The Future of English

The future of English has long been speculated about, and science fiction and fantasy novels and films offer multiple notions about what it might look and sound like hundreds of years from now. Bladerunner (1982) famously offered us "Cityspeak," described in Harrison Ford's voiceover as " gutter talk, a mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you." And, as shown in the original screenplay, it was exactly that, including words from Hungarian, Japanese, German, French, and Korean (thought notably not Spanish). However, while it's true that on a drive through LA one can pass through block after block of "Chinatown," "Korea Town," and other such areas, the social forces don't seem to be in place for anything like Cityspeak to evolve any time soon.

Another stab at the future was Anthony Burgess's "Nadsat," the slang he created for the criminal classes in his novel A Clockwork Orange. Nadsat draws from some native English lingo -- schoolboy talk, Cockney rhyming slang, and so forth -- but 90% of it is actually Russian, including some meorable words as "Gulliver" for head (from Russian golava), "lewdies" for people (Russian lyudi), and "droogs" for friends (Russian drug). A few years before he wrote the novel, Burgess and his wife had visited Leningrad, and heard of the problem of violent youths in that city -- but the reals surprise is how well Russian and English work together. A similar blended language, dubbed "Runglish," can often be heard at the International Space Station, which is maintained mostly by US and Russian astronauts/cosmonauts.

Perhaps the most innovative future English was that invented by Russell Hoban for his post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker -- the novel is actually written in this language, a degraded, worn-down English known simply as "Tok" (as in "talk" -- Hoban's future is phonetically spelled). It's unfortunate, though, that Tok at times sounds a little too much like the English of rural Yorkshire, with the implication that if such were to become the standard, it would represent a "degrading" of it (then again, Monty Python's famous 'village idiots' seem to have hailed from the North as well). A parallel problem troubles Sandra Newman's new novel The Country of Ice Cream Star, whose future disintegrated English bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Jamaican patwa:

"My name be Ice Cream Fifteen Star. This be the tale of how I bring the cures to all the Nighted States, save every poory children, short for life. Is how a city die for selfish love, and rise from this same smallness. Be how the new America being, in wars against all hope - a county with no power in a world that hate its life. So been the faith I sworn, and it ain't evils in no world nor cruelties in no read hell can change the vally heart of Ice Cream Star."

Crossed histories: Latinx and Anglo

Early Map of St. Augustine, Florida

While we have a tendency to think of English as the predominant language in the United States, it's important to realize a few things right at the start. For one, Spanish was the first European language to be spoken in North America, and in many areas Spanish settlements preceded English-speaking ones by centuries. Even today, there are more Spanish speakers in the U.S. than there are in Spain! Had history gone a little differently, Spanish might well have ended up as the main language of the area that's now the U.S. (French had a shot, too, and Benjamin Franklin even worried that if we weren't careful we'd all end up speaking German!). And, while we in the northeast tend to think of Spanish mission towns in what's now California, the earliest Spanish settlement was actually on the east coast! The  above map sows the town and port of St. Augustine, founded in 1565 and for two centuries the capital of Spanish Florida. The first English settlement, Jamestown, wasn't established until more than forty years later in 1607, and was (temporarily) abandoned a mere three years later; after sporadic attempts to repopulate it, it was abandoned for good in 1699.

The more recent politics of Spanish are the subject of Lippi-Green's chapter, which dopuments, among other things, the recurrent movement to make English the official language of the U.S., sometimes calling itself the "English Only" movement. In California in 1998, Proposition 227 mandated English be used in public schools, reversing the previous reversal of that policy under then-governor Ronald Reagan. 

All of this belies the fact that, just as with English, there are a great many forms of Spanish around the world, and most of them are spoken in at least parts of the U.S.. Even beyond the eight major dialects, there are all sorts of regional inflections, as well as Spanish creoles, every one of them very much alive and well. Not unexpectedly, various sorts of "Spanglish" have also evolved, and are continuing to evolve alongside ever-changing English itself. 

Southern English

The "country bumpkin" meets the "city slicker."

