The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language

by David Crystal

  Several prepositions have different uses from today: the zeal of (for) thine house, tempted of (by) Satan, to you-ward (towards you).

  It is only natural to focus on Shakespeare and the King James Bible in discussing this period. But they were by no means alone. There were

  A page from the King James Bible. The typography is in the style known as ‘black letter’ (or ‘gothic’).

  dozens of other dramatists writing at the time, some (such as Ben Jonson or Christopher Marlowe) of considerable stature. William Tyndale’s translation of the Bible (1525) was especially important (it was a major influence on the King James Bible), and there were several others, such as Coverdale’s (1535). The influence of these other writers and translators on the language is less obvious, but it can’t be ignored. Likewise, there were innumerable tracts, sermons, pamphlets, letters, and other publications presenting a variety of styles of varying levels of formality and complexity. The great age of Elizabethan literature resulted in an unprecedented breadth and inventiveness in the use of the English language. But not everyone in the seventeenth century found this state of affairs satisfactory.

  The age of the dictionary

  The problem had been sensed in the sixteenth century, when (as we have seen) thousands of new words were entering the language. ‘It were a thing verie praiseworthie’, wrote Richard Mulcaster in 1582, ‘if som one well learned and as laborious a man, wold gather all the words which we use in our English tung… into one dictionarie’. The task wasn’t attempted until 1721, when Nathaniel Bailey published his Universal Etymological English Dictionary. But in the meantime, there were several attempts to do something about the main problem – the existence of new and learned words which many people did not understand.

  The first ‘dictionary of hard words’ was published by Robert Cawdrey in 1604: A Table Alphabeticall was compiled ‘for the benefit and helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons, Whereby they may the more easilie and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselues’ (as it said on the title page). The book contained 3,000 ‘hard vsuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French, &c. With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words’. It included such words as aberration, glossed ‘a going astray, or wandering’, acquisition ‘getting, purchasing’, and paucitie ‘fewness or smale number’. It was a commercial success, and was followed by several other compilations along similar lines.

  By the end of the seventeenth century, there was a strong feeling of unease about the way the language was going. The language was changing too fast, it was felt. Words such as ‘unruly’, ‘corrupt’, ‘unrefined’, and ‘barbarous’ came to be applied to it. There seemed to be no order in it – unlike Latin, which was viewed as a model of fixed, definite structure and use.

  The critics were thinking of many things. They were worried about the uncontrolled way in which foreign words had come into the language. They could see no order in the creative way in which the Elizabethan dramatists and poets had used language, and they were uncertain whether to follow their example. They saw increasing variety in everyday usage – such as a fashion for new abbreviations (ult for ultimate, rep for reputation), or for new contracted forms (disturb’d, rebuk’d). Individual writers (and speakers) followed their own instincts. There were no norms of spelling or punctuation. Many people spelled words as they spoke, regardless of tradition (such as sartinly for certainly). Some had added extra letters to words, claiming that they were there in Latin (though in fact they were not): this is where the s in island or the c in scissors came from. An author might spell the same word in different ways on the same page, without anyone criticizing (or even noticing). The title page of Cawdrey’s book spells words with an e and then without an e. Which was correct?

  Many authors, in particular, were deeply worried. Given the pace at which English was changing, and the absence of any controls, would their work still be understandable in a generation or so? Jonathan Swift put it this way:

  How then shall any man, who hath a genius for history equal to the best of the ancients, be able to undertake such work with spirit and cheerfulness, when he considers that he will be read with pleasure but a very few years, and in an age or two shall hardly be understood without an interpreter.

  The poet Edmund Waller made a similar point:

  Poets that Lasting Marble seek

  Must carve in Latin or in Greek;

  We write in Sand…

  Out of this developing sense of chaos and confusion came several lines of thought. Some scholars, such as John Hart (d. 1574), attempted to reform the spelling. Some, such as Bishop John Wilkins (1614–72), tried to develop a logical alternative to English, which would do away with all irregularity and inconsistency – a universal, artificial language. Some scientists tried to develop a plain, objective style, without rhetoric and classical vocabulary, more suitable to scientific expression. When the Royal Society was founded in 1662, this ‘naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses’ was said to be a hallmark of the founder members’ style. But the issue which dominated discussion for several decades, well into the eighteenth century, was whether the English language should be placed in the hands of an Academy.

  The first Academy was founded in Italy in 1582, and by 1612 it had produced a dictionary, which was seen as the first step on the road to ‘purifying’ the Italian language. A French Academy followed in 1635, and its dictionary appeared in 1694. During the same period, there came proposals for an English Academy which would look after the language in similar ways. The idea had been proposed by such men as John Dryden and Daniel Defoe, but it received its most vociferous support from Jonathan Swift. In 1712, he wrote a letter to the Lord Treasurer of England, ‘A proposal for correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English tongue’:

  What I have most at heart is that some method should be thought on for ascertaining and fixing our language for ever, after such alterations are made in it as shall be thought requisite. For I am of opinion, it is better a language should not be wholly perfect, than that it should be perpetually changing.

