the Italian tongue, by Master Claudio Corte, a man most excellent in this art.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-7

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Here briefly reduced into certain English discourses to the benefit of gentlemen and others desirous of such knowledge. Bedingfield’s translation met with a problem common at the time. Many of the specialist horse-riding terms used in Italian didn’t have English equivalents. Bedingfield often admits this. Here, for example, is the heading for Chapter 15 (again not at all short and pithy): Of that motion which the Italians call Coruette or Pesate, whereof in our language there is not (for aught I know) any proper term yet devised. A coruette is a frisky, leaping motion. Or there’s Chapter 3’s heading: How to teach your horse in the figure like unto a snail, which Maister Claudio calleth Caragolo or Lumaca. What the Italian words caragolo and lumaca express is a half-turn to the left or right. But what to call it in English? Exactly the same problem faced the Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde. His claim to fame was that he introduced the mathematical symbols = and +. In 1551 he wrote The Pathway to Knowledge, a translation of part of a book on geometry by the Greek mathematician Euclid. Recorde claimed that his book was the first geometry book written in English. Not surprising then that he had to decide how to refer to various concepts which had names in Greek and Latin, but not necessarily in English. He needed to talk, for example, about triangles where ‘two sides be equal and the third unequal, which the Greekes call Isosceles, the Latine men æquicurio.’ How to render this in English? Similarly with ‘rectangle’ and ‘tangent’ (a straight line touching a curve). We are of course familiar today with the Greek- and Latin-based words (isosceles, rectangle and tangent). But these were not in common use before Recorde’s time. Bedingfield’s and Recorde’s problem was particularly common in the sixteenth century. As we saw in Chapter 4, Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476, and this revolutionised the production of books. It made a new technology available. There was also plenty to write about; the period was a time of discovery in very many spheres  – not just world exploration, but science, mathematics, the arts and a huge range of skills (including, as we have seen, horse riding). There were literally hundreds of books waiting to be translated from the classics, while new writers were anxious to make their own thoughts known in all manner of subject specialisations. On top of that, there was also a huge audience ready to consume what was written. Recorde puts it well in relation to his own subject: geometry. It is, he writes in verse, a topic of great value to artisans of many sorts: carpenters, sculptors, masons and for ‘merchants, shipmaking, navigation . . . tailors and shoemakers, weavers . . . ’ He concludes: That never was arte so wonderfull witty So needefull to man, as is good Geometry.2

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Developments in education had dramatically increased the number of people who could read, and they thirsted for books. All the conditions were ready for a communication explosion: plenty of ‘new’ subject matter to write about, a ‘new’ audience of readers, and ‘new’ technology able to produce the required reading material. But was English up to it? As we have seen in earlier chapters, many considered the language inadequate to handle the communications explosion, and one of the greatest complaints was a lack of words. There didn’t seem to be the words in the language able to express the new ideas clamouring for attention. As Ralph Lever, an Anglican priest, put it in 1573: there were ‘moe things, then there are words to expresse things by.’3 More words were needed. But where should they come from? ‘Two heads’

Richard Mulcaster, who is our landmark figure in Chapter 6, comments on the sixteenth-century growth of English’s word-stock that ‘all the words which we do vse in our tung be either natural English . . . or borrowed of the foren .  .  . Whereby our tung seemeth to have two heds, the one homeborn, the other a stranger.’4 These two ‘heads’ – the ‘foren’ and the ‘homeborn’ – are just where new words came from. Bedingfield goes for the ‘foren.’ He brings the Italian terms into English. Throughout his book he speaks of coruettes. He even makes an English verb out of the Italian noun, talking on one occasion of to coruette, and on another of coruetting. He also explains the word, to help readers understand it: ‘Coruetta is that motion, which the crow maketh, when . . . she leapeth and jumpeth upon the ground: for Coruo in the Italian tongue signifieth a crow, and a leap in that sort is called Coruetta.’ His solution works, and the word does in fact enter the English language, though the form changes to curvet. Shakespeare himself uses it in this form, both as a noun and as a verb.5 Bedingfield was also the first user in English of the other term we mentioned earlier: caragollo. By the mid-seventeenth century it had become caracol. It was used in descriptions of military tactics and is still used today in dressage. Bedingfield chooses the ‘foren,’ but Recorde stays with the ‘homeborn.’ Having noted the Greek word isosceles, he goes on to say of the triangles, that ‘in English tweyleke may they be called.’ Twe means ‘two,’ and ‘like’ signifies that the triangle has two equal sides; it is a ‘two-like’ triangle. For rectangle he invents the term long square, and for tangent his word is touch line. Rather than borrowing Latin or Greek words, he creates new phrases or compounds based on already-existing English words. These two solutions – borrowings and inventions based on existing English words – were the strategies used in the sixteenth century to enrich the English language and make it capable of living up to its new challenges. The results

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were dramatic. According to one estimate, as many as 13,000 Latin-based words entered English between 1575 and 1675  – and that’s just from one language.6 In fact, the two sources – the ‘foren’ and the ‘homeborn’ – came into conflict with each other, in a debate which had become known as the ‘Inkhorn Controversy.’ An ‘inkhorn’ was what today we would call an inkwell, a piece of equipment associated with scholarly, and often pedantic, writers. ‘Inkhorn terms’ were strange and obscure words used by such writers, the ‘foren’ elements borrowed into English from foreign tongues. The controversy was about which of these two sources English should properly be using. ‘Foren’ borrowings

A strong supporter of the ‘foren’ side was Sir Thomas Elyot. The son of a distinguished lawyer, he was probably born in Wiltshire around 1490. In 1510, young Thomas was sent to the Middle Temple – a place where budding lawyers were trained. This was followed by some time in Oxford. In fact, Sir Thomas never actually practised law, and his father was doubtless disappointed that, by the early 1520s, his son was not a barrister but a mere clerk at an assize court. In about 1521, Sir Thomas married Margaret Barrow. He never made any comment about his life with her, except to regret that they did not have children: ‘In this temporall lyfe,’ he said, ‘no thing is to natural man so desirous as to have by lefull [lawful] increase procreation and frute of his body.’7 They lived near Oxford until 1530, then moved to Carlton, a village about sixteen miles from Cambridge, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Over the course of his career, Sir Thomas held a number of administrative positions, and he became closely involved in Henry VIII’s celebrated marital problems. At the time, Henry was married to Catherine of Aragon, but she had failed to provide a surviving son, an important requirement for the royal lineage to continue. He was eager to marry Anne Boleyn, but this would involve a divorce, and the Pope would not allow it. The dispute went far beyond Henry’s amorous preferences and came to involve issues of national sovereignty, as well as the clash between the Catholic Church, based in Rome, and the new Protestantism, which had Germanic roots. In 1531, Henry was looking for an ambassador to the court of Charles V, the leader of the Holy Roman Empire, who spent much of his life as a Catholic ruler fending off the advance of Protestantism. Henry wanted someone who would present the case for his divorce plan to the Emperor and attempt to gain his support. The man chosen was ‘Maystre Vullyot’ – ‘Master Elyot’ – our Sir Thomas. But the ambassadorship didn’t go well. Sir Thomas seems to have failed in the near-impossible task of gaining Charles’ support for Henry, and indeed relations between the two states became so bad that there was talk of introducing an embargo of English cloth in the Netherlands. There were also

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personal reasons making Sir Thomas discontent. Being an ambassador was an expensive business; money spent in the job far outweighed the salary, and the shortfall had to come out of the ambassador’s own pocket. So Sir Thomas resigned. But he was none too happy about what he was then offered – the post of Sheriff of Cambridgeshire. It was another administrative and judicial position which was likely to involve extra personal expense. Nevertheless, he was obliged to take the post. He was also the MP for Cambridge on two occasions. Many who opposed King Henry ended up being beheaded, and one of Sir Thomas’ claims to fame was that he was among the few to criticise Henry VIII and die with his head on. Sir Thomas risked upsetting the king (and his henchman, Thomas Cromwell – eventually one of the beheaded many) in a number of short publications. One lay itself open to the interpretation that Sir Thomas had some sympathy for Catherine of Aragon, the wife Henry was trying to rid himself of. Another seemed to warn the king against becoming a tyrant. Publications like these led many to think that Sir Thomas had papist sympathies. But somehow he seemed to keep both the king and Thomas Cromwell onside, and he died a natural death in 1546. Sir Thomas’ administrative career was mediocre, and his real claim to fame rests in his writings. In 1531 he published the Boke named the Gouernour. This lengthy text (there are 71 chapters) is about the characteristics that members of the ruling classes (‘governors’) should possess. It begins by outlining the social order which Elyot believed in  – one which had a hierarchical structure, with ‘governors’ near the top of the pyramid and a monarch at the apex. The book is dedicated to Henry and talks throughout in flattering terms about kingship. It touches on a wide variety of subjects, looking in detail, for example, at the personnel involved in training a ‘governor,’ from the cradle onwards. A school curriculum is laid out, in which languages play a role: Greek to be taught first, then Latin, then French. Attention is also paid to physical education. The Gouernour then looks at the qualities a governor should possess, as well as listing the vices that should be avoided. In the opening paragraphs of The Gouernour, Sir Thomas talks about words ‘borowed of the latin tonge for the [because of] insufficiencie of our owne langage.’ In a later work, he refers back to The Gouernour and explains that part of its purpose was ‘to augment our Englyshe tongue, whereby men shude as well expresse more abundantly the thynge that they conceyued in theyr hartis . . . hauyung wordes apte for the pourpose.’8 And for Sir Thomas, the only way to do this was by introducing ‘foren’ words. Figures published in the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED) show the extent of Sir Thomas’ borrowing. One of the characteristics of that dictionary (which our Chapter 10 is about) is that it gives examples – what it calls ­‘quotations’ – for each word, illustrating its use. It also publishes figures about where the quotations come from. Sir Thomas is 132nd in the most-quoted list,

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and is cited 2601 times in all; 424 of these are the first time that the OED has found the word being used. There are also 1139 instances where Sir Thomas seems to be the first to add a new meaning to an already-existing word. The Gouernour’s ‘first-time citations’ include many words still in use today, like abusively, adapt, encyclopaedia, frugality, modesty and persist. Among the already-existing words to which Sir Thomas gave a new sense is absolute. It first appeared in 1425 meaning ‘free from imperfection,’ but in The Gouernour, the sense is ‘complete.’9 Another interesting new meaning is for the word cormorant. It had been used since the fourteenth century to refer (as it does today) to a sea bird. Sir Thomas extended its meaning to refer to a ‘greedy person’: he speaks of the ‘insiatiable gloteny’ of some Roman leaders ‘to whiche carmorantes, neither lande, water, ne ayre, mought be sufficient.’ Earlier we saw Bedingfield adding a gloss to the new word coruetta to clarify its meaning. Sir Thomas often does the same for his foreign imports. For example, The Gouernour is the first time we find the adjective adult used. Here is how Sir Thomas glosses it: ‘Soche persons, beinge nowe adulte, that is to saye, passed theyr childehode.’ And for encyclopaedia (another Gouernour ‘first’), he explains: ‘In an orator is required to be a heape of all manner of learning . . . which is in one worde of greeke Encyclopaedia.’ One of Sir Thomas’s major aims (which helps to give him the right to landmark status) was to make information, often coming from classical times, more available to the general public. Thus he was one of the first to provide readers with a book about medicine – an early example of a health manual, called The Castel of Helth. Its coverage is wide, outlining the classical theory of medicine based on the four humours of earth, water, air and fire. It looks at diseases and possible cures, as well as at the values of different foods and drinks. Lettuce is regarded as the healthiest vegetable, and he is a supporter of wine, especially for the elderly: ‘thereby they should seeme to retourne unto youth, and forgette heavynesse.’ Such cheering advice may have contributed to the great popularity of Sir Thomas’s book. Writing a work like the Castel of Helth gave Sir Thomas just the sort of problem which Bedingfield and Recorde faced: having to come up with specialist terms which did not exist in English. In Sir Thomas’ Castel, these were to do with medicine and health. Since the book was largely based on classical texts, it was natural for Sir Thomas to take the new terms he wanted from the classical tongues. Three of the new words found in the Castel, all loosely associated with health and medicine, are apoplexy, tamarind and constipate. In his last years, Sir Thomas worked on another large-scale project – a LatinEnglish dictionary. It was first printed in 1538, then substantially revised in 1542. Again, the book was dedicated to Henry (‘a divine influence or sparke of divinitie’), who encouraged its production. The scale of the work can be seen by the number of authors Sir Thomas claims to have consulted: there were 119. After The Gouernour, the dictionary is responsible for the largest

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number of Sir Thomas’ OED quotations: 730 in all. To understand why, consider what preparing a work like this would involve. Effectively it meant that Sir Thomas had to find – or invent – English words to correspond to the entire Latin vocabulary. It also meant that the end product would make it possible to claim that every Latin word had an English equivalent, or, to put it another way, that English had the means to express anything that Latin could express. Sir Thomas did much to help English grow out of its earlier inferior, impoverished state. The ‘homeborn’

On the other side of the argument – against the use of ‘foren’ terms – was Thomas Wilson. Like many sixteenth-century figures involved in statesmanship and religion, this Thomas led a turbulent life. It started tranquilly enough in Lincolnshire, where he was born in about 1523, and at Eton. But at King’s College Cambridge he came into contact with a group of strongly Protestant scholars, led by the classicist John Cheke. ‘Strongly Protestant’ became a problem in 1553, when Catholic Mary I came to the throne. She was known to many as ‘Bloody Mary’ because of her determination to return England to Catholicism and her consequent persecution of Protestants – she had over 280 of them burned during her reign. Many fled the country, including Thomas, who met up with fellow escapee John Cheke at the University of Padua. It was in Italy that Thomas’ life became particularly turbulent. He was called back to England but, fearing more persecution, didn’t go. He went instead to Rome, the home-base of his enemies, the Catholics. Was that wise? He was denounced as a heretic, tortured and thrown into jail. But he managed to escape and made his way back to England. That was in 1560, when Protestant Elizabeth was now queen. Thomas was safe. In Protestant England, Thomas flourished. He held a number of diplomatic posts and was secretary of state for several years. He gained a reputation for being an efficient and hard worker, with (one commentator claims) a ‘large and strong memory.’10 He died a rich man, in 1581. Thomas’ most famous publication was The Arte of Rhetorique. Described as ‘a landmark in the history of the English Renaissance,’11 it was a manual of rhetoric which was extremely popular during his lifetime. In the book, Thomas argues that an orator’s aims are three: to teach, delight and persuade. To achieve these aims, an Orator muste labour to tell his tale, that the hearers maie well knowe what he meaneth, and vnderstande him wholie, the whiche he shall with ease doe, if he vtter his minde in plain woordes, soche as are vsuallie receiued, and tell it orderlie, without goyng aboute the busshe; That if he doe not this, he shall neuer doe the other. For what man can bee delited, or

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yet be perswaded, with the onelie hearyng of those thynges, whiche he knoweth not what thei meane. For Thomas, teaching, delighting and persuading meant avoiding foreign words, which many listeners and readers would not understand. Importing foreign words was, he notes, a fashion of the times: He that commeth lately out of Fraunce will talke French English and never blush at the matter. An other chops in with English Italianated and applieth the Italian phrase to our English speaking. . . . I know them that thinke Rhetorique to stande wholie upon darke wordes, and he that can catche an ynke horne terme by the taile, him they coumpt to be a fine Englisheman, and a good Rhetorician.12 Thomas’ Cambridge colleague, Sir John Cheke (1514–1557), was another on the ‘homeborn’ side. Here’s what he says about the ‘darke words’ of foreign borrowers: ‘Our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, vnmixt and vnmangeled with borowing of other tunges. . . . For then doth our tung naturallie and praisablie vtter her meaning.’13 Cheke translated religious works into English and carefully replaced words with classical roots with invented terms of Germanic origins. So ‘lunatic’ became mooned, a ‘centurion’ was a hundreder, ‘crucified’ was crossed and a ‘disciple’ was a learning knight. Satirising ‘darke words’

Those on the ‘homeborn’ side of the inkhorn controversy enjoyed satirising the excessive use of ‘darke words.’ Thomas himself gives an example of a letter which, he claims, was written by a Lincolnshire man to someone in the service of the Lord Chancellor. It is such a collection of juicy inkhorn terms that some think Thomas invented it himself, though he denies this. Here is part of it (with a gloss of some of the words used): There is a sacerdotal dignitee in my natiue countrey, contiguate to me, where now I contemplate: which your worshipful benignitee, could sone impetrate for me, if it would like you to extend your scedules, and collaude me in them to the right honorable lorde Chauncellor, or rather Archigrammacian of Englande. You know my literature, you knowe the pastorall promocion I obtestate your clemencie, to inuigilate thus muche for me. sacerdotal, priestly impetrate, procure Archigrammacian, chief scholar inuigilate, keep watch over

dignitee, position scedule, note, letter literature, learning

contiguate, close by collaude, extol promocion, position

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Another satiriser was the dramatist Ben Jonson. In his play The Poetaster (first performed in 1601), there’s a character named Crispinus. He is given an emetic which makes him vomit words – most of which have Latin roots. Here they are, in order of vomiting: retrograde, reciprocall, incubus, glibbery, lubricall, defunct, magnificate, spurious, snotteries, chilblaind, clumsie, barmy, froth, puffy, inflate, turgidous, ventosity, oblatrant, obcaecate, furibund, fatuate, strenuous, conscious, prorumped. clutch, tropologicall, anagogical, loquacious, pinnosity, obstupefact Shakespeare too joined in, and his plays contain a number of characters who were unrepentant, comic, inkhorners. Particularly good examples are the characters of Holofernes and Don Armado in the comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost; we’ll mention them again in the next chapter. As the fake letter, the vomiting and Shakespeare’s inkhorners suggest, the controversy generated a lot of fun. But there were serious ideas behind it. Thomas really was a devout Protestant, and part of the ethos of Protestantism was the personal, intimate relationship between an individual and his god. There was no time for ostentation or showy elaboration of any kind, and that included in language use. The plain, simple, everyday language that Thomas required of his orators came from his own religious outlook. Important too was that Protestantism started in Germany, and many of its followers believed in the virtues of Germanic languages. The Dutch scholar Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519–73) was a particularly ardent supporter. We mentioned him in Chapter 1; he believed that in both Paradise, and in the Garden of Eden, a variant of Dutch was spoken. His argument partly revolved around the fact that Dutch (like many Germanic languages) was rich in monosyllables and was hence ‘simple.’ Languages, he and many others believed, evolved over time from simple to more complex, so the earliest, Garden of Eden language must have been a simple one. Such views had quite an effect in Elizabethan England (and indeed into the seventeenth century). This is the context which fostered Thomas’ desire to rid the language of Romance words and introduce more monosyllabic Germanic ones. A growing vocabulary

The inkhorn controversy was about what kind of words should help to increase the language’s vocabulary. Neither side, of course, won or lost; what’s important is that while it raged, both sides added significantly to the language’s stock of words. Shakespeare is representative of his age in this respect. His inventory of new words was large. Exactly how many words he brought into the language has been fiercely debated, and some of the claims have been excessive.

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In 1906, the scholar Harold Bailey claimed that Shakespeare coined almost 10,000 words. Since then the number has come down, as more and more texts from early periods become available, and we find prior uses of words in authors before Shakespeare. A more recent, and more sober, estimate, made in 2004, is 1,700.14 But even that’s a really high figure for a single author. Shakespeare’s new words are both ‘foren’ and ‘homeborn.’ In the 1980s, the American scholar Bryan Garner made an inventory of Shakespeare’s borrowings from just one language: Latin. It has more than 600 items, and includes many words still in use today, like assassination, comply, discontent, epileptic, pedant, pious, process, retirement.15 As for the ‘homeborn,’ a technique favoured by many writers of the time, including Shakespeare, was the creative use of prefixes and suffixes. Take Shakespeare’s use of the prefix un- for example. When Lady Macbeth expresses her wish to be more virile and less womanly, she asks the spirits to unsex her. Then, in Richard II, Gaunt hopes that his death’s sad tale may yet undeaf the king’s ear – make the king listen. In the Merry Wives of Windsor one character who has acted foolishly asks whether there is any way to unfool himself. And in Macbeth the Porter says that alcohol both provokes and unprovokes lechery – increases the desire but decreases the capability.16 One estimate has no fewer than 314 new un- words in Shakespeare, and that’s just one prefix.17 Another way that Elizabethan writers increased the ‘homeborn’ word stock was through inventing new compounds – a method of word formation that Germanic languages have always liked. In Shakespeare, the compounds are often made up of two nouns joined together: in Measure for Measure a coldhearted person is described as having blood like snow-broth, while Macbeth dreads the time when, in old age, people will pretend to honour him, but only superficially; they will show him mouth-honour. Other parts of speech could be combined. Shakespeare has honest-true, down-fallen, and even, in King Lear, to-and-fro-conflicting. Using prefixes and suffixes and forming compounds are just two of a number of techniques Shakespeare and his fellow authors employ. Most of the inventions we have been considering are still in use today, but plenty have disappeared. Sometimes it’s easy to guess what the lost words meant: Shakespeare has untent, pauser and offenseful, which are relatively easy to guess. Others are more tricky: facinorous, intrince and probal, for example.18 Sometimes you may feel it’s rather a shame that particular words have gone: exceptless, meaning ‘without exception,’ might be one. And then there’s under-honest to mean someone who is ‘economical with the truth.’ It’s a pity that one’s gone. As Lever suggested, sixteenth-century English may have started off with too few words, but by its end, that criticism could no longer be levelled. Indeed, English was by then not quite the impoverished language that Caxton and many others berated. The time was ripe for people to sing the language’s praises rather than endlessly disparaging it. And that’s what Chapter 6 is about.

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Notes 1 Bedingfield and Recorde are used as examples of ways to introduce new words in Johnson (2016), Chapter 15. 2 In the preface to his Pathway to Knowledge. Cited by Stedall (2012), p. 15. 3 Lever (1584), cited by Jones (1953), p. 69. 4 Mulcaster (1582), p. 153. 5 As it happens, with the benefit of modern scholarship, we now know that Bedingfield was not the first to use the word in English (by a few years only), though his remark about finding no other ‘proper term yet devised’ suggests that he thought he had introduced it. 6 The estimate is from Nevalainen (2006), p. 53. 7 Elyot (1532). Cited in Lehmberg (1960), p. 127. 8 The later work is Sir Thomas’ 1533 dramatic dialogue between Plato and Dionysius, entitled The Knowledg Whiche Makes a Wise Man. Cited by Jones (1953), p. 79. 9 Some of the examples given are from Barber (1997), p. 54. 10 The commentator is Antony Wood, in his Fasti Oxonienses ed. 1721, p. 98. Cited in the Introduction to Mair (1909). 11 Introduction to Mair (1909). 12 The Thomas Wilson quotations are from Wilson (1560). 13 In a letter from John Cheke to Sir Thomas Hoby, 1557. 14 The estimate is from Crystal (2004), p. 326. 15 The list is from Garner (1982). He describes his list as tentative, and indeed for some items Shakespeare has since been revealed as an early user, rather than the first. In some cases it’s a meaning rather than the word itself that is new. 16 Unsex is from Macbeth, 1.5.39, undeaf from Richard II, 2.1.16, unfool from The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4.2.109, and unprovoke from Macbeth, 2.3.27. 17 The statistics for un- neologisms are taken from Crystal (2010). His focus is on the word undeaf. 18 The words mean ‘very wicked,’ ‘intricate’ and ‘probable,’ respectively.

6 ‘WORSHIPPING THE ENGLISH’ Richard Mulcaster and his Elementarie

The growth in the vocabulary of English helped to improve its status and make users feel confident that their language was not quite so impoverished as those at the end of Chapter 4 felt it to be. Scholars also began to realise that to increase the language’s status even more, books describing the language – grammars, dictionaries and the like – were required. National pride was also important: if you’re proud of your country (as many sixteenthcentury British were), you should show pride in its language. The landmark figure of this chapter is the sixteenth-century teacher and scholar Richard Mulcaster. He wrote about the English language and encouraged others to do so. He was also an enthusiast – just what was needed to turn the tide away from criticism, towards admiration for the language.

In Chapter 5 we mentioned that Shakespeare had plenty of characters who were ‘unrepentant, comic, inkhorners,’ and we mentioned Holofernes and Don Armado from Love’s Labour’s Lost as examples. Don Adriano is described as a ‘Spanish knight and braggart,’ and Holofernes is a somewhat crusty schoolmaster and pedant. Here’s an example of their linguistic extravagance. At one point in the play, Armado uses the expression the posteriors of the day to describe what, he says, ‘the rude multitude call the afternoon.’1 Holofernes just loves this expression. His reaction: The posterior of the day, most generous sir, is liable, congruent, and measurable for the afternoon. The word is well culled, choice, sweet, and apt. Generous means ‘noble,’ while liable, congruent and measurable all mean ‘suitable’ (if you want to be extravagant, why use one word when three will do?). DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-8

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All these words had come relatively recently into English, all borrowed from Romance languages. Holofernes talks in this quirky, pedantic way all the time, and Shakespeare makes fun of him. It’s been suggested that the character of Holofernes is based on a man who may, to some small extent, have come into competition with Shakespeare.2 He was a man who had recently given up the post of headmaster at the large and well-regarded Merchant Taylors’ school in London and was soon to become headmaster of St Paul’s school, also in London. Both these schools were famous for their child actors, and their headmaster had played an enthusiastic part in training them. The troupes of school pupils had performed before Queen Elizabeth on various occasions and were thus in competition with Shakespeare’s actors, who always keenly sought opportunities to perform before the Queen. The headmaster was about fifty-eight when Love’s Labour’s Lost was written, and he was an easy target for the young, sharp-witted, twentyfive-year-old Shakespeare. His name was Richard Mulcaster. ‘The father of English pedagogy’

Richard was, above everything else, a school teacher – and a very special one at that. In fact he’s been called ‘the leading schoolmaster of the Elizabethan age,’ ‘one of the greatest English pedagogues’ and even ‘the father of English pedagogy.’3 He was born in about 1531 in the city of Carlisle, about eight miles from the Scottish border and some three hundred from London. He went to school at Eton, started his university life at Cambridge and later moved to Christ Church College, Oxford. Why the move from Cambridge to Oxford? It may have had something to do with the fact that he was accused of stealing from his Cambridge classics tutor and was indeed briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London for this, before eventually being pardoned. Accusations of larceny apart, people spoke well of him: when he left university in 1558, he had developed a reputation as an exceptional scholar of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He was briefly a member of parliament, then for a while taught at a school in London. In 1560, he married Katheryne Ashleye, the daughter of a London grocer. It was a happy marriage, and they had six children. When she died in 1609, he wrote a memorial describing her as ‘a loveinge wife, a careful nurse, a godlie creature, a sainct in heaven.’ The next year, 1561, he was selected – ‘for the good reporte that hath bene made of him’ – to be the first headmaster of the newly formed Merchant Taylors’ School in the City of London. After a year in the post, the school was ‘inspected’ and Richard was judged ‘worthy of commendation.’ The only criticism was the presence of masters who ‘were Northern men borne, and therefore did not pronounce so well as those that be brought vp in the scholes of the south parts of the Realme.’4 It sounds as if Richard may have recruited some of his teachers from the Carlisle district.

