Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  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 sort of a language?

  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.* 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 c
ome 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.

  As with Chinese, one can say that, for learners, the English language has been literate too long.

  Westward Ho!

  The language I have learned these forty years,

  My native English, now I must forego:

  And now my tongue’s use is to me no more

  Than an unstring’d viol or a harp;

  Or like a cunning instrument cas’d up,

  Or, being open, put into his hands

  That knows no touch to tune the harmony:

  Within my mouth you have engaol’d my tongue,

  Doubly portcullis’d with my teeth and lips;

  And dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance

  Is made my gaoler to attend on me.

  I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,

  Too far in years to be a pupil now:

  What is thy sentence, then, but speechless death,

  Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?

  (The Duke of Norfolk, on being exiled) Shakespeare, Richard II, act I, scene iii

  Norfolk’s words stand as the first example of an Englishman’s despair, now almost traditional, at the prospect of having to learn another language: could exile hold any greater terror? English was then a language spoken exclusively within the confines of the British Isles. When the words were written, most likely in 1595, there had been only a single English-speaking colony outside the British Isles, Ralegh’s 1586 colony at Roanoke, ‘Virginia’, and no one in England then knew if it was still in existence.*

  Little by little, it was going to become more and more unnecessary for travellers from Britain to learn other languages, because English speakers were now to spread new settlements around the world, and many of those settlements were going to expand, to become—with Britain—among the largest, richest and most powerful nations on earth. The motives for British settlements over three centuries were various: the glory of the realm, gains from piracy, founding new utopias, wealth from agriculture or mining, trade, personal glory, a stirring of duty to spread the gospel, global strategy, windfall spoils from military victories, even in the end some sense of obligation to educate the native inhabitants. In this, they were unlike their greatest predecessors, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and the French, who were each moved by just one or a few of these. The British were in this sense the universal exponents of European imperialism.* And the sheer variety of the motives could almost be parleyed into a claim of no motive at all. In 1883, the publicist Sir John Seeley was famously to claim: ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’16 This has well suited British conceits of their own virtuous innocence.

  Pirates and planters

  The first extensions of the English language across the Atlantic recall the stirrings of Sanskrit across the Bay of Bengal a millennium and a half before, when glamorous sāhasikā pirates could scarce be distinguished from sādhava merchants (see Chapter 5, ‘The spread of Sanskrit’, p. 199). Britain was the last of the Atlantic-fronting powers to seek new fortune in the west, and it was not, at first, an easy game to break into. In the sixteenth century, when Spain was drawing vast profits from its mines in Mexico and Peru, and Portugal stitching up the trade of the Indian Ocean, when even France was exploring the extent of the St Lawrence river, England’s Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had supported a very few exploratory voyages across the North Atlantic which yielded nothing, hardly even a landfall. But Francis Drake had discovered a line that could be profitable, euphemistically known as the ‘taking of prizes’. In fifteen years from 1573 he alone had brought back, from a mixture of raids on Spanish ports, high-sea robberies of Spanish and Portuguese ships, and trading in the East Indies, booty to the value of three quarters of a million pounds, twice the annual tax revenues at the time; Elizabeth’s share was enough to clear the national debt in 1581, and provide another €42,000 to found the Levant Company (which went on to become the financial basis of the East India Company itself).17 And he was not alone. From 1585 to 1604, at least a hundred ships set off every year to plunder the Caribbean, netting at least €200,000 a year.18

  But one thing that the Elizabethan voyages had shown was that lines of supply were the point of greatest weakness in any long expedition. Even piracy, in the long term, calls for a secure base, defensible and self-sustaining, but close to the action. And this was prominent in the rationale offered in the prospectus to investors for Ralegh’s newly planted colony in Virginia, written by Richard Hakluyt in 1584. In the executive summary,* after pieties about ‘the inlargement of the gospell of Christe’, and the Spanish threat to decent ‘englishe Trades … growen beggerly or daungerous’, he promises that ‘this westerne voyadge will yelde unto us all the commodities of Europe, Affrica, and Asia’; most especially, ‘5. That this voyage will be a great bridle to the Indies of the kinge of Spaine and a means that wee may arreste at our pleasure for the space of tenne weekes or three monethes every yere, one or twoo hundred saile of his subjectes shippes at the fysshinge in Newfounde lande.’

  In the way of business plans, it did not turn out quite like that. The colony was at first hard put to it even to grow its own food, and survive the attentions of the Indians; it had no energy, indeed no ships, to harry the Spanish. But Hakluyt’s term planting, originally just an elegant metaphor for ‘colony’, became in the event very appropriate: the Virginia colony, once re-established at Jamestown, was to find its sustenance through the commercial plantation of tobacco. And although English royal sponsorship of piracy ended when James I came to the throne, this was not the only pirate base that came good in the end through commercial agriculture. British naval strength grew through the seventeenth century, and Britain was able to take possession of some of the islands of the Caribbean, until then really a Spanish lake: most importantly, Jamaica was captured in 1655. At first, piracy targeted on the Spanish remained the major British activity in the region. But increasingly, Britons were noticing the potential in producing sugar, an Asian crop that the Portuguese had pioneered in Brazil. Henry Morgan, the most famous pirate of them all, invested the proceeds of his freebootery in Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela to buy land in Jamaica; Morgan ended up a sugar baron, with a knighthood to boot.19

  The possession of land,
taken for whatever reason, made possible commercial cultivation of exotic crops for the European market. There was no gold or silver in the British possessions, but supplying consumers rather than bankers turned out to be much better business. Cultivating crops also meant that a workforce was needed: if these were indentured workers from Britain (as most were at first, especially in North America), they would of course go on speaking English; if they were purchased slaves from the western coast of Africa, they would learn it when they arrived, since all links with their home communities were lost. The revenues from sugar, and later cocoa, in the Caribbean islands, and from tobacco, and later indigo and cotton, in the North American continent, became the firmest foundations of sustainable English-speaking communities across the Atlantic.

  Someone else’s land

  They call Old England Acawmenoakit, which is as much as from the land on t’other side. Hardly are they brought to believe that water is three thousand English miles over.

  …

  Chauquock; a knife. Whence they call Englishmen Chauquaquock, that is Knive-men; stone formerly being to them instead of knives, awlblades, hatchets, and hoes.

  …

  Wunnaumwayean; if he says true. Canounicus, the old Sachim of the Narroganset bay, a wise and peaceable prince, once in a solemn oration to myself, in a solemn assembly, using this word, said, ‘I have never suffered any wrong to be offered to the English, since they landed, nor never will.’ He often repeated this word, ‘Wunnaumwayean Englishman, if the Englishman speak true, if he mean truly then shall I go to my grave in peace, and hope that the English and my posterity will live in love and peace together.’ I replied, that he had no cause, I hoped, to question Englishman’s Wunnaumwauonck, that is, faithfulness, he having had long experience of their friendliness and trustiness. He took a stick, and broke it in ten pieces, and related ten instances, laying down a stick to every instance, which gave him cause thus to fear and say.