Practically since the birth of the Republic, Americans have been making fun of the way each other talked. As we've seen, this was partly a feature of the differences and distance between them; urban northerners, whose speech came mostly from East Anglia and gave us the "Boston Brahmin" dialect, had an entirely different prestige dialect than those of the southeast, whose "tidewater" tones were broader, more open, and fronted.

In part as a result of this, the American stage developed a long tradition of comic skits involving a "city slicker" from the urban north being taken to town (or away from it, rather) by a seemingly bumpkinish rural denizen. Many of these skits, and lines from them, still ring a distant bell today: "How far to Little Rock?" or "You can't get there from here." To the city slicker's "Have you lived here all your life" came the rube's reply: "Not yet!" The practitioners of the comic "southern" accent today, from Jeff Foxworthy to Larry the Cable Guy, draw upon this same old story. These identical skits were just as popular on early recordings, such as this one.

It can be traced in cartoons and television shows as well, within which there is -- perhaps -- a gradual transition from more comic to more respectful depictions of southern speech and life. From the comic "Beverly Hillbillies" or "Hee-Haw," we moved on to comedy-dramas such as "Designing Women" or "Evening Shade," with even a purely dramatic show ("In the Heat of the Night") now and then. And, as with AAVE, the comedy on stage and screen belies potential prejudice in social life; a "southern" accent can still be read as the speech of a less intelligent, less well-educated person. It's something that's been found in children as young as five years of age, due no doubt in part to their exposure to stereotyped accents in cartoons.

AAVE

The history of African-American Vernacular English is not unlike that of other dialects of US English -- migration (although in this case forced, and ending in enslavement), partial assimilation with English, and (in the end) a significant contribution to our national linguistic strength and variety. And yet, more so than any other dialect, it's been haunted by its often-distorted shadow in popular culture, from the 1830's until the present, from Minstrelsy to R&B to Hip-hop. Its authentic cultural productions have always had to compete with imitation, parody, and appropriation.

Blackface Minstrelsy may very well have been the single most popular American form of entertainment from the 1840's through to the 1940's. Its popularity waxed and waned, from a peak in the 1850's, through a gradual decline until a revival in the 1880's, followed by a gradual shift toward more "refined" versions produced by both amateur and professional companies in the period between WWI and WWII. The 1940's saw its permanent decline, in large part due to social changes, integration of the armed forces, and the post-war rise of television, although it still survives in a few isolated places such as Derby Connecticut, where a clown-face "Gang Show" is now in its 100th year (they stopped using blackface in 1944). On American TV it was familiar enough for Sonnny & Cher to parody it with a "greenface" parody dubbed a "Monstrel Show" in 1976, while in the UK, where minstrelsy had been enormously popular from its earliest period, the Black and White Minstrel Show remained on the air until 1978!

Of course it is easy to see this tradition as fundamentally compromised from the start, as it relied upon a distorted, comical, theatrical version of "blackness" devised by white entertainers. And yet, from the beginning, it was a hybrid form, appropriating bits of actual Black culture and mixing them with elements such as Irish jigs, regional "rustic" humor, melodrama, and early skits and vaudeville routines. As early as the 1850's there were a number of Black Blackface troupes ("Black people in blacker faces," as Bamboozled's Pierre Delacroix puts it), some of which enjoyed even wider success than white troupes. The commercial success of the form, for better and for worse, paved the way for other artforms which were, or were perceived as, "Black," including Dixieland jazz, blues, and Black vaudeville.

Fortunately, the actual history of AAVE is more complex, and infinitely richer, than its pop-cultural avatars. Its origins can be traced to various West-African languages and trade pidgins (these were argots drawn from languages along a trade route, such as the Congo river). When slaves were deliberately sold in lots in which there was no common dialect, the trade pidgin formed the basis of communication; when latter agglomerated within various colonial languages, they became "creoles." Jamaican "patwa" is an English creole, and there are Spanish, French, and Portuguese creoles scattered through the Caribbean and the Cape Verde Islands. AAVE, in its origin, was also a creole, but as its speakers were part of a much larger population surrounded by land instead of water, there was a longer period of addition and assimilation. Modern AAVE is a full, complete, English dialect which indeed -- as it preserves some features of West African languages, such as a "habitual" mood of the verb "to be" -- is more capacious than "standard" English.

