The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  16 The Arabic word is linked to an ancient Assyrian term, meturgeman. This passed into Aramaic and was used of the men who translated the Hebrew scriptures.

  17 Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (London: Phoenix, 2005), 33-4.

  18 Ostler, Empires of the Word, 407.

  19 I use the word trader as a shorthand form, for, besides those who actually performed the transactions, there were also sailors, bankers, carters, various kinds of agent, and an assortment of other menial workers as well as men with technical expertise in, for example, the practicalities of moneylending.

  20 Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond (eds.), Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World: Illustrative Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 423.

  21 See Jack Turner, Spice: The History of a Temptation (London: HarperCollins, 2004), 114-15.

  22 Sakk is related to the verb sakka, meaning ‘to mint money’.

  23 S. D. Goitein (ed.), Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 16-17.

  24 Ibid., 78, 189.

  25 W. Montgomery Watt, A History of Islamic Spain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965), 51.

  26 Kees Versteegh, The Arabic Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 228.

  27 L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 325.

  28 The first (poor) translation into English, by Alexander Ross, was published in 1649.

  29 Peter’s polemic did not circulate widely, but the very fact of its existence is further evidence of the desire to engage with Islam intellectually rather than militarily. However, as Richard Fletcher has pointed out, Peter was at the same time writing to Louis VII of France ‘expressing the hope that he would smash the Saracens as Moses and Joshua had destroyed the Amonites and Canaanites of old’. See Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992), 154.

  30 Pococke’s career is covered in detail in G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning:The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

  31 References to Mecca not in Islamic contexts, but simply to denote a place of special interest, date from the middle of the nineteenth century.

  32 Ostler, Empires of the Word, 108.

  33 Louis Heller, Alexander Humez and Malcah Dror, The Private Lives of English Words (London: Routledge, 1984), 110.

  Chapter 4: Volume

  1 See Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1988).

  2 Piers D. Mitchell, ‘The Infirmaries of the Order of the Temple in the Medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem’, in Barbara S. Bowers (ed.), The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 225.

  3 Quoted in Lerer, Inventing English, 88

  4 For a detailed account of the life of John Trevisa, see David C. Fowler, The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).

  5 Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 181.

  6 S. Thrupp, ‘The Grocers of London’, in Eileen Power and M. M. Postan (eds.), Studies in English Trade in the Fifteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1933), 248.

  7 Ibid., 284-5.

  8 Regarding the Italian influence on Chaucer, see Piero Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

  9 Christopher Cannon explains, ‘The subtle movements of Chaucer’s words encouraged the view that his English was new, but Chaucer also had a direct hand in this encouragement – although his touch was exceedingly light. Daring statements were hemmed in by qualification and great ambition was couched in significant reserve. The careful reader may search but will search in vain for lines in which Chaucer says that he “invented” English literary language, but that same reader will be equally likely to come away from Chaucer’s texts with the impression that he has claimed precisely this.’ See The Making of Chaucer’s English:A Study of Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 136.

  10 This example is hardly original, having been used in several books about Chaucer. For instance, it appears in John H. Fisher’s The Importance of Chaucer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), and Fisher comments, ‘The substantive vocabulary is almost wholly French (“March” and “palmers” preserve the Anglo-Norman forms instead of the Parisian French; until Chaucer, French “Averil” was the most common spelling in England, and … “Zephirus” is directly from Latin)’ (p. 31). Fisher also states that in The Canterbury Tales the amount of French-derived vocabulary varies ‘from a low of 26.7 percent for the Miller’s Tale to a high of 51.3 percent for the Parson’s Tale, with the average about 40 percent’ (p. 29).

  11 Peggy A. Knapp, Time-Bound Words: Semantic and Social Economies from Chaucer’s England to Shakespeare’s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 15.

  12 Lerer, Inventing English, 78.

  13 I have borrowed some of these examples from Simon Horobin, Chaucer’s Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 83-4.

  14 The idea of English as an ‘upstart language’ comes from N. F. Blake, A History of the English Language (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 184.