  Change, for Swift, and for many others in the early eighteenth century, was synonymous with corruption. Language was going downhill. It needed protection, and only dictionaries, grammars, and other manuals could provide it. The language needed to be purified and refined, its defects removed. It would then have its rules clearly stated, and would remain fixed, providing standards of correctness for all to follow.

  Such opinions have appealed to every generation since, but they have never been implemented. The idea of an Academy never got off the ground, even though it received a great deal of support at the time. It was apparent to many that language could not be kept static, and that standards change. Even Latin and Greek had changed over the centuries when they were spoken. And it was evident that the work of the French or Italian Academies had not stopped those languages changing. Dr Johnson summed up the alternative opinion in his typical style:

  When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with

  a page from Johnson’s dictionary. Note the careful attention paid to the different senses of a word, the copious use of quotations to support the definition, and the personal element in the writing. The last point is best known from such definitions as lexicographer ‘a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge’, or oats ‘a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’.

  Samuel Johnson

  equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, or clea
r the world at once from folly, vanity and affectation.

  However, what the debate about language corruption did achieve was to focus public attention on the nature of the problem, and the need for a solution. And the first part of the solution, an English dictionary, came from Johnson himself, in 1755. Over a seven-year period, Johnson wrote the definitions of over 40,000 words, illustrating their use from the best authors since the time of the Elizabethans. In the words of his biographer, Boswell, the work ‘conferred stability’ on the language – at least in respect of the spelling and meaning of words. Its influence on the history of lexicography has been unparalleled.

  At about the same time, the first attempts to define the field of English grammar began to appear. One of the most influential grammars of the time was Robert Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) – the inspiration for an even more widely used book, Lindley Murray’s English Grammar (1794). Both grammars went through twenty editions in the years following their publication, and had enormous influence on school practices, especially in the USA. Murray’s axiom was: ‘Perspicuity requires the qualities of purity, propriety, and precision.’

  It is in these books, and those they influenced, that we find the origins of so many of the grammatical controversies which continue to attract attention today (see Chapter 2). Should grammars (and, indeed, dictionaries) reflect usage, simply describing it, or should they evaluate usage, by prescribing certain forms as correct and proscribing others as incorrect? This is the age when many of the rules of ‘correct’ grammar were first formulated, such as those governing the use of shall and will, or the rule which states that sentences should not end with a preposition, or that two negatives make an affirmative. And these rules were as forcefully attacked as they were firmly formulated. Thus, on the one hand, we find Robert Lowth saying in 1762:

  The principal design of a grammar of any language is to teach us to express ourselves with propriety in that language; and to enable us to judge of every phrase and form of construction, whether it be right or not.

  And on the other hand, we have Joseph Priestley saying in 1761:

  Our grammarians appear to me to have acted precipitately. It must be allowed that the custom of speaking is the original and only standard of any language. In modern and living languages, it is absurd to pretend to set up the compositions of any person or persons whatsoever as the standard of writing, or their conversation as the invariable rule of speaking.

  That was the controversy in the 1760s, but the same sentiments, in almost the same language, can be found a hundred years later, and indeed are still widely expressed today. Even the examples are the same, as the arguments about double negatives, split infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, and so on, continue to illustrate.

  At the end of the eighteenth century, any English language history has to adopt a fresh perspective. It no longer makes sense to follow a single chronology, as we have in Chapters 10–12, plotting changes within a single community (England). This single ‘story’ has in any case been a considerable simplification, neglecting as it does the wide range of non-standard varieties of English (such as the northern dialects) which were developing in parallel throughout the period. The language of the eighteenth century is now very close to that of the present day, and there is very little by way of linguistic commentary that can be added. This part of the story is brought up to date in Chapter 14.

  But first it is necessary to recognize that, in the early modern English period, it becomes increasingly unreasonable to focus on England alone – and on its ‘standard’ variety only – as the basis of a historical account. There were important parallel developments in the rest of Britain, especially in Scotland and Ireland. And a new perspective is required in order to take account of the linguistic consequences of the discovery of America and other parts of the world – the colonization of some of these areas by English-speaking people, and the development of regional linguistic standards different from those in use in England. Indeed, given the statistics on the use of English described in Chapter 1, it is likely that, in another century or so, the influence of some of these other areas on the future development of the language will be critical (see Chapter 15). In Chapter 13 therefore, we look at English linguistic history on a world scale.