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Richard was far from happy in his post. By all accounts he was a petulant man, with a fiery temper, and this led him into innumerable clashes with authority during his working life. His main complaint at Merchant Taylors’ was the salary, which was as low as those of his assistants. Sometimes this fed the dishonest streak in him which had first emerged at Cambridge. On one occasion he broke the rules by conducting private lessons in his house, and on another he falsified accounts to his gain. Eventually financial dissatisfaction led him to resign from Merchant Taylors.’ His farewell message to the school was Fidelis servus perpetuus asinus, ‘a faithful servant is always a beast of burden’ – not a very complimentary valediction. There followed ten years in which Richard tried his hand at private enterprise. He opened a school of his own, but this failed and left him with heavy debts. He also held several church posts, though by all accounts he was not a good preacher, and his heart was not really in the work. Given Richard’s discontent with a headmaster’s salary, it’s perhaps odd that he should have agreed, in 1596, to become headmaster of St Paul’s School, especially since he was then sixty-five years old – the age when most people today retire. Unfortunately, he brought his discontent with him, as well as that dishonest streak: during his time there, he was accused of exceeding the number of pupils allowed, to generate extra income for himself. More seriously, he also sold nominations for assistant masters’ posts. One of the more honest activities he enjoyed at St Paul’s, as at Merchant Taylors’, was drama, and the schoolboy actors had plays written for them by famous playwrights like Middleton, Dekker and Webster. Richard finally retired in 1608, at the ripe old age of seventy-eight. He was given the post as rector of a church in Stanford Rivers, Essex. The main attraction of the post for him was the attached stipend. When he died, in 1611, he was buried beside his wife in Stanford Rivers Church. Despite the stipend, he died very poor, and his son had to petition Merchant Taylors’ for money to pay off his various creditors. Positions: Richard’s educational views

Richard wrote two major books. The first is entitled Positions Concerning the Training up of Children (1581). It’s well and truly the work of a pedagogue and shows clearly that his main focus was on education. You can see this by looking at the topics covered. There is, for example, a section on whether education should be offered to both sexes. His views are in general liberal: he believed that all children had the right to be educated, and that everyone – male or female, rich or poor – was capable of educational achievement. He was also among the first to advocate teaching at the elementary level. Positions also considers more practical issues, like what criteria a school should use to decide which pupils should be promoted to better classes. Teacher training is covered

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too: there’s a section on the qualities required to make a good elementary teacher and another for grammar school teachers. He also proposes setting up specialised colleges, each focusing on training in a distinct subject like languages, maths or philosophy. As well as having a keen interest in drama, Richard was also a strong advocate of physical training at school, and he did much to promote football, among other sporting activities. Indeed, he helped to establish football as an organised game. When a football match is not properly controlled, he said, the result is the ‘thronging of a rude multitude, with bursting of shins and breaking of legs.’ He believed that referees were essential, as well as a clear set of rules for players to follow. The Elementarie: describing English and reforming spelling

Richard’s second book was published a year later, in 1582. It was entitled The First Part of the Elementarie. As this title suggests, the book was intended as the first of a series, together providing an entire curriculum for elementary level teaching: ‘the hole matter, which children ar to learn, and the hole maner how masters ar to teach them.’5 There are, Richard says, five main areas to be covered in the elementary school. These are reading, writing, drawing (including elementary geometry, which involved introducing some mathematical principles), singing and playing (of music). Only the first part of the Elementarie was written, and it deals largely with reading and writing – language, in other words. It’s what the Elementarie says about language that makes Richard a landmark figure. Richard’s book starts by outlining what content is to be taught at the elementary level, and this leads him to a detailed description of (albeit restricted) parts of the language. He devotes much space to spelling. Sixteenth-century spelling was chaotic: every writer tended to follow their own rules. Attempts to rationalise and bring order to English spelling were very much in the air from the 1540s onwards. Spelling, it was initially thought, should reflect pronunciation. From that point of view, the problem English had to face was that there were more sounds than letters of the alphabet, so it was inevitable that each letter should represent more than one sound. This is in fact still true of the language today. A couple of PDE examples: the letters ‘th’ can stand for the sound /θ/ at the beginning of thing, as well as for the sound /ð/in this. Then there are the short and long vowels (/æ/ and /ɑ:/) – as in British English cant and can’t – different sounds both spelt with the same letter ‘a.’ Some sixteenth-century spelling reformers suggested introducing more letters or symbols, to achieve ‘one sound, one symbol.’ In 1551, for example, the English educator, John Hart, wrote: ‘seeing then that letters are the images of man’s voice, ye are forced to grant, that the writing should have so many letters as the pronunciation needeth of voices, and no more, or less.’6 To solve the

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‘th’ issue, for the voiced ‘th’ Hart proposed reintroducing a letter mentioned in Interlude 1 – the OE and ME ‘thorn,’ written (Þ). So the spelling of ‘this’ was Þis. Hart also uses a dot below the letter to mark a long vowels, with /ɑ:/ being written /ạ/. The problem with systems like Hart’s (and there were other similar ones) was that it’s well-nigh impossible to persuade people to learn new letters and symbols; reforms expecting the population to do so are doomed to failure. Richard’s proposed spelling reforms were much more temperate. He argued that what he called ‘custom’  – ‘accepted practice’  – should be taken into account when proposing changes. We should accept what had long been the situation with English – that ‘one sound one symbol’ was not what happens – and we should learn to live with it. One of Richard’s spelling-reform suggestions was to do with ‘consonant doubling’ – where a consonant is repeated at the end of a word. This was a common practice at the time, and Richard disliked it (though it must be said that on occasions he indulges in it himself). He complains of ‘the dubling of consonants in the end of a word . . . and a thousand such ignorant superfluities.’7 His examples include putt, grubb, and ledd for ‘put,’ ‘grub, ‘led.’ Richard’s theory as to why writers do this is rather quaint. When discussing it in relation to the doubling of ‘l’ at the end of a word (as in devill for ‘devil’), he says that ‘it is the swiftnesse of the pen sure, which can hardly staie upon the single ending l, that causeth this dubling.’8 The pen just can’t stop. In the Elementarie, Richard goes through the sounds and letters of English in some detail. The one which receives the most attention is the letter ‘e.’ Sometimes, Richard notes, a final ‘e’ it is yet another of those ‘ignorant superfluities,’ and, like consonant doubling, it was also very common. So in just the first fifty lines of the First Folio version of Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labour’s Lost (mentioned at the beginning of this chapter), there are about twentyfive examples of words ending in an ‘e,’ which today would not have it. They including grosse, terme, foode, meale and harme. But Richard’s analysis is thorough, and he is aware that sometimes a final e can be anything but superfluous. The letter can play an important role in spelling. Think for example about these PDE word pairs: hat mad

hate made

not strip

note stripe

Here the final e indicates a difference in the pronunciation of the preceding vowel; where there’s a final e, that vowel is pronounced in RP9 as a diphthong. Because of this, spelling teachers today sometimes talk about the ‘magic e,’ and Richard’s description of it comes close to calling it magic too. It is, he says, ‘a letter of maruellous vse in the writing of our tung’ because it ‘sometime altereth the vowell.’10

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The Elementarie’s language descriptions are not confined to letters and sounds. There’s a section on punctuation, which contains the delightful definition of the comma as ‘a small crooked point’ which, he continues ‘in writing followeth som small branch of the sentence, & in reading warneth vs to rest there, and to help our breth a litle’). And there’s a section on English word formation. He describes compound words as ‘the coplements of several hole words which by their vinting make a new one.’ His examples include headstall (part of a horse’s bridle), beadman (a man of prayer) and cupboard. Another process, which he calls ‘derivation,’ ‘handleth the coplements of one hole word, and some addition put to it.’11 One example he gives is the word friend, which provides us with friendship, friendly, friendliness, friended and many other derivations. Grammars and dictionaries: an appeal

A good part of the Elementarie is a description of English – not by any means an entire grammar, but a firm nod in that direction. Indeed, Richard argues that we need more studies of English to help establish it as a language capable of holding its own against Latin. There’s no doubt that Richard’s urging contributed towards the production of the earliest-known grammar of English: William Bullokar’s Bref Grammar for English, which appeared just four years after the Elementarie, in 1586. The Elementarie makes a firm nod in another linguistic direction too  – towards the appearance of a dictionary. It contains what Richard calls a ‘generall table’ of words. This is partly intended as a guide towards spelling standardisation, and it is over 8000 words long, covering some fifty-five pages; indeed, it has been said that the list’s length made the book expensive to buy, which considerably cut down its distribution and popularity. Richard’s ‘generall table’ contains various types of words. Many fall into the category of ‘hard words,’ included as a means ‘to help ignorance.’ In an era of huge vocabulary development, many people were struggling to come to grips with the large number of new words entering the language – words of the sort we saw Holofernes using at the beginning of this chapter. You can see some of these struggles in Shakespeare’s comic characters, many of whom constantly use ‘malapropisms’ – confusing words in their efforts to keep up with the growing vocabulary. Many of these words are what Richard classes as ‘enfranchised’ ones – borrowed from foreign languages and in the process of being ‘naturalised’ into English. But the ‘generall table’s’ contents go well beyond the ‘hard’ and the ‘enfranchised,’ and Richard’s aim was to include ‘a great parcel of our ordinarie speche.’ Hence the list includes many everyday items: words which were neither hard nor recently enfranchised, like eat, town and before. Richard is aware that his ‘table’ is far from a complete one and confesses that, were it not for constraints of time, he would have made it much longer.

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So he makes an appeal: ‘it were a thing verie praiseworthy in my opinion . . . if som one well learned and as laborious a man, wold gather all the words which we vse in our English tung . . . as well learned as not, into one dictionarie.’12 There was not long to wait: in 1604, twenty-two years after the Elementarie appeared, Robert Cawdrey (an English clergyman) revealed himself to be just the right ‘learned and laborious’ man to produce one of the first dictionaries of English. His Table Alphabeticall focused, like many dictionaries which followed, on ‘hard words.’ There’s no doubt that Richard’s appeal played its part in stimulating Cawdrey’s work. Supporting English

Part of the Elementarie’s landmark value lies in its description of English, its discussion of spelling reform, and its call for further studies on the language. The book ends with a Peroration (the word means a ‘conclusion intended to inspire the reader’), and many of Richard’s general comments about language are made in this. It’s here that the true landmark occurs, and the Peroration contains a full-blooded ‘defence’ of English in comparison with other languages, particularly Latin. As we have seen in earlier chapters, Latin was an important language, used by the Church and for scholarship. One advantage of it was that it was used internationally, and hence books written in Latin could be read by an international audience. But after centuries of belittlement, the so-called ‘vernacular languages’ – those in everyday use, like English, French and Spanish  – were in general seeking to gain a status equal to Latin’s. In 1542, an Italian humanist scholar, Sperone Speroni, wrote a polemical defence of the vernaculars against Latin called Dialogo delle lingue. In France, a group of seven writers gathered together with the aim of enriching the French language; they called themselves ‘la Pléiade,’ after the name given to seven classical Greek poets in Alexandria. The group’s ‘manifesto’ was a book written by du Bellay and appearing in 1549. It was called Deffence et Illustration de la Languge Françoyse. The movement to dislodge Latin from its throne really was Europe-wide. Richard plays an important role in the dethronement of Latin in England. He doesn’t do this by diminishing Latin’s importance. But, he argues, that importance lies solely in the content which has been written in the language – the literature, the scholarship, the religious texts. It’s nothing to do with any inherent qualities that Latin possesses and English lacks. In his Peroration, Richard says: ‘the question is not to disgrace the Latin, but to grace our own. And why more a stranger in honor with vs, then our own peple, all circumstances serued?’ Or, in Richard’s most famous, ‘landmark’ words: ‘I  loue Rome, but London better, I favor Italie, but England more, I honor the Latin, but I worship the English.’13 Incidentally, it is this ‘worship of English’ that

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makes Richard write the Elementarie in that language. Scholastic books were normally written in Latin. Richard chose English. Richard’s praise of English is profuse. ‘I must needs say,’ he argues, ‘that in som points of handling by the tung, there is none more excellent that ours is.’ He identifies characteristics of the language that give it a special excellence – pith, plainness and pliability being the chief ones: ‘I  do not think that anie language,’ he declaims, ‘is better able to utter all arguments, either with more pith, or greater planesse, then our English tung is.’14 With its monosyllabic (Germanic) words, it is able to express meanings in a direct and succinct way. It is also ‘wonderfull pliable.’ Richard realises something which, as we mentioned in Chapter 1, not all writers about language come to terms with: that languages change. For him, English was at its peak: ‘I take this present period of our English tung to be the verie height thereof, bycause I find it so excellentlie well fined, both for the bodie of the tung itself, and for the customarie writing thereof.’ He accepts that things may well change in the future: ‘when the age of our peple, which now vse the tung so well, is dead and departed, there will another succeed, and with the peple the tung will alter and change.’15 English may well grow and develop then, ‘bycause no banks can kepe it in so strait, bycause no strength can withstand such a stream, bycause no vessel can hold such a liquor.’16 Richard is not an easy author to read, which perhaps accounts for why he’s not better known. His prose style is awkward, and his writing full of digressions. But he had two qualities which helped make him a landmark character. One is that he was obstinate: once he had a fixed idea in his head, he didn’t let go, and the support of English was one such fixed idea. Then, and above all, he was an enthusiast, an ‘advocate, and impassioned insider.’17 This was just what English needed at the time. After all the criticisms the language had suffered, the declarations of its shortcomings, English needed an enthusiast to sing its virtues. Richard did just this. Notes 1 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.1.82. 2 This suggestion is discussed by DeMolen (1975), p. 52. 3 These three labels have been given by DeMolen (1975), p. 30; Dobson (1957), p. 117; and Oliphant (1903), p. 143 respectively. 4 The quotation, which first appeared in Merchant Taylors’ Minutes of Court for 16 August, 1562, is taken from DeMolen (1975), p. 38. 5 From the Introductory Epistle to Mulcaster (1582). 6 From Hart (1551), p. 117. Cited in Howatt and Widdowson (2004), p. 85. 7 Mulcaster (1582), p. 105. 8 Ibid., p. 121. 9 RP stands for ‘Received Pronunciation,’ the term used to describe standard educated British English pronunciation. 10 Mulcaster (1582), p. 111. 11 The quotations in this paragraph are from Mulcaster (1582), pp. 148 and 144.

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12 Ibid., p. 166. 13 Ibid., p. 254. 14 Ibid., p. 258 15 Ibid., p. 159. 16 Ibid., p. 161. 17 The quotation is from DeMolen (1975), p. 43.

Interlude 3 WHAT EModE WAS LIKE Hands red with blood

Shakespeare’s play Macbeth was written in about 1606. When the play opens, Macbeth – a Scottish general – hears a prophecy from three witches that he will become king of Scotland. The present king, Duncan, comes to stay at Macbeth’s castle. Spurred on by the witches’ prophecy, Macbeth and his wife resolve to kill Duncan at night. The following passage (Act 2, Scene 2, lines 56–73) occurs just after Macbeth has done the deed, and in fact he is still holding the daggers. There’s a knocking at the castle gates as people seek entry. Macbeth, having just committed the murder, is in a state of great agitation, and the noise makes him nervous. His hands are covered in blood. He asks whether all the seas on earth are enough to wash his hands clean. His answer is no – instead, the blood will, he says, turn the seas red. His wife, Lady Macbeth, tries to reassure him that all will be well – just a little water will wash the blood away. She suggests they put on night clothes, so as not to arouse suspicions. Macbeth expresses the wish that the knocking on the gate might wake up the dead king. So that you can see something of EModE writing, the text from Shakespeare’s First Folio is copied (including such details as spaces – or lack of them – between letters and punctuation marks).1 You probably won’t need a word-for-word translation (which we gave for Interludes 1 and 2), because the language really is similar to PDE. There’s a glossary under the passage. Macb.

Whence is that knocking ? How is’t with me, when euery noyſe appalls me ? What Hands are here? Hah: they pluck out mine Eyes.

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With all great Neptunes Ocean waſh this blood Cleane frm my Hand? No: this my Hand will rather The multitudinous Seas incarnadine, Making the Greene one, Red. Enter Lady. Lady.

My Hands are of your colour: but I ſhame To weare a Heart ſo white. Knocke. I heare a knocking at the South entry: Retyre we to our Chamber: A little Water cleares vs of this deed. How eaſie is it then ? your Constancie Hath left you vnattended. Knocke. Hearke, more knocking. Get on your Night-Gowne, leaſt occaſion call vs, And ſhew vs to be Watchers: be not loſt So poorely in your thoughts. Macb.

To know my deed. Knocke. ‘Twere beſt not know my ſelfe. Wake Duncan with thy knocking: I would thou could’st. Exeunt.

Glossary

Multitudinous, innumerable Incarnadine, to make blood-red Constancie, resolution Unattended, alone Watcher, someone who is wide awake To know my deed,/‘Twere best not know my selfe. Two difficult lines. A possible meaning: ‘rather than face up to what I have done, it would be better for me to remain in ignorance of myself.’

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Perhaps the first thing to catch your eye will be the presence of a letter we no longer use: ſ. It’s a form of ‘s’ and is derived from the Roman letter found in everyday writing. It is often called the ‘long s,’ to distinguish it from the ‘short s’ which we use today (and which is also found in the passage). The two letters do not represent different sounds. What distinguishes them is that ‘short s’ is used at the ends of words (as in Eyes) and at the beginning of words when the word has a capital letter (as in South). ſ comes at the beginning of words when not a capital (ſhame) and within words (noyſe). Then there’s ‘u’ and ‘v.’ Today these are pronounced differently, and one is a vowel, the other a consonant. We saw in Chapter 4 that these are not used as today; in ME and EModE the difference is to do with where in the word the letter comes: ‘v’ is used at the beginning of words (as in vs), while ‘u’ is used within words (euery). Notice also the use of capital letters. Some nouns have them: so there’s Hands, Chamber and Night-Gowne. But others don’t (noyſe, blood, deed). The same is true of adjectives: there are some with a capital letter (Greene, Red) but some without (white, multitudinous). It’s been said that at this stage in the language, words regarded as important take a capital letter, though it’s hard to say why Green and Red should be important but white not! Certainly there are more words beginning with a capital in EModE than we find today, and their use increased until the eighteenth century, when capitals were used for nearly all nouns.2 In Chapter 6 we mentioned that there are plenty of words in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost which end with an ‘e’ that would not be in the spelling today. So too in Macbeth (and indeed in all Shakespeare). In our passage we have cleane, greene and gowne, among others. You do occasionally find clean, green and gown in the plays. As far as grammar is concerned, there’s an example of the -th verb form in the word hath. We found this in Chaucer (Interlude 2), and the form is also mentioned in Chapter 4. It was on its way out in Shakespeare’s time, replaced more and more by -s (so we increasingly find has instead of hath). Notice also the two forms my and mine (my Hand and mine Eyes). Some have suggested that my (and thy too) is more emphatic that mine (and thine), but very often the forms are interchangeable in EModE. So Shakespeare sometimes has my honour and sometimes mine honour. You also find my eyes as well as mine eyes. There’s one thou and one thy in the passage. Today we rarely see these forms, and we use you/your instead. In ME and EModE, one use of thou was to express intimacy, while you suggested more formality. By Shakespeare’s time, the distinction was dying out. If you look through the entire text of Macbeth, you will find both thou and you being used, with the distinction between the two often being unclear. For example, Lady Macbeth sometimes addresses her husband with you and sometimes with thou, and it’s difficult to

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see any rhyme or reason in the choices. So in Act 1 Scene 7, line 35, Lady Macbeth says to her husband Was the hope drunk,/Wherein you dress’d yourself. Four lines later she says, still to her husband, Art thou afeard/To be the same in thine own act and valour. The points we have made about EModE grammar, spelling and writing reveal that much variation was permitted. It was a transitional period, full of old forms on the way out and new forms taking over. Chapter 5 is largely about vocabulary and talks about the number of new words, often borrowed from a classical or Romance tongue, which came into the language at this time. Our Macbeth passage has some good examples. It contains several words which were probably very new indeed. For example, the OED’s first example of unattended is dated 1603, and it’s the same year for multitudinous. Constancy was also quite a new word. Incarnadine is a particularly interesting case. The OED has it first occurring as an adjective in 1605 – just one year before Macbeth was written – and its use in our passage is the first time we know of it appearing as a verb. It originally referred to the pink colour of flesh (carnis is the Latin for ‘flesh’), but in the passage, the colour is clearly darker – blood-red. The word retire also has a changed meaning. Originally it was used of an army in the sense of ‘retreat’; its use in this passage, ‘to withdraw from a place’ (a sense we use it in today), was also very new. All these words have Latinate roots. Notes 1 The text is based on Hinman (1996). 2 In another Germanic language, modern-day German, all nouns start with a capital letter.

7 FIXING THE LANGUAGE Samuel Johnson and his dictionary

The sixteenth century was a time of great creativity and development for the English language, with its vocabulary expanding in a particularly dramatic way. You’ll recall from Chapter 5 that in 1573 Ralph Lever said there were ‘moe things, then there are words to expresse things by.’1 But look at what the jurist, John Selden, declared just over a hundred years later: ‘we have more words than notions, half a dozen words for the same thing.’ How times change! As the seventeenth century started, people felt it was time to curb the extravagant growth, to allow the heat to cool a little and to impose some systematisation on the language. It had grown; now it needed to be shaped, controlled, possibly even ‘policed.’ The seventeenth century saw feelings like these being articulated, and the eighteenth century put them into practice. It was an age with a strong sense of order, coupled with an enthusiasm for codifying and classifying. Someone who applied this sense of order to the English language, and who did much to codify and classify parts of it, was this chapter’s landmark figure – Samuel Johnson.

More complaints about English

Jonathan Swift, born in Dublin and educated in Ireland, lived in England at various points during his life. In 1710 he was in London, his most famous book, Gulliver’s Travels, still in the future  – it was published in 1726. He was intensely active politically at the time, writing pamphlets and journalistic pieces. One such was a spoof letter which he wrote for The Tatler magazine, a literary and society journal which had started just the year before (a ‘tattler’ was an ‘idle talker’). Swift wanted to let off steam about some features of the English language which he particularly disliked, and he filled his letter with examples of them. Here is part of it:2

DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-10

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SIR, I  cou’dn’t get the things you sent for all about town.  .  .  . I  th’t to ha’ come down myself, and then I’d h’ br’t ‘um; but I ha’n’t don’t, and I believe I can’t d’t, that’s pozz. . . . Tom begins to gi’mself airs, because he’s going with the plenipo’s.  .  .  . ‘Tis said the French King will bamboozl’ us agen, which causes many speculations. The Jacks and others of that kidney are very uppish, and alert upon’t, as you may see by their phizz’s. . . . Will Hazzard has got the hipps . . . The letter focuses on three features in particular. One was the abbreviation of words, like pozz (for ‘positive’), plenipo (for ‘plenipotentiary,’ meaning ‘representative’), phizz (‘physiognomy’) and hipps for ‘hypochondria,’ a word often used to mean ‘depression.’ He also disliked contractions, where words were made shorter by replacing a letter with an apostrophe. We still do this today, of course, as when the ‘o’ is replaced by an apostrophe in couldn’t, but Swift’s letter contained much more outlandish examples, like I th’t to ha’ and I’d h’ br’t ‘um. His third dislike was for ‘new-fangled’ words and usages which he saw as the result of foolish fashion. This might well have included the letter’s bamboozle and uppish, both recent words; perhaps slightly older words too like plenipotentiary (or plenipo). Two years later, in 1712, Swift wrote a letter lamenting the state of English in general and suggesting what might be done about it. It’s entitled A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English tongue (ascertain meant ‘fix’). The letter was written to Robert Harley, who at the time held a position not unlike today’s prime minister. We’ve already seen, in earlier chapters, that there have been many examples of authors complaining about the state of the English language. Swift’s letter is very much in the same tradition, though in his case he blames recent history  – the Civil War (1642–51) and the reign of the rather hedonistic Charles  II  (1660–85)  – for a ‘falling off’ in the language since halcyon Elizabethan times. The letter talks about the features mentioned in his 1710 spoof, blaming poets for ‘that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, to fit them to the Measure [metre] of their Verses.’3 As for new words, he points the finger at ‘young men at the Universities’ who use ‘all the odd Words they have picked up in a Coffee-House.’ All in all, he says, the culprits are ‘illiterate Court-Fops, half-witted Poets, and University-Boys.’4 In Chapters 1 and 6 we mentioned how important it is to view language as something that changes. Swift wanted to stop change, and argued that ‘some Method should be thought on for ascertaining and fixing our language for ever.’5 He also says: ‘I see no absolute Necessity why any Language would be perpetually changing,’ and he cites several examples from history showing how it’s possible to preserve a language. After all, ‘the Chinese have Books in their

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Language above two Thousand Years old.’ If we don’t ‘fix’ the language, he warns, anything written today will not be understood in future years ‘without an interpreter.’6 Swift also makes one concrete proposal. It is to gather together a small group of linguistically responsible individuals who ‘should assemble at some appointed Time or Place, and fix on Rules by which they design to proceed.’7 It’s an idea that had in fact been suggested in the seventeenth century, when it was proposed that a Royal Society should be established, one task of which would be to ‘fix’ the English language. The French had done the same by establishing a French Academy  – the Académie française  – which had produced a grammar in 1660 and a dictionary in 1694. Swift is quite firm in his letter, and he issues Harley with a warning: ‘I must venture to affirm that if Genius and Learning be not encouraged under Your Lordship’s Administration, you are the most inexcusable Person alive.’ Stern words, indeed. Swift’s opinions about fixing the English language by setting up an English Academy were by no means shared by all. Soon after his letter appeared, the English historian John Oldmixon published his Reflections on Dr Swift’s Letter. Languages, Oldmixon said, could never be fixed permanently. And as for the idea of an Academy, it would end up being nothing more than ‘meeting over a bottle once a week, and being merry. At which times people mind talking much, more than talking well.’ In other words, an excuse for a drink and a chat. The English just didn’t like the idea of a body set up to ‘police’ their language, and an Academy was never established. But the idea of linguistic fixing and controlling remained all the same. Better, it was thought, if this were managed not by an Academy but through publications: grammars setting out what the language should be like and guides helping people to use the language ‘correctly.’ So the grammars and the guides proliferated, laying down fixed rules about usage. Some of these rules are still remembered and even sometimes followed, today. There’s the rule, for example, that ‘a sentence shouldn’t end with a preposition:’ it’s not ‘the man I spoke to,’ but ‘the man to whom I spoke.’ Or that ‘an infinitive shouldn’t be split’ – by putting a word between the ‘to’ and the infinitive word. It isn’t ‘to boldly go’ but ‘to go boldly.’ A third example: you shouldn’t use two negative words (a ‘double negative’) in a sentence: ‘I didn’t do nothing’ is bad; ‘I did nothing’ and ‘I didn’t do anything’ are good. Where did rules like these come from? Sometimes they were rules that applied in Latin, regarded by many (as we have seen in earlier chapters) as a ‘superior’ language. On other occasions, a kind of logic was applied. ‘Two negatives make a positive,’ the maths teacher might say, and some people would apply this to grammar, suggesting that ‘I didn’t do nothing’ must mean ‘I did something.’ It can mean that, of course, but language use is often far

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from logical. In some dialects today, ‘I  didn’t do nothing’ would mean the opposite: ‘I  didn’t do anything,’ and in Shakespeare’s day, double negatives were used for emphasis, so the meaning would be ‘I really didn’t do anything.’ It was not just grammars and usage guides that the ‘language-fixers’ required. In 1665, John Evelyn, one of those interested in founding a Royal Society, proposed an agenda for the Society, ‘that there might first be compiled a Grammar. . . . To this might follow a Lexicon, or collection of all the pure English words.’8 An authoritative dictionary, as well as a grammar, were considered desirable. Samuel Johnson: a ‘brave boy’

Our eighteenth-century landmark was just that: an authoritative dictionary. It was the work of Samuel Johnson. In mid-life, he started to write his autobiography. It began: Sept. 7, 1709, I was born at Lichfield. My mother had a very difficult and dangerous labour, and was assisted by George Hector, a man-midwife of great reputation. I was born almost dead, and could not cry for some time. When he had me in his arms, he said, ‘Here is a brave boy.’9 Samuel really did need to be brave, because he suffered from ill health not just as a boy but for much of his life. The list of his physical ailments is long. At the age of three he was found to have scrofula, thought to have been passed on from his wet-nurse’s milk. He had an operation for it, which left him scarred. It also caused him to lose sight in his left eye, and his right eye was weak too; it’s said that his poor eyesight meant that he had to be led to school by a maid, even though the journey was very short. His hearing in one ear was bad as well. At an early age he contracted smallpox, and this too left its scars. Then there was the convulsive tic, plus that he ‘constantly rolled his big body about from side to side, adopting the most awkward-looking postures and rocking his head spasmodically.’10 Later in life, he failed to be given several teaching posts because it was feared that the pupils would constantly make fun of him. His appearance overall was not very attractive. Nor were his problems all physical. He continually suffered from deep depressions, and on occasions thought seriously about suicide. He was perhaps what we would today call a manic depressive. Lichfield is a city in the English Midlands, eighteen miles north of Birmingham. Samuel’s father, Michael, owned a bookshop there. Michael was from humble stock, but his wife – Samuel’s mother – was from a ‘better’ family, and the class differences led to an unhappy family life. Samuel went to school in Lichfield until he was sixteen, then began work in his father’s shop.11 He was an avid reader and found work and life in Lichfield dull.