  15 Translated from the Latin and quoted in Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 261.

  16 Lerer, Inventing English, 84.

  17 David Burnley, The History of the English Language: A Source Book, 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), 171-2.

  18 Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods (London: Macmillan, 1996), 171.

  19 Julia Boffey, ‘From Manuscript to Modern Text’, in Peter Brown (ed.), A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 114-15.

  20 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 92.

  21 These details are taken from Bailey, ‘English Among the Languages’, in Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford History of English, 339.

  22 Baugh and Cable, A History of the English Language, 215, n.

  Chapter 5: Bravado

  1 As Nicholas Ostler points out, the colony at Roanoke in Virginia had been set up several years before, but ‘no one in England then knew if it was still in existence’ (Empires of the Word, 477).

  2 Mack, Bazaar to Piazza, 25.

  3 On this last subject, see Neva Ruth Deardorff, English Trade in the Baltic during the Reign of Elizabeth (PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1911).

  4 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, abridged by Richard Ollard (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 444-5.

  5 For a detailed account, see Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

  6 Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 91.

  7 See Fraser Mackenzie, Les Relations de l’Angleterre et de la France d’après le vocabulaire, 2 vols. (Paris: E. Droz, 1939), II, 130.

  8 Turner, Spice: The History of a Temptation, 40.

  9 David B. Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 5.

  10 See Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 143.

  11 Tim Ecott, Vanilla: Travels in Search of a Luscious Substance (London: Penguin, 2005), 24.

  12 The diverse means of glorifying Elizabeth are explored in detail by Helen Hackett in Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).

  13 Robert Claiborne, The Life and Times of the English Language (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), 148.

  14 Ostler, Empires of the Word, 382.

&
nbsp; 15 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 136.

  16 A pidgin is a system of communication that develops among people who have no language in common.

  17 J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 224.

  18 Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London: Little, Brown, 1994), 17, 31.

  19 Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (London: Picador, 1997), 136.

  20 Figures from David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behaviour in Early English America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5.

  21 Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 220.

  22 William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London: James Knapton, 1697), 222, 464.

  23 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 375.

  24 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003), xxii.

  Chapter 6: Genius

  1 See James Shapiro, 1599:A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber, 2005), 209.

  2 Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Antwerp: Robert Bruney, 1605), 204-5.

  3 Isaac D’Israeli, Amenities of Literature (London: Frederick Warne, 1867), 361.

  4 Ralph Lever, The Arte of Reason (London: H. Bynneman, 1573), ‘The Forespeache’.

  5 F.W. Bateson, English Poetry and the English Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 31, n. 1.

  6 Lerer, Inventing English, 141.

  7 I draw my statistics and much else in this paragraph from Thomas N. Corns, A History of Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 1-22.

  8 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 133.

  9 It is in John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne that we first find the word dogmatism.

  10 G. Hughes, A History of English Words, 163.

  11 Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1582), 81-2.

  12 Owen Barfield, History in English Words (London: Faber, 1954), 148.

  13 John Stow, A Survey of London Written in the Year 1598 (Stroud: Sutton, 2005), 327.

  14 Greene was also the author of A Notable Discovery of Coosnage. Now daily practised by sundry lewd persons, called Connie-catchers and Crossebiters … with a delightfull discourse on the coosnage of colliers (1591), a book which memorably displays the copiousness of Elizabethan slang.

  15 These details are from Elspeth M. Veale, The English Fur Trade in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edn (London: London Record Society, 2003), 136-46.

  16 Edmund Coote’s The English Schoole-maister (1596) laid the groundwork for Cawdrey’s volume and could legitimately claim to be the first such dictionary, although it has tended to be dimissed as no more than a ‘spelling list’.

  17 I have borrowed this expression from N. F. Blake, The Language of Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 55.

  18 Many common expressions have their roots in sport. For instance, bowls is the source of the now widely used bias. When I let fly, the image comes from archery; if I turn the tables, backgammon provides the idiom; keeping one’s end up, knuckling down and acing something (such as an exam) are from cricket, marbles and tennis respectively.

