Class consciousness

So what's the alternative to the old "parts of speech" model? Schoolhouse Rock provides a handy clue: "conjunction junction, what's your function?" -- what if we were were to ask of other words, not what it is they are, but what it is they do? The answer would give us word classes, which have the tremendous advantage of describing what English words actually do do in actual sentences and utterances. Some of these classes, such as the class of prepositions or that of conjunctions, are relatively stable -- these are sometimes called "closed" classes -- but in other cases -- what the parts people call nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs -- a word's class status might be completely different depending on the particular sentence it's in. In addition to words such as fish, photograph, taste, and service -- all of which can potentially be members of several classes without changing their form at all (these are called zero morphs) we also have a wide array of suffixes, and sometimes prefixes, that "recruit" a word from one class to another: -able turns verbs into adjectives (love ==> lovable); -ment turns verbs into nouns (govern ==> government); and of course -ly turns adjectives into adverbs (quick ==> quickly).

What is Grammar?

We all know the "Grammar Nazi" -- and can laugh along with parodies such as College Humor's take on the famous scene from Inglorious Basterds. But why is this notion so persistent? I think it's because those of us who have anxieties about our grammar and usage have them because we've been called out somewhere -- in a classroom, on a stage, by a seeming friend -- for some real or purported usage error. The grammar guardians have that same smugness that we fear from the enforcers of some imaginary authoritarian regime: the law is on their side, and they will show no mercy. But how did we get to this state of affairs, with a language that most of us have been speaking since before we were two years old? How did we come to feel not at home in our own home language?

Part of it is that English is notoriously filled with inconsistencies. Compared with either Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian) or Germanic ones (German, Norwegian, Icelandic), we have dozens of exceptions to the rules, all of which someone learning English as a second language must contend with. On top of that, we have quite a few "rules" which the grammar correctors are convinced are rooted in stone, which are in fact not rules at all, but merely conventions (see the previous sentence for how we're not supposed to end things). Perhaps most significantly, we tend to confuse these conventions -- which are those of formal written English -- with rules about everyday, informal speech.

I have good news though: as Dante Alighieri noted about his childhood acquisition of Italian, if English is your first language, then you learned it by imitation, and sine omni regula (without any rules). Rules come later, and after, and actually have nothing whatsoever to do with how we actually learn to speak, or do speak. Which is not to say English has no structure, but rather that the structures which help us generate speech are not the same as those external after-thoughts with with grammarians have measured and examined speech. When one thinks of language in generative terms, one realizes the sad futility of the rule-followers: to follow rules is not the same thing as grasping a principle.

Johnson's Dictionary

In one particularly memorable episode of Blackadder," Ink and Incapability," when the Prince Regent (played by Hugh Laurie) asks Dr. Johnson (played by Robbie Coltrane) what his new Dictionary is good for, the learned Doctor declares that "It is a book that tells you what English words mean." "I know what English words mean," replies the prince, "I speak English! You must be a bit of a thicko!"

And indeed, one may well ask, why do we need a Dictionary of our own language? After all, numerous English writers, from Chaucer to Spencer to Shakespeare, got along quite well without one, as did their readers -- not to mention the great throng of ordinary speakers of English, whose talk continued unabated, with no need for works of reference to understand it, for centuries. And yet English, by the eighteenth century now well-established in print and manuscript, was rapidly expanding its vocabulary, variety of styles, and usage -- becoming in a sense as much as textual presence as a spoken one. Furthermore, since it had acquired so many words from other classical and modern languages, the search for the right word -- le mot juste, as the French say -- might well involve choosing between several near-synonyms with slightly varied shades of meaning. Finally, since English had been around for a while, there were now a fair number of uncommon or archaic words with which not every reader would necessarily be familiar.

And yet, as the television skit suggests, the idea of an English dictionary took some getting used to; not everyone was sure that the enterprise was worthwhile, or even possible. It would take a man of prodigious talents, hard-working, stubborn, and bottomlessly erudite, to manage such a thing -- and Samuel Johnson was the man to do it. He was widely regarded as one of the most intelligent men of his era -- and he was also brusque, opinionated, and so rude on occasion that some latter-day diagnosticians believe he suffered from Tourette's Syndrome. He did not so much speak as blurt, and many of his exclamations have joined the list of immortal quotes: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a Scoundrel," "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," and "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of Life," to name but a few. 

The learned Doctor is portrayed by Robbie Coltrane, with every bit of bluster the role demands. Dr. Johnson's rising irritation as Blackadder peppers him with a plethora of portmanteau words -- "interphrastrically," "pericombobulations," and "extramuralisation" -- is priceless. And yet it may surprise many to learn that Johnson's own accent was anything but the posh pretentiousness of Coltrane's memorable performance; he had, in fact, a very thick and distinctive Staffordshire accent; according to Jeffrey Meyers' Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, he said "shuperior" for superior, "woonse" for once, and "poonsh" for "punch."

I hadn't realized this myself, until on listening to the audiobook version of my novel PYG -- in which the learned Doctor meets the Learned Pig (this is based on contemporary accounts) -- that I heard Simon Callow's marvellous personation of Johnson's voice, which perfectly and richly evokes both the accent and the man.

