N. Love (ed.) Language and History
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Language, history and Language and History
Nigel Love
Defining a topic for discussion by conjoining two large, vague nouns with ‘and’ is not
calculated to elicit narrowly focused debate. On the contrary, it is a procedure that
apparently invites contributors to say anything that in some way relates one designated
thing or phenomenon to the other; and when the things or phenomena are in themselves
complex and multifaceted, and the connections and relationships between them numerous
and varied, the likeliest outcome is no more than an enhanced and perhaps rueful
appreciation of how many disparate issues can be made to fall under the heading in
question. This shortcoming of the ‘X and Y’ formula may appear especially salient in the
case of ‘language and history’. To take only the most obvious point, it seems to embrace
questions pertaining to the language of history and questions pertaining to the history of
language. Aren’t those two (at least two) different subjects? Is there anything to be gained
by bringing them together in a single volume? Does this collection go beyond merely
bringing them together and perform the altogether more useful and significant operation of
yoking them together?
That is for its readers to say. At any rate, without claiming that everything in this
book is directed towards sustaining the thesis that the two kinds of linguo-historical
question are related, an attempt can be made to spell out that thesis and to draw attention
to those aspects of the following chapters that support or illustrate it.
A commonsensical view of the relation between language and history might run as
follows. In the primary sense of the word, history is what happened in the past. In a
secondary sense, sometimes covered by the word ‘historiography’, history is what historians
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produce: in essence, collections of statements, factual or interpretative, as to (some of)
what happened. Language serves the historian, as it serves any other species of statementmaker, by providing the linguistic equipment for making statements. That equipment
consists of words whose meanings convey the substance of the statements the historian
wishes to make. A language is a device for encoding systematically recoverable semantic
content. What could be simpler than that? A famous epistemology – Popper’s – has been
founded on treating language and languages as thus unproblematically capable of
enshrining ‘objective knowledge’ (see e.g. his 1972 book of that title).
That matters are not quite so simple may be initially insinuated with the observation
that languages themselves (allegedly) have histories; and this, if true, must be expected to
complicate their role as repositories of stable meanings. But once again common sense
offers a bluff response. Languages do indeed change over time, and the reader of noncontemporary texts must be alert to the interpretative difficulties this may cause. But can
we not rely on linguistic historians (philologists, historical linguists) to reconstruct the
history of languages and thereby alleviate such difficulties? The temporal instability of
languages may in certain ways be problematic, but the problems can in principle be
overcome.
Christopher Hutton’s chapter in this volume raises by implication the question how
far common sense of this order is the product of a linguistic culture whose writing happens
to involve the deployment of characters that have long since come to be treated as visually
arbitrary. This is not so with Chinese, for instance. Chinese characters offer a
‘fundamental semiotic challenge’, being read ‘in complex ways as having both a pictorial
and a phonetic element’. That is to say, the meaning and history of the word taken to be
represented by a character is bound up with questions about what the character depicts or
portrays and how that portrayal has evolved. The whole enterprise of reconstructing
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linguistic history is thus from the outset liable to be conceived in ways that differ radically
from those taken for granted in other cultures, with a range of consequences not just for
how in detail ancient texts are interpreted but for what it is to interpret them.
Even if we confine ourselves to the world of Western languages and linguistics, one
would have more confidence in the deliverances of common sense on these questions if
linguistic historiography were theoretically better founded than it is. The purpose of that
enterprise is to investigate and describe the history of languages, i.e. how they change
through time. But the fact is that there is no agreement among historical linguists as to
either (a) what a language is, or (b) what it is that changes when a linguistic change occurs,
or (c) what kind of event, if any, a linguistic change might be. This is an unpromising state
of affairs.
It is a linguists’ platitude that what counts as a language in ordinary parlance is a
matter of indefinitely variable sociocultural definition; that no linguistic (i.e. internal
structural) justification can be found for distinguishing Swedish and Danish as separate
languages if Mandarin and Cantonese are to be acknowledged as versions of the same
language; that what happened to Dutch when taken to South Africa was on the face of it
no more cataclysmic than what happened to English when the Normans invaded, and yet
South African Dutch became Afrikaans, while English marched on as English. Historical
linguists, for their part, have in general never been particularly concerned to impose some
special definition of their own, uniquely required for their historians’ purposes,1 or to
displace ordinary parlance by defining the term ‘a language’ so as to give unequivocal
answers to questions about the boundary between one language and another (whether in
time, in space, in terms of social stratification…), or to specify how exactly the concept of a
1
That is not to say that particular language historians have not come up with their own definitions. See, for
instance, Millar’s discussion of Meillet (this volume).
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dialect relates to the concept of a language, or to worry over whether the sense of ‘a
language’ in which Spanish, say, is a form of Latin, should or should not take priority over
the sense in which Spanish and Latin are different languages. Such issues have traditionally
either not been thought to matter or else have been set aside sine die, or at any rate for a
rainy one.
In his chapter in this collection Roger Lass considers, from the perspective of a
historical linguist working (albeit critically) within the orthodox scholarly tradition that
starts with nineteenth-century comparative philology, some of the consequences for
linguistic historiography of supposing that a language name like ‘English’ uncontroversially
identifies a domain susceptible to historical treatment in terms of a linear narrative.
English is especially problematic in this respect because of the relative wealth of
documentary evidence available from different times and places, and because of the depth
and intensity of study to which surviving texts have been subjected. A paradox emerges:
the more that is known of a language’s history the less reason there is to suppose that it has
one. Published histories of English are replete with statements to the effect that A
‘becomes’ B in cases where there is no reason to suppose, even granting the standard
assumption that in certain circumstances the formula A > B has a coherent interpretation,2
that A and B stand in any identifiable relationship of temporal succession. Forms attested
in eighth-century Northumbrian are treated as directly ancestral to forms attested in tenthcentury West Saxon. It is as if items from one period in Italian were to be linked by the A
> B formula to items from a later period in Portuguese. The reason that would be
unacceptable is that Italian and Portuguese are well known to be different ‘languages’.
