Settlers’ different kinds of speech gave rise to the real diversity of Old English dialects. The word English comes from Anglisc, the name of the dialect used by the Angles, and both the country and its inhabitants came to be known as Angelcynn, ‘the race of the Angles’. (English precedes England, which superseded Angelcynn in the eleventh century.) The form we now call Old English, which looks deeply alien to modern readers, was used for about 700 years after the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, and during this period changes happened only slowly.
The earliest speakers of English were illiterate pagans. There were traces of Christianity from the second century, and small Christian delegations travelled from Britain to continental religious councils early in the fourth century, but outside a few metropolitan centres Christian beliefs did not take a firm hold until much later. St Patrick began the work of Christianizing Ireland in around 430, and Irish missionaries travelled throughout Europe. Yet the defining moment was in 597, when St Augustine landed on the Kentish island of Thanet. He and his company of forty monks had been sent by Pope Gregory to convert the Anglo-Saxons. The inspiration for this, according to the Venerable Bede, writing more than a hundred years later, was an encounter at a Roman market (a word coming ultimately from the Latin merx, meaning ‘merchandise’) between Gregory and a gaggle of heathen English slaves. Struck by their fine appearance – ‘Non Angli, sed angeli,’ he is supposed to have said – he decided to free their countrymen from the wrath of God. Augustine and his followers were generously received by Ethelbert, the king of Kent; a monastery was established at Canterbury, and soon, having apparently brought Kent under Christian authority, Augustine’s monks were able to look further north. In 627 King Eadwine of Northumbria was converted, and within fifty years of Augustine’s arrival Christianity had extended its reach through much of the island.
The monks brought with them the Roman alphabet, which displaced the Germanic alphabet of jagged characters (runes) as the chief medium for writing, and brought as well the custom of preserving learning in written form. Although most of their work was done in Latin, they introduced a few hundred words into the vernacular: new concepts required new terminology. Deofol (devil), munuc (monk) and preost (priest) seem to be pre-Christian borrowings, but among the fresh Christian additions were Mass, from the post-classical missa meaning ‘dismissal’ (the prayer at the conclusion of a liturgy), halig gast (‘Holy Ghost’, a calque of spiritus sanctus) and cross (from crux), which would slowly take the place of the older noun rood – a word preserved in the title of the Dream of the Rood, a visionary Old English narrative of the Crucifixion, and in the rood screen, the division in church between the nave and the choir. Minster was adapted from the Latin monasterium, while martyr came from Greek via post-classical Latin. A less morally resonant borrowing was an early form of lentil, the Latin root of which would later also provide us with lens – a device that gets its name through being the shape of a lentil seed. You might expect Latin to have coloured English more visibly at this time, given the deep impression made by Christian teaching, but English, ever adaptable, had its own ways of refashioning Latin concepts. For instance, the Latin disciple and the Romanized Greek word apostle begin to appear as Christianity is embraced, but their roles are often taken by the indigenous words folgere, cniht, leornere, leorningcniht and even the poetic-sounding spelboda .
Bede refers in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People to the multilingualism of Britain in the eighth century: English, Welsh, Irish and Latin were in wide use, and the Pictish tongue was spoken in the northern part of Scotland. This seemed like something to celebrate. Bede wrote in Latin, which was the language of learning, of record, and of the Church.11 The influence of Latin did not die out with the departure of the legions: Latin words were absorbed first as elements of the vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxon invaders; then through the work of Christian missionaries during the period of Anglo-Saxon rule; then after the Norman Conquest, often via French, in connection with matters of medicine, law and religion; during the Renaissance, with the reawakening of classical learning; and as specialist terms obtaining only in certain domains, such as botany or jurisprudence. A glossary surviving from around 680 provides English explanations of Latin words, and shows among other things an attempt to copy Latin categories of occupation and profession. One example is the use of egderi for a man who operates a harrow, apparently on the model of the Latin herpicarius.12
The next period of foreign influence began in a blaze of violence. The first Viking attack on England was recorded in 789.Three ships arrived at Portland in Dorset; the local reeve, Beaduheard, mistook them for traders, rushed to meet them, and was slaughtered. More significant incursions began with a raid on Lindisfarne, which is mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s entry for 793. That year ‘terrible portents came about over the land of Northumbria, and miserably frightened the people.’ ‘Dragons were seen flying in the air,’ and there soon followed ‘a great famine’. Then ‘a little after that … the raiding of heathen men miserably devastated God’s church in Lindisfarne.’13 The following year Vikings plundered the monastery at Jarrow, where Bede had written his Ecclesiastical History. Later raids were more intense, and the invaders stayed for longer; in 851 a group wintered on the island of Thanet, and between 865 and 869 significant inroads were made in East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. Plunder and the desecration of religious sites were rife; whole communities were wiped out.
