A History of English (RLE: English Language)

Barbara M. H. Strang

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317421900
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Lingue e linguistica
• Categoría: Linguistica

A History of English, first published in 1970, is a book for beginners in linguistic history. This title examines the changes in English language speech and writing over a period of almost 2000 years, whilst also exploring more recent changes within the author's living memory. This title aims to raise countless issues for enquiry and discussion, and its purpose is to serve as a springboard for language history learning rather than a textbook.

Part One
Introductory

Section One
Synchronic variation and diachronic change

§ 1

The prevalence of linguistic change is something widely forced on our attention. Very often the notice it receives is unfavourable; these comments from the press represent points of view held by many educated and thoughtful English-speaking people:

I

Sir,-May I utter a protest against the currently fashionable abuse of the word sophisticated as applied to weapons or nuclear and electronic devices of advanced design?

The Oxford English Dictionary (Vol. 10, page 436) gives three meanings for sophisticated: (i) adulterated, not pure or genuine; (ii) altered from, deprived of, primitive simplicity or naturalness (generally, it seems, in a perjorative sense, implying artificiality); (iii) falsified in a greater or less degree; not plain, honest or straightforward.

None of these definitions fits the meaning now given to the word by the scientific and strategic pundits and radio and television commentators when they talk of sophisticated weapons or machines. On the other hand, there is a range of simple terms that are perfectly adequate for the purpose.

I suggest complex, elaborate, highly refined, or highly developed. Some of these terms are shorter and none contains more syllables than sophisticated.

Let this word, therefore, be saved from deteriorating into pseudo-learned jargon.

Yours faithfully,

II

Sir,-In The Teacher dated June 16 a correspondent wrote of 'the clumsy efforts of we anglers'. In The Times dated June 17 a correspondent writes 'Let we in the West make sure that we do all we can ...'

Does this mean that the word us is about to disappear from our language? Or that normal English usage is now ignored in papers which previously set high standards?

Yours faithfully,

III

Sir,-Is it not regrettable that a headline in The Times 'The lesser known side of a great collection' (September 20) should lend authority to the increasing practice of treating 'lesser' as an adverb, a usage which the O.E.D. tells us has been obsolete since 1625?

One is helped to keep the distinction clear by remembering that the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker is more spotted, not less spotted, than the Greater Spotted Woodpecker.

Your obedient servant,

IV

Sir,-Every so often a familiar word takes on a new and senseless life. Superb, for instance, is now commonly abused. Literally - 'he literally exploded with rage' - seems to be on the way out, but virtually has taken its place. In the course of a day influenza-bound recently I heard speakers on various B.B.C. programmes use this adverb improperly nine times.

With superb diffidence, I am, Sir, virtually yours,

Sir,-Can anything be done to stop the appalling new word 'escalate' from escalating into the next edition of the Oxford Dictionary? The hope is being expressed that the Viet-Nam business may not 'escalate' into a major war. What's wrong with the simple word 'develop'?

Your obedient servant,

Sir, -It is with regret that I read in your columns of the passing of the word 'literally' from our vocabulary.

I have had an affection for its misuse ever since I read that Squeers had literally feasted his eyes, in silence, upon the culprit (Smike).

Yours faithfully,

V

Sir,-I am also one who fears for the state of the English language. Care for its development, propagation and standardisation needs to be made more of a political issue, as in France, Norway and the USSR.

In particular, let there be care over the formation of new words, 'Television,' 'auto-mation,' and 'hyper-sonic' are of mixed linguistic origin.

Also, consider this sentence: 'I've got to get there to get rich.' Such usage is common now.

In English this becomes: 'I need to arrive there to become rich.'

Moreover, 'Ae've getten a one' sounds better than 'I've got one.' Most curious!

Yours faithfully,

On the other hand, a more tolerant view is also expressed

VI

Sir,-English is a living language. Meanings change, and dictionaries cannot always keep pace with current usage.

If the majority of English-speaking people use the word sophisticated to describe something which is highly refined, then that is its meaning.

Yours faithfully,

Familiarity with the concept of change should not blunt the edge of curiosity about it. It is not immediately obvious that language should change; indeed, many have thought, at various periods, and some still think, that change could be halted, or at least brought under control. Animal cries, for example, may change a little from era to era, but there is some reason to think they do not change nearly as much as language. The sound made by sheep was represented by the Ancient Greeks as bē, bē (approximately /bε:/ /bε:/), and much the same sort of sound can be heard from English sheep at the present day. But the Modern Greek equivalent of the linguistic form is pronounced /vi:/; it has lost all connection with the natural sound to which it was originally related. Why should speech be more subject to change than animal cries? Before we answer that question, we should put beside it another, even nearer home. Ancient Greek also had a representation for the sound of a sob, pheu, which would have been something like /phεƱ/, with a clearly echoic character, presumably then, and certainly in relation to sobs as we now know them. Yet this in present-day Greek has become /fεf/, a sound which emerges rather ludicrously from the lips of a tragic actress. Evidently, even among human vocalisations linguistic ones are more subject to change than non-linguistic ones. Why should this be?

