The Secret Life of Words
Page 42
For now, as the number of languages in the world declines, their diversity is something to cherish, just as we should cherish the diversity of human interests, energies and traditions. The differing creative potential of different languages, their particular understandings of the world, the ways in which they embody the cultures and histories of those who use them, the ways moreover in which they empower their native speakers: these are the very limbs of civilization. Languages blossom in ways that the speakers of a single language, however worldly, cannot fully grasp. Cultures are subtly interrelated. The empires of language may rupture, but they can also intertwine.
Also by Henry Hitchings
Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary
Acknowledgements
Anyone writing about the English language is profoundly indebted to those who have gone before. Where I have been sure of my obligations to others, I have made them clear either in the text or in my notes, but inevitably there are some I have failed to recognize or remember. In order to keep end matter to a reasonable minimum, some quotations have been included in the text without a full reference. Where a quotation is from a well-known source, such as the Bible or Shakespeare, or where it can readily be found in a dictionary or an online resource, a detailed reference has not been provided. For quotations from works that are less readily available I have given details of the source.
My continual recourse to The Oxford English Dictionary has enriched my sense of quite how extraordinary a feat of scholarly collaboration it is. We consult dictionaries rather as the Bible was once consulted – for definitive truth. Faith in dictionaries is often blind. As Dr Johnson pointed out, ‘dictionaries are like watches,’ since ‘the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.’ But the OED has served me magnificently, again and again. So have other dictionaries and works of reference, notably The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In the interests of concision and readability, I have not always explicitly marked these debts in my text.
In the course of my work I have received kindnesses from David Crystal, Joanna Gray, Helen Hawksfield, Kwasi Kwarteng, Guy Ladenburg, Douglas Matthews, Dan O’Hara, Rowan Routh, Benedict Shaw, James Spackman and Christopher Tyerman, as well as from the patient staff of the British Library, London. For greater acts of generosity I wish to thank Richard Arundel, Joshua Burch, Alex Burghart, Christopher Burlinson, Jonty Claypole, Bob Davenport, Sam Gilpin, John Mullan and especially Robert Macfarlane.
My agents, Peter Straus and Melanie Jackson, immediately understood what sort of book I wanted to write. At John Murray, Anya Serota embraced the idea, and Eleanor Birne skilfully and trustingly saw it through to fruition. At Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Eric Chinski was especially supportive, and I am indebted also to Corinna Barsan, Christopher Caines, Eugenie Cha, Susan Goldfarb, Gena Hamshaw, Matt Kaye and Ethan Rutherford.
My greatest debts are to my parents, generous as ever in many ways, and to Angela, whose support has been at once tactful, affectionate and unstinting.
Notes
Chapter 1: Ensemble
1 The Diary of Samuel Sewall, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), I, 380. Regarding the choice of Torrey as president of Harvard, see Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard University, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: John Owen, 1840), I, 38.
2 James Harris, Hermes: Or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar (London: Nourse and Vaillant, 1751), 408-9.
3 My examples of animal communication are borrowed from Jean-Louis Dessalles, Why We Talk:The Evolutionary Origins of Language, trans. James Grieve (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3-29.
4 Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (London: HarperCollins, 2005), 557.
5 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 24.
6 Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960), 125, 140.
7 The case is made engagingly, though incompletely, in M. J. Harper, The History of Britain Revealed (London: Nathan Carmody, 2002).
8 The question of how the Indo-European languages spread is still moot. The hypothesis mentioned here was first advanced by Colin Renfrew in the 1980s.
9 John McWhorter, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (London: William Heinemann, 2002), 95.
10 Dieter Katsovksy, ‘Vocabulary’, in Richard Hogg and David Denison (eds.), A History of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 199.
11 I borrow this useful phrase from T. E. Hope, ‘Loanwords as Cultural and Lexical Symbols’, Archivum Linguisticum 14 (1962), 120.
12 Linda and Roger Flavell, The Chronology of Words and Phrases (London: Kyle Cathie, 1999), 165.
13 Horace, On the Art of Poetry, in Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 80-81.
14 David Crystal, How Language Works (London: Penguin, 2005), 225.
15 Stanley M. Tsuzaki and Samuel H. Elbert, ‘Hawaiian Loanwords in English’, General Linguistics 9 (1969), 22-40.
16 Christopher Ball, ‘Lexis: The Vocabulary of English’, in W. F. Bolton and David Crystal (eds.), The English Language (London: Penguin, 1993), 182-3.
