by Bill Bryson
Other settlements followed, among them the now forgotten Popham Colony, formed in 1610 in what is now Maine, but abandoned after two years, and the rather more durable but none the less ever-precarious colony of Jamestown, founded in Virginia in 1607.
Mostly, however, what drew the English to the New World was the fishing, especially along the almost unimaginably bounteous waters off the north-east coast of North America. For at least 120 years before the Mayflower set sail European fishing fleets had been an increasingly common sight along the eastern seaboard. Often the fleets would put ashore to dry fish, replenish stocks of food and water, or occasionally wait out a harsh winter. As many as a thousand fishermen at a time would gather on the beaches. It was from such groups that Samoset had learned his few words of English.
As a result, by 1620 there was scarcely a bay in New England and eastern Canada that didn’t bear some relic of their passing. The Pilgrims themselves soon came upon an old cast-iron cooking pot, obviously of European origin, and while plundering some Indian graves (an act of crass in-judiciousness, all but inviting their massacre) they uncovered the body of a blond-haired man, ‘possibly a Frenchman who had died in captivity’.17
New England may have been a new world to the Pilgrims, but it was hardly terra incognita. Much of the land around them had already been mapped. Eighteen years earlier, Bartholomew Gosnold and a party described as ‘24 gentlemen and eight sailors’ had camped for a few months on nearby Cuttyhunk Island and left behind many names, two of which endure: Cape Cod and the romantically mysterious Martha’s Vineyard (mysterious because we don’t know who Martha was).
Seven years before, John Smith, passing by on a whaling expedition, had remapped the region, diligently taking heed of the names the Indians themselves used. He added just one name of his own devising: New England. (Previously the region had been called Norumbega on most maps. No one now has any clear idea why.) But in a consummate display of brown-nosing, upon his return to England Smith presented his map to Charles Stuart, the sixteen-year-old heir apparent, along with a note ‘humbly intreating’ his Highness ‘to change their barbarous names for such English, as posterity might say Prince Charles was their Godfather.’ The young prince fell to the task with relish. He struck out most of the Indian names that Smith had so carefully transcribed and replaced them with a whimsical mix that honoured himself and his family, or that simply took his fancy. Among his creations were Cape Elizabeth, Cape Anne, the Charles River and Plymouth. In consequence when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth one of the few tasks they didn’t have to manage was thinking up names for the landmarks all around them. They were already named.
Sometimes the early explorers took Indians back to Europe with them. Such had been the fate of the heroic Squanto, whose life story reads like an implausible picaresque novel. He had been picked up by a seafarer named George Weymouth in 1605 and carried off – whether voluntarily or not is unknown – to England. There he had spent nine years working at various jobs before returning to the New World as interpreter for John Smith on his voyage of 1613. As reward for his help, Smith gave Squanto his liberty. But no sooner had Squanto been reunited with his tribe than he and nineteen of his fellows were kidnapped by another Englishman, who carried them off to Málaga, and sold them as slaves. Squanto worked as a house servant in Spain before somehow managing to escape to England, where he worked for a time for a merchant in the City of London before finally, in 1619, returning to the New World on yet another exploratory expedition of the New England coast.18 Altogether he had been away for nearly fifteen years, and he returned to find that only a short while before his tribe had been wiped out by a plague – almost certainly smallpox introduced by visiting sailors.
Thus Squanto had certain grounds to be disgruntled. Not only had Europeans inadvertently exterminated his tribe, but twice had carried him off and once sold him into slavery. Fortunately for the Pilgrims, Squanto was of a forgiving nature. Having spent the greater part of his adult life among the English, he may well have felt more comfortable among Britons than among his own people. In any case, he settled with them and for the next year, until he died of a sudden fever, served as their faithful teacher, interpreter, ambassador and friend. Thanks to him, the future of English in the New World was assured.
The question of what kind of English it was, and would become, lies at the heart of what follows.
