The Story of English in 100 Words

by David Crystal

  Meanwhile, various technologies had adopted the term. Dentists used it to describe the material which serves as a temporary wall for a cavity when filling a tooth. Photographers used it as part of their printing process. Printers used it to describe the mould in which a piece of metal type was cast. Electronic engineers used it to talk about a type of circuit. And in 1990s’ computing, the matrix became a popular term for the global network of electronic communication.

  The stage was set for Keanu Reeves. Here we have a word which at one level means an organisational network and at another level means the electronic network that makes up cyberspace. It was only a matter of time before it would be picked up by the science-fiction world. And time is the relevant word, as the first recorded use of matrix in this genre is in a 1976 episode of Dr Who.

  Alphabet

  talking about writing (16th century)

  When it comes to talking about the English language, no word holds a more central place in the popular mind than alphabet. Although speech long preceded writing in the history of language, and children learn to speak years before they learn to write, we find we can talk about letters more easily than we can talk about sounds. Letters are nice distinct shapes, and each shape has a simple name which we probably learned at our mother’s knee – A, B, C … Sounds are not so easy to identify, and – unless we’ve learned to transcribe them using a phonetic alphabet – not so easy to name.

  So it can come as a bit of a surprise to learn that the word alphabet arrives in English quite late – almost a thousand years after the language was first written down. It’s first used during the 16th century, at a time when thousands of new words were being borrowed from Latin and Greek to make the language, as the historian William Camden put it, ‘beautified and enriched’. And many of these new words allowed people to talk more efficiently about what they were doing when they were speaking and writing. Think of all the words we have today to describe punctuation marks, for example, such as comma and full stop. Most were first used during the 1500s. And alphabet was one of them, first recorded in a 1580 dictionary.

  We’re so used to the idea of an alphabet nowadays that it’s difficult to imagine a time when the notion wasn’t a routine part of everyday life. Once we’ve learned to read, we don’t think twice about putting things into alphabetical order, and we expect words to be in order when we look them up in telephone directories, indexes and so on. But in 1604, when Robert Cawdrey published the first English dictionary, he felt it was such a new idea that he had to explain in his introduction how his ‘Table Alphabeticall’ should be used:

  If thou be desirous (gentle Reader) rightly and readily to understand, and to profit by this Table, and such like, then thou must learn the alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfectly without book, and where every Letter standeth: as b near the beginning, n about the middest, and t toward the end.

  In Shakespeare’s time, children had a hornbook to help them learn their letters. This was a handheld device looking a bit like a long-handled mirror, but displaying a sheet on which was printed the alphabet in large and small letters, along with a small selection of other reading material. The sheet was usually covered by a thin layer of translucent horn, hence its name.

  By the 18th century, alphabet books were arriving in schools, and soon they were all the rage. The writers looked for new ways of making the learning of letters appeal to a young readership. Authors and illustrators began to play with the language, using alliteration and rhyme. Stories were told about Angry Alice, Timid Tabitha and a host of other characters.

  8. A typical children’s hornbook from the 16th century.

  Alphabet games appealed to the adult reader too. The most famous one was written by a journalist, Alaric Watts, which first appeared in the Trifler magazine in 1817. It has been reprinted thousands of times, often with variations.

  An Austrian army, awfully arrayed,

  Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade.

  Cossack commanders cannonading come,

  Dealing destruction’s devastating doom.

  Every endeavour engineers essay,

  For fame, for fortune fighting – furious fray!

  Generals ’gainst generals grapple – gracious God!

  How honours Heaven heroic hardihood!

  Infuriate, indiscriminate in ill,

  Kindred kill kinsmen, kinsmen kindred kill.

  Labour low levels longest, loftiest lines;

  Men march ’mid mounds, ’mid moles, ’mid murderous mines;

  Now noxious, noisy numbers nothing, naught

  Of outward obstacles, opposing ought;

  Poor patriots, partly purchased, partly pressed,

  Quite quaking, quickly ‘Quarter! Quarter!’ quest.

