Lecture One
THE WORLD'S LANGUAGE
MORE THAN 300 M I L L I O N P E O P L E in the world speak English and the rest, it
sometimes seems that English belongs to the world: 'Nobody owns English now'. The statements
identifies the reality of what has happened as English has spread around the globe and become the
world's first choice of lingua franca. Whereas once upon a time it would have been possible to say
that England 'owned' English, and later that the US 'owned' English, insofar as the notion of
ownership relates to matters of historical power and numbers of speakers, the present-day reality is
that the centre of gravity of the language has shifted from these localities. As you know, there is a
sentence in sociolinguistics which tries to relate languages and nationalities: 'If I speak X, then I
am Y'. if I speak Welsh, then I am Welsh', is probably true for virtually all Welsh speakers, if I
speak Finnish, then I am Finnish' must also be very largely true, if I speak Russian, then I am
Russian' is much less true, but still predominantly so. But if I speak English, then I am,.,' well, it
proves impossible to give the sentence a sensible conclusion. You could be from anywhere.
People have been predicting the emergence of English as a global language for at least two
centuries but in a genuine sense of 'global' the phenomenon is in fact relatively recent. A language
achieves a truly global status when it develops a special role that is recognized in every country
For better or worse, English has become the most global of languages, the lingua franca of
business, science, education, politics, and pop music. For the airlines of 157 nations (out of 168 in the
world), it is the agreed international language of discourse. In India, there are more than 3,000
newspapers in English. The six member nations of the European Free Trade Association conduct all
their business in English, even though not one of them is an English-speaking country. When
companies from four European countries—France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland—formed a joint
truck-making venture called Iveco in 1977, they chose English as their working language because, as
one of the founders wryly observed, "It puts us all at an equal disadvantage." For the same reasons,
when the Swiss company Brown Boveri and the Swedish company ASEA merged in 1988, they
decided to make the official company language English, and when Volkswagen set up a factory in
Shanghai it found that there were too few Germans who spoke Chinese and too few Chinese who
spoke German, so now Volkswagen's German engineers and Chinese managers communicate in a
language that is alien to both of them, English.
For non-English speakers everywhere, English has becdme the common tongue. Even in
France, the most determinedly non-English-speaking nation in the world, the war against English encroachment has largely been lost. In early 1989, the Pasteur Institute announced that henceforth it
would publish its famed international medical review only in English because too few people were
reading it in French.
English is, in short, one of the world's great growth industries. "English is just as much big
business as the export of manufactured goods," Professor Randolph Quirk of Oxford University has
written. " Indeed, such is the demand to learn the language that there are now more students of English
in China than there are people in the United States.
To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Imagine being a foreigner
and having to learn that in English one tells a lie but the truth, that a person who says "I could care
less" means the same thing as someone who says "I couldn't care less," that a sign in a store saying
ALL ITEMS NOT ON SALE doesn't mean literally what it says (that every item is not on sale) but rather
that only some of the items are on sale, that when a person says to you, "How do you do?" he will be
taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, "How do I do what?"
The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always
communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain. Indeed, Robert
Burchfield, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, created a stir in linguistic circles on both sides of
the Atlantic when he announced his belief that American English and English English are drifting
apart so rapidly that within 200 years the two nations won't be able to understand each other at all.
However, it is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is
the richness of its vocabulary. Webster's Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and
the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and
scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common
use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000). The richness of
the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often
draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot
distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between
"I wrote" and "I have written." The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, etc.
English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of
synonyms like Roget's Thesaurus. "Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books
exist."
On the other hand, other languages have facilities English lacks. Both French and German can
distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition (respectively connaitre and kennen) and
knowledge that results from understanding (savoir and wissen). Portuguese has words that
differentiate between an interior angle and an exterior one. All the Romance languages can
distinguish between something that leaks into and something that leaks out of.
Of course, every language has areas in which it needs, for practical purposes, to be more
expressive than others. The Eskimos, as is well known, have fifty words for types of snow—though
curiously no word for just plain snow. To them there is crunchy snow, soft snow, fresh snow, and old
snow, but no word that just means snow. The Italians, as we might expect, have over 500 names for
different types of macaroni. Some of these, when translated, begin to sound distinctly unappetizing,
like strozzapreti, which means "strangled priests", vermicelli means "little worms" and spaghetti
means "little strings." When you learn that muscatel in Italian means "wine with flies in it," you may
conclude that the Italians are gastronomically out to lunch, so to speak, but really their names for
foodstuffs are no more disgusting than English hot dogs.
A second commonly cited factor in setting English apart from other languages is its flexibility.
This is particularly true of word ordering, where English speakers can roam with considerable freedom between passive and active senses. Not only can we say "I kicked the dog," but also "The dog
was kicked by me"—a construction that would be impossible in many other languages. Similarly,
where the Germans can say just "ich singe" and the French must manage with "je chante," we can say
"I sing," "I do sing," or "I am singing." English also has a distinctive capacity to extract maximum
work from a word by making it do double duty as both noun and verb. The list of such versatile words
is practically endless: drink, fight, fire, sleep, run, fund, look, act, view, ape, silence, worship, copy,
blame, comfort, bend, cut, reach, like, dislike, and so on. Other languages sometimes show inspired
flashes of versatility, as with the German auf, which can mean "on," "in," "upon," "at," "toward,"
"for," "to," and "upward," but these are relative rarities.
At the same time, the endless versatility of English is what makes our rules of grammar so
perplexing. Few English-speaking natives, however well educated, can confidently elucidate the difference between, say, a complement and a predicate or distinguish a full infinitive from a bare one.
The reason for this is that the rules of English grammar were originally modeled on those of Latin,
which in the seventeenth century was considered the purest and most admirable of tongues. That it
may be. But it is also quite clearly another language altogether. Imposing Latin rules on English
structure is a little like trying to play baseball in ice skates. The two simply don't match.
A third supposed advantage of English is the relative simplicity of its spelling and
pronunciation. English is said to have fewer of the awkward consonant clusters and singsong tonal
variations that make other languages so difficult to master. In other languages it is the orthography, or
spelling, that leads to bewilderment. In Welsh, the word for beer is cwrw— an impossible
combination of letters for any English speaker.
In all languages pronunciation is of course largely a matter of familiarity mingled with
prejudice. The average English speaker confronted with agglomerations of letters like tchst, sthm, and
tchph would naturally conclude that they were pretty well unpronounceable. Yet we use them every
day in the words matchstick, asthma, and catchphrase. Here, as in almost every other area of
language, natural bias plays an inescapable part in any attempt at evaluation. No one has ever said,
"Yes, my language is backward and unexpressive." We tend to regard other people's languages as we
regard their cultures—with ill-hidden disdain. In Japanese, the word for foreigner means "stinking of
foreign hair." To the Czechs a Hungarian is "a pimple." Germans call cockroaches "Frenchmen,"
while the French call lice "Spaniards." We in the English-speaking world take French leave, but
Italians and Norwegians talk about departing like an Englishman, and Germans talk of running like a
Dutchman. Italians call syphilis "the French disease," while both French and Italians call con games
"American swindle." Belgian taxi drivers call a poor tipper "un Anglais." To be bored to death in
French is "etre de Birmingham," literally "to be from Birmingham". And in English we have "Dutch
courage," "French letters," "Spanish fly," "Mexican carwash'! (i.e., leaving your car out in the rain),
and many others. Late in the last century these epithets focused on the Irish, and often, it must be said,
they were as witty as they were wounding. An Irish buggy was a wheelbarrow. An Irish beauty was a
woman with two black eyes. Irish confetti was bricks. An Irish promotion was a demotion.
So objective evidence, even among the authorities, is not always easy to come by. Most books
on English imply in one way or another that English is superior to all others. In The English
Language, Robert Burchfield writes: "As a source of intellectual power and entertainment the whole
range of prose writing in English is probably unequalled anywhere else in the world." Yet, one can't
help wondering if Mr. Burchfield would have made the same generous assertion had he been born
Russian or German or Chinese. There is no reliable way of measuring the quality or efficiency of any
language. Yet there are one or two small ways in which English has a demonstrable edge over other
languages. For one thing its pronouns are largely, and mercifully, uninflected. In German, if you wish
to say you, you must choose between seven words: du, dich, dir, Sie, Ihnen, ihr, and euch. This can
cause immense social anxiety. In English we avoid these problems by relying on just one form: you.
In other languages, questions of familiarity can become even more agonizing. A Korean has to
choose between one of six verb suffixes to accord with the status of the person addressed. A speaker
of Japanese must equally wend his way through a series of linguistic levels appropriate to the social
position of the participants. When he says thank you he must choose between a range of meanings
running from the perfunctory arigato ("thanks") to the decidedly more humble makotoni go shinsetsu
de gozaimasu, which means "what you have done or proposed to do is a truly and genuinely kind and
generous deed." Above all, English is mercifully free of gender. Anyone who spent much of his or her
adolescence miserably trying to remember whether it is "la plume" or "le plume" will appreciate just
what a pointless burden masculine and feminine nouns are to any language. In this regard English is a
godsend to students everywhere.
English also has a commendable tendency toward conciseness, in contrast to many languages.
German is full of jaw-crunching words like Wirtschaftstreuhandgesellschaft (business trust company),
while in Holland companies commonly have names of forty letters or more, such as Douwe Egberts
Kon-mlijke Tabaksfabriek-Koffiebranderijen-Theehandal Naamloze Vennootschap (literally Douwe
Egberts Royal Tobacco Factory-Coffee Roasters-Tea Traders Incorporated; they must use fold-out
business cards). English, in happy contrast, favors crisp truncations: IBM, laser, NATO. Against this,
however, there is an occasional tendency in English, particularly in academic and political circles, to
resort to waffle and jargon. At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as
"the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning
reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon—the practice of never
calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement— and it
is one of the great curses of modern English.
Lecture Two
Languages in Contact
We cannot understand what a language is until we know its history. More than for most subjects,
history is the key to language, because the very fabric of a language - its vocabulary, its grammar, its
spelling, and so on - is a living record of its past.
So in the light of history, how can we begin to explain how English came to be what it is in the twentyfirst century? How did it come about that this language, once a tongue spoken by only a small number of
people in a rather small island, has become the most powerful international language in the world's
history? English is said to be a Germanic language, but why is it that more than half of its words are of
Latin or Romance origin? Why do we sometimes have a wide choice of words to express more or less the
same thing? And what is to blame for the chaotic English spelling? In the next few chapters we turn to
history to find the answer to these and other questions.
In a satire on eighteenth-century Englishmen's beliefs in national superiority, Daniel Defoe, probably
best known as the creator of Robinson Crusoe, described his mother tongue as 'Roman-Saxon-DanishNorman English'. To Defoe, English was but a mixture of the tongues spoken by different peoples who, in
the course of history, had invaded what is present-day England. Although he was being sarcastic, he did
have a point. Put simply, the making of English is a story of successive invasions.
Roman Britain
English was not always spoken in these islands. During the first millennium BCE, Celtic tribes
settled here, as they did virtually in all of western Europe, in successive ways of migration.
Although they were actually a mix of peoples speaking related languages, we will refer to them
collectively as Celts. It is important, though, that the Celts spoke a group of Celtic languages, and
were not a single national or ethnic group.
Some 2,500 years ago, Celtic languages were spoken widely across Europe. On the
European mainland, however, they were gradually replaced by other languages - for example, the
Romance family of languages, including French, Spanish and Italian. On a rough estimate, Celtic
languages are today spoken only by some one million people in the world. In the British Isles, th e
Celtic languages, which now survive as modern Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, have long been
fighting a rearguard action against English. The most viable of these survivors is Welsh with about
half a million speakers in Wales, where the vast majority of the population also know English. In
some western parts of the Republic of Ireland, efforts are made to sustain and revive Irish Gaelic and,
in the highlands of Scotland, Scottish Gaelic, but these efforts are having to fight hard to survive
against the insidious influence of English.
Over 2,000 years ago, the Roman general Julius Caesar led two expeditions to what he called
Britannia, the land of the Britons. Although Caesar’s most famous utterance was' Veni, vidi, vici' ('I
came, I saw, I conquered'), this certainly did not apply to his visits to Britannia: he soon went home
and never returned. The inhabitants of Britannia, collectively called Britanni by the Romans, kept
their political freedom and were not again troubled by Roman legions for almost 100 years. It was
later, in 43 CE, that Emperor Claudius ordered the invasion of Britain. Gradually the Roman legions
moved their frontiers further north and west, bringing almost all of what is now England under
Roman rule. During most of the period of occupation, the effective northern frontier was Hadrian's
Wall (named after the Roman Emperor Hadrian 76-138 CE), stretching between the present-day
northern English cities of Carlisle and Newcastle. Designated a World Heritage Site in 1987, the
remains of Hadrian's Wall, also known as the Roman Wall, proudly rank alongside the Taj Mahal
and other treasures among the great wonders of the world.
English
Frisian
West Germanic --------Flemish
Dutch
German
--Germanic
Norwegian
Icelandic
North Germanic(Norse)---
Indo-European
Danish
Swedish
East Germanic------------Gothic (extinct)
Gaelic---------------------Celtic------Britannic----------- -------
Scottish Gaelic
Irish Gaelic
Manx
Welsh
Cornish
Breton
-Romance---Latin--French/Italian/Spanish
In Roman Britain, towns grew up for a variety of reasons. The earliest settlements were built
by the army. In place-names like Lancaster, Leicester, Chester, Manchester and Winchester, the
element spelled caster, cester or chester is derived from the Roman word castra, meaning 'camp'. The
Romans brought a wide range of innovations to their British province, changing its landscape for
ever. Roman roads still criss-cross the landscape of England. The Latin word for a Roman road
was via strata ‘ paved road’ , which is the origin of English street German Strasse and Italian
strada. But, even though Britannia was under Roman rule for nearly 400 years, the Roman
occupation left hardly any lasting linguistic legacy. This is because the English language has its
roots in the next invasion, beginning in the fifth century, when Germanic tribes settled in the
country. Unlike the Romans they stayed for good and, in due course, they were to call their
language English.
The Anglo-Saxon Settlement
Like other parts of the Empire, Roman Britain had long been subject to attacks from external
enemies or 'barbarians' and, by the early fifth century, Roman legions were withdrawn and
Britannia was left to defend herself. According to later sources, in this desperate situation one of
the Celtic leaders enlisted the help of Germanic peoples who lived just across the North Sea on the
European mainland. It is reported that these semi-pirates expelled the enemies of the Britons, but
then turned their weapons against their hosts. Once settled, the newcomers supposedly invited
other continental tribesmen who arrived with swords at the ready.
This story rings true. Befriending one band of enemies to ward off another was an old
Roman tactic which the Britons no doubt adopted. But we shall probably never know exactly what
happened. It is clear, though, that from the middle of the fifth century and for
the next 100 years or so waves of migrating tribes from beyond the North Sea brought their
Germanic dialects to Britain. These tribes are traditionally identified as Angles, Saxons and Jutes.
Archaeology confirms that objects found in English graves are comparable to those from what is
now north Germany and the southern half of the Danish peninsula. To this list of tribes we should
add Frisians who, to this day, speak the continental language considered to be closest to English.
There was no sense of national identity among all these tribes, but they spoke neighbouring
Germanic dialects and were no doubt able to communicate with each other. For centuries there was no
collective name for the Germanic peoples who settled in Britain. The term Anglo-Saxon is sometimes
used to denote anything connected with English soil - language, people, culture - before the Norman
Conquest. But this is reconstruction, a convenient but vague label, used in contradistinction to Old
Saxons who remained on the continent. The Settlers called the native population wealas 'foreigners'
(from which the name Welsh is derived), while the Celts called the newcomers Saxons, regardless of
their tribe.
This term today appears in the modern Welsh words Saeson' the English ( people)' and Saesneg
' the English language.
Very few old Celtic words survived the invasions to leave their imprint on Modern English The
main survivors were the names of places and rivers. Place-names, such as Dover, Cardiff, Carlisle,
Glasgow, and London, and river names, such as the Avon, the Clyde, the Severn, the Thames , all
have some distant Celtic link. This scarce linguistic evidence has been used in support of the idea that
all Celts were driven out or killed. Most scholars however agree that the word ‘genocide’ is out of
place here, and that ‘ ethnic cleansing’ may have been more applicable. Many of the Celtic speaking
Britons retreated into the more remote and rugged regions that we now know as Cornwall, Wales,
Cumbria and the Scottish borders. Some of the Britons even emigrated across the Channel to
Armorica, as reflected in its present-day name Brittany, but the bulk of the British population
probably continued to live under Germanic rule and to speak their own language. Gradually the
Britons became absorbed into the Germanic population and eventually gave up their own language.
This process has continued to the present day. Cornish, the Celtic language of Cornwall, passed into
history in the late eighteenth century. The Celtic language of the Isle of Man, Manx, gradually gave
way to English in the nineteenth century, and the last Manx speaker is said to have died in the 1970s.
the tragic issue of ‘ language death’ is highly topical today, and these languages are now being
revived by enthusiastic antiquarians.
Old English was not very hospitable to foreign loans, which make up less than 5 per cent of
the recorded Old English words. But the traditionally held view that the Celtic languages made
virtually no impact on the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons has recently been questioned. Some
linguists argue that, so far, Old English has been traced in a purely Germanic context and that the
social context in which English emerged has been overlooked. All Indo-European language families,
Celtic being one of them, share similarities, and where people intermingle it is realistic to consider
multiple origins of words or of other language features. Bilingualism is a recurrent theme in the
history of the English language. It existed not only at the time of the Germanic settlements but also
later at the time of the Scandinavian and Norman conquests. If these later invasions had not taken
place, the English language today might have sounded Frisian, the European language most
similar to English.
Christianity in the Isles
Roman Britain has been described as 'a religious kaleidoscope'. Christianity was introduced
into Britain in Roman times and, by the third century, British bishops were regularly attending
Church Councils. Constantine the Great, who was to convert the Roman Empire officially to
Christianity, was actually acclaimed emperor at York (then known as Eboracum) in 306. The Germanic
tribes, however, were pagans, worshipping their own gods, whose names, incidentally, survive in
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. After the Germanic invasions, the Christian faith was
kept up only in Celtic areas such as present-day Cornwall and Wales. From Celtic Britain it was
introduced, in the fifth century, into Ireland where it developed in cultural and artistic isolation for
nearly 200 years. From this Celtic Church, Christianity was carried to the island of Iona on the
west coast of Scotland and, later, to the northern English kingdom of Northumbria.
In 596 Pope Gregory I sent a group of missionaries, headed by a monk named Augustine, to
the former Roman province of Britannia with instructions to convert the Anglo-Saxons to
Christianity. The kingdom of Kent, nearest to the continent, was swiftly converted and Augustine
became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. Since then Canterbury has remained the ecclesiastical
capital of England.
The missionaries promoted literacy and promoted translations from Latin into the native
tongue. A number of Christian ideas needed to be explained in simple terms to the new converts,
and Old English native words were applied to these new concepts: the Latin euangelium ( from
Greek evangelion) was rendered as gōdspell ‘good news’, later shortened to gospel; Dominus was
rendered as hlāfweard, literally ‘ guardian of the loaf’, from which we derive Lord ;the Latin
Infernum was rendered as Hell, an old Germanic word meaning ‘ hidden place’. In this way, the
language extended its own wordstock to meet new cultural needs.
But in other cases the translators found it easier to borrow words direct from Latin.
Altogether, there have been recorded some 400 Latin words in Old English introduced as a result of
the spread of Christianity. However, many of these loanwords, were not in general use and only a few
of them actually survive in modern English. The survivors are typically connected with religion or the
services of the church, such as these:
Latin
Old English
Modern English
abbas
abbod, abbud
abbot
apostolus
apostol
apostle
candela
candel
candle
cyriacum
cyrice
church
diabolus
dēofol
devil
discipulus
discipul
disciple
episcopus
biscop
bishop
martyr
martir
martyr
monachus
munic
monk
nonna
nunne
nun
papa
papa
pope
presbyter
prēost
priest
templum
temple
temple
While most of these words were originally Greek, they were adopted into English from
their Latin forms. Latin loanwords have been taken into English in virtually all periods of its
history. It is sometimes difficult to separate loanwords that were common Germanic from those that
came directly into English. For example, the Latin scōla was most likely borrowed into prehistoric
West Germanic on the European mainland, as it has since evolved into German Schule, Dutch
school, Swedish skola and Danish skole, as well as English school.
Most Latin words we find in Old English were introduced considerably later, in the tenth
century, through the great revitalizing of church life and learning known as the Benedictine
Revival.Many names of animals, plants and trees entered the language this way: for example, cypress,
ginger, lily, lobster, parsley, plant, purple and radish.
The Viking age
One summer day in the year 793 strange-looking ships were sighted out on the North
Sea. These strangers later would become all too well known and feared as the Vikings.
The origin of the word Viking remains a puzzle. In the Old Norse sagas, the word viking
(Old Norse víkingr) is generally restricted to brutal and unpleasant characters. It vas as late as the
nineteenth century that the word became the standard term for Scandinavian invaders. Contemporary
chroniclers called them by many names, including ‘heathens’ and 'pagans', but they were generally
referred to as either 'Northmen' or 'Danes'.
There were at least three phases of Viking activities, stretching over some 250 years: sporadic
raids, permanent colonization and political supremacy. In the first phase, from the late eighth century,
the attacks were basically hit-and-run affairs.
In the second phase, from 865 to 896, casual plundering gave way to permanent colonization. Until
the mid-tenth century there was no unified English monarchy but, in the mid-ninth century, there were still
four recognizable Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex. By the early
870s only the kingdom of Wessex (roughly corresponding to present-day England south of the Thames but
excluding Kent and Cornwall) remained intact. In Wessex the opposition was better organized than in the
other kingdoms. King Alfred of Wessex succeeded to the throne at the time of acute danger from Danish
invasion but, through a mixture of military success, tactful diplomacy and good luck, he managed to roll
back the Danish tide. Before Alfred's death in 899, he reached an agreement with the Viking leader
Guthrum to confine the Danes to the north and east of a diagonal line stretching roughly from London
to Chester, an area later known as the Danelaw, where Danish customs prevailed in contrast to the areas of
Anglo-Saxon law to the south and west. Guthrum agreed to leave Wessex alone and even accepted
Christian baptism, taking the English name of Athelstan.
However, this legacy of Alfred had a sad ending during the long inglorious reign of King Ethelred,
nicknamed 'the Unready'. In the years up to 1014, Viking activities entered the third and final phase of
political conquest, when King Sveinn of Denmark arrived with a Viking army, not for the extortion of
tribute, as was customary towards the end of the tenth century, but for the conquest of the kingdom. After
his death, the throne of England eventually passed to his son Cnut, the 'King Canute' who, according to
legend, sat on the shore and tried to stem the rising flow of the tides. Actually a wise and effective ruler,
Cnut was reconciled with the English, supported the Church and maintained peace in the country. After his
death in 1035, Denmark and England again became separate kingdoms, and in 1042 the old House of
Wessex was able to return to power. Politically, but not linguistically, this was the end of Scandinavian
influence in England.
The Vikings spoke dialects of Old Norse, the parent language of modern Danish, Swedish,
Norwegian and Icelandic. The Anglo-Saxons spoke dialects of Old English, which is the name we give
to the language from the middle of the fifth to the beginning of the twelfth century. Old English and Old
Norse were related Germanic languages, and many words were identical (folc/folk, hus 'house', sorg
'sorrow') or similar ( Old English fæder ‘father’, græs ‘grass’, wīf ‘woman’ corresponding to Old Norse
words fair, gras, víf).
About 1000 words in modern English can be traced back to Old Norse origins. The impact was
particularly great in English varieties spoken in northern England and in Scotland , where today we meet
dialect words such as these ( for comparison, modern Danish words are given in brackets): gate (gade)
‘street’, ‘road’ , ken (kende) ‘know’, lake (lege) ‘play’, neb (næb) ‘ beak, nose’. The borrowings from Old
Norse belong to the language of everyday life, reflecting close social contacts between the two peoples. As
the great Danish scholar , Otto Jespersen , once observed: ‘ An Englishman cannot thrive or be ill or die
without Scandinavian words; they are to the language what bread and eggs are to the daily fare’. In this
sentence, all four words in italics come from Old Norse.
In view of all the Scandinavian loanwords and place-names, it is likely that the Vikings and the AngloSaxons could understand each other - the two languages must have been to some extent mutually intelligible.
Wherever the Vikings settled and came into contact with another culture, they would ultimately be the ones
who lost most of their identity, being assimilated into the larger population around them. For the greater
part of the Viking age - roughly from 750 to 1050 -contacts, fierce or friendly, continued between
Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons. Although the Scandinavian impact on English was considerable, Norse
did not survive much beyond the twelfth century In England. But interestingly, quite a few Norse
influences first appear in texts from the centuries after the Viking influence had ended. One very
common Norse loanword in English, the pronoun they , is an example of this time-lag.
Compared with the effects of the Norman Conquest, which was to follow, the Scandinavian
influence was less spectacular and revolutionary. But, as their name implies, the Normans themselves
were also 'men of the north', who had come originally from Scandinavia. This brings us to the next
important epoch in the history of English, when the language came under the dominant influence of French
- but French as spoken by the formerly Norse-speaking Normans.
THE NORMANS
The Viking adventurers who settled in Normandy in northern France during the early tenth
century were also baptised. They did not impose their oral vernacular, but were gradually assimilated
to the customs and language of the more centralised lands they colonised. In France, however, they
had to learn a language that was structurally very different from their own. That they did this, within
about four or five generations, is evidenced by the fact that it was a variety of French that they
imposed on England when, as Normans, they added this territory to their possessions by the military
Conquest of 1066. For the next three centuries or so, French was to be a living force in England, and
its influence continued to be felt, though less directly, for centuries after that.
The Norman invaders were few in number, but well-organised. They were interested in
territorial annexation and overcame the English by means of efficient military campaigns. The
superstructure of political and economic power -based on the ownership of land - was then almost
exclusively wrested from English hands and given to Norman friends of William the Conqueror. The
positions of power, in respect to both king and Church, were thus in the hands of French speakers, who
spent the next 150 years 'commuting' between their possessions on both sides of the Channel. It was
only when this ruling class lost its possessions in Normandy at the beginning of the thirteenth century
that it could begin to think of itself as English. Bу that time, French had become firmly established in
England as the High language of law, government, administration, and also, to some extent, literature
and religion. It was not until the fourteenth century that English was re-developed within these
domains. We need to distinguish, therefore, two phases of contact with French. The first involves the
Scandinavianised French of the Norman elite. Norman French was imposed by a ruling caste; but
since Latin continued in its spoken form in the Church, and as the written language of scholarship, the
linguistic situation after 1066 may be described as triglossic.
There has been some controversy about the extent to which this state of societal bilingualism
was realised at the individual level. Some have argued that French was very widely learned throughout
English society; others, that its use was very limited. One thing that we can be sure about is that
French did not displace English. Norman French did not offer linguistic unity or a prestigious, literate
language to linguistically diverse, uncentralised tribespeople. Neither did the Normans take much
trouble to encourage English people to learn their language. Norman French was exclusive, the
property of the major, and often absent, landowner.
While no wholesale language shift took place, it is probable that individual bilingualism came
to exist among certain social groups. The motivation for learning a second language, however, may
have been different in each case. Some groups would need to be bilingual, whereas for others
opportunities for contact with the other language would have been minimal.
We know that the
first language of the English monarchs was French until the end of the fourteenth century - long after
the Norman dynasty. It is also probable that the upper aristocracy were monolingual French-speakers
for a considerable time after the Conquest. It seems too that the upper aristocracy continued to use
French for a considerable time after 1066, although there is also evidence that some of them began to
learn English quite soon after that date. At the other end of the social scale, there is no reason to
believe that the ordinary people who worked the land spoke any language other than their local variety
of English. In a society overwhelmingly agrarian, this class would constitute the vast majority of the
population. During the period of French dominance, t hen, the regional variation of the Anglo-Saxon
era was intensified.
Not all the Normans were aristocrats, however. They brought with them people who could
administer their feudal estates; and these would have needed to be bilingual in their role as mediators
between overlord and land-labourers. There were also adventurers who became lesser landowners:
these were thinly spread in the countryside, and it is likely they would have adapted to local ways and
language, just as many of those who went on to settle in Ireland eventually learned Gaelic.
If at this time bilingualism was at all common, it was perhaps quite unremarkable, as it is in so
many parts of the world today. We do know that many Normans married English women, so it is likely
that children in the towns grew up as bilinguals.
French was also less strongly institutionalised in the domain of religion. Writings in English
emanated from the monasteries throughout the period of French dominance: the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle was continued for nearly a century after the Conquest, and in following centuries didactic
religious texts circulated from mainly west midland sources. Sermons continued to be delivered in
English, although there is some evidence for French. It has been argued that most of the lesser clergy
were monoglot speakers of English, and that even in the monasteries newly founded by the Normans,
bilingualism, rather than French, was expected. As an institution of learning, then, the Church tended
to promote fluency in more than one language, as it had done in Anglo-Saxon times.
At the top of the social pyramid, however, Norman French was secure: a great deal of Norman
French literature was produced in England. About one hundred years after the Conquest, the first loanwords into English show how the language was associated with the instruments and offices of power:
prison and castle, cardinal and prior. But the full weight of loan-words comes later, during the second
phase of contact with French, this time with another variety of the language.
CULTURAL CONTACT WITH THE FRENCH OF PARIS
In 1204, the dukedom of Normandy was won by the king of France. While the kings of
England still retained possessions in more southerly parts of France, the descendants of the Norman
conquerors lost the sense of their ancestry. The ruling class of England became increasingly
Anglicised, but it maintained its contacts with the French of the kings of France, a monarchy which by
the end of the thirteenth century had become the strongest and most centralised in Europe.
From a sociolinguistic point of view, this second phase of contact with French is probably more
interesting than the first. We see language come to be regarded as a social symbol, as it is identified
with social groups of declared interests. The old Norman French is seen as provincial and
unfashionable, while the language of the French court is seen as the emblem of the most sophisticated
and prestigious culture in the contemporary world. To use this French, then, is to impress. In the eyes
of many, English had perhaps the aura of a peasant language. But among others, it became a marker of
what today we might call ethnicity.
Individual bilingualism would have been extensive during this phase. While the court retained
its devotion to French language and culture, the ruling class gradually acquired English. By the
fourteenth century, we begin to see the linguistic consequence of this process. English is saturated
with French loan-words, some of which have become such common currency that we tend to forget
their ancestry - words like pass, join, butcher, large. Some, like chase and guarantee, had even been
borrowed earlier, in the forms catch and warranty, from Norman French. The taste of the Francophile
court was reflected in much of the English poetry of this phase, which borrows French themes,
techniques, and language; and in so far as the English poet was brought up in this atmosphere, we can
best describe this period of contact as one of cultural bilingualism.
It is also the case that many English people learned French. The prestige of French as a marker
of high social status meant that some people learned it for its snob value. Since the Conquest, French
had been the medium of education, and schools were a means of acquiring the language. A
fourteenth-century writer, Higden, records that even people from the country busied themselves 'to
speke Freynsh', so they could sound like 'gentil men'. If there was a demand for the language, people
who could teach it had a vested interest in its continuance. Thus, we see in the same century edicts
enforcing French in the domains of education and religion. That a similar entrenchment existed in the
domain of law can be seen by the fact that 'Law French' was still in use, for some purposes, in the
seventeenth century. For a lawyer, the possession of a special language is a powerful weapon, as can
be seen in many multilingual societies today. The 'professionalisation' of law in the course of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries meant that its practitioners could exploit the advantages of knowing a
special language: they could become parasitic on the people they were meant to serve.
If for some the French language meant social advancement, for others it aroused antagonisms.
Cultural contacts with France were an increasing source of tension in English life. The monarchy of
France came to be seen as a foreign power, whose interests often clashed with those of the people of
England. Moreover, while some kings of England waged long, costly, and fruitless wars against France,
others lavished the wealth of England on French favourites. Either was likely to upset baron, lesser
landowner, and merchant alike. Frenchmen, and the French language, were increasingly disparaged. From
its position as a tolerated language under the Normans, English became what socio-linguists might call a
promoted language, a mark of 'Englishness'.
The promotion of English was associated with gradual changes that had been taking place in
English society. The old feudal structure so successfully sustained by the Norman kings, the system of
obligations between king and aristocracy, was giving way to an economy based, not on land, but on
money. We see the emergence of new bases of power, new feelings of group loyalty. Alliances were made
between lesser landowners, who were making money out of raising sheep for wool, and the rising merchant
class in the towns, a pact institutionalised in the thirteenth century by the assembly that came to be
called Parliament. The founding of universities stimulated mobility, both geographical and social,
among certain sections of the population; and by the fourteenth century mobility had even spread to the
land-labourers, who could bargain for wages now that labour was scarce. By that time, the balance of
forces was beginning to favour an increasingly articulate, English-speaking merchant class. It was this
class, with London as its base, that spoke the basis of what came to be called standard English.
What's in a name?
This most remote province of the Roman Empire was called Britannia and its
people Britanni, from which come the modern forms Britain and British. Caledonia was
the Roman name for Scotland and, although outside the Empire, it was seen by the
Romans as a sphere of their influence. Hibernia, the Roman name for present-day
Ireland, was never part of the Roman Empire.