  Words Then and Now

  Language changes when society changes. And while it is true to say that there have been no fundamental alterations in the structure of the language during the past 300 years, that mustn’t be taken to imply that English has stood still. The vast social and technological changes since the Industrial Revolution have had their linguistic consequences in the form of thousands of new words. (Pronunciation and grammar, by comparison, have changed very little in that time; but some of the changes which have taken place – several of them resulting in disputes about usage – are described in Chapters 2–4.)

  Since the seventeenth century, the flow of new words into the language has continued without interruption, especially in the fields of science and technology. Scientific and technical terms now comprise some two-thirds of the vocabulary of English. A few examples from each century are given opposite (dates are of the earliest recorded usage).

  Vocabulary change is always the most frequently noticed aspect of language development, and it affects all sections of society – as is suggested by this random selection of words which began to be widely used in various fields of English during the 1960s and 1970s:

  aerobics, Afro, biofeedback, blue movie, brain-drain, childproof, command module, computer graphics, disco, disinformation, frisbee, gay, hovercraft, jogging, male chauvinist, neutron star, ombudsman, fibre optics, privatize, quasar, RAM, sexploitation, skateboard, skyjacking, software, VAT, windsurfing, zip code

  Not all of these words refer to new concepts or inventions, of course. There will, for instance, have been objects in Victorian times which were capable of withstanding the attacks of young children – but they would not have been characterized as childproof. And Victorian homosexuals were not gay.

  The process of new word formation continues relentlessly, reflecting trends in society and technology. During the 1980s and 1990s we find the arrival of air miles, edutainment, Eurosceptic, outsource, ring-fence, rollover,

  Scientific terms in English

  Eighteenth century

  anaesthesia (1731), antiseptic (1751), dicotyledon (1727), fallopian (1706), fauna (1771), hydrogen (1791), molecule (1794), nitrogen (1794), nucleus (1704), oxygen (1790), pistil (1718), thyroid (1726)

  Nineteenth century

  accumulator (1877), allotropy (1849), barograph (1865), centigrade (1812), chromosome (1890), dynamo (1882) gyroscope (1856), micron (1892), ozone (1840), pasteurize (1881), protoplasm (1848)

  Twentieth century

  allergy (1913), biochemistry (1902), decaffeinate (1934), gene (1909), hormone (1902), ionosphere (1913), millibar (1912), penicillin (1929), photon (1926), quantum (1910), radar (1942), sputnik (1957), vitamin (1912)

  and toyboy, as well as a steady increase of new words and senses to do with computer technology and the Internet:

  applet, bootable, CD, cracker, cyberspace, download, DVD, email, geek, helpdesk, icon, Internet, menu, mobile, mouse, multimedia, net, newsgroup, smiley, spam, superhighway, Web

  The Internet is also having an impact on the speed at which new words enter the language (p. 140): a new word introduced on the Net in the morning can be in use all over the world by the evening.

  But looking at new words from our own generation does not provide a strong sense of the recent history of vocabulary. An easier way is to look back at the literature of previous generations, and to note which words or senses have gone out of use – such as the fashionable slang of the twenties and thirties (tosh, what-ho, old top, ripping), or the names of early carriages (gig, sociable, brougham, surrey, etc.). Novels written a generation or so ago usually provide excellent examples:

  ‘It won’t do, old top. What’s the point of puttin
g up any old yarn like that? Don’t you see, what I mean is, it’s not as if we minded. Don’t I keep telling you we’re all pals here? I’ve often thought what a jolly good feller old Raffles was – regular sportsman. I don’t blame a chappie for doing the gentleman burglar touch. Seems to me it’s a dashed sporting —.’

  P. G. Wodehouse, A Gentleman of Leisure (1910)

  Dated, archaic, or unfamiliar old words are easy to spot. And similarly, the contrast between old and modern meanings is usually clear: no one has failed to notice that gay, for example, has developed a new meaning in recent years. But there are aspects of vocabulary change which are much more difficult to sense – in particular, the way in which words have changed their social status, coming into favour, or falling out of favour, among a particular social group.

  Probably the most widely known attempt to discuss words in terms of their social prestige was carried out by the British linguist A. S. C. Ross, in an article published in 1954. The ideas were popularized by the novelist Nancy Mitford, and the terms ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ came into being. ‘U’ stood for ‘upper-class usage’ in Britain; ‘non-U’ for other kinds of usage. The idea was to draw attention to the way that words, pronunciations and other forms could demarcate upper-class people (or people who aspired to the upper class) from those belonging to other classes. Since the 1950s, of course, society and usage have profoundly altered; but many of the words considered to be U and non-U in those days still carry noticeable social overtones (though it is by no means easy to say precisely what these are):