The Adventure of English

by Melvyn Bragg

  The new English words soon found their place in pamphlets, plays, poems, slotting in as if they had always been there, bringing yet more distinction and fine distinctions into the home tongue, and again bringing a spring of ideas in a few syllables. “Absurdity,” for example, came in at this time and both then and since it has spiralled into innumerable uses and nuances, bringing in the description of absurd situations and absurd circumstances and absurd people all of whom had been just as absurd before the word came in but were now classified accurately as such, although to use the word “classify” of a characteristic in a human being is rather absurd in itself. And, from Latin and Greek, we have “chaos” or “crisis” or “climax,” words seized on by everyone who loved exaggeration as most of us do, who enjoyed the scary side of life, the darker, the melodramatic. Once again the words soon began to spin their own story, spread like an infection, increase their territories of meaning so that “climax” becomes sexual as well as dramatic, a resolution as well as a final confrontation, or just a happy lazy way to pep up daily life by introducing a little excitement through a big word. And “chaos” now has a range of applications from chaos theory to a rather disorganised day at the office.

  The Renaissance was a time when scholarship, the arts and intellectual pursuits in many areas were re-energised basically by the rediscovery of the classical past, much of it transferred to western Europe by Arabic translations and scholars. Science was once more of legitimate concern and as new worlds were discovered on the planet so new worlds were discovered above, inside and around the planet. Medicine too awoke in Europe from the sleep of over a thousand years. It was to Latin and Greek that the scholars often went to initiate their studies and it was to these ancient languages they went to describe what they found. From Latin, or from Greek via Latin, we borrowed “concept” and “invention” and “technique.”

  A closer look at the words borrowed from Latin and Greek in the developing area of medicine gives us a snapshot of the time. So successful was the classical branding of medical terms during the Renaissance that it has gone on ever since. Among the hundreds of words that arrived from Greek via Latin were our “skeleton,” “tendon,” “larynx,” “glottis” and “pancreas.” From Latin we also inherit “tibia,” “sinuses,” “temperature” and “viruses” as well as “delirium” and “epilepsy.” Our “parasites” and “pneumonia,” even our “thermometers,” “tonics” and “capsules,” are all words of classical origin. We talk of our bodies in ancient tongues.

  Even today we use Latin and Greek for our medicine and technology. The Greek-derived “plutonium” came in the nineteenth century, but got its current meaning in the twentieth. The Latin “insulin,” “id,” “internet,” “audio” and “video” are all twentieth-century inventions. One of the most recent additions to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002 was the phrase “quantum computation,” which is purely Latin in origin. Every day in the sixteenth century we spoke Latin, Greek, French — Norman, Francien and Parisian — Dutch, Anglo-Saxon and Norse and sprinklings of languages from Celtic to Hindi, all alchemised into English. And it has multiplied greatly since then.

  The word-grab into Greek and Latin for the new science and medicine of the Renaissance might have had elements of apprehension and snobbery about it. Respectability is often craved by the new kid on the block and the classical languages certainly helped. Reassurance is often another necessity when coming in out of the blue, and what could be more reassuring than languages with thousands of years of achievement? Great and lasting empires had been built, learning had flourished, laws been laid down in Greek and Latin. There was also, perhaps, a little snobbery, which grew as time went on. To give something a Greek or Latin name gave it an exclusivity, made it something of a cult, meant that you had to have at least the smatterings of a superior education to be on terms with it, took it away from the common tongue, as had happened in the Church. Some Latin scholars thought that English was simply not up to certain tasks. Francis Bacon, for instance, wrote in Latin on subjects in which he thought that English would “play the bankrupt with books.”