Whereas from a standpoint that starts by identifying ‘English’ as the object whose history is
to be mapped, Northumbrian and West Saxon are not. They are merely ‘dialects’. Thus
2
See Love 2002.
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the historiographical enterprise is distorted from the outset by the requirement that a folk
language name correspond to a real-world entity whose history can be likened, in Lass’s
trope, to a tube or cylinder whereby ‘the historiographical act consists of pouring in forms
at one end … and looking to see what occurs at the various graduation marks (the points at
which the surviving texts allow us to intersect the “stream” of history), and then finally
seeing what comes out of the bottom’.
Lass further observes that ‘historians tend to adopt a manner of speaking in which
the collection of materials whose ancestry we are reconstructing, no matter how complex
and variable, always at some remove appears to go back to a single ancestral object whose
“story” we then find ourselves telling’. We know quite well from reflection on our own
first-order experience of language that it is hard to find ‘single objects’ at any level of
generalising description. Lass takes the example of ‘the’ Modern English vowel ‘short a’, as
in bat, cab, sap, etc., which, looking at the English-speaking world as a whole, corresponds at
the very least to all of [], [], [], [], [], []. But as we go back in time such variation
dwindles away: ultimately all of these will be held to have a single, unitary origin in the
‘comparativist fiction of the “dialect-free protolanguage”’. There is no such phonetic
object as ‘short a’ (nor for that matter any unitary phonological analysis in terms of which
‘short a’ would emerge as a single pan-English phoneme), but the very act of setting it up
for the modern language establishes it as the reflex of some definite ancestral entity. Thus
does a language’s history emerge as an artefact of the particular synchronic analysis taken as
a starting point.
Why are these conceptual problems that swirl round the concept of ‘a language’
largely ignored? Partly because they are intractable, and partly because the central
proposition on which Western historical linguistics is founded is not that it is possible to
identify languages across transformations in time, but linguistic substance constitutive of
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linguistic units, i.e. the component microparts of languages. What language any units thus
historically located count as belonging to can indeed be left to politics, or societal
Selbstverstehung, or whatever; the historical linguist is in business on the footing that, given
any two états de langue, however crudely identified, it is possible to say whether they do or do
not contain a core of material, at the meaningful level of articulation, which counts as ‘the
same’ in that one can plausibly postulate continuous direct or indirect historical
transmission of linguistic units combining a form with a meaning. Non-meaningful
sameness, i.e. the subject matter of phonetic or phonological history, has in practice tended
to get the lion’s share of attention in historical linguistics, but in fact is logically subordinate
to meaningful sameness in that one has no basis for historically relating two ‘sounds’ unless
there is some justification for relating meaningful units in which those ‘sounds’ appear. So
what makes English Indo-European is hundreds of etymologist’s facts such as that the
word thatch contains the same root as the Latin verb tego, that feather is ultimately the same,
or contains some of the same linguistic substance, as Welsh adar ‘birds’, that cow and the
stem of bovine are ultimately cognate, and so on and so forth. What makes English
Germanic is hundreds of facts such as that although English father, German Vater, Latin
pater are all ‘the same word’, as are English foot, German Fuss, Latin pes, the English forms
stand closer to the German than they do to the Latin, in that there are forms, attested or
reconstructible, taken to be ancestral to both the English and the German that are less
historically remote than forms ancestral to the English, the German and the Latin. And
what makes Modern English and Old English the same language historically speaking (even
if they are different languages according to most other kinds of speaking) is that many Old
English forms are themselves identifiable as the recent forebears of Modern English forms.
But where do such ‘facts’ come from? Feather and adar, for instance, have neither a
single phonetic segment in common (granted a non-rhotic English speaker) nor anything
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but the loosest semantic connection. Crucially required, it might seem, is some way of
perceiving the ‘sameness’ allegedly lurking behind obvious – in many cases, gross –
discrepancies. But this is the wrong way to look at it. It is not a matter of first noticing a
(non-existent) sameness and then working back to ancestral forms whose divergent
development in different branches of Indo-European has caused the differences. It is a
matter of demonstrating that, provided it is not on semantic grounds wholly implausible to
associate feather with adar, a story can be told whereby given, among many other things, a
certain reconstructed Indo-European root or form, certain established sound changes
distinguishing Germanic from Celtic …, continuous transmission through many
generations might be expected to yield feather or something like it as the contemporary end
point of one line of development and adar or something like it as the contemporary end
point of the other. The alleged ‘sameness’ is an artefact of the notion of ‘continuous
transmission’. What is claimed to have been continuously transmitted? The only possible
answer is: a metalinguistic reification located in the mind of the historical linguist.
In trying to rationalise this onto-epistemological curiosity, two kinds of explanation
suggest themselves. In ‘History and comparative philology’ Roy Harris discusses issues in
the historiography of historical linguistics itself. He suggests that the main achievement of
early scholars in the tradition of comparative philology, and their main claim to have
founded a science of language, was that, going beyond merely observing many formalsemantic correspondences across Indo-European languages, they devised ways of
systematising those observations and reducing them to simple correlational formulae. But
this immediately invites the question what the correlations mean and why they should hold.
