Mugglestone - The Oxford History of English

key to phonetic symbols

The following gives a guide to the symbols which are most commonly used throughout the volume. Symbols not included here are chapter-specific, and are explained (with keywords) in the chapters in which they appear.

Consonants

Vowels

key to phonetic symbols xi

Diphthongs

introduction

A H I S T O R Y O F

E N G L I S H

Lynda Mugglestone

How can there be a true History, when we see no Man living is able to write truly the History of the last Week?

T. Shadwell, The Squire of Alsatia (1688)

SIR William Belford’s words, spoken in Act II of Thomas Shadwell’s late seventeenth-century play, The Squire of Alsatia, articulate the problems of history with conspicuous ease. As Belford comments to his brother, no history can be complete. Instead, all historical description is based on acts of interpretation, leading to accounts which may, or may not, conXict with those oVered by other tellers and other tales. In this sense, gaps and absences necessarily beset the historian; not all can be known, and a change of perspective inevitably brings new, and diVerent, considerations to the fore. A single true—and all-encompass-

ing—history is an illusion.

These problems are equally pertinent for historians of language for whom the subject is the many-voiced past. Gaps and absences here may be particularly tantalizing; for the remote past of language—the pre-history of English (discussed in the opening chapter of this volume)—not a single record remains and history must be reconstructed, deduced from the patterns of languages which share the same ancestry. Even later, the historical record may be fragmentary; if the primary form of language is speech, only with the advent of sound recording (and the invention of the phonograph in 1877) do we begin to

2l y n d a m u g g l e s t o n e

have a record of the actual voices of the past—and even this evidence is necessarily partial and selective. The majority of speakers through the history of English have left not a single trace to document the words they spoke, or the conversations in which they participated. Even for those who had access to the written word, not all has been preserved (and only in the more recent historical past has access to the written word been extended to all, irrespective of class and gender). The passage of historical time has enacted its own selectivities, to which historians have often added others. In many histories of the language, regional voices rarely feature once a standard variety begins to emerge in the Wfteenth century. Likewise, the history of the language is often mapped through a progression of canonical landmarks—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson—that marginalize the range of other voices which co-existed (and which, in a variety of ways, might themselves be seen as more rather than less representative of what ‘ordinary’ English speakers were doing at a given point in time).

For these and other reasons, the emphasis throughout the following volume is placed on the construction of ‘a history’ rather than ‘the history’, recognizing that many other pathways could be navigated through the past—and present—of the English language. The wider emphasis throughout is, however, placed on the twin images of pluralism and diversity, and on the complex patterns of usage which have served to make up English. While the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Johnson does therefore appear (if perhaps more brieXy than in other histories of English), then so too does the language of footmen, mining butties, and missionaries, of telegrams and emails, of trade, exploration, and colonization. The language of thieves and the underworld appears in Chapter 8 on Renaissance English; that of, say, eighteenth-century Jamaican English in Chapter 12. The English of ordinary letters, of diaries, and of private testi- mony—as in Chapters 7, 9, and 10—frequently takes its place in the attempt to engage with what it was like to use English, in a variety of circumstances, in previous centuries. Examples of usage from Scotland, Norfolk, or from Dorset, Spain, Singapore, and America (amongst others) emphasize the diversity of the speakers who make up ‘the English language’.

Rather than a seamless synecdoche of the history of English with the history of the standard variety, the image of the past that is explored over the course of this volume is therefore one characterized by its heterogeneity, and by the ebb and Xow of a language (and language-varieties) continually on the move. As David Crystal has recently pointed out, ‘For every one person who speaks Standard English, there must be a hundred who do not, and another hundred who speak other varieties as well as the standard. Where is their

a history of the english language 3

story told?’.1 The history of the English language in the following pages engages with both domains—documenting the rise of a standard variety, but also continuing to examine the import of regional speech, not only in Middle English (‘par excellence, the dialectal phase of English’, as Barbara Strang has famously stressed),2 but also through the Renaissance and into the present day. As Chapter 11 aYrms, nineteenth-century fears that the demise of dialect—the end of the regional voice—was nigh have resolutely proved unfounded. Instead, as conWrmed by the one million plus hits received by the BBC’s Voices 2005 website (as at March 2005), diversity is dominant, and interest in language and variation perhaps more compelling than it has ever been.3

