19/4/91

So Much For the Queen’s English

MOTHER TONGUE: The English Language by Bill Bryson. London, Hamish Hamilton. 270 pp. 14.99

YOUR LANGUAGE, a French Canadian friend once snorted playfully, "confounds me. A crate in a ship is called cargo; in a car it's called shipment. And that car? You drive it on a parkway, and park it on a driveway."
    My friend could just as confoundingly have tossed that crate into a mailbox. In America, he would mail it through the Postal Services, but in England he would post it through the Royal Mail.
    The English language is at once a complex communication system, epic cultural heritage, anthropological study tool, and an infinitely malleable and wondrous intellectual toy. I think if I were not curious about the English language I would be bored with life.
    Mother Tongue is the second book I've come across that I wish I could commit to memory (the first was the Scrabble dictionary). It is all books on the language rolled into one: a comprehensive yet comprehensible ramble through the history and development of the language in all its facets; it is academic with a lively touch; it is peppered with the anecdotes and curiosities that make English such rollicking fun.
    The book hardly interested me at first. The jacket, both front and back, sell the book short, purporting to sheath yet another personal collection of linguistic vagaries. Even the ubiquitous reviewers' commendations failed to excite me: "Hilarious ... suave, sarcastic and very funny ... ," "sets out ... the commonest confusions to which writers in the public prints are prey" and "littered with wonderful lines and memorable images" - all of which it is, but none of which it is only.
    My dubiety was confirmed by the blurb on author Bryson. It seems he was born and raised in Iowa and now lives in Yorkshire, in which places the language is little more than hearsay. (So what if I was born in Yorkshire? I left at the age of six weeks because I couldn't speak the language. )
    Iowans and Yorkshiremen will forgive the dig. Snobbery is a surprising cornerstone of the English language's unconventionality, and by extension, of its wealth and color. At the time of the Norman conquest, English was the tongue of the uneducated, and its vulnerability to the influence of other languages was of no concern to England's French-speaking upper classes. (Consider that for more than 300 years, from the 1066 conquest until the accession of Henry IV in 1399, no king of England spoke English. )
    The language's lowly position helped it become simpler and less inflected, and as the language of the common people, it was also subject to the whims of peasant dialects. It happily took on new words and influences from the Danes, Scandinavians, the Normans of France and other invaders - but oddly, the "Anglo" influence on our vocabulary died out quickly and almost entirely. Only about 1 percent of the words in the Oxford English Dictionary survive from those wonderful folks who provided the very name of our language.
    So who were these original Anglos, progenitors of our language, who first arrived in Britain in 450 CE? They were an obscure illiterate tribe called Angles, from Angeln, northern Germany, whose present-day townsfolk still speak a dialect eerily reminiscent of English.

ANOTHER DIALECT vaguely resembling English is that spoken by New Yorkers. A study by dialectologist William Labov of the sound of the letter r, as pronounced by New Yorkers, revealed that its use reflects social standing: the higher the class of New Yorker, or the more elevated the conversation, the more likely it is the r will be pronounced.
    Bryson relates that Labov also found that some ethnic groups of New York - particularly Jews and Italians - stressed the pronunciation of certain vowels, and suggested that this is a kind of "hypercorrection" in which the speaker unconsciously distances himself from his parents' foreign accent. Yiddish speakers tended to have trouble with certain unfamiliar English vowel sounds, and Labov deduced that their children compensate for this by overpronouncing these vowels. Hence, a Yiddish-speaking immigrant might pronounce "bag" as "beg", but his children would say "be-agg".
    And how would a New Yorker pronounce Vlacht Bos? The answer is "Flatbush," just as De Kromme Zee came to be spoken in the Big Apple as Gramercy.
    Go ahead, you purists of the "Queen's English," smirk. The Americans are making a farce of your grand old language, right? Harumph. The truth is, shiver-me-timbers, it may be quite the opposite.