In 1707 the nation of Great Britain was formed by the Act of Union between England,
Scotland and Wales. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was formed
in 1921 when the Irish Free State - later named the Republic of Ireland -became a separate
nation. The United Kingdom (or UK for short) includes the island of Great Britain,
comprising England, Scotland and Wales and, in addition. Northern Ireland, occupying
the north-east corner of the island of Ireland. Unofficially, the UK is often simply called
Britain, and its people are called British.
The British Isles is an unofficial but convenient geographical name. It refers to the
two large islands of Great Britain and Ireland, together with several islands and island
groups, such as the Isle of Man and the Orkney Islands. Many Irish people consider this
term British Isles a misnomer. For them, Ireland is not, nor should it be, in any sense
'British'.
The people of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are British
citizens. Not everybody likes the modern label Briton or Britons, although this is the
correct way of referring to the ancient Celtic people of Britannia. Still, it is short and
practical to use in headlines:
BRITONS FLOCK TO THE SEASIDE
Brit is informal and can be derogatory. In older American slang the British are
called Limeys, a term originally applied to English sailors who were routinely supplied
with limes to prevent scurvy. In Australian and New Zealand slang Pom and Pommy are
common but can be offensive. It seems there is no neutral way of referring to the
inhabitants of the United Kingdom!
KING ALFRED THE GREAT
King Alfred is the only English monarch ever to be given the title 'Great', and justly so,
since he not only stemmed the Viking invasions, but laid the ground for a re-conquest, so that
his heirs eventually became kings of England. The West Saxon monarchs who succeeded him
gradually took over the Danelaw, paving the way for the unification of all England towards the
end of the tenth century. Under King Edgar, the country enjoyed two decades of peace up to
the 970s.
Alfred longed to improve the education of his people and set up what today might be
called 'a crash programme in education'. He started a court school and invited scholars from
abroad, arranged for the translation of Latin texts into English, and employed learned
churchmen to strengthen royal authority and establish a system of law. He and his team of
scholars were the founding fathers of English prose. If it had not been for Alfred, the history of
the English language might have taken quite a different turn - the standard language of Great
Britain might actually have been a Scandinavian tongue.
Lecture Three
GENERAL SURVEY OF THE
OLD ENGLISH VOCABULARY (5-15 centuries)
Examination of the origin of words is of great interest in establishing the interrelations
between languages and linguistic groups.
The OE vocabulary was almost purely Germanic; except for a small number of borrowings,
it consisted of native words inherited from PG or formed from native roots and affixes.
So from the point of view of its origin the Old English vocabulary can be divided into 2 groups:
I. native words or the so-called native element of the vocabulary.
II. borrowings (loan words) characterised also as the foreign element of the vocabulary. The
bulk of the Old English vocabulary consisted of native words, borrowings constituted but a
small part of the vocabulary.
Native words were not homogeneous in their origin. They are divided into the following 3
groups from the point of view of their reflection in other Indo-European Germanic and non-Germanic
languages:
1. Common Indo-European words:
Words belonging to the common IE layer constitute the oldest part of the OE vocabulary.
They go back to the days of the OE parent-language before its extension over the wide territories
of Europe and Asia and before the appearance of the Germanic group. They were inherited by PG
and passed into the Germanic languages of various subgroups, including English.
Among these words we find names of some natural phenomena, plants and animals,
agricultural terms, terms of kinship, etc.; verbs belonging to this layer denote the basic activities
of man; adjectives indicate the most essential qualities. This layer includes personal and
demonstrative pronouns and most numerals. OE examples of this layer are: eolh, mōna, trēōw,
næʒl, beard, brōðor, mōdor, sunu, dōn, bēōn, lång, ic, mīn, þæt, twā, etc. (MnE elk, moon,
tree, nail, beard, brother, mother, son, do, be, long, I, my, that, two).
2. Common Germanic words:
The common Germanic layer includes words which are shared by most Germanic languages,
but do not occur outside the group. Being specifically Germanic, these words constitute an
important distinctive mark of the Germanic languages at the lexical level. This layer is cer tainly
smaller than the layer of common IE words. Semantically these words are connected with nature,
with the sea and everyday life. Some of the words did not occur in all the OG languages. Their
areal of distribution reflects the contacts between the Germanic tribes at the beginning of their
migrations: West and North Germanic languages (represented here by OE, OHG and O Icel) had
many words in common.
Common Germanic Words in Old English
OE
OHG
Gt
O Icel
MnE
hand
hant
handus hond
hand
sand
sant
sandr
sand
eorþe
erda
airþa
jorð
earth
siggwan singva sing
sinʒan singan
findan
findan
finþan
finna
find
gruoni
græn
green
ʒrēne
steorfan sterban starve
scrēap
scâf
sheep
fox
fuhs
fox
macian mahhon make
3. Specifically OE words:
The third etymological layer of native words can be defined as specifically OE, that is words
which do not occur in other Germanic or non-Germanic languages. These words are few, if we
include here only the words whose roots have not been found outside English: OE clipian, brid,
boʒ, ʒyrl, hlāford, etc. (MnE call, bird, boy, girl, lord).
FOREIGN INFLUENCES ON OLD ENGLISH
The Contact of English with Other Languages. In the course of the first 700 years of its
existence in England it was brought into contact with at least three other languages, the languages of
the Celts, the Romans, and the Scandinavians. From each of these contacts it shows certain effects,
especially additions to its vocabulary. Nothing would seem more reasonable than to expect that the
conquest of the Celtic population of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons and the subsequent mixture of
their languages; that consequently we should find in the Old English vocabulary numerous
instances of words that that the Anglo-Saxons heard in the speech of the native population and
adopted.
Celtic Place-Names and Other Loanwords. When we come, however, to seek the evidence
for this contact in the English language, investigation yields very meager results. Such evidence
survives chiefly in place-names. The kingdom of Kent, for example, owes its name to the Celtic word
Canti or Cantion, the meaning of which is unknown, while the two ancient Northumbrian kingdoms of
Deira and Bernicia derive their designations from Celtic tribal names. Other districts, especially in the
west and southwest, preserve in their present-day names traces of their earlier Celtic designations.
Devonshire contains in the first element the tribal name Dumnonii, Cornwall means the 'Cornubian
Welsh', and the former county Cumberland (now part of Cumbria) is the 'land of the Cymry or
Britons'. Moreover, a number of important centers in the Roman period have names in which Celtic
elements are embodied. The name London itself, although the origin of the word is somewhat
uncertain, most likely goes back to a Celtic designation. The first syllable of Winchester, Salisbury,
Exeter, Gloucester, Worcester, Lichfield, and a score of other names of cities is traceable to a Celtic
source, and the earlier name of Canterbury (Durovernum) is originally Celtic. But it is in the names of
rivers and hills and places that the greatest number of Celtic names survive. Thus the Thames is a
Celtic river name, and various Celtic words for river or water are preserved in the names Avon, Exe,
Esk, Usk, Dover, and Wye. Celtic words meaning 'hill' are found in place-names like Barr (cf.
Welsh bar 'top', 'summit'), Bredon (cf. Welsh bre 'hill'), Bryn Mawr (cf. Welsh bryn 'hill' and mawr
'great') and others. Certain other Celtic elements occur more or less frequently such as cumb (a deep
valley) in names like Duncombe, Holcombe, Winchcombe; torr (high rock, peak) in Torr,
Torcross, Torhill; etc. Besides these purely Celtic elements a few Latin words such as castra,
fontana, fossa, portus, and vīcus were used in naming places during the Roman occupation of the
island and were passed on by the Celts to the English.
Outside of place-names, however, the influence of Celtic upon the English language is almost
negligible. The relation of the two peoples was not such as to bring about any considerable influence
on English life or on English speech. The surviving Celts were a submerged people. The AngloSaxon found little occasion to adopt Celtic modes of expression, and the Celtic influence remains the
least of the early influences that affected the English language.
Three Latin Influences on Old English. Unlike Celtic Latin was not the language of a
conquered people. It was the language of a highly regarded civilization, one from which the AngloSaxons wanted to learn. Contact with that civilization, at first commercial and military, later religious
and intellectual, extended over many centuries and was constantly renewed. It began long before the
Anglo-Saxons came to England and continued throughout the Old English period. For several hundred
years, while the Germanic tribes who later became the English were still occupying their continental
homes, they had various relations with the Romans through which they acquired a considerable
number of Latin words. Later when they came to England they saw the evidences of the long Roman
rule in the island and learned from the Celts additional Latin words that had been acquired by them.
And a century and a half later still, when Roman missionaries reintroduced Christianity into the island,
this new cultural influence resulted in a quite extensive adoption of Latin elements into the language.
There were thus three distinct occasions on which borrowing from Latin occurred before the end of the
Old English period, and it will be of interest to consider more in detail the character and extent of these
borrowings.
I. Continental Borrowing (Latin Influence of the Zero Period).
The first Latin words to find their way into the English language owe their adoption to the early
contact between the Romans and the Germanic tribes on the continent. Several hundred Latin words
found in the various Germanic dialects at an early date testify to the extensive intercourse between the
two peoples
The adopted words naturally indicate the new conceptions that the Germanic peoples acquired
from this contact with a higher civilization.
1) Next to agriculture the chief occupation of the Germanic tribes in the empire was war, and this
experience is reflected in words like camp (battle), segn (banner), pīl (pointed stick), weall (wall), pytt
(pit), stræt (road, street), mīl (mile), and miltestre (courtesan).
2)More numerous are the words connected with trade: cēap (bargain; cf. Eng., cheap, chapman)
and mangian (to trade) with its derivatives mangere (monger), mangung (trade, commerce), and
mangunghūs (shop), pund (pound), mydd (bushel), sēam (burden, loan), and mynet (coin). From
the last word Old English formed the words mynetian (to mint or coin) and mynetere (moneychanger).
3) One of the most important branches of Roman commerce with the Germanic peoples was the
wine trade: wīn (wine), must (new wine), eced (vinegar), and flasce (flask, bottle). To this period are
probably to be attributed the words cylle (L. culleus, leather bottle), cyrfette (L. curcurbita,
gourd), and sester (jar, pitcher).
4)A number of the new words relate to domestic life and designate household articles, clothing,
and the like: cytel (kettle; L. catillus, catinus), mēse (table), scamol (L. scamellum, bench, stool; cf.
modern shambles), teped (carpet, curtain; L. tapētum), pyle (L. pulvinus, pillow), pilece (L. pellicia,
robe of skin), and sigel (brooch, necklace; L. sigillum). Certain other words of a similar kind probably
belong here: cycene (kitchen; L. coquina), cuppe (L. cuppa, cup), disc (dish; L. discus), cucler (spoon;
L. cocleārium), mortere(L. mortārium, a mortar, a vessel of hard material), līnen (cognate with or
from L. līnum, flax), līne (rope, line; L. līnea), and gimm (L. gemma, gem).
5)The speakers of the Germanic dialects adopted Roman words for certain foods, such as
cīese (L. cāseus, cheese), spelt (wheat), pipor (pepper), senep (mustard; L. sināpi), cisten (chestnut
free; L. castanea), cires {bēam) (cherry tree- L. cerasus), while to this period are probably to be
assigned butere (butter; L. būtӯrum), ynne (lēac) (L. ūnio, onion), plūme (plum), pise (L.pisum, oea)
and minte (L. mentha, mint). Roman contributions to the building arts are evidenced by such words as
cealc (chalk), copor (copper), pic (pitch), and tigele (tile).
II. Latin through Celtic Transmission (Latin Influence of the First Period)
The Celts, indeed, had adopted a considerable number of Latin words - more than 600 have been
identified - but the relations between the Celts and the English were such, that these words were not
passed on. Among the few Latin words that the Anglo-Saxons seem likely to have acquired upon
settling in England, one of the most likely is ceaster. This word, which represents the Latin castra
(camp), is a common designation in Old English for a town or enclosed community. It forms a familiar
element in English place-names such as Chester, Colchester, Dorchester, Manchester, Winchester,
Lancaster, Doncaster, Gloucester, Worcester, and many others. Some of these refer to sites of
Roman camps, but it must not be thought that a Roman settlement underlies all the towns whose names
contain this common element. The English attached it freely to the designation of any enclosed place
intended for habitation, and many of the places so designated were known by quite different names in
Roman times. A few other words are thought for one reason or another to belong to this period: port
(harbor, gate, town) from L. portus and porta; munt (mountain) from L. mōns, montem; torr (tower,
rock) possibly from L. turris, possibly from Celtic; wīc (village) from L. vīcus. All of these words are
found also as elements in place-names. It is possible that some of the Latin words that the Germanic
speakers had acquired on the continent, such as street (L. strāta via), wall, wine, and others, were
reinforced by the presence of the same words in Celtic. At best, however, the Latin influence of the
First Period remains much the slightest of all the influences that Old English owed to contact with
Roman civilization.
III. Latin Influence of the Second Period: The Christianizing of Britain. The greatest influence
of Latin upon Old English was occasioned by the conversion of Britain to Roman Christianity
beginning in 597. The religion was far from new in the island, because Irish monks had been
preaching the gospel in the north since the founding of the monastery of Iona by Columba in 563.
However, 597 marks the beginning of a systematic attempt on the part of Rome to convert the
inhabitants and make England a Christian country. According to the well-known story reported by
Bede as a tradition current in his day, the mission of St. Augustine was inspired by an experience of
the man who later became Pope Gregory the Great. Walking one morning in the marketplace at Rome,
he came upon some fair-haired boys about to be sold as slaves and was told that they were from the
island of Britain and were pagans. “‘Alas! what pity,’ said he, ‘that the author of darkness is
possessed of men of such fair countenances, and that being remarkable for such a graceful exterior,
their minds should be void of inward grace?’ He therefore again asked, what was the name of that
nation and was answered, that they were called Angles. ‘Right,’ said he, ‘for they have an angelic face,
and it is fitting that such should be co-heirs with the angels in heaven. What is the name,’ proceeded
he ‘of the province from which they are brought?’ It was replied that the natives of that province were
called Deiri. ‘Truly are they de ira,’ said he, ‘plucked from wrath, and called to the mercy of Christ.
How is the king of that province called?’ They told him his name was Ælla; and he, alluding to the
name, said ‘Alleluia, the praise of God the Creator, must be sung in those parts.’” The same tradition
records that Gregory wished himself to undertake the mission to Britain but could not be spared. Some
years later, however, when he had become pope, he had not forgotten his former intention and looked
about for someone whom he could send at the head of a missionary band. Augustine, the person of his
choice, was a man well known to him. The two had lived together in the same monastery, and Gregory
knew him to be modest and devout and thought him well suited to the task assigned him. With a little
company of about forty monks Augustine set out for what seemed then like the end of the earth.
The third period of Latin influence on, the OE vocabulary began with the introduction of
Christianity in the late 6th c. and lasted to the end of OE.
Numerous Latin words which found their way into the English language during these five
hundred years clearly fall into two main groups:
(1) words pertaining to religion,
(2) words connected with learning.
The rest are miscellaneous words denoting various objects and concepts which the English
learned from Latin books and from closer acquaintance with Roman culture. The total number
of Latin loan-words in OE exceeds five hundred, this third layer accounting for over four
hundred words.
The new religion introduced a large number of new conceptions which required new names;
most of them were adopted from Latin, some of the words go back to Greek prototypes:
OE apostol
MnE apostle from L apostolus
from Gr apóstolos
antefn
anthem
antiphōna
antiphona
biscop
bishop
episcopus
episcopos
candel
candle
candēla
clerec
clerk
clēricus
klerikós
dēofol
devil
diabolus
diábolos
mæsse
mass
missa
mynster
minster
monastērium
munuc
monk
monachus
monachós
cyrice < Gr. kuriacon (ÏÇñ³ÏÇ) “of the Lord”
Mn.E. church
English “The house of the Lord”
Armenian “The day of the Lord”
To this list we may add many more modern English words from the same source: abbot,
alms, altar, angel, ark, creed, disciple, hymn, idol, martyr, noon, nun, organ, palm, pine
('torment'), pope, prophet, psalm, psalter, shrine, relic, rule, temple and others.
After the introduction of Christianity many monastic schools were set up in Britain. The
spread of education led to the wider use of Latin: teaching was conducted in Latin, or consisted
of learning Latin. The written forms of OE developed in translations of Latin texts. These conditions
are reflected in a large number of borrowings connected with education, and also words of a more
academic, "bookish" character. Unlike the earlier borrowings scholarly words were largely
adopted through books; they were first used in OE translations from Latin, e.g.:
OE scōl
NE school
L schola (Gr skole)
scōlere
scholar
scholāris
māʒister
master, ‘teacher’
magister
fers
verse
versus
dihtan
‘compose’
dictare
Other modern descendants of this group are: accent, grammar, meter, gloss, notary, decline.
A great variety of miscellaneous borrowings came from Latin probably because they indicated
new objects and new ideas, introduced into English life together with their Latin names by those
who had a fair command of Latin: monks, priests, school-masters. Some of these scholarly words
became part of everyday vocabulary. They belong to different semantic spheres: names of trees
and plants - elm, lily, plant, pine; names of illnesses and words pertaining to medical treatment cancer, fever, paralysis, plaster; names of animals - camel, elephant, tiger; names of clothes
and household articles - cap, mat, sack, sock; names of foods - beet, caul, oyster, radish;
miscellaneous words - crisp, fan, place, spend, turn.
From the beginning, the English did not hesitate to hybridize by combining Latin roots with
native prefixes or suffixes and by forming compounds consisting of one Latin and one English element.
Thus OE bemūtian 'to exchange for' has an English prefix on a Latin stem (L. mutare). OE
candeltrēow 'candelabrum' has a Latin first element and an English second element (trēow 'tree').
Latin influence on OE vocabulary is also occasionally reflected in calques, or loan translations, in
which the semantic elements of a foreign word are translated element by element into the borrowing
language. For example, Latin unicornis 'unicorn' was loan-translated as ānhorn 'one horn', and OE
tofealdan 'to come to land' is a calque of Latin applicare. Probably the best-known OE calque is
godspell 'gospel', literally "good news," from Latin evangelium.
Good examples of translation-loans are the Germanic names of days.
L. Lunnae dīes =
O.E. Mōndan dæʒ “ day of the moon”
L. Martis dīes =
O.E. Tiwes dæʒ
Tiw was a Germanic God identified with the Roman Mars
L. Mercuri dīes =
O.E. Wōdnes dæʒ
Woden was a Germanic God.
L. Iowis dīes =
O.E. þūnres dæʒ
L. Jupiter
=
O.E. þūnr
L. Veneris dīes =
O.E. Friʒe dæʒ
Friʒe was a Germanic goddess corresponding to Roman Venus
L. Sōlis dīes =
O.E. Sunnan dæʒ “ day of the sun”
The only exception was Saturday.
L. Saturni dīes =
O.E. Sætern dæʒ
The number of translation-loans was great in O.E. religious literature.
In English history the Middle English period is marked by 2 important historical events, which
influenced the further development of the English language. These were the Scandinavian invasions on
the one hand and the Norman Conquest on the other hand. Due to these conquests English came into
contact with 2 different languages: Scandinavian dialects (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) and French,
and underwent the influence of the languages. Especially important was the influence of Scandinavian
dialects as the fusion of English with the Scandinavian dialects brought about considerable changes in
the grammatical structure, especially in English morphology. (The process of reduction of unstressed
syllables was strengthened and accelerated under the Scandinavian influence).
The Relation of the Two languages. The relation between the two languages in the district
settled by the Danes is a matter of inference rather than exact knowledge. Doubtless the situation was
similar to that observable in numerous parts of the world today where people speaking different
languages are found living side by side in the same region. Although in some places the Scandinavians
gave up their language early there were certainly communities in which Danish or Norse remained for
some time the usual language. Up until the time of the Norman Conquest the Scandinavian language in
England was constantly being renewed by the steady stream of trade and conquest. In some parts of
Scotland, Norse was still as late as the seventeenth century. In other districts in which the prevailing
speech was English there were doubtless many of the newcomers who continued to speak their own
language at least as late as 1100 and a considerable number who were to a greater or lesser degree
bilingual. The last-named circumstance is rendered more likely by the frequent intermarriage between
the two peoples and by the similarity between the two tongues. The Anglian dialect resembled the
language of the Northmen in as number of particulars in which West Saxon showed divergence. The
two may even have been mutually intelligible to a limited extent. Contemporary statements on the
subject are conflicting, and it is difficult to arrive at a conviction. But wherever the truth lies in this
debatable question, there can be no doubt that the basis existed for an extensive interaction of the two
languages upon each other, and this conclusion is amply borne out by the large number of
Scandinavian elements subsequently found in English.
SCANDINAVIAN BORROWINGS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON
THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY
Scandinavian borrowings present great variety as to their semantics though words of everyday
life prevail over any other words. Chronologically, the first significant new source of loanwords in
ME was Scandinavian. (At this time, the differences among Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian were so
slight that it is unnecessary to try to distinguish them; hence we use the more general terms Norse or
Scandinavian.) Many of the Scandinavian words that first appear in writing during ME were actually
borrowed earlier, but, particularly in a society with a low literacy rate, there is a lag between use in
speech and first appearance in writing. When they were written down, it was usually first in the North
and the East Midlands, those regions with heaviest Norse settlements. Only later did they spread to other
areas of England.
The listing below is not exhaustive. The Scandinavian element in English amounts to over 650
words.
Nouns –
birth, booth, bull, crook, dirt, down, fellow, freckle, gap, guess, husband,
kid, leg, link, loan, root, skill, score, sky, tidings, trust, window.
Adjectives awkward, flat, ill, loose, low, meek, odd, rotten, scanty, sly, ugly, wrong.
Verbs –
to busk, to call, to cast, to crawl, to die, to drop, to gasp, to glitter, to lift, to
nag, to raise, to scatter, to screech, to take.
A quick perusal of these lists reveals that almost all these words are so common. English
today, so native in appearance, that it is hard to believe that they are loans from another language. Part
of their familiarity is explainable by the fact that they have been in the language for so long that they
have had plenty of time to become fully assimilated. Further, Scandinavian is so closely related to
English that these loans "feel" like English.
Some of the Norse loans (such as both, call, and take) express such basic concepts that we feel
that they must be native words, that Old English could not have done without them. Old English did
have its own terms for the concepts, but, unlike the majority of ME loans from French or Latin, Norse
loans often supplanted rather than supplemented native vocabulary. Thus Norse call replaced OE hātan,
both replaced OE bā, and take replaced OE niman and fōn. In other instances, the Norse loan took over
only part of the domain of the native English word, while the English word survived in a narrowed
usage. For example, ON sky replaced OE heofon as the general term for the upper atmosphere, but
heaven survives, especially in the sense of "dwelling-place of God." Occasionally, both the native
word and the Norse loan survive as almost complete synonyms; few people could specify any distinct
difference in meaning between Norse crawl and native English creep.
In addition to its contributions to the general vocabulary, Norse introduced a number of new
place-name elements into English, especially into the areas heavily settled by the Scandinavians.
Chief among these were –beck ‘brook’, -by ‘town’, -dale ‘valley’, -thorp ‘ village’, -thwaite
‘piece of land’, and –toft ‘piece of ground’: Griezebeck, Troutbeck, Thursby, Glassonby,
Knarsdale, Uldale, Braithwaite, and Seathwaite.
Finally, Norse influence was heavy at about the time the English began to us surnames, so
Norse was able to give English the common surname suffix -son. The suffix proved so popular that it
was attached not only to first names of Norse origin (Nelson, Anderson), but also to native English
names (Edwardson, Edmundson) and even to French names (Jackson, Henryson). English did not,
however, adopt the Scandinavian practice of using -datter 'daughter' as a surname suffix for females.
The Scandinavian words that made their way into English were not confined to nouns and
adjectives and verbs but extended to pronouns, prepositions, adverbs, and even a part of the verb to be.
Such parts of speech are not often transferred from one language to another. The pronouns they, their,
and them are Scandinavian. Old English used hīe, hiera, him. Possibly the Scandinavian words were
felt to be less subject to confusion with forms of the singular. Moreover, though these are the most
important, they are not the only Scandinavian pronouns to be found in English. A late Old English
inscription contains the Old Norse form hanum for him. Both and same, though not primarily
pronouns, have pronominal uses and are of Scandinavian origin. The preposition till was at one time
widely used in the sense of to, besides having its present meaning; and fro, as the equivalent of from,
survives in the phrase to and fro. Both words are from the Scandinavian. From the same source
comes the modern form of the conjunction though, the Old Norse equivalent of OE þēah. The
Scandinavian use of at as a sign of the infinitive is to be seen in the English ado (at-do) and was more
widely used in this construction in Middle English. The adverbs aloft, athwart, aye (ever), and seemly,
and the earlier heþen (hence) and hweþen (whence), are all derived from the Scandinavian. Finally the
present plural are of the verb to be is a most significant adoption. While we aron was the Old English
form in the north, the West Saxon plural was syndon (cf. German sind), and the form are in Modern
English undoubtedly owes its extension to the influence of the Danes. When we remember that in the
expression they are both the pronoun and the verb are Scandinavian, we realize once more how
intimately the language of the invaders has been rooted in English.
Sometimes it is difficult to determine whether we have a Scandinavian borrowing or a mere
influence of the Scandinavian word upon the meaning or the form of the corresponding English word.
Thus Modern English “dream” in its pronunciation goes back to the O.E. “drēām”, but its meaning is
influenced by the Scandinavian words as O.E. “drēām” had the meaning of “joy, triumph”.
The Scandinavian influence is often told upon the form of the word:
Mn.E. give < Sc. gefa
Mn.E. get < Sc. geta
The O.E. forms were “ʒiefan” [jievan], “ʒietan” [jietan].
O.E. ʒiefan > M.E. yiven
O.E. ʒietan > M.E. yiten, yeten
Had the M.E. form survived in Mn.E., we should have had “yive” and “yet”, but not “give” and
“get”.
The Scandinavian influence upon the English vocabulary led to the development of AngloScandinavian etymological doublets, which appeared due to the fact that both the English and the
Scandinavian word having the same origin survived in English. The phonetic difference between them
was later used for their semantic differentiations and as a result then developed 2 different though
etymologically identical words:
English
shirt Sc.
skirt
shatter
scatter
shriek screech
With the preservation of the combination “sc” peculiar to the Scandinavian dialects and with its
change into “sh” peculiar to English.
English
road Sc.
raid
whole hale
to rear
to raise
In connection with Scandinavian influence there developed also Anglo-Scandinavian semantic
doublets, i.e. peculiar synonyms, which appeared due to the fact that both the English and the
Scandinavian words survived in English. Later on they were differentiated in their meaning and often
the appearance of the Scandinavian word led to the narrowing of the meaning of the corresponding
English one.
Mn.E. to starve
<
Sc. to die
< O.E. steorfan
Mn.E. craft
<
Sc. skill
Mn.E. hide
<
Sc. skin
Mn.E. sick
<
Sc. ill
Mn.E. heaven
<
Sc. sky
Thus, the Scandinavian borrowings not only enriched the English vocabulary, but at the same
time they had influenced upon it. This influence led to the disappearance of the number of words, to
the change of their meaning and to the rise of etymological doublets and synonyms.
FRENCH BORROWINGS IN MIDDLE ENGLISH
The Norman Conquest took place in 1066 and was headed by the Norman Duke William the
Conqueror. The Normans were Scandinavians by origin (O.E. Norpmånn). During the 9 th and 10th
centuries they occupied a considerable part of the Northern district of France where the Dukedom of
Normandy was formed. After several generations the Normans became Romanized as having
conquested politically and economically they were greatly influenced by the conquered as to their
culture and language. The fact is that they were out off from a steady intercourse with their
Scandinavian relatives and thus they adopted the higher culture of France and French language. And
when in 1066 the Normans conquered England they already spoke French (the Northern dialect of
French). Thus in linguistic respect the Norman Conquest there began a long period of bilinguism in the
country as the Norman nobility who formed the upper classes of English society spoke French while
the Anglo-Saxons, especially the peasantry spoke English.
The penetration of French borrowings into English was gradual (beginning with the 11th
century). The strongest French influence however is marked in the 14th century. It is important to note
that during the 11th -12th century it was Norman French which had immediate influence upon English
whereas beginning with the 13th century when Norman French began to die out there began the
influence of Parisian French i.e. of the central dialects which lie in the basis of literary French. Unlike
the Scandinavian borrowings French borrowings belong to definite semantic spheres. French words
are in their bulk borrowed by the ruling feudal class and are therefore of “aristocratic” character
reflecting the interests, tastes and mode of life of the Norman nobility. Here belong:
1. titles and ranks of respect: feudal, vassal, noble, prince - princess, baron - baroness, peer,
emperor - empress, duke - duchess, count - countess, squire - squires, marquise - marquis, miss,
Mrs., majesty.
All designations of rank except King, Queen, Lord, Lady, Earl are of French origin.
2. words relating to Government and the highest administration: to govern, governor,
government, serve, service, servant, state, country, power, crown, parliament, council, authority,
court, courtier, realm, reign, royal, treaty, tax, tyrant, subject, public, liberty, rebel, rebellion,
exile, treason, traitor.
3. words relating to law court: innocent, just, justice, justify, judge, jury, crime, punishment,
prison, advocate, evidence, proof, complaint, sentence, verdict, to accuse, condemn, acquit, force.
4. As the management of military matters was also in the hands of the Norman nobility we find a
number of military words, such as: war, peace, victory, defeat, siege, to siege, battle, banner, army,
regiment, soldier, officer, sergeant, lieutenant.
5. Among French borrowings there are a number of words relating to the mode of life of
aristocracy, the names of precious stones, to cookery, some towncrafts, art, literature, religion:
a) leisure, pleasure, feast, dance, appetite, taste, supper, dinner, dress, gown, frog, attire,
coat, petticoat, cloak, collar, veil, lace, embroidery, fashion,
b) diamond, emerald, sapphire, ruby, amber, turquoise, amethyst, garnet.
c) beef (ox, cow - Anglo-Saxon), mutton (sheep - Anglo-Saxon), veal (calf - Anglo-Saxon),
pork (bacon, pig, swine - Anglo-Saxon).
d) city, towncrafts, merchant, tailor, painter, butcher, carpenter, mason (whereas the
craftsmen living in the village retain Anglo-Saxon names: shoemaker, blacksmith,
spinner, weaver.
e) art, music, beauty, figure, colour, paint, sculpture, architecture, arch, tower, pillar,
column, palace, cast, cathedral, literature, prose, poet, chronicle, story, tragedy,
comedy, romance, volume, chapter, title, prologue, preface, parchment, pen, paper.
f) religion, pray, prayer, preach (v), to repent, to confess, sacrifice, adore, devotion,
obedience, faith, baptism, image, crucifix, passion, temptation, saint, charity, mercy,
virtue, virgin, chapel, etc.
Among French borrowings there are words, which at first sight seem to be quite common not
relating to the life of aristocracy, e.g. table and chair. However, the close examination of these words
convinces us of the fact that their penetration into English is also connected with the life of aristocracy.
The corresponding Anglo-Saxon words denoting the same notions are:
board < O.E. bord
stool < O.E. stōl
which denote rough furniture whereas table and chair denoted refined pieces of furniture which first
appeared at the feudal castles. French borrowings like the Scandinavian ones led to the development of
Anglo-French etymological doublets which had definite sources:
1. a part of Anglo-French etymological doublets developed on the basis of the common IndoEuropean element of the vocabulary in the Germanic and Romance languages. To such doublets
belonged:
brother = friar
fatherly = paternal
2. some Anglo-French etymological doublets appeared due to the fact that English borrowed
one and the same French word twice from different French dialects:
Norman
catch
Parisian
chase
cattle
chattels
canal
channel
3. Latin - French etymological doublets which appeared due to the fact that English borrowed
one and the same Latin word twice: once directly from Latin and for the 2nd time the same Latin word
through French:
MnE sure – secure (from O Fr seure and L securum)
MnE defeat – defect (from O Fr defait and L defectum)
MnE pursue – prosecute (from O Fr persuir and L prosecutum)
MnE vowel – vocal (from O Fr vouel and L vocalem)
French influence led also to the development of Anglo-French semantic doublets that’s
peculiar synonyms, one of them native, the other French. It goes without saying that when both the
native and the French words having the same meaning survived in the language, they underwent
semantic changes and were differentiated in their meaning and use. The differences that have
developed in course of time between the two synonyms, when both have survived, are chiefly the
following: the native word has the strongest association with everything primitive, fundamental,
popular, while the French word is often more formal, more polite, more refined and less emotional.
The difference between the English word and its French synonym is usually the following. The
English word is colloquial, its French synonym is more bookish. Or the English word is associated
with everything popular, primitive and its French synonym is more polite, more refined:
to begin - to commence
to feed - to nourish
to look - to regard
to look for - to search
to hinder - to prevent
to hide - to conceal
to wish - to desire
help - aid
life - existence
ship - vessel
tongue - language
friendship - amity
hearty - cordial
inner (outer) - interior (exterior)
In the result of changes that took place in M.E. the English vocabulary became mixed, this
being the most characteristic feature of M.E. vocabulary as compared with that of O.E. This mixed
character of the English vocabulary later became stronger leading to modern state of things with its
complicated interrelation between the native and foreign elements.
