The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language

by David Crystal

As long as it is

  Written in lines.

  Sometimes the line length itself becomes part of the poem – as in the visual effects of the school of concrete poetry, anticipated by such ‘shape’ poems as George Herbert’s ‘The Altar’ (p. 153). More usually, the lines have a rhythmical identity, and provide a means of distributing the meaning into units of different ‘weights’. In its most straightforward form, the rhythm is predictable, line by line; each line coincides with a unit of meaning, and may be reinforced by a fixed rhyme scheme:

  George Herbert’s ‘The Altar’

  A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears,

  Made of a heart, and cemented with tears:

  Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;

  No workman’s tool hath touch’d the same.

  A HEART alone

  Is such a stone,

  As nothing but

  Thy pow’r doth cut.

  Wherefore each part

  Of my hard heart

  Meets in this frame,

  To praise thy name.

  That if I chance to hold my peace,

  These stones to praise thee may not cease.

  O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine.

  And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.

  As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,

  Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:

  What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

  Robert Browning, ‘A Toccata of Gallupi’s’

  In less obvious cases, the rhythm varies from line to line, and there may be a carrying-over of meaning from one line to the next:

  April is the cruellest month, breeding

  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

  Memory and desire, stirring

  Dull roots with spring rain.

  T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

  A marked contrast in semantic (and rhythmical) weight can be seen in the final line of this extract:

  Interruption looms gigantified,

  Lurches against, treads thundering through,

  Blots the landscape, scatters all,

  Roars and rumbles like a dark tunnel,

  Is gone.

  Robert Graves, ‘Interruption’

  The repetitive use of sounds within and between lines is a major characteristic of poetic language. The effects are usually referred to under the headings of ‘alliteration’ (repetition of sounds at the beginning of words), ‘assonance’ (repetition of vowel sounds), and ‘rhyme’ (repetition of syllables at the ends of words). These repetitions may be pleasing in their own right. They may simply ‘sound nice’, or have a symbolic value (see p. 124). A series of s sounds might symbolize the sound of the sea, or of a snake, as in Milton’s famous line:

  The serpent subtlest beast of all the field

  Paradise Lost, ix, 86

  But more importantly, the similarities of sound make the reader relate the meanings of words that would otherwise be kept apart. In Pope’s line ‘Thron’d in the centre of his thin designs’ (in An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot), the main function of the repetition of th is to force the words thron’d and thin together, ironically diminishing the elevated tone of the former.

  Effects such as alliteration and rhyme work because they are not normal in English: rhyming in conversation is unusual – and, if noticed, can be commented upon (‘Coo! You’ve been a poet, and you didn’t know it!’). Similarly, there are unusual uses of spelling and typography, most of which would be impossible to ‘translate’ into spoken form. Look at the way in which the medieval associations are conveyed in this extract from T. S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’, for example:

  And see them dancing around the bonfire

  The association of man and woman

  In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie –

  A dignified and commodious sacrament.

  Two and two, necessarye coniunction,

  Holding eche other by the hand or the arm

  Whiche betokeneth concorde.

  The e. e. cummings extract on p.151 provides a further example of graphic deviance.

  A deviant use of punctuation – in this case, not using any at all – is found in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in the final pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses:

  … of course shes right not to ruin her hands I noticed he was always talking to her lately at the table explaining things in the paper and she pretending to understand sly of course that comes from his side of the house and helping her into her coat but if there was anything wrong with her its me shed tell not him he cant say I pretend things can he Im too honest as a matter of fact I suppose he thinks Im finished out and laid on the shelf well Im not no not anything like it well see well see now shes well on for flirting too with Tom Devans two sons…

  Deviant grammar and vocabulary (poetic ‘diction’) have long been recognized as other ways of identifying an author’s style. The constraints of working within a fixed rhythm or rhyme scheme can force the grammar in all kinds of unexpected directions:

  How like a winter hath my absence been

  From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!

  What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!

  What old December’s bareness everywhere!

  William Shakespeare, Sonnets

  Often an abnormal use is made of a specific construction. In ‘Fern Hill’, Dylan Thomas takes the phrase ‘all the [NOUN] long’, and replaces the expected nouns of time:

  All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

  Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

  And playing, lovely and watery

  And fire, green as grass.

  And nightly under the simple stars

  As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

  All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars

  Flying with the ricks, and the horses

  Flashing into the dark.