2
Becoming Americans
We whoſe names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereigne Lord, King James, by ye grace of God, of Great Britaine, France and Ireland, King, defender of ye faith, etc., haveing undertaken for ye glory of God and advancement of ye Christian faith, and honour of our King and countrie, a voyage to plant ye firſt Colonie in ye Northerne parts of Virginia, doe by theſe presents Solemnly, and mutualy ... covenant and combine our?elves togeather into a civil body politick for our better ordering and preſervation and furtherance of ye end aforeſaid ...
So begins the Mayflower Compact, written in 1620 shortly before the Mayflower Pilgrims stepped ashore. The passage, I need hardly point out, contains some differences from modern English. We no longer use S interchangeably with s, or ye for the*5 A few spellings – Britaine, togeather, Northerne – clearly vary from modern practice, but generally only slightly and not enough to confuse us, whereas only a generation before we would find far greater irregularities (for example, gelousie, conseil, audacite, wiche, loware for jealousy, council, audacity, which and lower). We would not nowadays refer to a ‘dread sovereign’, and if we did we would not mean by it one to be held in awe. But allowing for these few anachronisms, the passage is clear, recognizable, wholly accessible English. Were we, however, somehow to be transported to the Plymouth colony of 1620 and allowed to eavesdrop on the conversations of those who drew up and signed the Mayflower Compact, we would almost certainly be astonished at how different – how frequently incomprehensible – much of their spoken language would be to us. Though it would be clearly identifiable as English, it would be a variety of English unlike any we had heard before. Among the differences that would most immediately strike us:
Kn-, which was always sounded in Middle English, was at the time of the Pilgrims going through a transitional phase in which it was commonly pronounced tn. Where the Pilgrims’ parents or grandparents would have pronounced knee as ‘kuh-nee,’ they themselves would have been more likely to say ‘t’nee.’
The interior gh in words like night and light had been silent for about a generation, but on or near the end of words – in laugh, nought, enough, plough – it was still sometimes pronounced, sometimes left silent and sometimes given an f sound.
There was no sound equivalent to the ah in the modern father and calm. Father would have rhymed with the present-day gather and calm with ram.
Was was pronounced not ‘woz’ but ‘wass’, and remained so, in some circles at least, long enough for Byron to rhyme it with pass. Conversely, kiss was often rhymed with is.
War rhymed with car or care. It didn’t gain its modem pronunciation until sometime after the turn of the nineteenth century.1
Home was commonly spelled ‘whome’ and pronounced, by at least some speakers, as it was spelled, with a distinct wh- sound.
The various o and u sounds were, to put it mildly, confused and unsettled. Many people rhymed cut with put, plough with screw, book with moon, blood with load. Dryden, as late as the second half of the seventeenth century, made no distinction between flood, mood and good, though quite how he intended them to be pronounced is anybody’s guess. The vicissitudes of the wandering oo sound are evident both in its multiplicity of modern pronunciations (for example, flood, wood, mood) and the number of such words in which the pronunciation is not fixed even now, notably roof, soot and hoof.
Oi was sounded with a long i, so that coin’d sounded like kind and voice like vice. The modern oi sound was sometimes heard, but was considered a mark of vulgarity until about the time of the American Revolution.
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br /> Words that now have a short e were often pronounced and sometimes spelled with a short i. Shakespeare commonly wrote ‘bin’ for been, and as late as the tail-end of the eighteenth century Benjamin Franklin was defending a short i pronunciation for get, yet, steady, chest, kettle and the second syllable of instead2 – though by this time he was fighting a losing battle.
