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Part I
Preliminaries and Ancestries
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1 | | History, and historical change |
1.1 History: is it bunk?
This is a history book. It is not the history of a country or a people, but of a language – English. So here, right at the very beginning, it is worth asking whether there is really any value in studying the history of a language. After all, knowing the history of English will probably not help you speak it better, and familiarity with Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s versions of the language is unlikely to help your own written English very much. Why bother, then? Is it worth studying the history of English? What value do you expect that study to have? If you wish, think beyond language, about the value of history in general. Do all your thinking before you read on.
In 1916, the American car industrialist Henry Ford is supposed to have said ‘History is bunk’ (‘bunk’ is a word not much in use today, meaning ‘nonsense’). ‘We want to live in the present’, he continued – there is no point in living in the past. Others have given history an equally bad press. The British politician Augustine Birrell talks about ‘the great dust-heap called history’, and the Spanish philosopher George Santayana says history ‘is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there’.
But plenty of people disagree, and there are generally two sorts of argument in defence of the study of history. One is to do with understanding the here and now. ‘The past is the key to understanding the present’ is how the historian Edward Carr put it. It is certainly true that looking into the history of English will throw light on its present. For example, people say that English has a particularly large vocabulary. How did that come about? As we shall see, it happened partly through invasions, like the Norman one in 1066, which brought French vocabulary with it. Interest in classical cultures also had its effect, particularly at the time of the Renaissance, which brought Latin and Greek words flooding into the language. Then there was British colonial expansion abroad, where part of the bounty carried home was new words. History will also throw light on small details. For example, why do some British English speakers today say adult with the stress on the first syllable, while others stress the second? It is in fact the remnants of a conflict between English’s Germanic roots, where the stress generally falls on the first syllable, and the influence of French which came in with the Norman conquest, where the stress is often on later syllables in words. You see the same conflict in the word garage in British English today. Again, some speakers stress the first syllable, others the second (as in the French). There is also the consonant at the end of the word. Some use the consonant found in the French garage (the same as in the middle of the word lei s ure), and others prefer to say it as if it were written ‘dg’ (also changing the preceding vowel – ‘garidge’). These few examples suggest that the past can indeed throw light on features of the present, big and small.
The second sort of argument is rather more grand, and to do with culture more generally. Tolstoy said in War and Peace that the aim of history is ‘to enable nations and humanity to know themselves’. Even more grandly, here is what Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon in the twelfth century, claims: ‘The knowledge of past events … distinguishes rational creatures from brutes’. This type of argument suggests that learning about the history of English will tell you something about yourself (if you come from an English-speaking culture), or about the culture (literature, art) that you are studying.
How convincing do you find these arguments? After exploring your own thoughts, you might wish to find out what others have written. Try using an internet search engine to look up ‘what’s the point of history?’, or ‘the value of history’, or even ‘history is a waste of time’. You will also find that many books on the teaching of history include a chapter on ‘why teach history’. Sites that you may wish to go straight to are mentioned under Further reading.
Before embarking on this study of English, another question worth asking is how much you know about the history of your own language, whether it be English or some other language. Activity 1A (About your L1) invites you to think about this. The term L1 (for ‘first language’) is used to refer to someone’s native or mother tongue.
1.2 How English has changed
The novelist L. P. Hartley famously begins his book ...