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Temporary relief came when a relative of his mother died, leaving her some money. It was enough to pay for Samuel to attend Oxford University for a short time. From an early age, Samuel had shown a tendency to ‘constitutional ­indolence’  – laziness. He regularly stayed in bed until mid-morning, and sometimes even into the afternoon. This characteristic revealed itself at Oxford. He found the lectures tedious and spent a good deal of time lounging about. He was forced to leave Oxford in 1729, when the money ran out, and he spent several years in the Midlands looking for work. He worked as a teacher for a while and wrote for a local newspaper in Birmingham. There he met a rich draper named Harry Porter, and when Harry died in 1734, Samuel married his widow, Tetty (an abbreviation for Elizabeth). She was twenty years older than he but retained some good looks, though in later life she became fat and had a red face, doubtless caused by the alcohol to which she became seriously addicted. She also took opium. They must have seemed an odd couple later in life as they walked down the street: ‘he, lumbering clumsily along, rolling his head, his shoulders shaking convulsively, sometimes murmuring to himself; she, fat, and painted, gaudily dressed like an elderly actress.’12 Tetty had some money, and it was decided that Samuel should use it to open a private boarding school in a village near Lichfield. But Samuel didn’t seem cut out to be a teacher, and the new school was unable to attract pupils. The project failed, and Samuel, together with his friend David Garrick (later to become a famous actor), shared a horse to take them to London to seek their fortunes. Samuel arrived with just twopence halfpenny in his pocket. Years of grinding poverty and hard work followed. Samuel picked up work writing, and later doing editorial chores, for a monthly journal called The Gentleman’s Magazine. It was started in 1731 and continued to be published right up until 1922. It was hack work, and at some point Samuel decided to return to the Midlands, again to seek employment as a teacher. His job applications were unsuccessful, and to add to the misery, his parents’ business was in trouble. His father had died, and his mother was now running things. Times were very hard. Samuel returned to London and continued to write and edit. He was so poor that on occasions he had to work at night in the near-dark, not being able to afford candles. Samuel’s thoughts were on how to escape from this dire situation. His favoured plan was to produce an edition of Shakespeare, and he wrote a proposal for this. But like other Shakespeare proposals at the time, it fell foul of one Jacob Tonson, a bookseller who claimed to hold the copyright to Shakespeare editions, and he would not allow it. Samuel was bitterly disappointed. He toyed with other ideas: a life of Alfred the Great, a translation from Aristotle . . .

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The Dictionary

. . . then one day, in 1745, Samuel was sitting in the bookshop of his friend Robert Dodsley, who announced that he thought a dictionary of English would be well received. Samuel had had similar thoughts himself in the past, but his initial reaction to Dodsley was negative: ‘I believe I shall not undertake it,’ he said. He soon changed his mind. Eighteenth-century booksellers acted as publishers, and a consortium of six of them got together to contract Samuel to produce a dictionary. Poverty-stricken Samuel was paid, in instalments, £1575 for the work. In 1746, at a breakfast meeting at the Golden Anchor pub in Holborn, the parties met together, and the contract was signed. The next year, Samuel wrote a Plan of a Dictionary, laying out the principles he would use in writing it and the elements it would contain. He also bought a house in Gough Square (between Fleet Street and Holborn) and recruited six assistants to help him – a stark contrast to the forty such assistants the French Academy used for their dictionary. Samuel was keen to seek patronage for his project, and he approached Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, an aristocrat known for patronising cultural initiatives. Initially Chesterfield was keen on the project and gave Samuel some money, though an amount so small that it was taken as an insult. Over the period of the Dictionary’s production, Chesterfield was largely unhelpful, and when the Dictionary was published, Samuel wrote a reproachful letter to him. Samuel didn’t mince his words; he had produced the book, he said, ‘without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour.’13 Samuel’s bold letter to an aristocrat became the talk of the town. For a man who regarded himself as lazy, Samuel’s Dictionary was an astonishing achievement. It had taken the forty members of the French Academy some forty years to produce their dictionary. Samuel’s reaction: ‘Sir, I have no doubt that I can do it in three years.’14 This proved to be over-ambitious, and after a year of work, the team were still on the letter A. But they finished in eight – still an amazing accomplishment for such a huge undertaking. In 1752, while writing was still in progress, Tetty died. The marital relationship had not always been a happy one, and for periods they had even lived apart. But Samuel was devastated by her death; it’s said that thereafter he worked in the garret of his house because that was the only room which did not remind him of Tetty. It was towards the end of 1754 that Samuel was able to deliver the final part of the Dictionary. The bookseller’s comment on receiving it from the eccentric Samuel: ‘Thank God I have done with him.’ Samuel was forty-six when the Dictionary appeared, in two large folio volumes, costing an expensive £4.10. Two thousand copies were printed, and they sold well. By 1773, the book was in its fourth edition.

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Samuel’s linguistic landmark

The Dictionary is Samuel’s linguistic landmark. It was the first major dictionary of English. A broad scope is one of its distinctive features. Most earlier dictionaries had just focused on ‘hard words’ – often unfamiliar terms from that mass of borrowings we saw coming into the language in Chapter 5. But Samuel’s also covered everyday items. There are, for example, entries for the words of, the and but, and Samuel’s longest entry is for the ‘everyday’ word take. He identifies 133 different senses, includes 363 example quotations and dedicates more than 8,000 words to it. Another feature of the Dictionary is something mentioned in Chapter 5 in relation to the OED – the use of quotations to provide examples of how the words being defined are used. The decision to provide quotations (rather than taking information from already-existing dictionaries) proved to be hugely time consuming. Samuel himself had to read a large number of written texts, selecting passages to illustrate different words. Once the choices had been made, the passages were written on cards, which were then collated into alphabetical order. Only at that point would Samuel be able to write his definitions and etymologies. Samuel took the highest number of quotations from Shakespeare – 17,500 in all, about 15% of the total. Other writers he used extensively were Bacon, Pope, Milton and Spenser. The Bible was also a common source. Illustrating the usage of words was, Johnson says, just one function of the quotations. They were also intended to enlighten and to convey knowledge. From philosophers he took ‘principles of science,’ from historians ‘remarkable facts,’ ‘striking exhortations’ from divines and from poets ‘beautiful descriptions.’ The quotations also had a moral dimension, and the cited writers had to be ethically, as well as aesthetically, acceptable. An example of a writer who failed the ‘ethics test’ was the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). His views were, for Johnson, too deterministic, and Hobbes’ idea that life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,’ was not in the least morally uplifting. ‘I scorned, sir, to quote him at all,’ Johnson explained to a friend, ‘because I did not like his principles.’15 Samuel himself admits that his Dictionary is not without inaccuracies, and it certainly had its idiosyncrasies. Some of his etymologies are suspect. About the word spider, for example, he asks: ‘may not spider be spy dor, the insect that watches the dor [beetle]?’ (it’s actually from a Saxon word and is associated with the word ‘spin,’ which is, after all, what a spider does). Occasionally his definitions are just wrong. The words windward and leeward, for example, are defined as meaning the same, and he defines a pastern as a ‘horse’s knee,’ while (as everybody knows!?) it’s actually part of a horse’s foot. According to Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, when a lady asked why he had misdefined pastern, he replied: ‘Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.’ Other ladies were only too pleased to see that he had omitted obscene words from the Dictionary. When this was pointed out, he replied with characteristic wit: ‘What, my dears!, then you have been looking for them.’

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As for idiosyncrasies, perhaps the best known is his definition of oats. It reveals his professed antipathy to Scotland (‘a very vile country to be sure,’ he once called it). The definition is: ‘a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’ Then there’s his mention of Lord Henry St John Bolingbroke, a politician whom Samuel disliked. Here’s the quotation he uses to illustrate the word irony: ‘a mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words as Bolingbroke was an holy man.’ And doubtless it was his experience with Lord Chesterfield that led him to define patron as ‘one who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.’ Sometimes his word definitions are so difficult to understand that they obscure rather than clarify. Thus a cough is defined as ‘a convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp seriosity,’ while network is ‘any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.’ But though idiosyncrasies and obscurities grab the attention, they were in fact very few. Crystal (2018) estimates that out of all Johnson’s definitions, fewer than twenty are idiosyncratic. The overwhelming majority are clear and perceptive. Prescription, but description too

Our attention is often drawn to how prescriptive eighteenth-century writers about language can be, and this includes Samuel. Prescription, after all, is part of what ‘fixing’ a language entails. It’s certainly true that on occasions Samuel makes his negative feelings towards certain words abundantly clear. About the word writative (like talkative but in writing), he says it is ‘a word of Pope’s coining, not to be imitated.’ And he describes shabby as ‘a word that has crept into conversation and low writing; but ought not to be admitted into the language.’ Nor does he flinch from criticising the usage of celebrated literary figures. He notices, for example, that Shakespeare sometimes uses the word prejudice simply to mean ‘mischief,’ without any sense of the true ‘judgement made beforehand’ meaning. Shakespeare’s usage, Samuel says, should not be followed. But on the ‘fixity’ issue, Samuel had a change of heart between his initial 1747 Plan and the Preface which accompanied the appearance of the Dictionary in 1755. In the first, Samuel states that ‘one great end of this undertaking is to fix the English language.’16 But here’s what he says in the Preface: ‘Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design will require that it should fix our language.’ But, he goes on, when we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided,

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who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.17 As Crystal (2018) puts it: there was a ‘great change in [Samuel’s] thinking from purist to linguist.’ It’s true that the Dictionary contains plenty of fierce comments about how the language should and shouldn’t be used. But there’s also a huge amount of description  – statements about how words are used rather than about how they should be used. One reason for the Dictionary’s landmark status is that it describes the language’s word-stock as never before; there are no fewer than 140,871 definitions in the book’s first edition. Another reason is the influence it had on later generations. Some, including the poet Robert Browning, actually read it from cover to cover, like a novel. Coleridge announced that though Samuel’s work had some deficiencies as a dictionary, he ‘should suspect the man of a morose disposition who should speak of it without respect and gratitude as a most instructive and entertaining book.’18 Henry Hitchings, whose 2005 book on the Dictionary is full of fascinating facts, calls it ‘the most important British cultural monument of the eighteenth century.’19 For many people in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it was referred to as ‘the Dictionary.’ If you said that, everyone would understand that the dictionary you were talking about was Samuel’s. Life after the Dictionary

After the Dictionary was finished, Samuel fell into a deep depression – there were now two vacuums in his life: Tetty was dead, and the work that had filled so much of his time was completed. The Dictionary didn’t bring in that much money, and he continued in poverty, at one point even being arrested for a small unpaid debt. In his diary he again expressed the feeling of selfdisgust which plagued him through his life, for his ‘idleness, intemperate sleep, dilatoriness, immethodical life. Lust. Neglect of Worship.’20 But as always, the self-accusations of idleness were followed by periods of great activity. An idea from his early years came back to him – to produce an edition of Shakespeare. In 1756 he published Proposals for Printing, by Subscription the Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare. The subscriptions which would pay for the book came in sure enough (and indeed Samuel proceeded to spend the money as it was received!). But where was the book? It didn’t in fact appear until 1765. Between the Proposals and the book’s publication, two important events took place. In 1759, his mother was taken seriously ill. Samuel hadn’t seen her for nineteen years, and by the time he reached Lichfield to visit her, she was dead.

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To pay for her funeral expenses and other debts, he wrote a kind of novella: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. It tells of how Rasselas left the comforts of his own home and travelled the world in search of happiness. He finally realises the futility of his search and returns home, his wishes unfulfilled. The story has echoes of Voltaire’s Candide, which had been published just two months before. The second event took place in 1762. It not only gave Samuel – now aged fifty-two – the space to complete his Shakespeare edition, but it also changed his life in dramatic ways. King George III announced that, in order to reward Samuel for his literary work, he should receive a pension. Given Samuel’s experience of patronage with Lord Chesterfield, he was at first apprehensive about the offer. Was it really to reward past achievements, or were there strings attached? But there were no attached strings, and Samuel was able to say: ‘I never courted the great; they sent for me.’21 After Tetty’s death, Samuel was, by his own admission, in search of a new wife. There were several women in his life, but none of the relations he struck up ended in marriage. One important friendship was with a Mrs Hester Thrale, a young lady unhappily married to a rich brewer. Samuel spent time with her at their family house in Streatham Park, south-west London, and travelled with her on trips to Wales and France. But when her husband died, she unexpectedly married an Italian music teacher, though he was far below her social standing. Samuel described the marriage as ‘ignominious.’ After his death, Mrs Thrale was a great source of information about Samuel’s life and times; in 1786, she published Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson. Another major source of information about Samuel was provided by the Scottish author James Boswell, whose Life of Samuel Johnson appeared in 1791. Boswell had come to London in 1762 seeking his literary fortune, much as Samuel had done in the 1730s. Boswell was keen to meet Samuel, but their first meeting was awkward. Knowing Samuel’s dislike of Scotland, Boswell felt at some point the necessity to come clean that he was Scottish. He said: ‘I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.’ Samuel replied: ‘Sir, that, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.’22 They eventually not only became friends but also made a three-month trip to Scotland together. One of the literary outcomes of this trip was Samuel’s Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland; another was Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. One more publication from Samuel followed, and it was a major one. When he was sixty-seven, he was approached to write a collection of short biographies of English poets. Entitled Lives of the English Poets, the collection appeared in 1779–81 and is considered a landmark in literary criticism. Ageing Samuel was now famous and receiving accolades. Oxford, where he had as a young man lounged his way through a short period of undergraduate study, had given him an MA on publication of the Dictionary. Now, in

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late life, he was awarded a doctorate, and to this day he is often referred to as Dr Johnson. But his final years were filled with loss of friends, depression and disease. In 1783 he had a stroke which resulted in a loss of speech for two days. He died in December 1784. According to one story, his last words were in Latin – ironical for a landmark figure in the history of English. They were: Iam Moriturus (‘I who am about to die’). In the latter half of the nineteenth century, another English dictionary was produced which, by its sheer size and scholarship, competed with Samuel’s landmark one. It showed its debt to Samuel by acknowledging over 1700 definitions taken from him. But the Oxford English Dictionary, with many more facilities at its disposal, had the means to go far beyond Samuel’s. It’s the landmark which will be described in Chapter 10. Notes 1 Pollock (1927), p. 67. Cited by Jones (1953), p. 246. 2 From the September 1710 issue of The Tatler. 3 Swift (1712), p. 21. 4 Ibid., p. 28. 5 Ibid., p. 31. 6 Ibid., p. 16. 7 Ibid., p. 29. 8 In a letter to Peter Wyche. 9 McAdam et al. (1958), p. 3. 10 The words are Hibbert’s (2009), p. 12. 11 For a short time, he also attended a school in Stourbridge, forty miles from Lichfield. 12 The quotation is from Hibbert (2009), p. 70. 13 Letter 61 in Chapman (1952). 14 Cited in Martin (2008), p. 197. 15 Ibid., p. 208. 16 Johnson (1747), p. 11. 17 Lynch (2002), p. 40. 18 Watson (1956), p. 137. 19 Hitchings (2005), p. 1. 20 Cited in Hibbert (2009), p. 107. 21 Boswell (1791a), p. 124. 22 Boswell (1791b), p. 306.

8 CROSSING THE ATLANTIC Noah Webster and American English

In the last chapter we saw how the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made efforts to systematise, shape and control English into a monolithic standard version generally used and accepted. But English was now beginning to spread round the world, and this saw the emergence of new varieties of the language which diverged from that ‘monolithic standard version.’ The new varieties generally had to fight hard to gain status. The process typically involved a stage of strong criticism, where people highlighted the new variety’s shortcomings. It was up to key individuals to lift its status, and the appearance of an authoritative dictionary helped a lot in this process. It’s a major theme of several of our remaining chapters how the process was gone through by other varieties of the language. We start, in this chapter, with the emergence of American English and the story of how it became a distinctive and accepted variety.

Barbarous English?

We saw in the last chapter that Jonathan Swift blamed ‘illiterate Court-Fops, half-witted Poets, and University-Boys’ for the degradation of the English language. But another culprit was identified from the eighteenth century onwards. Americans! Francis Moore was an eighteenth-century English traveller. In 1735 he visited the American state of Georgia and wrote an account of it entitled A Voyage to Georgia. He seems to have liked the town of Savannah, talking of its ‘very pleasant prospect.’ But he is also critical of the type of English the inhabitants used. He says: ‘the Bank of the River (which they in barbarous English call a Bluff ) is steep.’1 Over a century later, an English churchman, Henry Alford, talks about ‘the process of deterioration which our Queen’s English has undergone at the hands of the Americans.’2 In his book, DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-11

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entitled A Plea for the Queen’s English, he has a section entitled ‘American Debasements.’ English was, after all (the Brits liked to think), their language, and it was up to those who spoke it in other countries to treat it with respect. Harrumph! How did the Americans feel about this? Well, as one writer put it, for a long time ‘America preserved the most unshaken attachment to Great-Britain: The king, the constitution, the laws, the commerce, the fashions, the books and even the sentiments of Englishmen were implicitly supposed to be the best on earth.’3 The list could also have contained ‘the language.’ Then in 1773, there was the Boston Tea Party. The Americans, tired of having to trade on poor terms with the British imperialists, emptied caskloads of imported tea from British ships into Boston harbour. The act of rebellion led, two years later, to the American War of Independence. America was breaking free from British shackles. Attitudes towards all things British changed dramatically. Admiration turned to disdain, and the Americans called for separation from Britain in very many spheres, including language. The nation yearned for a tongue of its own, not one imposed on them by a country that was now their enemy. ‘The time cannot be distant,’ it was felt, ‘when the population of this vast country will throw off their leading-strings [baby reins], and walk in their own strength.’4 There were even suggestions that in order to break away from British English, Americans should speak Hebrew, French or Greek instead. An alternative view, expressed by a politician, was that ‘it would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it was, and make the English speak Greek.’5 Or perhaps just giving American English another name was what was required: ‘Let our language . . . be called the Columbian language,’ one letter to a newspaper suggested.6 What American English needed was someone who would sings its praises, just as Chapter 6’s Richard Mulcaster had done for British English in the sixteenth century. In fact American got something better, not just a Mulcaster but a Samuel Johnson too – someone who not only praised but also described and standardised the language by producing an authoritative dictionary of it. His name was Noah Webster, and he was born in 1758, when Samuel Johnson was just reaching the age of fifty. Son of a Connecticut farmer, Noah studied at a local school and managed to gain a place at Yale, paid for by his father mortgaging the family farm. Times were very hard; food prices were soaring, and inflation was rampant – indeed, George Washington himself declared that ‘a wagon load of money will scarcely purchase a wagon load of provisions.’ On occasions there was also widespread smallpox. Public buildings were in disrepair and, both at school and at college, Noah had occasion to spend part of each day chopping up wood for heating. He also frequently had to take time off studies to return home and help on his father’s farm.

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Relations were in fact never that good in the family. When Noah left Yale and was uncertain what to do with his life, he sought the advice of his father (also named Noah). But Noah Sr was not sympathetic towards his son’s pursuits, and he practically washed his hands of the young man, giving him an eighty-dollar bill and announcing, ‘Take this: you must now seek your living: I can do no more for you.’7 Noah Jr must have felt betrayed and lonely. It was a family rift that never really healed, and when his father died in 1794, Noah didn’t go to the funeral. It’s possible too that these early family tensions left a permanent mark on Noah’s temperament. He always found it difficult to get on with people. As he said of himself later in life, ‘I am led very often to differ in opinion from many other of my respectable fellow citizens.’8 Here are some of the things that his biographer, Joshua Kendall, says of Noah: he was a ‘socially awkward loner,’ a ‘cantankerous, driven and indomitable New Englander,’ with a ‘mercurial temperament,’ on occasions ‘teetering on paranoia.’9 He was also arrogant and vain. When he was met on a visit to Philadelphia in 1786, someone congratulated him on his arrival in the city. His response: ‘Sir, you may congratulate Philadelphia upon the occasion’ – Philadelphia was luckier to have him as a visitor, he thought, than he was be to visiting Philadelphia.10 Two related events dominated Noah’s young years. One was the war with England. Noah’s father often spoke against the English, whose army was close to Connecticut on several occasions, and indeed on one the entire family, including Noah, took to arms, ready to fight. The other event was the birth of the new American nation, happening as England was driven out. Momentous events, with the creation of the new constitution, and the presidency of George Washington, were taking place around the young Noah. ‘A Grammatical Institute’

Noah’s early adult years were partly spent studying and partly practising law. But it was not an easy time for lawyers to make a living, and more than once he resorted to teaching. In fact he even opened his own private school: ‘In the year 1782, while the American army was lying on the bank of the Hudson,’ he says, I  kept a classical school in Goshen, Orange County, State of New York. I there compiled two small elementary books for teaching the English language. The country was then impoverished, intercourse with Great Britain was interrupted, school-books were scarce and hardly attainable, and there was no certain prospect of peace.11 Noah’s books were in three parts, together called A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, Comprising an Early, Concise, and Systematic Method

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of Education, Designed for the Use of English Schools in America’; the word ‘institute’ here means ‘design’ or ‘plan.’ The first  – and by far the most ­successful  – part was a spelling book. The second was a grammar and the third a reader. The quotation given earlier about Britain having ‘the best on earth’ is taken from Noah’s Introduction to his Institute. But, he continues, the situation has now changed, and ‘Europe is grown old in folly, corruption and tyranny.’12 Great Britain is not worthy to be a model for a newly emerging country: ‘a durable and stately edifice can never be erected upon the mouldering pillars of antiquity’ The Institute was the first significant shot in American’s war of linguistic independence. The time had come, Noah believed, for American English to be recognised as a different and perfectly respectable version of the language. It’s important to appreciate the political basis of these beliefs. At a time when America was struggling to free itself from British control, drawing attention to the differences between American and British English, and arguing for the respectability of the American version, were political acts. American schools had up to then relied on British textbooks for teaching English. The main one was a book written by a British clergyman, Thomas Dilworth, called A New Guide to the English Tongue. Published in 1740, it was widely used in America, and Noah wanted to supplant it. Both his and Dilworth’s books consist largely of ‘tables’ – lists of syllables, words, sentences for pupils to read aloud. Noah’s tables are more principled than Dilworth’s; Noah is sensitive to the developmental stages of his pupils and follows a clearer progression from simple to complex. For example, his Table 4 covers words with two syllables with the stress on the first syllable (like abbot, caper, fluent), while Table 5 has two-syllable words with the stress on the second syllable (adore, consume, decide). As the book progresses, the lists contain sentences, not just single words, and it even has passages telling little stories. These are intended ‘not only to entertain; but to inspire the minds of youth,’13 and they are laden with morality. So Table 37 includes the sentences My son, do as you are bid. I will not walk with bad men, and Table 38 has My son, hear the counsel of thy father and forsake not the law of thy mother. As well as being more carefully graded, Noah’s tables are also more in touch with the interests of children – covering, for example, the names of domestic articles, animals and fruits  – items that children come across in their daily lives. ‘I  consider it as a capital fault in all our schools,’ he says, ‘ that the books generally used contain subjects wholly uninteresting to our youth.’14 And since Noah is dealing with American children, this means that the items will be American ones. Indeed, the most distinctive feature of Noah’s tables is their American content. The last table of all, number 43, is a chronology of American history. There are also tables of place names: one covers the countries of Europe, but there’s a much longer one giving the names of American towns, cities and states.

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These lists reveal a curious aspect of Noah’s personality. For the Connecticut county of Hartford, Noah’s home, he gives details of each town’s population size and how far away it is from the county capital. Noah loved tabulating things. At one point he went round cities and towns in America counting the number of houses. He also loved making records of weather conditions, as well as even keeping notes on his own pulse rate. Noah’s biographer, Kendall, makes an interesting comparison with Samuel Johnson, who had similar compulsions. For example, when he was in a disturbed mental state in his student days at Oxford, Johnson produced a chart listing the total number of lines of Latin poetry he would translate in a week, month and year. Incidentally, Noah idolised Johnson; in the Institute’s Introduction he says that ‘In spelling and accenting [saying where stress falls], I have generally made Dr Johnson’s dictionary my guide’ as ‘the most approved authority in the language.’15 Noah’s introduction argues strongly for American English to be given its distinct identity. It also puts in a plea for standardisation and uniformity. At a time when America was struggling to change itself from a collection of states into a unified whole, this was an issue of great importance. Noah was particularly aware of the need for this as regards pronunciation, and indeed the Institute’s full title mentions that it includes ‘a new and accurate standard of pronunciation.’ The country is full, Noah says, of the ‘odious distinctions of provincial dialects,’ and teachers ‘require some easy guide to the standard of pronunciation, which is nothing else but the customary pronunciation of the most accurate scholars and literary gentlemen.’16 Unsurprisingly perhaps, Noah felt that those same ‘accurate scholars and literary gentlemen’ hailed from his part of America: it was the pronunciation of New England, which ‘represented the best and most historic pronunciation.’17 Though the first part of the Institute is about spelling – the written word – it did perhaps have some influence on American pronunciation, because the tables were used for pronunciation practice in class, with words being recited by pupils syllable by syllable. It has been suggested that this encouraged the American tendency to place more stress on weak syllables than British English does: so while the British might say appreHENsion (with a strong stress on ‘hen’), Americans (while not completely losing the stress) might prefer a more even pattern  – ap-pre-hen-sion. In the introduction to the Institute, Noah quotes the Irish author Richard Sheridan, who (in a lecture he gave on elocution) says, ‘A good articulation consists in giving every letter in a syllable its due proportion of sound, . . . [so] that the ear shall without difficulty acknowledge their number.’ Perhaps reading aloud from a spelling books, syllable by syllable, helped to instil the more even pattern.18 The second part of the Institute is a grammar of English. Dilworth’s book also covered this area, but once again Noah takes pains to distance himself from the Englishman’s approach. He criticises British writers like Dilworth for basing their descriptions of English grammar on the study of Latin and

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Greek, mistaken because English is so unlike these languages in many respects. Dilworth’s New Guide, ‘being founded entirely upon the principles of the Latin language’ is, Noah says, ‘worse than none.’19 The Institute’s grammar book was not popular and was more or less suppressed by Noah. His reader fared a little better. But the success of the spelling book was staggering. Its name changed several times, from The American Spelling Book in 1786 to The Elementary Spelling Book in 1829, and it was always known affectionately as the ‘blue-backed speller’ because of its blue cover. There were some four hundred editions of it during Noah’s lifetime. By 1829, twenty million copies had been sold, seventy-five million by 1875, and probably a hundred million all told.20 It’s thought to have played a major part in the introduction of ‘spelling bee’ competitions in America. But it was very much more than a stimulus for word games; ‘A spelling book,’ Noah wrote, ‘does more to form the language of a nation than all other books.’ His spelling book practically heralded the arrival of a new language: American English. The politician Jefferson Davis, who was to become the president of the Confederate States, said: ‘Above all other people we are one, and above all books which have united us in the bond of a common language, I place the good-old spelling book of Noah Webster.’21 It was indeed a landmark book. Marketing and marrying

Noah was a skilled marketing man, and he knew how to promote himself and his work. He travelled round the United States doing just that. When he met with criticisms, he defended himself aggressively. After all, attacks were a form of publicity, and indeed some suggested that he invented some of the attacks himself for the publicity. One of his main concerns was to try to establish copyright laws in the states that he visited. As the author of a best-seller, he naturally had a personal stake in copyright laws, though he also seems to have been motivated by a selfless sense of justice. In his travels he also delivered lectures on the English language, and some of these were brought together in a 1789 book entitled Dissertations on the English Language. The themes were the familiar ones: the need to save American from British influence, and how ‘our political harmony . . . [involves] a uniformity of language.’22 With his marketing instinct, Noah was not beyond promoting his talks by writing favourable reviews of them himself for the press. But Noah was perhaps also looking for something else on his journey: a wife. Since his youth, he had shown a vigorous interest in members of the opposite sex, and he was now ready for love and marriage. In 1787 – when he was twenty-nine – he met Rebecca Greenleaf, the daughter of a Huguenot Boston merchant (and a distant ancestor, incidentally, to the poet T. S. Eliot). She had ‘fine eyes’ and an ‘amiable deportment,’ and Noah pursued her with intensity. They agreed to marry, but Rebecca’s stern mother insisted that he

