It is within this field that borrowings from French have continued most steadily. France is of course Britain’s nearest neighbour, and French has long been the living foreign language most widely taught in British schools. It has maintained its prestige by playing a leading role in the lexis of fashion and high art. Think, for example, of these more recent French borrowings, all of which have kept their French pronunciation: ballet, promenade, croquet. Then there are those which are pronounced the French way by some speakers and in a more English manner by others: envelope, trait, valet. In many cases the French stress has been kept, though the pronunciation has been anglicized: examples are gazette and grimace. (The former has its real roots in Italian, possibly in gazzetta,‘little magpie’: the sixteenth-century Venetian news-sheets were eclectic collections of information for an audience of chatterers.) And then there are other words, less likely to be recognized as borrowings, where the stress has sharply altered from the original: palace, beauty, service.
Complaints about borrowing from French have been clamorous for much of the last millennium. We shall see a particular anxiety about them later when we look at the nineteenth century. To this day many people consider them pretentious. The standard argument has always been that Anglo-Saxon words are pure and French ones artificial, barbarous and infused with the dark scent of depravity. But purism itself carries a whiff of the absurd. Much of what is condemned as wrong was standard in the past, and the very language that is now held up as ‘pure’ is itself likely to have been imported in its time. What passes for vigilance is often just intolerance in disguise.
At any time there will be a number of new words or new usages that attract particularly violent condemnation. Yet often they only appear to be new. I’ll admit that the first time I saw the word architect used as a verb – in an advertisement by a management consultancy, and of a business strategy, not a building – my brow furrowed. Yet later I found it used as a verb by Keats, who also used architecture in this way. Had I been too quick to bridle at a perceived solecism? I now think I had, notwithstanding the fact that Keats was pilloried by contemporary reviewers for his profligate way with verbs. We frequently hear pronouncements about what words ‘ought’ to mean, and these often make studious reference to etymology, as if words must cleave to their etymological roots. But could we find anyone who would insist, in a spirit of etymological nicety, that a candidate must be dressed in white, or that a school should be, as it was for the ancient Greeks, a place of leisure? As C. S. Lewis pointed out, ‘Statements that honour, or freedom, or humour, or wealth, “does not mean” this or that are proof that it was beginning to mean, or even had long meant, precisely this or that … We are in fact resisting the growth of a new sense.’53 Our communicative procedures evolve, as we have done and (slowly) continue to do.
None of this is to say that we need no guidance on matters of usage. There are compelling reasons for punctuating and spelling according to particular conventions, as there are for wanting a large degree of stability in our language. But fighting battles about individual words and tiny increments of semantic change is bootless. There has long been – and in some quarters there remains – an appetite for employing Anglo-Saxon words where more recent imports are the norm. The nineteenth-century clergyman William Barnes preferred wheelsaddle to bicycle and folkwain to omnibus. By the same token forceps would be nipperlings, and pathology would be painlore. Some of his new words recalled the language of Old English poetry: he proposed glee-mote in place of concert, and the wonderful cellar-thane instead of butler. In the sixteenth century John Cheke had tried something similar in translating passages from the Bible: for example, he coined gainrising in place of resurrection. More recently the historian and broadcaster David Starkey has declared that ‘the word liberation is a foreign word, and … it’s very inappropriate to our own context … I actually believe in a good English word, and it’s called freedom.’ 54 Here we have, once again, the familiar notion that the older word is more authentic, more true to something intrinsically English, less smudged by its foreign associations – which in this case are to do with the French Revolution.