- ous -
- able
-
ADJECTIVE-FORMING SUFFIXES
By means of the suffix adjectives were formed from native English nouns:
murder – murderous
thunder – thunderous
This adjective-forming suffix was the most productive in English. A great number of
hybrid adjectives were formed from native English verbs in the English language in the
Middle English period and later.
drink – drinkable
read – readable
eat – eatable
answer – answerable
utter – utterable, unutterable and many others.
FRENCH PREFIXES
This prefix had a negative meaning:
disown, disarm, disbelieve
enThis prefix was used to form verbs from nouns and adjectives:
to endanger, to endear, to enlist
One of the peculiarities of the word-stock of the English language in the Middle English period
was hybridism, i.e. the formation of new words built of elements from different languages.
For instance, a native English suffix was added to a French borrowing, or vice versa, a French
suffix could be added to a native English word.
Hybrids Formed from French Borrowing + Native English Noun-Forming Suffixes:
- ness
faintness, secretness, simpleness
- dom
dukedom, martyrdom
- ship
courtship, companionship
- ful
beautiful, powerful, artful
- less
artless, colourless
French Borrowing + Native English Adverb-Forming Suffixes:
-ly
nobly, faintly, easily
Hybrids Formed from Native English Stems + Foreign Wordbuilding Suffixes:
dis / des -
-ess
-ment
shepherdess, lioness
endearment, enlightment, bewilderment
It is worth mentioning that the influence of the French language on English lasted for some
centuries thus increasing the English wordstock with many French words.
The pronunciation of the French words which made their way into the vocabulary of the
English language at the beginning of the Middle English period, soon after the Norman Conquest, was
later adapted to the English manner of pronunciation.
For instance, such French loan-words as “change” and “chance” are first pronounced as in
French with the sibilant consonant:
M.E. “change” [∫a:nz]
>
N.E. “change”
[t∫eindʒ]
Those French loan-words in which their original French sibilant consonant survived
penetrating into the English wordstock much later, probably at the beginning of the New English
period.
For instance,
machine [məʹ∫i:n] - Charlotte [∫a:lo:t]
There are some loan-doublets in the English wordstock at present. These are loan-words which
stemmed from one and the same French or Latin word, but they made their way into the English
language in different periods of time and sometimes in s slightly different meaning.
For instance:
chief - chef
gentle - genteel
saloon - salon
suit - suite
liquor - liqueur
rout - route
Lecture Four
Social Variation
The Social Dimension
'Hello, i t 's me again.' It would be quite natural for a friend who is phoning you for a
second time to say that. It would be less natural for him to say 'Good morning, this is me once
more.' A judge talking to the Home Secretary, on the other hand, might consider it more
appropriate to use the latter sentence. In these examples there is a difference of vocabulary (again is
less formal than once more) and morphology (elision as in it's is more likely in informal speech). The
informal style is more likely to be spoken with a regional pronunciation. What people say and
how they say it varies in accordance with who they are, who they are speaking to and the context
of the conversation. In Pygmalion Henry Higgins says that it would take him three months to pass off
Liza Doolittle with her 'kerbstone English' 'as a duchess at an ambassador's garden party'. Such
variation forms part of the field of study of sociolinguistics.
An individual's speech can be plotted on a matrix with one axis representing the spatial
dimension and the other axis the social dimension. In practice, of course, one is then faced by the
problem of establishing a social scale. Are wealth, occupation and education all relevant factors?
Are there others? What is their relative significance?
By observing the speech of people who live near a line drawn from the north of
England to the south of England and recording their socio-economic group one could produce a
matrix for a feature of the language such as the pronunciation of the vowel in the word bus. This
would show that the higher a person is on the social scale, the more likely they are to use the
southern /A/, this also being the vowel of the more prestigious standard. It shows that there is less
regional variation at the highest social level; to reflect this, the situation is often represented by
means of a truncated triangle.
Generally, people in higher socio-economic groups - and perhaps some who aspire to be in
such groups - have an idiolect that is less conditioned by the region in which they grew up, that
approximates more closely to a standard variety. This is likely to be a variety that they were
exposed to by parents and friends. In Britain it may have been consolidated by a public school
education. Their profession may require the use of a standard form of speech. They are likely to
be geographically mobile. Thus, it is likely to be easier to identify a bus driver's region of origin
than a judge's. And because the standard language is based on the speech of the south of England it
is likely to be easier to distinguish between a judge and a bus driver in Bolton than between a
judge and a bus driver in Brighton.
u
Λ
u
u
u
North
Λ Λ
u Λ Λ
Λ
u u A
u u u
South
Λ
Λ
Λ
Λ
Λ
Λ
Λ
Λ
Highest
socio-economic
group
Lowest socioeconomic
group
The Standard Language
The higher one's social standing, then, the less likely one is to use a regional dialect,
and the more likely one is to use a more standardised variety. This is in part due to the
greater mobility of those on the higher social levels; the wider one's social and
geographical horizons, the more one's speech and that of one's children will lose regional
features. Another major factor is the prestige that is associated with the more standardised
varieties; a judge's authority is likely to be lessened if he speaks a regional dialect.
It is this prestige that sets a standard language apart. Linguistically a standard
language is just another dialect; its origins are usually as humble as those of the other
dialects. But socially it has been elevated, put on a pedestal as the supreme variety. R. A.
Hudson specifies four characteristics of a standard language: 1) It has been selected from
among the varieties of the language, 2) it has been codified, 3) it is suitable for use as an
official, written medium, 4) it has been accepted by 'the relevant population'. As it is
codified, as it serves as a literary language, as it is perpetuated by the education system, the
standard language tends to be conservative, these factors acting as a brake on change. Being
codified, it can be used as a yardstick for assessing a person's 'correctness'. A standard
language can also serve as a symbol of nationhood.
As the nation states in Europe developed, the centralised governments, assisted by the
invention of printing, spread the use of a particular variety. As one might expect, the
variety that rose to assume the role of the prestigious ideal was often that of the seat of power.
As we have seen, Standard British English is more akin to the speech of southern
England than that of northern England, the seat of power being in the south. For similar
reasons the speech of the region centred on Paris, Francien, became the prestigious variety in
France. Often, then, the standard form of a language is based on the speech of the educated
inhabitants of the capital city; in the case of Danish, for example, 'the most prestigious
pronunciation is that of an educated Copenhagener. In Italy, however, it was Florence rather
than Rome that provided the prestigious variety; Italy has only been a political entity since the
second half of the nineteenth century and the status of the speech of Florence goes much
further back, to the Renaissance. The prestige may, then, have its roots in cultural rather than
political influence. A variety may become a standard language as the result of being
adopted as a religious norm; standard German and standard Arabic are in large part the
result of a particular variety being selected as the form for the Bible of Martin Luther and the
form of the Koran respectively. Often, of course, the development of a standard will be
influenced by a greater complexity of factors than the above suggests; the spread of Luther's
East Central German, a variety of High German, was, for example, made easier by the
decline of the Hanseatic League and with it the influence of Low German.
MEN AND WOMEN
A person's speech tends to relate to his social class, to his education
and occupation. City-dwellers may speak differently compared to those who live in
the surrounding rural areas. Also of relevance to our speech is whether we are a man or a
woman.
Many studies have shown that women generally use forms which approximate more
closely to those of the standard language than do men of the same social background, age,
and so on. In his study of the variable /iη/ vs. /in/ in the verbal ending -ing in the speech of
his native Norwich, for example, Peter Trudgill found that women were more likely to use
the standard form /iη/ than men were.
Trudgill showed, moreover, that women were more likely to believe that they use
forms closer to the standard language than those they actually use. This has been explained
in terms of a greater consciousness of status on the part of women. The status of men, it
has been argued, has been traditionally defined by their occupation and wealth, while
women have had to find other ways of establishing their position and one of these has been
their speech. Women are expected to behave better than men; traditionally, just as
society has been harsher on women, a better standard of language may have been
required.
On the other hand, the spread of sexual equality may be eroding many of these
factors. Perhaps women are increasingly feeling that they do not have the same need to
impress, to justify themselves. If so, they might move towards the less tormai styie or
seen more associated with men who, to quote Trudgill, 'are at a subconscious or
perhaps simply private level very favourably disposed towards non-standard speech
forms', a situation that has been ascribed to a greater concern with group solidarity than
with the desire to rise on the social scale. Men may associate masculinity with the
physical labour of the working class. It may be coarse language that helps you attain your
social goal when that goal is to be 'one of the lads'.
According to Hudson, this correlation between sex and style of speech must be
regarded as 'one of the most robust findings of socio- linguistics'.
Power and Solidarity
Women, then, tend to want to give an impression of high status more than
men do. Women are more concerned than men are with a vertical social dimension, men
setting greater store than women by a horizontal social dimension, by group identity. In
connection with these two dimensions sociolinguists use respectively the terms power and
solidarity.
Whether it is power or solidarity that is more significant in a particular
social relationship depends not only on who is speaking but also on whom the speaker is
speaking to. Hello, Lizzie is an appropriate way of greeting a sister or friend called Elizabeth;
if you were talking to the Queen of the United Kingdom it would be more appropriate to
say "Good morning, Your Highness". Saying "Hello, Lizzie" Xo the Queen would be
considered extremely disrespectful. If you said "Good morning, Elizabeth" to your sister she
might wonder what she had done to upset you. In a conversation with the Queen it is the rules
associated with power that are the most relevant, there being a substantial difference in
social status. In a conversation with your sister it is the rules of solidarity that apply. The
former require a more formal speech variety than the latter do. If we want to be accepted
by those 'above' us or to distance ourselves from those 'below' us we use more formal
speech. Using formal speech with our equals might give them the impression that we
consider ourselves better than them or, as we have just seen, that they have done
something to up set us.
Our speech may be marked as more or less formal by the choice of vocabulary .We
may make our speech more formal by such means as avoiding the imperative and using
more complex formulae;
'May 1 see the photograph" is more polite than "Show me the photograph."
If we wish to use a person's name when talking to or about then we need to decide
whether it is appropriate to use their given name (e.g. Elizabeth) or their surname (e.g.
Miss Smith). Whatever our social relationship we can, however, always address that
person with you. In most European languages, on the other hand, there an two
equivalents of the singular you, a formal form and an informal form. In French these are
vous and tu respectively and the linguist often refers to these two varieties as the V form
and the T form. The Spanish equivalents are usted and tu, the German ones Sie and du the
Russian ones вы and ты.
Generally the informal form is gaining ground as society becomes more egalitarian
and the criterion of solidarity becomes more significant at the expense of that of power.
In France, for example, ii was once common for children to address their father, a figure of
power, with vous, b\ t now most address their father with tu, the determining factor being
that he is a close relative.
In some oriental languages such as Japanese and Korean the relationship
between the speaker and the person to whom he is speaking has to be reflected more
extensively in the form of the utterance. In Japanese verbs have a basic form and a polite
form; imasu, an equivalent of to be, has a deferential form, irasshaimasu, that elevates the
person being spoken to and a humble form, orimasu, that indicates the modesty of the
speaker.
A noun may be prefixed by o- as a mark of, respect for the addressee; if a
person is asking somebody what his name is he may say o-namae rather than just namae.
Our relationship with somebody may affect not only how we address him but also
what we say. If somebody rings you on the telephone you may feel an obligation to ask
him/her how he/she is if that person is a friend. Here we are touching on the rules
governing a conversation, the requirements that our social values impose on what we say and
how we say it. This is an area of study called discourse analysis.
Registers and Diglossia
If we are talking to a judge we may be in court, perhaps as a lawyer, perhaps as a
witness. If we are talking to a friend we may be playing golf or discussing a personal
problem. Thus, related to the consideration of who we are talking to is the consideration
of the social context in which we are talking. We interact with others in many different
situations. One may be an employee, a colleague and a teacher, a husband and a father, a
member of an archery club, a neighbour and a dental patient. While differences reduce as
society becomes les formal, his/her speech will vary somewhat between roles. A speech
variety that is appropriate to a limited social context is known as a register.
Alternating between registers is known as code-switching or style-switching.
The speech of the individual, the idiolect, is variable. The postman from Preston
and the doctor from Dover use different registers when talking to members of their
family and when talking to members of the public in the course of their work.
Trudgill's study of the variation between /iŋ/ and /in/ in Norwich showed
that it correlated not only with the social class of the speaker but also with the formality of
the situation. Middle-class people generally use the standard /iŋ/ in casual speech, whereas
working-class people generally use the non-standard /in/. All groups increase their use
of /iŋ/ in formal speech, particularly those in the middle class, those who had already
preferred it in casual speech.
These findings reflect those of the pioneering studies of the American
sociolinguist William Labov who examined the speech of the Lower East Side of New
York in the 1960s, looking at the articulation of a number of phonemes that varied
between individuals and, indeed, between the registers of the one individual. In New
York the initial phoneme of the word think may be articulated as /t/. Labov found that the
middle class-the highest class that is normally found in the district- produced /θ/ in over 80
per cent of cases when speaking in a formal register, and he found that the incident of
/t/ increased with people in a lower social position and at every level increased in less
formal registers.
Clearly if a person uses an informal variant of a particular feature there is a greater
chance that they will use informal variants of other features in the same utterance. If a
New Yorker says He's thinking as opposed to He is thinking the likelihood that he will
pronounce the word thinking with /t/ as opposed to /θ/ is increased. There tends, then, to be
co-occurrence of features. When such co-occurrence is so systematic that there are two
distinct varieties for formal contexts and informal contexts respectively, we can say that
there is a state of diglossia. When there is diglossia the social position of the speaker may
not be a significant factor, the choice of variety being determined principally by the
degree of formality of the context. One may argue that there is diglossia in the south of
France, for example; Dennis Ager tells us that Occitan, the long-established variety spoken
in the south of France is used in the home and in informal situations while French is used
in formal situations and in administration, that Occitan is used to speak of basic human
needs and during leisure activities while French is used to speak of intellectual matters. Further
south, on the other side of the Pyrenees, the repressive centralist policies of Franco in the
middle of the twentieth century resulted in Spanish being the language used in public even in
the north-east of Spain where Catalan persisted as the language of many homes. An
example that is often referred to on the subject of diglossia is the situation in Germanspeaking Switzerland; there a form of High German is used in more formal situations
while the distinctive local variety of German, Schweizerdeutsch, is used in less formal
situations. Until recent times proponents of a 'high' variety and proponents of a 'low' variety
for supremacy in Greece but under the democratic regimes 'low' variety, Dimotiki, has
almost prevailed over the 'high' variety Katharevusa. The two varieties of a diglossic
situation may be very different languages; as an example of this reference is often made to the
situation in Paraguay where the ' high' variety is Spanish, the language of the former
colonial power, and the 'low' variety is Guaraní, the indigenous language. In former
colonial societies there may be a 'high' variety that is, or is close to, Standard English,
Standard French, and so on, and a 'low' variety that is a creole that is lexically based on the
standard. 'High' and ' low' varieties may also be referred to as acrolects and basilects
respectively.
Taboo and Political Correctness
Some terms are rarely used in formal contexts because they are socially
unacceptable in such contexts. The sensitive areas will vary from society to society
depending on their values. They may involve death or religion. When Scandinavians
swear they often refer to the Devil. Such socially sensitive terms are called taboo words.
As alternatives to using taboo words we can either use medical terms or evasive terms.
Thus acceptable alternatives to piss are urinate and pass water. If, like me ,one
were particularly considerate, one might even use such constructions as expel the body's
waste material. This is not a new phenomenon; what is to relieve himself in the New
English Bible was to cover his feet in the King James Version. We can avoid profanity by
amending a word or phrase; thus heck can be used instead of hell, jeepers creepers can be
used instead of Jesus Christ. Such alternatives to unacceptable terms are known as
euphemisms. In The Linguist, the journal of the Institute of Linguists, the translation
specialist Peter New mark suggested that a euphemism might be defined as 'an
inoffensive or embellishing word or phrase substituted for one considered offensive,
frightening or hurtful, especially one relating to religion, sex, crime, death, drunk
health and serious diseases'.
The French verb baiser, once meaning to kiss, came to denote a more intimate
activity, with the result that an alternative, embrasser, came to be used to denote kissing.
A euphemism may be evasive, discreet, but if it is to be of use it must, like any other word,
be unequivocably associated with the concept that it denotes. Most people understand
that sleeping with somebody implies something more stimulating than getting a good
night's rest beside somebody else. This being the case, the euphemism can through time
become as tainted as the term that it replaced. Thus a concept may be denoted by a
succession of terms. In a work published in 1974 Geoffrey Leech gave the word nigger
as a denigratory equivalent of negro, now, a quarter of a century later, many would be
unhappy with negro and would prefer a term such as black, coloured person, or Afro-
Caribbean.
We have now entered the field of political correctness. As society becomes
more egalitarian, more liberal, we are less sensitive to terms related to sex and
other bodily functions but more sensitive to the concerns of disadvantaged; people
with deficient eyesight, for example, are now often described by the phrase visually impaired
rather than blind.
Taboo words are often avoided because they are unacceptable in many
social situations. Other words may not be widely used because they are not even
known to most people. A section of society may wish to reinforce its identity and
exclude other people, social elite may do so by such means as social etiquette.
Linguistically it may do so by adherence to the standard language. Other sections of
society may strive to achieve the same end by going to other extreme, by using a variety
that is so different the standard language that it cannot be easily understood by
uninitiated. Such a variety is slang. When slang is used to conceal the activities of a
group of people such as criminals it may be called argot.
One example of slang is the rhyming slang associated with the East End of London.
This refers to an object, action, and so on by using a phrase which rhymes with the
standard term; thus a telephone may be referred to as a dog and bone. The exclusivity
may be increased by omitting the element that rhymes with the standard I thus a Londoner
may refer to his friend or mate as his china, the first element of the phrase china plate. Some
examples,on the other hand, have been more widely adopted to the extent that people
are often unaware that the word has its origins in rhyming many people will not be
aware, for example, that when they say a phrase use your loaf as an alternative to use your
head they are usin g an abbreviated form of loaf of bread.
Another example is to.be found in French which has a form of slang known as
verlan. The basis of this form of slang is the inversion syllables and the word verlan is itself
an example, it being the equivalent of I'envers meaning the reverse. Other examples include
tromé instead of metro and renpats instead of parents.
In a similar way certain ethnic groups may revert to a creole. In the end of 1960s
immigrants to Britain from the Caribbean brought with them varieties such as Jamaican
Creole. Over time this generally approximated towards standard English. Some, however,
particularly the young who feel themselves to be marginalised by society, may turn back
towards the Creole, in so far as it can be readopted, in order to have an alternative identity.
Some of today's slang words will eventually be elevated to the standard language.
Some will disappear. Slang words are an aspect of language that is particularly prone to
change.
Thus, a person's speech is influenced not only by where he grew up but also by his
social background. At the higher social levels there are standardising factors which result in
less regional variation. The most uniform and prestigious variety is the standard language,
the variety that is used in official contexts, the variety that provides the written norm. The
standard language has generally been elevated from amongst other dialects because it was
the dialect of a centre of influence. People who live in cities and women tend to
approximate more closely to the standard language than do people who live in rural areas
and men.
A person's speech is also influenced by whom he is speaking to; if the two people
concerned have a 'power' relationship the speech will be more formal than if they had a
'solidarity' relationship. The significance of this depends on the formality of the society
concerned. Our speech varies between social situations. Where two distinct varieties exist
for formal and informal situations we may say that there is a state of diglossia.
Some terms are avoided in formal situations because they may cause offence; such
terms are taboo words. Instead, euphemisms or politically correct forms are used. Some
terms are not widely used because they are exclusive to certain social group; such terms are
slang.
Lecture Five
LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL FUNCTION
Seeing language in terms of its functions, and relating language changes to changes of
function is sometimes referred to as the sociolinguistic profile of a language. Two of the most
important factors to the sociolinguistic history and description of a language are:
standardisation and literacy. To recognise their importance, however, is not to say that a
standardised, written language is in any way better or more important than its unwritten,
unstandardised counterpart. Nor would it be true to say that languages of the latter type are
inferior or handicapped. It means, rather, that the demands of speakers on their language are no
more than those associated with the customary, local needs of small, technologically simple
societies. A larger, more centralised society will make new demands on its language or
languages, as specialised institutions - administrative, legal, religious, educational - are created.
The adaptation of a language to such demands is closely bound up with the cultivation of
standardised varieties and the written word.
The range and kinds of functions that a language serves must be borne in mind when we
describe its sociolinguistic profile. In general, languages that function in the domains of a
centralised state have been described as developed, while the term oral vernacular has been used
to denote languages with alternative characteristics. Both developed and vernacular languages
can function in societies where they are the only languages their speakers need to know; and
where this is the case, we can further describe them as autonomous. Thus, as a standardised,
literate language of a modern state, English is autonomous today within England; but no less
autonomous was the oral vernacular of the Germanic tribes who first settled here.
The notion of autonomy is important, since it enables us to describe the difference
between a vernacular and a dialect. Dialects can be described as undeveloped, oral varieties of
a language that are heteronomous with respect to a standardised one. Unfortunately, different
scholars at different times have used the term to denote different combinations of criteria,
some social or functional, others mo're directly linguistic. In French usage, the term dialecte
refers to a regional variety that has a written form, in opposition to a patois, which does not.
Also, speech-varieties have been called dialects on the basis of purely linguistic similarities
among them, such as shared words, similar sound-systems, grammatical patterns, and so on.
Some scholars, therefore, have used the term to relate varieties that most of us would consider
separate languages. It has been said that the earliest speakers of English used a dialect of
Germanic, similar in terms of linguistic structure to the other kinds of speech used by other,
related, Germanic tribes. The term Germanic here denotes a kind of parent language. And in
principle there is no knowing where to stop applying the term dialect, since it can be used, it
seems, to relate any varieties that have some perceived linguistic feature in common. More
often the line is drawn according to some notion of mutual intelligibility: when people stop
understanding each other, they can be said to be speaking different languages. But this
criterion is not nearly as useful as it seems. Unintelligibility can be total, or only partial; and it
also depends very much on the motivation of speakers to understand each other. Indeed, some
would argue that there are enough problems of intelligibility between different dialects in
contemporary England to justify calling them separate languages.
Another crucial dimension in the sociolinguistic description of a language is the value
placed on its different varieties by its speakers. Greater prestige tends to be attached to the
notion of the standard, since it can function in higher domains, and has a written form.
Developed languages, therefore, tend to be more prestigious than vernaculars. When
developed languages come into contact with vernaculars, the latter tend to be influenced by
the former. This is partly a reflection of power: developed languages tend to be used by
societies that are more centralised politically, and these are usually better equipped to fight
and survive in conflicts with less centralised ones. But it is also a reflection of attitudes to
language. People who use a language with traditions of standardisation and literacy may
develop a sense of historicity, a pride in their language's past, and its continuity with the
present. They tend to.be more keenly aware of their language's difference from other
languages. They do not see their language as being under threat, and in danger of dying out:
rather, they are aware of its vitality. These factors are extremely important in the modern
world, when oppressed languages, such as the Celtic ones of Britain and France, and
languages such as Pennsylvania German in the United States of America are being kept alive
by their speakers.
The prestige attached to standardised, written varieties of language is associated with
the belief that they are the most correct forms of the language, and that they are perhaps the
most 'beautiful'. Aesthetic judgments of this kind are even shared by people who may be
illiterate, and who have little access to the prestige variety. This is most likely to happen
where a classical variety, enshrining a literature either sacred or secular, develops in a
language spoken over a very wide area, and where literacy is the preserve of an elite. In such
conditions, the everyday spoken varieties of such a language may diverge quite sharply from
the classical one. The consequences of this divergence may be seen today in the case of
Arabic. This language, to put it rather simply, has two forms: one based on an ancient,
classical variety, the other on the colloquial usage of the present. No contemporary speaker of
Arabic uses the form deriving from the ancient literary variety as a medium of everyday
conversation. In fact, the two varieties are functionally differentiated, just as they are
evaluated differently by their users. The classical form, which is considered more correct and
beautiful than the colloquial forms, is used in the prestigious domains like law, religion and
education, and has therefore been called the High variety of the language. The Low variety which uses many words, grammatical constructions, and sounds that are different from the
High one - is subject to great regional variation (as distinct from the 'fixed' classical form
codified in dictionaries and grammars) and is used in more informal contexts.
The situation just described is known as diglossia and it demonstrates the value of
describing languages or linguistic varieties according to the ways in which they function in
society.
BILINGUALISM
People will readily acquire a second language if they need one, and if they have access
to its speakers. This is particularly common when speakers of different languages intermarry,
and their children grow up bilingual. In some circumstances, a first, or 'native' language, may
not be as useful to an individual's daily needs as a second language: this often happens when
people migrate to other countries to work. And in some conditions people learn a simplified
version of another language when contact with its speakers is only intermittent; and they use
it for very limited purposes, such as trade. These simplified languages are known as pidgins.
Bilingualism can be of various kinds. Where one person commands more than one
language, we can speak of individual bilingualism. But this need not mean that both
languages are actually spoken: scholars, for instance, can be fluent only in the written form of
another language, and translation from one language to another can introduce linguistic
changes that are far-reaching. Such cultural bilingualism, as we shall call it, is of great
importance in the early history of English.
Where a society regularly uses two or more languages to carry out its affairs, we can
speak of societal bilingualism. The restriction of each language to certain areas is referred to
as geographical bilingualism. In parts of Belgium for instance, French is spoken as a first
language, whereas Flemish is natively spoken elsewhere; and both languages have official
status. Some people, of course, will be bilingual; and in most bilingual societies, one
language-group is more bilingual, at the individual level, than the other. This is particularly so
in the very common cases where one language is the official one, used in High domains, and
the other is relegated to functions that can be described as unofficial, where it is merely
tolerated (as in the case of immigrant languages in English cities). The speakers of the Low
language are much more likely to be bilingual than those whose first language is the High
one. In such situations one language is clearly the dominant one, and we can adapt the term
diglossia to describe them, and speak of diglossic bilingualism.
STANDARDISATION AND WRITING
To many educators and politicians, the 'standard' is seen as a product of centuries of
careful cultivation. It is seen as a 'national' norm, a lingua franca for all speakers of English
within Britain (and even a supranational one across the Anglophone world). It is both the
'native' spoken language of educated people, and the variety we expect to find in print.
However, any references to the 'nation' or to the 'educated' beg the question as to how
those concepts are to be defined. This problem is exacerbated by the habit of many influential
commentators to talk about the 'standard' as an ideal of usage, restricted to the written
medium and inseparably linked to the notion of literary greatness.
Sociolinguists have tended to see the standard in less idealised terms, as a linguistic
variety much like any other dialect. But there are immense problems involved in drawing a
boundary between such a 'standard' and whatever is felt to be 'not-standard' usage. Applied
too loosely, the 'standard' includes virtually the whole of English, with dialect, slang and
perhaps jargon constituting only an exotic fringe. Applied too restrictively, the standard is
associated with only a very limited range of supposedly correct forms. On this latter view,
which is not the one adopted by sociolinguists, the standard is an ideal that has to be
constantly fought for.
Standardisation as a project, which took different forms at different times. One thing
we can be clear about is that the process of standardisation cannot be seen as merely a matter
of communal choice, an innocent attempt on the part of society as a whole to choose a variety
that can be used for official purposes and, in addition, as a lingua franca among speakers of
divergent dialects. It involves from the first the cultivation, by an elite, of a variety that can
be regarded as exclusive. In short, the process means the creation of a class dialect, that is
imposed on an often resentful, and sometimes bewildered, populace.
Although standardisation gives speakers a sense of historicity in relation to their
language, many have been led to believe that the so-called standard variety is the language
itself. From this comes the unfortunate belief that most people do not speak their own
language, or at least do not speak it 'properly'. Many people are quite unsure whether or not
they speak 'Standard English', although, as a result of codification, they are quite sure what
they are not supposed to say.
Writing can be seen to be an indispensable component of standardisation. Indeed, it is
difficult to imagine the process without the existence of a written form. At the same time, the
existence of a writing system does not presuppose the existence of a standard. But once a
particular variety has become dominant, writing is a powerful agent for its dissemination
especially as literacy spreads and printing makes written materials more readily available. As
the written forms acquire prestige, and are considered 'correct', they increasingly exert a
pressure on speech. Written forms act as a norm and a guide.
The term to which standard is most often opposed is dialect. One dimension of this
contrast concerns writing: dialect is not usually associated with writing, still less with print.
Another dimension has to do with functional elaboration: the dialects have not been
developed in the same range of formal functions. A third is that dialects have often been seen
as barriers to communication, thereby 'holding back' their speakers. Finally, dialect is seen as
regional, whereas the standard is seen as national, even mainstream.
STANDARDISATION: THE SELECTION OF A DOMINANT VARIETY
The origins of a dominant variety of English - on which notions of the standard were
subsequently built - lie with the merchant class based in London. The dialect they spoke was
the East Midland one - associated at first with Norfolk, later with Northamptonshire,
Leicestershire, Bedfordshire - and already by the fourteenth century this was a class dialect
within London. The lower class spoke another dialect, a south-eastern one, the antecedent of
Cockney. The dialects were similar in many respects but there were some regular differences;
for instance, the merchant would say mill, with the short i of pin, but the tradesman said mell,
with the e of pen. Vestiges of this pattern have been found in Cockney speech today. It is
important to stress this linguistic stratification in London, since the subsequent history of
standardisation has much to do with its relationship to the speech of the Londoner in the
street.
By the end of the fourteenth century, East Midland can be seen as an embryonic
written standard. Within the dialect, however, there were variations, often associated with the
birthplaces of bourgeois immigrants into London; so at first we see in use a number of
different written standards. After about 1430, however, one of these variants became
increasingly dominant. By the end of that century, the fixing of the selected variety was
greatly strengthened, and accelerated, by the printing press.
We cannot yet assume the existence of any standard of spoken usage. It is one thing
for a minority of literate people to adopt a different written form; quite another for them to
change their speech-habits overnight. As we shall see, it took some time for the East Midland
speech of the London merchants to acquire prestige. But there is another reason why East
Midland, or variants of it, may have been quite widely adopted during the later Middle Ages.
Students from all over England mixed in the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, both
only about sixty miles from London. In the triangle formed by these three centres, a great deal
of East Midland speech would have been heard, and possibly used as a kind of lingua franca
among a mobile social group.
There is some evidence to suggest that a popular East Midland norm existed as a
medium for folk-song. From the printed broadsheets of the sixteenth century to the songcollections of contemporary singers, the linguistic medium for folk-song is one that does not,
on the whole, reflect regional differences. We do not know whether this is to be attributed to
the people themselves, or to the commercial presses: but it seems clear that while ordinary
people spoke in their local dialect, they were less likely to sing in it.
So far, we have identified both regional and socio-economic factors in the selection
process. There is a political dimension as well. A dominant variety tends to emerge when
ideas about political autonomy are gaining currency: and we find that in other European
kingdoms where a degree of centralisation had occurred early, dominant varieties were
emerging at this time. But they were not always associated with the same power base in
society. In both France and Spain, it was the usage of Court and monasteries in the areas of
political power - the regions of Paris and Castile respectively - that determined its selection.
In countries where political autonomy was achieved relatively recently, standardisation took a
different course. Thus, while Tuscan developed as a literary norm during the later Middle
Ages in Italy, it did not have a political dimension until the unification of the country in the
1860s. By that time, the municipal varieties of Italian in the old, independent city-states had
become regional norms.
STANDARDISATION: ACCEPTANCE OF THE DOMINANT VARIETY
By about the middle of the fifteenth century, the East Midland dialect had been
accepted as a written norm by those who wrote official documents. But its acceptance was
tacit rather than explicit, a matter of convention rather than diktat. For when Caxton who had
spent much of his life on the continent - came to set up his press, he did not realise that the
variety he was printing was already a written norm. Instead, he complained about the
difficulty of choosing a dialect that all could understand, and also - like a good many people
since - about how English had changed since he was young. By the sixteenth century, this
variety was well-established in the domain of literature.
In the course of the sixteenth century, the growing sense of a literary norm can be seen
by the numerous attempts to represent the speech of foreigners, the linguistic characteristics
of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish people, and the speakers of other dialects of English. It is now
that we begin to see the social stereotyping of such speakers. Increasingly, they play the role
of buffoon or boor. Non-standard speech is equated with simplicity or roughness; and in
order to depict those qualities in literature, some form of marking for non-standard features is
adopted. A tradition is established which has lasted until the present day, and which has been
translated into cinema and television soap-opera: deviation from the norm implies social
comment in the minds of author and audience alike.
But by the end of the sixteenth century, we have an accepted printed standard, and
some prestigious speech forms, that were being promoted consciously and unconsciously by
a tiny elite. We do not know, however, how widespread that pronunciation was among the
aristocracy in general. What we can be sure of is that the prestige of one dialect triggers the
disparagement of the others. Kentish is only the first to be stigmatised. In the course of the
following centuries, the dialects of other parts of England are labelled variously as
'offensive', 'disgusting', 'barbarous'. And by the beginning of the twentieth century,
disparagement is directed towards an urban dialect, that of London itself; but it is the working class dialect, Cockney, that is singled out in a School Board report as speech unworthy of
citizens living in the capital city of an Empire. By then, of course, 'Standard English' is a
subject taught in schools: and 'acceptance' is backed up with the teacher's rod.