  The late Roy Porter, when Professor of the History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute, was eloquent about this:

  Suddenly you find that there are thousands of plants and elements and stars and things that nobody quite knew what to call. When, at the end of the eighteenth century, the astronomer William Herschel discovered a new planet, he had to find a name. But what do you call a new planet? He wanted to call it “George’s Planet” after King George. That however was considered rather too vulgar . . . they worried that the French wouldn’t like it very much if a whole planet was called after England. So in the end they Latinised it and called it “Uranus” instead.... It was one of the great claims of so many nineteenth century scientists when they were naming the elements that they weren’t just scientists in the lab, but they were scholars of Greek or Latin. And therefore they were very proud of themselves when they thought of words like “paleolithic” instead of saying simply “dawn of time.” Paleolithic gave everything a higher status. . . . So when you found particular sorts of rocks in Mid-Wales, instead of calling them “slaty rocks” or “grey rocks” or “hard rocks” or “friable rocks,” you called them “Silurian.” Silurian was based on the Latin name of the tribes who’d lived there — a word taken from the writings of Caesar.

  Yet there is something attractive and even poetically apposite about a Welsh tribe who had fought the great Julius Caesar living on as a name in those slaty, grey, hard, friable rocks. Most of these Graeco-Roman names are memorable, sui generis, and often accurate.

  Power play, snobbery and cherished distinctions in style, in class, in accent, have played an entertaining role in the adventure of English. “Speak as we speak or you will show that you are inferior” has been a refrain of the controlling elite throughout languages, I would guess, and there is a mountain of proof for this seemingly inevitable element — ownership — in the development of English.

  Many of those factors were brought into play during the Inkhorn Controversy, named after the horn pot which held ink for quills. Inkhorn words were new, usually elaborate, classically based terms. This controversy was the first and probably the greatest formal dispute about the English language. In a sense it became a thing of its own, leaving behind snobbery and power play and ownership. It became an exuberance, a spouting, an intoxication with words which in Renaissance England grew into a fever. There was a rush to invest in bubbling and fashionable new stock on the word exchange.

  The honeycombing of English with these Latin and Greek terms disturbed some scholars: there seemed no stopping it. Latin, they feared, had the potential to eliminate some Old English words. For not only were the Latinists mining the classics, Latinate words that had already been borrowed from the French under the Normans were borrowed again, in their original Latin form, adding duplicates and choice. So now “benison” stood with “benediction,” “blame” with “blaspheme,” “chance” with “cadence,” “frail” with “fragile” and “poor” with “pauper.”

  The Inkhorn Controversy was intense, public and serious and men felt that they were defending and defining the breath of life itself. Curious or even ridiculous as it might seem today, there arose guardians of what they claimed as the True, the Old English, who were every bit as determined to repel the invaders as Drake and his fellow captains to repel the Armada. These were serious scholars, men of stature, zealots, fearful that their language would be overwhelmed by immigrant words.

  Like Francis Bacon, the scholars often used monetary terms to describe their feelings in what became a bitter debate. New words were currency. Supporters of the new terms used words like “enrich” and “credit”; opponents, supported by a strong Puritan strain, talked about “bankruptcy” and “counterfeiting.”

  One of the key defenders of the influx was Sir Thomas Elyot (1490–1546), who published The Boke Named The Governour. He worried, he even apologised f
or new words like “maturity” which he termed “strange and darke” but which, he assured his readers, would soon slot in, soon be as “facile to understande as other wordes late commen out of Italy and Fraunce.” He saw borrowings from Latin as part of “the necessary augmentation of our langage.”

  Another supporter of lexical expansion was George Pettie (1548–89), who was pithy: “It is not unknowen to all men how many wordes we have fetcht from thence within these few yeeres, which if they should be all counted inkpot tearmes, I know not how we should speake anie thing without blacking our mouthes with inke: for what word can be more plain than this word plain, and yet what can come more neere to the Latine?” (my italics).

  This potential knock-out punch was ridden quite easily by the defenders of true English. Thomas Wilson (1524–81) wrote: “Among all other lessons, this should first be learned, that wee never affect any straunge ynkehorne termes, but to speake as is commonly received: neither seeking to be over fine, nor yet living over-carelesse, using our speeche as most men doe, and ordering our wittes as the fewest have done.”