English with an Accent

We're shifting gears this week -- from historical English to the Englishes of today, from an emphasis on written language to one on spoken language in all its variety, from the underlying structures beneath language to the overlying srtuctures society erects above and on top of language. And we could have no better guide at this moment than Rosini Lippi-Green.

In this chart, taken from her book English With an Accent, we see how white undergrads in Indiana thought about samples of spoken language -- how "correct" or "normal" was the speech they heard. Of course, they sounded normal to themselves, and so did most folks from the Midwest, along with California, Colorado, and Washington State. The southwest, particilarly Texas, sounded less correct, and the dep south -- sometimes called the "Southern Trough" -- sounded the most incorrect of all. Rhode Islanders, incidentally, came out in the second quintile -- that is, just a little less normal than Hoosiers -- and better than New Yawk.

But what does this perception mean? If such a survey had been conducted sixty or seventy years ago, it might have come out a bit different, as most Amderican in public life -- politicians, actors, and speech-makers -- adapted the "Mid-Atlantic" accent (you can hear it, among many other places, in 1939's "The Wizard of Oz," in which everyone says Wizzahd instead of Wizerd).  But this common upper-middle-to-upper-class accent faded away after WWII, and the era of broadcast television; rumbly midwesterners such as Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Tom Brokaw soon set the standard, and placed our national normative right in the middle of the midwest.

But of course American accents -- mostly "L1" accents, that is, accents acquired from infancy via regional variations in one's natural/family language -- are only one part of it. For those, whether in the US or abroad, for whom English was their second (or third, or fourth) language, there's another set of issues; these we know as "L2" accents. In the same way we might call an American accent a "Southern" or a "New England" accent, L2 accents are often called "foreign," though that's not really a good way to describe them. Foreign to whom? The key difference, though, is that L2 speakers are more likely to substitute sounds from their native language in the place of less familiar (or less-familiarly-placed) sounds in English. Thus, say, a German speaker might say "heff" instead of "have," and a French speaker might pronounce "sweater" as "swettauw." We're exposed to such accents all the time, but -- as with L1 accents -- it's pop culture, in the form of cartoons, comedy skits, and television shows that often sets up our expectations. Certainly, during the time I was growing up, it was hard to avoid picking up on the negative connotations of a German accent (Colonel Klink), a Russian one (Boris Badanov), or even a French one (Pepé le Pew) -- and there were plenty of "bad" L1 accents in cartoons too (anyone remember the Hillbilly Bears?).

This week, we're going to use both the Speech Accent Archive and various Accent Tags to bend our ears to the sounds of English: here, there, and everywhere.

American English

The history of American English usage marks the most recent, and in some ways the most dramatic set of changes in English since the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare.  And yet, in this change, there was no single author, no single literary or political influence to credit, or blame; like the United States itself it was a patchwork affair, arrived at by degrees and with contributions from both immigrants and indigenous peoples over a period of more than four hundred years.

There is, however, one name that is often linked to some of the key changes in spelling and usage which made American English distinctive, and it's that of Noah Webster (1758-1853). Webster was a schoolmaster who, like many such men of his time, wrote his own textbooks, with a focus on orthography -- the spelling and pronunciation of words -- as well as elements of grammar.  He used the books in his school, and sold them to others; at a time when the printing business was in its infancy, Webster's "Spellers" as they became known, soon dominated the market.  The money he earned from them enabled Webster to work on his Dictionary, on which his larger hopes and ambitions rested.  In his instruction, as in his books, Webster held that the study of Latin and Greek, admirable though it was, should not take precedence over the study of English, and that everyday American usage, not that of British aristocrats, should be the model. He once lamented that "the whispers of common sense, in favour of our native tongue, have been silenced amidst the clamour of pedantry in favour of Greek and Latin."

One may note his usage there -- clamour and favour used the older British spellings that Webster would eventually abandon, preferring clamor and favor -- but his was no overnight reform, and the changes he made took place gradually over the course of his career.  Perhaps that, along with the ubiquity of his books, helped American adapt to, and eventually adopt, his spellings. Not all of his reforms succeeded -- we still use ache instead of Webster's ake, soup rather than his soop, and tongue rather than tung -- but for the most part, his changes have become permanent.  He even had some influence on British usage -- Charles Dickens, for one, tended to use the -or rather than the -our endings -- but his publishers corrected these and so the Brits (and Canadians and Australians) are stuck with with them.