Lecture Six
ELABORATION OF FUNCTION
The dialects lost status. Their writing systems came to be used only rarely for literary
purposes. In short, their range of functions was restricted as those of the dominant
metropolitan variety were elaborated. They became patois, unwritten vehicles for informal,
everyday conversation among equals. The process of standardisation may be said, therefore,
to have involved an accompanying process of patoisation.
The new metropolitan variety had to function in those domains previously associated,
either fully or in part, with the use of Latin and French: law, government, literature, religion,
scholarship, and education. Progress for English against the incumbent languages in these
domains was often rather uneven, slow, and at times controversial, and the circumstances of
its adoption were often different in each case. Inertia, the jealous guarding of ancient
privileges, or feelings about the inadequacy of English delayed its advance. Occasionally
even Acts of Parliament were required to support its implementation.
The stage we are describing points towards one of the two major goals of
standardisation: maximal variation in function. And since a standardised language, has to be
omnifunc-tional, it will develop new structures and new meanings, appropriate to its use in
different domains. Each group of specialists - lawyers, the writers of religious texts,
administrators, and later, journalists and advertisers - cultivate their own varieties and these
have to be learned by each new recruit to these professions. Thus the metropolitan variety
cannot be as monolithic as people like to imagine: it has to develop variations to suit its wide
range of functions.
The linguistic consequences of this process were profound. The major source of
variation was no longer regional, as different styles (some linguists call them fields of
discourse) developed their own particularities. Often these were influenced by Latin and
French usage. Extreme cases of this are the English of religion and the English of law, whose
special qualities today derive in part from the fact that they were in process of formulation
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In all styles, words developed additional
technical meanings as they came to be used in certain contexts, and these technical meanings
often influenced casual spoken usage. In sum, English vocabulary became differentiated to an
extent previously unknown, in that words can be identified as 'literary', or 'legal', or technical'
in one sphere or another.
We have already seen the importance of the fourteenth century in the process of
standardisation. In 1362, for example, English was used for the first time in the domains of
both government and law. But in the first of these, the use of French in written documents
persisted for about a century after this date; and in law, it was used in some circumstances
until the eighteenth century. An Act was passed in 1731 to limit its use in this domain once
and for all, along with Latin (which was also occasionally used for keeping records). Today,
legal English still employs Law French and Law Latin phraseology, such as fee simple and
habeas [heibiəs] corpus.
By the end of the sixteenth century some observers felt that English could function as
a medium for serious literature; but any acceptance of its potential in this respect was won
only after a great deal of controversy. For many writers and scholars had a crisis of
confidence about the suitability of English for this purpose; they felt it could never match the
heights achieved by the writers of ancient Rome and Greece. What is important here is not
that English was in any way actually impoverished as a language, but that some people
apparently felt that it was. At one extreme, English was described as 'dull' and 'barbarous'. At
the other, some thought that there was nothing worth saying that could not be said in English.
A compromise view held that English could attain the eloquence of the classical languages if
two courses of action were taken. The first was to produce handbooks of composition, based
on the classical manuals of rhetoric, to guide writers of English. The second was to inject
thousands of Latin loan-words into the language. Some advocates of this second course contemptuously known as inkhoins - went overboard in larding their speech with Latinisms,
and became figures of fun in Elizabethan drama.
By about the 1580s, some authors were declaring English to have achieved a state of
eloquence. On this view, a balance had been achieved between native usage and foreign
importation, and the patterns of rhetoric had been successfully applied to literature in English.
Moreover, some poets like Spenser and Sydney had written works that many felt were a
match for any literature.
The power of the Anglo-Saxon tradition can also be felt in another domain, that of
religion. Protestantism gave the English monarchy a further chance to assert political
autonomy by appropriating the Church, which was re-constructed as a specifically 'English'
institution with English, its language. The sixteenth century witnessed a flurry of Biblical
translation, and the preparation of prayer books and other Christian texts. While people had
been used to hearing sermons spoken in English, these printed texts seemed to the most
devout to bring to them the word of God itself, in their own language. The publication of the
Authorised Version of the Bible in 1611 is often regarded as a landmark in the history of
English. It furnished English with a dignified and elevated language of worship, what might
even be called a classical variety of its own to match the Latin of Catholicism.
The crucial stage in functional elaboration is the development of a medium for serious,
expository prose. Inspired by the example of the Authorised Version, writers began to
cultivate prose to such an extent that the seventeenth century has been called the century of
prose: and a significant aspect of that trend was the increased use of English in writing of a
scientific and scholarly nature. The tradition of scholarly writing in Latin was so long, its
audience so wide, that as late as 1687 Newton chose to write his Principia in that language.
But this choice of Newton's stands at the end of a tradition. Fed by a developing interest in
science and philosophy, people wrote political pamphlets, journals, essays, and the first
newspapers, in English. By the end of the seventeenth century, the range of possibilities for
expression in prose had expanded to cover imaginative, fictional writing. Such a wide functional range engendered further self-consciousness among writers of English, and enhanced
the status of the language.
The displacement of Latin as the automatic language of scholarship was part of a
wider process, the extension of English in education. In considering the roles of language in
education, we need to distinguish between languages that are taught, and those that function
as media of learning. In the Middle Ages, Latin had been both a taught language and the
medium of instruction in the universities. But in schools the latter role had been filled by
French. Both languages were being challenged in the education system by English as far back
as the fourteenth century. In grammar schools throughout England French was being
abandoned as the medium of instruction; and in the University of Oxford an edict of 1340
forbidding the use of English among students suggests that the latter had made their
preferences clear. Two trends underlie these changes: the general reaction against French, and
the gradual loosening of the Church's hold on institutions of learning and literacy.
Formal education was extended throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Grammar schools were founded, often for the children of merchants; and some of these
deliberately excluded clergy from teaching positions. The growth of secular education
increased the demand for learning in English: and this was met after the introduction of
printing. Books in English sold more widely than those in Latin. And when the Protestant
Reformation had promoted the English language as a medium for religious instruction, the
identification of Latin with learning was undermined still further.
A major goal of education still remained: the learning of Latin, and the cultivation of a
good written style in that language. During the literary and cultural Renaissance of the
sixteenth century, Greek was added to the syllabus; and Latin, ironically enough, was the
object of renewed interest and enthusiasm. But it was the classical Latin of writers like
Cicero, rather than the medieval variety of the Church, that was studied and analysed. Latin
had received a fresh boost, but as a taught language rather than as a medium of learning.
Latin remained important to the education of elites: it was still a requirement for certain
university courses, and hence for certain occupations until well into the present century.
CODIFICATION
Some degree of standardisation is usually involved if a language is to be formally
taught, if a highly centralised nation-state tends to select one linguistic variety for this
purpose. A taught language inevitably becomes subject to attention and scrutiny, aimed at
describing its forms and structures. One of the two goals of standardisation is the attainment
of minimal variation of form. In practice, this means two things. First, eliminating variation
within the standardised variety. Second, it means trying to stop linguistic change. Both these
interrelated aims - constitute the stage in the standardisation process that has been called
codification.
Codification is undertaken by a small elite of scholars. Its method has less to do with
description of linguistic forms, however, than with prescription: the evaluation of variants as
'correct', and the stigmatisation of variants which, for one reason or another, are felt to be undesirable. The arguments for justifying one variant in preference to another are often
arbitrary, irrational, and inconsistent. This is because variants are associated, inevitably, with
particular social groups; and certain social groups are felt to be more worthy of emulation
than others. Unfortunately for the codifiers, the usage of London in the early years of
standardisation was extremely mixed. There was still considerable variation in pronunciation,
for instance, amongst the upper class; what is more, such usage was constantly being pulled
hither and thither by aristocratic fashion, educated pedantry, and the unmonitored speech of
ordinary Londoners. But by the early nineteenth century, the recommendations of the
codifiers could be embraced by those social classes who felt the need to mark their speech off
from that of the class below.
In the codification of English, the example set by other languages is of paramount
importance. The codifiers looked back at Classical Latin, and envied the illusion of fixity and
order lent by the Latin grammarians. But they also had other models to go on. Both Italy (in
1582) and France (in 1635) had developed Academies - bodies of learned men, who could
make pronouncements on particular variants and changes. For a time, the idea of an English
Academy was mooted. But by the middle of the eighteenth century, support for such an
institution had fallen away. The Academie Francaise had failed to fix the unfixable, just as it
is failing today. Perhaps also, the English codifiers wanted to retain the freedom to make, and
break, the rules as they chose. Thus codification in France has always been a more centralised
and formalised affair than in England, where it has tended to be more ad hoc. Either way, the
effects are much the same. It seems the higher the premium on codification is set, the less
tolerant and the more rigid is the attitude to linguistic variation and change.
Recommended usage in England, therefore, is identified not with the decisions of a
committee, but with particular books, written or compiled by established scholars and literary
men. The most famous of these is undoubtedly the Dictionary of Dr Samuel Johnson. When
we think of dictionaries today, we probably have in mind what Johnson achieved - an
alphabetical list of all those words which are neither dialectal or slang, together with their
meanings. Before Johnson dictionaries were not of this type. They were either dictionaries of
hard words, or bilingual ones. The first was a list of those words which were felt to be
difficult to understand because they were largely unassimilated into the mainstream of usage:
they were often polysyllabic, Latinate words. The second type of dictionary corresponded
largely with our idea of a 'French-English' one - an aid to translation. What Johnson did was
altogether different. He listed the range of meanings for each word, including the
commonest; and he illustrated each strand of meaning with quotations from writers.
The prestige enjoyed by the Dictionary during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries was enormous. His Dictionary could even be viewed as constituting the language
itself.
The second half of the eighteenth century was also the high water mark for the
codification of grammar. Certain grammatical forms and structures were judged as 'correct',
while others were stigmatised as 'vulgar'. The legacy of these pronouncements is still strong
today: many people are extremely nervous about being incorrect in speaking and writing.
The grammarians sought to justify one usage at the expense of another by applying
certain principles. The most important of these is probably the example of Latin. Grammars
of Latin had been available for centuries, and all scholars knew and used them; hence, the
grammatical categories established by the Latin scholars were applied, ready-made, to the
grammar of English. The fact that by the eighteenth century Latin was usually encountered
only in its written form gave rise to the idea that it was a fixed, regulated, and invariant
language. English, by comparison, seemed untidy: it was therefore felt to be appropriate to
promote grammatical variants which corresponded, in one way or another, to equivalents in
Latin. Thus, the English pattern it's me, which had been common for centuries and still is, was
deemed incorrect since the Latin construction ego sum made use of the subject form of the
pronoun, ego, rather than the object form me: English people should therefore say it's I. The
pervasiveness of such reasoning can be judged by the fact that people still write about this
shibboleth in letters to the press.
Knowledge of Latin presupposed a knowledge of etymology, the origins of words. As
well as disliking variation, the grammarians also hated change: hence, correctness was
associated with what used to be the case, and the further back you could go, the better. Such
arguments were very common where the meanings of words are concerned, but the
'etymological fallacy' was also applied to justify certain constructions. Different from was
preferable to different to, or different than, because the di part of the word originally indicated
'division' or 'separateness'; and therefore from suits the etymological argument better.
Similarly, the constructions averse to and under the circumstances were considered incorrect,
since the meanings of the a in averse and the circum in circumstance are respectively 'from'
and 'around', and these meanings were not felt to be congruent with those of to and under.
The grammarians failed to see that the use of such prepositions as to and from is in any
language highly idiomatic.
A final principle involved the application of a kind of algebraic logic to stigmatise
some constructions and promote others. Perhaps the most notorious example concerns the
pattern of negation in English. In common with many languages today, English had since
Anglo-Saxon times signalled negation by the cumulative use of negative particles. Hence, I
don't know nothing was a traditional English pattern. By the end of the eighteenth century this
had been condemned as illogical, by applying the principle that 'two negatives make a
positive'. That great writers like Shakespeare used the traditional construction was a source of
some embarrassment to the grammarians.
Pronunciation is the most difficult aspect of language to codify. As we have seen, our
spelling is a most imperfect and inappropriate model for the sounds we make; yet people
have felt bound by it for more than 400 years. Already in the sixteenth century some scholars
interested in the codification of pronunciation had begun to consider the relationship between
sounds and spellings. Hart, a phonetician, argued that spelling should be reformed so as to
draw it into line with pronunciation. Mulcaster, a headmaster, rejected this plea for a
phonemic model, arguing that people pronounced differently. But others were already
proposing the inversion of this priority. Sir Thomas Elyot, author of the immensely
influential Governor of 1531, wrote that noblemen's sons should omit no letter in their
pronunciation, a view echoed by the pronouncing dictionaries of 300 years later, and heard
ever since.
Attempts to base pronunciation on spelling were not helped by developments in the
writing system in the early phase of standardisation. The early printers introduced spellings
that had nothing to do with sounds, like the ue of tongue. Other spellings were remodelled by
scholars themselves, to show their origins: the nativised spelling dette had a b inserted to
show that it came from Latin debitum. In cases like debt and island (where the scholars got
the etymology wrong: they put an s into iland, thinking it to be from Latin insula)
pronunciation has remained unaffected, and we are left with a spelling difficulty; but in other
cases, as in perfect, the etymological spelling gives us the basis for modern pronunciation,
displacing parfit. Such pedantry was not the only complicating factor. As we said before, the
metropolitan variety was at first a very mixed one, mingling not only the pronunciations of
different areas, but also to some extent their traditional spelling systems. The spelling of busy,
for instance, may reflect the old Winchester standard, whereas its pronunciation is an East
Midland one. Some pronunciations themselves appear to have a south-western origin. Finally,
some pronunciations seem to have had an East Anglian source. The famous example of
spelling irregularity in bough, though, rough, cough, and tough shows how spelling can
create the illusion of relationship among words that are either of different origin (the vowels
of some of these words are historically unrelated) or whose pronunciations have diverged. We
find that in the first two words, the final consonant, represented by gh, is no longer sounded,
but the last three have the eastern /f/.
We do not know the circumstances governing the adoption of some pronunciations
rather than others. It has been suggested that in some cases choice was motivated by a desire
to maintain or even establish distinctions among pronunciations that were either not made in
other dialects, or were being lost in them. Thus, the adoption of a southwestern
pronunciation of one could create a useful distinction between that word and own.
In the early years of standardisation, the precepts of the codifiers had to compete with
the push and pull of fashion. Some pronunciations were undoubtedly adopted because, for
one reason or another, they were considered prestigious. But by the end of the eighteenth
century, codification of the other levels of structure led to the production of the pronouncing
dictionary, a book in which the pronunciation of words in the prestige variety could be
looked up. In these works, there is both an appeal to spelling as a guide, but also an appeal to
tradition.
Johnson's Dictionary had codified not only words but their spellings also; and now that
spelling was virtually fixed, it was a good deal easier to recommend pronunciations based on
them. Moreover, Johnson himself had written that the best pronunciations were those that
accorded with the spelling. This precept was put into effect by John Walker, the writer of A
Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791). If there was an h in the spelling, then h should be
sounded. The verbal ending -ing, as in going, should not be pronounced -in', for the same
reason. The pronunciation of whole words, like forehead, often, and waistcoat, should
moreover be reformed in accordance with spelling, to replace forrid, offen, and weskit.
Certain pronunciations, however, were too firmly entrenched in upper-class society to be
changed.
By the early nineteenth century correct pronunciation was an issue of class. The 'best'
pronunciation was identified with a particular social class and is given institutional
expression by the development of the fee-paying schools, a pronunciation that may be
described as codified grew up, or was cultivated and taught. But the recipients of this
privilege have always been only a tiny minority, a minority drawn primarily from the wealthy
and powerful groups in English society. In no other country in the world are pronunciation
and social class so closely and clearly linked.
In the public schools, the predominantly East Midland basis of the upper-class London
pronunciation gradually lost its regional colour. It became a purely class accent, and was
accordingly evaluated in ways which reflect the attitudes of the most powerful social group.
Known today to linguists as Received Pronunciation - a term in which the adjective 'received'
has the now obsolete sense of 'socially acceptable in the best circles' - this accent is still
widely claimed to be the best form of pronunciation. Received Pronunciation (RP) is often
described, not in terms of the class that uses it, but as the most beautiful and euphonious of
accents. Most strikingly, its status as an accent has even been denied: if you speak RP, you
speak English 'without an accent'.
It need hardly be said that this view was often accepted and even fostered by ordinary
people wherever English was spoken. Persuaded that their own regional accents were ugly or
slovenly, people have often accepted the view that RP offers a prestigious norm. Many of our
popular designations of RP - 'Queen's English', 'Oxford English', 'BBC English' - reflect its
association with power, learning, and influence. RP has been a powerful agent in the restructuring of regional pronunciations which originally had quite different sound-systems.
Yet while RP exerts prestige at the overt level, there has been no widespread, wholesale
adoption of the accent. For the vast majority of the population, RP may be all the things we
have listed above, but it is also the speech of a social class that they have no ambition to
emulate.
CODIFICATION AND SOCIAL CLASS
We have seen that from the first the process of standardisation is associated with
power in society. Throughout the period of standardisation, an increasingly dominant source
of power has been the ownership of capital. By the nineteenth century, the factory system was
producing enough wealth for its owners to acquire positions in society. But ownership of a
fortune does not guarantee refined behaviour or courtly manners. The new entrepreneurs
needed to be 'socially acceptable in the best circles'. What more accessible way of doing this
than to embrace the standards of correctness in speech, now that these had been codified and
made widely available?
Recent research in both England and the USA suggests that the class most anxious
about linguistic usage is the lower middle class. Insecurity about social status is reflected in
nervousness about being incorrect in linguistic behaviour. In the early nineteenth century, it
was the industrialists who felt insecure about status, and who therefore provided the need for
a 'superior' kind of English. The adoption of the codified standard would mean that your
speech could be sharply different from that of the working class, who, as a consequence of
the process of industrialisation, were flooding into the cities in their hundreds of thousands. It
was in their speech, appropriately enough, that the stigmatised pronunciations and
grammatical items could be found.
Codification could be said to have become a weapon of class. What the codifiers had
done, ultimately, was to propose and cultivate a code of linguistic forms which were in some
degree different from those in use among the vast majority of the population. By analysing
'correct' usage in terms that only a tiny minority of educated people could command, the
codifiers ensured that correctness remained the preserve of an elite. The usage of most people
was wrong, precisely because it was llie usage of the majority. The worst aspects of the
codification process were institutionalised in the compulsory state education system introduced after 1870. The doctrine of correctness was preached with mechanical inflexibility:
attention to linguistic form overrode all considerations of linguistic function. Not
surprisingly, millions of people left school convinced that not only were they ignorant of their
own language, but they were stupid as well.
It would, however, be mistaken to suggest that the codifiers were a lightly-knit group
of conspirators extending across several generations, intent on laying traps for the unwary. In
fact, they did not by any means represent a homogeneous body of opinion; they often argued
amongst themselves, and some laid the foundations for the serious study of language and of
linguistic history. But the codifiers did pave the way, however unwittingly, for the
mystification that has often characterised discussion about language. Many people today,
when they examine the work of the eighteenth-century grammarians, are struck by the triviality of the examples cited, and by the tortuousness of the arguments. And if the judgments are
arbitrary, and the result of special pleading, it may well be because the codifiers themselves
were not unaffected by allegiances of class and background.
Codification was not based on an informed and systematic analysis of language. It is
not surprising, therefore, that there is little consensus today about what items upset us or
gladden our hearts. A recent survey among employers, examiners, and teachers shows that
while some people make a fuss about it's me, others like to wax haughty on different
to/than/from. We all have a linguistic bete noir. But one of the most depressing results of
codification is that as well as encouraging this prescriptive stance, it has tended to elevate
personal taste into a norm, a characteristic particularly apparent in the pages of Johnson,
Walker, and Fowler. In view of the social history of the past two centuries, this was perhaps
unavoidable: but we should remember today that individual preference and informed
understanding are not necessarily the same thing.
Lecture Seven
Words and meanings
Contact with other languages, has greatly influenced the word-stock of English. New
words are more easily added to a language than grammatical forms or structures, or sounds,
and so the word-stock of a language, or its lexicon, can be considered to be more open-ended
than its grammar or sound-system. Social and cultural changes are accordingly clearly
reflected in changes in vocabulary: and this is one aspect of the history of English about
which it is possible to make some simple, clear, and fairly safe observations. We know, for
instance, that the vocabulary of English has vastly increased in size during the last 1500 years,
as an accompaniment to the process of functional elaboration. In the lecture we shall examine
the process of word-borrowing, and how it might reflect social needs. We shall explore parts
of the vocabulary which is socially sensitive, by discussing the notion of 'keywords', the
vocabulary of power and status, terms of address, and words which refer to women.
From a social point of view, more interesting than the mere addition of new words to
the vocabulary is the change in the character of our word-stock, from one which can be called
Germanic to one that is partly Romance. Exposure to Latin, and its offspring French, has
been sustained throughout much of the recorded history of English, and it is this that helps
give the language its European flavour, in that many of the words are quickly recognisable to
speakers of French, Italian, and Spanish. This exposure has been pervasive enough to give
rise to some popular notions and stereotypes about parts of the English lexicon. Speaking 'in
words of one syllable' appeals to the Anglo-Saxon element (the reason for this monosyllabic
quality is, the loss of inflexions), 'talking like a book', to the more learned, polysyllabic
lexical material derived from the Romance languages. These associations square with an
important stylistic trait in the language. Romance loan-words are common in domains
associated with power and prestige, and it is a matter of everyday experience that formal
business letters tend to favour the French request rather than the Anglo-Saxon ask and that
military medals are awarded for gallantry or courage, rather than for guts (deriving from an
Anglo-Saxon word denoting bowels and entrails).
There have also been fundamental developments in the principles of word formation.
In Anglo-Saxon times, new words could be coined from established ones, a process generally
known as compounding. There were some productive prefixes, such as for-, under-, mis-, and
suffixes like -some, -craft, -dom, and -ness, and these could be combined in various ways
with other words: thus, poetry was wordcraeft, medicine laececraeft. The technique is similar
to that often found in modern German, which might have Ausgang ('way out') where the
English language is likely to use the latinate Exit. It has often been said that English has been
particularly receptive to the possibility of absorbing foreign words. As well as making up new
words, it borrows them; and not only, of course, from the languages mentioned. On this view,
the borrowing process has been so dynamic that it has taken up prefixes and suffixes as well
as words: the French -able, for instance, can be added to words of Anglo-Saxon origin, for
instance, as in likeable.
The tendency to borrow rather than create has its social consequences. It has been
argued that the Anglo-Saxon habit of word-formation kept the meaning of a word transparent
and was therefore democratic: you can work out what a new word means, because you know
the meanings of the parts. It is certainly true that foreign vocabulary has often been used, and
is still used, to dominate or mystify; and it is easy to laugh at people who, unfamiliar with the
sound- and syllable-patterns of the Latinate vocabulary of, say, medicine, mispronounce
words or use them inappropriately. On the other hand, can words in themselves exemplify
either a democratic or an undemocratic trend in a language's development? The desire to be
either of these things must be in reality a matter for the users of a language. Indeed, when it
comes to demagogy, it is just as possible to manipulate people by using words drawn from a
less heterogeneous vocabulary. The meanings of Anglo-Saxon words like hearth, home, kin,
child, father, mother, can easily be exploited in persuasive language, since they are words to
which strong emotions are often attached.
THE MOTIVATION FOR BORROWING
A number of sociolinguistic issues are raised by the question of why words are
borrowed in the first place. It is a common misconception that some languages are inferior, or
more handicapped than others, because they lack not only words but concepts that find
expression in other languages. Therefore, the argument goes, English borrowed words
because it needed them. There are several objections that can be made to these notions. First,
words are often borrowed into particular varieties of a language, and become part of the
technical or specialised usage of certain groups of users only. Writers used to reading, say,
philosophy, in another language, will grow accustomed to a certain range of vocabulary and a
particular kind of expression; and they may well conclude that their own language is deficient
by comparison. Second, words borrowed from other languages often develop a particular
resonance that is stylistic: we expect to encounter them in certain contexts, either written or
spoken, formal or informal, official or literary. Thus, they can be said to parallel already
existing usages rather than fill in the gaps of an impoverished language. Third, borrowed
vocabulary is very often used as a means of marking social distance. Since ordinary people
might be impressed by a high-sounding utterance, there is a demand among elites for foreign
vocabulary: thus, the motivation for borrowing may be as much to do with social snobbery or
social differentiation as anything else. Finally, it can be shown that thousands of borrowed
words introduced nothing that was conceptually new; English was already adequately served.
One consequence of this is that the meanings of older words tend to be changed by the
admission of the new.
Linguists usually argue against the notion of handicapped languages by asserting that
all languages develop vocabularies that fully serve the needs of their users. In general,
vocabulary is more finely differentiated in fields or subject areas which are culturally valued
and significant; so that if a language has more words than another in relation to, say, rice, it
will reflect the interests of its speakers. The fact that English has borrowed so many words in
its history is not, however, so much a reflection of need as of the enduring cultural dominance
of languages like French and Latin. Unfortunately global statements about the needs of
different speech-communities mask an important fact about language and its relation to
society. Different groups of speakers may have different needs. Within one language like
English, for instance, it will be necessary for a group such as farmers to classify cows and
bulls with a more specific vocabulary - more sensitive to age. Similarly, one has a richer
vocabulary of address to a loved one - ranging from Christian name, nickname, pet-name,
terms of jocular abuse - than to a colleague of only slight acquaintance. In culturally diverse,
literate, technologically complex societies it is more difficult to identify areas of general
social need than in more homogeneous societies (a famous example is that of Eskimos and
their many words for different kinds of snow). At the same time, it is fair to assume that the
more homogeneous Anglo-Saxon tribes had a clearer need for a vocabulary denoting natural
topographical features. For the Anglo-Saxons, the process of settlement was of crucial
importance, and it is reflected in a great many English place-names whose meaning is
obscured for us. Unless we are foresters, we no longer need single words to refer to such
features as 'wood on a slope' (hangra, preserved in Oakhanger, Hants), 'land covered with
brush or small trees' (hese, as in Hayes, Herts).
Despite what has been said, it is still possible to point to certain areas of human life in
which all the groups of users of English have a common interest. There is a general sensitivity
about subjects like sex, drunkenness, and death, and there are clear social norms about ways
of referring to them. Vocabulary tends to proliferate around such taboos. When we examine
the relevant vocabulary, however, two clearly different modes of reference can be
distinguished. One, associated with the more 'polite' social groups is towards euphemism.
New words are selected, or coined, to replace existing ones which are thought to have picked
up the unpleasant or undesirable associations characteristic of the referent. Thus, in some
contexts die is felt to be abrupt, and phrases such as passed away, departed this life are used
to soften the fact of death. Other social contexts, however, permit a more jocular periphrasis,
such as snuffed it, kicked the bucket, etc. What both tendencies have in common is the need
for novelty: with euphemism, the need to find new ways of avoiding unpleasantness, and with
slang, new ways of sensationalising, humourising, or actually cultivating offensiveness. The
desire for newness, then, provides another motivation for borrowing.
Unfortunately for the historian of English, detailed information about words and
meanings in these socially sensitive spheres is often lacking for past centuries. This is partly
because ways of referring to them are covert, and partly because many such terms were until
very recently rarely written down. If they ever reached print, they may have changed their
meaning, and so do not provide evidence of ways of verbalising taboo subjects. The further
back in history we go, the narrower the range of texts available and it is very difficult to know
what subjects, if any, were taboo for the Anglo-Saxons. It might be argued, however, that the
Anglo-Saxons had already devised euphemisms for death and dying. The word die is not
firmly evidenced in Anglo-Saxon (although related forms death and dead exist) and it is
possible that the concept was referred to by means of words which were historically
euphemisms: sweltan (compare modern swelter), which originally meant 'burn slowly'; and
steorfan (cf. modern starve), originally meaning 'become stiff. The modern form die is probably a borrowing from Scandinavian deyja, and the reason for its borrowing may well have
been that the other words had become too closely identified with their sensitive referent. The
other words develop modified meanings: swell does not become part of the metropolitan
variety, but it survives in dialect to mean 'faint with heat'; in starve the meaning is specialised,
with the cause of death specified: cold in dialect, hunger more generally.
A further meaning of starve in contemporary English brings us to one more needs this time of a more abstract nature. It is quite common to hear people say I'm starving when
they are only more than a little hungry. In other words, they achieve emphasis by choosing a
word whose dictionary meaning, as it were, is too strong for the context. The desire for
emphasis has weakened the meanings of a great many words, such as awfully, terribly,
frightfully, marvellous, glorious, stupendous, because they have been used where the
attitudes of the speaker are of paramount importance. In such affective uses of language, the
desire for emphasis creates the need for new terms, as the affective content of words rapidly
becomes diluted: we therefore find a motivation for borrowing. Furthermore, an important
dimension of attitude is the desire to register approval or disapproval of certain objects,
practices, ideas, and so on. A great part of our everyday vocabulary tells other people about
our likes and dislikes: we often want to place things on a scale of evaluation, and our
vocabulary is often correspondingly vague, as in the ubiquitous nice. At the extreme ends of
the favourable/unfavourable continuum, new words are constantly being introduced - like
fabulous, and more recently magic, with its handy antonym, tragic.
THE COMPLEXITY OF MEANING
The dictionary is of limited usefulness in the study of meaning and semantic change
because the notion of meaning itself is so complex. We shall distinguish six types of meaning.
The first, and most important kind, is called conceptual meaning. The meaning of many
lexical words may be discussed in terms of what they denote; or, to put it another way, what
their reference is. This type of meaning is sometimes called denotative or referential meaning.
Many words 'stand for' objects, events, or processes that exist, or are felt to exist, in the real
world; and such objects, and so on, are called referents. If we take the two words woman and
lady, we can see that despite differences in meaning between them both words refer to an
entity that is human, adult and female. Thus the conceptual meaning of both words may be
related to this irreducible core of meaning.
This notion of reference is often misunderstood. It should be emphasised that the
relationship between the form woman, and the thing it refers to, is a purely conventional one:
there is nothing inherently feminine about the word itself, and in principle any other word
would do to signify a woman, as long as we all agreed on the matter!
The relationship between words and referents, then, is a fluid one; and this comes
about because as human beings we must conceptualise the objects, events, and processes that
we find around us. These conceptualisations, being products of the human mind, are
themselves inclined to change. There are of course different kinds of conceptualisation,
according to the criteria used for relating words to referents. We use the word mountain to
apply to a range of objects which conform to certain criteria, such as height, size, shape,
substance, and so on. In sum, we apply the word to referents whose form satisfies the criteria
listed. Formal criteria of this kind are less important, however, in applying the term boat to a
range of objects. If we want to cross water, we need something that will carry our weight and
stay afloat; size, shape, substance are of less concern, and a raft might do as well as an ocean
liner. The word boat can refer to all shapes and sizes of things, as long as they function in a
particular way. So far, then, we can distinguish very broadly between formal and functional
criteria in our exploration of conceptual meaning, and we can test their validity by assessing
the role of formal criteria in the applications of boat, and functional ones in the case of
mountain. While we may think of a certain range of shapes when we use the term boat, it
would not be true to say that the word is applicable to anything that happens to be boatshaped, unless we are speaking metaphorically. Similarly, a mountain is something that can
be climbed; but this aspect is not criterial, since we are not justified in applying the word
mountain to, say, a ladder, simply because we can climb it. A third kind of conceptualisation
involves criteria that are evaluative. When we use the term hovel, we specify a residence that
seems to us to be dirty, tumbledown. What is uppermost in our minds is our attitude to the
referent: we have placed it on a scale of evaluation, of approval or disapproval. The
importance of this dimension of meaning cannot be over-emphasised: the impetus towards
evaluation, is very strong, and we shall see this again as we examine the history of some
English words.
So far, we have discussed what is perhaps the most important dimension of meaning,
but we have yet to account for other, incidental perceptions, that may not form part of the
central core of meaning, but that are highly relevant when we consider how language
functions in society. They are also instrumental in the process of semantic change. Another
type of meaning, for instance, can be termed connotative. We saw above that woman and
lady have roughly the same conceptual meaning, but a moment's reflection will remind us that
we use the two words very differently. Woman, for instance, might connote a relatively openended set of properties, including the ability to bear children, the tendency to be warm and
sensitive, the ability to satisfy men's sexual needs, and so on. The connotations of lady, on the
other hand, tend to be associated with social status and graces. It is important to remember
that though a word's connotations may vary from one individual to another, they are not
purely personal or subjective; they often reflect the values and ideology of a particular social
group at a particular time, and in the case of woman, the word will probably connote different
things to men than to women.
The next type of meaning can be called stylistic meaning. Certain words advertise
themselves as belonging to particular contexts of use.
Thus, while we may agree that, say, horse and steed have the same conceptual
meaning, we are unlikely to take a steed for a Saturday morning's ride. We recognise steed as
a word appropriate to certain contexts of use, such as poetry, or prose romance: it belongs to a
particular 'style'. From a historical point of view, stylistic meanings develop as the language is
functionally elaborated, and certain words are specialised in particular fields of usage. Thus,
steed, from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning stallion, has been associated with poetic language
since the sixteenth century.