    Shakespeare may well have sounded more American than modern-day British. The colonization of America began at the time the Bard of Avon was cranking out his works, so the prevailing pronunciations were naturally transferred to the new colonies. Furthermore, it has often been said that if you want to hear what Elizabethan English sounded like, you should hie to the hills of the Ozarks and Appalachia, whose isolation has preserved the English of Shakespeare. So much for the Queen's English, eh?
    (Shakespeare, by the way, spelled his name many different ways, but he was never known to have spelled it as has now been accepted. His grandfather usually called himself Shakestaff. We can be grateful that the Bard of Avon's father moved to Avon shortly before the playwright's birth, else we would be writing about the Bard of Snitterfield. )

BRYSON EXPOUNDS on the factors that set English apart from other languages. Most obvious is the wealth of its vocabulary. We have somewhere in the region of 400,000-600,000 words, not including technical and scientific terms, which add perhaps millions more. About 200,000 words are in common use, double what the French draw on.
    Even so, our language has its poor patches as compared with, say, the language of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, who have 100 words for types of yams; there are 50 different words for types of snow available to the Eskimos (though there is no word for just "snow"); the Maoris have 35 words for dung; Italians have 500 words for types of macaroni; and rather poignantly, the Araucanian Indians of Chile have a multitude of words to describe different degrees of hunger.
    The second of Bryson's factors setting English apart is its flexibility, especially with the availability of the active and passive senses. Our words generally have much more flexibility than is found in other languages, and there is a fine penchant for words doing double-duty as both nouns and verbs.
    The third and most contentious advantage is the relative simplicity of English spelling and pronunciation. This may seem objectionable at first, when one considers the many peccadillos of our language, but Bryson points out that English has fewer awkward consonant clusters and singsong tonal variations that make other tongues so difficult to master.
    Lesser but no less blessed factors are the lack of gender of inanimates; the absence of inflection of pronouns; the dispensation of definite and indefinite articles (we don't have to say "it is the time to go to the bed"); the motherlode of pithy phrases; free borrowing from other languages; a conciseness that favors truncations like zoo (zoological garden) and mob (mobile vulgus) over such miseries as the German word for a law pertaining to war reparations, Kriegsgefangenanentschadigungsgesetz.
    The devious flip-side of this conciseness, however, is the waffling bafflegab that has crept into common use, which is designed to confuse and obfuscate, rather than communicate. That is how a chicken becomes an "egg-producing entity," a "manual earth-restructuring implement" is a wily new term for a spade, and, according to one quack at a conference of sociologists in 1977, "cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance" is just another way of saying "love."

I COULDN'T put down Mother Tongue until page 223, at which point I couldn't stop putting it down, if you know what I mean. Up to then, it was the last word on the English language, a thoroughly researched and utterly trustworthy account. (There was one earlier blip that mildly irritated me, a reference to "Torontoans", a sloppy or ignorant faux pas where "Torontonians" was meant. )
    But there on page 223, in the chapter on Wordplay, Bryson rattled my confidence in his reliability. He treads clumsily on my own small turf - Scrabble - where I could best judge him. I was stunned that the little he writes about the game is categorically incorrect. One example: "Butts [the game's inventor] insisted on having at least two of each letter, which means that Q, J and X appear disproportionately often." In fact, Q, J and X - plus K and Z, for that matter - each appear only once, exactly as Butts originally decided. If Bryson could be so wrong about something so current and widely known, how can I believe anything else he writes? Ultimately I decided to wince and carry on, and enjoy the rest of the book, which in any case had only a few more pages to go.
    The chapter titled Wordplay is one of several that chronicle the evolution of very specific aspects of the language. In others, Bryson traces the development of pronunciation and spelling; derivations of words; varieties of English including dialects, accents, creoles and pidgins; the evolution of place names and surnames; and swearing. Throughout, there are intriguing anecdotes, curios, quirks and quiddities of the language that impelled me to immediately reread the book (the second time, I skipped page 223).
