When English Climbed Onto Dry Land
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The evolution of language is no less astonishing and improbable than the evolution of life. To discover in Homo sapiens the direct heir of some unicellular flagellate is awe-inspiring and dismaying: It is uncanny that something so familiar and sturdy as our own species could have such murky origins. So, too, with the English language, which is used today practically everywhere human beings congregate.
How do we find our way from the speech of New York and London, Johannesburg and Bombay, Hong Kong and Honolulu, back to the dialect that a few thousand Angles and Saxons brought with them across the North Sea in the fifth century A.D.? What possible connection can the language of this newspaper have with lines like these:
Oft him an-haga are gebideth Meotodes mildse, theathe he mod cearig geond lagu lade lange scolde hreran mid handum hrimcealde sae.
They are the opening lines of “The Wanderer,” an Anglo-Saxon elegiac poem preserved in a thousand-year- old manuscript known as the Exeter Book. (An accurate transcription, in fact, would look still stranger, for the sound we now write as “th” was represented by two Anglo-Saxon letters, “thorn” and “eth,” that have long since vanished from the language.) Here and there we find glimmers of recognition: “Oft” is our “often,” for instance, and “handum” is “hands.” But it would be easier for an educated English-speaker to make sense of a passage of classical Latin, with its familiar roots and af fixes and Romance echoes, than to translate these four lines into:
Often the solitary man prays for favor
the mercy of the Lord, though he
with sad heart
through the watery way must long
stir with hands the ice-cold sea.
In fact, as David Crystal shows in his fascinating and erudite “The Stories of English” (Overlook Press, 565 pages, $35), Anglo-Saxon already looked bizarre to English-speakers 500 years ago. Around 1490, the pioneering English printer William Caxton recorded a trip to Westminster Abbey, where “my lorde Abbot of Westmynster ded do shewe to me late certayne evydences wryton in olde Englysshe for to reduce it into our Engylysshe now usid. And certaynly it was wreton in suche wyse that it was more lyke to Dutche than Englysshe: I coude not reduce ne brynge it to be understonden.”
Already with Caxton, we are on much more familiar ground. Beneath the erratic spellings (“Engylysshe” for “English”) and obsolete constructions (“ded do shewe” for “showed”), this is a perfectly comprehensible piece of Early Modern English. Not the least modern thing about it, indeed, is Caxton’s complete alienation from Anglo-Saxon: sometime between 1000 and 1500, the language changed as decisively as when the first fish shed their gills and climbed onto dry land.
The story Mr. Crystal has to tell is not, of course, a new one. The major discoveries of English philology were made in the 19th century, and they provided the basic curriculum for generations of students. Indeed, until the mid-20th century, studying “English” at a British or American university meant studying the emergence of the modern language from its Anglo-Saxon chrysalis – a study that, it must be said, bored at least as many as it fascinated. As the young Philip Larkin wrote from Oxford to Kingsley Amis, then serving in World War II: “Sometimes I think of ‘Beowulf’ & ‘The Wanderer’. Oh boo hoo. You lucky fellow to be in the Army away from it all.”
But the near disappearance of philology from higher education has left even sophisticated users of the language completely ignorant of its history. It is this gap which Mr. Crystal, a leading British authority on linguistics, aims to fill with “Stories of English.” For the most part, he is wonderfully successful, communicating a complex subject in a witty and accessible way.
He shows how Anglo-Saxon was transformed by its contact with Danish and Norman invaders; how it embraced courtly French and scientific Latin; how its grammar was regularized in the 15th century, and its orthography in the 17th; how “correct” usage became a class-marker in the age of Johnson, and how the former colonies transformed the mother tongue in the age of Rushdie and Walcott. In the latter part of the book, especially, Mr. Crystal reveals a strongly (at times self-righteously) anti-prescriptivist temper, attacking the grammatical dogmas of Fowler and the gentilities of BBC pronunciation. The historically informed pluralism of “Stories of English” offers a perfect rebuttal to spuriously authoritative usage guides like “Eats, Shoots and Leaves.”
Mr. Crystal enlivens his demanding text with fascinating case studies – what might be called historical trivia, if it were not so enlightening. To illustrate the influence of French on English after the Norman Conquest, for instance, Mr. Crystal offers a list of “doublets” used in early legal formulae, meant to ensure that there could be no ambiguity between plebeian English and noble French. To this day, we still use these doublets, in both legal and lay contexts: “breaking and entering,” “fit and proper,” “wrack and ruin.”
Mr. Crystal might have gone on to show how this particular legal formula had a profound influence on “Hamlet,” where Shakespeare turns it into a literary formula for his hero’s double-mindedness. The play is full of famous doublets: “rank and gross in nature,” “ponderous and marble jaws,” “rogue and peasant slave.” Such are the “by-paths and indirect crook’d ways” (to quote the King in “Henry IV”) by which the study of philology leads to the study of literature, and linguistics helps to shape aesthetics. It is a small example of why the education Mr. Crystal offers in “The Story of English” is indispensable for anyone who speaks, reads, and writes English.