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.
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.
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.
The land now known as England was originally inhabited by an unknown culture of people, sometimes referred to as "Megalithic" people (a reference to the standing stones they left at, among other places, Stonehenge). These people were displaced by Celtic tribes, who in their turn were pushed back to the peripheries of the island by three Germanic tribes -- the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes -- who arrived in the fifth century to fill the power vacuum left by the departing Roman colonizers. We know little of their culture, though, and nothing of their literature, until the moment when they were converted to Christianity -- and literacy -- a couple of centuries later, and some of the earliest texts we know are those used by missionaries to help persuade the Anglo-Saxons of the superiority of Christian belief. In fact, the very oldest written text -- The Dream of the Rood -- survives in part as a runic inscription on a stone cross (shown here). The Dream is a proselytizing poem -- a poem that sought to convert its readers actively. The main speaker of the poem, in fact, is the Cross itself, which explains why it had to allow Christ to be crucified upon it -- a vital "backstory" for the Saxons, who considered crucifixion to be be"fraecodes gealga" -- the thieves' gallows. The cross, in contrast, represents itself as a faithful thegn (military follower) who only did as his Lord commanded, and was rewarded by having a mini-resurrection of his own, uplifted into the light of heaven, where it was covered with gold and rich gems, a hero's reward.
As with modern English, there were several major dialects of Anglo-Saxon: Northumbrian in the North, Kentish in the East, Mercian in the midlands, and West Saxon in the West of England. The political center of the Saxons was in Winchester (Wintanceastre) in the West Saxon area, and thus its speech became the prestige dialect of the language; more than 90% of surviving Old English texts are in this dialect. Much has changed since then, but even to this day, if you look at the top decile of English (the top 10% of our most frequently-used words), nearly all of them are directly descended from closely similar Saxon antecedents: stone (stan); house (hus); was (wæs); say (secgan); father (fæder); and many more.
Our best glimpse into the everyday life of the speakers of Old English is through their written texts. With Beowulf, we have a sense of the kinds of epic tales with which the Saxons regaled one another before -- and even after -- their conversion to Christianity. With Ælfric's Colloquy, we can visit a typical schoolroom, where the students -- known as leorningcnihtan ("knights of learning") engaged in questions and answers with their teachers. With Alfred's letter to his bishops -- the oldest form-letter in English -- we can hear the urgency and passion he felt for the cause of education. And, in later texts, we can sense the feeling that the Anglo-Saxons had that their world was slowly slipping away from them. One of their very last alliterative poems, the Battle of Maldon, describes a Viking assault on a coastal village. The same language used in Beowulf -- the leader, the ring-giver, with his faithful warrior thegns -- is used to describe the village's defenders, who in reality were no more than farmers with pitchforks and rusty daggers. They died -- gloriously -- the last of an ancient tradition. With the death of King Harold in 1066, their social world was instantly doomed -- although their language, altered and battered but unwilling to die -- would return to fight again.
Welcome to our class blog for English 433, Modern Grammar, Fall 2018, at Rhode Island College! This course, despite its official name, is not strictly speaking a course on grammar, though grammar will not be neglected. What it really is is an introduction to issues in the study and teaching of the English language today, including (but not limited to) such matters as modern usage, the idea of the "standard," perceptions of "accent," the history of the language, and its inner mechanics. Throughout the course, by demonstrating that there is in fact a history to many aspects of our language -- particularly to the usage perceived as "correct" at different times and places -- we will be able to demystify some of its more arcane and troublesome features. We will also pay special attention to current issues in the teaching of English, language development, and the ways in which new technologies of communication (satellite television, the Internet, texting) have affected patterns and perceptions about speech. No previous experience with linguistics is needed!
