Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (94 page)

One possible solution that never seems to have suggested itself in England was for different dialects to become standard for different types of writing, although we have seen that this is what had happened in the early days of Greek literature, and to some extent also in Iberia, when Portuguese developed a role as the vehicle of love poetry, even in Spain. It would have been conceivable, for example, that the success of ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’, and ‘The Fox and the Wolf, two beast dialogues in verse of the thirteenth century, might have made Southern English the preferred language for this type of conceit. But nothing like this ever happened. Instead, a single dialect came to be preferred for all.

William Caxton, the first English printer and publisher, faced the problem in the most extreme form, and was highly influential in solving it. We can predict what the answer would be: overwhelmingly (as we shall note in Chapter 13, p. 529) the dialect spoken in a capital city has become the standard for its national language. Before declaring his policy, Caxton did point out the predicament:

Caxton, then, claimed to be following a classic English policy of reasonable compromise. But what he was actually doing was converting texts into London English. This is clear, for example, in the passage that begins this section, where the text that John de Trevisa had originally written is set out above the version published a century later by Caxton. Examined closely, it is a fairly slight set of changes—here using
they
for
hy
, eliminating the verbal ending -
ep
in the plural, and replacing b and z throughout with th and gh—but it is still amazing what a difference it makes in bringing a text into the ambit of readability for a speaker of modern English, even now, some five hundred years on. Standard English, as we now know it, still bears the mark of those decisions taken by Caxton and his contemporaries.

Once this decision was taken, the growing availability of printed literature, in concert with growing powers of literacy among the public, strongly reinforced use of the particular dialect that was being printed. It helped that the main sources of book-writing in English, Oxford and Cambridge, were also located in the same broad dialect area, often known as southern West Midlands.
^*
Printing, once enough people could read and did read, became the first of the mass media, with the polarising, ‘winner takes all’ effects now familiar from TV culture. People inevitably learnt from the books they read how English should be written, and the King’s English thereby became the people’s English too, at least on the page. ‘The English tongue’, for the first time, was being defined.

This process was not confined to English. Almost precisely comparable processes of language definition were under way at the same time for other languages of western Europe, notably French, Spanish and German, which in speech had been at least as dialectally riven as English. French typographers in the first half of the sixteenth century begin to give rules for spelling and use of accents, beginning the task—one never completed—of pruning the vast numbers of consonants traditionally written by purists but never pronounced in that language. Spanish, whose pronunciation had changed less since it had been Latin, could afford to be more rigorously phonetic; but the existence of Nebrija’s 1492 grammar of Castilian meant that there was a basis for excluding forms characteristic of other dialects, particularly the closely related Aragonese.

The comparison shows that political unification was in no way essential to the definition of a national language in this natal age for print literature. The lands where German was spoken had no single government. Nevertheless, in 1522 Martin Luther, a native of Lower Saxony and Thuringia, brought out his translation of the New Testament into his own German, aspiring all the while ‘to be understood by the inhabitants of Germany High and Low’. He added the Old Testament in 1534. Through the popularity (and excellence) of his work, he succeeded in establishing standard German in the image of his local dialects. Local editions of the Bible were made in farther parts of German-speaking territory, in Basel, Strasburg, Augsburg and Nuremberg, but localised only to the extent of adding glossaries of Luther’s more distinctively westerly terms; and for the first time, whole grammars of the German language began to be written, explicitly based on Luther’s usage.
¹³
Thus was
Hochdeutsch
defined.

The Bible was cardinal also in the definition of English. Evidently, the explosion of print literacy in the early sixteenth century was a major support to Protestant ideas, which were rocking western Christianity at exactly this time. Luther was, after all, only defining the German language as a byproduct of his passionate concern that the word of God be available directly to everyone, not just the learned. Readers of English were just as avid for this boon; indeed, such enthusiasm went back to 1382, when John Wyclif’s translation had been put into circulation through handwritten volumes, only to be rigorously suppressed in 1407–9: there is always a party who believes that great blessings must be distributed only under rigorous supervision, and this view largely prevailed until the end of the fifteenth century.

A series of English-language Bibles came out in print in the sixteenth century, led off by William Tyndale’s 1525 New Testament.
¹⁴
They were at first seditious documents, of course; but none the less popular for that. By the reign of Elizabeth, 1558–1603, the right to read the Bible in English
^*
was firmly established; and with it, perhaps even more important as a text that everyone was reading, the Book of Common Prayer. Then in 1611 the King James Bible, produced by a royal committee, established the definitive text of the Bible, as it would be read in English for the next three centuries, a single work common to ten generations of English-language Christians.