  The Inkhorn Controversy is interesting because it set up a discussion which still goes on as to the most effective, the most poetic, the most honest, even the “truest” way of writing English.

  The leading opponent of the increasing invasion of Latin and Greek words was Sir John Cheke (1514–57), Provost of King’s College, Cambridge. He argued strongly that English should not be polluted by other tongues. Ironically, Cheke was a classicist and the first Regius Professor of Greek in Cambridge. Nevertheless, Cheke believed that English should be reappraised as a Germanic language. It had to go back, uncover and build on its Anglo-Saxon roots. During his time the history of English became a fashionable subject and manuscripts copied from Anglo-Saxon texts were read aloud among the anti-Inkhorn tendency. To prove a point, Sir John even went so far as to translate the Gospel of St. Matthew using English lexical resources for new words. He invented “gainrising” for “resurrection,” “ground-wrought” for “founded” and “hundreder” for “centurion” and used “crossed” for “crucified.”

  He wrote: “I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges, wherin if we take not heed by tiim [by time], ever borowing and never payeng, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt.” It is significant that, as Francis Bacon was to do in the time of Shakespeare, Cheke should seek out the analogy with money, with the wealth of man, with the financial stability of the state. Words, like money, must be kept in credit, no National Debt, balanced books. Yet the words Cheke used — like “bankrupt” and even “pure” itself — are not of Anglo-Saxon or Germanic origin. They are from the Latin-based languages, Italian and French. He disliked what he called “counterfeit” words — though “counterfeit” itself was not of Anglo-Saxon origin.

  Cheke found a formidable ally in the poet Edmund Spenser, whose work was thought at that time to soar above all others in the English tongue. Spenser too argued that we should attempt to revive obsolete English words — what were sometimes called “Chaucerisms”! — and to make use of little-known words from English dialects: “algate” for altogether, “sicker” for certainly, “yblent” for blinded.

  A minor victory for Cheke was achieved in his own Cambridge college. In his time there were, and they still exist, the Protocollum books which contain the records of admission to King’s College since its foundation. The name of the book is Latin and it is written in Latin. But written beneath Cheke’s entry, for the very first time in this book, is a text in English. This short English note was the first chink in the classical shutter that had protected scholarship and isolated it from everyday people. The passage begins: “First of all I do protest and declare that otherwise I do not swear or promise anything thereby that should bind me contrary to the true doctrine of the Church of England.” It was undoubtedly a step forward for English.

  But however hard he tried to promote a pure English, however much Spenser’s great authority weighed in the balance and Thomas Wilson brought cannons of sarcasm to bear against Latinisation in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), Cheke had no chance. No one could control the appetites of the English language. By the end of the sixteenth century, after more than fifty years of influx and controversy, the building blocks had been laid to create a language that we can still understand today and that we call Modern English. It is shot through with Latinate words.

  Some of those which seemed oddest at the time have survived — words like “industrial,” “exaggerate,” “mundane,” “affability,” “ingenious,” “celebrate,” “dexterity,” “discretion,” “superiority,” “disabuse,” “necessitate,” “expect,” “external,” “exaggerate” and “extol” — all thought most curious in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  However, Cheke may have taken some comfort from the fact that some of the thousands of Latin and Greek words coined during the great Inkhorn Controversy did not survive. Natural selection had its way and “obtestate” (to bear witness) and “fatigate” (to make tired) have been lost, as have been “illecebrous” (enticing) and “deruncinate” (to cut off). “Abstergify” (to cleanse), “arreption” (a sudden removal) and “subsecive” (spare) have all slipped out of use. “Nidulate” (to build a nest), “latrate” (to bark like a dog) and “suppeditate” (to supply) have also disappeared. Whilst a word like “impede” survived, its opposite, “expede,” did not. It is fun to mock these creations but they demonstrate the intense interest the English language inspired among the educated English. It is arguable that in that period they explored language with more enthusiasm and rigour than they explored the sciences or the globe itself.