‘Interlinguistic correspondence formulae (of the kind typified by Grimm’s Law) are no
more than that: i.e. formulae. In themselves they contain no historical information and capture
no “facts” other than the observations and assumptions (whether accurate or inaccurate)
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that went into their formulation’. So an interpretation is required. The preferred
interpretation, much influenced by a contemporary revolution in biological science, was to
suppose they represented the different development, along separate evolutionary lines, of
linguistic entities that could be traced back to a common ancestor. Thus did comparative
philology find itself committed to belief in the survival across millennia of sounds and
forms which although in many cases transformed beyond recognition nonetheless
mystically retained their identity. In the biological case items that did indeed retain their
identity across such time spans were eventually identified and called genes. In the linguistic
case, needless to say, nothing analogous to genes has ever turned up.
Another kind of explanation would point out that the ‘sameness’ of linguistic forms
across long time spans is no more than a logical extension of a commonplace feature of
our understanding of how languages work ‘synchronically’. If you and shortly afterwards I
each produce an utterance that might be written down as ‘feather’, then irrespective of any
phonetic differences between them we have both said ‘the same thing’. That in itself,
properly understood, may be uncontentious enough. What is highly contentious is that
‘saying the same thing’ in such a case is to be interpreted as instantiating an abstract
invariant, viz. the ‘thing’ (in this case the word feather) that has been said twice.3 Once one
makes that reifying move there is nowhere to stop. For if the abstraction in question
remains the same across minor phonetic differences (as between your pronunciation and
mine) and tiny time gaps (as between your utterance and mine), at what specifiable degree
of enlargement do the differences and the gaps begin to matter, and why? A viable
concept of the limits of ‘a language’ would help here. But it is not clear that there is any to
This is the crucial move behind the ‘strong tendency to view [a] language as an object (or an inventory of
objects such as lexemes) rather than as verbal communicative behaviour’, discussed in this volume by Michael
Walrod. On this point Geoffrey Harpham (this volume) identifies Saussure as the key historical figure in
modern times, with his striking theorisation of the notion that ‘[a] language has a determinate nature as a
concrete object’.
3
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be had.
What, then, is a linguistic change, granted a historical linguistics crucially founded on
identifying linguistic continuities through time? Is there a theoretical perspective in which it
makes sense to conceive of linguistic objects as changing and yet mysteriously staying the
same?
Let us approach an answer by sketching the kind of account a historical linguist
might give of a small lexical change in English that seems to be taking place right now, if
indeed it has not already been accomplished. English contains a word font, which belongs
primarily to the technical vocabulary of printers, and which according to the second edition
(1989) of the Oxford English Dictionary4 refers to ‘a complete set or assortment of type of a
particular face and size’. It has a number of homonyms, and a variant fount.
As against that, the word-processing program with which I am now writing offers me
(i) a choice of ‘fonts’, and (ii) a choice of ‘font sizes’, each choice independent of the other.
This suggests that, at any rate for the designers of Microsoft Word, the word font does not
mean what the OED says it means, in at least two respects. For the fonts in question are
not ‘assortments of type’, nor are they of any particular size.
What does the linguist make of these discrepancies? He is likely to detect a
paradigmatic case of semantic change, recent or ‘in progess’, induced by developments in the
technology of printing. The use of movable type requires discrete collections of physical
objects (‘types’) each consisting of an adequate supply of the various characters needed for
printing in a given size and ‘face’. Such a collection is, as the OED tells us, called a ‘font’.
Any desired change in either the size of the type, or the typeface, or both, calls for a
different font. So in this usage 10 pt Garamond is as much a different font from 12 pt
Garamond as either is from any size of Baskerville. But computer simulation of the effects
4
www.oed.com
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brought about by changing fonts does not depend on substituting one set of physical
objects for another. Moreover, the software works in such a way that size is most
conveniently treated as an independent variable.5 Hence the world of electronic printing
has no use for the word font in its old face-and-size sense, and the way is open for it to
change its meaning. Font has come, or is well on its way to coming, to mean ‘typeface’. It
remains to be seen whether that meaning is destined to be merely additional to the old one,
or whether it will eventually supplant it.
A story along these lines is supported by the fact, readily ascertainable by inquiry
among e.g. contemporary university undergraduates, that there are many members of the
generation familiar from childhood with personal computers who are unaware that font ever
meant anything else. Moreover, one of the semantic developments here can be slotted into
a familiar category: old linguistic expressions are commonly retained, with consequently
different meanings, across changes in the way things are done, as when we carry on
‘dialling’ telephone numbers even though what we actually do is press buttons, or when
ships continue to have ‘sailing times’ despite having no sails.
Let us briefly consider just some of the assumptions on which such an account rests.
The first assumption is baldly announced in the opening observational statement: ‘English
contains a word font’. This is a statement about a certain public codification6 of the English
lexicon. That is to say, in Michael Walrod’s image, font is one of the objects currently on
display in the lexicographer’s museum. But one may ask why the relevant part of the
lexicon is codified in the way it is, and whether alternative ways would not be at least
equally appropriate. Simplifying what the OED has to say, it appears that there are (at
least) two separate nouns with the form font. One of them – the one with which we are
5
6
As are roman vs italic and bold vs non-bold.
The term is used in the sense of Harris 1996; see especially ch. 12.
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concerned – has fount (exactly the same meaning as font in the printing sense) as a variant.
The other (‘baptismal water container’) has connections with, but is not apparently to be
seen synchronically as a mere variant of, the word fount as a poetic or metaphorical version
of fountain. So two forms, font and fount, are analysed as three words: font, fount and
font/fount. What is the rationale for this analysis? It seems to be largely etymological, but
etymology is not taken as definitively settling the matter: if it did, presumably font in the
printing sense would count as the same word as fondue7 – which of course is precisely what
the macrohistorical linguist would want to say. We seem to be working here with some
synchronic notion of wordhood and word-identity which, while partially or intermittently
deferential to the macrohistorian’s notion, nonetheless diverges from it in accordance with
criteria that are far from obvious. Such considerations have a bearing on the putative
linguistic change we are considering, in as much as they are involved in settling one kind of
question as to what exactly it is that is held to be changing. Fount as a variant of font in the
printing sense seems never to have had much currency in the United States. And since it
may be surmised that the change whereby font comes to mean ‘typeface’ originates in
America, we may ask whether it extends to the variant fount at all. Certainly those for
whom font means ‘typeface’ do not seem to use fount in this way. If that is so, it would be
good reason for ceasing to treat fount as a mere variant of font. In other words, the change
in the meaning of font has arguably brought about a lexical differentiation of font and fount.