But how pure are the purists? Daniel Defoe could refer in his poem ‘The True-Born Englishman’ (1700) to the ‘heterogeneous’ island people: given their origins ‘in eager rapes’ or ‘furious lust’ and the repeated infusions of foreign blood, it was all too easy to see that ‘A true-born Englishman’s a Contradiction, / In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.’ As for the language this Englishman spoke, it was best described as ‘your Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman-English’. Defoe had pertinent and immediate reasons for writing this – after all, at that time the English throne had recently passed to a Dutchman, William of Orange – but his words stand as a deft summary of the miscellaneous nature of English and its speakers. He identifies some of the traits the English have been bequeathed by their ancestors: there is Roman valour, Nordic glumness, the sour manner of the Picts, Saxon honesty, and Norman falsehood. The different ‘customs, surnames, languages, and manners’ of these groups contribute to an ‘amphibious’ national character. Defoe’s lines manage both to satirize conceited English self-regard and to demonstrate his confidence in the expressive potential of English.
The debt to French, and the resistance to it, is a subject to be revisited later on. Yet while French percolated through English, there was at the same time another, much more remote, source of new words that was beginning to involve itself in the language.
3. Saffron
A product consisting of the dried stigmas of a kind of crocus. It is used as a flavouring and dye, and was formerly used as a medicine.
The noun ultimately derives from the Arabic zafaran, the origin of which is unknown. Etymologists sometimes make an erroneous connection between zafaran and the word asfar, ‘yellow’.
In San Francisco Bay there is a small island which from 1850 to 1963 served as a prison. Its name is Alcatraz. It was christened by the Spanish seaman Juan de Ayala, who landed on its rocky shore in 1775; struck by its sizeable pelican colony, he dubbed it La Isla de Alcatraces – in Spanish, alcatraz is the name of that gregarious bird with its bucket-shaped bill. If we trace this word back further, we find its source is al-qadus, the Arabic term for a bucket attached to the sort of waterwheel used for irrigation.
This may seem little more than a curious nugget of trivia, but it opens up a significant lexical field, as we can see when we consider some of the other English words that begin al-. In an age when al-Jazeera – literally ‘The Peninsula’, after Qatar, the peninsula where it is based – is a hugely popular Arabic television channel and al-Qaeda , ‘The Base’, a globally infamous Islamist group, we may be more alert to the possibility that words of this type have Arabic roots. It is from Arabic that we have derived alkali, alchemy and almanac. Alcohol is related to kohl, the sooty powder used as a cosmetic in the Middle East.1 And ealfara, an obsolete Old English word for a packhorse, which seems to have been the first borrowing from Arabic, derived from al-faras, ‘the horse’.2
The noun algorithm has become quite common in an age of computerized calculations, although it did not make its first appearance until 1957. Previously the word had been algorism, which was a corruption of the final part of the name of a ninth-century mathematician, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi: the Latin algoritmi was an approximation of al-Khwarizmi, which meant ‘the man from Chorasmia’ (today the Khorezm province of Uzbekistan). Another English word imbued with a legacy of misunderstanding is admiral. This is an anglicized version of amiir al-bahr, which literally means ‘commander of the sea’. It is the word bahr that means ‘sea’, but this is the part that English has relinquished. Thinking of words of this stripe, we should note that the first appearance in English of algebra (Arabic al-jabr) was in 1541, when it was used to mean ‘bonesetting’. The refined organizational work of a mathematician working with complex formulae is not unlike the fastidious prestidigitation of a bone-setter. And if we look to other European languages
, in particular Spanish, we can see this link preserved.
All these words retain the Arabic definite article and are thus quite easily spotted. Yet many of English’s borrowings from Arabic are not of this pattern and would not commonly be recognized as having such a source. While words connected with the Muslim faith – Allah, Qur’an, Ramadan – are all plainly Arabic in origin, as is the word Arab itself, what of carcass, syrup or mattress? Each of these can be traced to an Arabic root. Mattress derives from an Arabic phrase meaning ‘the place where something is thrown’: it seems that medieval travellers to the Middle East noticed the Arab habit of sleeping on scattered cushions. Here, then, is a classic example of something we take for granted having a source – now forgotten – in European encounters with that amorphous construct ‘the East’. (And, while we are about it, there is a certain irony in the name of Marco Materazzi, the Italian footballer most famous for falling theatrically to the turf after being butted by Zinedine Zidane in the 2006 World Cup Final, deriving from a word for something thrown to the ground.)