Why did the raiders come? One standard account suggests the multiplicity of possible explanations: ‘Famine, pestilence, cataclysmic natural disasters in their native land, over-population as a result of the widespread practice of polygamy, the custom of driving out younger sons to fend for themselves, the cutting off by the Arabs of the old trade connections with Byzantium, an obsessive mania to destroy other people’s property, a fanatical loathing of Christianity, and an insatiable appetite for high adventure.’14 This was a period of tribal movement – of restlessness and displacements. Britain was not the only territory to face the Viking menace: Charlemagne had to upgrade the Frankish coastal defences to secure them against Scandinavian pirates, monasteries in Ireland and on the Loire were attacked, and Vikings settled on the southern coast of the Baltic and in eastern Europe. Later Paris was looted, and Charles the Bald had to pay the plunderers 7,000 pounds of silver to withdraw.15
During the ninth century these mainly Danish invaders settled in Britain, concentrating at first on the accessible northern and eastern reaches, and making the greatest impression in what are now Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. In time they took London and Canterbury, and their ambitious gaze turned west towards the kingdom of Wessex. Yet, though they came as pirates, their contributions in time became more positive. They did not eject the English from their homes, but created new urban centres and strengthened the market for property, as well as providing richer opportunities for traders and craftsmen. Collaboration thrived. For instance, Northumbrians welcomed Viking support in their quarrels with the West Saxons, and more than one archbishop of York actively cooperated with the city’s Scandinavian conquerors.16 Many Vikings converted to Christianity and assumed ‘local’ identities – an indication that status mattered more to them than their innate ethnicity.17 The vocabulary of farming suggests another area of collaboration: surviving dialect words such as lathe, a barn, and lea, a scythe, came straight from Norse. Although there were abundant differences between Norse and English, the two groups could understand each other. The language scholar Roger Lass suggests that we can imagine their levels of mutual comprehension by reaching for a modern example from South African English, where borrowings from Afrikaans colour a simple question about why someone has failed to put sausage on the grill: ‘Ag, man, why didn’t you put the boerewors on the braai?’18
Words of Scandinavian origin rarely look or feel foreign to modern English-speakers. They have been completely assimilated, and most denote everyday objects. Yet different habits of pronunciation meant that a borrowed wo
rd, though shared between communities, could evolve in different directions. Thus shirt and skirt are different flowers of the same root, and so are scrub and shrub. Here we have a clue to the abrasive nature of the two groups’ interactions. As Bruce Smith writes, ‘each culture has its own distinctive way of understanding the world through sound,’ and accordingly ‘the borders between cultures become, potentially at least, sites of noise, confusion, pandemonium.’ Settlers and colonists will always try to impose on their conquered lands a particular ‘acoustemology’ – a recognition that people establish their culture through sound.19 The Greek historian Herodotus made the startling claim that the desert people known as the Garamantes squeaked like bats; the noises they made were an integral part of their aura of belligerence. Things said and things heard are challenges: sounds are evidently outside us, yet we experience them as though they are inside us. The Norse settlers’ acoustic onslaught was the most intimate kind of affront. Just sample the guttural force of konungr, the Norse for ‘king’, and hrafn, meaning ‘raven’, or the abrupt stab of the adverbs ok and mjök, meaning ‘also’ and ‘greatly’.