All this, of course, against the background of the macrohistorian’s insistence that font and
fount in the printing context just are and will continue to be the same word.
A second assumption is that when a word-processing program offers its users
separate drop-down menus of fonts and sizes and thereby implies that font means
‘typeface’, it speaks with the authority necessary for having its usage acknowledged in a
7
They are variant forms (‘strong’ and ‘weak’ respectively) of the past participle of the French verb fondre.
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public codification of English words and their meanings. This is by no means the only
possible reaction. It could be treated as a simple mistake – a solecism not to be
countenanced by a reputable dictionary. In which case there has been no semantic change,
and a whole generation of English speakers has been woefully misled. This conclusion
would of course be powerfully assisted, not to say made definitively true, if when the next
version of Microsoft Word comes along we find that its authors, perhaps having
encountered some such discussion as this, have solemnly taken a decision systematically to
replace font with typeface. Meanwhile, and absent such decisive metalinguistic intervention,
we are left wondering just when and on what grounds to declare that a change has
‘occurred’.
A third assumption is that font did indeed mean what the OED says it meant, up at
least until when Mr Gates and his confrères started to mess around with it. One question
that arises here, put in terms of a much-discussed dichotomy, is whether or how far a
lexicographer’s statement of the meaning of a word is supposed to be descriptive or prescriptive
of usage.8 It is not impossible that there have always been reputable English-speakers for
whom, and irrespective of whether one thinks there are rights and wrongs in the matter,
font just did or does mean ‘typeface’.9 If this is so, then the amendment required of a
descriptive dictionary is the acknowledgement not of a new sense of the word but of failure
to record an old one.
But stating the third assumption in this way itself implies a fourth, which is that
words ‘have’ one or more definitely statable meanings. The fact is, though, that alongside
those for whom, erroneously or not, font may have meant ‘typeface’ long before the
invention of word-processors and the associated printing technology, there will be those,
For recent discussion see e.g. Taylor 1990a, 1990b.
Cf. Weigand’s comment (this volume) on the statement that Italian afferrare has undergone a metaphorical
change of meaning from ‘grip, grasp’ to ‘understand’. The problem with this is that both meanings appear to
exist side by side in the contemporary language.
8
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especially outside the world of old-style printing, for whom font, albeit in some sense or
degree known to them as an English word, never had any clear or precise meaning at all.10
(These, doubtless, are disreputable speakers, but that is a kind of judgement unknown to
modern linguistic science.) Most people’s vocabularies have more or less extensive
penumbral areas in which there dwell words about whose meaning and usage they are to
varying degrees vague.11 Our acquaintance with what the dictionary codifies as the words
of our language is not all or nothing: it runs the whole gamut from knowledge of the
precise wording of the dictionary definition to sheer oblivious ignorance. Positions in
between these end points of the scale are especially interesting in the present context, since
they are likely to be a potent source of lexical change. Perhaps the originators of the
change in question knew that font meant something to do with the letterforms of printed text,
and found it handy for pressing into service as, in effect, a synonym of typeface. Or perhaps
they knew perfectly well that it meant ‘a complete set or assortment of type of a particular
face and size’, but preferred to use font anyway. It is, after all, a shorter word than typeface.
The issue is what account we can give of the role of (a) the language-users whose usage
ushered in the change in question; (b) the language-users whose widespread adoption of
the new usage is what licenses, if anything does, recognising a ‘change’ at all.
Here we come upon the question that has for many years been acknowledged as
central to the theoretical debate in historical linguistics: how do we bring the behaviour of
language-users into a discourse about linguistic history in terms of which languages and
their component parts are treated essentially as if they were agents of their own temporal
evolution? 12
Current descriptions of English would have it that key, to vary the example, is one of
See Weigand (this volume) for discussion of the need to base any viable account of semantic change on a
recognition of synchronic semantic indeterminacy.
11 Walrod (this volume) doesn’t know what chick flick means. Do you?
12 Deumert 2003 is a comprehensive overview of this debate.
10
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a large number of nouns that can be used as a premodifier. And we are familiar with
expressions such as a key idea or the key issue. Latterly – very recently, perhaps – key seems
to have made a significant move towards becoming a fully fledged adjective, in being used
predicatively (this problem is key), with intensifiers (that notion is really key), and as the head of
an adjectival phrase (key to a solution here is …). It is likely that there are many speakers on
whose ears such expressions fall as would this station is railway or the vicar’s collar is unusually
dog. On the other hand, a pundit might be inclined here and now to announce a syntactic
change. But note two salient points about any such pronouncement. First, its inherently
normative nature; secondly, the fact that it will typically be based on no information
whatever about the linguistic consciousness of the speakers in respect of whose usage it is
proffered.
The fact that we have no reason to believe that speakers of a language share the same
linguistic consciousness is the most important obstacle to pinpointing the origin of
linguistic changes in communicational interaction. A linguistic change is the result of
metalinguistic judgements based on linguistic reflection. The ‘actuation problem’ that so
troubles sociohistorical linguists13 is insoluble because a linguistic change requires not just
an event, or even many events, but an interpretation. If culturally powerful enough the
interpreter may get his interpretation written into the record. If not, not.