    Some of my more remarkable finds:
* Silence is not so golden for English speakers. The absolute limit for a pause in conversation is four seconds, at which point someone - or everyone - will blurt out something - anything - to keep the silence from going to a dreaded fifth second.
* A gold piece found in 1982 in Suffolk, England, and dating to 450-480 CE, has inscribed on it the first recorded English-language sentence. Not often repeated since, it is believed to read: "This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman."
* An odd habit of English has been to adopt a foreign adjectival form for an Anglo-Saxon noun, e.g. finger/digital, eye/ocular, mouth/oral, book/literary, water/aquatic, house/domestic, moon/lunar, son/filial, town/urban.
* The British pronunciation of such words as bath, castle and dance - with a broad A - suddenly arose as an upper-class whim of fashion in the 18th century.
* The most far-flung variety of English is that found on Tristan da Cunha, a mid-Atlantic group of islands that is the most isolated inhabited spot on earth. Their English often throws spelling and grammar to the winds. Many of the 300 islanders are named Donald, but curiously all spell it Dondall, apparently because it was misspelled generations ago and the spelling stuck.
* Why do the spellings of colonel, ache and bury bear so distant a resemblance to their pronunciation? When colonel first came into English in the mid-16th century from the Old French coronelle (which itself came from the Itaian colonello), it was spelled with an r. For a century or more both Italian and French spellings and pronunciations were used, until finally, we settled on the French pronunciation and Italian spelling.
    Ache preserves an old spelling with a later pronunciation. Until Shakespeare's day, the noun ache was pronounced as it looks. As a verb it was pronounced ake - and spelled that way. Other such examples still exist (speech/speak, stench/stink, stitch/stick), but illogically with ache, the verb pronunciation was adopted for the noun, and the noun spelling for the verb.
    Busy and bury suffered similar silliness, with the western England spelling becoming accepted, along with pronunciations from London (for busy) and Kentish (for bury).
    A 13th century monk named Orm was an early campaigner against inconsistent spelling, an issue that has been oft-addressed through the ages. Noah Webster was so passionate about it that he lobbied Congress to make deviant spelling a punishable offense.    Incredibly, the first English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, a 3,000-word compendium published in 1604 by Robert Cawdrey, spelled words in two different ways on the title page.
* In 1874, Englishman Major Walter Clopton Wingfield invented an outdoor game he called sphairixtike. It only caught on when his friend Arthur Balfour suggested he change the name to lawn tennis.
* God forbid I should end a sentence with a preposition - but why not? Because Robert Lowth said so. The clergyman and amateur grammarian, in the forgettable but astonishingly influential A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), gave us numerous unnecessary rules we shouldn't have to abide by. I should be shot for that last sentence, according to Lowth, though he in fact didn't insist on the rule, but prodded it as more graceful in "solemn and elevated writing." Pooh!
    Lowth also fixed “different from” as being correct, and “different to” and “different than” as incorrect; the idea that two negatives make a positive; and other such fodder for the nitpicking editor.
    Bryson offers as the last word on the subject of word usage the last words of Dominique Bonhours. The venerable French grammarian, on his deathbed, whispered to his faithful followers: "I am about to - or I am going to - die; either expression is used."
* The compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary was a monumental accomplishment, undertaken in the late 19th century by an eccentric Scotsman, James A.H. Murray. He was helped in his research by hundreds of volunteers, including some very prominent oddballs. James Platt was one of the most prolific contributors, a specialist in obscure words. He was said to speak 100 languages, yet he owned no books. He would conduct his research in the opium dens of London, seeking out speakers of obscure tongues. An even more prolific supplier to Murray was Dr. W.C. Minor, an American expatriate who did have books of his own but couldn't do much field work, as he was held hostage in a hospital for the criminally insane.
* The naming of products is a dangerous can of worms when crossing linguistic borders. A British vintage port called Dry Tang didn't do so well when marketed in Sweden, mainly because tang in Swedish means seaweed. It did a lot better when renamed Dry Cock, which of course wouldn't go over very well back in England. It also didn't do well in Denmark, where cock means, of all things, the female genitalia.