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should first earn a steady income. For a while Noah’s activities took him away from Boston and Rebecca, and the separation made him, a friend said, as ‘unstable as water.’ One of those activities was to start a literary magazine – The American Magazine, but it didn’t do well and closed after a year. Noah realised that for the marriage to happen, he had to turn from literary pursuits towards something more lucrative. When the marriage did happen, in 1789, it was a happy match. Rebecca was, Noah wrote ‘all that is kind and amiable . . . our happiness is without alloy.’23 But giving up literary activities was not easy for him. For a while he was a local councillor in Hartford, and he became involved in debate about the abolition of slavery. He also tried law again but soon became involved in writing about law rather than practising it. Gradually he was dragged into other writing projects. In 1791, he wrote series of essays called The Prompter, or a commentary on common sayings and subjects. It’s something of a Readers’ Digest collection – little pieces of moralising about everyday life – ‘prompting’ people into how to live their lives. There’s a chapter on ‘It is better to borrow than to buy,’ another on ‘When a man is going downhill, every one gives him a kick.’ There’s even one entitled ‘A Nose,’ which argues that you can tell how capable a man is from his nose shape. He invites readers to look at their own noses to assess their own capabilities. In 1793 Noah moved to New York and was asked by George Washington to start the city’s first newspaper, the American Minerva, later called the Commercial Advertiser. He also added a semi-weekly paper, The Herald (which became The New York Spectator). Then there was something quite different. Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, parts of America had been suffering from yellow fever, and by the 1790s it had become a major problem. In 1973, Noah wrote to a friend: ‘the melancholy accounts . . . of the progress of a fatal disease . . . excite commiseration in every breast. An alarm is spread over the country.’24 With his predisposition for tabulation, he started keeping track of case numbers, and this resulted in a collection of papers on the topic, followed in 1789 by A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases. Brief? The book was seven hundred pages long. It was an extraordinary feat for a non-medical person. As Kendall puts it, Noah ‘managed to put public health on a scientific footing.’25 The nineteenth-century William Osler, sometimes called the ‘father of modern medicine,’ called Noah’s book ‘the most important medical work written in this country by a layman.’26 Spelling reform

In Chapter 6, we saw Mulcaster and others lamenting the chaotic relationship between pronunciation and spelling in English. It’s a topic that Noah mentions briefly in the Institute’s Introduction. ‘How would a child or a foreigner,’

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he asks, ‘learn the different sounds of “o” in these words, rove, move, dove. . . . Or that “a,” “ai,” “ei” and “e” have precisely the same sound in these words, bare, laid, vein, there?’ Authors, Noah says, ‘lament the disorder and dismiss it without a remedy.’27 In fact, Noah’s Institute does little more than this. He has a table (number 31) which draws attention to pronunciation/spelling discrepancies, but he doesn’t include any modified spellings, or ‘reforms,’ in the book. Someone else particularly concerned with the spelling issue was the writer, inventor and statesman Benjamin Franklin. In 1768 he wrote A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling. Noah had met Franklin on several occasions, and they became friendly. Noah read Franklin’s Scheme, and his initial reaction was not entirely favourable. Franklin wanted to introduce new letters into the alphabet to help get rid of sound/spelling discrepancies, and Noah found this impracticable  – who could be bothered to learn new letters? This was, you may remember, just the reaction to John Hart’s reform proposals in Chapter 6; he too proposed adding new letters and symbols. For a while, Noah and Franklyn discussed working together on spelling reform, but disagreement over new letters and symbols scotched that. Nevertheless Noah maintained a keen interest in the problem, and to his Dissertations book he added an appendix on spelling reform. There, he suggests that America should ‘introduce order and regularity into the orthography of the AMERICAN TONGUE,’ thus making it superior to British English, which persists with orthographic ‘abuses.’28 There’s a familiar nationalistic theme here – different spellings would help to separate the two languages. Notice too that reform in this area would, Noah thought, make American not as good as, but better than, British English. We’ll see in the following section where Noah took his spelling reform ideas. A new dictionary for a new language

As his work became known, people began to put the idea of writing an English dictionary into Noah’s head. The first seems to have been Elizur Goodrich, a friend whose son married one of Noah’s daughters. Noah was initially reluctant, feeling he was not ready for the challenge. Then in 1790, the author Daniel George told him: ‘Sir, we must . . . have a dictionary, and to YOU we must look for this necessary work.’29 Noah succumbed. One of his first actions was to buy a copy of his idol, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary – published just thirty-five years earlier. He studied it in detail. Initially he had in mind a school dictionary, but this was abandoned for a volume with more general readership. In 1806 he published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (the word ‘compendious’ meant ‘concise’). Then came the big project: An American Dictionary of the English Language. According to Kendall the precise moment when he started work can be pinpointed.30 It coincided with the appearance of what astronomers

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call C/1807 R1  – more commonly known as the ‘Great Comet of 1807.’ Noah reports that he went up to his study, put on his glasses, picked up his quill pen. He put the date on the top right hand corner of his page, and then wrote down the letter ‘A.’ It was more than twenty years before he completed the letter ‘Z.’ We know how his long adventure ended, too. In 1824, Noah travelled to France and England to have access to European scholars and books. He did not take that well to Paris – perhaps a trifle gay for his New England tastes. He sighed with relief when he reached England. He found the buildings in Cambridge, where he ended up, ‘heavy, old and gloomy,’ but it was ‘a pleasant thing to get among people that look & dress & eat & talk like our own people.’ He writes: ‘I was sitting at my table in Cambridge, England, January, 1825. When I arrived at the last word I was seized with a tremor that made it difficult to proceed’; no doubt, given his propensity for tabulation, this is one of the occasions when he recorded a high pulse rate.31 Noah’s initial plan was to publish the Dictionary in England, but no publisher was interested, and he returned to America. After several more years of painstaking editorial work, it was all finished by 1828. Then, always a driven person, he very soon started working on revisions. The Dictionary was a monumental work, covering 70,000 words. Though he borrowed a lot from Samuel Johnson and others, it was largely an individual effort – in fact the last major dictionary written by one person. When he had started, people were either not interested or sceptical. But once it was completed, there was huge acclaim. The local Connecticut Mirror commented: ‘we are aware of no other publication in this country or in Europe, upon which equal research and labor has ever been expended by a single individual.’32 His friend James Kent compared the dictionary to the building of Parthenon and the pyramids of Egypt.33 In the context in which Noah was writing – with a new country being created and a new constitution being written – word definitions had a particular importance. The meanings of terms like Federalist, Republican and freedom were the subject of debate, and Noah knew that problems of state were sometimes caused by poor definitions. He believed, for example, that a misunderstanding over the word pension led to unrest in the 1780s, when people called for pension reform; what they understood by the word ‘pension’ was money paid out as bribes rather than provision for the aged.34 Noah was critical of the definitions in Johnson’s Dictionary. Sometimes, he felt, they were inexact, and often they were too short  – providing little more than synonyms. Noah determined to do better. Here’s a comparison: Johnson’s definition of the word telescope is ‘a long glass by which distant objects are viewed’ – just nine words. Noah’s starts in a similar way: ‘An optical instrument employed in viewing distant objects, as the heavenly bodies.’ But he then describes the two ways in which a telescope assists the human eye: by

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enlarging an object and by making it brighter and more distinct.35 His definition is a hundred and five words long. Noah took the search for etymologies (word origins) very seriously and became increasingly fascinated by the subject. While working on the dictionary, he took considerable time off to plan a supplement covering ‘the origin and history not only of the English, but also of the Greek, Latin and other European languages.’36 The resulting Synopsis of words in twenty languages was finished in 1817 but remained unpublished. Johnson, you’ll recall from Chapter 7, was also interested in etymologies, though they were often mistaken. So too were Noah’s, who had a tendency to declare words etymologically connected just because they shared a few letters in common. He suggested, for example, that the word speak came from an Ethiopian word sabak, which means ‘preach, teach, proclaim.’ It is associated, he goes on, with the Italian word spiccare, ‘to shine,’ or ‘thrust forth.’ In fact it’s a Germanic word, associated with the Old Frisian spreka and the Old Saxon spreken. Then there is the word papoose, meaning a Native American child. He notes that in the language of ancient Syria, called Syriac, there was the word babosa for ‘little boy.’ He is suggesting that this might be the origin of papoose. In fact the word comes from the Native American language Algonquian. Some of Noah’s detractors, in those early days when his dictionaries were in preparation, were critical because the volumes did not focus exclusively on what they regarded as the ‘pure,’ British version of the language. Instead they described – and hence gave some legitimacy to – ‘American impurities’ in the language. This comment by a Boston pastor, John Gardiner, shows just how indignant the critics could be. If Noah persists with his dictionary idea, Gardiner says, let ‘the projected volume of foul and unclean things bear his own Christian name and be called NOAH’S ARK.’37 But to many then – and to us today – it’s just this focus on America that makes Noah’s Dictionary a landmark. Even more than his earlier Spelling Book, Noah’s American Dictionary helped to establish the new language for the emerging nation. In what ways was Noah’s dictionary distinctly American? Though European allusions are not avoided, there are frequent mentions of American places and people. For example, he illustrates the word flood with the sentence ‘there is a flood every spring in the Connecticut [river] which immerses the adjacent meadows.’ And under the entry for Savior (spelt saviour in British English), he wants to indicate the difference between this word and saver. ‘Gen. Washington,’ he explains, ‘may be called the saver, but not the savior of his country.’ To the chagrin of critics like John Gardiner, the dictionary introduces many American words and American meanings. He notes, for example, that the verb tackle means ‘to harness,’ but says that in New England it has come to mean ‘to seize, lay hold of’; indeed the Oxford English Dictionary (more of that in Chapter 10) cites Noah as the first to use the verb in that sense.38 Then there’s

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clever, about which Noah says: ‘In Great Britain a clever man is a dextrous man, one who performs an act with skill. . . . In New England a clever man is a man of pleasing, obliging disposition and amiable manners.’ Perhaps the major contribution of his dictionaries39 is that Noah puts some spelling reforms into practice. They were modest changes, involving no new letters or symbols, and this is one reason why they caught on. Although Noah realised that spelling could never entirely reflect pronunciation, there are particular cases where he moves in that direction. Here are the main spelling changes that he makes: The change British English American English -our to -or colour, honour color, honor -re to -er theatre, metre theater, meter -ise to -ize organise, apologise organize, apologize -c- to -s-: defence, pretence defense, pretense -x- to -ct-: connexion, inflexion connection, inflection -mme to -m: diagramme, programme diagram, program -ogue to -g catalogue, epilogue catalog, epilog -que to -k: cheque, masque check, mask double to single consonant jeweller, waggon jeweler, wagon drop final -k40 musick, logick music, logic   There’s also jail  – he shows his disdain for the British English spelling by saying that the word is ‘sometimes written very improperly, gaol.’ Storey becomes story; draught becomes draft and plough becomes plow. All these changes have remained in American English, but not all Noah’s proposals were adopted. At various points in his writing he suggested that ‘silent e’ should be dropped at the ends of words, so that doctrine and medicine would become doctrin, medicin; also that the ‘silent a’ should be removed from words like head, weather – to give hed and wether. He also suggested tung, wimmen, flem, ruf and ake. Noah blamed French influence for some of British English’s odd spellings. He wanted French-derived words having ch to be written with sh. So machine would become masheen. The final ‘k’ on musick was, he says, derived from the Norman musique. Also, though the English had dispensed with some of the French -re endings (giving chamber and disaster), they had all too often kept the -re, as in theatre and metre. The French were also responsible for the -mme endings. Vive la difference! ‘Genuine descendants’ and ‘English ancestors’

Noah was happy in his old age, but he still courted controversy. In one essay he seemed to renounce the notion of democracy, and his rebellious spirit

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remained strong. Here’s what he said about the nation’s rulers at the time: ‘I would, if necessary, become a troglodyte and live in a cave in winter, rather than be under the tyranny of our present rulers. . . . We deserve all our public evils. We are a degenerate and wicked people.’41 Degenerate and wicked! What a far cry from Noah’s early days and his heady optimism towards the New World. Then it was the British who were degenerate and wicked; so much so that the English language needed to be rescued from their degenerate, wicked hands. He recognised that British and American were different tongues. But as time passed, he was prepared to admit that they were historically connected. They had much in common, and, he wrote, ‘it is desirable to perpetuate that sameness.’42 There’s no doubt that Noah’s revised attitude towards Britain and its version of English was sincere and that his stay in England in 1824 was partly responsible for it. But commercial instincts were often somewhere in Noah’s mind. The American Dictionary sold very well in England, and Noah was moved to send a copy of its second edition to Queen Victoria, telling her that ‘our common language is one of the ties that bind the two nations together’; the dictionary will show that the ‘genuine descendants of English ancestors born on the west of the Atlantic, have not forgotten either the land or the language of their fathers.’43 Then, in 1831, an edition of the Dictionary was published in England – with one crucial change: it was no longer the American Dictionary but A Dictionary of the English Language. Noah’s issues with England were truly settled, and his work was coming to be internationalised. Noah’s fame was now established, but this did not affect the stream of writing flowing from his pen. He worked, up to his death, on revisions to the dictionaries and to his spelling book. In 1808 he had a religious experience and became a devout Calvinist. This led him to produce, in 1832, a new version of the Bible, making various changes to the King James version. His final years were spent round the family. He died in 1843 at the age of eighty-five. His daughter Eliza wrote to her husband: ‘All is over. Father, dear father, has gone to rest.’ A world of dictionaries

After Noah’s death, his dictionary work became even more internationalised. In 1890 An International Dictionary of the English Language appeared. Notice the change in name from the initial An American Dictionary, to A Dictionary (the 1831 one published in England), to An International Dictionary. In 1847, four years after Noah’s death, two brothers – George and Charles Merriam, printers and booksellers working in Springfield, Massachusetts  – bought the rights of the American Dictionary. Sixty-five years later, in 1982, they renamed their company Merriam-Webster Incorporated.

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The connection with Merriam has kept the name of Noah at the forefront of the dictionary world. A version of the dictionary which has done particularly well is the Collegiate Dictionary, a one-volume dictionary for students and general readers. Since it was published in 1898, it has sold 56 million copies. It is now web based and is continually being updated. A glance at any online bookseller’s list will reveal just how far Noah’s name has travelled. There’s a Merriam-Webster children’s dictionary, a crossword-puzzle one, a rhyming one, a visual one, one for colleges, for advanced and elementary learners, a pocket one. There are ones for special subjects (law, for example) and for a variety of languages: Spanish to English, French, Chinese and Arabic to English. Noah’s work started as a landmark by recognising and giving status to one national variety of English. Its results can now be found round the globe. Notes 1 Moore (1744), p. 24. 2 Alford (1866), p. 6. 3 Webster (1783), p. 3. 4 Webster (1828), p. xli. 5 Cited in Fisher (2001), p. 59. 6 Kendall (2010), p. 79. 7 Ibid., p. 59. 8 Ibid., p. 238. 9 All from Kendall (2010), pp. 21, 368, 21, and 254. 10 Ibid., p. 139. 11 Cited in Scudder (1881), p. 18. 12 Webster (1783), p. 14. 13 Ibid., p. 12. 14 Ibid., p. 23. 15 Ibid., p. 11. 16 Ibid., p. 6. 17 The words are Scudder’s (1881), p. 104. 18 The Sheridan quotation is from Webster (1783), p. 8. The suggestion is made by Baugh and Cable (2013), p. 362. 19 Webster (1783), p. 10. 20 These figures are taken from Rollins (1980), p. 35. 21 The Webster quotation is from Kendall (2010), p.  80, and the Davis one from Ibid., p. 106. 22 Webster (1789), p. 20. 23 Kendall (2010), p. 189. 24 Ibid., p. 224. 25 Ibid., p. 247. 26 Ibid. 27 Webster (1783), p. 5. 28 Webster (1789), p. 394. 29 Cited in Martin (2019), p. 42. 30 Kendall (2010), p. 291. 31 The first and third quotations in this paragraph are from Scudder (1881), p. 97, and the second is from Kendall (2010), p. 335. 32 Kendall (2010), p. 341.

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33 Ibid., p. 346. 34 The importance of definitions is discussed by Rollins (1980), p. 124. 35 The telescope example is Scudder’s (1881), p. 106. 36 Kendall (2010), p. 289. 37 Ibid., p. 264. 38 The word is used in rugby and American football in a similar sense today. 39 ‘Dictionaries’ (plural) because, as we’ll discuss in a later section, his initial dictionary eventually led to a number of others. 40 He was not always entirely consistent with this. For example, he has traffick and almanack. 41 Rollins (1980), p. 141. 42 Webster (1828), p. 3. 43 From a letter to Queen Victoria, cited in Rollins (1980), p. 127.

9 GOING BEYOND THE STANDARD William Barnes and the Dorset dialect

In the introduction to Chapter 8, we mentioned the ‘monolithic standard version’ of accepted English that the eighteenth century sought to develop. The desire of many was to ‘fix’ the language. But into the nineteenth century. there was another impulse in the air. It wasn’t just ‘new’ varieties, like American English, that craved acceptance and status. In Britain, people began to turn their attention to varieties of the language – particularly regional dialects – which were not ‘new’ at all but were certainly ‘non-standard.’ Suddenly, rather than being regarded as inferior versions of standard English, they became cherished for their diversity and richness. This change of focus made itself felt in the leafy lanes of Dorsetshire, in south-west England, a county which took pride in its own distinctive dialect.

A quaintly attired ‘philologer’

There were, the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy wrote, few figures more familiar to the eye in the county town of Dorset on a market day than an aged clergyman, quaintly attired in caped cloak, kneebreeches, and buckled shoes, with a leather satchel slung over his shoulders and a stout staff in his hand. He seemed usually to prefer the middle of the street to the pavement, and to be thinking of matters which had nothing to do with the scene before him. He plodded along with a broad, firm tread, notwithstanding the slight stoop occasioned by his years.1 Hardy continues: ‘This venerable and well-characterized man was William Barnes.’ He was venerable as a poet – a ‘lyric writer of a high order of genius’ – but also as a ‘philologer,’ what we would today call a linguist. Though William DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-12

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did develop general theories about language, his particular interest was in his own variety of English: the Dorset dialect. It’s William’s interest in dialect that makes him a landmark figure. Hardy described William as a ‘thorough son of the soil.’ He was born in 1800 or 1801, in a small hamlet close to the town Sturminster Newton, in Dorset’s scenic Vale of Blackmore. His family were poor, and though William did well at school, his working life started modestly: he was a cow-pat-clearer – responsible for clearing cow dung from the fields. He was rescued from this lowly occupation by a local solicitor looking for someone to copy out legal documents. One story is that the solicitor came across William resting from his dung-related labours by sitting on his upturned wheelbarrow and sketching a cow. The solicitor admired William’s drawing and offered him the job. Then, in 1818, he found work with another solicitor in the county town of Dorchester, where he arrived with just a few shillings in his pocket. Fortunately his new employer encouraged him to study in his spare time. His interests, even from an early age, were wide  – the classics, languages, art, engraving, music (he played the violin, piano and flute). In March 1818, William was walking along Dorchester’s High Street when, outside the King’s Arms Hotel (which still stands today), a coach stopped, and from it appeared a young lady named Julia Miles. She was daughter of an excise officer and just fourteen years old. She had, William said, ‘blue eyes and wavy brown hair,’ and he instantly fell in love. ‘That shall be my wife,’ he declared.2 Unfortunately Julia’s father was against the match, coming up with a variety of reasons – at first it was that Julia was too young, then that William was too poor. William used his literary skills to forward his case. In 1820, a short collection of poems appeared in praise of Julia, and this was followed by a verse romance entitled Orra: A Lapland Tale. He paid for its publication by selling some engravings he had made of Dorset scenes. But his suit was in dire need of stable work prospects. They came in 1823, when the headmaster of a private school in the small town of Mere – in the neighbouring county of Wiltshire – died, and it was suggested that William should take over. He was just twenty-one. It was the first of a series of headmasterships spread through William’s working life. Initially he was alone in Mere, and what spare time he had seems to have been taken up by a growing passion for language study. He learned Latin, Greek, French, Italian, German, Persian and, for a time, Russian; he also kept a diary in Italian and German – just for language practice. After four years, Julia joined him and they got married. It was a happy union; their first child was born in 1828, and by 1834 there were three, with more to follow. They moved to larger premises in Mere, and Julia helped with the teaching: she taught the day-girls, while he handled the boys and the boarders. William flourished as a teacher. His pleasant temperament helped him recruit and keep pupils; his ‘genial good manners, high spirits, and ready

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laugh made him popular with people of all classes.’3 The job was not an easy one. For many years he worked virtually alone and as a consequence had to teach all age groups, from five to seventeen, together in one class; imagine what a challenge that must have been! The range of the topics he taught was also extraordinary, particularly as regards the languages he offered for tuition; at Mere these were Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Swedish, Danish. His biographer, Alan Chedzoy, calls him a ‘linguistic marvel,’ and it was said that by the time he reached old age, he could read over seventy languages.4 Another factor which made his job difficult was a lack of teaching materials, and William set out to rectify the situation by writing his own textbooks. It’s no surprise that the first, in 1829, was to do with language. The title was The Etymological Glossary, or Easy Expositor for the Use of Schools and nonLatinists, wherein the greater part of the English words of foreign derivation are so arranged that the learner is enabled to acquire the meaning of many at once. Its aim was pedagogic, to help pupils work out the meanings and derivations of words borrowed into English from other languages. A number of William’s many writings about language started life in this way – as textbooks for his pupils. But they were not all language related; in 1833 he published A Catechism in general and that of England in particular, which dealt with the civil rights and duties of citizens. Later there were textbooks about mathematics, dynamics and – bizarrely – A Mathematical Investigation of the principle of Hanging Doors, Gates, Swing Bridges, and other Heavy Bodies – partly designed to help farmers deal with unstable gates. As his textbooks reveal, William was a true polymath, and this is also shown in another of his major activities: writing articles for newspapers and journals. In his early twenties he contributed articles – initially anonymously – to the local Dorset County Chronicle. Then, as he became known, he started to publish under his own name, often in a journal which (we saw in Chapter 7) Samuel Johnson also contributed to: The Gentleman’s Magazine. The articles, letters and book reviews were on a dizzying array of topics. Here are some titles: On the civilization of the Spanish Celts, Sturminster Newton Church, Hindu Fakirs, The Rise and Progress of Trial by Jury in England. But by far the most common topic was language; there were articles on etymology, hieroglyphics, loan words in English and much more besides. William was also a poet – a ‘lyric writer of a high order of genius’ as Hardy put it. Initially his poems were written in standard English. But they were mostly about Dorset characters, and it soon occurred to him that it would be more natural for them to be written in dialect. Initially he had to step carefully: as the headmaster of a private school, he was dependent on the good-will of prospective parents, many of whom were conservative in tastes and had little time for local dialects, which they regarded as ‘uncouth.’ But his dialect poems proved popular and did much to make his name. In late life he spent time

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travelling round the countryside giving dialect poetry readings to enthusiastic audiences, made up largely of dialect speakers. In 1835, William and Julia rented a house in Dorchester  – a veritable metropolis in comparison with Mere – and opened a new school there. Two years later they bought and moved to a bigger property in the same town; in fact, the young Thomas Hardy, training to be an architect, was to come to work in an office next door. William, the headmaster, had come a long way from his dung-collecting days. But lacking a university degree, he still felt a sense of academic insecurity. He was accepted for a place at St John’s College, Cambridge, following a ten-year programme which involved occasional attendance and led to the degree of Batchelor of Divinity. He was awarded the degree in 1850, but the study took its toll, involving much extra work in Dorchester for Julia, whose health was anyway bad. She was eventually diagnosed with breast cancer, and in 1852, she died. ‘Oh, day of overwhelming woe!’ William wrote, ‘I  am undone. My dearest Julia left me at 11.30 this morning.’5 William continued to run his school, but, consumed with grief, the spirit had gone out of him. The school started to do badly, and he had to take to writing magazine articles to make ends meet. He was also beginning to gain recognition for his dialect work. In 1859 a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte and a distinguished dialect scholar, Prince Lucien Bonaparte, visited William to consult him about the Dorset dialect and to ask him if he would translate into dialect parts of the Song of Solomon. William agreed, though his ­payment – a box of academic books – did little to ease his financial situation. But real relief came when, on a day in April 1861, two men turned up at his door, telling his daughter that they had come to congratulate William, ‘On what?’ his daughter asked, ‘On having received a Civil List pension of £70 a year,’ they replied.6 Then, in 1862, the rector of the small church in the village of Winterborne Came, close to Dorchester, resigned his post. William, with his BD degree, was qualified for the position, and he was appointed. His school-teaching days were over. Ironically, as he left, an opportunity for their continuation occurred. He had a pupil who had done well in the exam for entry into the Indian service – which many ambitious parents sought for their sons. When this success became known, William was inundated with letters from parents wanting to place their children in his school. He wrote: ‘Thus a popularity which I had never known during the working years of my life came at almost the first moment when it was no longer of use to me.’7 William grew old in Winterborne Came, where he led a contented life. He was conscientious in his rector’s duties, visiting parishioners once a week and becoming known as a friendly soul in the village. He had gained some fame and was visited by illustrious individuals like the poet Tennyson, as well as of course by his local friend, Hardy. From 1884 he was mostly confined to bed.