17 John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure (London: Picador, 1996), 43.
18 Don Paterson, The Book of Shadows (London: Faber, 2005), 154.
19 Louis Deroy, L’Emprunt linguistique (Paris: Société d’Edition ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1956), 215.
20 Examples from Jean Aitchison, Language Change: Progress or Decay? 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 142, and Pius N. Tamanji, ‘Indirect Borrowing: A Source of Lexical Expansion’, in George Echu and Samuel Gyasi Obeng (eds.), Africa Meets Europe: Language Contact in West Africa (New York: Nova Science, 2004), 78.
Chapter 2: Invade
1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits, ed. Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 27-28, 132.
2 The designation ‘Celts’ was not used in British history until the sixteenth century, and in the eyes of specialists it is a rather lazy catch-all for the peoples who lived in Britain and Gaul before the rise of the Roman Empire. I use the term here because it is convenient and commonly understood.
3 Barry Cunliffe, The Ancient Celts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5-6.
4 Celtic also, at least on the Continent, made some impact on Latin. The subject is discussed in J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Adams notes that ‘Latin took a considerable number of terms to do with transport and horsemanship from Celtic, a reflection of Gaulish expertise in such matters and of trading contacts between Gauls and Latin speakers’ (p. 184).
5 It seems significant that the Latin schola explicitly denoted a place of study, whereas the older Greek word schol denoted leisure – which among Greeks was expected, though not guaranteed, to be given over to study.
6 This information comes from Helena Drysdale, Mother Tongues: Travels through Tribal Europe (London: Picador, 2002), 129.
7 Clearly, under Roman rule, some people had permanently transplanted themselves to Britain from the Mediterranean, but they were in the minority.
8 Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola and Heli Pitkanen (eds.), The Celtic Roots of English (Joensuu: University of Joensuu, Faculty of Humanities, 2002), 6.
9 In his book Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World (London: Century, 1999), David Keys has argued for another factor in the changing fabric of Britain: a huge natural disaster around AD 535, possibly a volcanic eruption or asteroid collision, that resulted in famine, migration and political change. He explains, for instance, that ‘Tree-ring evidence from the British Isles shows that tree growth slowed down significantly in 535-6 and did not fully recover until 555’ (p. 110), and identifies this period as one of ‘clim
actic chaos’ (p. 112) characterized by freak storms and exceptionally bitter winters.
10 Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, 5th edn (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002), 82.
11 The original title of his work was Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum.
12 The subject is given far more detailed treatment than is possible here in Hans Sauer, ‘Old English Words for People in the Épinal-Erfurt glossary’, in Hans Sauer and Renate Bauer (eds.), Beowulf and Beyond (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007), 119-81.
13 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, trans. and ed. Michael Swanton (London: Phoenix, 2000), 55-7.
14 John Geipel, The Viking Legacy (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1971), 31.
15 Else Roesdahl, The Vikings, trans. Susan M. Margeson and Kirsten Williams, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1998), 193-8.
16 Peter Sawyer, Scandinavians and the English in the Viking Age (Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, 1995), 7.
17 David Miles, The Tribes of Britain (London: Phoenix, 2006), 218.
18 Roger Lass, The Shape of English: Structure and History (London: J. M. Dent, 1987), 53.
19 Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 289.
20 Emerson, English Traits, 28, 75.
21 Matthew Townend, ‘Contacts and Conflicts: Latin, Norse, and French’, in Lynda Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford History of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 82-3.
22 The subject is treated in depth in Sara M. Pons-Sanz, Norse-Derived Vocabulary in Late Old English Texts (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2007).
23 More recent loans from Scandinavian languages include silt, troll, lemming, cosy, queasy, saga and ombudsman. The dahlia takes its name from a Swedish botanist, Anders Dahl, although somewhat confusingly the Swedes call this flower a georgine.
24 Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9.
25 Drysdale, Mother Tongues, 50.
26 The Isle of Man and the Hebrides were the last two outposts of Norse influence. The last speakers of Norn, a Norse dialect known in Shetland, Orkney and Caithness, seem to have died in the eighteenth century.
27 Ernest Barker, ‘An Attempt at Perspective’, in Ernest Barker (ed.), The Character of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 556. In the whole of the British Isles, the furthest point from the sea is reckoned to be 1 mile south-east of Coton in the Elms, South Derbyshire.
28 Details from Terttu Nevalainen and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, ‘Standardisation’, in Hogg and Denison (eds.), A History of the English Language, 301.
