Chels

I may not be our resident linguist, but I am fascinated by the history of language, and how English came to be what it is today. I got to study the history of English a little, but through the lens of place names, so when I saw that Rupert Gavin’s talk on his new book Amorous or Loving? The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and the English was available with our Hay Festival online pass, I knew I had to give it a watch. This week, I’d like to share a patchwork history of the English language, pieced together from all the things I’ve been lucky enough to learn from people who know much more than me.

In the year 878, roughly 200,000 people spoke Anglo-Saxon, the language that would become English. Eleven centuries later, English is the most spoken language in the world, with 1.35 billion speakers, which is pretty impressive, given how small an island it began on. Of course, part of the reason for the spread of English is Britain’s colonial history, which Rupert Gavin touched on in the Q&A portion of his talk, but today I want to focus on the development of the language, rather than the spread.

The problem with English history is that there are a lot of things we just don’t know the answer to, and probably never will. There’s very little surviving evidence of early languages. Before Anglo-Saxon, we mostly spoke Celtic or Brittonic. Not much of these early languages survived, and what does survive mostly relates to place names. It’s why so many rivers are called Avon – when the settlers arrived, they asked the names of rivers, and the Celts told them Avon, because that was the Celtic word for river. I feel lucky to live in a town whose name originated as Celtic (which is especially rare, as where I live was included in the Danelaw, but we’ll get to that later). Celtic influenced our grammar significantly, though. The present continuous tense, as in, I am writing, was used by the Celts. Gavin depicts Celtic as a rhythmic language, and their influence on grammar does not contribute much to meaning, rather to the rhythm of the way we speak. I am writing is only marginally clearer than I write, and mostly because of years of speaking creating that nuance, but the phrases have different tones, different rhythms. Gavin also cites the Celts as the reason we use ‘do’ so much. I’m not a linguist, so when he suggested that many of our ‘do’s are meaningless, I was a little confused, but having given the idea time to settle, I can understand it clearer. ‘How do you do’ is a bit of a mouthful, and open ended, too. How do I do what? How are you is much clearer to understand, but there’s no denying that ‘how do you do’ is more rhythmic – it sounds more pleasant and friendly. It can be a confusing phrase to non-native speakers, but since it’s so ingrained into our culture and speech, native English speakers tend not to question how unusual it is.

After the Celts came the Angles and Saxons – Germanic tribes who have come to be seen as one due to their history, and the choices made in language. There were quite a few dialects spoken by these tribes, and over time, they influenced each other as people communicated. They were influenced by the indigenous Celts, and later, by Viking settlers. After the Viking invasion, and to cut a long story short, England was divided into two distinct areas. The Norse Vikings were given the North and East of England, which became known as the Danelaw, while the Anglo-Saxons took the South and West. Gavin refers to this area as Angloland, though the area is more commonly split up into its seven kingdoms. These kingdoms influenced our current place names (Essex, Wessex, and Sussex all named for being the home of Saxon tribes). To unify the seven Kingdoms, King Alfred chose West Saxon as the official language of Angloland. Peculiarly, he called it Anglish, even though it was the language of the Saxons rather than the Angles. Again, this is one of those things that we just don’t have an explanation for. I’d hazard a guess that it was a kind of compromise between the groups. West Saxon, or Anglish as it was now known, would become Old English, the basis of our current English. Thankfully, we have a decent amount more surviving written Old English than we do Celtic, and much of it is written in the West Saxon dialect.

Of course, the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons did communicate – how else would they know where the boundaries of land were? This happened largely in the North East of England, where some Anglo-Saxons remained even through the Danelaw. It helped that Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse were both Germanic languages, so there were some overlaps in vocabulary, and similar word origins. The interactions produced a much simpler common language, which is what became Middle English. Again, while this had an impact on our language from a vocabulary lens, it also greatly affected our grammar rules. Middle English is the origin of the subject-verb-object sentence structure, as in, the Vikings spoke Old Norse. It was a very practical era of English, since it was used to bridge the communication gap between two cultures living together. The Anglo-Saxons had complex suffixes (too complex for me to understand – my crude and not quite correct explanation weighed down my grade in the module), but Middle English no longer dealt with them. Instead, we used pronouns more simply. And, to everyone who likes to say that the gender neutral ‘they’ is not grammatically correct, the gender neutral they/them/their has been around for a millennium – it replaced suffixes that denoted neither male or female, used in both plural and singular form. Middle English migrated south and west until it was the primary vernacular tongue in England.

I specifically referred to Middle English as the vernacular tongue, because it wasn’t the only language spoken in England at the time. French and Latin were brought to the country by the Normans (led by William the Conqueror), spoken in church and education, and later in official medical settings. They were seen as the proper languages, the language of the educated. The Normans made a huge impact on English through the infusion of French and Latin words. In place names, they’re largely the reason why many place names include affixes like East, West, Little, or Great. They also renamed many places to suit their native tongue – Durham was much easier to pronounce than Dunholme. While English prevailed in Britain, French and Latin still infused the language – vocabulary doubled from around 50,000 words to 100,000 words during this time. Gavin suggests that this is the core reason why we have so many synonyms, and interestingly points out some key differences.

Words of Anglo-Saxon origin tend to be more casual, whereas their French synonyms are fancier, more studied. Start is Anglo-Saxon, but commence is French, and to borrow from the book’s title, loving is Anglo-Saxon, but amorous is French. Clearly, despite French and Latin making their way into English, the notion of Norman as the language of the educated and English as the vernacular tongue still remains. We can see it as well when we talk about animals. We raise cows and eat beef, rear pigs and eat pork. I suspect this comes from class and occupation differences – Britain has a great agricultural history, and many Anglo-Saxons were farmers by trade, so their words were used for the live animals. The Normans, on the other hand, were the early politicians and rulers, they were not concerned with farming – but they consumed the animals.

These days, it seems people are quite hesitant to embrace language changes. I think because English is so old, we see it as stagnant – surely it’s always been the same? But really, English is a language formed out of change. It’s the accepting of new vocabulary and grammar that made English such a full language. I’ll be talking again about a much more recent language that influenced English next week, any guesses which it might be?