The Language Wars Read online

  Ironically, Caxton’s press introduced confusions rather than quelling them. His own habits as a writer were erratic, and he seems not to have had a precise policy in mind. He was lax in his supervision of the compositors who worked for him; mostly they were foreigners, and they were unlikely, as they set up texts in type, to be confident about regularizing the spelling of English words. The type they used was cast in Germany, and did not include certain letters that appeared in some manuscripts: the thorn (þ), the eth (), and the yogh (3). The first two were generally replaced with th, and yogh with g or gh, though as late as the 1570s the musician Thomas Whythorne used the old letters in his autobiography, hoping to revive them. The archaic Ye we sometimes see today where we would expect The – as in ‘Ye Olde Tea Shoppe’ – was originally the result of printers’ misreading of thorn, and later came to seem a pleasantly medieval quirk.

  Caxton’s efforts and those of the next few generations of printers were complicated by the fact that English pronunciation had been changing significantly since around 1400. Whereas consonants have been articulated in the same way since the Old English period – the one exception being r which used to have a trilled sound – this is not true of vowels. The Great Vowel Shift, as it is usually known, occurred in England over the course of about three hundred years. As David Crystal points out, Caxton was working at a time when, as well as there being several spellings in London for a single word, some words were being pronounced by Londoners in several different ways. ‘These were not the best circumstances for fostering a standard written language. Nor was it a conducive climate for people to develop an intuition about norms of usage.’5

  To call the change that occurred between the age of Chaucer and the end of the seventeenth century the Great Vowel Shift makes it sound like something that happened suddenly, or indeed steadily, whereas the movements were fitful and had different effects in different regions. It is not clear why the change happened, but during this period there was a general ‘raising’ of long vowels. If we go back to Middle English, an a was usually sounded the way it is today in father, an e like the first vowel sound in bacon, an i like the ee in deem, o as in go rather than as in hot, and u as in blue rather than as in bun. Crystal explains that ‘We do say it’s time to go now’ would have sounded, in the age of Chaucer, roughly like ‘Way doe sah it’s teem to gaw noo’.6

  Less important here than a definitive account of the shift is an awareness that attempts to sort out English spelling in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were made against a background of changing vowel sounds. In The English Grammar, which he wrote around 1620, Ben Jonson stated that ‘All our Vowels are sounded doubtfully.’7 This was certainly the case, and printers were attempting to freeze spelling at a time of phonological uncertainty. The correspondence between grapheme and phoneme – that is, between letters or combinations of letters and the smallest units of sound – was thus lost, and the language’s spoken and written forms moved further apart.

  Caxton’s legacy was in other respects profound. Printing created a keener sense of a national literary culture. True, it enabled the spread of junk, but it also made it possible to imagine a virtual library of great English books, and led to a new emphasis on individual authors and their literary property. By enabling the preservation of precious documents, printing changed ideas about the perishability of texts and the language with which they were fashioned. A language with a printed literature can be transported and preserved. Printed books did not just help standardize the written language, but also made a standard form look and feel achievable, and – less obviously – as writers’ practices became more alike, so they collected examples of diversity. The historian of print Elizabeth Eisenstein makes the point that ‘Concepts pertaining to uniformity and to diversity – to the typical and to the unique – are interdependent’. As a result, ‘one might consider the emergence of a new sense of individualism as a by-product of the new forms of standardization. The more standardized the type, indeed, the more compelling the sense of an idiosyncratic personal self.’8

  It seems likely that print culture changed the ways people used their brains. As consumers of printed reading matter grew more numerous, memory must have played a smaller role in the transmission of texts, and the process of comprehending ideas, which had previously had a strong auditory element, presumably became more visual. The notion of privacy – specifically, of a secular readership engaged in private study – became potent. Readers were able to compare texts, and it was easier to analyse writers’ methods of argument. They believed that the printed copy of a text they were reading was the same as the copy another person was reading – which was certainly not the case when people read manuscript copies of a text. Printing changed the experience of authorship, with authors able to take pleasure at seeing not only their words’ crisp existence in print, but also the apparently limitless reproducibility of those words.

  The reproductive power of print could be dangerous. Certain types of material, printed in the vernacular, seemed to threaten the status and security of the elite. For two hundred years or so after the arrival of printing, some writers shunned print because they wished to be read only among their own coterie. The clergy were especially worried; their vital social role could be undermined if religious texts were widely available.

  In the fifteenth century Europe was Catholic; by the end of the sixteenth it was divided, broadly speaking, into a Protestant North and a Catholic South. Beginning in the 1520s, the English people responded to the new Protestant message that the Roman Catholic Church was neglectful of their needs. Catholic theology was condemned as obscure. The monarch, Henry VIII, had his own reasons for wanting to break with the authority of Rome. Anne Boleyn, who captured Henry’s interest in 1526 and eventually married him seven years later, was the patron of many reforming churchmen. She pushed for an English vernacular Bible that would enable ordinary citizens to hear the gospels. One of her prized possessions was an illuminated copy of William Tyndale’s recently produced English rendering of the New Testament – at that time illegal. She offered protection to those who imported the scriptures in English from foreign presses.