Any history of the language is, in this respect, enacted through innumerable voices, many of which illustrate that even the history of the standard variety is far more variable than has often been assumed. While Chapters 4 and 5 engage in part with some reassessment of the origins of standard English, a number of other chapters in this volume examine the continuing variability of these non-localized forms of English, especially in contexts unaVected by print. If the eighteenth century is, for example, often characterized by a set of prescriptive stereotypes of correctness which inform popular images of a norm, ‘real’ English—even within the standard variety—could reveal signiWcant diVerences within the patterns of usage actually deployed. As a result, just as Johnson’s private spellings varied from those publicly commended in his dictionary (as in his usage of pamXet for pamphlet, or dutchess for duchess), so too could the grammatical dictates proVered by Robert Lowth in his celebrated grammar fail to coincide with the forms he used in his own letters and correspondence. There is in fact compelling evidence for a set of dual standards of language, with private patterns of usage co-existing alongside those more formally proclaimed (and often adopted in print).4 Both, however, are part of language history and it is important to recognize that, in this respect, the public image of English does not tell the whole story. As Chapters 9 and 10 examine, printers’ readers and correctors habitually normalized the manuscripts which they prepared for public view, concealing the underlying variabilities of ordinary usage. It was a practice which can still lead to a number of prevailing misconceptions about the periods in

1 D. Crystal, The Stories of English (London: Penguin, 2004), 5.

2 B. M. H. Strang, A History of English (London: Methuen, 1970), 224.

3 See <http: // www.bbc.co.uk/voices/>. Over one million hits had been registered by the end of March 2005.

4See especially N. E. Osselton, ‘Informal Spelling Systems in Early Modern English: 1500–1800’, in N. F. Blake and C. Jones (eds), English Historical Linguistics: Studies in Development (SheYeld: CECTAL, 1984), 123–37.

4l y n d a m u g g l e s t o n e

question—and not least in modern editorial (mis)judgements on the spellings or grammatical forms of earlier texts, which, while commonly adjudged awry (and in need of emendation), may instead be entirely typical. Outside the printed text, the realities of informal usage, even in the nineteenth century, could display a variability which is strikingly at odds with many popular images of the language at this time.

Transition—between diVerent language states, between diVerent speakers, and diVerent texts—proves a further enduring theme throughout the volume. While transitions in geographical space inform the diversities analysed in Chapters 2 and 4, for example, with their central focus on Old and Middle English respectively, it is the working-out of change in progress—of transitions in usage—which preoccupies other chapters. The history of English is, in this sense, not a series of static states but, at each and every point in time, patterns of variation reveal the cross-currents of change, whether in the gradual marginalization or loss of older forms, alongside the rise of newer and incoming ones. Susan Irvine examines the strategic intersections of internal and external history in Anglo-Saxon England; Jeremy Smith explores the transitions of the Wfteenth century in Chapter 5, a boundary between the conventionally designated ‘Middle English’ and that of ‘early modern English’. Terttu Nevalainen in Chapter 7 uses the evidence of letters and trials to examine a number of signiWcant changes as they took place in the later years of the Renaissance. Factors of age, gender, class, and regional loca- tion—just as in the present—inXuence the patterns of usage which the past also presents. Rather than the familiar (and neat) categorization of discrete periods, changes instead clearly overlap in time; the ebb and Xow of the subjunctive is worked out over many centuries while, for instance, shifts of inXexional forms diVuse slowly through time and space. The -s ending of the third person singular (he walks, she runs) is Wrst found in Old English, as Marilyn Corrie points out in Chapter 4, but it does not become a central part of the standard variety until the later years of the Renaissance (and even later, as Chapter 10 conWrms, variability can still be found).