Speech was in general much broader, with stresses and a greater rounding of rs. A word like never would have been pronounced more like ’nev-arrr’.3 Interior vowels and consonants were more frequently suppressed, so that nimbly became ‘nimly’, fault and salt became ‘faut’ and ‘saut’, somewhat was ‘summat’. Other letter combinations were pronounced in ways strikingly at variance with their modern forms. In his Special Help to Orthographie or the True-writing of English (1643), a popular book of the day, Richard Hodges listed the following pairs of words as being ‘so neer alike in sound ... that they are sometimes taken one for another’: ream and realm, shoot and suit, room and Rome, were and wear, poles and Paul’s, flea and flay, eat and ate, copies and coppice, person and parson, Easter and Hester, Pierce and parse, least and lest. The spellings – and misspellings – of names in the earliest records of towns like Plymouth and Dedham give us some idea of how much more fluid early colonial pronunciation was. These show a man named Parson sometimes referred to as Passon and sometimes as Passen; a Barsham as Barsum or Bassum; a Garfield as Garfill; a Parkhurst as Parkis; a Holmes as Holums; a Pickering as Pickram; a St John as Senchion; a Seymour as Seamer; and many others.4
Differences in idiom abounded, notably with the use of definite and indefinite articles. As Baugh and Cable note, Shakespeare commonly discarded articles where we would think them necessary – ‘creeping like snail’, ‘with as big heart as thou’ and so on – but at the same time he employed them where we would not, so that where we say ‘at length’ and ‘at last’, he wrote ‘at the length’ and ‘at the last’. The preposition of was also much more freely employed. Shakespeare used it in many places where we would require another: ‘it was well done of [by] you’, ‘I brought him up of [from] a puppy’, ‘I have no mind of [for] feasting’, ‘That did but show thee of [as] a fool’, and so on.5 One relic of this practice survives in American English in the way we tell time. Where Americans commonly say that it is ‘ten of three’ or ‘twenty of four’, the British only say ‘ten to’ or ‘twenty to’.
Er and ear combinations were frequently, if not invariably, pronounced ‘ar’, so that convert became ‘convart’, heard was ‘hard’ (though also ‘heerd’), and serve was ‘sarve’. Merchant was pronounced and often spelled ‘marchant’. The British preserve the practice in several words today – as with clerk and derby, for instance – but in America the custom was long ago abandoned but for a few well-established exceptions like heart, hearth and sergeant, or else the spelling was amended, as with making sherds into shards or Hertford, Connecticut, into Hartford.
Generally, words containing ea combinations – tea, meat, deal and so on – were pronounced with a long a sound (and of course many still are: great, break, steak, for instance), so that, for example, meal and mail were homonyms. The modern ee pronunciation was just emerging, so that Shakespeare could, as his whim took him, rhyme please with either grace or knees. Among more conservative users the old style persisted well into the eighteenth century, as in the well-known lines by the poet William Cowper:
I am monarch of all I survey ...
From the centre all round to the sea.
Different as this English was from modern English, it was nearly as different again from the English spoken only a generation or two before in the mid-1500s. In countless ways, the language of the Pilgrims was strikingly more advanced, less visibly rooted in the conventions and inflections of Middle English, than that of their grandparents or even parents.
The old practice of making plurals by adding -n was rapidly giving way to the newer convention of adding – s, so that by 1620 most people were saying knees instead of kneen, houses instead of housen, fleas instead offlean. The transition was by no means complete at the time of the Pilgrims – we can find eyen for eyes and shoon for shoes in Shakespeare – and indeed survives yet in a few words, notably children, brethren and oxen, but the process was well under way.
A similar transformation was happening with the terminal -th on verbs like maketh, leadeth and runneth, which also were increasingly being given an -s ending in the modern way. Shakespeare used -s terminations almost exclusively except for hath and doth.*6 Only the most conservative works, such as the King James Bible of 1611, which contains no -s forms, stayed faithful to the old pattern. Interestingly, it appears that by the early seventeenth century even when the word was spelled with a -th termination it was pronounced as if spelled with an -s. In other words, people wrote ‘hath’ but said ‘has’, saw ‘doth’ but thought ‘does’, read ‘goeth’ as ‘goes’. The practice is well illustrated in Hodges’ Special Help to Orthographie, which lists as homophones such seemingly odd bedfellows as weights and waiteth, cox and cocketh, rights and righteth, rose and roweth.