  19 Hilda M. Hulme, Explorations in Shakespeare’s Language (London: Longman, 1962), 315-40.

  20 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 72.

  21 Donald Sassoon, The Culture of the Europeans from 1800 to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 2006), 22.

  22 For a detailed examination, see Gustav Ungerer, Anglo-Spanish Relations in Tudor Literature (Madrid: Clavileño, 1956), 81-174.

  23 This subject is discussed in detail in Heather C. Easterling, Parsing the City: Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and the City Comedy’s London as Language (New York: Routledge, 2007).

  24 John Green, A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (London: W. White, 1615), 41-2.

  25 See James T. Henke, Gutter Life and Language in the Early ‘Street’ Literature of England (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1988).

  26 A detailed treatment of the experiences of English travellers in the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century is John Stoye’s English Travellers Abroad 1604-1667, rev. edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

  27 Peter Burke, ‘The Language of Gesture in Early Modern Italy’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds.), A Cultural History of Gesture (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 80.

  28 Laura Pinnavaia, The Italian Borrowings in the Oxford English Dictionary (Rome: Bulzoni, 2001), 146-51, 153.

  29 Its first use in the context of chess appears to have been not in Italian, but in Spanish around 1560.

  30 Knapp, Time-Bound Words, 179-80.

  31 Thomas’s The Historie of Italie was also composed at this time.

  32 For a full discussion of this, see Jeannette Fellheimer, ‘The Section on Italy in the Elizabethan Translations of Giovanni Botero’s Relationi Universali’, English Miscellany 8 (1957), 289-306.

  33 Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities, 2 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1905), I, 228, 274, 303; II, 17, 48.

  34 Ibid., I, 229.

  35 Ibid., I, 413, 370.

  36 Markus Klinge, ‘Milton’s Balcony in Areopagitica, II, 524’, Notes and Queries 52 (2005), 298-304.

  37 G. Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), II, 289-90, 293.

  38 I am indebted for this curious piece of information to Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples, and Languages, trans. Mark Seielstad (London: Allen Lane, 2000), 183.

  Chapter 7: Powwow

  1 The word colonist does not appear to have been used until the early eighteenth century.

  2 A Counterblaste to Tobacco (London: Robert Barker, 1604). This volume is not paginated.

  3 The Spanish influence is especially clear today.You have only to think of all the American communities bearing names like Buena Vista or El Dorado. In California, the maps show — among many others – Cresta Blanca, Escondido, La Jolla, Monte Vista, Palo Alto, Tiburon and Yorba Linda, in addition to the very well-known San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento and Los Angeles.

  4 Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), 4.

  5 Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, 2nd edn (London: Henry Fetherstone, 1614), 451.

  6 Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1603 (London: Allen Lane, 2000), 279.

  7 Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 94, 144.

  8 Quoted in Charles Nicholl, The Creature in the Map (New York: Morrow, 1995), 24.

  9 David Beers Quinn (ed.), The Roanoke Voyages 1584-1590, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), I, 95-106.

  10 Ibid., I, 403-64.

  11 Ibid., I, 204-5.

  12 Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 21-5.

  13 James Rosier, A True Relation of the most prosperous voyage made this present yeere 1605, by Captaine George Waymouth, in the Discovery of the land of Virginia (London: George Bishop, 1605). This volume is not paginated.

  14 Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes. In Five Books (London: Henry Fetherstone, 1625), 1667.

  15 This theme is developed in an original and detailed fashion by Peter Charles Hoffer in his Sensory Worlds in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

  16 In After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), James Axtell imagines the pr
ocess of social and linguistic change, poetically writing of the latter, ‘Native gutturals were to give way to the smooth sibilants and languid labials of … English’ (p. 110).

  17 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ix – x. It is worth pointing out that the French exported young women – filles à marier – in an effort to keep their settlers from consorting with and marrying local females. Children born of such unions would, after all, have been unlikely to learn much French, and the French administration understandably wanted French America to be unequivocally francophone.