Our fourth type is affective meaning. We have already noted the importance of attitude
and evaluation in shaping our use of language. The words we use to address, or refer to, other
people are often highly partisan, particularly where differences of social class, race, sex,
region of origin, or political persuasion are concerned. Certain words become so emblematic
of a point of view that their conceptual content is pushed into the background. Nigger,
originally a word denoting a racial type, has virtually become a term of abuse; and a similar
development has occurred with parts of the political vocabulary, such as fascist.
The fifth and sixth types of meaning are respectively reflected and collocative
meaning. Certain words over the centuries have developed more than one conceptual
meaning, and sometimes more than one meaning is perceived by the user. The Anglo-Saxon
word deore originally denoted things of great value, and was later applied to people in the
sense of 'esteemed', from which the sense 'dear' subsequently arose. It is possible for poets to
exploit both meanings, 'costly' and 'beloved', so that such words in certain contexts may be
said to reflect both. Finally, collocative meaning concerns the somewhat idiosyncratic
properties of certain words like pretty and handsome. While both words share a similar
conceptual meaning, they habitually co-occur with different sets of nouns. Thus, pretty
collocates with girl rather than boy, village rather than typewriter. While both pretty and
handsome mean much the same thing, they are not normally interchangeable, for part of their
associative meaning is derived from the collocational company they keep.
Collocational meaning reminds us of a vital point about words. We are accustomed to
hearing them strung together with other words: and the rules which specify which words can
collocate with a particular word constitute an important part of that word's meaning. Thus, we
can extend the notion of collocational meaning, and speak of collocational range. Some
words, like big, can qualify almost any noun, referring to a wide range of referents, human
and non-human, animate and inanimate, abstract and concrete, and so on; whereas rancid can
collocate with very few. As we shall see, extension or contraction in the collocational range
often promotes a change in meaning; and a change in meaning of one word usually brings
about a change in another. For words enter also into another series of relationships with other
words, forming little systems of meaning: big patterns with large on one scale, with gigantic
on another, with small on yet another, and so on. Thus, it is unwise to pluck a single word
from its network, and discuss it in isolation, as is so often done; we should keep an eye on the
fortunes of its peers.
Lecture Eight
SEMANTIC CHANGE
TYPES OF SEMANTIC CHANGE
It is difficult enough to deal with the semantics of MnE; but it is much more difficult to
recapture the semantics of a much earlier stage of a language for which surviving texts are few
or nonexistent. Only occasionally are we able to glimpse the process of semantic change from
Indo-European to Germanic. One instance is the IE root *teuə- 'to swell' (cf. the Latin loans
into English tumor, tuber, tumulus). This appears in OE as þēoh ‘thigh’ and, from a variant
form of the same root, þūma 'thumb', examples of both concretization and narrowing of
meaning.
The basic meanings of the OE core vocabulary do seem to have remained relatively stable
over the centuries, though the individual items often have developed extended meanings. For
example, the OE meaning for such words as mother, son, tree, sun, good, have, and be seem to
be much the same in OE and in MnE. Thus, OE habban had the same basic sense of
possession as its MnE reflex have, even if MnE has added idiomatic meanings as exemplified
in I won’t have you talking like that, I had some friends in for the weekend, I had my car
stolen.
In many cases there is no detectable motivation for semantic shifts. Four OE words all
referring generally to lack of light were dimm, sweart, deorc, and blæc. All of them survive
in more or less recognizable form in MnE as dim, swarthy, dark and black. In OE, dimm,
sweart, and deorc also were used metaphorically to refer to evil, but blæc apparently was
not. In MnE, dim and swarthy have lost their extended meaning of evil, dark has retained it,
and black has added it. Today we can speak of a black heart or dark thoughts, but not of a
dim heart or swarthy thoughts.
Generalization and Narrowing Generalization, or extension of meaning, can be
represented by OE gesūnd 'safe, healthy, uninjured'; MnE has added the more abstract
meanings of "thorough" (a sound scolding), "unbroken" (a sound sleep), "reliable" (a
sound investment), and "sensible" (sound advice). OE flicorian seems to have meant
only "to move the wings, to flutter,'' while MnE flicker has been extended to include the
movement of light (a flickering candle) or even of emotion (flickering interest).
It is much easier to find examples of narrowed meaning of words between OE and MnE,
perhaps because, as English has incorporated thousands of new loanwords, the semantic
domain covered by a single item has been correspondingly limited. For example, OE wæd
could refer to any garment, whereas MnE weeds is used only to refer to mourning clothes
(widow's weeds). OE wēod referred to herbs or grass in general; MnE weed refers only to
undesirable, unwanted plants. OE swætan meant to exude liquid, including blood; MnE
sweat is usually restricted to the exuding of water, especially perspiration.
Amelioration and Pejoration Amelioration, or a change to a more favorable
meaning, can be exemplified by OE prættig 'tricky, sly, wily'; compare MnE pretty. The shift
in meaning from OE smītan 'to soil, pollute, defile' to MnE smite could also be considered
amelioration. Pejoration, much more common than amelioration, can he illustrated by OE sælig
'happy, prosperous', which has become MnE silly. Other examples are OE cræftig 'skillful,
strong, learned', MnE crafty; OE ceorl 'peasant, freeman', MnE churl.
Strengthening and Weakening As we have noted earlier, strengthening or
tensification is a rare type of semantic change. One example is OE wrecan, MnE wreak as in
wreak vengeance. The OE word could be used in the strong sense of "avenge, punish,'' but
also often had the milder meaning of “push, impel” or simply "pronounce, relate." Instances
of weakening are easier to find. A few examples are OE hraðor 'hastily, immediately', MnE
rather; OE sweltan 'to die', MnE swelter; OE drēorig “bloody”, MnE dreary.
Abstraction and Concretization Abstraction, the change from a concrete to a
more abstract meaning, can be exemplified by OE grund, which meant simply 'ground; the
bottom of something, such as a body of water'. During ME, the more abstract meanings
of "fundamental principle, foundation, basis" developed, as in MnE grounds for divorce. The
opposite kind of change, from abstract to more concrete, is illustrated by OE hlafordscipe
'authority, rule', literally "lordship." In late ME, the word took on an additional, more
concrete meaning when it became used as a title for specific persons, as in Your Lordship.
Shift in Denotation Occasionally, words undergo such an extreme shift in
denotation that it is not easy to trace the path of the change. OE dwellan meant "to lead into
error, deceive, wander, err," a very different meaning from its MnE descendant dwell. The
MnE meaning was probably influenced by a similar-sounding Old Norse verb dvelja 'delay,
stay, remain'. Less explicable is the change in OE clūd 'rock, hill', MnE cloud.
Shift in Connotation Shifts in connotation are often closely related to amelioration
and pejoration, but may also involve changes that are neither especially ameliorative or
pejorative. The examples given from the Old English epic poem Beowulf involved the OE verb
scūfan 'push, thrust' and its MnE reflex shove, and the OE noun wyrm 'serpent, dragon, worm'
and its MnE reflex worm. It was pointed out there that today we simply would not use either the
word shove or worm in the lofty context of a serious, elegaic poem because both words have
undergone such drastic connotative changes over the centuries. A somewhat similar example of
connotative shift from OE to MnE is that an Old English term for Epiphany, the church
festival celebrated on January 6 and commemorating the baptism of Christ (in the Eastern
Church) was bæðdæg, literally "bath day." There is nothing pejorative as such about the term
"bath day," but in the highly religious context of the birth of Christ, it sounds ludicrous and
perhaps even faintly sacrilegious to modern ears.
All of these semantic shifts are relatively simple; they represent one step and one type of
shift. Many semantic changes, however, are much more complex. Consider the history of the
word fair. OE fæger meant "beautiful, attractive." By the end of the twelfth century, the
word still meant "beautiful," but it was also being used to mean "free of fraud or injustice,
legal," a reasonable extension of the basic meaning; this meaning survives in the MnE fair
trial, fair play, fair game. By the thirteenth century, another specialized meaning had been
added, that of "unblemished." Fair was used widely in this meaning during ME, but the
"unblemished" meaning was later lost again in most contexts, surviving today primarily with
respect to weather phenomena (a fair day, fair-weather friends). During the sixteenth century,
fair, still preserving its basic meaning of' “beautiful,” also came to mean ''blond'' (a change that
suggests something about English speakers’ concepts of beauty). This meaning has of course
also survived to the present day; it combines with the original meaning of "beautiful" in the
expression fair-haired boy, meaning a favorite or pet. Then, during the eighteenth century,
weakening of the basic meaning took place as fair and its corresponding adverb fairly came to
mean "so-so, adequate." This weakened meaning eventually supplanted the original meaning
of' “beautiful,” which survives today only in highly restricted contexts in such expressions as
fair maidens and Only the brave deserve the fair. The original basic meaning of "beautiful"
has been lost. For most native speakers of MnE, fair probably has the two seemingly
unrelated core meanings of "so-so" and "free of injustice,” and the two additional
meanings of "blond" and "uncloudy," used only in the specialized contexts of complexion
and hair-color, and weather, respectively.
Like all other aspects of language, semantic change is inevitable.
To give some idea of the process of semantic change, let us look at three words which
have developed new meanings within living memory. All three are borrowings from either
French or Latin. Each has a meaning that is not accepted by everybody in contemporary
English society; though this need not surprise us, since speech-communities are never truly
homogeneous, and there is no reason to believe they ever were. What is more, each has been
cause for overt comment from people who object to certain meanings; and this shows that
changes of meaning are in general more consciously felt than changes in grammar or
pronunciation.
Our first example is the well-known case of sophisticated. A borrowing from Latin,
the word is first recorded in English in the form of the verb sophisticate during the fifteenth
century. Letters to the press, especially in the 1960s, often complained that the word had
come to be used to describe technologically advanced weapons or other devices, with the
sense 'elaborate' or 'highly refined'. This use of the word, associated sometimes with certain
groups, such as broadcasters, or scientific and military commentators, was at variance with
the so-called definitions of the word's meaning in the OED, which lists 'adulterated',
'artificial', or 'falsified'. Such complaints show how misleading a dictionary can be: the
meanings it lists do not seem to square with the ways in which the word is most commonly
used. (The most recent meanings are now recorded in the Second Edition of the OED.) When
we inspect the kinds of words with which sophisticated collocates, and the kinds of people
who use the new meanings, we can begin to see how changes in meaning are brought about.
We shall find above all that these depend on whether sophisticated collocates with words
having inanimate referents (where the meanings already discussed are appropriate) or human
ones (where it has the contemporary meanings 'urbane', 'worldly-wise', or 'refined'). In its
earliest usage, sophisticated clearly had an evaluative meaning, implying disapproval, and its
use seems to have been limited to the description of inanimate things: if you sophisticated
wine, you adulterated it, and if Art, or pleasures, were sophisticated, all primitive simplicity
and naturalness were taken out of them. In all probability it was a word more appropriate to
written than spoken discourse. Gradually, the connotations of the word changed, as it was
used in a widening range of contexts by different groups of users. What is natural and pure to
some, is to others naive and ingenuous, and such new connotations affected the word's
conceptual meaning by the time it was applied, at the end of the nineteenth century, to
people. The word has now lost its disapproving sense, and is used in popular speech to mean
'refined'; and when the word is re-applied to objects, it denotes those things that appeal to
people of taste and experience. It is thus only a short step to the sense of 'technically
advanced' in the usage of certain groups of specialists. And today, taking our cue from this
latest application of the word, we speak of sophisticated cameras, tape recorders, stereo
equipment, and so on.
In many histories of English, sophisticated is cited as an example of the process of
amelioration, a type of semantic change in which a word originally denoting disapproval is
given either a neutral or even a favourable meaning by its users. The use of terms such as this,
though they may highlight dramatic shifts in meaning, not only obscures the complex and
subtle pattern of interaction among varieties of the language, written versus spoken, technical
versus everyday, but also the variations in connotation at a given time.
One word with which sophisticated patterned, in its early sense, was vulgar. Here, the
relationship was one of contrast: sophisticated meant 'artificial', vulgar 'ordinary', 'everyday'.
Deriving from the Latin vulgus (the common people: hence Vulgar Latin), vulgar, like
sophisticated, originally collocated with words denoting inanimate referents; but by the
sixteenth century it was being applied to people. By the mid-seventeenth century, it had
developed its modern meaning, 'coarse', by a process known as pejoration, in which a word
acquires a negative evaluation - the reverse of amelioration. If what was ordinary had become
coarse, then what was adulterated could be refined; so that the development of new meanings
in both words could have been mutually influential.
Educated speakers today may also
balk at using our second example, chronic in its recent sense of 'bad' or 'awful'. The word was
borrowed in the course of the seventeenth century from Latin chronicus (reinforced by the
French form of the same word) in the sense 'relating to time'; but the most usual meaning was
that associated with the field of medicine in late Latin, where the word meant 'persistent', in
contrast to 'acute'. By the nineteenth century this technical application of the word had
loosened, and we find wars and doubts defined as chronic. The shift to its present meaning,
however, probably comes from popular use. People were most likely to hear the word in
medical contexts, as in 'he's got chronic bronchitis', and gradually the word acquired
evaluative connotations: persistent bronchitis is unpleasant. What starts as a connotation
becomes, in time, criterial; and now, in the sense of 'bad', it can collocate with a wide range of
words - teachers, holidays, cars, can be chronic. In this meaning, it is used affectively: it
conveys first and foremost information about the speaker's attitude. An important part of the
word's meaning is, as we have said, stylistic; this now belongs to informal spoken usage. The
Second Edition of the OED records the new meaning from the very end of the last century,
describing it as 'vulgar', not, it should be added, in the sense of 'coarse', but in the older
meaning - though it is difficult for the modern reader not to feel the disapproving sense
reflected in this use of the word! Our third example is the word 'gay', in the recent sense of
'homosexual', we are dealing with a word where a specific group-consciousness is involved,
and where a very deliberate concern with language is manifested. A fourteenth-century
borrowing from French, the word has retained the meaning 'merry', 'jolly', 'light-hearted' from
that time, but by the seventeenth century an additional meaning had developed. Lightheartedness could also be interpreted as frivolity, lack of seriousness, or even hedonism. The
meaning 'addicted to social pleasures' developed, and the word came to be used
euphemistically, of people who lived immoral and dissipated lives. Its downward path continued into the nineteenth century: in slang usage, a gay woman was a whore. And by the first
third of the present century, a gay man, in slang, was 'homosexual'. The last few decades have
seen the attempt by homosexuals to get the word accepted as a standard term of reference,
now that the earlier associations with immorality and prostitution have been forgotten.
Groups who occupy a subordinate or oppressed position in society invariably suffer
from linguistic disparagement. Homosexuality is regarded as deviant behaviour, and is often
referred to in abusive terms (like bent and queer). Sometimes these words are wielded
innocently, in that some people are genuinely unaware of their pejorative meaning; but more
often than not they are used as conscious symbols of an attitude. And, just as politicallyconscious Black people have struggled to promote words like Black at the expense of nigger
or coon, so gay has become instrumental in the cause of homosexual equality; moreover,
people who support such causes are expected to use these terms, since the use of the
traditional terms is an index of a social stance. Thus, on a range of sensitive social and
political issues we have to choose our vocabulary with care, and cultivate a conscious, highly
self-critical attitude to the issue of words and meanings.
The heightened awareness of language exhibited by such groups as gays and feminists
is the intelligent response of the exploited or the powerless. It stems above all from the
recognition that language has a vital part to play in the exercise and consolidation of power.
Not unnaturally, the powerful in society have long recognised this. It is a matter of everyday
experience that in political discourse meanings are manipulated and words chosen to load the
dice in favour of one point of view. Evaluative connotations of words like democratic are
cultivated at the expense of their conceptual meaning, so that a word denoting particular kinds
of political organisation becomes what we might call a 'purr' word, used merely to win
approval for a particular position.
Formerly, however, democratic was a 'snarl' word when used by the ruling class in
England, for whom it was linked with the ideas of the French Revolution. The word
moderate, connotatively favourable but referentially vague when applied to politics, has been
widely used to enlist support for people whose political views are often fundamentally
conservative.
Since the early 1980s a new vocabulary has developed in Britain to reflect the reemergence of de-regulated, 'market' capitalism with its aggressive form of management and
commitment to 'enterprise'. Many terms shared by both government and managers can be seen
as euphemistic: mass redundancy is re-labelled downsizing, working on short-term contracts
flexible working. The words clearly reflect the point of view of the powerful. The relatively
powerless, on the other hand, have been re-cast as consumers; the metaphor of consumption
has even been applied to formal education, in which students are now called customers. The
term citizen has been revived in the context of consumer or customer rights, rather than in the
context of legal and democratic rights and responsibilities as on the Continent and in the
USA.
KEY-WORDS
If certain words are emblematic of particular social stances, other words act as keys to
whole systems of belief. Students of medieval English literature need to learn that the
thirteenth-century French borrowing cortaysye cannot be translated by its modern form
courtesy; more than just politeness and respect are involved, since for poets and audience the
word was a central element in the conceptual edifice of chivalry. Similarly, we need to
recognise the theological assumptions underlying the use of grace, mercy, and nature again, all medieval borrowings from French - in the plays of Shakespeare. These words
reflect critical social, political, and ethical concerns, but we must beware of assuming that
particular systems of belief were always accepted by all groups in society. There can be little
question that at all times a dominant set of beliefs existed; but at times certain groups
articulate different values, and evolve their own vocabulary, or their set of meanings for
common words, to express them. The meaning of nature, for instance, has been adapted in
the course of over 500 years to suit various ideologies. Its fourteenth-century meaning,
'inherent force directing the world, or the human race, or both' was fluid enough to permit
significant variations of focus. By the early eighteenth century, the word referred to the
material world, and part of that included the world of people: their way of doing things. Thus,
a set of social relations could be legitimised by appealing to the notion that it was 'natural'.
By the late eighteenth century, however, nature had become the state of original innocence
before human beings had created imperfection. These essentially static conceptions of nature
were challenged in the nineteenth century by the post-Darwinian focus on the competitive
and destructive aspects of nature as an inherent force; and again, certain types of human
behaviour and organisation could be justified by citing what happens 'in nature'. As
contemporary arguments about 'human nature' show, you can almost make the word mean
whatever you like.
It is clear that in the past words were manipulated by their users just as they are today.
And in so far as words emblematic of certain values are handed down through the
generations, it is arguable that the vocabulary we learn conditions or even determines our
thoughts on various subjects. Earlier we noted how some languages, or some varieties within
a language, had richer vocabularies with respect to certain fields of thought or activity, and it
is often claimed that differences of this kind lead to differences of perception: where the
gardener sees weeds, the botanist, or Native American, sees a variety of interesting or
potentially useful plants. A bolder articulation of this idea was that advanced by the American
anthropological-linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, who, influenced by his teacher Edward Sapir,
suggested that different languages structured the perceptions and thoughts of their users in
very different ways. By comparing languages like English with some of those spoken by
Native Americans, Whorf concluded that there existed very different notions of time in the
different speech-communities, notions based on differences of grammatical structure. English,
for instance, could 'objectify' time by permitting such constructions as they stayed ten days, in
which a day is treated as a discrete entity, like a man or a chair; whereas Hopi, a Native
American language, handled time as a continuum. Language, then, as viewed by Whorf is a
kind of perceptual strait-jacket: we are at the mercy of the inherited vocabulary and grammar
of our mother tongue.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis seems to ignore the fact that languages are not
homogeneous, and that they are subject to change. It seems more fruitful, therefore, to
concentrate on how our thoughts and responses are shaped by particular users of our
language, since we know that various kinds of propaganda will not work unless they can
exploit the fact that much of our thinking is habitual and unreflecting-In this way, we may be
able to see more clearly how some words change their meanings.
THE VOCABULARY OF POWER, RANK, AND STATUS
The proposition that different social groups may use words differently extends to the
words used for the social groups themselves. As we have said, such words are particularly
sensitive to the development of pejorative or affective meanings. It is therefore instructive to
explore some aspects of the vocabulary of rank and status: how reference is made to the social
hierarchy, and how people of different status address each other. There are three major trends
in the history of the words chosen. First, terms originally denotative of rank often become
evaluative; second, those denoting the more powerful groups are most likely to retain their
status as rank-terms; and third, there are interesting changes in the possibilities of using these
words in direct address.
While the relationships among these status and rank terms, being based on a hierarchy
of power in society, are clear, they are more fluid than those of more highly structured
hierarchies, such as the army. The army has evolved a set of mutually exclusive terms, the
individual meaning of which depends entirely on an understanding of the meaning of the
others: thus, we can only know what captain means if we understand its relation to major,
lieutenant, and corporal, and so on. Social relations are in general, however, less static, so the
meanings of their terminology are more susceptible to change; but we must beware of
assuming that any change in meaning automatically accompanies, or signals, a change in
social structure. The relationships between the words and the things they signify are more
complex than that.
The Anglo-Saxon system of rank-terms was largely re-structured after the Norman
Conquest. Cyning and cwen (king and queen), hlafweard and hlaefdige (lord and lady - the
former being a warden of loaves, the latter a kneader of them) survive, in senses known to the
Anglo-Saxons; but other terms were pushed into new meanings by the introduction from
French of duke, prince, squire, villain, etc. The Anglo-Saxons used aldormann to denote a
man responsible to the king for administrating a large territory, þegn (modern 'thane' or
'thegn'), a lesser landowner, and ceorl (churl) to denote the lowest rank of freeman. Another
word was eorl, which denoted high status in general, and which, like þegn, was used in
poetic texts in the sense of 'warrior'. In the Period of Viking power, the meaning of eorl was
influenced by the related Scandinavian word jarl, which had a similar meaning to aldormann; and the word has survived the Norman Conquest in this later sense. Aldormann has
become specialised, in terms of municipal power and status, while pegn has been superseded
by the French baron, and interestingly enough by the Anglo-Saxon term cniht. Originally
cniht was not a rank term, but denoted a boy or lad; inferiority in age gave way to inferiority
of status, and the word came to mean a servant. But there are different kinds of servant: a
king's servant or knight, had to be of noble blood, and the word was specialised to the kinds
of meaning hitherto represented by þegn.
The meanings of words denoting low social status seem to have been affected by
further borrowings from French. One of these, gentle, had already acquired an evaluation of
approval by the time it was borrowed into English in the thirteenth century. Originally it had
meant 'highborn', but its meaning widened to include those characteristics felt by the highborn to be appropriate to their social position. If gentle - something of a key-word in the
history of English - denoted good breeding and gracious behaviour, then words like churl
could be associated with coarseness. By about 1300, churl had lost its technical sense as a
term of rank, and indicated low breeding in general; from that point, connotations of
'rudeness' gradually became criterial. Interestingly enough, the French borrowing villein
dropped even further. By 1300 again, its primary meaning was 'base'; from there it is only a
short step to the present wholly pejorative meaning of 'villain'. While both these words have
become pejorised, a later borrowing, peasant, has retained its early meaning, 'one who works
the land', as well as a later pejorative one. By the end of the sixteenth century we find it used
affectively - almost as a 'snarl' word - in Elizabethan drama, notably in Marlowe's Edward II.
In the examples cited, the criteria relating word to referent have shifted from the
functional to the evaluative. It is difficult not to interpret this development as the projection of
attitudes that are upper-class on to the words. To put it another way, the connotations that
become criterial originate with the socially powerful: the dominant class imposes the
dominant connotations. We see this process at work among words that were not associated
with rank, like vulgar, common, illiterate, and lewd The last two examples show the high
social value that has come to be placed on literacy and learning. Illiterate is now a rough
synonym for 'stupid', and the meaning of lewd has changed dramatically over the last
thousand years. Originally meaning 'lay' at a time when learning and the Church were
virtually synonymous, it could also mean 'unlearned'. By the seventeenth century it was
applied to those of low social status, implying that by that time learning was associated with
class. By about 1700 it meant 'worthless' of objects, 'unprincipled of people; and from the
latter meaning, a special kind of unprincipled-ness became criterial, that relating to sexual
conduct. Hence the meaning 'lecherous'.
A more complex pattern of class attitudes has affected the history of bourgeois. As a
word that has not been thoroughly assimilated into English from French, bourgeois is an
excellent example of a word whose meaning depends on the loyalties of its users. This is
partly because, like exploitation, and so on, it forms part of the technical vocabulary of
Marxist thought, and has therefore acquired a certain stylistic meaning. For this reason many
people avoid using it. On the other hand, it has been more recently used in a more affective
sense, by groups such as students, who see it as a term exemplifying certain tastes and types
of behaviour which are 'respectable'. The fortunes of the word have depended on the attitudes
of the classes in the social hierarchy above and below the bourgeoisie. Its thirteenth-century
Anglicised form burgess (town-dweller, enjoying full municipal rights) points to its
association with the mercantile town, and this meaning remains in the background, as it were,
of the re-borrowed form bourgeois, which retains more of the phonetic characteristics of its
source. Originally bourgeois in French was rather like a rank term: it denoted, for instance,
residence of long standing. Associated by the eighteenth century with the commercial class,
especially those able to five off invested income, the term came to be used contemptuously by
the class above, the landed aristocracy. The evaluative meaning arose because the
characteristics of the mercantile class - solidity, stability, sobriety - were perceived as being
small-minded, narrow, and complacent by the upper class. The same attitude came to be
shared by artists, writers, and some intellectuals who derided the 'respectability' and 'safe'
views of the bourgeoisie. But the technical sense of the word, as used by Marx, arose from a
recognition of the dominance of the bourgeoisie in society: they were the employing class, the
group who controlled capital, in whose factories things were manufactured. These roles and
functions gave them definite ideas about society and their place within it, and, according to
Marx, it is they who have been able to present their own values and ideology as given,
universal, immutable, and necessary.
ELIZABETHAN TERMS OF ADDRESS
If we follow the fortunes of gentle into the sixteenth century, we find that it acquires,
in the compound gentleman, a considerable social significance. It has been considered the
most important rank term in use at this time, since it differentiated the privileged and
unprivileged. By the sixteenth century, however, the sources of privilege were changing.
Power and status could increasingly be achieved through education or entrepreneurialism:
hence gentle could in principle be extended to people whose status no longer derived from its
traditional source, the ownership of land. By the 1580s a gentleman could be someone who
was able to live comfortably without having to 'engage in trade'. (And since then, of course, it
has lost its function as a term of rank and become a polite word for any kind of man.) In
many respects gentleman was filling the social vacuum left by the obsolescence of the
knight.
It seems that the Elizabethans were particularly sensitive to the issue of rank and
status. If a social hierarchy is felt to be changing, people will become uncertain about who is
entitled to be called a gentleman. The same can be said for the word master, another classdefining term, which was widening its range of application at the same time. It may be this
uncertainty that underlay the Elizabethan fondness for using terms of address. It has been
concluded from a survey of such usage in Shakespeare's Falstaif plays that in about 1600
people liked to 'place' each other in the social hierarchy when they were conversing in the
more formal contexts. Thus, titles, occupational terms like parson or cook, generic terms like
man, woman, and gentleman, even terms of relationship like husband and wife (used freely
between spouses on good terms) were frequently used in direct address; and if none of these
was appropriate or available, a vague word like neighbour was even used. Condescension,
even open insult, could be indicated by the deliberate use of terms inappropriate to the status
of an addressee. The Norse word fellow used to mean, literally, one who lays down money
(fee), thus a partner in business. By the fourteenth century, as a term of address it implied
polite condescension; and in Shakespearean address its use is an insult to anyone not greatly
inferior in social status. Similarly, good-man denoted in its early sense the master of an
establishment: as gentleman expanded down the social scale, it pushed goodman with it, so
that by the seventeenth century it could be a term of abuse. So we can see that new meanings
may develop as words are used, in face-to-face interaction, as terms of address.
This aspect of Elizabethan speech-behaviour contrasts in certain ways with usage
today. Many people now limit their terms of address to the Title + Last Name pattern
(indicating a respectful, neutral distance), and reserve sir or madam to mark greater
politeness, Christian names or terms of endearment like darling or sweetheart to mark intimacy, nicknames or generic terms like mate to mark solidarity. While our usage depends to a
certain extent on social class and group loyalties, it is possible to make some generalisations:
for the Elizabethans, greater intimacy was required before 'first-naming' was possible. There
was greater fluctuation between the use of first names and surnames, and men could be freely
addressed with both.
The Elizabethan habit of referring to social status in their mode of address is similar to
that of some modern Europeans. Power relationships in the sixteenth century could be marked
by a choice in the grammar, involving the pronouns thou and you: you could say thou to a
subordinate, and expect a polite you in return, a choice still found in many European
languages which have retained the two second person pronouns. This system has given way to
one based on mutual respect where one pronoun, you, is used reciprocally. What is interesting
is that it is the pronoun of neutral distance that becomes generalised, like the Title + Last
Name pattern among the terms of address. More interesting, however, is the fact that at the
same time as the Elizabethans were showing such concern about naming in direct address
they were beginning to discard the traditional use of second person pronouns.
THE SEMANTIC DISPARAGEMENT OF WOMEN
Power relationships do not of course necessarily involve social stratification. Adults
have generally exercised power over minors, and women have been controlled by men. Male
power, and male attitudes, therefore, are reflected in the ways in which women are talked
about. Men have developed a rich vocabulary of affective words which denigrate women who
do not conform to a male ideal; and there has been a constant tendency to develop new
meanings denoting the availability of women as sex objects. It has been estimated that there
are over 1000 words which in their history have denoted women and have also meant 'whore'.
Words which classify women by age tend to reflect the male predilection for the
younger, sexually attractive female. Unfortunately, many of these words are not recorded in
early varieties of English, so that it is often difficult to trace their history. Crone may derive
from a Norman French word for a cantankerous woman (from the fourteenth century it has
meant 'withered old woman', and suchlike), but it could also come from a Germanic word for
an old ewe - a sense in which it is used between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Either
way, women are hardly flattered. If old age is unforgivable in a woman, ugliness or
slovenliness invites further ridicule. Drab, a possible loan from Irish Gaelic, is recorded in
the sense 'ugly woman' in 1515, and slut, deriving perhaps from Scandinavian, means a dirty
one from the fifteenth century. Some words denoting young women had at first no sexual
connotations, but they were not slow to develop them. Doll, originally a pet name for
Dorothy, was used in the sixteenth century as a generic pet name for a mistress; and mynx,
deriving perhaps from minickin, a word for a pet, came to mean a young girl, and later a
wanton one.
A great many of these words developed the meaning of 'whore' at some stage in their
history. The same is true of many other endearment terms, such as sweetmeat and Kitty,
occupational terms like nun, spinster, even laundress; and kinship terms, such as aunt and
cousin. But this process of semantic 'disparagement' does not necessarily mean that men have
always regarded women of all kinds as little more than objects to be bought for selfgratification. Sexual relations among men and women have often depended on the brothel.
Although even the most powerful in the land might indulge in it, whoring was socially taboo;
and like all taboo subjects it generated a proliferation of terms, many of them euphemistic. In
the covert patronage of prostitutes, it was necessary to keep the flow of terms going; hence
even words like nun and laundress found themselves used in this sense.
Finally, we shall consider a word which may show the influence of male attitudes in a
more complex and subtle way. The meanings of buxom have changed dramatically over the
last 800 years. Today its meaning unites two separate properties; one associated with physical
appearance, of 'plump comeliness', even voluptuousness; the other involving mental
attributes, 'jolliness', 'openness', perhaps 'sexual uninhibitedness'. Today, the word is used
only to refer to women. When we look back at how the word has been used in the past,
however, we find that there were far fewer restrictions on the kinds of word it could modify:
men, and also inanimate objects like air, can be buxom. Like sophisticated, then, the change
in meaning is closely linked to changes in the kinds of words with which it could co-occur. In
its earliest recorded uses the word meant obedient, in the moral sense, and this meaning
remained fairly constant from the twelfth century until the nineteenth. (Originally it may have
meant something like 'ready to bow', as its elements were bow + some, as in handsome,
winsome, etc.) Out of this core meaning other related senses developed: submissive' by about
1300, then in the course of the fourteenth century gracious' or 'kindly'. Until about the middle
of the sixteenth century, then, to be buxom meant to be generally well-disposed and tractable;
and we find by the end of that century a new set of connotations developing, related to the
old, but gradually replacing them. Throughout the seventeenth century the word could be used
in the sense of 'physically obedient', or 'pliant', and we begin to see the origins of the modern
sense of the word as it is used in relation to women. At the same time as 'physically pliant',
the old sense of 'kindly' was extended, so that from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries it
also meant 'blithe', 'lively'; and this gives us the second dimension in the meaning of the word
at present. The sense 'blithe' was re-applied, as it were, in the physical dimension: the physical
counterpart of 'jolliness' was 'comeliness', 'healthy well-favouredness', and we find the word
used in this sense from the end of the sixteenth century until the present day, with the use of
buxom gradually limiting itself only to women from the nineteenth century (influenced,
perhaps, by bust). It is difficult not to see the projection of masculine attitudes towards
women embodied in this example of semantic change. An important aspect of male desire, it
seems, is to want not only women who are sexually submissive, but if possible comely and
well-favoured too.
LECTURE NINE
GRAMMAR
English grammar is complex and confusing. The one very simple reason for that is that
its rules and terminology are based on Latin – a language with which it has so little in
common that making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play
baseball using the rules of football. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an
infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an
infinitive either.
The early authorities used Latin grammar as their model. For the longest time it was
taken entirely for granted that the classical languages must serve as models. John Dryden, an
English poet, translator and playwright spoke for an age when he boasted that he often
translated his sentences into Latin to help him decide how best to express them in English.