  Reason returns, religious right redounds,

  Suwarrow stops such sanguinary sounds.

  Truce to thee, Turkey! Triumph to thy train,

  Unwise, unjust, unmerciful Ukraine!

  Vanish vain victory! vanish, victory vain!

  Why wish we warfare? Wherefore welcome were

  Xerxes, Ximenes, Xanthus, Xavier?

  Yield, yield, ye youths! ye yeomen, yield your yell!

  Zeus’, Zarpater’s, Zoroaster’s zeal,

  Attracting all, arms against acts appeal!

  Suwarrow, incidentally, was the name of a Russian general. And did you notice that there was no line for J? This was because J was seen as a variant of I.

  Alphabet achieved new heights in the 20th century, when its use was extended by computer scientists to include numerals and other characters. It also became one of the few words which we could literally eat. Around 1900, food manufacturers introduced a clear soup containing tiny pieces of pasta or biscuit shaped like individual letters. They called it alphabet soup. And not long after there was alphabetti spaghetti.

  Potato

  a European import (16th century)

  Something very noticeable happened to English vocabulary during the 16th and 17th centuries. It began to look different. Loanwords from French had already started the process in the early Middle Ages. New French words meant new French spellings. But the revival of learning known as the Renaissance brought a fresh encounter with the countries of Europe, and as the people of Britain learned about the latest thing in such areas as science, architecture, cuisine and the arts, so they found themselves faced with an array of new words and spellings that must have seemed bizarre.

  Bizarre was one. Grotesque was another. These were from French. So were moustache, colonel, vogue and naive. Even less familiar would have been the way words were ending with sounded vowels. English had long had a ‘silent e’, usually marking a long vowel earlier in a word (house, time, sore …), but a sounded final -ee in a word of several syllables was a novelty, as in devotee, referee and repartee.

  A final -o in these new loanwords must have felt really strange. Italian imports included cameo, concerto, portico, soprano and volcano. Spanish or Portuguese arrivals included bravado, desperado, mosquito, tobacco and potato. Some of these words originated in the Indian languages of South or Central America. Potato is one of them, thought to be from a Haitian language, and introduced to Spain by Christopher Columbus.

  Words like potato presented a number of linguistic problems. People were evidently uncomfortable with the -o ending, for a popular early spelling was potatoe. And then, how should they turn it into a plural? Simply ‘adding an s’, which is the usual English way, would give potatos, and that -os ending didn’t well reflect the long vowel. Potatoes, as we now know, became the standard spelling. But in the 16th century, there was an alternative solution: use an apostrophe. We find potato’s – one of the earliest examples of what today some people call the ‘green-grocer’s apostrophe’. The problem didn’t go away. English speakers have never felt comfortable with the spelling of words ending in sounded vowels, which is why forms such as potato’s and tomato’s are still widely seen.

  Spelling aside, potato has be
en quite a linguistic success story. Few vegetables have acquired such a wide range of meanings. In the 18th century, unimportant or worthless things or people began to be called potatoes. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once famously described the London literati as little potatoes. American English began to use the phrase small potatoes for something unimportant. Then there was a curious development: potato developed the opposite sense. Now it meant something or someone was right, correct, excellent. That’s the potato! In Australian English we find clean potato being used for a first-rate or honest person. And American slang gave us a sense of ‘money’: Got the potatoes to buy it?

  A really odd development was when the word came to be used in a children’s counting game. One potato, two potato, three potato, four … – linguistically highly unusual because there’s no plural ending. And something even odder happened in Australian slang, when in the mid-20th century potato came to be used as a slang word for a girl or woman. Why? Rhyming slang. Potato peeler. Sheila.