When we think about European encounters with the East, we would do well to picture the relationship from the other side. Europe, so easily thought of as a big place, especially when we are talking up its diversity, can also be seen as a small one. In Fernand Braudel’s chastening phrase, ‘Europe is an Asian peninsula.’3 It is a given that Europeans underestimate the scale and resources and history of Asia – and do so recklessly. By looking at English’s Arabic connection, we can begin to correct this.
Sugar, for instance, is one of those articles we think is ours by right and can barely imagine being without. But it was introduced to western Europe by Berbers only at around the time the first Viking ships were harrying England. Its name derives from the Arabic sukkar.4 Apricot comes from Spanish, yet can be traced back further to al-burquq; the fruit was known to the Greeks, but was popularized by Arabs who introduced it into Andalucia and Sicily. The lute took its name from the Arabic al-ud (or from an older Persian term); today visitors to the Middle East can hear music played on a modern fretless version of this called the oud.
Examining the Arabic element in English, we sense how important the Arab peoples were in bringing ideas and goods to the West. They were also the essential intermediaries in the flow of commodities between the Mediterranean and the Far East. Wood, iron, linen and money were ferried in one direction, and silks, spices, sugar, glass, gems and finely worked metal came back in the other.5 Etymologies hint at the channelling of disparate cultures that the traders achieved. Among the spices were cinnamon, which gets its name via Greek from Hebrew, and ginger, which can ultimately be traced to Sanskrit, while marzipan, which came later, may have taken its name from a Burmese city known for its handsome storage jars. Meanwhile, Arabic passed on the intellectual legacy of antiquity, and especially the rewards of Persian culture. The civilization of the Mediterranean was competitive, hybrid and prosperous; the Renaissance had its roots in this fertile exchange.
The language of the Arabs – part of the Semitic division of the Afro-Asiatic family, named after Noah’s second son, Shem – is recorded roughly a millennium before anyone spoke English. It has imprinted itself significantly on the vocabulary of more than a dozen languages, among them Spanish, Turkish, Urdu, French and Swahili. Although English lags behind these, it is striking that so many of the words we have taken from Arabic denote everyday phenomena. Most are nouns. Crimson, which comes from the Arabic qirmizi, is unusual in this group in being in English both noun and adjective. Qirmiz was the name of a louse which was ground up to produce dye of this hue. A Spanish ship set upon by pirates off Sandwich in 1228 reportedly contained 100 pounds of qirmiz.6 And crimson is not alone: the language of colour brims with Arabic. Before 1200, Egypt and Syria were regarded as important sources of the best kinds of cloth; by 1300, English merchants (and artists) were more interested in Egyptian and Syrian dyes, and they sold to the Levant cloth that they had immersed in these dyes and had indeed sometimes produced using raw fibres sourced in the Near and Middle East. Thus around 1200 we find the first reference to the coarse cloth called fustian, which took its name from fustat, a word for a large tent or canopy made of haircloth. Fustat was so called after a suburb of the ‘virtual capital’ of the Islamic world, Cairo.7 Not long after this we borrowed cotton, which derives via French and Spanish from the Arabic qutn or qutun; it had been introduced to Iraq, from India, around AD 600, and had spread to Europe by the tenth century. With cotton came colours and dyes: first saffron and scarlet, then azure and henna.