He complained that English “is in a manner barbarous.” Dryden believed there
should be an academy to regulate English usage, and for the next two centuries many others
would echo his view. In 1664, the Royal Society for the Advancement of Experimental
Philosophy formed a committee “to improve the English tongue,” though nothing lasting
seems to have come of it. Thirty-three years later in his Essay Upon Projects, Daniel Defoe
was calling for an academy to oversee the language. In 1712, Jonathan Swift joined the chorus
with a Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. Some
indication of the strength of feeling attached to these matters is given by the fact that in 1780,
in the midst of the American Revolution, John Adams wrote to the president of Congress
appealing to him to set up an academy for the purpose of “refining, correcting, improving and
ascertaining the English language”. In 1806, the American Congress considered a bill to
institute a national academy and in 1820 an American Academy of Language and Belles
Lettres, presided over by John Quincy Adams, was formed, though again without any
resounding perpetual benefits to users of the language. And there were many other such
proposals and assemblies.
The model for all these was the Académie Française, founded by Cardinal Richelieu in
1635. In its youth, the academy was an ambitious motivator of change. In 1762, after many
years of work, it published a dictionary that regularized the spellings of some 5,000 words—
almost a quarter of the words then in common use. It took the s out of words like estre and
fenestre, making them être and fenêtre, and it turned roy and loy into roi and loi. In recent
decades, however, the academy has been associated with an almost ayatollah-like
conservatism. When in December 1988 over 90 percent of French schoolteachers voted in
favor of a proposal to introduce the sort of spelling reforms the academy itself had introduced
200 years earlier, the forty venerable members of the academy were, to quote the London
Sunday Times, “up in apoplectic arms” at the thought of tampering with something as sacred
as French spelling. Such is the way of the world. Among the changes the teachers wanted and
the academicians did not were the removal of the circumflex on être, fenêtre, and other such
words, and taking the -x off plurals such as bureaux, chevaux, and chateaux and replacing it
with an -s.
Such actions underline the one almost inevitable shortcoming of national academies.
However progressive and far-seeing they may be to begin with, they almost always exert over
time a depressive effect on change. So it is probably fortunate that the English-speaking world
never saddled itself with such a body, largely because as many influential users of English
were opposed to academies as favored them. Samuel Johnson doubted the prospects of
arresting change and Thomas Jefferson thought it in any case undesirable. In declining an
offer to be the first honorary president of the Academy of Language and Belles Lettres, he
noted that had such a body been formed in the days of the Anglo-Saxons English would now
be unable to describe the modern world. Joseph Priestley, the English scientist, grammarian,
and theologian, spoke perhaps most eloquently against the formation of an academy when he
said in 1761 that it was “unsuitable to the genius of a free nation. ... We need make no doubt
but that the best forms of speech will, in time, establish themselves by their own superior
excellence: and in all controversies, it is better to wait the decisions of time, which are slow
and sure, than to take those of synods, which are often hasty and injudicious.”
So if there are no officially appointed guardians for the English language, who sets
down all those rules that everybody knows about from childhood – the idea that we must
never end a sentence with a preposition or begin one with a conjunction, that we must use
each other for two things and one another for more than two, and that we must never use
hopefully in an absolute sense, such as “Hopefully it will not rain tomorrow”? The answer is
that no one does that and when you look into the background of these “rules” there is often
little basis for them.
Consider the curiously persistent notion that sentences should not end with a
preposition. The source of this stricture, and several other equally dubious ones, was Robert
Lowth, an eighteenth-century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential
life both in his native England and abroad. It is to Lowth we can trace many a pedant’s most
treasured notions: the belief that you must say different from rather than different to or
different than, the idea that two negatives make a positive, the rule that you must not say “the
heaviest of the two objects,” but rather “the heavier,” the distinction between shall and will,
and the clearly nonsensical belief that between can apply only to two things and among to
more than two. By this reasoning, it would not be possible to say that St. Louis is between
New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, but rather that it is among them, which would impart a
quite different sense. Perhaps the most remarkable and curiously enduring of Lowth’s many
beliefs was the conviction that sentences ought not to end with a preposition. But even he was
not didactic about it. He recognized that ending a sentence with a preposition was idiomatic
and common in both speech and informal writing. He suggested only that he thought it
generally better and more graceful, not crucial, to place the preposition before its relative “in
solemn and elevated” writing. Within a hundred years this had been converted from a piece of
questionable advice into an immutable rule and nineteenth-century academics took it as read
that the very name pre-position meant it must come before something – anything.
But then this was a period of the most resplendent silliness, when grammarians and
scholars seemed to be climbing over one another in a mad scramble to come up with fresh
absurdities. This was the age when, it was gravely insisted, that Shakespeare’s laughable
ought to be changed to laugh-at-able and reliable should be made into relionable. Some
people wrote mooned for lunatic and foresayer for prophet on the grounds that the new
words were Anglo-Saxon and thus somehow more pure.
Today in England you can still find authorities attacking the construction different
than as a regrettable Americanism, insisting that a sentence such as “How different things
appear in Washington than in London” is ungrammatical and should be changed to “How
different things appear in Washington from how they appear in London.” Yet different than
has been common in England for centuries and used by such exalted writers as Defoe,
Addison, Steele, Dickens, Coleridge, and Thackeray, among others. Other authorities, in both
Britain and America, continue to deride the absolute use of hopefully. The New York Times
Manual of Style and Usage flatly forbids it. Its writers must not say, “Hopefully the sun will
come out soon,” but rather are instructed to resort to a clumsily passive and periphrastic
construction such as “It is to be hoped that the sun will come out soon.” The reason? The
authorities maintain that hopefully in the first sentence is a misplaced modal auxiliary – that it
doesn’t belong to any other part of the sentence. Yet they raise no objection to dozens of other
words being used in precisely the same unattached way – admittedly, mercifully, happily,
curiously, and so on. No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The
New York Times once had a boss who wouldn’t allow it because his professor had forbidden
it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his
uncle who was a man of great learning ... and so on.
Considerations of what makes for good English or bad English are to a large extent
matters of prejudice and conditioning. Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say “you
was” if you were referring to one person. It sounds odd today, but the logic is impeccable.
Was is a singular verb and were a plural one. Why should you take a plural verb when the
sense is clearly singular? The answer is that Robert Lowth didn’t like it. “I’m hurrying, are I
not?” is hopelessly ungrammatical, but “I’m hurrying, aren’t I?” – merely a contraction of the
same words – is perfect English. Many is almost always a plural as in “Many people were
there”, but not when it is followed by a, as in “Many a man was there.” There’s no inherent
reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar. They are
because they are. Nothing illustrates the scope for prejudice in English better than the issue of
the split infinitive. Some people feel ridiculously strongly about it. When the British
Conservative politician Jock Bruce-Gardyne was economic secretary to the Treasury in the
early 1980s, he returned unread any departmental correspondence containing a split infinitive.
However, it is exceedingly difficult to find any authority who condemns the split
infinitive, as many of them think that there is no logical reason not to split an infinitive. Otto
Jespersen even suggests that, strictly speaking, it isn’t actually possible to split an infinitive.
As he puts it: “ ‘To’ ... is no more an essential part of an infinitive than the definite article is
an essential part of a nominative, and no one would think of calling ‘the good man’ a split
nominative.”
It is believed that one of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and
democratic language in which changes take place in response to the pressures of common
usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for
centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the
weight of usage will push new meanings and structures into currency no matter how many
authorities hurl themselves into the path of change.
But at the same time John Ciardi observed, resistance may in the end prove futile, but
at least it tests the changes and makes them prove their worth.
The venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours proved on his deathbed that
a grammarian’s work is never done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and
whispered: “I am about to – or I am going to – die; either expression is used.”
LECTURE TEN
THE SYNTHETIC GRAMMAR OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS
From the point of view of morphology, there are some striking differences between
contemporary English and the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons. The rich morphology of
nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns. Anglo-Saxon is a different type of language with rich
morphology of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns.
For the linguist, the significance of the difference between the grammars lies in the
fact that in Anglo-Saxon the relationships among words in the sentence are often signalled by
inflexions that are put on the ends of words. The shape of a word changes according to
whether it is the subject or the object. Thus, it is not so much the order of words in the
sentence that determines, say, the subject, as is the case with contemporary English: in theory,
words in languages such as Anglo-Saxon can be put in any order, because it is the endings
that specify their function. Anglo-Saxon, then, is more like Classical Latin than modern
English in this respect, in that syntactic relationships are achieved by what is called synthesis,
the building up of the word by adding inflexions to the stem.
A very simple example can show us how a synthetic grammar works. While there are
no possibilities for changing the word-order in the sentence our own experts handle the
installation. In some other sentences in contemporary English, however, word-order can be
changed to achieve radically different meanings. In the subject-verb-object structure the boy
killed the bear the noun-group in final position can function as the subject, producing the
bear killed the boy. Both boys and bears can kill, and we need word-order to tell us who did
what. But in classical Latin, word-endings will tell us who did the killing, irrespective of the
word-order. Thus, in Latin, the sequence can be puer interfecit ursum, ursum puer interfecit,
or interfecit ursum puer. but in all these examples, we know what the object is, because it has
the distinctive -um ending. In principle, the same can be said for Anglo-Saxon. The order of
the words in se cnafa of-sloh þone beran could be re-arranged in a similar number of ways.
But we would always know which word functions as the subject because of the ending: cnafa
(modern ‘knave’) ends in -a, which in this kind of noun is the inflexion associated with
subject-position, as -n is with that of the object. We should also note how the definite article
agrees in form with the noun it immediately precedes; se in subject position, þone in object
position.
What we have been describing is the grammatical category of case, the signalling of
relationships among words in a sentence by adding specific endings to the words. Above, we
saw the association of -n with the object, or accusative case, with one class of noun, and we
saw how the form of the definite article changed. Other kinds of function are also signalled by
different case-endings. For instance, a relationship between nouns that might be loosely called
possessive is specified by genitive case-endings, of which one, -’s, still survives today as in
John’s book. And an indirect object relationship, that of ‘to the youth’ in I’ll give a pound to
the youth, is often (depending again on the type of noun, etc.) specified by adding -e: this is
the dative case. Thus, cniht (youth) becomes cnihte. In general, the Anglo-Saxon case-system
is very similar to that of modern German; although the former also has another case, of minor
importance and only affecting adjectives, called the instrumental.
The case-system in Anglo-Saxon is considerably more complex than our brief
description makes it appear, partly because the cases discharge a wider range of functions
than those listed, but also because there is no single range of case-endings that apply to every
noun. The student of Anglo-Saxon has to learn to which class of nouns a word belongs before
assigning it the correct endings. To some extent, the nouns are also classified according to
gender - masculine, feminine, neuter - as in modern German.
THE LOSS OF INFLEXIONS
Unfortunately, we have no evidence for the conversational usage of those times, but it
would not be surprising if the grammar of written usage were more synthetic than that of the
spoken. There is some evidence to suggest that while Classical Latin retained the full range of
inflexions in writing, popular spoken Latin had begun to dispense with them.
Even within Anglo-Saxon writing we find that prose, for instance, is in general less
synthetic than poetry. In prose sentences where verbs govern direct objects, as in our model, we
find that word-order is more often than not the same as in modern English. Thus, the case-endings
in se cnafa of-sloh þone beran are largely redundant if se cnafa is always likely to come first in
the sentence: it has no need of distinctive endings to tell us it is the subject. We can conclude, then,
that certain varieties in Anglo-Saxon, since the beginning of literacy, were already placing less
reliance on the system of inflexions than others.
What we have seen since Anglo-Saxon times is the gradual erosion, in all dialects, of those
inflexions. The term which is used to denote this process is known as simplification. With the
loss of case-endings, other means had to be found for signalling relations among words in the
sentence, since such endings had a syntactic function. Prepositions, like for, of by, etc., began
to serve those functions; and word-order became less flexible. Thus, while something in the
language may be abandoned by its speakers, something else will emerge as a counterbalance.
The dropping of one part of the system of noun-endings occasioned the same process in
other parts of the system. The complex classification of nouns according to three genders was
simplified, and with it the half dozen or so patterns of plurality which existed in Anglo-Saxon. In
the case of plurals we see the selection of just one inflexion as a productive pattern, which is
generalised for most nouns. In different dialects, however, different plural inflexions, associated
with frequently occurring nouns, became dominant. In the north, -s, was selected, whereas in much
of the south and south-west, it was -n. Today, the system of plurals is still not regularised in any
dialect. The codified metropolitan variety preserves fossilised instances of the older range: the -en
in oxen, the vowel-change in feet, geese, etc., and the unmarked plural of nouns like sheep. Other
dialects retain more -n forms, as in een (eyes) in the north and west midlands, and have extended
this pattern to nouns like house which originally had no plural inflexion (as in parts of East
Anglia and the west midlands). And in ‘non-standard’ speech generally, the Anglo-Saxon
uninflected plural is common in nouns specifying measurement: three ton of coal, three pound of
potatoes, three mile away. Thus, the selection of plural endings, and their allocation to particular
words, seems to have proceeded in a way that strikes the modern speaker as arbitrary. And
most arbitrary, in a sense, is the metropolitan variety, which from the advent of printing has
tended to fix its own idiosyncratic selection, while in dialectal speech the process of
restructuring has continued.
The loss of distinctive forms for, say, nouns and verbs, could offer enormous syntactic
possibilities for a poet and dramatist like Shakespeare. Lip is traditionally a noun, but once it
has lost its endings, it can be used as a verb, so that in To lip a wanton in a secure couch (Othello,
IV. i. 73) Shakespeare uses it to mean ‘kiss lecherously’. It is characteristic of contemporary
English that many words can act as either nouns or verbs, a freedom exploited to the full in
everyday speech. Within the last decade or so, nouns like impact and access have increasingly
been used as verbs in a variety of registers.
It is very difficult to know the why and the how of the process of morphological
simplification. But one thing we do know about is the erosion of inflexions as spoken languages
come into contact, especially in those conditions that produce pidgins or cause pidginisation.
Pidgins are a type of language that may be said to have pushed the process of morphological
simplification to its limit, by abandoning any inflexions that might be considered redundant. Thus
even the plural ending, which most English people would probably consider indispensable, is
eradicated in a sequence like di tu big pepa, ‘the two big newspapers’ in Cameroon pidgin. Since
plurality is already specified by the numeral tu, it is not absolutely necessary to inflect the noun in
this instance.
The notion of redundancy can be readily appreciated when we look at verbal inflexions,
and see how they pattern with pronouns. Taking a verb like go, we can set out the contemporary
‘standard’ English paradigm thus:
I
you
he
she
it
we
you
they
go
go
singular
go
go
go
go
plural
We see here that apart from you, each pronoun has a different form, whereas there are
only two verb-forms: the third person form agrees with the he, she, it pronouns by taking the (e)s ending. The inflexion in the third person is a relic of the fully inflected verb in Anglo-Saxon:
ic
þu
he
heo
hit
ga
gaest
gaeþ
we
ge
hie
gaþ
gaþ
gaþ
Here we find four distinctive forms of the verb, including not only endings but vowel
changes. And all the pronouns have distinct forms, including, significantly, the second person
ones þu and ge (modern thou and ye). But when we compare this paradigm with the more highly
inflected verb in Latin, we find that pronouns are unusual, and there is maximum differentiation
in the forms of the verb:
eo
is
it
imus
itis
eunt
From this comparison of three different paradigms, we can say that languages, or
varieties, that have a more fully differentiated system of pronouns which function in concord with
distinctive verbal endings can be said to exhibit a greater degree of redundancy than those which
have simplified either pronouns or inflexions. Thus, Classical Latin has less redundancy than
West Saxon, since it makes do without pronouns in subject position (though pronouns were
available for emphasis) and modern standard English points towards the elimination of redundancy by retaining only the -(e)s ending. Cameroon pidgin, however, has removed even this:
a
yu
i
wi
wuna
dem
go
go
go
go
go
go
The loss of the inflexion in the verb form is compensated for by the plural you form, wuna, in
the pronominal system.
Since West Saxon manuscripts of the tenth century seem to show the merging of
unstressed vowels in final syllables, we cannot say for sure that a process like pidginisation
caused the abandonment of the Anglo-Saxon system of inflexions. But it would not be
surprising if the process was at least hastened by contact between the English and their
Scandinavian neighbours and subsequently by contact with the Normans. We know that
certain pronoun forms arose from such contact with Vikings, suggesting a thorough and close
mixing of the two speech-communities. In these conditions, there would have been pressure to
level inflexions in the interests of spoken communication. New forms, originating in various
parts of the Danelaw and along its borders, could then gradually spread at the level of popular
speech. It is noteworthy that the two instances of inflexional change that we have noted - the s plural and third person verbal ending -(e)s- arose in areas well away from Wessex, and were
gradually adopted into the metropolitan variety.
Today, morphological simplification is most clearly associated with working-class
speech. While the metropolitan variety preserves some vestiges of the older pattern, dialects
get on with the elimination of irregularity and redundancy. In Norfolk, for instance, we can
hear the same verbal paradigm as in Cameroon pidgin. And many dialects make a consistent
paradigm of the reflexive pronouns: I wash myself, you wash yourself he washes hisself
where they are possessive throughout. But as it is in process of consolidating, the
metropolitan variety begins to freeze earlier patterns in morphology, and even cultivate
variety of form as a mark of education. In short, we are back to the idea that grammar is a
matter of morphology.
MORPHOLOGICAL SIMPLIFICATION AND SOCIAL STIGMA
Two other ways in which the morphology of the verb has been simplified involve the
conversion of strong verbs to the weak pattern, and the simplification of the strong verb itself.
The first has resulted in about five-sixths of the 360-odd strong verbs recorded in West Saxon
being changed to the weak pattern. Thus, while some verbs, like drink, swim, break, and bear,
remain strong, and still signal past tense by means of an internal vowel change, many others,
like glide, seethe, fret, and fare, have adopted the simple –ed past inflexion.
West Saxon has seven recorded strong verb patterns. An example, fleogan (fly), had
five distinct vowel changes in its various tense-forms. Today, we find that the number of
vowel changes has been reduced to three, so we get fly, flew, flown. But in ‘non-standard’
speech, we often find a reduction to two forms, so we hear I flown it, I done it, etc. Here the
past participle form is used for marking past tense.
It is customary, among historians of English when describing the evolution of verb
morphology, to attribute such changes to the principle of analogy: verbs originally belonging
to different verb classes are blended in the mind of the speaker, and new forms for these
verbs, based on parts of the pattern of vowel changes in other verbs, are created. Moreover,
the different dialects of Anglo-Saxon may well have had differences in various parts of the
strong verb patterns and contact between speakers of different dialects would have produced
re-structuring in the system. We find in recent dialect speech that variation in verb forms is
apparently endless, as different strong verb patterns compete with the dominant weak ones.
Finally, it is the presence of that two-part weak pattern, present versus past, that may account
for the reduction to two forms in the strong verbs that remain.
It is not only in broad dialect speech that the tendency to reduce strong verb forms to
two has occurred. Speakers sometimes hesitate about the past tense of drink; is it he drank, or
he drunk? The likelihood is that they will simplify the paradigm by using the past participle
form drunk for the simple past drank. Sometimes, however, the process involves the reverse
selection: in Jane Austen’s narrative, we sometimes find the past tense form used for the past
participle, as in the tables were broke up, and much was ate. Thus, the process of simplification used to be as true of so-called educated speech as it is today of dialect. What has
happened is that the tendency to reduce the forms of the verb to two has been stigmatised.
It was the eighteenth-century codifiers, however, who legitimised such sociolinguistic
stratification by insisting that a tripartite pattern in the strong verb was proper and correct
from the linguistic point of view. English, like Latin, they suggested, should distinguish
between past tense and past participle. The richer the morphology, the better; and one
grammarian, Lowth, thought it essential to restore inflexions, and vowel-alternations,
wherever it was possible. English grammar, he declared, was getting too easy, and needed
stiffening up.
THE SOCIAL MEANING OF PRONOUNS
In discussing the verb, we have already noted two kinds of change associated with
pronouns. One concerns the forms themselves. Many parts of the pronoun system preserve
three distinctive case-forms: the nominative, accusative, and genitive, or possessive, I/me/my,
we/us/our, he/him/his, they/them/their, although other parts have been reduced to two, as in
you/your, she/her, it/its. Some of these forms have arisen from contact with Vikings. Parts of
the area formerly known as Wessex, well away from Scandinavian settlement, still use AngloSaxon forms. Thus, an earlier accusative or object form of ‘he’, hine, has recently been
recorded as en, as in I hit en (I hit him); and the older form of ‘I’, ic, as utch.
The second change concerns the meaning and functions of the pronouns. As is known
some languages, or varieties, had a number distinction in the second person pronoun: one
form for you singular, another for you plural. This was the case in Anglo-Saxon. Not only was
there a singular þu (thou) and plural ge (ye: later replaced by its object form, you), but
distinctions could be made between ‘you many’, and ‘you two’, ‘we many’, and ‘we two’:
these are known as dual pronouns. These distinctions have been lost in the metropolitan
variety, although some dialects have the form youse for ‘you many’, and other dialects have
evolved other patterns of contrast. In parts of the south-west, us is sometimes used in subject
position as an unemphatic pronoun, while we marks emphasis.
In classifying vocabulary, pronouns are usually said to constitute a closed system.
There are not many possibilities for adding new pronouns to the system. However, we still
find that the system changes, because the use of pronouns is so closely bound up with the
process of social interaction. Pronouns occur very frequently in speech and from time to time
they arouse our social sensitivities. Recently, the lack of a neutral pronoun unmarked for
gender, to signify third person singular, has been an issue raised in the cause of sexual
equality. Many women understandably resent the airy use of he in reference to unspecified
people of either sex. In earlier centuries, however, it is the second person pronoun, the pronoun of address, that is at issue to such an extent that the Revolution in France in the
eighteenth century and the Russian Revolution in the twentieth both stimulated legislation on
the matter, so central did linguistic usage in this respect seem to be to the creation of equality.
As is known Elizabethans could address each other with thou or you. These pronouns
had different social meanings. Someone you did not know well, with whom you might want
to establish a relationship of neutral, respectful distance, could be addressed with you. And
you could expect you in return. For someone you felt especially close to, either emotionally or
socially, a reciprocal thou might be appropriate. The equality of these relationships was
underlined by reciprocal pronoun usage. But in unequal relationships, different pronouns
would be given and returned. It was necessary to address a superior by the use of you, and
thou would be expected in return. Moreover, you could be defiant, or insulting, by breaking
this code: using thou to a superior, or to someone of equal standing who had no reason to
expect it. And heightened feelings could be registered - sympathy, tenderness, anger,
reverence - by switching from you to thou in the middle of a conversation.
Anyone with a knowledge of modern European languages like French, German, and
Italian will see similarities between this system and pronoun usage in those languages. What
we have to account for in English is the widespread loss of thou, and with it the means of
‘power-coding’ relationships by addressing someone as thou, and getting you in return.
Of particular interest is the displacement of the original second person singular
pronoun by the you-form, which originally indicated plurality.
The use of the plural pronoun you as a respectful marker of address was a change led by
the most powerful social groups. Originating in the Latin of the later Roman Empire (there were
two Emperors, so to address one was to address the other as well) the custom of using, and
demanding, the polite plural pronoun spread into many European languages during the Middle
Ages. Once established in French, it was adopted by the Francophile English aristocracy. At
first, you, as a marker of special esteem, an emblem of courtly custom; but gradually,
relationships such as parent/child, lord/servant, husband/ wife were power-coded, in that the
former in each pair demanded you, and returned thou. By about 1500 it seems that this practice
had been copied by the middle class, and thou was becoming the ‘marked’ form. It could be used
for special effects; moreover, it was the reciprocal pronoun of the lower class.
In that you was emblematic of upper-class manners, as thou was of working people, the
widespread adoption of you in the course of the seventeenth century may be said to represent the
triumph of middle-class values. More difficult to explain is the abandoning of the non-reciprocal
pattern of power-relationships. In general, this pattern persists in societies where rank and
status are relatively fixed and transparent. When social relations become more fluid, however,
specific relationships are liable to be re-interpreted, and reciprocal pronouns used instead. In
many European languages, relationships involving social class or rank, such as customer/waiter,
officer/soldier, employer/employee, have been resolved by the use of the plural pronoun of
distance and respect; whereas differences of status in the family, as between parent and child, for
example, have been interpreted as meriting the mutual use of the intimate singular. And
research among younger speakers of French, Italian, and German shows that the system is still
changing. In more and more relationships, in some countries more than others, solidarity is
winning out over power, and the equivalent to thou in those languages is being extended. In short,
people are rejecting a linguistic expression of inequality and at the same time excluding the
reciprocal expression of respectful distance. The pronouns of intimate equality are felt by young
people in Europe today to be the best means of expressing democratic sentiments.
We do not have the evidence to reconstruct such a shift in sixteenth-century England. We
do not know whether it was parents and children, or masters and servants, who initiated the
rejection of power-coding. But it is interesting that while the merchants, tradespeople, and professions were aping upper-class manners, they abandoned the means of marking power
relationships with those below them. It has been suggested that this was motivated by an
egalitarian ethic. More likely was it a reflex of middle-class insecurity. In sixteenth-century urban
society, particularly that of London, social relations were not fixed. With power and influence
increasingly identified with the entrepreneur, there was no means of knowing who was entitled to
you, and who to thou. The best solution was to stick to you, which would not offend.
The retention of thou in dialect may have been motivated by covert prestige. It is
noteworthy that it is still heard in northern England where the desire to maintain a regional
identity is strong. Whatever the reason, dialect speakers who use the pronoun enjoy a clear
advantage over speakers of the metropolitan variety. For the former, thou can be the norm; you
can be a special pronoun to establish social distance with outsiders. Or thou can be used to signal
extra intimacy.
Finally, it is worth commenting on the selection of thou (sometimes thee) as the mutual
pronoun of address among the Quakers. In that they chose the pronoun of lower-class
solidarity, the Quakers of the seventeenth century could be said to have anticipated the future
development in the other European languages. You was apparently too loaded with connotations
of class superiority: English people had managed with mutual thou/thee for centuries, and why
should they not continue to do so? Moreover, the pronoun had a long, unbroken history of use in
the domain of religion as it still does. It was perhaps this insistence of the Quakers, who were not
then considered to be as respectable as they have since become, that helped to stigmatise thou/thee
in the minds of many people. If thou was the pronoun of religious fanatics, subversives, and stableboys, sensible people might be wise to forget it!
SYNTACTIC ELABORATION AND SOCIAL PRESTIGE
We have seen that changes in grammar may be introduced, or extended, by upper-,
middle- or lower-class usage. The same is true for the process of syntactic elaboration,
particularly in the extension of use of the auxiliary verbs. Lower-class speech, for instance,
seems to have promoted do as a ‘dummy’ auxiliary. Already used as a substitute verb in
Anglo-Saxon (as in swa hie ar dydon, ‘as they before did’, where dydon stands for a
previously-mentioned lexical verb ricsian, ‘rule’), do came to be used in questions: it is not
difficult to imagine how a sequence like this could be queried with did they? This pattern
probably spread from the south-west, where it is recorded first; and by the sixteenth century,
do-questions were a feature of lower-class London usage. In Shakespeare, it co-exists, as a
marker of popular speech, with the older, upper-class inversion pattern, as in go you?. At this
time, also, do was spreading into the negative construction. Originally, I don’t go would have
been Ic ne ga (noht); from this arose I ne go not, then I go not, then I don’t go. Perhaps this
use of do was originally emphatic, as it is used today in declarative sentences -I DO go and
see him!; from there it may have been over-used, and subsequently become the norm. Today
do is usual in questions and negative constructions except where other auxiliaries like have,
can, are, etc., are present; and even then one of these, have, is yielding to the process of
extension. In the USA, do you have a pen?, no, I don’t is more common than the have you
(got) .. ., no I haven’t pattern heard in England, although here the do-pattern is also gaining
ground among the young.
Another development of do seems to be associated with the written English of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We find it used in declarative sentences, as in she doth
go, where no special emphasis seems to have been required. But the rise of this pattern is both
dramatic and short-lived, since it had begun to die out by the following century. The
explanation for this may be that do could be used to mark the tense of verbs which had no
morphological distinction between present and past, like put and cast; and also of those verbs
borrowed from Latin, like illuminate and imitate, which at that time were entering literary
English in enormous numbers, and at too fast a rate, it seems, to become rapidly assimilated to
the English tense-system.
Other extensions in the use of auxiliaries are also associated with writing. The earliest
English writing appears to show the influence of Latin structures. While Latin had verbal
inflexions which marked future tense, Anglo-Saxon had not, so scholars had to find other
ways of translating Latin future tenses into English. One solution was to extend sceal (modern
shall), a modal verb meaning ‘be obliged’, for this purpose. Similarly, the Latin pluperfect
tense came to be expressed using the past tense of the verb have, as in he had said. Originally
this meaning in Anglo-Saxon would have been conveyed lexically, using an adverb with a
simple past tense; so that he had said would have been he sœde œr, ‘he said previously’.
Such constructions were not only copied, or adapted, from Latin; increasingly they
came to be seen as ‘better’ than the corresponding English ones. By the end of the eighteenth
century the native English pattern of negation, as in I don’t know nothing, where negatives
are used cumulatively, had been stigmatised, since it did not conform to the Latin pattern. The
cumulative negative was declared illogical.
In Anglo-Saxon, the joining of clauses and sentences relied less on specific
conjunctions like when, before, although, while, etc., than on then (þa), and and; and often,
such units were not linked at all, but merely juxtaposed. We can demonstrate this by using
different ways of presenting much the same information:
(a) I was tired: I went to bed.
(b) I was tired, and I went to bed.
(c) Because I was tired, I went to bed.
Of these, (c) is sometimes described as being more explicit, in that the relationship
between the two ideas - tiredness and going to bed - is made logically dependent: the first idea
is subordinated to the second. Because I was tired can thus be called a subordinate clause,
and this kind of structure is much more typical of Latin-based style than the other two
examples. Of these (a) leaves the readers or listeners to work out the relationship between the
juxtaposed clauses for themselves: it is less explicit. This kind of construction, called
parataxis, is very typical of Anglo-Saxon, as is also the second, which can be called simple
co-ordination.
We can use all three models today, but it is the last one, (c), that is often more highly
valued than the others, because of the notion of explicitness. Thus, the ability to use
subordinate clauses has been related to more abstract, more sophisticated kinds of thinking.
Parataxis has sometimes been dismissed as vague or even naive.
In Bernstein’s works of the late 1960s and early 1970s, syntactical subordination, or
more properly, the capacity to use syntactical subordination, is considered to reflect logical
thought; therefore working-class children are disadvantaged at school because their speech
makes small use of this kind of grammatical pattern. When we inspect the other grammatical
habits that working-class children are alleged to use – short, simple, often unfinished
sentences, simple repetitive use of conjunctions (and, then, etc.), rigid, limited use of adverbs
and adjectives, use of the active rather than passive voice we find a list of features
characteristic of all speech, irrespective of education or class. Speech is necessarily less
‘discriminative’ than writing, since the ear can best process a much less ‘dense’ kind of
language than the eye. The ability to command the elaborated code – in the sense of being
able to use the features Bernstein lists for it – is really the ability to use the structures of
written English in your speech.
And since subordination is typical of formal, expository prose, we often find that
twentieth-century novelists, like Hemingway, try to cultivate a style which avoids it. By being
less explicit, a paratactic style also can be said to respect its readers by demanding that they
themselves share the burden of interpretation. In the traditional ballad, for instance, we find
the paratactic principle extended, so that line and stanza, narrative and dialogue, action and
scene, are juxtaposed without comment. Moreover, the proverb, with its simple structure
(more haste, less speed) is no less capable of expressing complex, even abstract thoughts than
more explicit, less elliptical language. The tendency for subordination to replace parataxis as a
dominant style should be seen for what it is: a matter of style, not linguistic progress,
whatever that might be.
Lecture 11
Linguistic Change in Progress:
Time changes all things:
there is no reason why language should
escape this universal law.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de Linguistique générale (1916)
If you ask native speakers of English how the language is changing today, after
hesitation they will probably mention new vocabulary, or possibly some changes in
pronunciation, but it is unlikely that grammar will appear on the agenda. This is probably for
two reasons. First, most native English speakers are ignorant about the grammar of their
mother tongue. Second, grammar is an aspect of language that changes slowly, so it is
popularly assumed to be unchanging, its rules set in stone. The grammar of standard English
keeps changing, as it always has. However, within one generation there are likely to be few
dramatic changes. Interestingly, changes in recent English grammar tend to follow particular
patterns, which we list as follows:
 Grammaticalization - Items of vocabulary are gradually getting subsumed into
grammatical forms, a well-known process of language change.
 Colloquialization - The use of written grammar is tending to become more colloquial
or informal, more like speech.
 Americanization - The use of grammar in other countries (such as the UK) is tending
to follow US usage.
Grammaticalization
About 500 years ago, there developed a new class of English words, now known as
modal auxiliary verbs. The main members of this class are can, could, will, would, shall,
should, may, might and must. They are called ‘modal’ because the meanings they express are
in the area of modality (including such notions as possibility, necessity, obligation and
prediction). These modals resulted from grammaticalization: after losing many of the forms
and functions of main verbs, such as the ability to have infinitive or participle forms, they
became special little grammatical items which normally have to be followed by a main verb.