  New formations came in from prefixes: “disabuse,” “disrobe,” “nonsense,” “uncivilized”; from suffixes: “gloomy,” “immaturity,” “laughable”; from compounding: “pincushion,” “pine-cone,” “rosewood”; and conversions from verb to noun as in “invite” and “scratch” and from noun to verb as in “gossip” and “season.” Confidence could be seen everywhere.

  Richard Mulcaster (1530–1611), the headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School, promoted the idea of using Latin words in conjunction with English words and wrote: “I do not think that anie language, be it whatsoever, is better able to utter all arguments, either with more pith, or greater planesse, then our English tung is . . . I honor the Latin, but I worship the English.” He spoke for an increasing, intelligent, often word-obsessed number of men and women to whom the language was not only a necessity but a delight, to be embellished, groomed, increased and multiplied.

  English was now poised to grow into a richness, a subtlety and complexity which would enable it to become a world language.

  11

  Preparing the Ground

  Yet, for all its gathering confidence, English in the sixteenth century still felt itself in the shadow of other European languages. One source of evidence for this is the number of glossaries that were compiled in the form of bilingual Italian to English, French to English and Spanish to English dictionaries.

  England had to wait until the dawn of the seventeenth century, 1604, to get its own dictionary. This represents the first indication of a challenge to the rest of Europe, as it was eight years ahead of the first Italian dictionary, and thirty-five years before the French. Although, to put it in a rather longer perspective, it was eight hundred years after the first Arabic dictionary and nearly a thousand years after the first Sanskrit dictionary in India.

  The word “dictionary” is first used in its Latin form, “dictionarius,” around 1225. In many ways a dictionary is particularly well suited to the English language, a language that has absorbed so many others.

  The first English dictionary was put together in 1604 by Robert Cawdrey. He called it The Table Alphabeticall. The copy I examined — the only surviving copy — is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It is a small, slim volume, about the size of the palm of an average h
and. It is a list of English words, mainly though by no means wholly of Latinate origin, with a brief explanation of the meaning of each.

  So the first word in this first dictionary is “abandon” — “cast away or yeelde up, to leave or forsake.” “Maladie” we find is “a disease,” “summarilie” is “briefly” or “in fewe words.” “Argue” is “to reason” and “geometrie” is “art of measuring the earth.” “Elegancie” is “finesse of speech” and “empire” is “governement or kingdome.” “Quadrangle” is “fourecornered” and “radiant” is “shining or bright.”

  There are only two thousand five hundred forty-three words in this dictionary. It was a meagre word-hoard but a first attempt at a collection. You don’t find everyday words here, like “shoe,” “cold,” “food” or “house,” “cow,” “wet,” “rain,” “dress,” “fish” or “love.” More than anything, this little book was a recognition of the new status of the English language. As it declared on its first page, it was: “full of Hard Usuall English Wordes borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine or French &c.”

  Cawdrey intended his dictionary to be used by those who might not understand words “which they shall heare or read in Scriptures, Sermons or elsewhere.” This was not a book for scholars. It was a book for the gentlefolk and for intellectually ambitious people to catalogue new words and to explain the new ideas connected with those words. The English population was growing, and growing more educated. One estimate is that by 1600, half of the three and a half million population — at least in towns and cities — had some minimal education in reading and writing. Their minds were hungry, wanting to be fed.

  It was the aristocracy and the gentry who were at this time self-consciously determined to cultivate and satisfy the appetite for the finer words of life.

  By the middle of the sixteenth century, French had already had the poems and works of Villon, Du Bellay and Ronsard to rival or at least challenge those of Petrarch. Italian’s earlier literary Renaissance had also produced Dante, Machiavelli and Ariosto, while Spanish could boast Juan del Encina and Fernando de Rojas. Although English could already claim Chaucer and his contemporaries, their works were written in an English which had become to a great extent defunct. Because of changes in pronunciation and in forms of speech — like the loss of the final “e” — the Tudors could not hear Chaucer’s music in his lines. Compared with other countries, and despite Spenser, English did not have a national literature written in its new language. Gentlemen of England were eager to take on the task of inventing one.