OUR ENGLISH LANGUAGE 30

Wherefore do we speak English? The word ‘wherefore’ as in the dialogue from the Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet plaintively and rhetorically asks, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” means ‘why’, not ‘where’. After all, Juliet knows where Romeo is – he is right there below her balcony window in Verona talking to her. She is lamenting that Romeo is member of the Montague family and she is a Capulet. She fears that the bitter feud between the two families will forever keep them apart.

Unlike Italian, Spanish, French and a couple more languages based on Latin, English is a mess. Yes, English is derived from Old English and therefore in turn from Middle English, but also from German, French, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian languages, Indian (from India), Indian (from North America), Sanskrit, directly from Latin and Old Greek, and myriad other languages.

The greeting ‘good morning’ in German is ‘guten Morgan’. It is not a co-incidence that the words are similar – both are derived from the Old English ‘göd’ meaning excellent or pleasant and ‘morgen’ the beginning of morning. Determining the etymology, morphology, orthography, phonology, syntax, polysemy, and just plain evolved and evolving usage of any language is impossibly complex and convoluted and English is one of the worst.

When Americans pick up a telephone or press the talk button on a remote or a cellular phone they usually say “hello.” Why? Italians say ”pronto” which means I am ready to talk (Of course they are ready to talk; why else would they answer the telephone?). Spanish speakers say “si” (yes) or “bueno” (good). The French say “Allô” (they are copycats). Germans say “bitte” (a multiple usage word which means ‘please’, or a reply to “danke” (thank you) would be “bitte schón” (your welcome). It is also use as an equivalent to ‘pardon?’ when one did not hear or understand something correctly. It is always a polite word.

The person who originated the use of ‘hello’ to answer a telephone was Thomas Edison. As the telephone started to come into wider use in the 1880’s no standard greeting was used in answering telephone calls. People would use such awkward phrases as “Are you there?” or Are you ready to talk?”, completely foreign to the direct and right-to-the-point American predilection. One day Edison picked up the telephone receiver and shouted “hello!” The term is a historically nautical one used by sailors from one ship to hail sailors on another ship.

When you think about it you realize that answering a telephone caused a dilemma in social relationships. In face-to-face greetings people have difference ways of addressing who they are talking to whether it is family members or close friends, subordinates to superiors, strangers to strangers, or adults to children. Even now with caller ID (this is a term which did not exist a few years ago), initially one can not be sure who they are talking to so a neutral way was needed to answer the telephone. Once again necessity begat invention.

In a 2007 book INVENTING ENGLISH: A Portable History of the Language the author, Seth Lerer, discusses the origin and evolution of the English language. He describes his book as about inventing English (invent from the Latin invenire, to come upon or find). The development of English can roughly be divided into the periods of Old English (circa 600-1100 A.D.), Middle English (circa 1100-1450), and Modern English (1450-present).

As pointed out by Lerer, by the time of Geoffrey Chaucer, Old English words with a long a sound changed to a long o sound. Thus ban became bone; ham became home; twa became two. Old English had consonant clusters at the beginning of words (hl-, hw-, hr-) that were simplified in Middle English. For example hlud became loud; hwaet became what; hring became ring. By a phenomenon called metathesis, the same thing which causes some children to pronounce spaghetti as psghetti and for a dialect to change the pronunciation of “ask” to “aks”, sounds in some words from Old English were reversed in Middle English. The Old English word for bird was brid and third was thrid.

According to Lerer, Old English largely built new words out of the familiar stock of roots or morphemes; instead Middle English borrowed copiously from other languages. The Normans (the Norman Conquest at the Battle of Hastings was in 1066) imported new words from France for administration, commerce, the church, cooking, learning, technology, etc. Such words are easily recognizable because they are often polysyllabic with distinguishable sounds. In fact the language of the English monarchy was French well into 13th century. The Anglo-Saxons generally were the food growers while the Normans ate it. Not surprisingly the names of animals such as calf, cow, deer, sheep, and sow remained Old English while the words for meats changed to French: beef (boeuf), mutton (mouton), pork (porc), veal (veau), and venison (venison).

The languages of Europe, Northern India, Iran, and parts of Western Asia belong to what is known as the Indo-European group. Words that share a common origin are called cognates. For example, the word moon appears in recognizable form in such diverse languages as German (Mond); Latin (mensis- meaning month); Lithuanian (menuo); and Greek (meis-also meaning month). The word yoke in German is (Joch); Latin (iugum); Russiam (igo) and Sanskrit (yugam). The word wind in Latin is (ventus); Russian (veter); Irish Gaelic (gwent); and Sanskrit (vatas).