Gradually over the following centuries, a new class of ‘modal verbs’ arose: they
include be going to, have to, have got to, want to, need to, be supposed to. Some of these semimodals, as they have been called, such as be going to, have to, need to and want to, are
becoming more frequent, especially in speech. Some of them have also been developing
shortened, elided forms in speech, as is suggested by the informal spellings gonna, gotta,
hafta and wanna. In casual conversation they are behaving almost like single function words.
For example:
I just don’t know how we gonna do this, (‘how we are going to do this’)
I gotta take this door to the dump. You wanna help me?
The meanings of these items are also gradually changing so that be going to (gonna) is
developing a more neutral future meaning, and so competing with will. Especially in spoken
American English, there is a strong preference for be going to.
The semi-modals are encroaching on the territory of the ‘true modals’ like will and
must. For example, have to is now at least as frequent in speech as must and both verbs
express the same concepts of obligation and necessity. The frequency of modals is generally
declining. Some modals, like shall, must and may, are becoming rare, especially in American
speech, and also in some other varieties, such as Scottish English. The decline of the modals
in the period 1960-90 was overall about 10 per cent in written English and more in spoken
English. But during the same period the loss of frequency of the rarer modals, like shall, was
up to 40 per cent in some cases.
In spite of all this, it is difficult to argue that the rise of semi-modals is triggering the
decline of modals, as modals are still much more common than semi-modals, especially in
written English. Grammaticalization is perhaps just one cause of a changing balance between
two methods of expressing modality. What we can observe today is significant in itself, but
appears to be only a stage in an evolution which has been going on for centuries.
Colloquialization
As a general rule, changes in the grammar of English seem to come from the spoken
language, then gradually spread into the written language. This appears to be what is
happening in the rise of semi-modals and the decline of modals, as both trends are more
advanced in speech. Looked at from the viewpoint of written English, this process can be seen
as an aspect of colloquialization – the process by which written language is influenced by the
norms of speech.
Written grammar affected by speech - likely examples of colloquialization (1960-1990)
Increasing use in written English of:
Examples
‘Semi-modal’ verbs
be going to, have to, need to, want to
Present progressive constructions
is walking, are eating, ant telling
Verb contractions and negative
it’s, we’re, they’ve, she’ll, aren’t, don’t
contractions
Relative clauses with that or ‘zero’
the shows that I enjoy, the shows I enjoy
Decreasing use in written English of:
Examples
Passive constructions
is eaten, was told, are divided (by ...)
Relative clauses beginning with wh-forms shows which I enjoy, those whom I (who,
whom, which) admire
As this list shows, colloquialization has both a positive and a negative aspect. The
negative side shows up when features of grammar typical of written styles become less
frequent in writing as if they are giving way to the pressure of more speech-based
constructions. However, both negative examples in the table (decrease of passives and of whrelatives) also have another explanation. Both have succumbed to usage gurus - people who
lay down the law about correct and incorrect usages. The passive has long been the target of
usage manuals which portray it as a barrier to clear communication in ‘plain English’. The
relative pronoun which has also given offence to those who regard that as preferable, except
when the relative clause follows a comma, expressing a ‘separate thought’. These prohibitions
largely come from prescriptive tradition in the US, where they are reinforced by publishers’
editorial practices. But they are now almost certainly being spread around the world through
the grammar-checking software of word processors.
Colloquialization is far from uniform in its effects. In one or two respects, it seems
that written language is resisting the movement towards speech, and even increasing the
distance between spoken and written language. An example of this trend is an increase in
writing of the occurrence of words of Latin or Greek formation: suffixes such as -ism, -ist, ion and prefixes such as trans-, inter- and hyper- are on the increase in writing, although a
trend towards speech would lead to their avoidance. Another example, probably connected
with the last, is a trend towards greater lexical density - towards packing more information
into a smaller number of words. We see this most characteristically in newspaper reporting
(especially in headlines), where a sequence of several nouns without any intervening words is
not unusual. Here are three different newspaper examples:
New York City Ballet School instructor
real estate tax shelter sales people
San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Executive Director Chuck Springfield
We could make the meaning of the first example more explicit and ‘spread out’ by
using prepositions like at, for, of: an instructor at the School for Ballet in the City of New
York.
The frequency of noun-noun sequences has increased quite substantially in written
language generally, not just in the press. Acronyms or alphabetisms -words built out of
initial letters of a longer expression - have also increased dramatically. These provide another
way of condensing complex information into a smaller compass, as we recognize from fairly
recent coinages which have become everyday words: DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and AIDS
(auto-immune deficiency syndrome), PC (personal computer), GM (genetically modified),
SUV (sport-utility vehicle).
An increase in the use of the ‘apostrophe-s’ genitive, at the expense of the
corresponding of-phrase, is another trend towards greater density of information. Notice the
greater compactness of workers’ compensation compared with the compensation of workers,
or of the bill’s supporters compared with the supporters of the bill.
In another direction, colloquialization seems to go with more liberal attitudes to
grammatical rules. We have talked about the eighteenth century as the high noon of
prescriptivism, when the language was extensively codified and leaders of opinion attached
great importance to ‘correctness’.But it is difficult, if not impossible, to suppress naturally
occurring linguistic habits. It seems that some time-honoured usages rejected by grammatical
authority ‘went underground’, surviving in the kind of language which was not subject to
close scrutiny. Typically, this was spontaneous spoken language, which is the kind of usage
benefiting from greater laxity – or perhaps ignorance – of grammatical ‘standards’. We find
that the use of pronouns like me and them after the verb to be – outlawed from the written
language – is now more acceptable: Hi, it’s me.
A: Who was that on the phone?
B: Marj and Bill.
A: Oh, I guessed it was them.
On a similar theme, Who do you trust? (George H. W. Bush’s election slogan of
1992) – where traditional grammar dictates whom – is less likely to raise eyebrows or hackles
nowadays, when people are more grammatically ‘laid back’. The opposite phenomenon from
It’s me consists of expressions like between you and I (where orthodox tradition dictates you
and me). It is interesting to note that Shakespeare was not averse to committing this
‘grammatical crime’ in dialogue passages:
All debts are cleared between you and I (Merchant of Venice III.ii.321)
But nowadays this kind of departure from strict grammar is commonplace, even in
writing. Still on the theme of pronouns, a singular use of they, long condemned by prescriptive
grammar, is making increasing inroads into the written medium:
Any fool can make up a story like that if they feel like it.
This breaks the rule which says that a singular cannot agree with a plural, but far from
being a recent ‘flaw’, it dates back to before Shakespeare. The growing entrenchment of this
form in modern written English, however, is evident in the occurrence since the 1970s of a
new pronoun, themself:
We are asking everyone to post a photo of themself on the notice board.
This is still only marginally acceptable, causing outrage in some quarters because it
yokes plural them with singular self in one word.
Americanization
We have already noted one or two examples of British English (BrE) following
American English (AmE) in the realm of grammar. First, the mandative subjunctive form
has been increasing from a very low ebb:
Hence it is important that the process be carried out accurately.
And, as we have seen in this chapter, the increasing use of semi-modals along with
the declining use of the modals seems to be a change where AmE is leading the way. The
same applies to the increasing use of contractions like don’t and it’s in written texts; also of
that- and zero-introduced relative clauses – the car (that) I saw – versus the declining use
of wh-relative clause – the car which I saw. In fact, the general picture is that AmE has been
showing a more extreme or advanced tendency of colloquialization than BrE.
We mention finally an American-led change in BrE that was almost complete at the
end of the twentieth century. The main verb have in BrE used to be treated like an auxiliary
verb, in being placed before the subject in questions and before not or n’t in the negative.
AmE, on the other hand, treated have as a main verb, using do-support (as it is called
technically) to form questions and negatives:
A
B
C
AmE (now also BrE)
BrE (more common than AmE)
BrE (now rare)
QUESTIONS
Do you have a pen?
Have you got a pen?
Have you a pen?
NEGATION
I don’t have any milk.
I haven’t got any milk.
I haven’t any milk.
The ‘American’ construction (A) has largely displaced the ‘British’ construction (C) in
present-day English. The middle construction (B) is found in both varieties, but less in AmE
than BrE. It is an informal construction, largely confined to speech.
Of special interest are now moving on to more social developments in the language,
reflecting human relations among its speakers. The claim is sometimes made that English is a
‘democratic’ language. It appears to lack the honorific forms that exist in other languages to
signal relations of superiority or inferiority, deference or familiarity, between speakers. For
example, languages such as Japanese and Korean have highly elaborate honorific systems
manifesting traditional respectful relations and hierarchical values in society. Such languages
also have special ‘humble’ forms, marking the lower status of the speaker. In most West
European languages apart from English, there is at least one honorific marker - the use of a
respectful pronoun very roughly comparable to you in Shakespeare’s English as contrasted
with the familiar pronoun thou. French has tu and vous; German has du and Sie; Spanish has
tú and usted. Standard English had more or less lost this distinction by 1660, so that the only
second-person pronoun in general use was you. Since then, respectful forms of second-person
address have been exceptional, almost fossilized, such as your Honour or your Worship
(addressing a judge) or your Grace (addressing a duke, duchess or archbishop) – expressions
ordinary citizens rarely, if ever, have occasion to use.
But this does not mean English is totally lacking in honorific forms. The address
forms Sir and Madam or Ma’am are, in grammatical terms, honorific vocatives. These are
getting rarer: apart from ritualized uses such as addressing officers in the armed services, their
typical recipients in Britain tend to be ageing and imposing-looking people. The typical users
of Sir and Madam, on the other hand, are service providers such as sales assistants in an
upmarket department store. However, an American correspondent writes that, in some areas
in the Southern US, people use Sir and Ma’am more often than in the North: ‘My cousins
(who grew up in Texas) had to address their parents using Sir and Ma’am. They couldn’t just
answer a Yes/No Question with a simple yes or no. They had to say Yes, Ma’am or No, Sir. In
other places throughout the U.S. I notice that Sir and Ma’am are still pretty commonly used
when a sales assistant is trying to get someone’s attention. It usually comes in the form
Excuse me, Sir/Ma’am.’
Unlike familiar pronouns such as tu and du, though, vocatives are optional elements in
any utterance. In this sense an English speaker does not have to ‘declare’ a particular
relationship with the addressee: the most common kind of utterance in English is one that has
no vocative. But vocatives can be used, where we wish, to signal the relationship between the
speaker and the hearer – which may vary from respectful distance to familiarity.
By far the most frequent kind of vocative is one which addresses the person by name.
And the choice of mode of address – such as using a first name (Mary) or a surname with title
(Mrs Mack, Doctor Ladd) – is a way of calibrating the relationship we want to establish, or
maintain, with the addressee. What has happened over the last hundred years or so is a
massive change in habits of address, moving from the more distant and respectful to the more
familiar and friendly end of the social scale. Generally, to be on good terms with someone in
English in the twenty-first century, one needs to be on first-name terms.
Names of people
The names people address us by form part of our sense of identity. There are several
different types of proper names used for individuals:
A. First names (also called given names or forenames): Alexandra, Alexander, Amber,
Benjamin, Pamela, William
B. Middle names: John Maynard Keynes, George Walker Bush (often reduced to an
initial: George W. Bush, hence humorously nicknamed W or Dubya, see p. 166)
C. Family names (also called surnames): Abbas, Brown, Cohen, Flanagan, Giuliani,
Kim, Lakoff, MacDonald, Smith
D. Nicknames are familiar or shortened forms of proper names: Fran for Frances, Liz for
Elizabeth, Dick for Richard. The ending -y or -ie adds a touch of friendly familiarity,
especially popular in a girl’s name: Jackie for Jacqueline. Nicknames can also be
descriptive or joky names, such as Curly for someone with curly hair - or alternatively,
with no hair at all.
Personal names are highly ‘personal’ and, mumbled at introductions, they are difficult
to catch, spell - let alone, remember - especially for non-native speakers who also find it hard
to know what nicknames go with what given names. Here’s an example from the famous
Kennedy family: Joseph, the father, was called Joe. His oldest son Joseph Jr. Robert was called
Bob or Bobby, and Edward is known as Ted. John Fitzgerald, who became the 35th President of
the United States, was known in the family as Jack. After his inaugural in 1961 President
Kennedy (often referred to as JFK), let it be known that he didn’t want to be known publicly
as Jack. Familiarity may not be desirable for the world’s most powerful person!
Speaking of names, it’s important to check how they are spelled - nobody wants to see
their names misspelled. In English there is often a bewildering mix of ways of spelling names
that are pronounced the same way: Stevenson or Stephenson, Davis or Davies, Catherine,
Katherine , Graham or Graeme, Leslie or Lesley, Geoff or Jeff, Frances (female) or Francis
(male). Another source of confusion is the existence of ‘unisex’ names: a person answering to a
name like Charlie, Chris, Robin and Sam can be either a man or a woman.
It seems that, recently, the whole ethos of forms of address in English (at least in
western or westernized English-speaking culture) has been moving towards eliminating
distinction and distance. No distinction means that the first-name relationship is ideally
reciprocal: you call me Nick and I call you Vicky. It often exists mutually even between an
adult and a child (though rarely when children address their parents). No distance means that
the relation seems close and friendly. Even on first meeting, people will often get on firstname terms, without going through a previous stage of addressing one another as
Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss X.
Another example of this trend is the popularity of the general plural vocative you guys
or guys in AmE, now catching on in other Inner Circle countries. Although originally used as
a term of address to males, it is now used generally to address people of either gender. Also,
an adult may address children as guys. This is approaching the logical endpoint of a
movement towards no distinction and no distance, where age and gender differences no
longer count: where all people are guys. In this respect particularly American English, has
been progressively avoiding expression of relations of overt inequality in society, whether
between male and female, senior and junior, old and young. Other linguistic habits
contributing to this egalitarian ethos are various indirect forms of command or request: for
example, utterances beginning Why don’t you or Do you want to appear to be suggestions or
invitations, but may really be disguised imperatives:
Why don’t you put this in the office for me?
Do you want to hold this for a minute, Josh?
This can be called a drive towards individualism – every member of society counts as
an individual, as first-name address acknowledges. An important point to make, though, is
that this trend in ‘overt’ democratization does not necessarily mean ‘real’ democratization.
Covert inequalities exist and are understood, even if they tend to be disguised.
Is English becoming a non-sexist language?
To the ordinary user, grammatical change seems imperceptible and beyond human
control – with one notable exception: since the 1960s, change has been taking place
consciously and overtly through the efforts of the women’s movement. Feminist campaigns,
particularly in the period 1970-90, have been directed against sexual bias in the language in
favour of men. The general goal was to make sure that women and men would be treated
alike, eliminating built-in tendencies in the English language to give prominence or
superiority to one gender at the expense of the other.
Consider this case: English has no gender-neutral pronoun for ‘he or she’, but
according to a longstanding tradition, he has been used for this purpose:
Every writer would like his books to be read.
This seems to make the assumption that all writers are male. To get rid of this gender
bias, various solutions have been proposed. One has been to invent a new pronoun, s/he, but it
is not obvious how this word should be pronounced, nor how it could replace the oblique and
possessive forms him and his. Another solution has been the use of a coordinated phrase: he
or she, him or her, or, reversing the order, she or he, and so on:
Every writer would like his or her books to be read.
This has caught on, particularly in academic writing and lecturing, but can be wordy
and awkward, especially if the coordination has to be repeated again and again. It has, though,
led to an interesting new formation: the coordinated reflexive form, himself or herself, tends
to be compressed into him or herself where the suffix -self is grammatically attached to the
whole phrase: [him or her]self.
Two other solutions have been more generally successful. One has been to favour the
singular use of they:
Every writer would like their books to be read.
Although condemned by purists as a grammatical mistake, this is getting more
generally accepted these days, and is even found in educational publications. Finally, the most
popular solution is probably a strategy of evasion. By recasting the whole sentence or passage
in the plural, we can avoid both the problem of gender bias and the problem of mismatching
singular and plural:
All writers want their books to be read.
Gender bias is also found in the area of vocabulary. English has a large number of
human nouns with common gender, which cause no problem, such as student, worker, doctor,
guest. But there are also nouns like spokesman and hostess which clearly declare themselves
as masculine or feminine. The problem with such items is that they bring with them a lot of
social and cultural baggage regarding typical roles of women and men. For example, in the
past, spokesmen have typically been male, in keeping with traditionally masculine centres of
power. Using the term spokesman where the gender is unknown can perpetuate this bias.
Once again, there are a number of different solutions, but the use of spokeswoman (female)
and spokesperson (gender-neutral) alongside spokesman (male) seems to fill the bill.
Words with overt female suffixes (-ess, -ette) are more discriminatory, because these
suffixes are typically added to masculine nouns (poet ~ poetess, actor ~ actress, usher ~
usherette), treating the female role as if derived from, and lesser than, the male role. In fact,
these gender suffixes have declined markedly in recent decades. The obvious solution here is
to use the word without its suffix as a gender-neutral term. A woman can be a manager, just
as a man can: the need for a separate feminine noun manageress is highly questionable. The
few -ess words which remain popular in common usage today are nouns where the demeaning
associations typical of nouns in -ess don’t seem to apply. This may be (a) because the role is a
historical or mythical one, like priestess and goddess, or (b) because the word refers to an
animal, like lioness and tigress, or (c) because the female role is distinctive and has
favourable associations, like princess, hostess and actress.
Today’s society objects to antiquated gender-biased attitudes. Stereotypes are preserved
through careless usage, although this may be due to ignorance rather than prejudice. When
Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969 he was first quoted as saying ‘That’s one small
step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ This quotation, although famous, is somewhat
difficult to interpret. According to one explanation, the radio transmission obliterated the
indefinite article: ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind’ would make
more sense. At the time Armstrong probably had other things on his mind, but had he been a
woman he might have preferred to use humankind, humanity or the human race instead of
mankind, which seems to allow no room in this epic achievement for the female of the
species. Some people find humankind a ridiculous word, although it has existed since the
seventeenth century. But there are other options: human beings, society, men and women.
Some people try to root out all words with the element man even in cases like manicure,
manipulate, manoeuvre, manual, manufacture, manuscript. But this is uncalled for, since in
these cases the element comes from manus which is the Latin word for ‘hand’ and has nothing
to do with English man.
In a world where there are at least as many women as men, even an unreformed sexist
will realize that traditional masculine job titles, such as foreman, spokesman, fireman,
businessman, can be both inappropriate and offensive. In many cases there are alternatives
which focus on the job and bypass the gender of the person doing it. In practice both
congressman and congresswoman refer to members of the House of Representatives,
although technically the terms could also be applied to members of the Senate. A genderneutral term is member of Congress.
A chairman may be either a man or a woman. To address a female person, Madam
Chairman is used in formal, official contexts. But those who find that chairman is charged
with undesirably strong male associations have the option of using chairwoman or
chairperson. The latter is particularly appropriate when the sex happens to be unknown, for
example when a post has yet to be filled: ‘A new chairperson will soon be appointed’. One
way to avoid the problem is simply to use the word chair - a common practice at international
conferences: ‘Address your remarks to the chair’, ‘Chair at the afternoon session: Professor
Anna Brown’.
Gender-neutral terms
Below are listed a few traditional job titles which have been, or can be, replaced by
gender-neutral terms. Some of the female words in square brackets are not often used.
Traditional male[or female] terms
Some gender-neutral terms
businessman [ businesswoman]
businessperson, executive, manager, entrepreneur
cameraman
camera operator
cleaning woman/lady
housecleaner, office cleaner, housekeeper, cleaner
clergyman
member of the clergy, cleric, minister, rabbi, priest,
pastor, rector, vicar
fireman
pre-fighter
forefathers
ancestors, forebears, antecedents
foreman
supervisor
housewife
homemaker
juryman
juror
layman
layperson, non-specialist, non-professional
mailman, postman
postal worker, mail carrier, letter carrier, mail
deliverer
man (in the generic sense)
human being, human, individual, person
man hours
working hours
man in the street
average person, ordinary person
man-made
manufactured, artificial, an artefact
policeman [policewoman]
police officer, law enforcement officer
salesman
salesperson, sales assistant, shop assistant
spokesman [spokeswoman]
spokesperson, representative
sportsman [sportswoman]
athlete, player, competitor, contestant, sportsperson
steward, stewardess
flight attendant
weatherman
meteorologist, weather officer
workman
worker, wage earner, employee
Frequently the changes introduced through the women’s movement have not so far
succeeded in ousting targeted usages, but have led to a more complex situation of what is
sometimes called divided usage, where a range of forms with differing associations is
available. It is difficult to say whether this fluctuating variation in usage is likely to continue
indefinitely, or whether, eventually, standard English will settle for one option or another as
the most widely acceptable. But the language has changed – in particular, the generic use of
he is no longer accepted by a wide range of native speakers of the language. There has never
been an English Academy to regulate the language, but we have now seen how a powerful,
committed change in public opinion can bring about a shift in the way the vocabulary and
grammar of English are used, even changing the use of core English words like he and man.
Electronic English
The greatest revolution affecting language use in the last twenty years is what we call
the e-revolution.
It is obvious that new electronic channels such as email and the World Wide Web
have brought an enormous quantitative increase in the usage of English around the world. It
can be said, in fact, that English had a headstart over other languages in this e-revolution,
partly because the Internet was tailor-made for a language using the roman alphabet with no
diacritics (like accents and umlauts), and English became the default language of the Net.
However, the electronic revolution has also boosted the use of other languages: even endangered languages can benefit from the Internet, through dispersed networks of users who can
now converse regularly around the world in a little-known tongue. Up to the late 1990s, it was
estimated that the majority of text on the Internet was in English. Since then, although the use
of English on the Net is still increasing immensely alongside that of other languages, the
proportion of English in relation to other languages has decreased. Manifestly, the electronic
revolution happening to English is also happening to other languages.
A more interesting issue is: How is the Internet affecting the language itself? What
many people have noticed is that the Net is extending the range of written language further
towards the pole of ‘Typical Speech’ in allowing a much more interactive, ‘on-line’ version of
written messages, for example in email, chat groups and Web logs. This shows up in an
unprecedented degree of colloquial informality and ellipsis on the computer screen. It also
leads to supplementary emotive means of communication, with symbols such as smiling faces
(‘smileys’) and other imaginative combinations of symbols from the regular QWERTY
keyboard.
This is not to deny that the Internet also fosters the dissemination of more formally
and traditionally constructed written texts, such as formal letters sent by email or Web pages
that have the character of legal or academic documents. Indeed, the Web provides by far the
largest and most varied collection of English texts that has ever existed.
David Crystal argues that the Internet amounts to a new medium for language use: that
alongside speech, writing and the third medium of sign language for the deaf, there is now a
further medium, Netspeak. This, he says, is ‘a development of millennial significance. A new
medium of linguistic communication does not arrive very often, in the history of our race.’
True. But without diminishing the importance of the e-revolution in language, we can
still argue that this revolution is not like the invention of writing – a totally new medium – but
more of a technological leap forward like the introduction of printing in the fifteenth century.
This had major repercussions on the language in spreading the availability of the written word
and stimulating the evolution of a standardized language. It may be that the e-revolution is
having even greater repercussions than did printing, and these show up in a radical extension
of the range of possibilities of written communication, so that in particular the vehicle of
writing invades a great deal of the territory of spoken communication without in any way
supplanting the use of speech. Interactiveness, emotive expression and on-line processing
were three of the features that distinguished typical speech from typical writing, and the
Internet enables users to go a long way towards attaining these features in the visual, written
medium. Communication in the electronic age seems to be extending its capabilities by leaps
and bounds – we recall here the new communicative opportunities of the cell phone (or
mobile phone), with the accompanying capability of text messaging. What we have said so far
has suggested that the e-revolution brings new ranges of variation in the use of language. We
must also take account of the way in which it has vigorously exploited and expanded the
resources of the English language. The vocabulary of English has been extended in many
ways. Here is a small sample:
Coinages of new words
blog (a shortening of Web log), geek, nerd, netiquette
Creating of new compounds
download, inbox, mailbomb, voicemail
Using specialized prefixes
e-mail, e-cash, e-commerce, e-courses, e-training
such as e- (‘electronic’) cyber- cyberspace, cyber-cafe, cyber-culture, multimedia, multi, and multi-, and suffixes like
tasking, multi-user, software, courseware, firmware,
-ware
freeware, spyware
Words converted from one
The following are converted from nouns to verbs:
class to another
bookmark, boot, e-mail, flame, messag(ing), text(ing)
New metaphorical uses of
browse, bug, chat, chip, client, cookie, dump, gateway,
existing words
hack, link, menu, portal, spam, surf, virus, wizard
Abbreviations, alphabetisms
Gb (gigabyte), IP (Internet protocol), FAQ (Frequently
and acronyms
answered questions), ROM (read-only memory), MUD
(Multi-User Dimension)
The most noticeable innovations of e-communication are often in the area of writing
conventions. Playing with the spelling of words and the visual forms of language generally
creates foregrounded, abbreviated or affective forms of written language. Unlike ordinary
written words, words in Netspeak can have internal capital letters and full stops which have
special functions in Web addresses, email addresses and the like (AltaVista, lastminute.com) as
well as symbols like @ (‘at’) and \ (‘backslash’) cropping up in unusual places:
lunch@Boots.yum was a clever advertisement for a café. These eccentricities have been
infiltrating playfully into other varieties of writing. So-called emoticons (‘emotive icons’)
find their way into e-mails and text messages, the most popular being the ‘smiley’:-) (a happy
face) and its opposite :-( (a sad face). But there is a large range of more exotic emoticons,
some building on these well-known ones, for example, :-)) for ‘very happy’ and :-)))))))) for
‘ecstatic’. Similar in spirit are impressionistic uses of repeated characters and capitalizations,
as in NOOooh!!!!! reEEALly???. These are the nearest equivalent written language has to
spoken-language features like voice quality, pitch range, and loudness – paralinguistic
dimensions that the human voice can draw on as an extra expressive channel of
communication. A few phrasal acronyms such as aka (‘also known as’), fyi (‘for your
information’) and btw (‘by the way’) have become widely used in workaday emails, but
glossaries of ‘Textspeak’ (the language of texting) give hundreds of other, more inventive
instances, building punningly on the phonetic quality of written symbols: for example, BCNU
for ‘be seeing you’, cu @ 7 for ‘see you at seven’, cul8r for ‘see you later’, ICQ for ‘I seek
you’.
People fear that these wayward practices will somehow undermine the standard
language and the educational goal of learning to write good English prose. But if we take the
view that Netspeak and Textspeak are essentially lively and versatile additions to the already
rich tapestry of English language varieties, there need be no fear that they will subtract from
the standard. In reality, the situation seems to be a mixture of pluses and minuses.
On the plus side, for a large proportion of young people using English, texting and
browsing the Web have become second nature, almost as natural as speech. This cannot but
ensure growing confidence in reading and writing, albeit of the racy vernacular variety of elanguage that is the written analogue of colloquial conversation. On the minus side,
educationists cannot help worrying that this vernacular writing will somehow become the
normal form of literacy for new generations of native speakers, and that the transition to more
formal literacy skills will become more difficult. Whatever will be the long-term outcome,
let’s finish by emphasising the positive: e-communication has brought to the English language
a welcome infusion of vigour and creativity.
Lecture 12
Americanisms and Americanization
Someone – and nobody seems to be sure if it was George Bernard Shaw, Winston
Churchill or Oscar Wilde – described the United States and Britain as ‘two nations divided
by a common language’. This saying is very popular, partly because it is witty and
paradoxical, and partly because it has a ring of truth. Every Briton who travels to the
United States, and every American who travels to Britain, is sure to come home with
stories of being astonished by strange usages or being laughed at for their own strange
usages, because of the differences between American and British English. This kind of thing
is often played up for humorous purposes. Bill Bryson says that in common speech, some
4,000 words are used differently in one country from the other. That’s a very large number
indeed. Some are well known on both sides of the Atlantic – lift/elevator, dustbin/garbage
can, biscuit/cookie -but many hundreds of others are still liable to befuddle the hapless
traveller.
He then presents a list of corresponding words in AmE and BrE, and challenges the
reader to cover up the left-hand column and think of the American equivalent for each British
word. Here is a shortened and re-ordered version of that list:
List A
List B
American
British
American
British
yard
garden
boxscore
baseball game summary
trunk (of a car)
boot
cabana
beach hut
VCR
video recorder
cheesecloth
muslin
zucchini
courgettes
crosswalk
pedestrian crossing
duplex
semi-detached house
downspout
drainpipe
station wagon
estate car
goldbricker
skiver
realtor
estate agent
ground round
best mince
pacifier
baby’s dummy
teeter-tooter
see-saw
List A on the left is different from List B on the right. Quite a few speakers of
British English will be familiar with the American meanings of the everyday words in List A.
On the right words are not exactly in the first rank of words of common speech that
British visitors need to master in the United States. Nearly half of the items in Bryson’s list
are in this category of rarely occurring words.
Contrary to the impression often given the differences between AmE and BrE
vocabulary are rarely so great as to cause serious misunderstanding. The 4,000 differences
Bryson mentions sound a lot, but this needs to be placed against the enormous size of
English vocabulary (there are over 600,000 different words in the latest version of the
Oxford English Dictionary, many of them, admittedly, obsolete). In fact, the travellers’ tales
of misunderstandings would not be so noticeable and amusing unless, as a rule,
Americans and Britons found themselves able to understand one another. Another point to
make is that very often the lists of equivalent items are misleading. Sometimes listed
AmE/BrE pairs are not true translations of one another: for example, cookies and biscuits
are somewhat different commodities. In Britain biscuits are small flat thin pieces of pastry,
as in chocolate biscuits, eaten as a snack; in the US biscuits are little breakfast breads and part
of a meal, not a snack.
‘Two nations divided by a common language’ – let’s trace the history of this idea. Is
it really true that AmE and BrE are so different? And if so, why don’t we consider them
different languages? There was a time, shortly after the Declaration of Independence, when the
patriotic founders of the American nation looked ahead to the time when AmE and BrE
would diverge and so become different languages. This hope was cherished by the great
dictionary-maker Noah Webster, who published his American Spelling Book in 1783, the year
of Independence, and whose name still lives on in the Webster dictionaries: the premier
lexicographic dynasty of the United States. But as time went on he changed his views and
recognized that the English language was in the New World to stay. This he implicitly
admitted in the title of his greatest work, published in 1828: An American Dictionary of the
English Language – America’s answer to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language
– which was enormously influential not only in spelling but in pronunciation.
Webster, ‘the schoolmaster of the Republic’, devoted his life to giving American
English an identity of its own. The reforms he promoted led to one of the most conspicuous
areas of divergence between AmE and BrE – differences of spelling. Webster’s spelling
proposals were widely adopted in the United States and produced such variants as labor (AmE)
vs. labour (BrE) familiar to today’s international student of English. Most of these changes were
undeniable improvements. But the reforms when adopted were more timid than Webster had
intended: today, the vast majority of English words are still spelled the same in AmE and BrE.
Some differences in spelling between American and British English
• In words of more than one syllable ending in -our in BrE, AmE omits the u;
AmE
BrE
behavior
behaviour
color
colour
favor
favour
humor
humour
labor
labour
There are exceptions, such as glamour in AmE, tenor in BrE.
• In words like theater, -er in AmE is often equivalent to -re in BrE:
AmE
BrE
center
centre
kilometer
kilometre
liter
litre
theater
theatre
The spelling theatre also occurs in AmE where it’s said to have ‘snob appeal’.
• Some words spelled -enise in AmE have -ence in BrE:
AmE
BrE
defense
defence
license (noun)
licence (noun)
• In verbs like travel (ending with an unstressed syllable vowel + consonant) the
British double the final consonant before -ing and -ed:
AmE
cancel: canceling, canceled
travel: traveling, traveled
Mainly BrE
cancelling, cancelled
travelling, travelled
program: programing, programed
programming, programmed
In BrE the spelling of program, except in the computing sense, is programme.
Notice also: traveler (AmE) vs. traveller (BrE)
• Nouns ending in -ogue in BrE are shortened to -og in AmE:
AmE
BrE
catalog
catalogue
dialog
dialogue
• In words from Latin and Greek, BrE keeps the spellings -œ- and -æ-; but sometimes
the AmE spellings with -e- are found in BrE too:
AmE
BrE
ameba
amœba
maneuver
manœuvre
encyclopedia
encyclopædia, encyclopedia
medieval
mediæval, medieval
• Verbs with the suffix -ize in AmE are often spelled -ise in BrE, although -ize occurs
in Britain too:
AmE
BrE
baptize
baptise, baptize
criticize
criticise, criticize
sympathize
sympathise, sympathize
regularize
regularise, regularize
Hundreds of verbs follow this pattern. But some verbs are always spelled -ise, in
both AmE and BrE: advertise, advise, arise, comprise, compromise, disguise, despise,
devise, disguise, exercise, improvise, revise, list; supervise, surprise.
• There are some spelling differences that are unique to particular words, for example:
AmE
ax, axe
check (in a bank)
draft (a current of cold air)
gage
gray, grey
curb (by the side of a road)
mold
plow, plough
pajamas
skeptical
story (in buildings)
tire (around wheels)
woolen
BrE
axe
cheque
draught
gauge
grey
kerb
mould
plough
pyjamas
sceptical
storey
tyre
woollen, woolen
From a present-day standpoint, there is no doubt that in spelling, as in other
respects, AmE and BrE belong to the same language. They are varieties, it is true, but the
differences should not be allowed to obscure their close similarity on many levels.