Arabic was spread by religion, though we should be clear that the rise of Islam breathed life into civilizations that already existed. The religion’s rapid ascendancy after the death of Muhammad in 632, at a time when Christianity was fanning through England, took Arabic to the fringes of the Black Sea, west as far as Tangier, south beyond Egypt, into Sind and the Punjab, and beyond Persia as far as the (now desperately shrunken) Aral Sea in the north of modern Uzbekistan. There are records of Arabic as early as the fourth century BC, but it was this seventh-century spiritual advance that spread it far beyond its heartland in Mecca and Medina. To those who heard the finely wrought language of Islam, there seemed no credible explanation save divine inspiration. Moreover, the religion’s teachings were concentrated in the immutable text of the Qur’an, a work whose name, meaning ‘Recitation’, announced the importance that it would place on words, reading and public performance. Wherever Islam went, Arabic established itself – at astonishing speed.8 Yet only slowly did Islam penetrate Western minds as ‘an intellectually identifiable fact’.9
One obvious area of contact between English-speakers and these Arabic-speaking Muslims was the Crusades. This succession of penitential wars occupied the thoughts of western Europe for a period of around 400 years – and even as late as the final years of the seventeenth century the Ottomans were being attacked by crusaders. The Crusades have traditionally been viewed as campaigns conducted by Christians motivated by the need to recover the holy sites in Jerusalem. But holy war penetrated a range of other regions, including North Africa, the Balkans and Poland, and the real definition of crusading is fluid. In its original conception the First Crusade, summoned by Pope Urban II to demonstrate his own political and moral authority as well as the authority of Christendom at large, was to comprise a body of disciplined, well-armed warriors. In reality it proved to be ‘an enormous rabble of zealous but for the most part uninstructed fighting men, unamenable to imperial control, who … blundered on down into Syria and Palestine where they captured Jerusalem’.10 This was achieved in July 1099: the celestial city was ransacked, and its Jewish and Muslim inhabitants were massacred.
Before the Crusades, British knowledge of the territory east of the Bosporus was fragmentary at best. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, set in the eleventh century although written in 1606, one of the witches boasts of sexually tormenting a sailor who has travelled to Aleppo, and in the play’s closing stages Lady Macbeth, reflecting on her guilt, says that ‘all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’ While Shakespeare knew something of Aleppo and Arabia, his characters would have been ignorant of them. In the eleventh century there was no accurate recent information about either Africa or Asia, and those who wished to learn about those two vast continents had to consult old accounts such as those of Pliny the Elder and St Isidore of Seville. The power of the Muslim world and the Byzantine Empire was immense and inscrutable. The Western impression of Africa and Asia was that they were hazardous and uncivilized, full of gargantuan lizards, men with the heads of dogs, eels many hundreds of feet long, and creatures like the monoceros, which was alleged to have a stag’s head, the body of a horse, and feet like an elephant’s.
The Crusades shifted the balance of power in the Mediterranean, and helped remedy some of these skewed notions. Even if many of the old ideas hung on tenaciously, the crusaders were at least aware of Islam and Muhammad. The First Crusade brought a large amount of land under W
estern control, and, while these gains were vulnerable, the new waves of pilgrims who flooded to the Holy Land were able to pen accounts that afforded a much more accurate picture of the region.Tales of wonder remained popular, and garbled polemics frothed with racist drivel, but the increased presence of Christians beyond the eastern Mediterranean ‘stimulated a small industry of written information’, which from the thirteenth century paid keen attention to the geography, politics, economy and social lives of Muslims, Mongols and the Asiatic peoples.11 The twelfth-century historian William of Tyre in his Chronicon (now lost) offered a detailed portrait of Lower Egypt, Edessa and Damascus. In the thirteenth century William of Rubruck travelled as far as the Mongol capital, Karakorum; he expected to see freaks and monsters, but encountered nothing of the sort, and his writings were distilled by Roger Bacon in his encyclopedic Opus Maius.
Yet even fresh productions could prolong outmoded images. The Hereford Mappa Mundi, produced in the 1280s, affords a wealth of information about the routes of trade and pilgrimage, but it incorporates very few of the recent findings and depicts Africa and Asia as the home of exotic and monstrous beings and of sites mentioned in the Bible, such as the Tower of Babel.12 (Mappa, incidentally, was post-classical Latin: the word had once signified ‘cloth’, and the vellum on which the Hereford map was drawn was close in dimensions to the sheet you might fit on a modern double bed.) One picture shows a venomous dragon; another a one-legged monster with eight toes on its single foot. Here is Calvary; there the Garden of Eden.
The Secret Life of Words Page 7