As the various language families from the Indo-European group developed there were also cognate words. Latin gave rise to what became known as the Romance languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. The word for wolf in Latin is lupus; French (loup); Italian (lupo); Romanian (lupu); and Spanish (lobo). Because English is a branch of the Germanic languages there are many words which are cognate with German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages. Most words for numbers are cognate. Consider the English numbers: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, hundred. In German they are: eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, seiben, acht, neun, zehn, hundert. Dutch: een, twee, drie, vier, vijf, zes, zeven, acht, negen, tien, honderd. Swedish: en, två, tre, fyra, fem, sex, sju, åtta, nio, tio, hundra. The days of the week and months of the year are spelled so similarly (or are the same) in Swedish that it isn’t even necessary to give the English equivalent (even though the Swedish alphabet has 29 letters to 26 for English). Thus: Söndag, Möndag, Tisdag, Onsdag, Tordag, Fredag, Lördag, and januari, februari, mars, april, maj, juni, juli, augusti, september, oktober, november, and december. Comparing words from Germanic languages and Latin we have: English (bear); German (Bär); Danish (bjorn); but Latin (Ursus). Also English (sea); German (See); Dutch (zee); Danish (sö); but Latin (mare) and Greek (thalassa).

The Celtic language which still exists as Gaelic in Ireland, Welsh in Wales, and Cornish in Cornwall contributed to Old English. Afon is the Celtic word for river with the most famous example as the birth place of Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon. The name of the river Thames is also a Celtic word.

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400) was almost to Middle English as William Shakespeare was to Modern English. I say almost because although Chaucer’s influence on the use and forms of English was similar to Shakespeare’s, especially through his stories in the Canterbury Tales and his greatest poem Troilus and Criseyde, he did not coin many new words and phrases although he did introduce many French and Latin words into English. By contrast William Shakespeare (1564-1616) coined nearly 6000 new words and phrases. Many people today use these words and expressions without realizing they came from Shakespeare. These are but a few examples as given by author Paula LaRocque: Eating me out of house and home; Kill with kindness; Laid on with a trowel; Forget and forgive; Sweets to the sweet; Elbow room; Naked truth; Charmed life; A dish fit for the gods; Salad days; Over hill, over dale; Middle of the night; Quiet as a lamb; Sink or swim; Pound of flesh; A motley fool; Bag and baggage; Brave new world; Forever and a day; Men of few words; Not a mouse stirring; In my mind’s eye; The undiscovered country; The better part of valor is discretion; and At one fell swoop. More Shakespearian sounding are: To be or not to be; What light through yonder window breaks; Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown; Cowards die many times before their deaths; The first thing we do, we kill all the lawyers; Something wicked this way comes; To sleep, perchance to dream; That way madness lies; Loved not wisely, but too well; Parting is such sweet sorrow; More sinned against than sinning; What fools these mortal be; Brevity is the soul of wit; and All’s well that end well.

Beyond the coinages by Shakespeare, the contributions to the uses and evolution of the English language by both Chaucer and Shakespeare are immense and can hardly be overstated. This advancement in the language was accomplished through some of the most entertaining and insightful stories, poems, and plays ever written in English and in the case of Shakespeare arguably the greatest plays ever written in any language. English would truly be much impoverished had these two giants not existed.

There was a process which occurred approximately from the middle of the 15th century to the end of the 17th century and was called The Great Vowel Shift. It was first studied by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) who coined the term. This was an important, but complicated, major change in the pronunciation of the English language which separates Middle English (1100-1450) from Modern English (1450-present) and this change made the language of the age of Chaucer largely opaque by the time of Shakespeare. It is difficult to understand, let along explain. Nevertheless, I will do my best, in my limited linguistic way, to clarify it.

The pronunciation of the long vowels form the main, but not the only, difference between Middle English and Modern English. And the Great Vowel Shift (GVS) was one of the historical events marking this separation. In order to get a feel for how the vowels sounds changed it is necessary to explain what a diphthong is. In phonetics a diphthong (literally with two sounds or tones) is a monosyllabic vowel combination involving a quick, but smooth movement from one vowel to another, often interpreted by listeners as a single vowel sound or phoneme. While monophthongs or ‘pure’ vowels have one target tongue position, diphthongs have two target tongue positions.

Each of these long stressed monophthongs may be said to have occupied a place in the mouth. Vowels could be high or low – that is, pronounced with the tongue high in the mouth or low in the mouth. And they could be front or back – pronounced either in the front of the mouth, towards the lips, or the back, towards the throat. Linguists have come up with ways of representing the place of these vowels schematically, and much of the business of explaining the GVS has in fact gone on by coming up with visual representations of its stages. Diphthongs are considered to be long vowels and monophthongs short vowels. Examples of long vowels are bait, beet, bite, boat, and beauty. Examples of short vowels are bat, bet, bit, bot(tle), and put. In the course of the GVS only four words (great, break, steak, yea) and one proper name (Reagan) that had the long open e and were spelled ea did not change their pronunciation. The reason for this is unknown.