At the same time, endings in -ed were beginning to be blurred. Before the Elizabethan age, an -ed ending was accorded its full phonetic value, a practice we preserve in a few words like beloved and blessed. But by the time of the Pilgrims the modern habit of eliding the ending (except after t and d) was taking over. For nearly two hundred years, the truncated pronunciation was indicated in writing with an apostrophe – drown’d, frown’d, weav’d and so on. Not until the end of the eighteenth century would the elided pronunciation become so general as to render this spelling distinction unnecessary.
The median t in Christmas, soften and hasten and other such words was beginning to disappear (though it has been re-introduced by many people in often). Just coming into vogue, too, was the sh sound of ocean, creation, passion and sugar. Previously such words had been pronounced as sibilants, as many Britons still say ‘tissyou’ and ‘iss-you’ for tissue and issue. The early colonists were among the first to use the new word good-bye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled ‘Godbwye’, and were among the first to employ the more democratic forms ye and you in preference to the traditional thee, thy and thou, though many drifted uncertainly between the forms, as Shakespeare himself did, even sometimes in adjoining sentences, as in 1 Henry IV: ’I love thee infinitely. But hark you, Kate.’*7
They were also among the first to make use of the newly minted letter j. Previously i had served this purpose, so that Chaucer, for instance, wrote ientyl and ioye for gentle and joy. At first, j was employed simply as a variant of i, as S was a variant for s. Gradually j took on its modern juh sound, a role previously filled by g (and hence the occasional freedom in English to choose between the two letters, as with jibe and gibe).
In terms of language, the Pilgrims could scarcely have chosen a more exciting time to come. Perhaps no other period in history has been more linguistically diverse and dynamic, more accommodating to verbal invention, than that into which they were born. It was after all the age of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Lyly, Spenser, Donne, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth I. As Mary Helen Dohan has put it: ‘Had the first settlers left England earlier or later, had they learned their speechways and their attitudes, linguistic and otherwise, in a different time, our language – like our nation – would be a different thing.‘6
Just in the century or so that preceded the Pilgrims’ arrival in the New World, English gained 10,000 additional words, about half of them sufficiently useful as to be with us still. Shakespeare alone created some 2,000 – reclusive, gloomy, barefaced, radiance, dwindle, countless, gust, leapfrog, frugal, summit, to name but a few – but he was by no means alone in this unparalleled outpouring.
A bare sampling of words that entered English around the time of the Pilgrims gives some hint (another Shakespeare coinage, incidentally) of the lexical vitality of the age: alternative (1590); incapable (1591); noose
(1600); nomination (1601); fairy, surrogate and sophisticated (1603); option (1604); creak, in the sense of a noise, and susceptible (1605); coarse, in the sense of being rough (as opposed to natural), and castigate (1607); obscenity (1608); tact (1609); commitment, slope, recrimination and gothic (1611); coalition (1612); freeze, in a metaphoric sense (1613); nonsense (1614); cult, boulder and crazy, in the sense of insanity (1617); customer (1621); inexperienced (1626).
If the Pilgrims were aware of this linguistic ferment into which they had been born, they gave little sign of it. Nowhere in any surviving colonial writings of the seventeenth century is there a single reference to Shakespeare or even the Puritans’ own revered Milton. And in some significant ways their language is curiously unlike that of Shakespeare. They did not employ the construction ‘methinks’, for instance. Nor did they show any particular inclination to engage in the new fashion of turning nouns into verbs, a practice that gave the age such perennially useful innovations as to gossip (1590), to fuel (1592), to attest (1596), to inch (1599), to preside (1611), to surround (1616), to hurt (1662) and several score others, many of which (to happy, to property, to malice) didn’t last.