  Debt

  a spelling reform (16th century)

  Why on earth is there a b in debt? This is one of the questions that English learners – native speakers and foreigners alike, faced with yet another irregular spelling to be acquired – ask with a mixture of frustration and resignation. ‘The language seems to have gone out of its way to make things difficult,’ said a student to me once. That’s certainly how it appears. Except we have to remember that language has no existence outside of the people who use it. And it is people who put the b into debt.

  Sixteenth-century people, to be exact. That was a century when writers were hugely expanding the language through the use of loanwords, as we saw with words like potato (§39), and Latin and Greek were especially favoured because of their prestige in literature and education. Many writers felt that English would become a much better medium, capable of reaching the heights achieved by the classical languages, if it used as many Latin and Greek words as possible. And the more these words looked like classical words, the better.

  Debt, meaning ‘something owed’, had been in English since around 1300. It was a French word, and in French it was spelled dete or dette. So English did the same, using those spellings as well as det and dett. Here we have a neat phonetic representation of how the word sounded. Why would anyone ever want to change it?

  A good question. But the mindset of the 16th century was different. Scholars pointed out that the ultimate origin of the word was Latin, not French, and in Latin the word was debitum. So writers made the word ‘look’ more classical by introducing a b, and the practice caught on. It was reinforced by other loanwords where the Latin consonant was pronounced, such as debit and dubious.

  Debt was not alone. The same process affected doubt, which came into English spelled dute or doute, and a b was added because people remembered Latin dubitare. Subtle got its b from Latin subtilis, though earlier it had such spellings as sotill and suttell. Receipt got its p from Latin recepta, despite earlier spellings such as recyt and resseit. Baptism came in as baptem or baptime, then acquired an s from Latin baptismus. Fault came in as faut or faute, then added an l from Latin fallita. There were many more.

  Of course, once a word was spelled in a certain way, some people then thought that all the letters should be pronounced. The pedantic schoolteacher Holofernes, in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (V.i.20), is horrified at the thought that there are people who don’t pronounce the b in debt! In fact, few of these Latin letters ever came to be pronounced, except in jest. Baptism was an exception. So was fault. We pronounce the l today, but even in the 18th century the word was being pronounced ‘faut’. Dr Johnson tells us in his Dictionary: ‘The l is sometimes sounded, and sometimes mute. In conversation it is generally suppressed.’ And his quotations from Pope and Dryden show it rhyming with thought.

  Ink-horn

  a classical flood (16th century)

  About two-thirds of all the new words that arrived in English during the 16th century came from Latin. And Latin continued to supply words at a great rate during the 17th century too. It was all part of a mood to ‘improve’ the language. Many authors felt that they should use a lot of Latin words because, as the playwright Ben Jonson put it, ‘Words borrowed of Antiquity do lend a kind of Majesty to style’.

  But several writers overdid it. The English diplomat Thomas Wilson wrote a book on rhetoric in 1553 in which he quotes the kind of ornately obscure style that he saw emerging at the time. His example is of a letter written by a Lincolnshire gentleman wanting help in obtaining a job. I’ve modernised the spelling, but several of the words still need a gloss in order to be understood:

  Pondering, expending [‘weighing’], and revoluting [‘revolving’] with myself your ingent [‘enormous’] affability, and ingenious capacity, for mundane affairs, I cannot but celebrate and extol your magnifical dexterity above all other.

  Wilson roundly condemns this kind of writing. He calls it ‘outlandish English’. These people have forgotten their mother tongue, he says, and he goes on to remark that if their mothers were still alive they wouldn’t be able to understand a word of what their children were saying.

  The critics found a vivid way of describing this style: ink-horn, or ink-pot. An ink-horn, as its name suggests, was a small vessel, originally made of horn, for holding writing-ink. The Latin-derived words were scornfully called ink-horn terms. The idea was that these words were so lengthy that it would take a huge amount of ink to write them. People who used them a lot were said to ‘smell of the ink-horn’.