Emerson could write lyrically that ‘The Scandinavians … still hear in every age the murmurs of their mother, the ocean; the Briton in the blood hugs the homestead still.’ Less appealing, yet no less salty, was his reference to the Norse legacy he could read in the features of a ‘misshapen hairy Scandinavian troll … whose speech is a brash of bitter waters’.20 Emerson’s words evoke the nature of the two cultures’ confrontation. The verb to amaze, a perpetual feature of our daily conversation (‘I’m amazed you can speak six languages’), dates back to these bristling encounters, and modern etymologists point out its links with two Norwegian verbs that denote bustling and dreaming, a Danish term for bother, and a Swedish word for sunning oneself. Imagine being in the middle of this triangle of languages: as you juggle the different senses, you act out the adjudicative experience of encountering new words. When words are learnt through conversation, as they were from the Norse invaders, the urgency of that confusion and the quick dialogue of intuition and judgement are all the more extreme.
Resistance to the Vikings was mobilized by King Alfred. He fortified the English law, encouraged shipbuilding, and revived learning. He acclaimed wisdom as ‘the loftiest of virtues’, and his reputation for prudent intellectualism spread far beyond his kingdom. Above all, he fostered a sense of national identity. Alfred felt able to refer to his language as English, and his thriving West Saxon kingdom, based in Winchester, enhanced the status of the vernacular. He promoted education and the translation of Latin texts, sometimes enlisting the help of foreign scholars, and, noting a decline in the knowledge of Latin, he established the idea that English could take its place as a suitable medium for intellectual argument as well as for the business of the court. This revival of learning ushered in Latin loans, and sometimes English words, especially abstract ones, were formed on Latin models. Thus a verb like the Old English utdraefan was based on the same Latin concept that gives us the modern English expel; the word’s constituent parts are native, but the compounding of ut and draefan is inspired by the Latin. The ‘learned’ aspect of English was steadily augmented in this way, and under Alfred’s aegis the burgeoning West Saxon dialect promised to become the language’s standard form – a process which became conspicuous from about 975, but was abruptly checked by the Norman Conquest.
Alfred’s drive for English unity was pragmatic. In 878 he and Guthrum, king of the East Angles, entered into an agreement, commonly dubbed the Treaty of Wedmore, which ended a quarter of a century of especially vicious plunder. Alfred formally conceded to the Vikings a large part of the Midlands and northern England, which was to be known as the Danelaw. Its most important communities lay in Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford and Lincoln. Derby’s name is telltale; that terminal – by is a clear sign of Viking influence, and can be seen in the names of other communities in the north of England and the Midlands, such as Corby and Rugby. One of the consequences of the agreement was that in the northern part of the country the Norse language became dominant, and, while Alfred’s resistance ensured that English kept its core of Anglo-Saxon, across the whole country many Anglo-Saxon words gave way to Norse. The verb to call, which first appears in a poem written after the Battle of Maldon in 991, is a striking example, and the poem highlights the loquacious contact between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. As violent clashes with the Norse settlers became rare, however, trade flourished, and the linguistic infusions came in a wider range of flavours. Among the borrowings from this period are gasp, rake and scare, along with such commonplace nouns as root and sky, the adjectives loose, tight and weak, and the pronoun both. The Norse vind-auga (‘eye of the wind’) became window. Phrasal verbs (put up, put away and so on) may also have come from this source. Most strikingly, Norse pronouns such as they and their displaced Anglo-Saxon ones.
Another of the Viking contributions to English was a move away from inflexional endings, which were an obstacle to communication between speakers of Norse and speakers of English. As Matthew Townend explains, Norse and English words were often similar, but their endings were different. Accordingly, ‘In a situation in which speakers of the two languages were repeatedly in contact with one another, on a daily or even a domestic basis, it is quite possible that these inflexional differences became eroded or ignored, as they played no role … in effective communication.’ Instead, other means of ‘expressing grammatical relationships came to be more prominent – above all, the method of a relatively fixed word-order’.21
There are two main periods of borrowing from the Scandinavian languages. The first introduction of Scandinavian words followed the northern raids at the end of the eighth century and lasted for a little over 300 years. Some of the new terms had to do with the invaders’ unique equipment – the names of the vessels they came in – or with their systems of government. It is to this early Scandinavian presence that we owe the words hustings, law (from the Norse lagu) and wrong, as well as husband and outlaw. The establishment of law owes much to the powerful homilist and legislator Archbishop Wulfstan of York, whose insistence on lagu pushed aside the Anglo-Saxon word æ; he also seems to have created the specialized legal sense of cost – ‘a condition’.22 Meanwhile, words such as dreng (warrior) and cnearr (a kind of small ship) were absorbed in times aquake with fear of Nordic military might.