Other transitions are necessarily located in the multilingual past of English, and in the various strands of linguistic conXict and contact which make up its history. Indeed, as Matthew Townend stresses in Chapter 3, ‘To write linguistic history by looking only at English would give an entirely false impression of linguistic activity in England; it would be like writing social history by looking at only one class, or only one gender’. Latin, Scandinavian, French, and Dutch all, in various ways, played a part in the earlier history of English; the catalogue of languages which later came to inXuence it is far wider still. The focus in the Wnal three chapters of the volume is, in various ways, placed on English looking

a history of the english language 5

outwards, with reference in particular to the diVusion of English (and Englishspeakers) outside the British Isles—and to the complex intersection of extralinguistic forces governing the creation of ‘world English’. As Tom McArthur explores in Chapter 13, it is English which is now a world-wide language and the interactions which result from this cannot be forgotten; a whole new set of linguistic identities—such as Singlish or Spanglish—are forged from the contingencies of dissemination and of dominance. Multilingualism is, as Dick Bailey rightly stresses in Chapter 12, perhaps the most important aspect of a history of English—tracing the multilingual history of English from the Renaissance (and before), he adds too the salutary reminder that, for much of this past, it was the skill of the English in assuming new languages which was celebrated (rather than that linguistic incapacity which has come to form a sad part of their modern stereotyping).

‘No one man’s English is all English’, wrote the lexicographer James Murray in 1883 as he strove to determine the limits of inclusion of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary ; diversities of register and region, of style and context, of education and of age, necessarily inXuence individual linguistic behaviour. A similar awareness of necessary diVerence has informed the making of this volume. As April McMahon notes in opening Chapter 6, ‘there are many diVerent ways of doing linguistic history and of Wnding out just what the important changes were’. A multi-author volume such as this is, in this respect, particularly appropriate for the diversity of the history of English, enabling a variety of perspectives on the reconstruction of the past to be adopted and applied. The examination of social networks and chains of linguistic inXuence is explored in Chapter 9; Chapter 7 focuses on the detailed awareness of change in progress enabled by an emphasis on corpus linguistics, and the close-up of variation which this provides; in McMahon’s own chapter, there is conversely a move away from the nuances of actual usage in order to examine the wide-scale structural changes which are at work in what is perhaps the most complex of linguistic problems in the history of English—the English Great Vowel Shift. The social texturing of language, in a variety of ways, unites other chapters. Moreover, while the volume maintains a broadly chronological framework, areas of productive intersection and overlap between chapters are also deliberately maintained; historical periods are not neatly conWned (even if they may be in the Wctions of history which are popularly advanced). Old English does not become Middle English merely with the advent of the Norman Conquest. Indeed, as Susan Irvine explores in Chapter 2, a number of the characteristics which we associate with ‘Middle English’ (such as the falling together of inXexional endings) are already well established in some areas of Britain by 900. However, to present a diVerent picture yet again, the

1

PRELIMINARIES:

BEFORE ENGLISH

Terry Hoad

languages on the move

THE English language is at more than one point in its history a language which is being carried from one part of the world to another. This is true at the beginning of its existence as a recognizably distinct language—the phase

which this and later chapters refer to as Old English. Migration of people and the consequent relocation of the languages they speak will therefore be one of the major themes of this chapter, which will focus on the pre-history of English and the various developments which underpin the creation of English as a language in its own right within the British Isles. We can, however, better understand some things about that early period, and what was happening to the language at the time, if we Wrst take a look at certain events in the more recent past which can be seen to oVer a number of useful parallels for the much earlier transmission of language varieties through time and space.

Early in the seventeenth century, a period which will be discussed in more detail in Chapters 8 and 12, speakers of English started to migrate from the British Isles to North America. This process of migration, once begun, continued on a signiWcant scale over the best part of three centuries. The forms of English that the migrants took with them varied considerably according to such factors as the part of Britain from which they came, their social class, their age, and the date at which they migrated. Once settled in North America they had contact not only with users of forms of English which were similar to their own, but also with those who spoke diVerent varieties of the language. Furthermore, they encountered