§ 2

The brief answer to these questions may sound paradoxical. Language changes because of the element of imitation inescapable in the learning and practice of it. The lamb does not bleat in deliberate imitation of the sheep-community into which it is born; it bleats as its genetic blueprint lays down for it. The human baby has a genetic blueprint, too, relevant to language, a blueprint which enables it to become a learner of language. But nothing in its inheritance specifies which language it will learn; a normal human baby, of whatever parentage, will acquire the language or languages of the particular speech-community in which it is raised. Many types of activity go into this long process of acquisition, and all the activities are dependent on the genetic capacity; we cannot say that a baby learns a particular language just by imitating. But we can say that imitation is one kind of activity which is indispensable. And it is precisely because of the two factors, absence of genetic conditioning towards a specific language, and presence of imitation, that language is always and everywhere subject to change, while 'natural' (non-linguistic) sounds, in animals and humans, are not.

§ 3

Let us examine this assertion. First a point of clarification. Not only pronunciation, but language as a whole, is always subject to change. In comparing non-linguistic vocalisations one can only give specific examples from pronunciation; non-linguistic vocalisations are, by definition, sounds, but they have neither words nor grammar. The main levels of organisation in language - sounds (phonetics-phonology), words or vocabulary (lexis) and grammar (morphology-syntax) are all three subject to the universal condition of mutability. The change takes various forms, and varies in pace, but operates at all levels. It could not be otherwise, since the levels are interrelated at many points. The absence of telling comparisons with non-linguistic material makes us fall back on other kinds of evidence, but we must not conclude that changes in pronunciation are somehow unavoidable in a way that other changes are not.

§ 4

All the same, it is easy to begin with sounds in showing how imitation results in change, and the problems of constructing an example can serve as a reminder that sounds do not function in isolation. A baby's vocal activities are steps on the road towards language long before he produces anything his parents seize on as his 'first word', but the parents' recognition of his activities is a milestone, because once they begin to accord linguistic status to certain vocalisations they reinforce these vocalisations by isolating, repeating and encouraging. From that point the rate of progress snowballs. Very often the items that usher in this phase of development take, in our society, such forms as /mΛmI, mama, dæd, dædΙ, dada/, etc. The qualification in our society is needed, not because English babies start their language-activities differently from other babies, but because both the targets of their imitation and the efforts most likely to be crowned with recognition by their parents, are English.

The sound-sequences I have given as examples involve complex continuous muscular movements - as do all linguistic vocalisations. They are so complex that exact repetition cannot be guaranteed, indeed, is so exceptional as to be a fluke. But once a sequence has been recognised and responded to the baby has a strong incentive to try to repeat it; how far this imitation is dependent on the parents' speech, and how far it is directed towards the child's own remembered vocal activity we do not know. There is no reason to think the mix between the two is the same for all children. The unit which sparks off this cycle of recognition, response and reproduction is one that from the viewpoint of adult language we call a word (though perhaps from the baby's viewpoint it could better be called a sentence, and even for adults it functions as a one-word sentence). To this, therefore, in the first instance, the child's efforts are directed. He aims to produce word-sentences, functioning in an activity where word and sentence are not yet discriminated as distinct types of structure.

These sequences which become the goals of conscious imitation are preceded, accompanied and even followed, by rudimentary syllables practised in the activity called babbling, the later phases of which clearly suggest a sense of speech-sounds as discrete. In /pa, ma, ta, da/, etc. we have two-place syllables, in which substitution regularly occurs in the first, i.e. consonantal, position. This already indicates the functional discreteness of the speech-sounds which in mature speech are to become phonemes. That is not, of course, to say that the baby thinks of two positions in such syllables as each constituting the domain of a range of substitutions.

When we turn to the discrete, or at least isolable, speech-sounds, we find a difference between the fillers of the two positions in our examples. The relevant characteristic is more clear-cut, and easier to describe, in the fillers of our second position, i.e. vowels, and it is the conditions for vocalic change we should examine first. When we aim to repeat a vowel sound, such as the /a/ of /pa/, we have normally two kinds of reference-standard to go by. We have our memory for muscular movement - for what it was like to place our jaw, tongue and lips in a certain posture, to create the resonance chamber, modified uniquely according to the peculiarities of our own oral-pharyngeal anatomy, in which a vibrating air-column will produce a sound of /a/-like character and no other. As this involves a sense of the placing of mobile parts of the body it may be called kinaesthetic, though in a somewhat specialised sense. Secondly, we recall the effect of the sound itself; we have an acoustic standard of appeal. But both the kinaesthetic and the acoustic references involve memory. We have in the ordinary way no objective realisation to refer to. Nowadays we are so familiar with an abundance of recording devices that the qualification 'in the ordinary way' is needed. However, the qualification has no bearing on how we become proficient in the making of speech-sounds or maintain our unthinking proficiency as adult speakers. Throughout the history of mankind language has been transmitted from generation to generation without recording devices, and now that we have them we do not attempt to transmit our language by giving infants a recorded standard to imitate.

§ 5

Therefore, without going into the stages by which, or the developmental phases at which, the child builds its repertoire of distinctive speech-sounds, we may safely assert that the building process depends, inter alia, on memory, on kinaesthetic sense, and on acoustic perception. With these three aids the incoming member of the speech-community aims at the reproduction of what he has isolated as being a speech-sound functional in that speech-community. If we think of the goal he aims at as the bull's-eye of a target, and if we bear in mind the rarity of exact repetition of complex muscular movements, we realise that most of the time he will not hit the bull's-eye; most shots will be, at best, near misses. As long as they are near-enough misses, he will not be corrected by a senior member of the speech-community, and every near miss left uncorrected will contribute in a very small way to the linguistic history of that individual, and in an even smaller way to the history of the language concerned. For a near miss will create its own memory, of movement and acoustic perception, and will tend to shi...