American English also marked a period of renewed growth and change in our lexicon. We added words from native languages (moccasin, kayak, tomahawk), as well as from the waves of immigrants who arrived on our shores (look up brogan, schmaltz, gauntlet, banana, tycoon, paprika, mammoth, or adobe for a sense of how wide the influence has been), along with all kinds of crazy coinages of our own, from shenanigans to shindig, from oink to woof, from pesky to phony, from vittles to vroom. Much like the UK, strong regional variations of English have developed, not only in terms of phonology but also lexicon and idiomatic phrases; the Dictionary of American Regional English catalogs these, and there are tens of thousands of them. Would you eat a "dropped egg"? How would you feel if you had the "mulligrubs"? And what does one do at a "chic sale?" All things considered, the American turn of English has been a wonderfully enriching one, and it ain't done yet.

Duelling Grammarians

One might think that English grammar, even more than its lexicon, would be something that would have long been intrinsically understood, and little in need of explication or improvement. And yet, the services of a dictionary having proven valuable, that of a printed grammar seemed a logical step -- after all, Latin Grammars were vital school textbooks, and the idea that English should be more like Latin, or at least described in Latin terms, caught on widely. We owe most of our grammatical terminology -- adjective (from adiectus, "to annex a territory"), to preposition (from præ-positiones, to place before), to conjunction (con iunctivo, to link together) -- to this idea.

Many different authors, mostly schoolmasters writing books for their own students's use, tried their hand at it, but two in particular proved to have long-lasting influence. Robert Lowth, who enjoyed a sinecure as Bishop of Oxford, was perhaps the most notable. Among his many contributions was the notion -- by false analogy -- that a "double negative" was an error because, in mathematics, two negatives equalled a positive. Math, alas, is not grammar, but the idea stuck and double negation is almost universally regarded as an error, never mind its long history (Chaucer, among others, even enjoyed double triple negation wihout any doubt as to its import). He also originated the idea that a sentence should not end with a preposition (since its name indicates that it must "come before" something else) -- which, although a reasonable guideline for written texts, is common and perfectly sensible in everyday speech.

Lowth is also often blamed (though in fact it came much later) for the "rule" that to place an adverb between "to" and the main verb (as in "to boldly go") was to "split the infinitive" -- again, on the mistaken analogy with Latin. Latin, like most ancient languages, has an infinitive (or non-finite) form that is actually a distinct one for every verb -- e.g. amare, "to love" -- so it would never be "split"; although Engish uses the preposition "to" to indicate a non-finite verb, the "to" is not actually part of the verb. In the example above, the non-finite form of the verb is in fact just "go" (which in English, confusingly, is identical to the first and second person present indicative form). George Bernard Shaw, among others, has minced few words in decrying this foolish supposed "rule."

Lowth's successor, Lindley Murray, was actually an American ex-pat, born in the woods of Pennsylvania, who moved to York at the age of 39 and spent the rest of his life in England. He kept most of Lowth's prescriptive rules, though his method of instruction was somewhat gentler, and adapted -- as the title-page puts it -- "for the different classes of readers." Among his innovations was a rule that one could not apply "more" to an adjective already in the superlative form (e.g. "more worst") -- and yet he extended this to adjectives which he regarded as "innately superlative" (chief, unique, extreme, etc.), so the would be no "more perfect union" for him!

Like dictionary-writers, grammarians saw themselves as arbiters, refiners, and polishers of the language -- the more so since, as their books were used for actual instruction on a daily basis -- and in that they surely succeeded. And yet, at the same time, they have given all of us a vague sene of guilt about the possible errors of our usage, and the sense -- entirely unjustified! -- that "bad grammar" is almost a sort of sin.

Johnson's Dictionary

In one particularly memorable episode of Blackadder," Ink and Incapability," when the Prince Regent (played by Hugh Laurie) asks Dr. Johnson (played by Robbie Coltrane) what his new Dictionary is good for, the learned Doctor declares that "It is a book that tells you what English words mean." "I know what English words mean," replies the prince, "I speak English! You must be a bit of a thicko!"