If we take “standardization pyramid”, at the top of it, we have something close to
an international standard of written English.
In science, on the level of serious
academic or informative writing, international standard English or world standard English
is taken for granted. Its spoken analogue also exists - for example, in TV broadcasts by CNN,
where the accent of the newsreader may be the only clue that points to a particular part of
the English-speaking world.
But as we move down the pyramid of standardization - to less standardized and
locally variable varieties - of course the differences begin to show. Big steps down the
pyramid are taken when we move from published printed communication to public spoken
communication (for example, in cinema and radio) and from there to private chat, in
conversational settings. Here we begin to meet noticeable differences between AmE and
BrE, not only in pronunciation and spelling but in vocabulary and grammar. Then, a
further move to the dialectal base of the pyramid will bring us to what sociolinguists call the
‘basilect’. Where unintelligibility sets in between American and British speakers, towards
the lower end of the pyramid, is also where there will be problems of comprehension if we
consider differences among American speakers or among British speakers within a single
country.
Looking at the top part of the pyramid, if we study the main standardized varieties
of AmE and BrE, we come to the conclusion that:
•
in grammar they are very similar;
•
in spelling they are very similar (in spite of those changes Webster
promoted);
•
in vocabulary they are different in some areas, but strikingly the same in
core vocabulary;
•
in pronunciation they are clearly different, but generally mutually intelligible.
A further factor we have to bear in mind is the continuing transatlantic drift by
which AmE habits are imported into the UK and into other English-speaking countries. The
lists of differences between American and British vocabulary published from time to time
have suffered from chronic obsolescence: they have begun to go out of date almost as
soon as they have been compiled. The most famous writer on this topic was H.L. Mencken,
journalist and iconoclast, whose book entitled The American Language went through several
editions and supplements between 1919 and 1948. The list of American-British differences
he published in 1936 included bakery, bank account, hardware (for British ironmongery),
raincoat, living-room and many more. But these are now totally normal words to use in
relevant senses in the UK.
The reason is simple: the British have been so busy borrowing linguistically from
the Americans that what was originally felt to be an Americanism has become thoroughly
at home in Britain. This happened over and over again in the nineteenth and (especially)
twentieth centuries, but after its adoption, naturally enough, a word’s American aura was
soon lost: it was no longer felt to be a foreign import. According to Mencken:
“When I became interested in the subject (... in 1910), the American form of the
English language was plainly departing from the parent stem, and it seemed likely that the
differences between American and English would go on increasing. ... But since 1923 the
pull of American has become so powerful that it has begun to drag English with it, and in
consequence some of the differences once visible have tended to disappear”.
The word Americanism has its own story to tell. It originated in the United States,
and its first user, John Witherspoon, defined it in 1781 as a ‘use of phrases or terms, or a
construction of sentences... different from the use of the same terms or phrases, or the
construction of similar sentences in Great-Britain’. The first Dictionary of Americanisms,
by the American John Pickering, published in 1816, portrayed them as provincialisms that
Americans should purge from their usage, in order to conform to the ‘English standard’ of
the old mother country. This attitude was not unusual in the early decades of the United
States. But from the middle of the nineteenth century things began to change: not only did
Americans grow bolder in asserting and justifying their right to bring innovations into the
language, but the British began to borrow more and more from the Americans.
This did not mean that the term Americanism lost its negative connotations. On the
contrary, in Britain Americanism was almost a synonym for ‘barbarism’ among
commentators – a hostile attitude that has persisted among many up to the present day,
although with decreasing influence. The irony, of course, is that once an Americanism
has become successfully established in British usage, it becomes ‘British’ and the
negative attitude disappears. Numerous linguistic imports have undergone this sea change:
dutiable, lengthy, bunkum and blizzard were early examples; later in the nineteenth
century arguments raged over advocate, placate and antagonize
The twentieth century has seen the American variant radio gradually displace
wireless, and American commuter become accepted in place of the long-winded season ticket
holder. Among usages to recently cross the Atlantic have been movie, guys (= ‘people’), I
guess (= ‘my opinion is’) and cool (= ‘superb, relaxed, fashionable’) – four familiar items
which are ‘classic’ Americanisms, but are nevertheless slipping more and more securely into
British usage. One of the odd consequences of this transatlantic drift is that the British make
use of American idioms whose literal meaning they are unlikely to know such as the three
strikes and you’re out (referring to a strict law enforcement policy) and in the right ball park,
a ballpark figure (referring to an approximation). These come from baseball, a sport that
has never caught on in Britain. But it is difficult to keep up with these changes: the
continuous and instantaneous flow of communication across the Atlantic, as elsewhere in the
world, means that new usages coming from the US can become almost immediately
assimilated. During the disputed presidential election of 2000, hanging chads, resulting
from defects in voting machines, suddenly became common currency in the British media, as
well as in the international media of CNN and the like. A similar story could be told of
WMD as an abbreviation for ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in the aftermath of the Iraq war.
The notion of ‘Americanism’ itself is a moving target, and it is no longer practical
to try to list Americanisms as in a glossary. Perhaps, indeed, the concept of ‘Americanism’
has had its day, and is giving way to the concept of ‘Americanization’ - the ongoing and
often unnoticed influence of the New World on the Old. But, of course, in this, Britain is no
different from other countries in importing linguistic cargo from America. There may be
exceptions to the trend; there may even be occasional borrowings from BrE in AmE, such as
an increasing use of shop to mean a small store. But at this point in history, Americanization
appears to be a global, and not just a transatlantic, phenomenon.
Yet not all features of American English become features of British English. A
challenging question is: why do some American-British differences persist indefinitely,
without the British usage giving way to the American usage? For example, there appears to
be little temptation for the British to adopt an American accent. Some small changes can be
observed (for example, the tendency for the word princess to be stressed on the first syllable
rather than on the second. Perhaps overall people’s pronunciation of their native language is
too intimately bound up with who they are: to change one’s accent is to change one’s
identity.
Borrowing of words from AmE has always been patchy. On the lexical level, many
persistent differences between AmE and BrE seem to be located in particular areas of the
vocabulary, such as transportation (AmE) (transport in BrE). Different terms referring to
aspects of the railroad (AmE) (railway in BrE) system are well known:
AmE
engineer
conductor
freight
one-way ticket
round-trip ticket
BrE
driver
guard
goods
single ticket
return ticket
Similarly, terms referring to cars and road travel are frequently different:
AmE
divided highway
gas, gasoline
gearshift
BrE
dual carriageway
petrol
gear lever
hood
license plate
muffler
overpass
truck
trunk
windshield
bonnet
numberplate
silencer
flyover
lorry
boot
windscreen
Some of the American terms here, though, are now competing in BrE with the
British equivalent: lorry and goods are fighting for survival against truck and freight.) Part
of the explanation for such differences is that rail and car travel originate from a period when
the United States and Britain were comparatively isolated from one another, both physically
and culturally: the later nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. After the
American achievement of independence in 1783 and the subsequent estrangement of the
countries, movements of people and communications across the Atlantic were relatively
infrequent. In 1889 the British author Rudyard Kipling claimed:
“The American I have heard up to the present is a tongue as distinct from
English as Patagonian”.
No doubt Kipling was indulging in a degree of humorous exaggeration. But it is difficult
to realize now that the vast majority of the inhabitants of Great Britain up to the early 1900s
had never met an American, and would not have even recognized an American accent. From
the early twentieth century, with the coming of the movies (BrE films, a term which is also
widely used in Hollywood), and the radio (BrE wireless is now dated) plus the intervention of
the United States in the First World War, this situation changed dramatically. Further
technological advances, such as air travel and television, led to an explosive increase in AngloAmerican communication. But by that time, the language of rail and road transport had
become well established and the differences institutionalized. The same period, incidentally,
also
saw
the
emergence
of
the
elevator/lift,
the
phonograph/gramophone,
the
subway/underground, all three named differently in AmE and BrE.
From the mid-twentieth century onwards, however, separate terms introduced through
technological advances and inventions seem to be less frequent, although it is noticeable that
when the British started to build large multi-lane highways like the German Autobahn, they
created the term motorway, instead of borrowing one of the existing American terms such as
expressway. Technological terms on both sides of the Atlantic seem to be converging on an
American standard, for example, in the prolific terminology of the computing and electronics
industry. Yet a recent interesting exception is the term cellular phone or cell phone (AmE)
which contrasts with the British mobile phone, popularly truncated to mobile.
Apart from everyday popular technology, the US and the UK also stick to
substantially different vocabularies for education: even the word school is interpreted
differently, to include tertiary education in the United States, but only elementary and
secondary (high school) education in the UK. The American education system blossomed
in the nineteenth century under German rather than British influence. Now, though, British
education is increasingly adopting American terminology: for example, in using graduate
students alongside post-graduate students, and semester or trimester alongside term.
Finally, many of the persistent differences between American and British usage
seem to belong to the domestic arena, or at least to things that relate to the family or local
life, rather than to the international sphere. These are stay-at-home words that tend not to
travel much through modern communications: an example is AmE faucet vs. BrE tap.
The Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling have been best-sellers on both sides of the
Atlantic, but it is significant that for the American edition of the book, some changes were
introduced to make these British books more intelligible to a young American readership.
A listing on the webpages of the Department of Translation Studies, University of Tampere,
Finland gives 203 changes in all (presumably this is an exhaustive list) made in the
‘translation’ of the British editions of the first four Harry Potter books. Here is a selection of
the changes made:
BRITISH EDITION
a lot
at weekends
barking
beetroot
bins
biscuits
Bit rich coming from you
bobbles
changing room
cinema
comprehensive
cooker
cracking
crumpets
cupboard
do his nut
dressing gown
dustbin
Father Christmas
football [the ball]
football [the game]
fortnight
glove puppet
go to the loo
AMERICAN EDITION
a bunch
on weekends
off his rocker
beet
trash-cans
cookies
You should talk
puff balls
locker room
movies
public school
stove
spanking good
English muffins
closet
go ballistic
bathrobe
trashcan
Santa Claus
soccer ball
soccer
two weeks
hand puppet
have a pee
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrEJ
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
good on you
group who ...
hamburger bars
he’s got flu
holidaying
ice lolly
it’s mad
jacket potato
jelly
jumper
lavatory seat
letter-box
mad
matron
motorbike
multi-storey car park
mum
mummy
newsreader
next day
next moment, Fred
Weasley had chucked
nobbled
notes
nutter
packet of crisps
pop my clogs
prevent them using
puddings
queuing
revising
roundabout
row /rau/
rowing /rauin/
sack [verb]
sellotape
September the first
set books
shan’t
sherbet lemon
straight away
sweets
tank top
timetable
tinned soup
toilet
torch
trainers
trolley
tuck in
twenty-foot-high
video
good for you
group that...
hamburger restaurants
he’s got the flu
vacationing
ice pop
it’s ridiculous
baked potato
jell-o
sweater
toilet seat
mail slot
crazy, insane
nurse
motorcycle
multilevel parking garage
mom
mommy
reporter
the next day
a moment later, Fred
Weasley chucked
clobbered
bills
maniac
bag of chips
kick the bucket
prevent them from using
desserts
lining up
studying
carousel
fight
arguing
fire [verb]
scotch tape
September first
course books
won’t
lemon drop
right away
candy
sweater vest
course schedule
canned soup
bathroom
flashlight
sneakers
cart
dig in
twenty feet high
VCR
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
[also BrE]
wardrobe
closet
waste bin
waste basket
[also BrE]
wellington boots
rubber boots
[also BrE]
whilst
while
[also BrE]
wonky
crooked
[also BrE]
*[also BRE] means that the American term is also used in UK.
American and British pronunciation: comparing GA with RP
It is now time to focus more on GA, using RP as a point of reference. Apart from differences in consonants and (especially) vowels, we also examine differences in stress and in
the pronunciation of particular words.
•
In GA the letter r is pronounced in all positions: heard /hз:rd/, speaker
/'spi:kәr/. This is a retroflex r in words like girl or bird, the /r/ is not so much a
separate sound, as a burr-sound colouring the whole vowel.
•
In RP, by contrast, r is not pronounced after a vowel.
•
In words such as after, aunt, can’t, dance, glass, last, path GA has the ‘front a sound'
/æ/ as in cat while RP has /a:/ - but GA has /a:/ in words with final r: bar /ba:r/, hard
/ha:rd/.
•
The RP diphthongs /ɪǝ, eǝ, ʊs/ are not found in GA, so the pronunciation is: beard
/bird/, hair /her/ and pure /pjʊr/.
•
In GA the diphthong /oʊ/ or the single vowel /o:/ corresponds to the RP
diphthong /ǝʊ/ in words such as both, rose, grow.
Accents with r pronounced after vowels are called rhotic (after the Greek letter rho).
The interesting thing about rhotic accents is that they are associated with different attitudes
in parts of America and Britain. In England the rhotic accent of the West Country is under
threat as the influence from RP, Estuary English and other non-rhotic accents spreads more
widely: the stereotyped user of the West Country burr is an agricultural worker, a
‘country bumpkin’, in contrast, in the eastern United States, it is the non-rhotic accent
that is losing ground and prestige. In a famous study of speakers of different classes in New
York City, the great American sociolinguist William Labov found that the traditional nonrhotic accent (memorably mocked in such New Yorker spellings as goil for ‘girl’ and woiks
for ‘works’) was used less by salespeople in ‘upmarket’ stores like Saks than in ‘downmarket’
stores like Klein’s. Moreover, people when asked to repeat a phrase would introduce the r
in a more careful pronunciation. Labov also observed that younger people used the r
pronunciation more than older people. This suggested a declining trend in the use of the
traditional New York r .
In all the above differences, GA reflects an older pronunciation; RP shows
innovations that took place in Britain after the founding of the American colonies.
•
GA has a longish /a/, corresponding both to the short RP-vowel /ɒ/ in words like
bomb, bottle, cod, spot, and to the long RP-vowel /ɔ/ in words such as bought,
daughter, law, laundry, saw, tall, water.
•
GA has /u:/ (not the /ju:/ often found in RP) in words such as due, new, suit, tune,
pursue, resume: ‘doo’, ‘noo’, ‘toon’ etc. Yet the /u:/ pronunciation (known as
yod-dropping) is by no means unknown in England, where /su:t/ for suit is now
more common than /sju:t/. (In some parts of England, such as East Anglia, yoddropping is even more widespread than in the US.)
•
In GA the t-sound between vowels is pronounced more lightly than in RP and
tends to sound like a quick /d/ (‘a voiced tap’). This means that writer and rider,
latter and ladder are pronounced the same. We symbolize this American feature
phonetically as /D/.
•
Like the Scots and the Irish, most Americans distinguish between witch /wɪtʃ/ and
which /hwɪtʃ/, weather /'weðǝr/ and whether /'hweðǝr/ - they pronounce /hw/ in
words spelled with wh. In RP, however, the single consonant /w/ is generally used
in both witch and which, weather and whether.
•
Adjectives ending in -ile usually have a reduced ‘schwa’ vowel /ǝ/ in GA, but not in
RP:
•
GA
RP
docile
/'da:sǝl/
/'dǝʊsaɪl/
fertile
/'fɜ:rDǝl/
/'fɜ:taɪl/
fragile
/'frædʒǝl/
/'frædʒaɪl/
hostile
/'ha:stǝl/
/'hɒstaɪl/
missile
/'mɪsǝl/
/'mɪsaɪl/
It is worth noting differences in assigning stress between GA and RP. In words
ending in -ary, -ery, or -ory GA has a full vowel with secondary stress (indicated by ),
while RP has a reduced schwa vowel, or else the vowel may not be pronounced at
all. This is signalled below by the raised symbol 3:
GA
RP
commentary
/'kamǝnteri/
/'kɒmǝntǝri/
cemetery
/'semǝteri/
/'semǝtǝri/
inventory
•
/'ɪnvǝn tɔri/
/'invǝntǝri/
In French loanwords GA often assigns stress to the last syllable, as in the original
French word:
•
GA
RP
attaché
/æDǝ'ʃeɪ/
/ǝ'tæʃeɪ/
ballet
/bæ'leɪ/
/'bæleɪ/
detail
/dɪ'teɪl/, /'diteɪl/
/'di:teɪl/
frontier
/frʌn'ti:r/
/'frʌntɪǝ/
In some polysyllabic words, there is variation in the placing of the main stress. In
GA there is usually only one option, but in RP, the ‘American’ pronunciation coexists with a ‘British’ pronunciation:
•
MAINLY AmE
BrE ONLY
MAINLY AmE
BrE ONLY
applicable
aristocrat
controversy
applicable
aristocrat
controversy
fragmentary
hospitable
premature
fragmentary
hospitable
premature
Apart from such general differences in pronunciation, certain particular words
are pronounced differently in GA and RP. Some of them are listed below.
Different pronunciation of some individual words
English word
advertisement
GA
RP
ædvǝ:r'taizmǝnt
ad'vɜ:rtismǝnt
ate (past of eat)
et, eɪt
buoy
eɪt
'bu:i
cafe
kǝ'feɪ
clerk
klɜ:rk
'kæfeɪ
kla:k
data
'dæDa, 'deiDǝ
'deɪtǝ
dynasty
'daɪnǝsti
'dɪnǝsti
garage
gǝ'ra:ʒ
'gæra:ʒ
inquiry
'ɪnkwǝri
ɪn'kwaɪǝri
laboratory
'læbrǝtɔri
lǝ'bɒrǝtri
leisure
'1i:ʒer
'lever
'leʒǝ
lever
lieutenant
lu:'tenǝnt
lef'tenǝnt
moustache
'mʌstæʃ
'nefju:
mǝ'sta:ʃ
'nefju:, 'nevju:
nephew
bɔɪ
'li:vǝ
process
'prа:ses
progress
'pra:grǝs
route
raʊt, ru:t
'prǝʊgres
ru:t
schedule
'skedʒʊl
'ʃedjʊ:l, 'skedʒʊl
shone (of shine)
ʃoʊn
ʃɒn
tomato
tǝ'meɪDoʊ
vase
veɪs
tǝ'ma:tǝʊ
va:z
vitamin
'vaɪDǝmɪn
'vɪtǝmɪn,
zi:
'vaɪtǝmɪn
zed
'zi:brǝ
'zebrǝ, 'zi:brǝ
z (the letter)
zebra
'prǝʊses
Presidential voices
In his book Presidential Voices, the American linguist Allan Metcalf discusses speaking
styles from George Washington to George W. Bush – how American presidents have spoken
to the American public and how the American public has wanted its presidents to speak:
It’s an understatement to say that the Atlantic Coast remains politically and economically
influential to this day. But a funny reversal has happened: Instead of the East serving as a model of
cultivation for the rest of the country, influencing would-be cultivated speakers from other areas to
drop their r’s, as used to be the case, the rest of the country now is influencing many Bostonians,
New Yorkers, and Soutlierners to pronounce their r’s. This reflects a shift in prestige from rlessness: Where once it seemed elegant to drop the r, now it seems pretentious, at least for those
who grow up r-ful.... Like other Americans, presidents now are normally r-ful.
According to John Wells, R-Dropping ‘has remained in American eyes an anglicism,
an easternism, or a southernism’.
President George W. Bush’s nickname is Dubya, which comes from his
pronunciation of his middle initial. This extract from Metcalf’s book shows how
experienced speakers adapt their speaking styles to formal and informal situations:
Dubya’s speech is r-ful. His part of Texas, like Lyndon Johnson’s, and like Clinton’s
Arkansas, is well beyond the limits of r-less Southern territory. But more than Johnson’s, though
less than Clinton’s, Bush’s speech has the Southern and Texan ah for i. It’s not pure ah in words
like lives and child and mind, but ifs not a strong Northern long i either. He also has a folksy
style that sometimes changes -ing to -in’ in words like talkin’ and gettin’, and that leaves out
some syllables and consonants. He will say lemme and gotta and gonna – not in prepared
remarks, but freely in press conferences and interviews.
American vs. British grammar
In the standard language, there are only slight differences in grammar between
American and British English. Gunnel Tottie writes: ‘most of the time, Americans and
British speakers have the same grammars, with the same inventory of forms and the same
rules, but that application of the rules differs between the dialects’. Perhaps the most
noticeable difference of form is the American word gotten, as a past participle of get: ‘She’s
gotten into trouble in school’ where, in BrE, got would be used instead.
Other differences are found in meaning and in the way grammatical forms are used.
For example, AmE has a useful construction to refer to a period of time:
The tour lasted from May through August. [AmE]
The tour lasted from May to August. [BrE]
In AmE, through in the sense of ‘up to and including’ is crystal clear, while in the
BrE construction, it is open to doubt whether August is included. To clarify this, inclusive
can be added: from May to August inclusive.
In the written language, grammar often involves people in problems of ‘correct’ and
‘incorrect’ usage, and arguments about which of two or more choices is preferable. One of
the observations made about grammar is that American users are more ‘grammar
conscious’, and more careful in following grammatical rules. Thus an American visitor
might flinch on seeing the following headline in a British newspaper:
ARSENAL DEFEAT MANCHESTER UNITED
This appears to break the rule of agreement: because Arsenal is a singular noun, it
should be followed by a singular verb: defeats. However, in BrE a football (soccer, that is)
team can be treated as plural, which is not wholly unreasonable as each side has eleven
players. In a similar way, singular collective nouns such as team, audience, board,
committee, government, the public can be treated as plural in BrE, whereas the singular is
normal in AmE: ‘The committee has voted in favour of the bill’.
Another point where AmE seems to be more ‘correct’ is the choice of verb
construction in an example like this:
[a] They insist that she accept the offer, (preferred in AmE)
[b] They insist that she should accept the offer, (getting unacceptable in AmE)
[c] They insist that she accepts the offer, (not accepted in AmE)
This construction is found with verbs like insist, recommend and suggest; also with
some nouns like recommendation and some adjectives like important:
There is a proposal that this tax be reduced.
It is important that every house have its own water supply.
AmE has a preference for the subjunctive verb, as in [a]. BrE nowadays treats [a] and
[b] as more or less equal options, whereas AmE nowadays avoids this ‘quasi-subjunctive’ use
of should. The third option [c] is found in BrE, but is avoided in AmE. Once again, AmE
seems careful of its grammar, using the traditional construction [a]. This subjunctive, which
has been declining over the centuries, became virtually obsolete in BrE around the 1950s. It is
an interesting case of reimportation – like the expression I guess which Chaucer used and
which survived in the United States – and is now being borrowed in BrE. In both cases the
New World has preserved an older usage now making a comeback in Old World English.
Contrary to belief, the subjunctive is not on its deathbed in Britain, but is being resuscitated.
This is a case where an Americanization process seems to be affecting BrE grammar.
However, the idea of the Americans being more ‘grammar conscious’ doesn’t always
hold up – at least not in the spoken language. Americans are more likely to use adjective
forms as adverbs, a habit which is frowned on as non-standard in Britain:
They pay them pretty well.
They pay them pretty good.
You’ll have to speak slowly.
You’ll have to speak slow.
She’s awfully thin.
She’s awful thin.
I certainly hope it’s temporary.
I sure hope it’s temporary.
Here the left-hand examples show a standard use of adverbs like well, while the righthand ones show matching adjective forms which would be considered non-standard in BrE,
but are common and relatively acceptable in spoken AmE. Another case where AmE seems
more ‘broad-minded’ in interpreting grammatical rules is the use of like as a conjunction,
introducing a clause with its own verb:
It seems like we’ve made another mistake.
Looks like the weather might be decent.
In standard BrE as if would be preferred to like here. Like as a conjunction is
traditionally judged to be a non-standard construction.
When we look at dialectal variations, one of the most interesting features of American
dialect grammar is the use of second-person plural pronouns like you all in the South.
Because of the demise of the second-person singular pronoun thou in early Modern English,
you is the only pronoun for the second person in standard English today. Whether you are
addressing one person or more than one, there is no second-person counterpart to the firstperson distinction between I and we. So there is a kind of semantic gap: how can we make it
clear that when we say you, it refers to all the people present, or just one addressee? This
doesn’t usually cause problems, but it’s fascinating that two American dialects have come up
of with a plural form of you: you all (pronounced and often written y’all) belongs to the
South, and yous (or youse) belongs to the Northeast, especially New York City: ‘I’ll see y’all
later’, ‘How much did yous want?’ Y’all is held in high regard in the South, and cannot be
considered non-standard. Yous is less acceptable, but has a dialect provenance that goes back
to Ireland and some other parts of the British Isles. In spoken AmE generally it is noticeable
that another plural of you is making headway: you guys. As guys is now a very general
informal term to use for ‘people’, whether male or female, old or young, the combination you
guys means ‘you people’, but it is so commonly used that it almost seems to have taken over
the grammatical role of a second-person plural pronoun. Yet in a more formal setting, you
folks or you people might be used instead.
Some other grammatical differences between
American and British English
In addition to such features as the use of gotten already mentioned, AmE and BrE
differ in grammar in these ways:
•
In AmE the past tense rather than the perfect can be used for the recent past: Dotty
(has) just finished her homework. AmE often omits the has here. BrE prefers the
perfect, in cases like this. Compare: Did you eat yet? [AmE], Have you eaten yet?
[AmE and BrE].
•
Prepositions are sometimes used differently in AmE and BrE. Out and off of are
commonly used as prepositions in spoken AmE: I always look out the window (BrE
usually out of the window); He wants to get off of the sofa (BrE usually off the sofa).
•
AmE more freely allows past tense forms like:
dove (alongside dived), as in ‘She dove under the table’
fit (alongside fitted)
pled (alongside pleaded)
rung (alongside rang)
sung (alongside sang)
sunk (alongside sank)
snuck (alongside sneaked)
swum (alongside swam), as in ‘Dad swum across the lake’
AAVE - Black English - Ebonics
In the United States, many blacks speak a form of English which differs sharply from
American Standard English, sometimes to the point of being misunderstood. A sentence like
‘Dey ain’t like dat’ can easily be misinterpreted as ‘They aren’t like that’ while it actually
means ‘They didn’t like that’. Language can be a class-marker, and those who do not meet the
general American standard are often branded as underachievers. There are different opinions
about how this variety, commonly referred to as Black English, should be regarded. Is it a
language? A dialect? A form of slang? An accent, or what? And how should the school
system and society at large deal with this language issue? Should it be used and taught in
school, or should students speaking this tongue be taught to adapt to the standard language?
How does the low status commonly accorded to this variety affect the prospects of such
students to function in a society dominated by speakers of a socially accepted standard
language?
The term preferred by linguists to denote the variety of English spoken by many
African Americans is African American Vernacular English, abbreviated as AAVE.
Common but more controversial terms are Black English and Ebonics (from ebony). Black
English can be controversial because not all blacks use AAVE: many are speakers of standard
American English. Ebonics is controversial because it is associated with the claim that AAVE
is a distinct language from English.
In 1996 the Oakland School Board in California decided to recognize the language
variety spoken by many African American students and to take it into account in teaching
Standard English. The students’ home language was to be accorded the status of a language
separate from English, rather than a variety of vernacular English. In this school district some
27,000 students were Black and AAVE was their ‘primary language’ – the variety of English
they had learned from their parents and used in the home and with their friends. The School
Board thought that the students’ education would improve if their ‘primary language’ was
accepted as their own school language. But this suggested reform caused enormous
controversy. If implemented, the reform could have led to a situation where students did not
acquire the language of the larger community.
In fact, the linguistics experts in the United States supported the view that AAVE was
not a distinct language, although it was recognized that AAVE has features derived from West
African languages which reached American through the slave trade. Eventually the resolution
of the Oakland School Board was overturned., but it is of interest in this regard to read the
carefully worded resolution of America’s most influential body of linguists, the Linguistic
Society of America.
Linguistic Society of America (LSA): resolution on the
Ebonics issue (extract)
The variety known as ‘Ebonies’, ‘African American Vernacular English’ (AAVE),
and ‘Vernacular Black English’ and by other names is systematic and rule-governed like all
natural speech varieties. In fact, all human linguistic systems – spoken, signed, and written are fundamentally regular. The systematic and expressive nature of the grammar and
pronunciation patterns of the African American vernacular has been established by numerous
scientific studies over the past thirty years. Characterizations of Ebonics as ‘slang,’ ‘mutant,’
‘lazy,’ ‘defective,’ ‘ungrammatical,’ or ‘broken English’ are incorrect and demeaning.
To illustrate the ‘systematicity’ emphasised by the LSA’s resolution, here are some
grammatical differences between AAVE and Standard English:
•
Speakers use multiple negation, also called ‘double negation’: He didn’t do nothing
instead of He didn’t do anything or He did nothing. (Such double negation is also
common in many non-standard English varieties, in the US, in the UK, and
elsewhere.)
•
The verb is often used in its base form where standard English has a different form,
for example They be driving instead of They are driving and She like it instead of
She likes it.
•
The verb be or one of its forms is omitted in sentences like She busy, instead of She
is busy.
•
Be done occurs instead of will have done in expressions like We be done this job
tomorrow.
•
It replaces there in a sentence like It’s no gas in the tank instead of There’s no gas
in the tank.
•
The past tense form went replaces the past participle gone: we find The students
had went to the gym instead of The students had gone to the gym.
Vocabulary also differs from standard AmE. New uses of words can often be traced
back to black jazz musicians and the culture of popular music: bad meaning ‘wonderful,
attractive, sexy’, mean ‘excellent, skillful’ (a mean game), wicked ‘strikingly good, effective’
(a wicked solo). Yet many such words and expressions of African American origin are now
part of mainstream American English, and indeed have become common colloquialisms
throughout the English-speaking world: for instance, chill out ‘relax’, gig ‘job’, cool
‘excellent’. A sample of idioms:
Stop bugging me. ‘Don’t bother me’
Catch you later. ‘Good-bye, speak to you later’
Get out of my face. ‘Leave me alone’
Get real. ‘Face reality’
The pronunciation of AAVE has some characteristics like those of the Southern accent
(see pp. 81-2), and some characteristics shared by Creoles, such as Jamaican Creole. This is
not surprising in view of the history of a black population tracing its ancestry back to slavery
in the southern states and ultimately to West Africa. ‘Southern features’ include the omission
of r after vowels, and the simplification of the /aɪ/ diphthong in high to /a:/ ‘hah’. The
features shared by Creoles include the omission of consonants at the end of a word: chil’
instead of child, wes’ instead of west, and so on; also, the replacement of the ‘th’ sounds by /t/
or /d/ (for example dat for that) or sometimes by /f/ or /v/ (for example bruvver for brother).
But such features are also found in white varieties of pronunciation, so it is too easy to
suggest a direct link between AAVE and creoles.
If we accept the LSA’s view that AAVE is a variety of English, rather than a separate
language, it is easier to explain a continuum of usage linking it to standard English.
Nevertheless, for many black speakers, there is a sense of being bilingual – of being able to
switch from the variety associated with ethnicity to the standard variety of AmE. It has been
observed that, generally, black speakers are moving closer to standard AmE, but also that
some young speakers are using more characteristic AAVE forms than their elders, as if to
emphasise their ethnicity.
Educationally, in the United States, as elsewhere in the English-speaking world, there
are benefits in maintaining vernacular speech varieties just as there are different benefits in
acquiring and using standard English. So the enlightened solution is emerging whereby the
study and awareness of dialectal varieties and minority languages goes hand-in-hand with the
acquisition and study of the standard language. In upholding ‘language rights’, the aim is to
cultivate, and welcome, linguistic diversity – above all in a country like the United States,
with
such
an
ethnically
and
linguistically
diverse
population.
Minority populations in the United States
In 1492 Christopher Columbus set out from the Canary Islands believing that the earth
was round and that he could reach the East by sailing West. To his dying day, he was convinced
he had found the sea route to the Indies. The people on the Caribbean islands that his ships
visited he called Indios or Indians. Today the word Indian is ambiguous in that it can refer either
to a person from India or to a person who belongs to the indigenous population of the Americas.
In the latter sense, Indian is firmly rooted in such common terms as Plains Indian, French and
Indian War, and Indian Territory and the term is in continuing use among American Indians
themselves. It is however potentially offensive and is these days replaced by Native American.
Recent surveys show that most Black Americans prefer the term African American to
Black, and it is widely used in the media. The term negro (from the word which means ‘black’
in Spanish and Portuguese) is however seen as offensive and can be used only in a historical
context such as the slave trade.
Hispanic and Latino, though often used interchangeably in American English, are not
identical terms. Hispanic, the term adopted by the US government for official documents, is by
many considered inaccurate (because of the suggestion that it refers to people whose ancestors
came from Spain). Among the multicultural population of Latin American origin living in the
United States, the most frequently used term is Latino (for male) and Latina (for female). A
third term, Chicano/Chicana (an alteration of mexicano), is more politically charged and can
nowadays have associations of political activism.
White is still used for Americans of European extraction, but Caucasian often appears in
the media and in legal jargon. Still, there is considerable confusion over the designation white or
Caucasian. Increasingly, the term white is becoming a default category, denoting that part of the
population not covered by the following classifications: Native Americans, African Americans,
Hispanics, East Asians, Pacific Islanders, and other ethnic communities.