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His last words as he lay dying in 1886 were, ‘Dry our eyes in weeping,/Shut our eyes in sleeping.’ Though Hardy didn’t make the funeral, he wrote a poem on William’s passing – ‘The Last Signal’ – as well as the obituary we mentioned earlier, which appeared in the London literary magazine The Athenaeum. In 1889 a statue was unveiled in the centre of Dorchester. William the language theorist

Among the many books and articles William wrote on language, there are two which might be said to provide a ‘theory of languages.’ One, published in 1854, was entitled A Philological Grammar. Its subtitle tells us that it was ‘grounded upon English, and formed from a comparison of more than sixty languages.’ Its aim was to find ‘basic grammatical principles common to all languages.’8 In it, William is particularly interested in the processes of word-formation found in languages throughout the world. For example, the Grammar has a section on how ‘nouns of agent’ (expressing who does an action) are formed in a variety of languages. In English, we often use the suffix -er – as in teacher (‘someone who teaches’) and writer (‘someone who writes’). These come from the OE suffix -ere. William provides details of how suffixes play the same role in an array of other languages, including Latin, Greek, Irish, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Arabic and Mongolian. Eight years later, William wrote Tiw; or A View of the Roots and Stems of the English as a Teutonic Language. Tiw was the name of a Germanic god, whose name gives us the word Tuesday. In the book, he claims to have discovered the ‘origins of all language.’ William’s theoretical ideas never really gained recognition; the academic linguists of the time – members of the Philological Society, founded in 1830 and devoted to the scholarly study of language and languages  – were not impressed. The Society was, though, greatly impressed by William’s work on the Dorset dialect. In fact, they positively supported it. Standard English, and ‘the grunting of beasts’

You will have picked up, particularly from Chapter 7, that in earlier centuries there were plenty of negative feelings about any variety of English which deviated from the standard. Such negative views still persisted in the nineteenth century. As Chedzoy puts it, a dialect like the Dorset one ‘was reckoned to be at best an unsuccessful attempt at standard English and at worst little better than the grunting of the beasts in the field.’ Dialect use ‘was the linguistic consequence of stupidity; the broader the dialect, the more stupid the speaker.’9 How could anyone argue against such strong views? Barnes’ answer was forthright. His defence was not to argue that the Dorset dialect was equal in status to standard English but that it was in fact ‘superior.’ This is because it

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was closely allied to the Germanic roots of the English language, and to OE in particular. In a letter he wrote to The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1840, he says: This [Dorset] dialect, which is purer and more regular than that which has been adopted as the national speech, is, I  think, with little variation, that of most of those western parts of England which were included in the kingdom of the West Saxons, and had come down by independent descent from the Saxon dialect. In this letter, and elsewhere, he shows how the Dorset dialect maintains links with OE which standard English has lost. Take for example the prefix a-. It’s used in Dorset to indicate the past participle of a verb: the Dorset dialect for ‘He has lost his ax’ was He’ve a-lost his hatchet, and ‘He has found his horse’ was He’ve a-vound his hoss. The prefix comes from the OE prefix ge-: the OE for ‘found’ is gefunden. Standard English does not use this past participle prefix. You can also see, Barnes says, how similar to OE the Dorset dialect is by looking at the present tense forms of the verb to be:10 Dorset OE I be Ic beo Thou bist Þu byst He is He is

Dorset We be You be They be

OE We beoth Ge beoth Hi beoth

The standard English forms are less similar: ‘I am,’ ‘thou art’ (not a form we use much nowadays), ‘he is,’ ‘we/you/they are.’11 Yet another example – and one which according to Hardy, William mentioned ‘with particular pride’ – was that while standard English has only two demonstrative pronouns – this and that – the Dorset dialect is the richer for having four.12 William also gives examples of single words which show closeness to other Germanic languages. For example, the Dorset dialect word for the sloping side of a hill is hangen, which in German is Abhang. ‘A language is called purer,’ Barnes wrote, ‘inasmuch as more of its words are formed from its own roots.’13 This is what made the Dorset dialect purer than standard English, which had allowed itself to become corrupted by admitting words from other languages, particularly Latin. William detested this process. Every language, he believed, had its own qualities, and they should not be allowed to mix. This led him to do something which we have already come across in Chapter 5, where John Cheke invented words with Germanic roots to replace Latinate ones. Some of William’s inventions were to do with language. He called a ‘prefix’ a fore-wording, ‘letters’ were speech-tokens, ‘conjugations’ were foreshapenings, ‘vowels’ breathsounds and ‘consonants’ clippings. William also made plenty of non-language-related inventions: sun-print for

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‘photograph,’ backshine for ‘reflection,’ outroam for ‘excursion,’ many-wedder for ‘polygamist’ and life-writ for ‘biography.’ Hardy reports that on his deathbed, William ‘became quite indignant at the word ‘bicycle.’ ‘Why didn’t they call it “wheel-saddle”! he exclaimed.’14 As well as arguing that the Dorset dialect was more ‘pure’ than standard English (which he disparagingly called ‘Englandish’), William also claimed that the dialect had a richness of vocabulary that standard English lacked. ‘If a man would walk with me through our village,’ he said, ‘I could show him many things of which we want to speak every day, and for which we have words of which Johnson knew nothing’;15 words, that is, which you do not find in Samuel Johnson’s bulky Dictionary. One view about dialects is that they may be adequate for speech, and for informal writing, but they can’t deal with formal written communication. William confronts this view in the early pages of his 1863 book: A Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect with the History, Outspreading, and Bearings of South-Western English. To show that the Dorset dialect was as capable of expression as any other variety of English, he gave a dialect rendition of Queen Victoria’s 1863 speech at the opening of parliament. The original speech begins: My Lords and Gentlemen! We are commanded by Her Majesty to inform you that despite the fact that civil war in North America is continuing, general trade with the country does not seem to have fallen off during the last year. William’s rendition: My Lords an’ Gentlemen! We be a-bid by Her Majesty to tell you, that, vor-all the hwome war in North America, is a-holden on, the common treade o’the land, vor the last year, don’t seem to be a-vell off. Describing the Dorset dialect

The way that William ‘talked up’ dialects, particularly his own Dorset one – after centuries in which full attention was given to standardising the l­ anguage – is the major reason he’s a landmark figure. But his actual descriptive work, producing glossaries and grammars of his dialect, is also valuable. For much of his working life he was engaged in building up a glossary of Dorset words, continually adding to it over time. An Athenaeum review of one version described it as ‘one of the best Dialect Glossaries we have ever seen.’ Its final fully published version of 1886 was entitled A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect, with a Grammar of its Wording.16

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To us today, a look through William’s Glossary reveals some quaint dialect forms. The word for a cockroach is black-bob, The verb to wag means ‘to stir,’ ‘to go,’ as in I  can hardly wag; it’s connected with the PDE ‘wag’ meaning ‘to shake,’ ‘to oscillate.’ Then there’s footy, meaning ‘insignificant,’ one of those words showing a link with OE, where the word fuht meant ‘musty.’ Another word with Germanic origins is glutch, meaning ‘to swallow’ or ‘to gulp.’ Interestingly, this dialect word has made its way over the Atlantic to Newfoundland, where folk from the south-west of England went to fish from the sixteenth century, taking some dialect words with them. But William’s glossaries have more than quaintness value. They provide an account of what Hardy in his Athenaeum obituary describes as ‘a complete repertory of forgotten manners, words and sentiments.’ Dialects and the nineteenth-century zeitgeist

William was by no means the only figure of his time interested in British dialects, and indeed studying them was very much part of the nineteenth century’s zeitgeist. It was a reaction against the prescriptivism of earlier centuries, a questioning of standard English’s ‘superiority.’ As we have seen, William felt the Dorset dialect ‘superior’ to the standard. Similar claims were made for other dialects. In 1874, the President of the Manchester Literary Club, one George Milner, read an essay he had written about the Lancashire dialect, claiming that it was ‘not only more appropriate than but also superior to Standard English for use in poetry.’17 Like William, he had no doubts that ‘delicate sentiments . . . can be transmitted through the dialect without material injury’ and that ‘the dialect can compel an improvement.’18 William’s friend Hardy was like-minded; he held the ‘Queen’s English’ in some disdain and wrote that there were other ‘varieties of English which are intrinsically as genuine, grammatical, and worthy of the royal title as is the all-prevailing competitor which bears it.’ Hardy also expressed the opinion that it might have been better if Winchester (towards the south-west of the country) had been the capital of England, rather than London. In that case, he said, ‘we might well have preserved in our literary language a large proportion of the racy [distinctive] Saxon of the West-country.’19 This favouring of dialects as against standard English made itself felt in literature. Suddenly it was acceptable to have heroes and heroines who used dialect. Hardy, with his many Dorset characters, is a prime example. An earlier one was Charles Dickens; his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, published in 1836–7, had the cockney-speaking Sam Weller, who became an extremely popular fictional character. George Eliot’s first novel, too – Adam Bede, published in 1859 – had a hero who uses a Midlands dialect. The hero in her later novel, Silas Marner, also uses dialect, and Eliot’s justification for this is forthright: ‘One is not bound,’ she says, ‘to respect the lazy obtuseness or snobbish

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ignorance of people who do not care to know more of their native tongue than the vocabulary of the drawing-room and the newspaper.’20 Another landmark figure in this area was Joseph Wright (1855–1930). He had an interesting life. He was born near Bradford, a city in West Yorkshire which played an important role in the Industrial Revolution. He came from a poor background, and his first job was leading a donkey pulling a cart full of tools to the smithy to be sharpened. He had almost no early schooling and could not read a newspaper until he was fifteen. In his late teens Joseph attended a night school to study languages, and at twenty-one he went to the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Later, after a period of study in Leeds, he returned to Heidelberg to complete a linguistics-oriented PhD. In 1901, he became Oxford Professor of Comparative Philology, a far cry from donkey-leading. In 1892, Wright published A Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill (an area of Bradford). His interest in the topic also led him to contemplate producing a dictionary of English dialects. Initially no publisher showed any interest, and Wright had to go ahead at his own risk. When the dictionary appeared, its title revealed just what an ambitious task it was: The English dialect dictionary, being the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years. Growing interest in dialects led, in 1873, to the establishment of an English Dialect Society, which accrued a large library of books and pamphlets related to dialects. The Society was dissolved in 1896, but in the following year, Wright helped to form a Yorkshire Dialect Society. It’s still in existence today and is in fact Britain’s oldest surviving dialect society.21 Other dialect societies were founded around the same time. For a very long time, Britain had acted as if there were only one acceptable variety of English in the country – standard British English. This chapter has shown how Barnes’ landmark work on the Dorset dialect helped to change perceptions. His work, we have seen, was encouraged and supported by the Philological Society, and that same Society was destined to play an even more important role in the history of the English language. In 1857, six years before Barnes’ Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect was published, the Society made a proposal for a ‘new English dictionary.’ What became of that proposal is the subject of the next chapter. Notes 1 The Athenaeum, 16 October, 1886, pp. 501–2. 2 Baxter (1887), p. 14. Cited in Chedzoy (2010), p. 27. 3 Ibid., p. 26. 4 Ibid., p. 46. 5 Ibid., p. 124. 6 Baxter (1887), pp. 187–8. Cited in Chedzoy (2010), p. 154.

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7 Hardy (1886), p. 502. 8 The words are Chedzoy’s (2010), p. 132. 9 Ibid., p. 10, and p. 77. 10 Notice the OE letter ‘thorn,’ written ‘Þ,’ in the word Þu – pronounced ‘thu.’ It was mentioned in Interlude 1 and Chapter 6. 11 Barnes (1886), p. 21. 12 The two Dorset forms of ‘this’ are this and thease, while for ‘that’ they are that and thik. The use of thease and thik is not easy to conceptualise. William calls them ‘shapen forms,’ used to describe objects ‘shapen up into a form fitted to an end.’ One of his examples is that thease stwone would refer to a piece of stone that has been given shape, while this stwone ‘would mean a lot of broken stone.’ 13 Barnes (1854), p. 258. 14 Hardy (1886), p. 502. 15 In the ‘Fore-say’ to Barnes (1878). 16 Wording means ‘forms of expression’ or ‘phraseology.’ 17 Hakala (2018). 18 The words are Hakala’s (2018). 19 Both quotations are from Archer (1904), p. 29. 20 Hakala (2018). 21 The Society’s web page is www.yorkshiredialectsociety.org.uk.

10 A ‘DICTIONARY OF ALL ENGLISH’ James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary

In 1859 Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species. The book well reflects the taste of the Victorian age for broad, all-encompassing accounts of phenomena. It was a taste that loved to search for origins and to trace how branches of the ‘tree of knowledge’ developed and were connected. In Darwin’s case, the phenomena were to do with evolutionary biology. This chapter is about a dictionary which might be said to have done for the English language what Darwin’s book did for biology. Its ambitious aim was to provide a total record of English from the twelfth century onward, showing how words came into the language and how their meanings changed over time. In scope it would far exceed both Johnson’s and Webster’s dictionaries. The new dictionary had a number of editors over time, but there was one whose contribution particularly stands out. He was James Murray, and the Oxford English Dictionary was, in effect, his life’s work.

A teacher in Mill Hill

Mill Hill is a suburb of north London, lying between Edgeware and Finchley, and with the M1 motorway whizzing noisily past. In the nineteenth century it was a small village, with a population in 1880 of just 1335. Then, as now, on the top of the hill stood Mill Hill School. From 1873, one of its teachers was a Scot. He was a tall, thin man, with a large head, a genial smile and a Scottish lilt to his voice. He also had a ‘flowing red beard and a long raking stride.’1 Though he disliked sport, he occasionally attended school cricket matches, but usually he carried a large wad of papers with him and, rather than watching the game, he spent most of his time perusing these. His name was James Murray. He was a good teacher, liked by his pupils; one of them once said ‘Dr Murray knows everything.’2 DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-13

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But teaching was only part of James’ life in Mill Hill. He lived in a large and comfortable house near the school. It was a highly attractive residence, but its looks were spoiled somewhat by an ugly corrugated iron shed in the garden. He called it his ‘Scriptorium’ (or ‘scrippy’ for short) – a room used for writing. It was made of corrugated iron to make it fireproof, so that its contents would not burn in the case of a fire. The most famous picture of James shows him in a later version of his Scriptorium, in Oxford.3 He is standing, which was his preferred way of working. Perhaps the most noticeable thing about him is that long, flowing beard. Possibly next is the cap on his head. It’s the kind of cap some academics wear for degree ceremonies. By the end of his career, James had seven degrees (mostly honorary ones). He had a cap for each, and he liked to wear one when he was working. In James’ hand is a book and a slip of paper. All around him, the walls of the Scriptorium are covered with pigeon holes, all holding similar slips of paper. If you could examine the slips in detail, you’d see that they all have the same format. In the top left corner there’s a word, and underneath a sentence containing an example of the word in use – what was called a ‘citation.’ In 1880 there were, James calculated, 2.5 million slips in the Scriptorium, and in 1882 they were coming in at the rate of 1,000 slips a day. They were samples of words collected by a legion of volunteer helpers for the massive new dictionary which James Murray was editing. Initially it was called the New English Dictionary; the name was later changed to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). OED1 (the first completed edition) did not appear until 1928, thirteen years after James’ death. It ran into twelve volumes, defined 414,825 words, and had 1,827,306 citations – taken from those slips of paper in the Scriptorium. A ‘dictionary of all English’

The story of the OED began long before James took up residence in Mill Hill. We mentioned the Philological Society in Chapter 9 – it was the organisation that supported William Barnes’ Dorset dialect work. In the 1840s the Society started talking about producing a new dictionary of English. Then, in 1857, one of the Society’s leading lights, the churchman Richard Chevenix Trench, wrote a study entitled On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries. His list of deficiencies is long, and he’s critical of both Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster. Trench believed that above all a dictionary should be what he called a Lexicon totius Anglicitatis – a dictionary of all English. As we saw in Chapter 7, Johnson’s dictionary focused heavily on literature and literary texts, and though it contained a number of ‘everyday words,’ it couldn’t be said to cover the entire language. As one of Trench’s supporters put it, for any future dictionary we must ‘fling our doors wide! All, all, not one, but all must

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enter.’4 Also, Johnson allowed his own views to creep into his dictionary. We saw in Chapter 7 just how subjective his word definitions could be – remember how he had defined the word oats, for example. As well as such eccentric definitions, Johnson’s choice of words to include and exclude showed that his approach was ‘normative’: his aim was to show people how they should and should not use language. What Trench wanted was an objective record: ‘We entirely repudiate,’ he said, ‘the theory which converts the lexicographer into an arbiter of style.’5 Another thing which Trench wanted was a systematically scientific approach to etymology. In Chapter 8 we noted that Webster’s method of establishing word etymologies was rather superficial, often depending on finding similarities in the ‘looks’ of words. An example was the word speak. Webster, you’ll recall, associated it with the Ethiopian word sabak (which means ‘preach, teach, proclaim’), because both words have an ‘s,’ an ‘a’ and a ‘k.’ This ‘etymology by word similarity’ approach was very common in Britain and America; James’ biographer (and granddaughter) Elizabeth Murray calls it the approach of ‘bogus etymologists.’6 But a new, more systematically scientific approach to etymology was being practised by German linguists, including the Grimm brothers – Jacob and Wilhelm – who had produced a German dictionary in 1852. This was the approach Trench wanted to follow. There were other aspects of the German linguists’ work that Trench sought to copy. He wanted to extend the proposed dictionary’s historical perspective beyond what Johnson and Webster had provided. It was an ambitious aim, and to meet it, Trench realised, would involve a massive team effort. Both Johnson and Webster had largely worked alone, and their achievements were indeed laudable. But the days of the ‘one-man dictionary’ were now over. The Germans had realised this, and it had been their idea to enlist volunteer helpers – members of the public – to supply copious citations of words in use. This way of working is a little like how Wikipedia is being developed today: extensive help from members of the public makes it possible to lay hands on massive quantities of data.7 By the end of 1857, Trench had collected seventy-six volunteers to read texts; later in the production process there were as many as eight hundred of them. Coleridge and Furnivall

In 1858, the Society formally agreed to produce a new dictionary along the lines Trench had suggested. The first editor was to be another Society member, Herbert Coleridge, the grandson of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He set up his own ‘mini-scrippy’ with fifty-four pigeon-holes, able to hold some 100,000 slips. He thought that once these had been collected, in, let’s say, two years, publication could begin (the plan was to publish the dictionary a section at a time). Unfortunately Coleridge died early, at the age of thirtyone – after catching a cold, it is said, during a Philological Society lecture.

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The editorship then passed into the hands of another Philological Society member, Frederick Furnivall. The son of a surgeon, he initially became a barrister but soon gave up law for a dizzying array of other pursuits – founding societies, fighting for socialist causes and above all pursuing anything to do with philology. As editor, he greatly increased the number of slips. Indeed, it’s unlikely that the dictionary would have come to fruition without Furnivall’s industry. He recruited staff to work as sub-editors, and when he found a lack of texts to provide sources for the early use of words, he founded the Early English Text Society just to make such texts available. At the same time, it’s also a wonder that the dictionary ever did come to fruition, given Furnivall’s involvement. He had many faults. One was his extreme tactlessness, and he managed to upset very many people. A number of the newly recruited sub-­ editors did not stay long, publishers like Cambridge University Press would have nothing to do with the project because of his involvement and on numerous occasions he created problems which needed energetic efforts to overcome. With time, Furnivall’s attention wandered into other projects, and he decided that he no longer wished to continue as editor. This is when James came onto the scene. ‘A mania for learning languages’

He was born in 1837, in a little village called Denholm, near the town of Hawick: Scottish borderland country. His father was a tailor. It was a religious and moral family, with a strong work ethic. He left school at fourteen, with little idea of what he wanted to do in life. He worked in a chemist’s shop for a time, did some farm work and tried his hand at his father’s craft of tailoring. Eventually he found a job teaching in a local school. He turned out to be a good teacher and was soon offered a post at a private school: the Hawick Academy. Like many teachers of the time, he was required to teach a large variety of subjects, including English, maths, geography, art and ancient and modern languages. Both as a pupil and as a teacher, languages were his passion. He had, he said, ‘a sort of mania for learning languages; every new language was a new delight,’8 and indeed in his lifetime he gained knowledge of a large number. His brother Charles tells a story of how one day he heard strange sounds emanating from James’ bedroom. Charles went in to check that James wasn’t ill, and found him in bed, practising Arabic vowel sounds aloud. As a teacher, James didn’t waste a moment of the day, studying late, sleeping little and rising early. He was even said to use his walk to school to study languages. A favourite was Old English. He first came across it in Alfred’s translation of Orosius (mentioned in Chapter 2). ‘I simply bathed and basked in it,’ he said.9 James introduced OE into his school curriculum. He found there was a lack of textbooks, so, like Webster, he wrote his own.10

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His interest in language led him to attend a course run by a fellow Scot, Alexander Melville Bell, who had invented a system called ‘Visible Speech,’ an early type of phonetic script used to help the deaf to talk. James became friends with his youngest son, Alexander Graham, the inventor of the telephone. In fact James is sometimes called the ‘grandfather of the telephone,’ because it was he who taught Alexander Graham about electricity. His interest in language also led him to study the local dialect, and the eventual result was a 250-page book entitled The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, published in 1873. His aims in the study were similar to those of Barnes, whose Dorset dialect work we saw in Chapter 9. Many regarded the Scots dialect as an inferior sort of English. James wanted to show that it had its own structure, and he was anxious to capture it before it became ‘corrupted and arrested’ by standard English. His dialect work did much to establish his reputation as a linguist. The young James, with his fashionably shoulder-length hair, enjoyed the company of girls. In 1861, when he was twenty-four, he fell in love with Maggie Scott, an infant-school teacher. They married, and in 1864 had a daughter. But both mother and child had poor health. James was advised that the family should move south for the sake of Maggie, who had consumption. They moved to London, and James got a job at a bank. The move was a huge upheaval, and though he lived the rest of his life in England, James never felt he belonged there. He was a Scottish Borderer at heart. James didn’t enjoy work at the bank and talked disparagingly of the ‘Mammon worship of Threadneedle Street.’11 The upheaval of his move took on tragic proportions when both daughter and wife died. ‘A marriage, a birth, two deaths, all in three short years!’ he lamented, ‘and I was left alone in London, doing uncongenial work.’12 But he was not single for long: the daughter of a friend, Ada Ruthven, took his eye, and they married in 1867. Initially his new wife found James difficult to live with, particularly given his the mood swings. But it turned into a very happy marriage. Later in life, James described Ada as ‘really a queen of women.’13 James joined the Philological Society in 1868. There he met Furnivall, who recruited him to work on some Early English Text Society volumes. James loved this work, and indeed on one occasion became so engrossed that he was mistakenly locked in the library where he was working. He also met Richard Weymouth, a senior Society member who had just become headmaster of Mill Hill School and was on the lookout for new staff. His eye landed on James. At first James was slow to respond, and there was a certain amount of haggling over salary before James agreed to relinquish his bank job and become a teacher once more. Established again in the school-teaching world, he planned to write textbooks. He worked on a possible German grammar and a Primer of English Grammar. He was also very aware that for his new career he needed

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a degree, so he signed up for a part-time London BA course, which he completed in 1873. But James did not finish his textbooks, because his energies were diverted into the project which engaged him for the rest of his life – the dictionary. Furnivall was giving up as editor, and the Society wanted James to take over. His friends worked hard to persuade him; ‘Nothing,’ one of them said, ‘must prevent you doing this work now.’14 But, as with the Mill Hill job, he was slow to accept. He hadn’t entirely given up the idea of a career in teaching and also had plans for other pieces of linguistic research. Besides, the dictionary proposal was finding difficulty in attracting a publisher. Initially, Trübner & Co. were interested but were soon put off by the size of the project. Macmillan were next on the scene and were prepared to go ahead, but, not for the first or last time, Furnivall intervened. He was not happy with the arrangement, he said, and was in contact with Oxford University Press. James was in an agony of indecision whether to involve himself in such an insecure, and potentially utterly consuming, undertaking. Ada helped him decide: she argued that it would be better for him to do one thing well than lots of other things. James went to Oxford to meet the publisher’s delegates, and the meeting went well. On 1 March 1879, an agreement was signed between the Philological Society and Oxford University Press for the publication of a dictionary, with James as editor. It envisaged a four-volume work to be completed in ten years. Up went the Scriptorium in the Mill Hill garden, and James’ working future was sealed for the remainder of his life. James became a part-time teacher at Mill Hill School, but it soon became obvious that he needed to work full-time on the dictionary and that it would be far more convenient if he were to move to Oxford, to make communication between himself and others involved in the project easier. In 1885 he and his family moved into a house in north Oxford at 78 Banbury Road. A new Scriptorium was needed, and this was built in the back garden, partially sunken so as not to be too much of an eyesore to the neighbours. Though practical, it was neither attractive nor comfortable, and indeed Furnivall described it as a ‘horrid corrugated den.’15 The dictionary generated so much correspondence that James was given his own post box, just outside the house, and you can still see it there today. It’s said that letters simply addressed ‘Dr Murray, Oxford’ would reach him. Troubles galore

The new project continued to be beset with problems. Furnivall passed over to James some two tons of slips. This impressive quantity doubtless led the publishers to think that a good part of the dictionary’s preparation had already been done. But on closer observation, Furnivall’s work was not impressive at all. Many of the papers were in a poor condition: there was a dead rat in one

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bundle and a family of mice living in another. Some of the documents were crumbling and faded, and it took James a very long time to sort out the correspondence. The quality of the work was poor, too, and much of it had to be redone. In fact James describes it as ‘an incubus of rubbish and error.’16 His view of Furnivall: ‘I do not believe in the soundness of his judgment or the sufficiency of his scholarship.’17 Finding good helpers was also a problem. Following the practice of Coleridge and Furnivall, James recruited a large number of volunteers to produce slips. Some of the volunteers were good, but many weren’t: Elizabeth Murray tells of one who collected a thousand quotations from a book popular at the time, about Egyptians and their customs.18 Only two of the thousand were of any use; the others were Arabic terms never actually found in English. Other helpers never produced any work and didn’t even return the books they had been sent to look through. The most famous volunteer worker was without doubt an American army surgeon, W. C. Minor, living in England. Having committed a murder, he was held in an asylum for the criminally insane. There he spent much of his time writing slips for the dictionary. In fact he became one of the dictionary’s most prolific contributors. James visited him in the asylum, and later paid tribute: ‘we could easily illustrate the last four centuries [of the English language] from his quotations alone.’19 The story of Minor’s connection with the Dictionary is told in Simon Winchester’s (1999) book, The Surgeon of Crowthorne. The American title is The Professor and the Madman, also the title of a 2019 film, starring Mel Gibson as James, and Sean Penn as Minor. Three connected factors caused particular friction between the Press and the editorial team, friction so serious that it led to threats – from the Press to abandon the project and from James resign. One was the dictionary’s length. The very idea of a ‘dictionary of all English’ implied a lengthy work. And it grew and grew. Webster’s dictionary was used as a yardstick to judge length. Thus it was noted that Webster covered the etymology of the word black in five lines, while Murray took twenty-three.20 And the length increased from letter to letter: for A, the entry size was said to be ‘Webster + 6’ (six times the length of Webster’s), for B it was ‘Webster + 7.5,’ and for C, ‘Webster + 8.’ In fact parts of the dictionary reached Webster + 17.21 James and the Press constantly argued over this. The Press wanted to keep the overall length at ‘Webster + 6,’ but eventually agreed to ‘Webster + 8.’ James complained bitterly that even this could only be achieved ‘with daily stringent application of the screw.’22 Then there was the related question of time. How long was it going to take to finish the dictionary? The initial contract had stipulated ten years, but when that time was up they were just midway through the letter C! At one point five years passed without the completion of a single letter; at that rate, Mugglestone says, ‘the complete work could conceivably take almost three

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centuries.’23 James couldn’t work any harder – while at Mill Hill he worked twenty hours a week as a teacher and fifty-seven on the dictionary; later he regularly put in fifteen-hour days. But the Press were very concerned about time: ‘if the publication cannot be accelerated,’ they said, ‘the Delegates will proceed to question the continuance of the work.’24 They tried to lay down time constraints, at one point suggesting three hundred pages a year as a minimum  – a proposal that was met with violent disagreement by the editorial team. James himself was still hoping the work would be finished by the end of the century. Then, as the century closed, he started thinking in terms of a 1908 completion date. After that, he looked towards 1916. Then he would be eighty years old, and it would be his Golden Wedding Anniversary. In fact James did not live to see the publication, which took place in 1928 – thirteen years after his death and forty-nine years after the contract had been drawn up. Questions of length and time were of course related to finance. Additional staff had to be employed to speed things up, and that involved extra expense. In 1885 the Press had supplied an additional £1250 to employ more assistants, and by 1892 they calculated they’d spent £32,400, with a net loss of £22,400.25 James’ own financial demands were meagre: ‘I am not a capitalist,’ he said, ‘but a poor man.’26 In the end the overall financial commitment of the Press on the dictionary was staggering: on their website they state that ‘at no period in its history has the Oxford English Dictionary been profitable commercially for Oxford University Press.’ The funding for the current revision programme of the dictionary is put at no less than £34 million. These various problems took their toll on James. As well as regularly threatening to resign, he was also sometimes on the point of a nervous breakdown. Worst perhaps was in the winter of 1889–90. Day after day he started work before sunrise, yet there was no end in sight, and he got precious little moral support from the Press. Relief came when he and a friend took a holiday on the continent in the spring of 1890. The trip began badly, when the two of them left the train in Calais to take a meal, while their luggage, still on the train, disappeared into Europe without them. But all ended well, and the trip pulled him out of his depression. An end in sight

As work on the dictionary progressed, a fixed procedure became established, with people playing different roles. Volunteers who had agreed to be ‘readers’ started off the process by poring over books and making the slips for the words they came across. These were sent to the Scriptorium, where they were checked for errors or omissions  – incomplete references, for example. The ‘sorters’ then put the slips into alphabetical order, identifying different parts of speech and senses and arranging the quotations chronologically. A ‘sub-editor’ would then continue the sorting process by putting the changes of meaning

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into chronological order, as well as adding an initial attempt at a definition. Finally came the editor, whose job it was to check everything, to add etymological and pronunciation information and select the best quotations. It is calculated that James did about half the work on the entire dictionary. During his lifetime, other editors were brought in, with James designated editor-in-chief. First was Henry Bradley. Like James, he was a man of modest origins – his father was a gardener – who had a talent for language. He became an editor in 1887. In 1901, the Scottish scholar William Alexander Craigie joined the team, followed by Charles Talbut Onions  – the son of a metal embosser – in 1914. The worst of the conflicts between the Press and James had died down by 1896, and the tide turned. When the Press’ threats to abandon the dictionary became known, there was something of a public outcry. The Saturday Review said that it would be ‘an indelible disgrace to the University.’27 Slowly people began to believe that, after all the delays and disagreements, the dictionary was indeed going to be completed. Oxford University and Press came to realise that there was glory to be basked in for its dictionary work. The Times called it ‘the greatest effort probably which any University . . . has taken in hand since the invention of printing.’28 James made the suggestion that the dictionary should be dedicated to Queen Victoria, and she accepted. His own contribution was recognised by innumerable honorary degrees. This included, at long last, one from Oxford – James had always been resentful that Oxford had not recognised his work properly; he had never, for example, been given a lectureship. About the degree offer, wife Ada said ‘At last!’ to which James replied ‘Yes. I suppose they were afraid I might die first and make me a post-mortem doctor.’29 In 1908 James was offered a knighthood. He accepted, describing it as ‘an honour to Oxford.’30 In 1914, both James’ and Ada’s health began to deteriorate. James had appendicitis, then prostate trouble, and he was unable to work for four months. Then he contracted pleurisy, and he eventually died of heart failure in July 1915. The next day, the Daily Graphic carried the headline: ‘Death of Sir James Murray. Great Dictionary-Maker’s Unfinished Volume.’ He was buried in Oxford’s most celebrated cemetery – the Wolvercote Cemetery – where lie numerous well-known lexicographers and philologists, among them J. R. R. Tolkien, the philologist turned best-selling writer. After James

Bradley became editor-in-chief after James’ death, but he himself died in 1923. Craigie and Onions were unable to give undivided attention to the dictionary, and it was not until 1928, almost seventy years from the time the dictionary was first mooted, that it appeared. Rather than 6,400 pages in four volumes – the initial plan – it was 400,000 words in ten volumes.