And indeed, one may well ask, why do we need a Dictionary of our own language? After all, numerous English writers, from Chaucer to Spencer to Shakespeare, got along quite well without one, as did their readers -- not to mention the great throng of ordinary speakers of English, whose talk continued unabated, with no need for works of reference to understand it, for centuries. And yet English, by the eighteenth century now well-established in print and manuscript, was rapidly expanding its vocabulary, variety of styles, and usage -- becoming in a sense as much as textual presence as a spoken one. Furthermore, since it had acquired so many words from other classical and modern languages, the search for the right word -- le mot juste, as the French say -- might well involve choosing between several near-synonyms with slightly varied shades of meaning. Finally, since English had been around for a while, there were now a fair number of uncommon or archaic words with which not every reader would necessarily be familiar.

And yet, as the television skit suggests, the idea of an English dictionary took some getting used to; not everyone was sure that the enterprise was worthwhile, or even possible. It would take a man of prodigious talents, hard-working, stubborn, and bottomlessly erudite, to manage such a thing -- and Samuel Johnson was the man to do it. He was widely regarded as one of the most intelligent men of his era -- and he was also brusque, opinionated, and so rude on occasion that some latter-day diagnosticians believe he suffered from Tourette's Syndrome. He did not so much speak as blurt, and many of his exclamations have joined the list of immortal quotes: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a Scoundrel," "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," and "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of Life," to name but a few. 

The learned Doctor is portrayed by Robbie Coltrane, with every bit of bluster the role demands. Dr. Johnson's rising irritation as Blackadder peppers him with a plethora of portmanteau words -- "interphrastrically," "pericombobulations," and "extramuralisation" -- is priceless. And yet it may surprise many to learn that Johnson's own accent was anything but the posh pretentiousness of Coltrane's memorable performance; he had, in fact, a very thick and distinctive Staffordshire accent; according to Jeffrey Meyers' Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, he said "shuperior" for superior, "woonse" for once, and "poonsh" for "punch."

I hadn't realized this myself, until on listening to the audiobook version of my novel PYG -- in which the learned Doctor meets the Learned Pig (this is based on contemporary accounts) -- that I heard Simon Callow's marvellous personation of Johnson's voice, which perfectly and richly evokes both the accent and the man.

So have a browse at his Dictionary, and some of his remarks on men and letters as transcribed by his longtime sidekick and eventual biographer, James Boswell, and (if you wish), leave a few words of your own here in comment or reply.

The Return of English

From a linguistic standpoint, it was a dramatic reversal: having banned any translation of the Bible for nearly 140 years, the Church in England -- soon to be the Church of England -- in 1539 approved an English Bible, which Henry VIII ordered placed in every pulpit in the nation. To add irony, this translation -- though credited to Miles Coverdale -- was, in large part, identical to that made by William Tyndale a decade before. Tyndale was not on hand to celebrate this achievement, however, as he had been burned at the stake for heresy three years previous. He lives on, though as most of the Authorized version of 1611 preserved his language; it has been rightly observed that, with the possible exception of Shakespeare, Tyndale has had the greatest influence on the development of the English language of any one person.

The change did not come easily, nor did it prevail completely, at least until the reign of Elizabeth I. Throughout the 1520's and 30's, a relentless campaign against those in England who, following the example of Martin Luther, clamored for the scriptures in their own language, along with other tracts favorable to their cause (Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man among them). Thomas More, Henry VIII's most influential chancellor and a champion of Renaissance humanism, was charged with maintaining a list of banned books, and doing everything he could to prevent their spread. Unfortunately for his task, the invention of the printing press enabled books to be printed faster than they could be burned -- and unfortunately for him, his involvement in the party of Anne Boleyn led to his own execution in the Tower of London in 1535. Via this link, you can see the license More had to possess heretical books, as well as the text of the Statutes of the Realm that attempted -- vainly -- to limit the reading and interpretation of the new English Bible.