The second period of borrowing, between the accession to the English throne of the Danish king Cnut in 1016 and around 1150, delivered words of a more domestic stripe: knife, skin, score. Other words acquired in this period are leg and same.23 Akimbo, which might be imagined to be Hindi or Japanese, appears also to derive from a Norse or Icelandic term heard at this time, although it did not achieve its present spelling until the eighteenth century. Whereas in the previous phase English-speakers had adopted Norse words out of deference to their new masters, now Norse-speakers were switching to English and interfering with its vocabulary. What did they feel the need to bring in? As Simon Winchester nicely remarks, ‘we can somehow understand that the gloomy antecedents of Ibsen would have given to English the likes of awkward, birth, dirt, fog (perhaps),gap, ill, mire, muggy, ransack, reindeer, root, rotten, rugged, scant, scowl, and wrong.’24 Even grimmer loans from this source include muck, scab and possibly scum.
A different perspective is offered by Helena Drysdale, who alludes to the lasting ‘northern connection’ between Britain and Scandinavia, and remarks of Sweden, ‘Muesli, yoghurt, fresh milk, brown bread, comfortable clothes: I felt more at home here than in France.’25 The sentiment rings true; the temperamental kinship between Britons and Scandinavians is a kind of open secret.
Although substantial during this second period up to 1150, the Scandinavian contribution to English then faded; Norse continued to be spoken in some northern areas well into the twelfth century, but fell away as the settlers gave up their language in favour of English – and then as French asserted itself.26 The total le
gacy amounts to about 2,000 words in use in Standard English today, with as many more hanging on in the regional dialects of Cumbria and the north-east, such as beck, a stream, and keld, a fountain or spring.
We get a sense of what was important in Anglo-Saxon life from some of the areas where its vocabulary was most concentrated. It is often claimed that the Inuit (or Eskimos, as they are wrongly called) have a vast array of words for snow, and the claim seems plausible, for they are likely to label different types of snow the way a geologist discriminates between types of stone. Yet whereas the image of the Inuit as connoisseurs of snow is actually quite doubtful, Anglo-Saxon provides a pleasingly authentic example of this sort of lexical clustering: its more than thirty words for ‘warrior’ reflect its pugnacious culture, and the profusion of seafaring terms is a reminder of Viking wanderlust, an addiction to seaborne adventures that has infiltrated the very heart of the British consciousness.
Pick up certain words, study them, and you can almost hear the rush of the sea inside. Storm, sail, oar and mast are stately and spacious. So is sea itself. The names for the four points of the compass are much older than the compass itself. Given their skill as sailors, we should not be surprised that the marauding Scandinavians introduced to the Anglo-Saxon stock of sea terms a fleet of new ones, such as billow and raft. In passing, it is worth noting how many everyday idioms derive from the language of the sea. Some of them retain an unambiguously nautical air, as when we talk of plain sailing, stemming the tide or clearing the decks. Others show their colours a little less clearly – to show one’s colours is indeed one such example, and so are to touch bottom, in the offing and distress signals. Then there are those phrases somewhat less plainly nautical in origin, which are nevertheless exactly that: under way, to break the ice, to keep abreast of something, to find one’s bearings, second-rate. This imagery is a relic of a now-desiccated maritime Britain. We may no longer agree with Ernest Barker’s claim that ‘the Englishman … hears the surge and thunder of the sea, and tastes its savour, however far inland he may be,’ but nowhere in Britain is more than 70 miles from the sea.27 For a modern Anglo-Saxon, the coast remains close, and the prospect of riding the waves seems alien only to a few.
The Secret Life of Words Page 4