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Long before the dictionary’s appearance – and indeed even while James was still alive – thoughts had turned to the need for supplements. That this should be so says something about the impossibility of the ‘dictionary of all English’ idea which had motivated Trench and his colleagues. There were, as James himself realised, entire lexical areas which, because of their newness, were not even touched on; for example, James said, ‘the whole terminology of aeroplanes and aeronautics is wanting.’31 Also, the status of individual words naturally changed with time. Mugglestone illustrates this with the abbreviated form bike.32 It was not included in the dictionary because, as the Times reported, in 1910 the word had a very ‘low bred sound at present.’ But in following decades the abbreviation became entirely acceptable and is hence included in a supplement. No sooner had the dictionary itself appeared than Craigie and Onions set to work on supplementary material. Their single-volume Supplement appeared in 1933. Then, in 1957, Robert Burchfield  – a New Zealand scholar who came to work in Oxford – was put in charge of producing a further supplement, and this was published in four volumes between 1972 and 1986. Several new versions of the OED have appeared in recent decades. In 1989 there was a second edition – OED2 – edited by John Simpson and Edmund Weiner. It had 22,000 pages and was in twenty volumes. In 1984, as the world was beginning to turn electronic, a team was set up to produce an electronic version of the dictionary. The OED’s web page describes this as ‘the most adventurous computerization project seen in the publishing industry at that time.’ One result came out in 1992 in the form of a CD-ROM version: ‘suddenly a massive, twenty-volume work that takes up four feet of shelf space and weighs 150 pounds is reduced to a slim, shiny disk that takes up virtually no space and weighs just a few ounces.’33 Then there’s OED3, a thoroughly revised version of the dictionary, at present in preparation, supported by its £34 million budget. New and revised entries are being added online every three months, and the dictionary really is up to date. Very recent words are included: there’s lol, Homer Simpson’s d’oh, and even stan, which, following its use by the rapper Eminem, has come to mean an ‘overzealous fan’ – the first quotation is in the year 2000. Viewing is by subscription, and many educational institutions, especially universities, hold subscriptions allowing their students free access. What the OED contains34

What kinds of information does the OED give? Here is some of what you will find if you look up the word dictionary in the OED Online: • Both British and American pronunciations are given in audio clips, with phonetic transcriptions. It’s noted that British speakers sometimes don’t pronounce the ‘a’ in the final syllable, saying /dɪkʃənri/.

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• Information is also given (almost 500 words in fact) about the word’s etymology, going back to the Latin dictionarius meaning a ‘word book’: a combination of diction (‘diction’), and the suffix -arium (‘connected with’). • Related word forms in various languages (like Portuguese, Italian and German) are shown. • For the use of the word as a noun, four main meanings are recognised, with various subcategories. There is the normal meaning of a ‘book which explains or translates . . . the words of a language or languages.’ A subcategory here is the usage referring to an encyclopaedia or some other reference book. The second meaning is ‘the collection of words used or understood by a particular person’ – as when you say a word is ‘not in someone’s dictionary.’ The third use, a figurative one, is to refer to a person having as much knowledge of a topic as a dictionary: sometimes we may call a person ‘a walking dictionary.’ The fourth use is in the idiom ‘to have swallowed a dictionary,’ to describe someone who has a very large vocabulary, usually including many obscure words. • Then there are several pages of compounds using the word dictionary, like dictionary writer and dictionary catalogue. • For all meanings, subcategories, and compounds, illustrative quotations are given, with details about where these come from. Thus under the first meaning category, there are no fewer than 31 quotations, from 1480 to 2006; a 2006 one is from the New York version of Time Out and runs: ‘I  felt like I  needed a cowboy–English dictionary to read the menu.’ By clicking on any quotation source, you can find a list of other quotations in the Dictionary from the same source. The OED Online has many other general resources. There is, for example, a ‘Timeline’ of first citations in fifty-year blocks, from the year 1000 up to the present day. This enables you to compare how productive periods have been in the introduction of new words. There is also a ‘Historical Thesaurus’ giving synonyms for given words at various points in history. The OED Online also contains a list of the top thousand citation sources: the most used is The Times newspaper (42,840 quotations), with Shakespeare coming second with 32,952. A national treasure

When OED1 was published in 1928, there were celebrations galore. A copy was formally presented to King George V and also to US President Coolidge. James was not forgotten, and a special medal was struck in his honour by the British Academy.35 Praise for the work was fulsome then and still is today. At one of the 1928 celebrations, the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, called the dictionary a

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‘national treasure’; and today you can read on Harvard University’s library website that the dictionary ‘is widely accepted as the most complete record of the English language ever assembled.’36 A true landmark, parented and nurtured by James Murray. Notes 1 Murray (1977), p. 110. 2 Ibid., p. 109. 3 The picture, which is on the front cover of Murray’s (1977) book, is by an unknown photographer. 4 The supporter was Frederick Furnivall. Cited in Mugglestone (2005), p. 215. 5 Cited in Mugglestone (2005), p. 8. 6 Murray (1977), p. 53. 7 This is argued in www.wired.co.uk/article/the-oxford-english-wiktionary. 8 Mugglestone (2005), p. 12. 9 Citations in this paragraph are from Murray (1977), pp. 32 and 52. 10 Though these didn’t in fact get published. 11 Murray (1977), p. 61. 12 Ibid., p. 65. 13 Ibid., p. 330. 14 Ibid., p. 144. 15 Ibid., p. 242. 16 Ibid., p. 88. 17 Ibid., p. 101. 18 The book was Lane (1836), cited by Murray (1977), p. 182. 19 Winchester (2003), p. 201. 20 Murray (1977), p. 276. 21 Mugglestone (2005), p. 31. 22 Ibid., p. 35. 23 Ibid., p. 22. 24 Ibid., p. 30. 25 Ibid., p. 27. 26 Murray (1977), p. 211. 27 Ibid., p. 278. 28 Ibid., p. 291. 29 Ibid., p. 293. 30 Ibid., p. 294. 31 Ibid., p. 200. 32 Ibid., p. 205. 33 From the OED’s web page: https://public-oed-com.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/history/ #into-the-electronic-age. 34 This section is based on the e-resources from Chapter 3 of Johnson (2021) and relates to the version of the OED current in early 2023. 35 The celebrations are described in detail in Gilliver (2016), a book which provides a full account of ‘the making of the OED.’ 36 https://library.harvard.edu/services-tools/oxford-english-dictionary.

11 THE SPREAD OF ENGLISH Braj Kachru and his concentric circles

As we saw in Chapter 8, English crossed the Atlantic and established itself in large parts of the American continent. Since then, there has been a massive spread of the language around the world, so much so that today English is indeed a truly international language. This chapter looks in detail at some of the versions of English which have emerged in the past two centuries or are now in the process of emerging. We’ll consider some of the changes to the language which have naturally occurred on its journey round the world. The ‘landmark figure’ of the chapter is the Indian linguist Braj Kachru. His work on these new varieties of the language has done much to establish what has become an important linguistic discipline: the study of ‘World Englishes.’

The language of settlers

In the time of Chapter 2’s King Alfred, English was spoken just in England, with a population of under two million. Even by Chapter 6, and seven hundred years later, we find Richard Mulcaster, in his 1582 Elementarie, declaring that ‘our English . . . is of small reatch, it stretcheth no further then this Iland of ours, naie not there ouer all.’1 At that time, the population of ‘this Iland of ours’ was just over five million. And today, four hundred years after Mulcaster wrote that? English is now used everywhere in the world, and if you include those who speak it as a foreign language, the number of users is around a billion and a half. What happened? Whatever it was, it was something extraordinary, leading to a spread far greater than that of other colonial languages like French, Portuguese and Spanish. We’ll spend some time looking in detail at how English has spread,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-14

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noting some of the ways in which its evolving varieties differ from ‘standard’ English.2 English came to be used in the US through a substantial migration of the British to that part of the Americas. Similar migrations brought the English language to other parts of the world, particularly Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Chapter 8 showed how American English grew to differ from the British variety, and it’s not surprising that the same happened to English in those other countries. So Australians had to find words to describe phenomena not found in other parts of the world. An example is the word koala, for that uniquely Australian animal. The Aboriginal name was gulawan, or gula for short. The name means ‘no water’ and was used because the animal seemed to need to drink very little. The initial ‘g’ in gula could be pronounced as a ‘k,’ and the word was imported into English as koala. Another innovation comes about because Australians have a liking for informality and have developed ways of forming new words to reflect this. One way is by shortening, or ‘clipping,’ words. So a ‘barbecue’ is barbie, ‘university’ is uni and ‘Australia’ is Oz. Another way is to use the suffix -ie, giving mushie for ‘mushroom,’ chewie for ‘chewing gum’ and chalkie for ‘teacher.’ There are many other characteristic features associated with the Australian variety of English, and the same is true of Canadian and New Zealand versions. The language of power

In other parts of the world, English arrived without any substantial migration of Brits. Often the British Empire played an important role. British colonialists went into large parts of Africa – including the Sudan, Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa; also into Asia – India, Pakistan, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong and elsewhere. The colonialists brought English with them, and they gave it power – it became the language of administration, education, the media, the legislature, higher education. Again, as English spread, it changed. Thus in Indian English we find Hindi words making an appearance. Here are two headlines taken from Indian newspapers. One reads: DESU workers gherao staff. Gherao is a Hindi word referring to a protest in which ‘workers detain their employers or managers on the premises, refusing to let them depart until their claims are granted.’ The other is: JNU karamcharis begin dharna. Karamcharis are ‘cleaners,’ and a dharna is a protest which involves sitting outside the property of someone like an employer, not eating or moving until a demand is met.3 It’s not just in words, but in all other linguistic areas too, that Indian English shows differences from British English. So a particularly common feature of Indian English is the overuse (in comparison with British English) of

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‘continuous’ form of the verb – forms which use part of the verb be together with the -ing form. Here are three examples:4 They were knowing the names We are having our house in Thema You’re not being audible. In British English the verb forms would be knew, have and are not. A language for all

What we have considered so far is only part of the story. English is now used throughout the world, in countries which may have no colonial ties with Britain, and with governments of any political persuasion. You hear it ‘in Iceland, Finland, Latvia, Russia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Korea, China, Indonesia, Morocco, Ethiopia, Mali, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina’ . . . used ‘for science, technology, medicine, computers, business, trade, shipping, aviation, diplomacy, international organizations, mass media, entertainment, journalism, youth culture, education, travel sports.’5 English is now an international language  – a ‘world language,’ in fact. In all these countries, too, we find that the language becomes modified away from the standard variety. Take Chinese English, for example. The linguist Zhichang Xu did an analysis of the syntactic features of this variety. Here are two of his features, commonly used by Chinese speakers:6 Sometimes just play basketball, and sometimes go to the Beijing library I think many many easy words we have forgotten.

A subject pronoun (e.g. I or we) is omitted The object (easy words) is put before the subject (we)

It’s easy to find versions of English that differ much more dramatically from standard English than the ones we have so far considered. Take ‘Solomon Island Pidgin,’ for example. The islands are in the SW Pacific Ocean and were under British protection until they gained independence in 1978. In the early 1900s, labourers from the islands came into contact with English, used throughout the region as a common means of communication, particularly between workers and their supervisors. The islanders developed their own pidgin version, and it is still widely used today. Here’s part of an advertisement broadcast on the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service in 1971. It’s for what is described as a ‘namber wan’ razor blade – Gillette: Paul: Hei, Peter! Baibai yu leit long parti blong Mary, ye. Peter: Orait, orait. Mi kam nau.

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Paul: Yu sheiv tudei, or no mor? Peter: Mi sheiv tudei, bat-e wichwei, yu tink mi luk-e no gud yet? Paul: Yes. Yu luk-e not veri klin this morning, and this taim mi teikim kam wan-fela ‘Gillette Thin Blade.’ The language is clearly based on English, and there are plenty of English words in the passage, though the spelling is sometimes different from standard English; so there’s parti for ‘party,’ nau for ‘now’ and sheiv for ‘shave.’ With some words you may have to think a little about what exactly they mean: baibai, for example (based on ‘bye bye’), and wichwei (‘which way’), but what do they both mean in the passage? The grammar too is different from standard English. Look for example at the passage’s questions. In standard English, to form some questions we start with part of the verb do, followed by the sentence’s subject, so it would be ‘Did you shave today?’ and ‘Do you think I  don’t look good?’ Notice from the passage what Solomon Island Pidgin does. There’s a loose translation of the passage in Note 7.7 Solomon Island pidgin was originally developed as what is called a ‘lingua franca’  – a language used for communication between people who do not share the same first language. Sometimes a lingua franca is used within the borders of one country where different first languages are spoken in different regions. Hindi, for example, plays that role in India. A lingua franca can also be used between countries, and English commonly plays this role – so much so that linguists have an acronym – ELF – for ‘English as a lingua franca.’ One context in which linguists have studied ELF is the European one, and they speak of an emerging variety of the language called Euro-English. The language is certainly often used as a lingua franca across the continent. According to a 2005 European Survey, 13% of EU citizens speak English as their native language (mainly in Britain and Ireland), while another 38% of EU citizens claim to have sufficient skills in English to hold a conversation.8 What are the linguistic characteristics of Euro-English? Jenkins (2003) discusses pronunciation, and it is not surprising that two standard English sounds which many non-native speakers of English find difficulty in ­pronouncing – the ‘th /ð/’ in this and the ‘th /θ/ in think – should be replaced by many Euro- English speakers with /d/ and /t/. Seidlhofer (2001) considers some grammatical features. Among her findings is that Euro-English speakers sometimes omit definite or indefinite articles, saying for example our countries have signed agreement [instead of ‘an agreement’] about this. They also tend to make plural some nouns which in British English are normally singular, examples being informations and advices. Another particularly interesting characteristic Seidlhofer discusses is exemplified in the Euro-English sentence I look forward to see you tomorrow. Here the user has been seduced by the fact that the word ‘to’ can be followed by an infinitive (linguists call it an ‘infinitive marker’), as in ‘I want to go,’ and this has led him or her to produce ‘to see.’

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But in fact here the word ‘to’ is a preposition, part of the phrase look forward to, and this phrase is followed in standard English by the -ing form: it should be look forward to seeing you. To finish this look at the dramatic spread of English, it’s worth mentioning how English has made its way into other languages, in specific words and phrases. These Japanese examples are taken from McArthur (1998.)9 Notice how the English words have been modified to look and sound like Japanese ones: Standard English Scotch whisky leadership hit and run ice cream

Japanese version Sukotchi uisukii ridashippu hitto endo ran aisukurimu

So all in all, English today is certainly very far from being (in Mulcaster’s phrase) ‘of small reatch.’ It comes in very many different forms and is put to very many different uses throughout the world. The complexities of English world-wide cry out for the attention of linguists. A man and ‘an institution’

The landmark figure who has given us a framework within which to view the spread of English is an Indian linguist. His name is Braj Bihari Kachru. He was born in 1932, in Kashmir’s largest city, Srinagar. His early upbringing was rather complicated. His father, known as Lala Sahab, was a teacher, the oldest of four brothers. The four shared a house together, and Braj spent much of his childhood in the company of innumerable cousins. His mother died when he was just five, and he was brought up by Lala Sahab and one of his aunts. Braj was misdiagnosed at an early age as having a rheumatic heart condition. So he didn’t attend school, and his early education was by private tutors. Lala Sahab was something of a scholar, and the large house was often filled not just with cousins but with Lala’s teacher friends and men of letters. Stimulated by this intellectual environment, Braj started writing poetry at a very early age; it’s said that by the age of eleven he had his own letterhead, used for correspondence with the editors of literary magazines.10 Kashmir is a place with a background of multiculturalism and multilingualism. For a long time it was a centre for Hindu, Buddhist and Sanskrit learning. But in the fourteenth century it fell under Moghul rule, as they spread from their Central Asian homes into India. Their religion was Islam and their language Persian. The Hindus became a marginalised minority, and the mother-tongue of the people  – Kashmiri  – became neglected. Then in the mid-nineteenth century, along came English. Within such a background,

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someone with an interest in language, like Braj, could not fail to develop an appreciation for the richness and complexity of the way languages are used. Also, with the suppression of his mother tongue, he would have developed at an early age a sense of the need to defend minority and endangered languages. It’s not surprising that his first book, published in 1969, was a reference grammar of Kashmiri. Braj’s initial intention was to study Sanskrit or philosophy, but he soon changed his mind in favour of English. He thought about studying in Allahabad (now called Prayagraj), in the state of Uttar Pradesh, considerably further eastwards, and close to the Ganges.11 But he found the climate there oppressive, so started off at a college in Srinagar, moving on later to Allahabad, where he was first exposed to linguistics. In 1957 he attended a summer school at the Deccan College Research Institute (to the south, in the state of Maharashtra), and it was there that he met Yamuna, who was to become both his wife and another well-known linguist. It was there too that, he said, he began ‘to think seriously about Indian English; its status, roles, and academic position.’12 In 1962, Braj won a British Council scholarship to follow the Diploma in Applied Linguistics course at the University of Edinburgh. The 1960s were exciting times for linguistics in Edinburgh. The phoneticians were involved in developing a speech synthesiser, while others were undertaking a survey of Scottish dialects. The linguist Michael Halliday was also there, in the process of developing his own distinctive linguistic theory.13 There too, as a visiting professor, was John Rupert Firth, a real father figure to British linguistics. He became a particular influence on Braj. He was familiar with the Indian context, having spent eight years teaching in Lahore, and was keen to promote the study of Indian languages. A central idea in Firth’s linguistics was the notion of ‘context of situation,’ which gave importance to all aspects of context when studying languages. As we shall see later, ‘context of situation’ became an important idea for Braj too. When he had completed his Diploma course, Braj stayed on in Edinburgh to do a PhD. Encouraged by Firth, his topic was ‘An Analysis of Some Features of Indian English: A Study in Linguistic Method.’ While he was in Edinburgh, Braj met Robert Lees, head of the Linguistics Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the United States. Lees loved nothing better than a good academic argument, and he was impressed by Braj’s ability to hold his own in this respect. Lees was seeking staff for his department, and wondered whether the person he called ‘the Indian boy’ would be interested. The Indian boy was indeed, and after a year teaching in Lucknow, Braj moved to Urbana, where he stayed for the rest of his life. His US car numberplate announced who he was, and in what year he went to Urbana: it was BBK 63. The Illinois Linguistics Department was well regarded, and came in time to be ranked as the third best in the country. While he was there, Braj did a good

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deal of writing – over a hundred articles and twenty-five books in all. Among his best-known works are an edited collection: The Other Tongue (1982), and The Alchemy of English (1986), with a subtitle which well captures Braj’s interests: ‘The spread, functions and models of non-native Englishes.’ He also took on several administrative jobs – head of the Department of Linguistics, director of the Division of English as an International Language – a centre that had started off as a service unit teaching English but became a research institute – and director of the Center for Advanced Study. He was also a president of the Linguistic Society of America. Braj was well liked in Urbana by both colleagues and students. ‘He delighted everyone who met him,’ two ex-students wrote. ‘He struck an impressive figure, tall and slim, with thick, dark, curly hair, handsome face, inviting smile, and a strong voice.’14 His sense of humour was particularly appreciated, and a biographical sketch of him (appearing in the journal World Englishes) noted that ‘there are very few people who are as quick with repartees as Braj, or who can use as outrageous similes and metaphors and get away with them as Braj.’15 His jokes were ‘rib-cracking,’ another says.16 Above all, he was respected as a pandit (a scholar) and was often referred to as ‘Kachruji’ – in Hindi the suffix -ji indicates respect. And, as one writer puts it: ‘Braj Kachru is not a man, he is an institution.’17 Braj is also described as a ‘happy family man.’ He and Yamuna had two children: daughter Amita became a medical doctor and son Shamit a research physicist. Yamuna was also a professor of linguistics at Illinois Urbana, and together they certainly took good care of their students. One remarked that ‘Braj and Yamuna were like our parents, constantly gorging us on delicious meals and hosting fascinating discussions in their living room.’18 Yamuna was suddenly and unexpectedly taken ill in 2013, and she died. Braj’s health took a turn for the worse, and he too passed away in 2016, at the age of 84. His death was recorded in India as well as in the United States: the North Indian newspaper, The Tribune, ran the headline in August 2016: ‘Indian-American Professor Emeritus Braj Kachru dead.’ The headline in The Indian Express was more expressive: ‘Braj B. Kachru: Language warrior rests his case.’ Concentric circles

In 1985, Braj published a paper in which he represents the spread of English in terms of three concentric circles. In the ‘inner circle’ are the ‘English as a first language’ countries, like Britain, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The number of inner circle speakers is estimated at 320–380 million.19 The ‘outer circle’ are those countries which have been brought under British control, largely by its Empire. They include the African and Asian countries listed earlier, where the use of English was not caused by large-scale

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immigration from Britain but by the adoption of English in powerful spheres. The term ‘English as a Second Language’ is sometimes associated with this circle, the word ‘second’ capturing the particular importance that the language held in these countries. Outer circle users are estimated at between 150 and 300 million. Braj’s third, ‘expanding,’ circle includes countries like China. English is commonly used within them, though they’ve usually had no special colonial relationship with Britain. In this context some speak of ‘English as a Foreign Language.’ There are up to a billion speakers in this circle. Kachru’s concentric-circle model is not without its critics. Some find it rather simplistic, reducing to three circles what is in fact a very much more complex world picture. For example, many countries have considerable linguistic diversity within them, with English being used in many different ways and at many different levels of proficiency. But the model has become widely accepted and at the very least provides a framework for thinking about the international uses of English. ‘Writhing snake pits of errors’

We have seen several times in earlier chapters that new, or non-standard, versions of English are certain to attract criticism from users of the well-­established, standard varieties. In Chapter 8, for example, we saw Brits talking of ‘American debasements’ and describing American English as ‘barbarous.’ The varieties we’ve met in this chapter have nearly all received similar treatment. So we find Louisa Anne Meredith, an English writer who emigrated to Australia in 1839, declaring that the locals ‘snuffle dreadfully; just the same nasal twang as many Americans have.’20 And, irony of ironies, we also find Americans, whose own variety was so criticised by some Brits, dealing out the same treatment to Australian English: William Churchill, a member of the American Philological Society, visited Australia in 1911 and described Australian English as ‘the most brutal maltreatment that has ever been inflicted on the mother-tongue of the great English-speaking nations.’21 It’s the same for nearly all the other varieties. One purist complains bitterly about a sin which Singaporean English often, he says, displays: sentences without verbs. Restaurant waiters, for example, might ask Any drinks for you?, without a verb in sight – the purist wants to hear Would you like any drinks? In fact, the linguist Halliday reports that some people regard Singaporean English as a ‘writhing snake pit of errors.’22 Not surprisingly, pidgin versions of English come in for particular vitriol. Here are some things people have said about one pidgin language: ‘a screamingly funny way of speaking,’ ‘a wondrous mishmash,’ an ‘ugly jargon,’ ‘a dreadful parody of the Anglo-Saxon language,’ ‘ghastly mutilated English,’ ‘of cannibalistic primativeness,’ ‘the most dreadful language of all.’23 Comments like these suggest a belief held by some

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unenlightened inner-circle folk that it’s the ‘inner circle’ native speakers who ‘own’ the English language and that varieties used in the other circles are no so much ‘non-standard’ as ‘sub-standard’ – just plain ‘wrong.’ Indeed it’s said that a common exam question in India had the rubric: ‘Correct the errors in the following sentences of Indian English.’24 But can we really call the inner circle countries the ‘owners’ of English? The statistics we saw earlier about the number of English users in each of the three circles suggest that the ‘ownership’ lies elsewhere. Here are some more statistics suggesting the same, and they may surprise you: • the percentage of English spoken around the world between native speakers is 4%. • the percentage between native speakers and non-native speakers is 22%. • the percentage between non-native speakers is 74%.25 Throughout his work, Braj argues for a move away from what he calls the ‘linguistic authoritarianism of the “native-speaker says” variety’26  – making native-speaker usage the model of how the English language should be. This means, Braj argues, that when we come across a non-native utterance which differs from native-speaker usage, we should not regard it as an error. It’s simply a deviation and can in some cases be thought of as a creative innovation. So the Indian who says They were knowing the names is not making a mistake; he or she is using an accepted form of Indian English, which happens to differ from British English. Similarly, for the Australian who talks about a chalkie, the Chinese speaker’s I  think many many easy words we have forgotten, the Solomon Islander who says Yu sheiv tudei, or no mor? and the European who comes up with I look forward to see you tomorrow. Braj’s firm belief is that we should give legitimacy to the non-native varieties of English. They are acceptable and distinct varieties with their own identity rather than deformed versions of some outside ‘standard’ model like British English. His own studies of Indian English27 are landmarks for this reason, and his attitude has had the effect of helping to liberate ‘the language of hundreds of millions of non-native speakers of English from the stigma of second-class speaker status, giving them ‘a new pride and voice.’28 The ‘-isation process’

Braj develops this way of looking at non-native varieties in a paper which appeared in 1976. He lists various ‘attitudinal sins’ which unenlightened inner-circle speakers commit. One is ‘the sin of not recognising the non-native varieties of English as culture-bound codes of communication.’ It’s not, he thinks, at all strange that when a language is transported to a different culture, it should undergo changes. ‘How else,’ he asks, ‘can a “transplanted” language

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acquire functional appropriateness?’ So when English came to India, it became ‘Indianised’ – ‘one of our own, of our own caste, our creed, our sect and of our tradition.’29 It was developed to express ‘uniquely Indian sociocultural and ideational content: the taste of curry, the sounds of Carnatic (South Indian classical) music, the fine distinctions of caste and taboos, and so forth.’30 It’s here that we see how Braj’s thinking has been influenced by Firth’s ‘context of situation’ idea, mentioned earlier. Braj’s view is that we should regard – and study  – non-native varieties of English within the geographical and cultural context in which these new varieties appear. In India, English became ‘Indianised,’ and we can see more examples of the ‘-isation process’ in the other varieties we looked at earlier. So Australian English becomes ‘Australianised’ by creating new words to express Australian phenomena (like the koala), and it reflects its desire for informality by clipping words and using the -ie suffix. Another of the sins Braj considers is ‘the sin of ignoring the systematicness of the non-native varieties of English.’ The comment we saw earlier that a pidgin language is ‘a wondrous mishmash’ contains the common but incorrect assumption of those unenlightened inner-circle folk that non-native varieties are just slapdash, careless examples of an English which is not governed by rules at all. But, Braj argues, there are various ‘systematic’ processes which control what a non-native variety will be like. One is the influence of the user’s first language. Thus the Indian frequent use of continuous forms (in They were knowing their names), happens because Indian languages contain a continuous structure used like this. Similarly, the Chinese English habit of putting the object before the subject (I think many many easy words we have forgotten) shows, Xu says, the influence of Mandarin. The omission of subject pronouns (Sometimes just play basketball) is also something that is brought over from Mandarin. Then there are the Euro-English plural forms (informations, advices) which occur because many European languages use these words in the plural. You can also see first-language influence in our Japanese phrases. You might say that the spelling of Sukotchi uisukii is English that has been ‘Japanese-ised.’ Another factor we mustn’t forget, Braj argues, is that the speakers of nonnative varieties have been learning English as a foreign or second language, and their English includes features that occur when anyone is learning an unfamiliar language. Take the Euro-English omission of articles, for example (our countries have signed agreement about this). Many European languages have article systems, so omission of articles in English can’t always be blamed on the influence of a first language. But omitting articles is something that many learners of English as a second or foreign language do, whatever their native language; it’s a way of ‘simplifying’ the language being learned. This is also true of the way that our Solomon Island pidgin speakers ask questions, without using part of the verb ‘do’ (it’s not ‘do you shave today’?, but