Why did the Great Vowel Shift occur? There are no definite answers, just speculation. Some theories attach one cause to the mass immigration to South-East England after the Black Death (1347-52), where the differences in accents led to certain groups modifying their speech to allow for a standard pronunciation of vowel sounds. The different dialects and the rise of a middle class in London led to changes in pronunciation which continued to spread out from London. Another highlights the language of the ruling class – the medieval aristocracy had spoken French, but by the early 14th century they were using English – the King’s English. This may have caused a change in the “prestige accent” of English, either by making pronunciation more French in style or by changing it in some other way, perhaps by hypercorrection to something thought to be more “English” (England was at war with France for much of this period - the same reason that the British Royal family changed their name to Windsor from Hanover during WWI when Britain was fighting Germany). Another influence may have been the great political and social upheavals of the 15th century which was largely contemporaneous with the GVS.

Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was one of England’s best known literary figures and the most quoted after Shakespeare. In the mid 1700’s he became convinced that English was being “corrupted” by misuse, especially by the masses. He therefore set out to write a comprehensive dictionary of the English language to establish standard word usage. Other dictionaries in English had been written, but they were all on specialized subjects – none was comprehensive. The French had their comprehensive dictionary so Johnson thought it was time the English did also.

Although Johnson could legitimately be called a curmudgeon (more on this word later) he was also brilliant and intellectually honest. In the years (1747-55) of putting this dictionary together Johnson came to realize that language was not static – it was naturally dynamic and evolving so he changed his opinion on what he had previously thought was incorrect and debased use of English.

As was to occur later with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) except that was on a much larger scale, Johnson received many suggestions from the public for words to be included in his dictionary. One suggestion was the definition and etymology of the word curmudgeon. The writer suggested that the word was derived from French words coeur (heart) and méchant (evil). Either the letter was unsigned or he lost it; nonetheless, Johnson thought it plausible so he set it down for what it was worth: “a vitious manner of pronouncing coeur méchant, Fr. An unknown correspondent.” Twenty years later in 1775, in his New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language, Dr. John Ash, cribbing from Johnson but, unfortunately for him, knowing no French, entered it as “from the French coeur unknown, méchant correspondent.” This was one the most flagrant and jolly instances of plagiarism in English.

When he was wrong Johnson was quick to admit it. In his dictionary he defined the “pastern” as the knee of a horse. On being queried by a admirer who was of the horse riding set as to how he could possibly make such a mistake he replied, “Ignorance madam, pure ignorance.” What could one say?

That Johnson was an irascible and crabbed old man can not be gainsaid as illustrated by the following stories. Quakers had moved into the area fairly recently where they had some women preachers. Johnson was asked what he though of women preachers. “Ah, yes, women preachers” Johnson opined ” are like dogs walking on their hind legs, you don’t marvel that they do not do it well, but that they can do it at all.”

During the period the American colonists were objecting to being taxed without representation in the British parliament and had British soldiers quartered in their homes without their permission, Johnson exclaimed that the colonists deserved anything that was done to them, short of hanging. After the Revolutionary War began he did not exempt that. A nice fellow, that Johnson.

Mark Twain (1835-1910, came into the world and went out in consecutive appearances of Halley’s Comet) did more than any other single author to define American English. The words hello and dude were used for the first time in literature in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (published for the first time in 1889). He is considered the archetype American novelist and the foremost exponent of the American idiom in his writings. Twain is legendary for his aphorisms. A few of them are: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” “Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.” “Always do right. That will gratify some and astonish the rest.” “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the one who can not read.” “Remember the poor. It cost nothing.” There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.” “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” “Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of others.” “One of the most remarkable differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.” “Be good and you will be lonesome. Be virtuous and you will be considered eccentric.” In addition to humor, these sayings are liberally laced with sardonic insight.

By a process called onomatopoeia (Greek: onomatopoiiā – from onoma name + poiein to make) which is an agglutinative language formation of a word in imitation of a sound, languages are enriched and English is no exception. Some of these words are: zap, zip, click, clank, sniff, snort, boom, crackle, and sizzle in addition to animals/insect sounds of quack, roar, meow, buzz, bleat, oink, cuckoo, chickadee, whooping crane, and whip-poor-will. In Gulliver’s Travels Jonathon Swift named the race of horses endowed with the power of speech the Houyhnhnm in imitation of the whinny of a horse.

If this essay has been informative and entertaining then I have accomplished my task.