  For abnormally constructed vocabulary, there are such extremely deviant cases as the wild words of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake:

  Oftwhile balbulous, mithre ahead, with goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitually fondseed, like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth he would caligulate by multiplicables the alltitude and malltitude until he seesaw by neatlight of the liquor wheretwin ’twas born…

  Or the powerful compounds of Gerald Manley Hopkins:

  Now burn, new born to the world,

  Double-naturéd name,

  The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled

  Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,

  Mid-numbered He in three of the thunder-throne!

  Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;

  Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;

  A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.

  ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’

  Literary linguistic ingenuity, and thus identity, knows no bounds. Rules are there to be broken in the interests of insight. But the process is not random, nor arbitrary. At every point, with every example, there is a unifying theme. It has been neatly summarized by Robert Graves: a poet needs to ‘master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them’. So too it is, or should be, for anyone who evaluates, or simply reads, English literature.

  Statistical Laws?

  There is another side to statistical work with English, apart from the study of individual differences. This is the investigation of whether there are properties of the language which do not vary at all – whatever the time or place, whoever the person. Several researchers have tried to find ‘laws’ governing the way people use sounds, letters and words – laws, moreover, which will hold not only for English, but for all languages.

  A good example of a strong statistical tendency in language is the relationship between how long a word is and how often it occurs. According to the American philologist George Zipf
, there is an inverse relationship between these two factors – that is, the more frequently a word is used in a language, the shorter it will be. The theory can be tested on any sample of English vocabulary, though it needs to be quite a large sample before the results begin to show up clearly.

  On p. 158 is a small selection of words taken from the beginning of letter C in E. L. Thorndike’s and I. Lorge’s The Teacher’s Word Book of 30,000 Words (New York, 1944). The first column gives words which occurred among the top 500 words of their sample; the second, words which occurred in the next 500; the third shows words that occur on average once in 4 million running words; and the fourth shows words that occur slightly less frequently than this. The average word length, in letters, is given beneath each column. Zipf seems to be right.

  There are other interesting statistical correlations. For instance, if you count the words in a text and list them in order of decreasing frequency (as on p. 158), the same pattern keeps turning up. The first fifteen words will account for 25 per cent of all the words in the text. The first 100 words will account for 60 per cent. And the first 1,000 words for 85 per cent. These proportions can be found in any text (as long as it is not too short), in any language.

  Or take this kind of relationship, also observed by Zipf. Here are five words taken from a very large sample of English conversation. The words have been ordered in terms of their frequency (‘rank order’). Very was the thirty-fifth most frequent word in the sample, turning up 836 times

  1–500

  501–1,000

  1 in 4 million

  4 in 18 million

  call

  cannot

  Ca

  calash

  came

  can’t

  cabalistic

  calibrate

  can

  captain

  caballero

  calif

  car

  catch

  cabby

  calliopsis

  care

  caught

  cabin-boy

  callisthenic

  carry

  cent

  cabinetmaker

  calumniator

  case

  center

  caboose

  calx

  cause

  century

  cacao

  camelopard

  chance

  certain

  cachet

  canalize

  change

  certainly

  cadaverous

  canard

  4.4

  6.1

  7.4

  8.1

  in all. See was the forty-fifth most frequent word, turning up 674 times. And so on.

  Rank order [r]

  Total frequency [f]

  very

  35

  836

  see

  45

  674

  which

  55

  563

  get

  65

  469

  out

  75

  422

  If you now multiply the rank order by the frequency (r x f) the total in each case is very similar, around 30,000:

  rxf

  very

  29,260

  see

  30,330

  which

  30,965

  get

  30,485

  out

  31,650

  As statisticians would say, the relationship between rank order and frequency is inversely proportional.

  However, when this kind of relationship is investigated thoroughly, it turns out to be less simple. The figures don’t always come out to 30,000. Words of very high frequency or very low frequency produce some different results. For instance, the r x f figure for the most frequent word in the sample, I, is 5,920. And generally speaking, it is very difficult to discover simple statistical regularities that work for all kinds of text. It is even a problem making a basic statement of frequency. What are the most frequent letters in English? What are the most frequent words? It depends, as the following tables show.

  Arne Zettersten compared the frequency orders of the letters in the English alphabet in several styles of American English (totalling over a million words of text). The average order is given first, followed by the order found in press reporting, religious writing, scientific writing, and general fiction. The last line gives the order used by Samuel Morse in compiling the Morse Code, which was based on the quantities of type found in a printer’s office. Apart from E and T (partly accounted for by the frequency of the), no two lines are the same.