In any case, it is not clear in what circumstances any particular speaker is obliged to
pay attention to what the record says. A well known piège à cons for teachers of historical
linguistics is the English verb weave. One will not infrequently find the form weaved, as in the
car weaved through the traffic, cited as illustrating the occasional failure of morphological
irregularities to carry across to figuratively extended senses of words (contast he wove the
fabric, where the verb in its literal sense retains the strong past tense form). But according
13
Milroy is an example; see e.g. Milroy 1992 pp. 169 ff.
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to the ‘official’ history of English this analysis is based on a sort of professional folk
etymology: there were historically two different verbs, one of which always had a weak past
tense (as in he ducked and weaved), and that is the one found in the traffic context. But is it?
Suppose someone simply announces that when he says ‘the car weaved through the traffic’
he is, as a matter of ‘fact’, using an analogically levelled past tense form of weave/wove. What
might in principle show him to be wrong about that? Here again we see the impossibility
of reconciling a would-be descriptive but in reality essentially normative statement of the
‘facts’ with the unbounded fluidity of the relationships different speakers may contract with
their language.
The point of adverting to just a few of the plethora of queries that arise in
connection with the hypothetical linguist’s story about font is not, in a sense, to challenge
the story itself. As far as it goes, and on its own terms, it is unexceptional. It is just the
kind of story historical linguists are wont to tell about simple lexical developments of this
kind, granted that they mostly discuss changes sufficiently far in the past to be treated as
definitely accomplished. Taking a change either very recent or still in progress has the
advantage of more readily revealing the nature of such stories. For, although
unexceptional, it is far from unexceptionable. On the contrary, precisely because it draws
attention to a currently live if trivial issue in English semantics, some may be expected to
take exception to it. Or at least to treat it as open for discussion and debate. Some may
even resolve to see to it that the alleged change is reversed or somehow halted in its tracks.
The starting point for the story is the observation of a mismatch between what an
extant codification has to say about the meaning of a word and how the word seems
actually to be used. The as yet uncodified new usage is so prevalent as to warrant, the
linguist urges, public acknowledgement of a change. Far from being a scientist’s
dispassionate statement of a fact or set of facts of some kind, such a story constitutes a
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move in a metalinguistic discourse which, if successful, will have a variety of social
implications. Exactly the same once applied to comparable stories about established
changes, albeit that their sociopolitical significance will in many cases have expired or been
exhausted by the passage of time.
On an account of this kind, a linguistic change just is a change in a codification.
What has changed, or what the hypothetical linguist is proposing ought to be changed, is a
dictionary entry.
This is especially clear when the change in question is the complete loss of some
item. Keller (1994) offers an interesting suggestion as to how, in general, to think about
linguistic changes. Keller challenges the assumption – as old as Western thought itself, he
suggests – that phenomena can be categorised in terms of a dichotomy of the natural
(sunsets, earthquakes, flowers…) on the one hand, vs human artefacts (coins, computers,
candlesticks…) on the other. For there is a category of things that straddle the boundary
between the two: phenomena that arise ‘naturally’, but as an unintended consequence of
concerted action, directed to other ends, on the part of human beings. Keller is not of
course the first to identify such a category, which he dubs ‘phenomena of the third kind’,
but, he claims, its relevance to linguistics has not previously been explored. In Keller’s
view it is the category into which linguistic changes fall.
As a simple non-linguistic example of a phenomenon of the third kind, Keller
describes what road-traffic analysts apparently call the traffic jam ‘out of nowhere’.
Imagine a steady stream of cars proceeding along a highway at roughly the same speed with
ample separation between them. For some reason somewhere in the stream driver A slows
down. In response driver B immediately behind applies his brakes too. To be sure of
avoiding collision B slows down slightly more than would be required to maintain his
distance from A. Behind B, driver C reacts in the same way … Each successive car ends
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up travelling somewhat slower than the one immediately ahead, with the result that drivers
L, M, N … come to a complete halt. The ensuing traffic jam is an artefact, but it has not
been consciously or intentionally created: it is the unlooked-for outcome of many
individual decisions to proceed with due prudence and caution in the light of the behaviour
of the driver in front. The jam has been brought about by what Keller follows Adam
Smith and (more recently) Robert Nozick in calling an ‘invisible hand’.
Keller’s most detailed linguistic example concerns the fate of the German adjective
englisch ‘angelic’ (< Engel ‘angel’). Around the middle of the nineteenth century this word
started to become infrequent as part of the vocabulary of the German-speaking
community. This happened because it was no longer learned by German-acquiring
children. It was no longer learned because those who knew the word tended to avoid it
and to use alternatives such as engelhaft instead. They avoided englisch because they did not
want to risk being misunderstood. That risk existed because englisch ‘angelic’ (call it englisch1)
was homophonous with englisch2 ‘English’, and because the meanings of englisch1 and englisch2
were such that in almost any utterance containing englisch1 this word could be understood as
englisch2 without making the utterance nonsensical. The opposite was not true: in most
contexts englisch2 could not be interpreted as englisch1 without rendering the proposition
senseless (bizarre, improbable, etc.). This being so, the use of englisch2 was much less likely
to be misinterpreted. Because englisch1 was more of a hazard to successful communication
than englisch2, and because there was a readily available alternative to englisch1 (engelhaft),
speakers came to use this alternative instead. The clash of homonyms became critical
when it did, says Keller, because cultural circumstances prevailing at the time led to an
increased need for and use of words meaning ‘English’ and ‘angelic’. The important point
about this explanation, from Keller’s point of view, is that there is no reason to suppose
that any one individual deliberately intended to bring about the demise of englisch1.
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N. Love (ed.) Language and History
Speakers were simply trying to make themselves understood and to avoid being
misunderstood: in the given situation these desiderata led them to avoid using englisch1, and
this avoidance eventually had the unsought consequence that englisch1 disappeared, as if
removed by an invisible hand.