So have a browse at his Dictionary, and some of his remarks on men and letters as transcribed by his longtime sidekick and eventual biographer, James Boswell, and (if you wish), leave a few words of your own here in comment or reply.

The New Normal -- and the old

Despite the efforts of those who actually study language, the notion of a "standard English," one to which we should constantly adhere, at the peril of revealing our fathomless ignorance, has persisted for generations. Perhaps it's just an inevitable consequence of the effort to make education accessible to the masses; in order to do so, language was codified, and people began to mistake those codes for the ones that actually govern everyday speech.

And of course, ever since there's been an English language, there's been a prestige or normative accent: The West Saxons looked down their noses at their Mercian and Northumbrian neighbors; the Oxbridge chattering classes guffawed at the parlance of Soho Square; even in the purportedly egalitarian American colonies, Boston Brahmins and Tidewater planters laughed at the usage of backwoods Kentuckians, at least until the Midwest conquered both, and laughed last.

And that's not all: even if, in terms of diction and pronunciation, we could talk about a normative way of speaking, and agree on what that was, none of us actually speaks it. We hear others having an "accent," and we may believe ourselves to have one, but truth be told, normative pronunciation is an accent too -- albeit an artificial one, known mostly by its seeming absence. Our linguistic variety, indeed, is our strength: the different phrases and idioms we use, the different pronunciations and accents natural to different persons, all of these are the life-blood of living language. The only languages that don't have such variations -- Latin, or Attic Greek -- are dead ones. And, within broad limits, the more differences, the merrier. English literature, indeed, is full of those whose manner of speaking is different from anyone else's, whether it's Dickens's Jo the crossing-sweeper, with his "I don' know nuffink," Liza Doolittle with her "Aaaaaaaaaaah-ow-ooh," or Popeye the Sailor with his "edjamication," his "horshpital," or his immortal apothegm "I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam" (which, incidentially, is the favored Twitter quote of Salman Rushdie). In more recent times, Hip-hop has brought us such wordsmiths as Keith Murray, Flavor-Flav, and Humpty-Hump, who boasts in "The Humpty Dance" that he'll "use a word that don't mean nothin', like loopted." But of course, sooner or later, every word means something.

Chaucer and Middle English

Every modern language seems to have its vital, foundational literary work: Italian has Dante's Divine Comedy, Spanish has Don Quixote, and English has Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. And yet, like other such works, the writings of Chaucer are more often talked about than read; unlike Shakespeare's, his characters have not so often strutted upon the stage. In the UK, the BBC has done them both as a period puppet piece as well as a modernized version, and in 1972 the great Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini made a memorable film version -- but here in the US there have been no major film or television adaptations, unless you count the somewhat squishy "A Knight's Tale." Still, Chaucer's influence has been deeply felt; his Troylus and Criseyde was one of Shakespeare's sources for his play of the same name; the Wife of Bath's Prologue was translated in 1700 by John Dryden; and in the twentieth century there have been no fewer than seven translations or adaptations into modern English, most recently by Peter Ackroyd (in prose) and Sheila Fisher (in verse).

And Chaucer's language is very close to ours -- close enough that, with a modest amount of practice, we can pronounce it and understand it reasonably well.  The main differences are that many combination of letters which are now silent, such as kn and gh, were pronounced, as was the e on the end of so many words which has since become our modern English friend "silent e." Lastly, the vowels of Chaucer's day were further back in the mouth, since the "Great Vowel Shift" which moved them forwards had not yet taken place.  Thus Chaucer's "Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote" is pronounced as "Whahnn that ah-prill, weeth hees shooriss soat-uh" in our reconstructed Chaucerian mode.  

The other difference is mainly vocabulary -- "lexical" as linguists would say. Chaucer still used a number of words left over from older English; a "swevene" was a dream; "eke" meant "indeed" or "as well"; he used "lykned" instead of "likened," "hem" instead of "them" and "hire" instead of "their" there was no neuter possessive "its" so everything had to be "hys" or hers. Happily, there are many fewer such survivals in his verse than in that of the Gawain poet, who, living the north-west Midlands, was removed from many of the changes of London English and still used athele (noble), sithen (since), schawe (show), and lovelokkest (loveliest).

Chaucer was also on the forefront of many changes of which modern English has been the beneficiary; he introduced many words and usages from French, some in their Anglo-Norman senses, nearly all of which are still with us today: bachelor, melody, adversary, bounty, refute, vein, army, season, and devout. He borrowed a few Latin terms, though most often via their French versions, and his verse structures, such as "rhyme royal,"turned out to be particularly effective in English. 

And yet, despite his many achievements, subtle changes in English -- particularly the "Great Vowel Shift" and the falling silent of 'silent e' -- made Chaucer's verse seem less melodious and metrical to readers from Shakepeare to Dryden; it wasn't until the mid-nineteenth century that philologists were able to reconstruct Chaucer's diction and restore his original English to its proper form and meter.