  Average E T A O I N S R H L D C U M F P G W Y B V K X J Q Z

  Press reporting E T A O N I S R H L D C M U F P G W Y B V K J X Q Z

  Religious writing E T I A O N S R H L D C U M F P Y W G B V K X J Q Z

  Scientific writing E T A I O N S R H L C D U M F P G Y B W V K X Q J Z

  General fiction E T A O H N I S R D L U W M C G F Y P B K V J X Z Q

  Morse Code E T A I N O S H R D L U C M F W Y G P B V K Q J X Z

  Similar differences emerge when we try to find out the frequency of English words. A great deal depends on the kind of material used. The counts on p. 160, based on British English sources, show the twenty most frequently occurring words. There are some important differences between the spoken and the written samples – note especially the frequency of I, yes, and well in adult speech, and the much more specific vocabulary in the child writing. Also note the way he and his appear, whereas she and her do not – a point reflecting the male bias found in the language (see p. 275). The greater frequency of no as opposed to yes in the child speech sample may or may not be significant!

  Written English (newspapers) Spoken English (conversation) Spoken English (5-year-olds) Written English (5-year-olds)

  1. the the I a

  2. of and you the

  3. to I it I

  4. in to the play

  5. and of to is

  6. a a a and

  7. for you that to

  8. was that and my

  9. is in one house

  10. that it no in

  11. on is on go

  12. at yes got on

  13. he was in this

  14. with this what with

  15. by but do went

  16. be on this are

  17. it well my am

  18. an he yes it

  19. as have oh at

  20. his for there some

  PART III

  The History of English

  We now look at the way the English language has changed over the centuries, from the days when it first arrived in Britain to its current status as a world language. Chapter 10 investigates the state of the language in Anglo-Saxon times: it examines the structure of Old English, its various dialects, and the social and historical pressures which affected the language between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. The final section introduces the runic alphabet, to permit access to the earliest inscriptions.

  Chapter 11 continues the account into the Middle English period, from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. It deals with the main linguistic consequences of the Norman invasion, looking at the great changes in vocabulary which took place during this period, and also at aspects of the grammar, pronunciation, and spelling. We look at the origins of the modern standard language.

  In Chapter 12, we follow English from Caxton and the Renaissance through Shakespeare and the Authorized Version of the Bible to the age of Johnson and the first major dictionaries and grammars. The way vocabulary changes is a special theme, and this is shown continuing right through the nineteenth century.

  In the next chapter, we retrace our steps, and examine the way in which other varieties of English developed in parallel with that found in England. We look in turn at Scotland, Ireland, America, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. There is a special feature on British v. American dialect differences today.<
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  With Chapter 14, we have reached the present day. We look at some of the factors which are affecting the way in which English is viewed in the world – the impact it is having on other languages (Franglais, Spanglish, etc.), some of the social pressures which are causing it to change (feminism, the plain English campaigns), new regional Englishes (in India and elsewhere), and the development of a world standard. Then, in a last, short chapter, 1 raise the question of the future of the language in the twenty-first century and beyond.

  10

  Old English

  What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

  By any other name would smell as sweet.

  Romeo and Juliet, II, ii

  When we look at the first years of the English language, the most immediate question is what to call it. Should we talk about ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘Old English’? Both labels are widely used.

  ‘How’s the Psalms’ title-page coming along?’

  Punch, 12 November 1986

  The historical events are clear. There is an account in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation reporting the invasion of Britain in AD 449 by warlike tribes from north-west Europe – the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, who lived in the regions now known as the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. Bede’s account was written in Latin in about AD 731.

  In the year of our Lord 449… the nation of the Angles, or Saxons, being invited by the aforesaid king [Vortigern], arrived in Britain with three long ships… they engaged with the enemy, who were come from the north to give battle, and obtained the victory; which, being known at home in their own country, as also the fertility of the country, and the cowardice of the Britons, a more considerable fleet was quickly sent over, bringing a still greater number of men, which, being added to the former, made up an invincible army… Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany – Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West-Saxons who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight. From the Saxons… came the East-Saxons, the South-Saxons, and the West Saxons. From the Angles… are descended the East-Angles, the Midland-Angles, Mercians, all the race of the Northumbrians, that is, of those nations that dwell on the north side of the river Humber, and the other nations of the English.