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Yu sheiv tudei?) You may well have come across second or foreign language learners who make the business of asking questions simpler by doing the same. The study of World Englishes

Deeply embedded in Braj’s views on language varieties is a plural noun: we should speak not of ‘World English’ but of ‘World Englishes.’ The study of the language’s varieties world-wide has today become a flourishing linguistic discipline, and there are now many books on the topic, some containing the plural ‘Englishes’ in their title. Braj did much on an administrative and planning level to further the development of this discipline. He and his colleagues realised that those who taught English as a foreign or second language were unaware of the work that was being done in the field of world Englishes, so they co-founded the International Association of World Englishes. Braj also co-edited the journal World Language English and changed its title to World Englishes. Both the Association and the journal are active today. Also, in his 1985 paper, Braj expresses the view that the time was ripe to set up ‘an international institute for the study of and research on English across cultures.’ He went into some detail as to its functions. It would have four aims: to provide an archive of materials, graduate teaching programmes, research programmes and international exchange programmes. The suggestion is explored further by David Crystal in a 2019 special issue of the World Englishes journal entitled ‘Honouring the Life and Work of Braj B. Kachru.’ Crystal laments that no such international institute has yet materialised. When it does, he suggests, ‘we could call it simply “The Kachru Institute”.’31 Braj’s administrative and planning initiatives help to make him a landmark figure. But more important is his pioneering contribution to the way we think of, and study, the spread of English  – a highly important phase in the language’s history. Notes 1 Mulcaster (1582), p. 256. 2 At different times and in different places, different versions of English will be ­regarded as the standard. Thus American English, so criticised by some Brits, has come to be regarded as standard today in many parts of the world. Here we mean any language version that is taken to be the standard. 3 The examples are cited in Kachru (1992a), p. 309. The first headline is from the Indian Express and the second from The Statesman. The definition of gherao is from the Oxford English Dictionary. 4 Kirkpatrick (2007), p. 94. Kirkpatrick takes them from de Ersson (2005). 5 The quotation is from Johnson (2021), p. 172, who takes the list of topic areas from Phillipson (1992). 6 Xu (2008). The explanations given on the right are simplifications of Xu’s. 7 The passage is taken from Johnson (2021), p. 4. Here is a loose translation:

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Hey, Peter! You’ll be late for Mary’s party soon. Okay, okay, I’m coming. Haven’t you shaved today? Yes, I have, but what’s wrong, do you think I don’t look right? Yes, you don’t look very clean-shaven this morning, but I just so happen to have brought a Gillette Thin Blade with me. 8 The report is Europeans and their Languages, European Commission, Special ­Eurobarometer Report, p. 243. 9 McArthur (1998), pp. 27 and 17. McArthur acknowledges that some of the examples are from Kay (1986). 10 Mentioned in Biographical Sketch (1992). 11 In fact it is close to the confluence of three rivers, the Ganges, the Yamuna and the Sarasvati. 12 Kachru (1992b). 13 Halliday’s linguistic theory became known as ‘systemic grammar.’ 14 Sridhar and Sridhar (2019). 15 Biographical Sketch (1992). 16 Bamgbose (2019). 17 Biographical Sketch (1992). 18 Lowenberg (2019). 19 All the speaker estimates are taken from Crystal (1997). 20 Meredith (1844), cited in Blair and Collins (2001b). 21 Churchill (1911), p. 14. 22 Webster (2019). 23 The language is Tok Pisin, spoken in Papua New Guinea. The quotations are from Mühlhäusler et al. (2003), p. 1. 24 The rubric is mentioned in Sridhar and Sridhar (2019), p. 11. 25 The percentages are given in Graddol (2007). 26 Kachru (1985), p. 25. 27 Studies like Kachru (1983). 28 Sridhar and Sridhar (2019), p. 2. 29 Kachru (1992a), p. 309 is quoting Rao (1978), p. 421. 30 Sridhar and Sridhar (2019), p. 262. 31 Crystal (2019), p. 83.

12 WHAT NEXT? David Crystal and the future of English

The future always holds a particular fascination for us all. So perhaps at the end of this book about the history of the English language, we should give a thought to its future. How will it develop? Will it still be a global language in fifty years’ time, or will some other language have ousted it from its present powerful position? It’s important that we should not present our thoughts about the future as facts; they can really only be speculations. But we can at the very least make sure that our speculations are informed ones – ‘guesses’ perhaps, but not wild ones. This chapter looks particularly at the work of David Crystal, a linguist who has thought and written a lot about the future of English. He considers what factors make a language important on the world stage, and this leads him to informed speculation about the possible future status of English. He also looks at the present, particularly at the rapid growth of electronically mediated communication – a variety which is likely to continue to develop and spread in the future.

A star in the ascendant

Holyhead is a small town on the island of Anglesey, in north Wales. The town’s population is about 11,000. Rather an out-of-the-way place, you might think: it takes around four and a half hours by car to reach Cardiff, the capital of Wales, and five and a half to drive to London. In fact the closest major city is Dublin, which lies some seventy miles cross the water, due west of Holyhead. This proximity to Ireland is the town’s piece of good fortune. London passengers catch the train to Holyhead, then over two million of them a year take the ferry to Dublin. Holyhead is a major gateway to Ireland and its capital. But the town has seen some bad times. Being a port, it was bombed quite

DOI: 10.4324/9781003275053-15

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heavily during the Second World War, and indeed as recently as 1988, it was designated ‘the most depressed town in Britain.’ Holyhead is half a world away from the city of Srinagar, where Chapter 11’s Braj Kachru was born. The two places have little in common, but they share one characteristic. We described Srinagar, you may remember, as a multicultural and multilingual place, where you might well expect someone like Kachru  – with his sensitivity towards cultural and linguistic differences  – to be brought up. So too is Holyhead. With Ireland close by, the town has a large Irish contingent (about a third of the population at one point). So there is Gaelic to be heard. Plenty of English, too, with many retired folk moving there from the north of England. And according to the United Kingdom Census of 2001, 47% of the residents in the town can speak Welsh. Holyhead is indeed a fit location to produce linguists attuned to multicultural and multilingual issues. David Crystal is such a one. He was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, in 1941. But he spent his early years in the Welsh town, and Welsh is his second language. In his book of memoirs, entitled Just a Phrase I’m Going Through, he records some early interest in language matters: learning to write was fun, he says, and he was reputedly a ‘good speller.’ But he didn’t much enjoy his years at primary school. As for hobbies, he spent a lot of time reading, going to the cinema, listening to music – ‘Some kids collect car numbers,’ he says. ‘I collected Mozart’s Köchel numbers.’1 The household consisted of himself, his mother, (Mary Agnes) and Grandma. His father, he believed, had been killed in the war. When Grandma died in 1951, Mary Agnes decided to move to Liverpool to stay with one of her brothers and his family. There, David’s Welsh accent took on Scouse overtones. His enjoyment of music continued; he learned the clarinet and later played the saxophone in a group which had some success – he was known for a while as ‘David Saxo,’ and, he says, it was through the group that he met Molly, the girl who was to become his wife. He also began a highly prolific writing career by producing some short stories, together with a letter written at the age of fourteen to the Sunday Express newspaper about the pleasures of train travel in Britain. He also learned languages: French, Latin, Greek and some German, plus a tongue which he himself invented – a kind of ‘Graeco-Latin,’ he calls it. He and a friend used the language to exchange coded messages during woodwork lessons. The English language work in school, though, left him cold. The lessons, he says, were ‘full of the strictures of prescriptivism, the parsing of boring texts, the counting of metrical beats, and the spotting of similes.’ All in all, he found ‘mother-tongue grammar a big bore.’2 Armed with good A-Level results, and despite his boredom with mothertongue grammar, he decided to study English at university. He chose University College, London. David enjoyed the literature component of the course, but ‘the linguistic subjects,’ he says, ‘did not come alive.’3 There was even a course

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called ‘Introduction to Linguistics,’ and he found this ‘confusing, ponderous, and unmotivating.’ How can this be, you might ask, for a man who was to become a celebrated linguist and who, not so many years down the line, was himself to deliver lectures on topics like the ‘introduction to linguistics’ . . . as well indeed as writing a book entitled What Is Linguistics?4 Perhaps it was the fault of his teachers, both at school and at university, who just didn’t make the subject interesting. Then along came Randolph Quirk, one of the UCL lecturers. Quirk’s first lecture, David says, ‘changed my life.’5 In no time David developed a hunger for linguistics – particularly phonetics, as provided by two other UCL lecturers, A. C. Gimson and J. D. O’Connor. David loved the subject and found he had an aptitude for it. As his degree course was coming to a close, David, who not so long ago had found linguistics ‘confusing’ and ‘unmotivating,’ was sold on the idea of becoming a linguist. Quirk gave him the opportunity; he was working on a ‘Survey of English Usage,’ the aim of which was to ‘provide description of the grammatical features of all varieties of spoken and written English.’6 Quirk needed a research assistant. He offered David the job . . . as long as he managed a first class degree in his finals. A complication then arose. Somewhere along the line David picked up tuberculosis, and soon before finals he was confined to hospital, where he had to stay for six months. He didn’t waste his time there. He did some writing – short stories, a radio documentary and even a novel; and ‘it was during those six months,’ he says, ‘that I think I found my métier’ – to write.7 It was decided that he would have to take his finals in the hospital. These included the phonetics practical exam, which involved producing an odd array of speech sounds for recognition and transcription. Nurses and doctors alike were puzzled by these noises emanating from David’s bed as he practised for the exam. But the result of it all was the first class degree that he required, and so he became a research assistant in London. His role in the Survey was to do with prosody – rhythm and intonation – and his task was to add prosodic information to the transcriptions of the spoken texts the Survey was collecting. It was a topic of such interest to David that he started a PhD in the area. Before the PhD was completed in 1966, quite a lot else happened in David’s life. In 1963 he applied for, and got, an assistant lectureship at the University of North Wales – in Bangor, a north Wales town looking across the water to Anglesey. The Department of Linguistics there was ‘the first specialist department in the country.’8 1964 too was memorable; still working on his PhD, he also learned to drive . . . and he got married, to that same Molly whom he had met in Liverpool. Later that same year, their son Steven was born. As if all this weren’t enough, in 1965, when he was just twenty-four, David became secretary of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. He also published a book on a topic that had interested him for years – language and religion. His star was well and truly in the ascendant.

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‘Linguistics and . . . ’

David’s book was entitled Linguistics, Language and Religion. The title reveals something that is right at the centre of his work, particularly in the few years to follow, but also throughout his entire life. It links linguistics to another area, in this case religion. After two years at Bangor, David – together with various other linguists from there – moved across to the University of Reading, which had expressed the intention to open a ‘Linguistic Science’ department, with the additional allure of an attached phonetics laboratory. It was there that we shall see the link between linguistics and other subject areas – the ‘linguistics and’ pattern – being explored a number of times. The next ‘linguistics and’ initiative intimately involved David. It was ‘linguistics and speech therapy.’ Speech therapists are concerned with managing speech problems and disorders. In his memoirs, David tells how he received a phone call from the local hospital asking whether he could help with a little girl called Gillie who had a serious language delay. Perhaps, the doctors thought, a linguist might be able to identify her problems. David went down to the hospital, took notes on Gillie’s speech and, because of his linguistic training, was able to compare it with that of a normal child of the same age. He was also able to make suggestions for remedial work to help Gillie improve. She did. It was an important moment. Up until then, training for speech therapists had been based on medicine; David had shown that linguistics could play a role too. Gillie was followed by many other patients, and eventually a ‘linguistics and’ degree course – ‘Linguistics and Language Pathology’ – was started at Reading. There was also a personal reason for David’s commitment to speech therapy. In 1968, Molly gave birth to Timmy. He suffered from a serious heart disorder and also had a cleft lip and palate. Lip and palate were improved through surgery, but he died following a heart operation, in 1971. ‘After Timmy,’ David writes, ‘I  was emotionally totally committed to doing whatever I could to promote the growth of speech therapy as a profession.’9 The book which David wrote on the topic, along with two Reading colleagues, was entitled The Grammatical Language of Language Disability. It was published in 1976 and is dedicated to the memory of Timmy. In that same year, David suffered another loss when his wife Molly died. Speech therapy was not the only ‘linguistics and’ exploration being undertaken in Reading’s Department of Linguistic Science, and several of them involved David. The Department had a strong commitment to the field of foreign language learning and teaching, and David played an active role in this, among other things with a book co-authored by a fellow UCL graduate, Derek Davy, and published in 1975. It was called Advanced Conversational English and included a number of authentic conversations, recorded and transcribed, with commentaries added to help learners’ comprehension. Yet

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another ‘linguistics and’ area was first language teaching. At the time, some were questioning whether school pupils should be formally taught the grammar of their own language. David argued that they should. With all his involvement in ‘linguistics and’ activities, David’s main interests in the 1970s were thus focused on the applications of linguistics. In his own words: ‘That was how the 1970s went, for me. I started the decade off as a linguist, but ended it very firmly as an applied linguist.’10 David met Hilary at an in-service speech therapy course. ‘Whoever loved that loved not at first sight,’ David exclaims in his memoirs.11 The two were married within the year, and she has contributed significantly both personally and professionally to David’s work ever since. She has co-authored three books with him, as well as writing books of her own, including for children. Hilary was not the only addition to David’s family at this time. We saw that when he was young, he believed his father had died during the war. But when he was about nine, he opened a letter which contained divorce papers. His mother had never once made mention of a divorce. Was David’s father, then, still alive? One day in the mid-1980s, the bank manager parent of a child attending David’s clinic commented to him, ‘Funny name, yours. I  have a client called Crystal.’ It turned out to be David’s father, Samuel Cyril. At last father and son met. ‘A teddy-bear of a man.’ David describes his dad. ‘White wavy hair. Quite thick, rimmed glasses. His eyes smiled.  .  .  . And he called me “boy”.’12 Much later, in 1991, there was another surprise. David was contacted by a person who turned out to be his half-brother. During their meeting, David records that ‘there was a point where I was accumulating relatives at an average rate of one every five minutes.’13 There was a ‘new’ uncle – his father’s brother, Hubert – and several half cousins. He also discovered that the family had a Jewish side. David was, he suddenly realised, ‘Welsh Scouse Irish Catholic Jewish.’ When Samuel Cyril died in 1999, there was one more family surprise. He had written a short memoir in which he revealed that his grandfather and family had fled from Lithuania in the 1880s. The family home had been in the Lithuanian town today called Ukmerge. David visited the town but was unable to find any evidence of family roots. As the 80s progressed, David began to feel that he was ready for a change. Reading University, like all others in the UK, was suffering financially and was keen to shed staff, both academic and administrative. David found that his administrative load was increasingly intolerable, and he decided he’d had enough. He acted decisively: he left Reading, bought a house in Holyhead, and from henceforth became a freelancer – or, as some preferred to call him, an ‘independent scholar.’14 His activities from then onwards show an extraordinary energy and dizzying variety. He wrote two language-related encyclopaedias: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987) and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995). He also worked on general encyclopaedias, producing The Cambridge Encyclopedia in 1990. The Holyhead

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house became what he calls a ‘veritable encyclopedia factory,’ with an extension being built to make room for, in 2000, no fewer than twelve extra ­people – a real Scriptorium, like the ones that Chapter 10’s James Murray set up in Mill Hill and Oxford. The future: ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’

Just because David had written a general encyclopaedia didn’t mean that he had turned his back on linguistics. Far from it. In the 1990s his thoughts turned to, among other things, the present and future states of English. ‘When I look back at the 1990s,’ David writes in his memoirs, ‘I see it as a revolutionary decade, as far as language is concerned.’15 One of the ‘revolutions,’ he says, is to do with a new variety of English that is emerging today and will doubtless become increasingly important in the future. We’ve already talked about new varieties of English a lot in this book, particularly in Chapter 11, where we saw that many countries of the world have developed their own ‘brands’ of English, so much so that we now talk about Englishes rather than English. But the revolutionary variety that David is talking about is not geographical. It’s associated with an emerging technology and is to do with computers and the internet. It has been called by many names, ‘electronically-mediated communication’ and ‘computer discourse,’ among others. David calls it ‘Netspeak.’ The new variety is emerging with breathtaking speed and has already become extremely widespread. To give you some idea of its rapid, and recent, appearance, here are some approximate dates: the World Wide Web was released to the general public in 1991, email was coming into use from 1995, Google was founded in 1998, the term ‘blog’ was first used in 1999, text and instant messaging date from the early 2000s, Facebook came along in 2004, YouTube was launched in 2005 and Twitter arrived in 2006.16 David has written extensively about Netspeak, starting with the book Language and the Internet, first published in 2001 and with a second edition in 2006.17 By his own admission, he is at his happiest when dealing with actual data: ‘I loved bathing in a warm pool of data,’ he says in his memoirs.18 In his Netspeak books, it’s the actual analysis of the new variety that is most captivating. And what he is describing plays an important role in the future of English. Here’s a taste of the sorts of things David describes. He notes how elements of Netspeak have made their way into general usage. Take the prefix e- for example; in the word email, it stands for ‘electronic.’ David traces how the prefix has spread.19 Though e- isn’t really a word, this didn’t stop the American Dialect Society proclaiming it ‘Word of the Year’ in 1998, and we now have e-text, e-money, e-tailing (retailing on the internet), e-cards and very many others: David tells the story of a bookmaker who, when he started to deal through the internet, called his firm e-we go! David has many other examples

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of Netspeak expressions coming into general use. They include: It’s my turn to download now (which he ‘translates’ as ‘I’ve heard all your gossip, now hear mine’); Let’s go offline for a few minutes (‘Let’s talk in private’); He’s 404 (‘He’s not around’; a 404 error, David explains, is when ‘a page or site is no longer in service’). Then there are abbreviations, used in texting and other forms of Netspeak: btw (for ‘by the way’), cul8r (‘see you later’), imho (‘in my humble opinion’) and f2f (‘face to face’).20 You will probably be able to add other examples of your own. One way of looking at much Netspeak communication is that it is ‘written down colloquial speech.’ This introduces a fascinating linguistic issue. In speech we have powerful ways of expressing feelings and emotions. They include varying our intonation, raising or lowering our voice pitch, using gestures. But in writing, you can’t do any of these things. How does Netspeak manage without them? Repeating letters to convey emphasis is one way: we may write aaaahhhhh, or soooo in a text message or email. Repeated punctuation marks can do the same thing (hey!!!!!!!!!, see what you’ve started??????????).21 Here are three other means David discusses:22 All capitals for ‘shouting’ Letter spacing for ‘loud and clear’ Word/phrase emphasis by asterisks

I SAID NO W H Y, N O T, w h y n o t The *real* answer

David’s analyses of Netspeak are much fuller than a few examples can convey. And there will be much more to say about the rapidly developing variety in the future. As David puts it, ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet.’23 A double life

Come the twenty-first century, David was living something of a double life. One was to do with business and encyclopaedias. His experience with data collection, gained through encyclopaedia-writing, led him to become involved with the kinds of IT developments which eventually gave us databases like Google’s. For a while he ran his own data-collection company called ‘Crystal Reference Systems.’ Encyclopedia-writing continued with The New Penguin Encyclopedia (2002), and for the next five years he and Hilary produced no fewer that fifteen reference books for Penguin. But this life came to something of a close. For one thing, David says, ‘I definitely did not like being a businessman.’24 For another, Penguin stopped publishing encyclopaedias in 2008. The other life was, as you’ll probably have guessed, a linguistic one. David has regularly talked about language on television and radio and has continued to write prolifically. We can’t summarise the many linguistic fields he has become involved in, but there’s one more ‘linguistics and’ area that stands out: ‘linguistics and Shakespeare.’ It started with David writing about Shakespeare’s

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language for the Globe Theatre’s magazine, Around the Globe. In 2003–4, he was made a Sam Wanamaker Fellow at the Globe. Then, with Ben (his and Hilary’s son), he produced Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion (2002). This has an associated website which you can use (among other things) to locate instances of particular words in Shakespeare’s works. Another book – Think on My Words – followed in 2008. It provides a linguistic analysis of Shakespeare’s writings. Then, as if all this weren’t enough, there’s The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation (2016). The Glossary and the Pronunciation Dictionary are substantial tomes, together weighing more than two and a half kilos. That’s a lot of Shakespeare. David remains very active. Until recently, he maintained a gruelling programme of travel, spending up to two hundred days a year ‘on the road.’ And he still continues to write. In 2023 there will be a new Shakespeare book, coauthored with son Ben, as well as a collection entitled A Date with Language, a book which provides a story, event or fact about language – one for each day of the year.25 The future of English: a language with no grammar?

We mentioned earlier that David saw the 1990s as a revolutionary decade. Netspeak was one revolution. Another was that ‘English came to be firmly established as a global language, and recognized as such.’26 But will English remain a global language in the future? Will it still be the language of the world in twenty, fifty, a hundred years’ time? David discusses this issue on a number of occasions, particularly in his book English as a Global Language, first published in 1997, with a second edition in 2003. To provide answers, he says, we first have to be clear about what it is that makes a language ‘global.’ What are the special characteristics that English has? Some believe the secret is that English has ‘no grammar’ and is hence easy to learn. It’s true, David says, that English does not have the mass of ‘endings’ that weigh down some other languages; we saw this in Chapter 3. But, he goes on to argue, ‘the point can be dismissed by a glance at any of the large twentieth-century reference grammars. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, [a popular grammar – Quirk et al. (1985)] for example, contains 1,800 pages and some 3,500 points requiring grammatical exposition.’27 And as for easy to learn: think about the confusion of the English spelling system; requiring the world to come to terms with English spelling seems almost sadistic! Besides, you only have to look briefly into the past to see that grammatical simplicity has nothing to do with how widely a language is used. Take Latin, for example, a world language in classical times and beyond. It has a really complex system of noun suffixes, ruled by gender, number and grammatical function.

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What makes a language potentially global is, David argues, power. Political, industrial, economic, cultural power. English has had all these in the past few centuries. There was the British Empire, the British Industrial Revolution, American global dominance. Much scientific literature, today and in past centuries, was and is in English, and films, plays, novels too. English is global because of power, power, power. Will this continue? Another mistaken idea is that a language, once in a powerful position, will stay put, perhaps forever. This is easy to disprove. We’ve already mentioned Latin. ‘If, in the Middle Ages,’ David says, ‘you had dared to predict the death of Latin as the language of education, people would have laughed in your face.’28 But it has in effect died and isn’t even taught very much in schools nowadays. Or take Russian, another language, incidentally, with a complex grammar. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, it was in widespread use, not just in neighbouring ‘satellites’ but also in countries sympathetic to communism worldwide. Then, with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the situation changed quickly, and Russian lost its prestige. Languages can fall as well as rise. Will English retain its power and hence continue as a global language? Well, really, we can only guess, though there are some statistics that may gives us clues. One way of measuring a language’s strength is in terms of the number of users. The American organisation Ethnologue provides us with annual figures which allow us to compare English user numbers with those of another strong competitor in the global language stakes: Mandarin Chinese. Its estimate for 2022 has English with 1.452 billion users, and Mandarin Chinese with 1.118.29 English just about stays on top. But user numbers aren’t everything, and there’s another way of measuring which takes into account political and social factors. In 1995, the English Company (UK) Ltd developed a model that ‘weights languages not only by the number and wealth of their speakers, but also by the likelihood that these speakers will enter social networks which extend beyond their locality.’30 It measures, Engco claims, ‘global influence.’ In 1995, the ‘Engco model’ showed that ‘English is .  .  . a long way ahead of all other languages,’ followed by German, French, Japanese and Spanish. Their predictions for 2050 have English remaining on top, though Spanish – another competitor in the ‘global’ competition  – moves up briskly from fifth to second place.31 If figures like these are right, English will remain in front, though with strong competition. Diglossia

But, you may argue, isn’t the existence of World Englishes (plural) likely to prevent the existence of World English (singular)? As we saw in Chapter 11, emerging versions of English reflect the distinctive cultural identity of their

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users and hence differ from each other. Australians want their English to be different from Canadian English, and vice versa. Surely there’s the danger that all the many different varieties will grow so far apart that they will eventually become incomprehensible to each other? English would then certainly no longer be a world language. It’s a possibility that David takes seriously. But his view is that perhaps World Englishes and World English can in fact co-exist side by side.32 It could happen that one variety of English will become accepted as the standard, world version, while at the same time countries will continue to use their own distinctive varieties for internal communication. Linguists have a word to describe a situation where ‘a community uses two distinct forms of the same language’; they call it ‘diglossia.’ An example often given is German-speaking Switzerland, where standard German is used in formal situations, and local forms of Swiss German are used informally.33 Diglossia is quite common in the world. The British are sometimes startled by the idea of people using two versions of the same language. But it’s common in Britain too. You often find a speaker using one form of standard English in formal situations and a rather different, local variety when at home wearing slippers or chatting with friends in the pub. People are certainly able to hold two versions of a language (or even, come to that, two quite different languages) in their heads.34 So perhaps the existence of World Englishes is not after all that much of a deterrent to the emergence of a World English. If the world decides that it wants English as a world language, one version can become accepted as a global lingua franca without this stopping local varieties from flourishing. A ‘World Standard Spoken English’?

There’s one more question to answer: if English is to remain the global lingua franca, which version of the language will it be? We saw in Chapter 11 that the number of inner circle speakers is relatively small in comparison with those in the outer and expanding circles. This is one reason why the inner circle versions, like British and American English, which have so long been accepted as models, are unlikely to continue as such. Some have suggested that we should ‘concoct’ a version of the English language suitable for global use. The ‘concoction’ would be based on the existing language, but made ‘decidedly easier and faster to learn than any variety of natural, “full” English.’35 One proposal was made by the British linguist Charles Ogden. His 1930 book, Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar, presents a simplified language, which has a core of just 850 words, and a collection of simplified grammar rules. All plural nouns, for example, would end in -s: so it would be two mouses, three criterions and four mans. Ogden’s ‘Basic English’ attracted the attention of the novelist H.  G.  Wells,

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and in his futuristic novel The Shape of Things to Come, it is presented as the future global lingua franca, spoken by everyone. Basic English also influenced the United States broadcasting service ‘Voice of America,’ which for a while broadcast round the world in its own simplified version of English, known as ‘Special English’ or ‘Learning English.’36 Another ‘concoction’ was proposed by that man who inspired David so much  – Randolph Quirk. His version is called ‘Nuclear English.’37 Quirk’s simplifications include replacing verbs like can and will, which cause difficulties for many learners of English, with simpler forms like be able to and be allowed to.38 But concocted models face the same problem we discussed in Chapters 6 and 8 in relation to spelling reforms. You may remember John Hart in Chapter 6 and Benjamin Franklin in Chapter 8. Their reforms introduced many new features and hence involve users in a lot of new learning. They were doomed from the start. So too would be versions of English that diverge too much from the language as we know it – people using Basic English would have to ‘unlearn’ two mice, three criteria and four men and learn Ogden’s alternatives. We might conclude that a future model for global English needs to emerge naturally rather than being concocted by a linguist. David talks about a model which does this. He calls it ‘World Standard Spoken English’ (WSSE).39 It’s a variety which, he admits, is still in its infancy. Indeed, ‘it has hardly yet been born.’ But we can predict what some of its characteristics will be. Many will reflect just what you do when communicating in English with someone from another culture. You would, for example, steer clear of colloquialisms – idioms and expressions that you know to be particular to your own culture. WSSE will probably do the same.40 It’s also likely to share some of the features found in the major ELF versions, like Euro-English. You’ll recall from Chapter 11 that these include omitting definite or indefinite articles and replacing difficult sounds (like /ð/ and /θ/) with ones easier to pronounce. Perhaps that’s where the future of English lies. But we can’t be sure. The best we can do is speculate in an informed way about what is likely and what unlikely. And this is what David does. With over a hundred and twenty books under his belt, David’s contribution to linguistics, particularly the study of the English language, has been immense.41 His claim to fame for us is that he has led informed speculation into the future of English. That makes him one of our landmark figures. Notes 1 Crystal (2009), p. 32. 2 Ibid., p. 45. 3 Ibid., p. 72. 4 What Is Linguistics? is Crystal (1985). 5 Crystal (2009), p. 83.