It is clear from this explanation that the workings of the invisible hand, as Keller
presents them, are relative to a particular codification of the German vocabulary. Nobody
seems to say ‘englisch’ any more to mean ‘angelic’, and there is no reason to dispute the
broad outline of Keller’s account of why not. But what changed, exactly? Apparently, the
willingness of German-speakers to tolerate the risk of saying ‘englisch’ and leaving their
hearers doubtful whether they meant ‘angelic’ or ‘English’. This took a plunge in the midnineteenth century. But a change of tolerance level is not a linguistic change. The
linguistic change only comes about when someone interprets the scarcity of new instances
of ‘englisch’ = ‘angelic’ as showing that the word englisch1 has ceased to exist. What does that
mean? It just means that the lexicographer has been persuaded either to remove a
dictionary entry or to adorn it with an obelisk. R. I. P.
Moreover, stories of this kind are incompatible with a macrohistorical perspective in
terms of which englisch1 exemplifies a fully productive word-formation process of which this
particular instance happens to have fallen out of current use, and font, for all its formal and
semantic vagaries, remains the ‘same’ linguistic item over whatever span of time
etymologists are able to give a plausible account of it. There is a gross conceptual
discontinuity here. The key to the enigma of linguistic objects that change while remaining
the same is that the objects that are held to change are not the objects that are held to
remain the same. Microhistorical changes are established in relation to synchronic
codifications irrelevant to the macrohistory. The macrohistory deals in entities invisible to
the microhistory. The rationale for the synchronic codifications is at best unclear, while the
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macrohistorical entities are artefacts of a dubious metaphysics.
In short, historical linguistics as currently understood and practised is a conceptual
and theoretical disaster area. Not only has it no viable foundations, it cannot even muster a
modicum of internal coherence. But one point emerges clearly enough: the ‘internal’
history of a language is a metafiction constructed from diachronic projections of the fiction
that lies at the heart of synchronic descriptive linguistics, namely that utterances instantiate
enduring linguistic abstractions (‘short a’, feather, font, weave/wove vs weave/weaved …). The
difference between synchronic and any kind of historical linguistics is that the former is in
practice concerned, as Saussure put it (or, given his theoretical context, was forced to
concede), with ‘un espace de temps plus ou moins long pendant lequel la somme des
modifications survenues est minime’14 – i.e. during which the temporal dimension can be
ignored. The difference between macro- and microhistorical linguistics is essentially a
matter of how long particular abstractions are held to endure. And since there can be no
objective or indeed rational answer to this question, the result is a indefinite multiplicity of
answers. Font and fondue are different words, perhaps several different words. On the
other hand, they are one and the same word. Take your pick. Alternatively, overthrow the
whole conceptual structure that gives rise to such quandaries. Meanwhile, let us observe
that languages clearly inhabit a domain where there is no viable distinction to be drawn
between history and historiography. A language’s history just is constituted by what its
historiographers say.
This is perhaps especially obvious where the historiography is patently in thrall to an
‘external’ sociopolitical agenda. Robert McColl Millar starts his discussion of the work of
Antoine Meillet with the observation that in his Aperçu d’une histoire de la langue grecque (1913),
which has been described as ‘arguably the first true “history” of the Greek language’, he
14
Saussure 1922 p. 142.
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was in fact ‘developing by implication a theoretical position on the relationship between
language, history and society’. That theoretical position becomes clearer when one turns to
his later work Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle, first published in 1918 and then in a
considerably revised edition in 1928. It amounts to proposing that the history of any given
‘language’ should be written in such a way as to subserve the requirements of a taxonomy
of however many socially stratified linguistic varieties need to be recognised in the light of
the sociolinguistic situation of the speech community or nation in question. Such a
taxonomy is entirely the invention of the historiographer. At the bottom of Meillet’s pile
are what he calls parlers, which owe their lowly status to the fact that they lack any
connection with ‘civilisation’. Somewhere in between, among other distinguishable
linguistic kinds, are dialectes, which may be ‘capable of literature in their own written form,
but will not be used either as the language of administration or the language of intellectual
debate’. In the case of some privileged communities their highest variety will earn the
accolade of being dubbed a grande langue de civilisation, of which for Meillet the most
illustrious example is French, as codified largely in the seventeenth century by the agencies
of an authoritarian state. Meillet’s interest for Millar lies in the fact that unlike many
predecessors he did not simply equate languages with grandes langues de civilisation, but
acknowledged that where language is concerned there is a ‘dynamic relationship between
historical processes and social patterns’, such that the connections and interactions between
stratified varieties should be taken into account. Meillet may therefore be seen as a
transitional figure ‘between the previous authoritarian and prescriptive discourse of the
French linguistic tradition and a newer sociology of language which embraced diversity and
at times actively encouraged, and engaged in, language development’.
Meillet’s work overtly (and prescientifically, some contemporary linguists would
scoffingly say) attempts to fuse the ‘internal’ history of languages with ‘external’
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considerations of their cultural status. The fact that such a project should even be
envisaged is an interesting comment on the epistemology of linguistic historiography. In
his chapter in this volume John Joseph identifies the most salient driving force behind such
projects: nationalism. His discussion focuses particularly on the debate among theorists of
the modern concept of national identity between those who are ‘essentialist’ and those who
are ‘constructivist’ about language. Both sides are agreed on the centrality of the idea of a
national language: the question is whether, as essentialists would have it, the national
language ‘can be taken for granted as what members of a nation share and what the rest of
nationalism can be constructed on’, or whether ‘a national language is itself constructed as
part of the nationalist project’. Within sociopolitical discourse constructivism about
national languages, i.e. authoritatively codified ‘standard’ languages disseminated through
formal education, is clearly a more sophisticated position than essentialism in so far as it
recognises that the provenance of such entities cannot be ignored if one is to understand
what they are and how they function. And constructivism about national languages is the
orthodoxy within modern linguistics, which has long made a fetish of disparaging the
‘prescriptivism’ involved in their construction15 and in fact sometimes affects to ignore
them altogether on the ground that, being constructed, they cannot be objects of naturalscientific study. Whether or when the next step will be taken – of grasping that this applies
to all languages merely in virtue of the linguist’s having identified them as such – remains to
be seen.