  The argument went backwards and forwards throughout the 16th century. Some found the classical words appealing; others argued for the superiority of ancient Anglo-Saxon words, which were felt to be short and clear. The scholar Sir John Cheke was quite certain about it. He writes in 1557: ‘I am of the opinion that our tongue should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues.’

  The arguments about the use of classical vs Anglo-Saxon vocabulary resound across the centuries, and are still with us today (§74). In the 20th century, George Orwell was one who launched an attack on what he called ‘pretentious diction’ in a famous essay called ‘Politics and the English Language’. But in the end it all comes down to balance. It’s actually impossible to write English without using some words taken from other languages. Even Cheke, in his comment, has four of them: opinion, mix, mangle and pure. And both of Orwell’s critical words come from Latin via French.

  English vocabulary, in fact, shows Latin and Greek loanwords of different levels of difficulty. Some of the words that arrived in the 16th century and became a permanent part of English remain ‘hard words’ – inveterate and susceptible, for instance. But others are so much a part of modern daily expression that most people wouldn’t realise they had classical origins, such as benefit, climax, critic, explain, immediate, official and temperature. Indeed, some, such as fact, crisis and chaos, would take up hardly any ink at all.

  Dialect

  regional variation (16th century)

  The many manuscripts written in Old and Middle English show lots of evidence of regional variation, so it’s a bit surprising that the word dialect doesn’t actually appear in the language until the 16th century. But it doesn’t take long thereafter for it to be widely used. And as awareness of local dialects increased, so did the collections of dialect words.

  Spare a thought for the words that never get into dictionaries. Everyone knows that, in the part of the country where they live, there are local words and expressions which differ from those used further afield. But, precisely because they are local, they don’t get into the big dictionaries. Dictionaries usually focus on the words in common educated use – the standard language. Only occasionally does a compiler allow in some local expressions. Dr Johnson was one who did. We find a few Scottish words in his dictionary, such as mow (‘wry mouth’) and sponk (‘touchwood’), as well as some words from Staffordshire, such as proud taylor (‘goldfinch’) and s
haw (‘small wood’). Why these places? Five of his assistants were from Scotland, and Johnson himself was from Lichfield. Small nods of appreciation, perhaps.

  Most dialect words remain uncelebrated until enthusiasts decide to collect and publish them. Once they do, we soon get a sense of just how numerous they are, and how important they are as a strand in the history of a language. One of the first serious attempts to locate dialect words in Britain was John Ray’s A Collection of English Words, published in 1674. Ray is best known as ‘the father of English natural history’ because of his pioneering work in classifying plants and animals, but he was also a keen amateur linguist. Everywhere he travelled he made notes about the words he heard. He found boor in Cumberland, meaning ‘parlour’; bragget in Lancashire and Cheshire, meaning ‘spiced drink’; and bourd in Scotland, meaning ‘jest’. His book contains hundreds of examples.

  The greatest dialect wordsmith was Joseph Wright, born in 1855, son of a Yorkshire labourer. He had no formal schooling, and he learned to read and write only when he was fifteen, but he went on to become professor of comparative philology at Oxford. He collected around half a million observations and between 1898 and 1905 published six large volumes as the English Dialect Dictionary. This is where to go if we want to find out how dialect words were used in the 18th and 19th centuries. Which counties used agoggle to mean ‘trembling’? Berkshire and Hampshire. Where was alkitotle used to mean ‘foolish fellow’? North Devon. In Wright’s pages we see old linguistic worlds passing before our eyes.

  But not always passing out of use. If we move on seventy years to a modern dialect survey, the Linguistic Atlas of England (1978), we find a surprising number of words still in use. Take boosy, the word for a ‘cattle trough’ or ‘manger’. Wright found it chiefly used in the West Midlands, in an area running north–south between Cheshire and Herefordshire. It was still being used there in the 1960s. And in the 1990s, when the Survey of English Dialects published a dictionary, it was still there. The word turns up in John Ray’s book too, and we find it again in the Anglo-Saxon gospels. Some dialect words have a very long life.