Its immediate legacy was for a time dimmed; on the death of Henry VIII's son Edward, Mary rose to the throne, and plunged England back into Catholicism. For this reason, the compendious Book of Martyrs prepared by John Foxe does not end with Tyndale, but carries on for an additional five volumes, volumes that catalog those put to death under Mary's rule. Eventually, under Elizabeth I, the Church of England and its reforms were solidly and permanently put in place, and indeed remain to this day; though attendance has dropped off steadily at COE churches in England, the worldwide Anglican Communion has held fast. Anyone curious to see a traditional Anglican "high church" mass -- which still uses the exact language of Queen Elizabeth's Book of Common Prayer -- can visit the Sunday services at St. Stephen's here in Providence (they also use plainchant, which is something to hear!).

English as Heresy

The traditional tale of the ascendance of English into all its national glory in the wake of Chaucer's great work is -- alas -- far from the whole story. Not only did the substance and structure of English change after his death, but the language itself came under attack from the authorities of both Church and State. With the 1401 act De Hæretico Comburendo ("on the burning of Heretics"), the new King Henry IV, who had grown up hearing Chaucer himself declaim his verse, and whose personal copy of Troylus and Criseyde survives to this day, signed a bill which made the possession of heretical books -- and, by implication, any and all books written in English -- a crime punishable by burning at the stake, a practice heitherto unknown in England. Indeed, the reach of this new law was so broad that the eminent theologian John Wycliffe, whose advocacy of an English version of the Bible gave his name to its earliest translations, was himself burned at the stake -- even though he had, by that time, been dead for many years; the authorities simply had him exhumed and burned his bones, tossing the ashes in the river Swift (see illustration above).

That Chaucer's own books could be, by this statute, made suspect, is confirmed by the arrest of one John Baron of Agmondesham for the possession of English texts, including a "boke of the Tales of Caunterburie," in 1464. But it was not only him; in the early years of the fifteenth century, nearly a hundred people across Britain were burned at the stake as "relapsed" heretics (it was a two-strikes-you're-out system). Many were women who had taken up the cause of the English scriptures, only to be arrested and forced to confess, among them Hawisia Moone and John Baron. The Lollards believed that women, too, could be preachers of the Gospel, another strike against them in the eyes of the Church. But there were also men of strong views, including a Buckimghamshire blacksmith who swore he could "make as good a sacrament with my tongs upon my anvil as any priest upon his altar." The blacksmith was among those executed.

The ban on any translation of the Bible into English was extended by the Constitutions of Archbishop Arundel, and lasted until Henry VIII finally permitted -- indeed commanded -- the use of the English Bible in 1539. Ironically, much of the New Testament in this volume was based on the translation of William Tyndale -- a man burnt at the stake on orders from Henry himself. And despite the hope that the availability of Scripture would ease the tensions of the theological debate, they continued unabated; in 1542 Parliament passed a statute attempting to restrict who could read, and who could interpret, the English Bible -- and women (except noblewomen) were specifically excluded.

Middle English and Chaucer

Every modern language seems to have its vital, foundational literary work: Italian has Dante's Divine Comedy, Spanish has Don Quixote, and English has Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. And yet, like other such works, the writings of Chaucer are more often talked about than read; unlike Shakespeare's, his characters have not so often strutted upon the stage. In the UK, the BBC has done them both as a period puppet piece as well as a modernized version, and in 1972 the great Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini made a memorable film version -- but here in the US there have been no major film or television adaptations, unless you count the somewhat squishy "A Knight's Tale." Still, Chaucer's influence has been deeply felt; his Troylus and Criseyde was one of Shakespeare's sources for his play of the same name; the Wife of Bath's Prologue was translated in 1700 by John Dryden; and in the twentieth century there have been no fewer than seven translations or adaptations of the Canterbury Tales into modern English, most recently by Peter Ackroyd (in prose) and Sheila Fisher (in verse).

And Chaucer's language is very close to ours -- close enough that, with a modest amount of practice, we can pronounce it and understand it reasonably well.  The main differences are that many combination of letters which are now silent, such as kn and gh, were pronounced, as was the e on the end of so many words which has since become our modern English friend "silent e." Lastly, the vowels of Chaucer's day were further back in the mouth, since the "Great Vowel Shift" which moved them forwards had not yet taken place.  Thus Chaucer's "Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote" is pronounced as "Whahnn that ah-prill, weeth hees shooriss soat-uh" in our reconstructed Chaucerian mode.  