If a language’s history is determined by its historiography, is there any object of
historical inquiry of which this is not true? In ‘How to make history with words’, Roy
Harris conflates history and historiography in respect of history itself. He argues that the
activity of historiographers is itself a way of making history. This is in one sense a lame
15
See Kilpert 2002 for an interesting recent discussion of the role of prescriptivism in linguistic theorising.
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truism – something one might be especially inclined to say in a case where the
historiography is famous and widely read. That is not what Harris intends. Nor is it that
he rejects the usual distinction between history as what happens in the past and history
(historiography) as what gets written by historians. Rather, he asks whether that distinction
is properly construed as a difference between two meanings of the word history. His point
is that the historian does not merely report or interpret objectively given facts or events.
Historiography is a language-bound enterprise, and facts and events, for the historian, are
from the outset constituted by the language in which they are formulated. What is more, any
such formulation undergoes an incessant process of contextualisation and
recontextualisation as it is recycled through the minds of readers and the works of
subsequent writers. There is no anchorage, says Harris, for the notion that we can ‘identify
the established facts of history’ and somehow hold them constant through the vicissitudes
of interpretation. We have nothing to hold them constant in except linguistic formulations,
and linguistic formulations offer no guarantee of context-neutral stability. There is no such
extralinguistic thing as ‘what really happened’, not just because to ask ‘what really
happened?’ is to call for a linguistic answer, but also because there are at least as many
answers as there are contextually determined understandings of the question. Or, to put it
another way, the fact that some codification of English may imply that two instances of
‘what really happened?’ are instances of the same expression – the sentence what really
happened? – by no means guarantees that the same question has been asked. Thus do
problems in the conceptualisation of language link up and mesh with problems in the
philosophy of history.
While sceptical of the general proposition that no historical event can be identified
independently of some verbal formulation, Talbot Taylor nonetheless acknowledges, in
‘Talking about what happened’, that verbal formulations may in a number of ways be
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crucially implicated in history. In the first place, ‘historical events very often involve
language’. One might go further and say that historical events may sometimes be largely or
wholly constituted by language. A recent notorious example concerned the death by
suicide of a British civil servant in circumstances that threatened to cast an ugly light on the
decision-making process leading to British involvement in the invasion of Iraq in March
2003. The ensuing judicial inquiry16 made it clear that from start to finish the whole matter
was about language: about the rights and wrongs of saying or refraining from saying what,
when and to whom. 17 Taylor’s focus, however, is on historical events whose occurrence is
typically reported in utterances containing verba dicendi – verbs such as promise, threaten,
mention, warn and their numerous like, which not only indicate that something has been said
but also categorise the act performed in saying it. Such verbs, says Taylor, are responsible
for constructing, at least in part, the cultural significance of the historical events reported
by using them; and this is a circumstance historiographers ought to take account of,
especially if, as Taylor argues, the import of a particular verbum dicendi, even where it
happens to have established translation equivalents in different languages, cannot be taken
as a cultural universal. Taylor does not discuss the interesting question how verbs of saying
report speech acts. It seems that in very many languages the most general verb of saying
(in English, say) may indifferently take as object direct speech, indirect speech, or a mere
paraphrase of what was said, as in he said “the vicar’s collar is unusually dog” vs he said that the
vicar’s collar is unusually dog vs he said that parson sports a preternaturally ecclesiastical neckpiece. This
consideration may have a bearing, one way or another, on Taylorian scepticism about the
total language-dependence of history, in as much as any culture whose language has a verb
of saying that works in this way is clearly committed by its most fundamental machinery for
16
See www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk
amplification of this point see Love 2004.
17For
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making metalinguistic statements to recognising the contextual equivalence of different
verbal formulations. But this is not the place to pursue this matter further.
Michael Toolan, for his part, is sceptical of the proposition that the history of a
verbal formulation can be clearly distinguished from the history of what it is used to talk
about. In ‘Part of the meaning/history of euro: integrational corpus linguistics’, Toolan
discusses this and in so doing raises, overtly or by implication, a number of relevant issues.
In the first place, euro poses some striking problems of wordhood and word-identity
(cf. font, fount and font/fount), of which the most salient is that its use in connection with a
new pan-European currency seems quite overtly intended to challenge, in a way that goes
well beyond the commonplace conundrum presented by a case like Anglo-French fondue,
the widely held notion that a given word belongs to a given language. (Is fondue a French
word sometimes used as such by English-speakers? Or is it a French word that has been
‘borrowed’ into English, and thus cloned itself?) As regards euro, the idea seems to have
been to come up with a form that would transcend petty nationalisms and make itself
equally at home in the languages of all or most participating nations.18 But the descriptive
linguist is nonetheless left asking whether there is one word euro, adopted by many different
languages, or as many different words of that written form as there are languages that have
adopted it. The modern possibility of the instant pan-global lexical prescriptivism that has
ushered euro into existence casts a glaring light on the conceptual deficiencies of a
metaphysics of language that obliges this to be treated as a serious question.
Notice that the act of lexical prescription itself does not answer it: the prescribers can
be presumed to be neutral as to what exactly linguists are to make of the situation thus
brought about. And, precisely because euro has been imposed by a sort of lexicographical
Greek requires it to be transliterated. The orthographic rules of Welsh would prescribe ewro. Readers of a
certain cast of mind may perhaps care to draw up a longer list of such caveats for themselves.