With such a text justifying and fulfilling their increasingly widespread literacy,
¹⁵
speakers more and more had a clear and distinct idea, indeed a single concrete model, of the English language in use. This model was soon to be transported to the uttermost parts of the earth.
^†

What kind of a language had English become? This was to become a question fraught with global implications. But it is a particularly hard one for an ordinary native speaker of the language to appreciate. The architecture of a language is invisible for the same reason that a conjuring trick deceives: by force of habit, everyone’s attention is on the apparent business in hand, not its means of execution. Even when the means is singled out, and a poet describes his craft, or a critic draws attention to the composition of a text, there is still a tendency to take the links between sounds and word, phrase and object, utterance and thought as either too obvious to mention, or totally mysterious. If language head has its reasons, the literary heart knows little of them, and cares less. Speakers and writers, listeners and readers deal deftly, and often intuitively, with outcomes they all accept and recognise, in a medium that is largely unanalysed—much as they breathe, digest and regulate their body temperatures.
^*

Nevertheless, there are properties of English that make it the language it is, and no other. Most of these were already present in the sixteenth century. From the perspective of the world’s plenty, it is a language with a very wide range of distinctly different vowels and diphthongs (e.g., in the British standard,
mat, met, mitt, motte, mutt, put, mart, mate, meet, might, moat, moot, mute, mouth, moist
, as well as
mere, mire, flower, more, moor
and
immure
) and relatively more restricted range of consonant sounds (
bun, pun, spun, dun, ton, stun, con, gone, scone, chin, gin, Hun, train, drain, son, shin, led, red, bum, bun
and
bung
, with
zoom
and
leisure
added later), although these have become more challenging when account is taken of the combinations allowed: consider
scrounged, widths, strengths, fifths, sixths, sevenths, eighths, shrinks, mostly, thrust, scripture, contemptibly, constraints, spindly, adze
and
stupid.
Some of the rules of its sound system come as a surprise to native speakers, since they have no role in the spelling, and so are seldom mentioned at school: for example, that the length of the vowels has everything to do with the last consonant in a syllable, and nothing to do with the vowel itself:
mat, mace, mitt, right, rot, lout, motes, route, kilt, health
and
Alf
all have short vowels, while
mad, maze, mid, ride, rod, loud, modes, rude, killed, delve
and
pals
all have long ones; or that the crucial puff of air that distinguishes, say,
pin
from
bin
, and
tab
from
dab
, is actually missing in
spin
and
stab
—so from a phonetic point of view, they might with more justice be written
’sbin’
and
’sdab’.
The stress rules of English are complex (e.g. sweet sixtéen, but síxteen swéet lámbs), but are essential for the understanding of fluent speech; and intonation patterns for whole sentences are also highly various.

The structure of English words is fairly straightforward: the inflexion system of Old English, reminiscent of Latin or Greek, has long been lost, and most words are either simple, or clearly composed of stem with a few prefixes and suffixes.
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Irregularity in English grammar mostly concerns the details of how suffixes are applied to particular words (not man+s but
men
, not strike+d but
struck).
Main verbs may appear with sequences of smaller verbs called auxiliaries and modals (
be, have, do, shall, will, can, may, must
), which may be mirrored under rather complex conditions (e.g.,
He has been taken for a ride, hasn’t he? They have too, haven’t they?
but
Everybody seems to have, don’t they?
) Word order is crucial. In the simple sentence it is fairly rigidly Subject-Verb-Object (
You saw a tiger
), but a plethora of variations and nuances arise in questions and more complex sentences.
Who saw a tiger?
is still S-V-O, but then the fun begins:
Such a tiger I saw!
(O-S-V),
Never have I seen such a tiger
(Aux-S-V-O),
Did you see a tiger?
(Aux-S-V-O),
What did you see?
(O-Aux-S-V),
What do you think you saw?
(O-Aux-S-V-S-V),
What do you think saw you?
(S-Aux-S-V-V-O). This juggling with word order, though common in Germanic languages, was beyond the ken of grammar as developed by the Greeks and Romans, and hence as taught in medieval and early modern Europe. In fact, it was only in the 1950s that theoretical linguists found a fitting means to analyse it. Not surprisingly, it was only then that English became the prime subject for theoretical linguistics.

If we compare English to the other languages that have achieved world status, the most similar—as languages—are Chinese and Malay. Of course, we need to discount the main sources of its vocabulary: English has been in close touch all its short life with French and Latin; and since 1500 the education of very many of its elite speakers has involved Greek too. As a result these three languages have provided the vast majority of the words that have come into the language, whether borrowed or invented. But when the origins of its words—and hence their written look on the page—is set to one side, the amazing fact emerges that the closest parallels to English come not from Europe but from the far east of Asia.

Like English, Chinese and Malay have Subject-Verb-Object word order, and very little in the way of verb or noun inflexion. Words are simple, and complex senses result from stringing them together. By contrast, all the other languages we have considered have a high degree of inflexion, although Portuguese, in the form in which it established itself in Asia, has most of this stripped away.

The peculiarly conservative, and hence increasingly anti-phonetic, system is another facet of English that bears a resemblance to Chinese (though not to Malay—in any of the writing systems that have been used to represent it). As has happened with Chinese (and of course Egyptian), the life of English as it is spoken has become only loosely attached to the written traditions of the language. True, words are still written in the order in which they are spoken.
^*
But spelling has not been revised to keep up with changes in pronunciation: hence the remains of
gh
, a combination of letters still found in many words, but nowhere keeping anything like its original pronunciation as [x], the
ch
in Scots
loch;
hence the bizarre spelling of the English tense vowels, seen in the words spelt
mate, meet, mite, mote, mouth
and
mute
, but which would be written
meit, miit, mait, mout, mauth
and
miuwt
if the letters were still being used vaguely with the values they had until the fifteenth century, values that they have largely retained in every other language that uses the Roman alphabet. As a result of the complexity of relation between spelling and sound, a large proportion of the primary teaching profession, in England at least, was until recently of the opinion that phonics are more confusing than helpful when teaching children to read and write: hence the notorious ‘Look and Say’ method, which essentially treated each word as if it were a Chinese character.