The other difference is mainly vocabulary -- "lexical" as linguists would say. Chaucer still used a number of words left over from older English; a "swevene" was a dream; "eke" meant "indeed" or "as well"; he used "lykned" instead of "likened," "hem" instead of "them" and "hire" instead of "their" there was no neuter possessive "its" so everything had to be "hys" or hers. Happily, there are many fewer such survivals in his verse than in that of the Gawain poet, who, living the north-west Midlands, was removed from many of the changes of London English and still used athele (noble), sithen (since), schawe (show), and lovelokkest (loveliest).

Chaucer was also on the forefront of many changes of which modern English has been the beneficiary; he introduced many words and usages from French, some in their Anglo-Norman senses, nearly all of which are still with us today: bachelor, melody, adversary, bounty, refute, vein, army, season, and devout. He borrowed a few Latin terms, though most often via their French versions, and his verse structures, such as "rhyme royal,"turned out to be particularly effective in English.

Old English

Lines from the poem are carved in runes on this cross.

The land now known as England was originally inhabited by an unknown culture of people, sometimes referred to as "Megalithic" people (a reference to the standing stones they left at, among other places, Stonehenge).  These people were displaced by Celtic tribes, who in their turn were pushed back to the peripheries of the island by three Germanic tribes -- the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes -- who arrived in the fifth century to fill the power vacuum left by the departing Roman colonizers.  We know little of their culture, though, and nothing of their literature, until the moment when they were converted to Christianity -- and literacy -- a couple of centuries later, and some of the earliest texts we know are those used by missionaries to help persuade the Anglo-Saxons of the superiority of Christian belief. In fact, the very oldest written text -- The Dream of the Rood -- survives in part as a runic inscription on a stone cross (shown here).  The Dream is a proselytizing poem -- a poem that sought to convert its readers actively. The main speaker of the poem, in fact, is the Cross itself, which explains why it had to allow Christ to be crucified upon it -- a vital "backstory" for the Saxons, who considered crucifixion to be be"fraecodes gealga" -- the thieves' gallows. The cross, in contrast, represents itself as a faithful thegn (military follower) who only did as his Lord commanded, and was rewarded by having a mini-resurrection of his own, uplifted into the light of heaven, where it was covered with gold and rich gems, a hero's reward.

As with modern English, there were several major dialects of Anglo-Saxon: Northumbrian in the North, Kentish in the East, Mercian in the midlands, and West Saxon in the West of England. The political center of the Saxons was in Winchester (Wintanceastre) in the West Saxon area, and thus its speech became the prestige dialect of the language; more than 90% of surviving Old English texts are in this dialect. Much has changed since then, but even to this day, if you look at the top decile of English (the top 10% of our most frequently-used words), nearly all of them are directly descended from closely similar Saxon antecedents: stone (stan); house (hus); was (wæs); say (secgan); father (fæder); and many more.

In addition to The Dream of the Rood, we'll have a look at Cædmon's Hymn and King Alfred's preface to St. Greogory's Treatise on Pastoral Care, and Ælfric's Colloquy, passages from which we'll go over in class.

The roots of English

Image courtesy The Guardian

Language is a strange thing. Human beings seem to have devised speech systems quite a long time ago -- perhaps 150,000 years -- but nearly all of its early evolution is lost to us; since there were no writing systems until about 5,000 years ago, we have only the very last slice of this history in hand.

That said, we can at least sketch out where English stands in this latter-day family tree. At about the time the cuneiform was invented by Sumerian scribes, a large group of as-yet-illiterate peoples were clustered around the slopes and steppes of the Caucasus mountain that divide Europe from Asia. Their speech was the ancient ancestor of a great many languages that still exist today, among them Hindi, Bengali, Latin, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish and Irish. Linguists have been able to trace a good many "root" words in this speech, even though it was never written; these roots are "hypothetical" but almost certainly existed. This status is shown by their being preceded by an asterisk -- so, for instance, the root *nrek-, which is the original word for king or ruler. In Sanskrit, it evolved into "Rig" (as in the Rig Veda or Royal Vedas), while in Latin it became "Rex" (though retaining the "g" in its possessive form, "regis"); in French it's Roi and in Irish Rí. Modern English however chose a different branch; its work "King" comes from the Germanic branch, where in German it's König; the Old English form was "cyning" (with a hard "c").