    When Standard Oil was thinking about changing its name (ultimately settling on Exxon), it first considered Enco, until it discovered the word means "stalled car" in Japan. A cigarette called Park Lane did badly in Spain - because the Spaniards couldn't pronounce it and were embarrassed to ask for it.
    Some foreign brands would do well to change their names if they were to try breaking into an English-speaking market. Would you buy a French soft drink called Pschitt? Or a Taiwanese chocolate bar called Plopp? Or how about a Finnish de-icer named Super Piss?
* We only have about 20 swear words, pretty tame compared with the ancient Romans, who could chew you out with some 800 dirty words. The foulest curse in China is to call someone a turtle, and among the South African Xhosa tribe, the worst insult is to call someone hlebeshako ("your mother's ears"). The Finns don't have much in the way of verbal abuse, but they do have one rather odd one: ravintolassa, which means "in the restaurant".
    But it is an English expletive that especially mystifies Bryson. "It is a strange idiosyncracy that when we wish to express extreme fury we entreat the object of our rage to ... engage in the one activity that is bound to give him more pleasure than almost anything else. Can there be a more improbable sentiment than 'get fucked!'? We might as well snarl, 'Make a lot of money!' or 'Have a nice day'!"
* Rhyming slang has always seemed to me a silly fad among easily-amused British youth. Bryson revealed that not only is the habit about 150 years old, but several common American terms are in fact Cockney rhyming slang. Did you ever wonder what you're raising when you put up your dukes? Duke - meaning hand - developed as Duke of Yorks=forks=hand. Bread as a '60s term for money comes from bread and honey=money. To chew the fat comes from have a chat; brass tacks comes from facts; and a raspberry as a synonym for a Bronx cheer comes from raspberry tart=fart. Now we know.
* Norman society in England had two tiers: the French-speaking aristocracy and the English-speaking peasantry. Our language reflects the division in an interesting way. Humble trades tend to have Anglo-Saxon names, such as baker, miller and shoemaker; the more skilled trades adopted French names: mason, painter, tailor. Similarly, animals are often called by their English names (sheep, cow, ox), but once they have been worked over by a chef, they take on French names: beef, mutton, veal, bacon)
* The word dord, as a synonym for density, appeared for the first time in the 1934 Merriam-Webster International Dictionary, and was later included in several other dictionaries. The word was created by a clerk, quite by mistake. A file card had indicated that the word density could be abbreviated as either "D or d." The card was misread, thus producing a new word.
* Some words that appear to derive from Latin were in fact adopted from that language only after it was long dead. The Romance languages became a passion in 17th century England, prompting stylists to change logical English spellings to more fashionable - but incompatible - Latin spelling. That is how debt and doubt came to be spelled with a b, reflecting the Latin debitum and dubitare (the English spellings had been dette and doute). By similar meddling, receipt picked up a p, island an s, scissors a c, anchor the h, rime became rhyme, verdit became verdict.
* English surnames were invented as a result of medieval bureaucracy. In the 1370s, a poll tax required every Briton over the age of 16 to report his or her name, and shortly afterwards, in 1413, the Statute of Additions required all legal documents to include not just the person's name but also his occupation and address.
* The British stiff upper lip is wont to quiver at American abominations invading their propah language. Stiff upper lip is, however, an American term adopted by the British, as is roundabout, a term invented by an American living in England to replace the British gyratory circus. Samuel Taylor Coleridge raged about the Americanism “talented” (which actually dates from 70 years before America was discovered). That most objectionable of "Americanisms" - yeah - is actually British. Stiff upper lips even today will not use horrible new Yankee words like maximize (in fact a century-old Britishism) and input (600 years old).
    Lest the British think they got the ball rolling English-wise, they should heed an American congressman who (quite seriously) told the head of the Joint National Committee on Languages: "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me."