18
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fiat on everyone at once, it raises in a rather obvious form, at the level of the individual
language as conventionally understood, a question that ultimately arises for the individual
speaker – namely, even if for the sake of argument one entertains the possible identification
of a single international linguistic entity called ‘the word euro’, how far is it in fact ‘the same’
in the various different tongues that have adopted it?19 Won’t that depend on the lexical or
lexicogrammatical company it finds itself keeping in different cases? We can perhaps
overlook as of strictly minority import the fact that euro was already established in the
speech of at least some English-speakers as the name of a species of kangaroo, even if that
may tend to colour their apprehension of the word for the currency. Of more general
significance is that in languages where, as in lexicogrammatical, -o- routinely combines one
classical root with another, euro seems (designedly?) to be a truncation of some longer word
that has, bafflingly, never been established. Euro-what, exactly? In others this question
will not arise. Toolan focuses on a semantic issue of this sort: in many (British) English
texts euro tends to collocate with words reflecting the fact that a very frequent context for
its use is discussion of the vexed question whether or when the United Kingdom should
adopt the currency in question. In English, therefore, although presumably not or not so
strikingly in some other languages, the word is for now as much the name of a political
problem as it is of a kind of money. That, of course, is because of the history of the euro
and of specifically British attitudes to it. So is there ultimately any distinction to be drawn
between the history of the euro and the history of euro?20 Toolan’s scepticism takes the
form of calling in question the formulation ‘history of the euro’. For there is no ‘euro’ for
It is a moot point whether that doesn’t mean all languages whose speakers ever have occasion to refer to
the currency in question. The French may still call pounds livres, just as they call London Londres, but in
general the idea that one might devise one’s own name for a foreign country’s money seems scarcely more
permissible nowadays than resisting the requirement that Ceylon should cede to Sri Lanka.
20 Cf. Austin’s question (Austin 1979 [1961]) whether ‘what is the meaning of the word rat?’ differs in any
significant particular from ‘what is a rat?’ A whole philosophy of language, as reflected in modern linguistic
semantics, has been founded on supposing that it does.
19
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there to be a history of, except what we can at different times understand to be the focus of
a multiplicity of different uses of however many different linguistic entities we deem there
to be that might be designated by the written form euro.
Doubtless to the chagrin of those contributors who do not like the result, this
introduction has, inevitably, treated their texts as subject to historical interpretation21 and
recontextualisation in the light of the larger text in which they are embedded. Their sense
of what has thereby been done to ‘what they wrote’ may be seen as a test case for one of
the central theses of this collection as a whole. That thesis has it that there is no what that
they wrote, over and above what subsequent interpreters, including themselves, may make
of it on future occasions of interpretation. A language is not a device for encoding
systematically recoverable semantic content, for one reason because there is no way such a
‘device’ could have been engineered, and for another because any such ‘content’ would
either be literally ineffable or else itself linguistic in nature, and hence subject to decoding
of its content, and so on in an infinite regress. And if a language is not such a device, then
nor is the language of history. And if the language of history is not such a device, there is
no support for the view that historians’ statements, or anyone else’s, stand in an
unchanging relationship to states of affairs that can somehow be established extralinguistically. That language should be incapable of providing any such service to
statement-makers in general can be seen from the difficulty of setting up a conceptually
unified platform from which to make statements about the history of languages. The
problem is that if languages are to have histories they and their component parts have to be
thought of as objects of some kind, whose transformation through time constitutes the
subject matter of the history. But because they are not objects of any kind, historians have
to decide for themselves, unconstrained by any empirical facts of the matter, on the
21
Given the late appearance of the volume some might think ‘historical’ here should be in bold italics.
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N. Love (ed.) Language and History
particular reifications they propose to entertain for their particular purposes, whether those
purposes be pedagogical, political, pseudo-scientific or anything else.
Setting this point in a broader context, Geoffrey Harpham (this volume) suggests
that the history of linguistic thought itself ‘can in fact be considered as a series of attempts
to determine the essentially linguistic, and with each new determination a new object is
brought into focus’. Harpham discusses why such attempts should be so unremittingly
made. His answer is that ‘the significance of language lies in the prestige it has long
enjoyed as the defining characteristic of the human’; and he spotlights the trenchant
resistance among some contemporary linguists to the linked ideas (i) that language as a
human faculty should in principle be made to yield to evolutionary explanation and (ii) that
other primates can be taught to use language. Thus is even the prehistory of language and
languages distorted in the interests of an ideological programme.
What non-human apes are very likely incapable of is engaging in the metalinguistic
reflection that would allow them systematically to decontextualise the signs they use and by
treating those signs as objects of intellectual contemplation and inquiry embark on the
process of constructing what human apes know as languages and as histories of languages.
One of the projects of integrational linguistics is to show how such second-order processes
are founded in and arise out of our first-order linguistic experience. Especially relevant to
that project is Stephen Cowley’s contribution to this volume. In ‘Bridges to history’
Cowley outlines a way of understanding how a child ‘comes into history’, i.e. enters
encultured language-mediated life, and concludes that ‘language development consists
primarily in taking steps towards acting in accordance with the belief that talk consists in
acts whose sound structure enables us to achieve goals’. Cowley’s argument is that coming
so to act may be explained without invoking the acquisition (before overt metalinguistic
indoctrination starts to be imposed) of definite linguistic objects of any kind, let alone
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postulating genetically built-in equipment for acquiring a language. Accounts of how
language is possible without a language will have their own intrinsic significance. But they
may also point the way to grasping the role of language in constructing languages, the
histories of languages, and history itself.
28