29 Baugh and Cable, A History of the English Language, 91.
30 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, ed. Swanton, 199.
31 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 6. It is now accepted that the final years of the Anglo-Saxon state were also quite heavily documented. However, these records have mostly been lost, having become redundant after the Conquest.
32 David Crystal, The Stories of English (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 135.
33 Nevalainen and van Ostade, ‘Standardisation’, in Hogg and Denison (eds.), A History of the English Language, 273.
34 Frederick Bodmer, The Loom of Language, ed. Lancelot Hogben (London: Allen & Unwin, 1943), 223.
35 Seth Lerer, Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 49.
36 Richard W. Bailey, ‘English Among the Languages’, in Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford History of English, 336.
37 Mario Pei, The Story of the English Language (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968), 41.
38 ‘Given’ names quickly lose their air of novelty, and we seem after very little time to lose sight of their origins. How often do we really think of Karen as a name borrowed from Danish, or of the name Natasha being Russian?
39 Stephanie Barker, Stefankai Spoerlein, Tobias Vetter and Wolfgang Viereck, An Atlas of English Surnames (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007), 9.
40 Charles Hughes (ed.), Shakespeare’s Europe: Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (London: Sherratt & Hughes, 1903), 213.
41 Geoffrey Hughes, Words in Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 45.
42 W. Rothwell, ‘Adding Insult to Injury: The English Who Curse in Borrowed French’, in Hans F. Nielsen and Lene Schosler (eds.), The Origins and Development of Emigrant Languages (Odense: Odense University Press, 1996), 41-54.
43 See Crystal, The Stories of English, 145, 154.
44 W. Rothwell, ‘Arrivals and Departures: The Adoption of French Terminology into Middle English’, English Studies 79 (1998), 151.
45 Quoted in Douglas A. Kibbee, ‘The Case of Anglo-French’, in Hans F. Nielsen and Lene Schosler (eds.), The Origins and Development of Emigrant Languages (Odense: Odense University Press, 1996), 5.
46 W. Rothwell, ‘The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo-French’, Medium Aevum 60 (1991), 183-4.
47 Geoffrey Hughes, A History of English Words (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 113.
48 Richard FitzNigel, Dialogus de Scaccario, trans. and ed. Charles Johnson, with corrections by F. E. L. Carter and D. E. Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 52-3.
49 A detailed account of the tenacity of Law French can be found in David Mellinkoff, The Language of the Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963).
50 See Suzanne Romaine, ‘The English Language in Scotland’, in Richard W. Bailey and Manfred Görlach (eds.), English as a World Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 56-8.
51 Robert Burchfield, The English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 18.
52 Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003), 51.
53 C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 18.
54 Quoted in David Graddol, Dick Leith and Joan Swann (eds.), English: History, Diversity and Change (London: Routledge, 1996), 7.
Chapter 3: Saffron
1 Kohl sounds German, but derives from kahala, an Arabic verb meaning ‘to stain’.
2 Andrew Breeze, ‘Old English Ealfara, “Pack-Horse”: A Spanish-Arabic Loanword’, Notes and Queries 38 (1991), 15-17.
3 Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, trans. Richard Mayne (London: Penguin, 1995), 304.
4 In Spanish the al- prefix has been retained – even if not always completely, owing to conventions in Arabic surrounding the pronunciation of the l in the prefix al- before certain letters. Algodon is the Spanish word for cotton, azucar for sugar.
5 See Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300-1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 15.
6 Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 215-16.
7 David Abulafia, ‘The Impact of the Orient: Economic Interactions between East and West in the Medieval Mediterranean’, in Dionisius A. Agius and Ian Richard Netton (eds.), Across the Mediterranean Frontiers: Trade, Politics and Religion, 650-1450 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 10.
8 Ostler, Empires of the Word, 94-6.
9 R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 13.
10 Richard Fletcher, The Cross and the Crescent: The Dramatic Story of the Earliest Encounters between Christians and Muslims (London: Penguin, 2004), 78.
11 Christopher Tyerman, God’s War:A New History of the Crusades (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 913.
12 See Bernard Hamilton, ‘The Impact of the Crusades on Western Geographical Knowledge’, in Rosamund Allen (ed.), Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers, 1050-1550 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 15-34.
13 See Suzanne Conklin Akbari, ‘The Diversity of Mankind in The Book of John Mandeville’, in Allen (ed.), Eastward Bound, 1
56-76.
14 See Katharine Scarfe Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
15 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 26.