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6 Ibid., p. 94. 7 Ibid., p. 90. 8 Ibid., p. 129. 9 Ibid., p. 173. 10 Ibid., p. 173. 11 Ibid., p. 181. 12 Ibid., p. 188. 13 Ibid., p. 230. 14 Ibid., p. 210. 15 Ibid., p. 239. 16 The dates are based on those given in a talk entitled ‘The Future of English,’ which David gave at an IELTS conference in Prague, 2014. The talk is available at www. youtube.com/watch?v=29K5c1pVk9Q. 17 Other books on the topic include Crystal (2004a, 2008 and 2011). 18 Crystal (2009), p. 107. 19 Discussed in Crystal (2006), p. 23. 20 The examples are taken from Crystal (2006) – the expressions from p. 21, the abbreviations from p. 91. 21 Ibid., p. 37. 22 Ibid. 23 From the DVD accompanying Crystal (2009a). 24 Crystal (2009), p. 216. 25 Crystal and Crystal (2023) and Crystal (2023). 26 Crystal (2009), p. 240. 27 Crystal (2003), p. 8. 28 Ibid., p. 123. 29 Though if you look just at first language speakers, Mandarin is far ahead of English. 30 Graddol (2003), p. 209. 31 The Engco figures are taken from Graddol (2003), p. 209. 32 This possibility is discussed in the final chapter of Crystal (2003). 33 The example and the definition of diglossia are taken from Matthews (2014). 34 David discusses diglossia and associated matters in Crystal (2003), Chapter 5, which is entitled ‘The Future of Global English.’ 35 Quirk (1982), p. 43. 36 The Basic English Institute’s website is at http://www.basic-english.org. The discussion about ‘concocted’ versions is based on Chapter 12 of Johnson (2021). 37 Discussed in detail in Quirk (1982). 38 They are difficult partly because they have irregular forms (they don’t, for example, take -s and -ed suffixes). Also, their meanings are difficult to specify precisely. 39 WSSE is discussed in the final chapter of Crystal (2003). 40 Prodromou (2007) gives some interesting examples of colloquial expressions to be avoided. Kirkpatrick (2008) discusses strategies people use in lingua franca situations. 41 The figure includes books authored, co-authored and edited.

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INDEX

Abingdon Chronicle 21 accusative case (Latin) 28 Adam Bede (Eliot) 106–7 adjectives: changes 29; inflections 28–30 Advanced Conversational English (Crystal/Davy) 136–7 æ (‘a’ sound) 24 Æthelbald/Æthelberht/Æthelred (brothers) 14–15; kingdom, growth 15–16 Æthelwulf (king) see King Æthelwulf Alchemy of English, The (Kachru) 127 Alford, Henry 85–6 Alfred the Great (King) see King Alfred the Great Algonquian language 94 alphabet, sounds 64–5 American debasements, British examination 128 American Dialect Society 138–9 American Dictionary of the English Language, An (Webster) 92–3; contributions 95; sales 96 American English 85; British English, contrast 92, 95; descendants 95–6; description 128; dictionary, creation 92–5 American Magazine, The 91 American Philological Society 128 American pronunciation, written word (impact) 89

American Spelling Book, The (Webster) 90, 94 American tongue, orthography 92 American War of Independence 26, 86 Andrometer, idea (Jones) 3, 13 Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (Thrale) 83 Anglo-Frisian (language sub-branch) 12 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 17, 21 Anglo-Saxon England, Vikings (threat) 16–17 Anglo-Saxon, parody 128–9 apostrophe: addition 25, 28, 75; ‘of’ idea 28 Arabic vowel sounds, practise 112 Archigrammacian of Englande 57 Aristotle, translation 78 Armagnacs, Burgundians (civil war) 38 Around the Globe (magazine) 140 Arte of Rhetorique, The (Wilson) 56 Arthur see King Arthur articles, omission (Euro-English) 130–1 Ashleye, Katheryne (Mulcaster marriage) 62 Assers (Welsh monk) 15–19 attitudinal sins 129–31 Australians, words (usage) 122 Bacon, Francis 80 Bailey, Harold 59 Baldwin, Stanley 119 barbarous English, question 85–7

152 Index

Barnes, William 99–106, 110, 113; fame 102–3; language theorist 103; philologer 99–103; teacher, impact 100–1 Barrow, Margaret (Thomas marriage) 53 Basic English (Ogden) 142 Basic English, usage 143 Becanus, Johannes Groropius 7, 58 Becket, Thomas 30, 46 Bedingfield, Thomas: language problem 51–2, 55; translations 50–1; words, change 55 Bell, Alexander Melville 113 Bible (Wycliffe) 30 Boethius 20 Bolingbroke, John 81 Bonaparte, Napoleon 102 Bonaparte, Prince Lucien 102 Borde, Andrew 45 Boston Tea Party 86 Boswell, James 80, 83 Bradley, Henry 117 breathsounds 104–5 Bref Grammar for English (Bullokar) 66 Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Disease, A (Webster) 91 Britain, Celt inhabitation 13 British English: American English, contrasts 92, 95; Indian English, comparison 122–3; spellings, French influence (Webster blame) 95 British textbooks, usage 88 Browning, Robert 82 Bullokar, William 66 Burchfield, Robert 118 Burgundans, Armagnacs (civil war) 38 ‘but’ (pronunciation/stress) 31–2 Caesar, Julius (Britain invasion) 21 Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, The (Crystal) 137 Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, The (Crystal) 137 Cambridge Encyclopedia, The (Crystal) 137 Cambridge University Press 112 Candide (Voltaire) 83 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer) 30, 44, 46, 48; General Prologue 46; Wife of Bath 46 capital letters, usage 72 case 28 Castel of Helth (Elyot) 55

Catechism in general and that of England in particular, A (Barnes) 101 Catherine de Valois, Henry V (meeting/ marriage) 39 Catholic Church: authority 44; Protestantism, clash 53 Caxton, William 41, 50, 59; printing 43–4 Celts, inhabitation 13 Chancery English (CE) 36; characteristics 42–3 Chancery, Signet Office (relationship) 41–2 Chancery Standard 43 Charles see King Charles Charles II see King Charles II Charles VI see King Charles VI of France Chaucer: death 26; declensions, usage 29–30; grammar, simplification 26; -th verb, example 72; word, selection 27 Chedzoy, Alan 101, 103 Cheke, John 56–7; words, invention 104–5 Chinese English: Mandarin, impact 130; syntactive features (Xu analysis) 123 Church History of the English People (Saint Bede) 21 Churchill, William 128 Civil War (1642–51) 75 clippings 104–5 Coleridge, Charles 112 Coleridge, Herbert 111–12; Ruthven marriage 113; Scott marriage 113 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 111 Collegiate Dictionary (Merriam/ Webster) 97 Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, A (Webster) 92 compounds, formation 59 compound words, description 66 Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk) 140 conjugations, foreshapenings 104–5 Connecticut Mirror 93 Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius) 20 consonants, clippings 104–5 ‘constitutional indolence’ (Johnson) 78 ‘context of situation’ idea (Firth) 130 contractions, Swift dislike 75 Coolidge, Calvin (OED presentation) 119 Corte, Claudio 50

Index  153

Council of Constance, issues (1417) 36 Craigie, William Alexander 117–18 creolisation, impact 31, 34 Crystal, David 131, 133–43 Crystal Reference Systems 139 Cura Pastoralis (Saint Gregory the Great) 18, 20 Cyril, Samuel 137 Daily Graphic 117 Danelaw 33–4 ‘darke words,’ satirising 57–8 Darwin, Charles 7, 109 Date with Language, A (Crystal) 140 dative case (Latin) 28 Davis, Jefferson 90 Davy, Derek 136–7 declensions 28; usage (Chaucer) 29–30 Deffence et Illustration de la Languge Françoyse 67 devil, word forms 28 Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland (Coleridge) 113 dialects 106–7; Dorset dialect 99, 103–6; forms (Barnes) 106; interest, growth 107; non-standard dialects 99 Dialogo delle linguie 67 Dialogues (Saint Gregory the Great) 21; analysis 23–5 Dickens, Charles 106 dictionaries 96–7; appeal 66–7 Dictionary (Johnson) 74–9, 92; bulkiness 105; definitions, Webster criticism 93–4; effect 82–4; supplement, addition (plan) 94 Dictionary of the English Language, A (Webster) 96 diglossia 142–3 Dilworth, Thomas 88–90 ‘Discourses to the Asiatick Society’ (Jones) 4 Dissertations on the English Language (Webster) 90 Dodsley, Robert 79 Dorset County Chronicle 101 Dorset dialect 99; description 105–6; grunting, analogy 103–5; Old English, comparison 104; purity, argument 105; purity/regularity 104 Early English Text Society, founding 112 Early Modern English (EModE) 50; description 70; grammar 70–3;

Middle English, contrast 72–3; writing 70 East Midlands (ME dialect) 41 educational influences, impact 32 Edward the Elder 17 -e ending, usage 48–9 eggs, spelling (variation) 41 Elementarie (Mulcaster) 61, 64–8, 121; language descriptions 66; value 67 Elementary Spelling Book, The (Webster) 90 Eliot, George 106–7 Eliot, T.S. 90–1 Elizabeth the First see Queen Elizabeth the First: translations 20 Elyot, Thomas 50, 53–4; administrative career 54; Barrow marriage 53; borrowings 54–5; Latin-English dictionary 55–6 emetic, usage 58 Engco model 141 England: formation 15–16; French language, adoption 32; French wars 37–8; Norman invasion (1066) 26, 32, 34; reputation, King Alfred the Great (impact) 19 ‘English as a first language’ countries 127–8 English as a Global Language (Crystal) 140 English as a lingua franca (ELF) 124, 143 English as a Second Language 128 ‘English as a Second Language’ 128 English Company (UK) Ltd 141 English grammar, descriptions 89–90 English language: adoption 128; ancestors 95–6; chancery English 36; complaints 74–7; concentric circles 127–8; description 64–6; educational reforms 19; enrichment 50; establishment 13; Euro-English 124; future 133, 138–41; idiom 40; Indianisation 130; inner circle countries 128–9; Italian, impact 57; Japanisation 130; language, battle 44–5; Mulcaster praise 68; national pride, relationship 61; Old Norse, similarities 33–4; origin 11–12; pedagogy, Mulcaster (relationship) 62–3; policing, dislike 76; prose, stock, (increase) 20–1; Queen’s English 106; simplification 26;

154 Index

spread 121–3, 125, 131; standard English, attempt 103–4; support 67–8; teaching 19; teaching, British textbooks (usage) 88; users 141; verb, Italian noun (relationship) 52; word-stock, description 82; world Englishes, study 131–2; world standard spoken English 142–3; worship 61; writing, Caxton apology 44–5; written communication 41; written English 44–5; written English, standardising 36 English parliament, war support 37 English people: languages, contact 33–4; learning, decay 19 ‘ð’ (‘eth’) 24 Etymological Glossary, The. . . (Barnes) 101 etymology: scientific approach (Trench desire) 111; Webster coverage 115 Euclid 51 Euro-English 124, 143; articles, omission 130–1 Evelyn, John 77 family relations, puzzles 9–11 feminine inflections 28 First Part of the Elementaire, The (Mulcaster) 64 Firth, John Rupert 126, 130 Fisher, John 40 foreign words, avoidance 57 ‘foren’ borrowings 53–6, 59 ‘foren’ terms, argument 56 foreshapenings 104–5 fore-wording 104–5 Franklin, Benjamin 92, 143 Franklin, Michael 5, 6 freeborn, educational studies 19 French English, usage 57 French language: English upper class usage 33–4; parliament usage 36 Furnivall, Frederick 111–12, 114–15 Gaelic, presence 134 Garden of Eden language, simplicity 58 Gardiner, John 94–5 Garner, Bryan 59 Garrick, David 78 gender: impact 29; natural gender 29 genitive case (Latin) 28 Gentlemen’s Magazine, The 78, 101, 104 George, Daniel 92

George III see King George III George V see King George V German Dictionary (Grimm) 10 German Grammar (Grimm) 10 Germanic languages, words (closeness) 104 German Mythology (Grimm) 10 ‘gh’ (pronunciation) 43 Ghanaian Pidgin, examples 33 Glossary of the Dorset Dialect, with a Grammar of its Wording (Barnes) 105–6 Golden Anchor (pub) 79 Goodrich, Elizur 92 Gouernour, The (Elyot) 54–6 grammar: lessons, absence 32; simplification 26 Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect. . . (Barnes) 105, 107 Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill, A (Wright) 107 Grammar of the Persian Language (Jones) 5 grammars: absence 140–1; appeal 66–7 Grammatical Institute of the English Language. . . (Webster) 87–90, 92 Grammatical Language of Language Disability (Crystal) 136 grammatical structures, stability 8 ‘Great Heathen Army’ 16 Greek, Latin (consonant differences) 11 Greenleaf, Rebecca 90–1 Grimm, Jacob 9–11, 111; taxonomy, passion 10 Grimm’s Fairy Titles (Children’s and Household Tales) 10 Grimm’s law 11 Grimm, Wilhelm 10, 111 Grimm, William 10–11 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 74 Gutenberg, Johannes 44 Guthrum (Viking), baptism 17 Halliday, Michael 126 Hardy, Thomas 99, 101–4, 106 Harley, Robert 75–6 Hart, John 64–5, 143 Hastings, Warren 4–5 Hector, George 77 Henry IV, Parts I and II (Shakespeare) 37 Henry V see King Henry V Henry V (Shakespeare) 37, 38 Henry VIII see King Henry VIII

Index  155

Henry VI, Part I (Shakespeare) 39 Hindu Fakirs (Barnes) 101 ‘Historical Thesaurus’ 119 History of English Sounds from the Earliest Period (Sweet) 34 History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, The (Johnson) 83 History of the German Language (Grimm) 10 Hitchings, Henry 82 Hobbes, Thomas 80 Holyhead (Anglesey, north Wales) 133–4 homeborn 56–7; technique 59 ‘Honouring the Life and Work of Braj B. Kachru’ (Crystal) 131 ‘Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) 38 idioms 40 incarnidine (usage) 73 India, English language (arrival) 130 Indian culture, Jones fascination 3–4 Indian English 126, 129 Indian English, British English (comparison) 122–3 Indo-European (I-E) languages 9; family 1 Indo-European (I-E) tree 11 Industrial Revolution 107 inflections: levelled inflections, ME usage 34; loss 27; loss, causes 31–4; simplification 26–7, 34; -s inflection, usage 49; word order, relationship 31 inflections, disappearance 26 -ing form, usage 125 Inkhorn: controversy 57–9; terms 53 inkhorners, impact 58 International Association of World Englishes, founding 131 International Dictionary of the English Language, An (Webster) 96 intimacy (expression), thou (usage) 72–3 irregular past tense, verb usage 30 irregular verbs (strong verbs) 30 -isation process 129–31 Italian language: noun, impact 52; translations 50–1; word, usage 94 Japanese English versions, standard English (comparison) 125 Jespersen, Otto 32–3 Johnson, Michael 77 Johnson, Samuel 77–8, 86–93; criticism 110–11; definitions, idiosyncrasy

81; Dictionary 74–9, 109; linguistic landmark 80–1; Lord Chesterfield patronage 83; prescription/ description, combination 81–2; Tetty marriage/death 78, 79, 82–3; views, impact 111; Webster, comparison 89 John the Saxon 19 Jones, William 14; death 7; dissertations 4; illness 6; inventiveness 13; Kolkata arrival 1–2; languages, learning 2; nicknames 1–5; retirement plan 6–7; syncretism/monogeneticism 3–5 Jonson, Ben (satire) 58 Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, The (Boswell) 83 Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (Johnson) 83 Just a Phrase I’m Going Through (Crystal) 134 Kachru, Braj Bihari 121, 125–31, 134; English, concentric circles 127–8 Kendall, Joshua 87, 89, 92 Kentish (ME dialect) 41 King Æthelwulf 14; death 15 King Alfred the Great 78, 121; Church status change 18; death 31; educational reforms 19; legal system changes 18; time machine, invention 13–14; translations 20; Vikings, battles/fights 13–16, 38; Wessex rescue 16–17 King Arthur 15, 17–18 King Charles 38 King Charles II 75 King Charles VI of France 39 King Edwin of Northumbria 21 King George III 83 King George V, OED presentation 119–20 King Henry IV: death 37–8; power 40 King Henry V: Catherine de Valois, meeting/marriage 39; chancery English, relationship 36; French throne control, belief 38; influence 40–1; letter 39–41; personal English, impact 43 King Henry VIII: ambassador, need 53–4; marital problems 53 language(s): branches 11–12; delay 136; descriptions 66; embalming 82; families/trees 7–9; family members,

156 Index

differences 9; grammar, absence 140– 1; Indo-European language family 1; learning, mania 112–14; nonlanguage-related inventions (Barnes) 104–5; parents/siblings/ancestors 7; pidgin language 33; prescriptive rule sets 32; problem 51–2; relations 7; repair 74; similarities 8; simplification 26; study, passion 100; usage 123–5; vernacular languages 67; worldmodifying statement 5–7; written communication 41 Language and the Internet (Crystal) 138 language-fixers 77 ‘Last Signal, The’ (Hardy) 103 Latin-English dictionary (Elyot) 55–6 Latin language: dethronement, Mulcaster (impact) 67–8; grammar 28; Greek, consonant differences 11; Greek, similarities 8, 11; language, teaching 19; rules, application 76–7; Sanskrit/Greek/English, similarities 8; vernacular polemical defence 67 ‘learned immigrants’ 20–1 Lees, Robert 126 letters: capital letters, usage 72; PDE examples 64–5; spaces, usage/absence 70; speech-tokens 104–5 Lever, Ralph 59, 74 lexical similarities, Jones discovery 8 lexicon 77 Lexicon totius Anglicitatis (Trench) 110 -lice (suffix), equivalence 24 Life of King Alfred (Asser) 15 Life of Samuel Johnson (Boswell) 83 lingua franca, development 124 linguistics 136–8; extravagance, example 61 Linguistics, Language and Religion (Crystal) 136–8 Lives of the English Poets (Johnson) 83 ‘Loss of Final n in Middle English’ (Moore) 27 Louis d’Orléans 38 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare) 58, 61, 65, 72 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 70–3 malapropisms, usage 66 Malone, Kemp 27 Mandarin Chinese: influence 130; users 141 masculine inflections 28

Mathematical Investigation of the principles of Hanging Doors. . . (Barnes) 101 Merchant Taylor’s School 62–3 Meredith, Louisa Anne 128 Merriam, George/Charles 96–7 Meulan, peace conference (1419) 39 Middle English (ME): appearance 26; arrival 26; dialects 41; Dictionary, production 27; divisions 34; EModE, contrast 72–3; features 46–8; grammar 70–3; late Middle English, inflections (simplification) 27; levelled inflections, usage 34 Miles, Julia 100; death 102 Milner, George 106 Milton, John 80 Minor, W.C. 115 Modern English: divisions 34; inflections, loss 34 Moore, Francis 85 Moore, Samuel 26–7, 34 mother-tongue, enlargement/adornment 40 Mulcaster, Richard 52, 86, 91–2, 121, 125; Ashleye marriage 62; educational views 63–4; education, focus 63–4; English language praise 68; English pedagogy 62–3; English, worship 61; ‘generall table’ 66; Latin, dethronement 67–8; retirement/ death 63; spelling, reform 65 Murray, Elizabeth 111 Murray, James 109–20, 138; death 117; Scriptorium 110; volunteers, need 115 Nadir Shah, life (description) 2 nationality, language (symbol) 36–7 natural gender, recognition 29 Netspeak 138–9 neuter inflections 28 New English Dictionary (Murray) 110 New Guide to the English Tongue, A (Dilworth) 88, 90 New Penguin Encyclopedia, The (Crystal) 139 Newton, Isaac 2 new words: proliferation 50; search 50–2 New World, optimism 96 -n plural, usage 30 nominative case (Latin) 28 non-language-related inventions (Barnes) 104–5

Index  157

non-standard dialects 99 Normandy, King Henry V (arrival) 38–9 Northern (ME dialect) 41 Northumbrian ‘golden age’ 18–19 ‘Nose, A’ (Webster) 91 nouns: capital letters, usage 72; gender 29; inflections 28–30; number 28 ‘Nuclear English’ (Quirk) 143 number, impact 29 nun/devil/lettuce (OE story) 23–4 Ogden, Charles 142 Old English (OE): change 26; characteristics 23; Coleridge study 112; complexity 28–29; divisions 34; Dorset dialect, connection/ comparison 104; features 23–24; inflections 34; Present Day English (PDE), similarities/differences 25 Old Frisian, word (usage) 94 Oldmixon, John 76 Old Norse (ON), English (similarities) 33–4 Old Saxon, word (usage) 94 one-man dictionary, cessation 111 Onions, Charles Talbut 117–18 On the civilisation of the Spanish Celts (Barnes) 101 On the Origin of Species (Darwin) 7, 109 orator, labour 56 Orosius 20 Orra: A Lapland Tale (Barnes) 100 Osler, William 91 Other Tongue, The (Kachru) 127 Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation, The (Crystal) 140 Oxford English Dictionary (Murray) 73, 84, 109; collection 117–18; completion date, consideration 116; construction 118–19; contents 118–19; Coolidge presentation 119; creation 110–11; ‘Historical Thesaurus’ 119; King George V presentation 119–20; national treasure 119–20; problems 114–16; progression 116–17; supplements, need 118; versions, updates 118 parliament, French language usage 36 ‘Paston Letters’ 40–2 Pathway to Knowledge, The (Recorde) 51

Peroration 67 Peterborough Chronicle 21 Philological Grammar, A (Barnes) 103 Philological Society 103, 107, 113 phrases, preservation 82 Pickwick Papers, The (Dickens) 106 pidgin: Ghanaian Pidgin, examples 33; language 33; Solomon Island pidgin 123–4, 130–1 Plan of a Dictionary (Johnson) 79 Plea for the Queen’s English, A (Alford) 86 Plegmund 19 plural declensions 29–30 Poetaster, The (Jonson) 58 Polton, Thomas 36 Pope, Alexander 80 Porter, Harry 78 Positions Concerning the Training up of Children (Mulcaster) 63–4 power, language 122–3 Preface (King Alfred the Great) 18, 20 prefixes: fore-wording 104; usage 59 prescriptive statements, impact 32 Present Day English (PDE): ‘a’ sound 24; letters, examples 64–5; nouns, case distinctions (absence) 28; Old English, similarities/differences 25; rise-rose (connection) 30; word order, alteration (absence) 31; word order, difference 48; word pairs, example 65; words, borrowing 8 Primer of English Grammar (Coleridge) 113–14 Prince Hal: kingship, ascension 37–8; real life 37 Principles of Government, The (Jones) 3 Proclamations, English (usage) 42 Professor and the Madman, The (Winchester) 115 Progress in Language (Jespersen) 32 Prompter, The (Webster) 91 pronunciation 72; American pronunciation, written word (impact) 90; changes 31–2; issues 9 Proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English tongue (Swift) 75 Proposals for Printing, by Subscription the Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare (Johnson) 82–3 Protestantism, Catholic Church (clash) 53

158 Index

punctuation marks, spaces (usage/ absence) 70 Pygmalion (Shaw) 34 Queen Elizabeth the First 56 Queen’s English 106 Queen Victoria: speech (1863), Barnes dialect rendition 105; Webster dictionary, arrival/submission 96 Quirk, Randolph 135, 143 Recorde, Robert 51; language problem 51–2, 55 Recueil des histoires de Troye – recueil 44 Reflections on Dr Switf’s Letter (Oldmixon) 76 Richard II (Shakespeare) 37, 59 Rise and Progress of Trial by Jury in England, The (Barnes) 101 Romance words, deletion (Wilson desire) 58 Ruthven, Ada: Coleridge marriage 113; dictionary assistance 114, 117 sacerdotal dignity 57 Sahab, Lala 125 Saint Augustine 20 Saint Bede 18, 21 Saint Gregory the Great 18, 20, 23 Sanskrit language: description 6; Jones, learning 5–6; Latin/Greek/English, similarities 8; structure 6 Sassetti, Filippo 8 Saturday Review 117 Saxon word, usage 80 Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling, A (Franklin) 92 scholastic immigrants, education/ learning 17–19 schwa, usage 32 Scott, Maggie (Coleridge marriage) 113 Selden, John 74 settlers, language 121–2 Seven Books of History against the Pagans (Orosius) 20 Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion (Crystal) 140 Shakespeare, William 24, 37, 140; competence 62; First Folio 70; inkhorners, impact 58; quotations,

Johnson usage 80; words, inventory 58–9 Shape of Things to Come, The (Wells) 143 Shaw, George Bernard 34 Signet Office, Chancery (relationship) 41–2 Silas Marner (Eliot) 106–7 simplicity, defining feature 34 Simpson, John 118 Singaporean English 128–9 singular declensions 29–30 Skelton, John 45 Soliloquies (Saint Augustine) 20 Solomon Island pidgin 123, 130–1; development 124 Song of Solomon 102 sounds 64–5; changes, impact 31–2 Southern (ME dialect) 41 spaces, usage/absence 70 Spanish Armada 38 speech-tokens 104–5 spelling reform 64–6, 91–2 Spenser, Edmund 80 Speroni, Sperone 67 -s inflection, usage 49 standard English 103–5; attempt 103–4; dialects, relationship 106–7; Japanese versions 125; superiority, questioning 106 Stanhope, Philip 79 Sturminster Newton Church (Barnes) 101 suffixes, usage 59 Sunday Express 134 Surgeon of Crowthorne, The (Winchester) 115 ‘Survey of English Usage’ (Quirk) 135 Sweet, Henry 34 Swift, Jonathan 74–5, 85; linguistic proposal 76 Tacitus 11 Tatler, The (magazine) 74 taxonomy, Grimm passion 10 Think on My Words (Crystal) 140 ‘þ’ (thorn) 24, 65 thou (usage), intimacy (expression) 72–3 Thrale, Hester 83 -th verb, example 72 Tiw; or A View of the Roots and Stems of the English as a Teutonic Language (Barnes) 103

Index  159

Tolkien, J.R.R. 117 Tonson, Jacob 78 Tower of London, Mulcaster imprisonment 62 Treaty of Troyes 39 Trench, Richard Chevenix 110–11 Tudor age 50 ‘two heads’ 52–3 verbs: irregular past tense, usage 30; irregular verbs (strong verbs) 30; simplification 30–1; weak verbs 30 vernacular languages 67 Verner, Karl 11 Verner’s Law, formulation 11 Victoria see Queen Victoria Vikings: attacks/raids 16; ‘Great Heathen Army’ 16; impact 16–17; language 33–4 vocabulary, growth 58–9, 61 Voltaire 83 vowels: Arabic vowel sounds, practise 112; breathsounds 104–5; change 30 Voyage to Georgia, A (Moore) 85 Washington, George 86–7, 91 weak verbs 30 Webster, Noah 85–7; classical school 87; criticism 110–11; detractors, impact 94; Johnson, contrast 89; marketing 90–1; personality 89; tables 88 Weiner, Edmund 118 Wells, H.G. 142

Welsh accent, usage 134 Werferth 20–1 Wessex, Alfred rescue 16–17 West Midlands (ME dialect) 41 Weymouth, Richard 113–14 What Is Linguistics? (Crystal) 135 Wikipedia, development 111 Wilson, Thomas 50, 56–7 Winchester Chronicle (Parker Chronicle) 21 Winchester, Simon 115 Worcester Chronicle 21 word order: alteration, PDE absence 31; difference 48; impact 32–3; inflections, relationship 31 words: abbreviation 75; coining (Shakespeare) 59; compounds, formation 59; compound words, description 66; ‘generall table’ 66; invention (Cheke) 104–5; new words, entry (struggle) 66–7; pairs, PDE example 65; preservation 82; proliferation 50; search 50–2 word-stock, description 82 World Englishes 127, 131 World Englishes, existence 142 world standard spoken English 142–3 Wright, Joseph 107 written communication 41 written English, standardising 36 Wycliffe, John 30, 36 Xu, Zhichang 123, 130