Old English itself branched off from the Germanic tree when its speakers crossed the English Channel somewhere between the fourth and fifth centuries; the Romans had gone home and they came to fill the power vacuum. Long before, of course, the Celtic peoples (ancestors of the Irish, Welsh and Scots) had been there already, and before them the "megalithic" people who set up Stonehenge -- but no matter. Its speakers were illiterate, but luckily were converted to Christianity somewhere around the year 700. This mean that they had to both learn Latin (then the universal language of the Church) but also could use its letters to come up with the means of writing out their own tongue. This they did along very phonetic lines; all letters in Old English sound like what they look like ("C" always being hard like "K") though there were a couple of exceptions. The special characters thorn (Þ) and edh (ð) were used for voiceless and voiced "th," and Æ (for the Bugs Bunny "aaah" sound) was known as "ash" (spelled "æsc").

The collected body of written works in Old English that survive is quite small, a mere 400 or so manuscripts. Nearly all of them are in one dialect -- "West Saxon" -- which was (not unexpectedly) the dialect spoken by its most powerful rulers, who were based in the western area around their capital of Winchester. The far greater body of speakers in the area around London spoke a dialect known as "Mercian," of which little written materials survive.

All of this, of course, was turned topsy-turvy when the French-speaking Normans conquered in 1066, making English a subaltern speech -- at least for a couple of centuries -- to Norman French -- of which more anon.

Introducing .... the International Phonetic Alphabet!

One of the things that makes English so distinct from most of the other languages on the planet is its unusually inconsistent and unpredictable spelling. Due to changes in the sounds of English over time, many letters once pronounced are now silent -- particularly our old friend "silent e." Add to that the fact that, as our vowel system changed, many words that use the same vowel are pronounced completely differently, and you have a pretty difficult spelling "system." The spelling reformer and playwright George Bernard Shaw jested at this by claiming that "fish" should be spelled "ghoti" -- since gh spells 'f' in "laugh," o is pronounced 'i' in "women," and ti spells 'sh' in "notion!

To save us from all this, and to enable us to understand English's changing sounds, the powers that be sent us the International Phonetic Alphabet. It may look a bit daunting, but it has the great advantage that, within it, one letter indicates one, and precisely one sound, and is always consistent.

I've provided a link to an excellent video tutorial (here and at the top of our links list -- have a look and a listen. It's a remarkable video, in that with it, you can both hear the IPA sounds and see the way the jaw, tongue, lips, and teeth make them.  At first it may seem daunting, it's fairly easy to get used to; after all, these are noises we've all been making nearly all our lives. And then, just for practice, see if you can transcribe one of the most familiar sequences of sounds -- your own name. You can write it out on a piece of paper, or if you like there are downloadable fonts that will enable you to type them out. 

Welcome

Wæs þu hæl !

Welcome to our class blog for ENGL 432, Studies in the English Language, Spring semester 2024, here at Rhode Island College.

Our language is, in an important sense, the most vital and intimate kind of history we have. Language bears the marks of all our other histories: our movements, our settlings, our neighbors, and our enemies. By looking deep into this glass, we can learn when we first needed names for things, whether it was “mouse” – quite possibly one of the oldest words in English – or “biohacking,” one of its newest. And, although the vast majority of language change is so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, there are moments when speech itself becomes a matter of contention, or undergoes an interval of significant, radical change. It’s these instances that will be the exemplary moments we’ll be studying in this class; many of them still shape our speech today, and each of them reveals the way in which language mirrors – or sometimes instigates – social change.

This blog will serve as a clearing-house many of our discussions, as well as a resource page where you'll find many useful links to language resources online. Make it yours! For, like the guests at a wedding, if we have anything to say about our language, we had best speak now, or forever hold our peace.