  Tyndale was a heroic figure, repeatedly condemned as a heretic. He exiled himself in Germany in order to produce his translation of the New Testament, and then smuggled copies to England, concealed in bales of cloth. Later he moved to the Netherlands. For the last decade of his life he was constantly in danger. His work was wildly popular. Sir Thomas More censured his use of ‘evil’ words (love instead of charity, elder instead of priest), but people flocked to listen to readings from the new translation. In the end, Tyndale was for his pains strangled to death and then burnt. Yet the reception of his accurate, clear and sometimes beautiful rendering of the sacred Christian texts offered handsome proof of the power of the vernacular. By the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the right to read the Bible in English was entrenched, and the monumental King James Version of 1611 drew repeatedly on the phrasing of Tyndale.

  The language of prayer was changing, too. Dissenters spoke of the Latin Mass as an obstacle to communication between churchgoers and their God. Thomas Cranmer, who took office as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533, promoted the idea of an English liturgy. This resulted in The Book of Common Prayer, published in 1549 and succeeded by a significant revision three years later. Cranmer’s prayer book met with hostility, especially in Ireland, the Isle of Man and Cornwall. In England its use would be outlawed in 1645, and when it was reintroduced following the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 some of its terminology was altered in the interests of clarity. Yet Cranmer’s text, with its regular and melodious prose, was widely adopted. It survived, with few changes, for four centuries. Cranmer’s most arresting achievement was creating a style of formal written English that did justice to the mysteries of faith yet was suitable for being read aloud. His sonorous phrases – ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’, ‘till death us do part’, ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’ – h
ave imprinted themselves on the imagination of countless English-speakers.

  When Mary Tudor, a Catholic, came to the throne, the power of Cranmer to bring about reform abruptly ended, and in 1556 he was burnt at the stake for treason. But he had created a vehicle for worship that barely changed in the next four centuries. English was now a medium for all kinds of religious expression. It was the language with which to address God, and it was the language of God’s word. A language that two centuries before had seemed insecure was now an instrument of astonishing social and spiritual reform. In the reign of Elizabeth I, the feeling would intensify that English had special powers of alchemy.

  4

  From Queen Elizabeth to John Locke

  Ripeness, rightness and the doubtful signification of words

  Thomas Cranmer was Queen Elizabeth’s godfather, and we may romantically imagine him blessing her with a passion for the vernacular. Shakespeare and John Fletcher, in their play Henry VIII, dramatize the connection between them, and have Cranmer salute Elizabeth’s birth with the lines: ‘This royal infant … / Though in her cradle, yet now promises / Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings, / Which time shall bring to ripeness.’

  The reign of Elizabeth was in fact scarred by religious conflict, and her citizens were anxious about the stability of the monarchy, but one of the period’s chief bequests to posterity was a luxuriant myth of Elizabeth as a heroine and of her era as a golden age. The flowering of English literature during her forty-five years on the throne was used as evidence of the nation’s distinctiveness. For a generation of writers born in the 1550s and 1560s, England and its people, together with its history and institutions, seemed the most important subjects to address.1 Literature became an instrument of political authority. The monarch was glorified, and so was the language used for the purpose. Images of Elizabeth pictured her as richly attired, an object of worship and a symbol of sovereignty in all its glory. The ornaments with which she was bedecked were also a kind of armour. Commentators on the culture of Elizabethan England, both then and now, recognize the same quality in its language: a copiousness that clothes ideas and arguments richly, its sartorial display a sign of military intent.

  When John of Gaunt in Shakespeare’s Richard II hymns ‘this sceptred isle’, he is articulating an Elizabethan view, not that of a fourteenth-century English prince. Elizabeth and her successor, James I, were not the first monarchs to play a palpable role as patrons of English. I have mentioned Henry V already, and long before him, in the ninth century, King Alfred championed translation and education in English. Before him, Æthelberht I of Kent had codified laws in English. But now there was a more dramatic posture of militant literacy: England’s intellectual and cultural climate was unique, and its people were ready to overtake any and every rival. The language was a symbol of unity, and a vehicle for it too.

  Today when English-speakers declare that their language is the best, they are renewing this Elizabethan spirit. We have all heard claims of this sort: it’s asserted that English has the biggest vocabulary of any living tongue, is particularly well adapted to an ever-changing world, has the most skilful teachers, is inherently civil, is a force for democracy, and is the language that the rest of the world most wants to learn or should most want to learn. Often such claims are supported by the statement that English is the language of Shakespeare. In our unconscious or semi-conscious myths of English identity – tinged with eroticism, and somewhat confused both historically and biologically – Elizabeth the virgin mother of the nation is also the begetter of Shakespeare, and we imagine a relationship between them, a golden meeting of politics and poetry, a perfect image of the majesty of the English language and its speakers.2 People who would not countenance sitting through a production of Hamlet still speak of Shakespeare not only as the greatest of English authors, but also as proof of English’s surpassing excellence. Shakespeare the national poet is used to embody ideas about the greatness of English.

  It was in the eighteenth century that it became usual to refer to Shakespeare as divine – a habit that frequently struck foreign visitors to Britain.3 But he was not the only Renaissance English poet to be mythologized, and he was not the first. Sir Philip Sidney, after his death at the Battle of Zutphen in 1586, was celebrated as a model of piety, valour, courtesy and creative brilliance. In The Defence of Poesy, which he wrote in the late 1570s, Sidney had suggested that poetry could stimulate men to perform virtuous and even heroic deeds. Posthumously he was acclaimed as a hero, a scholar who was also a soldier. Reflecting on Sidney’s achievement, poets of this period were apt to think of themselves as protean creatures, capable of large contributions in other arenas: the court, warfare, history, and the promotion of patriotic feeling.

  Samuel Daniel was one of many who used the heroic image of Sidney to justify their own activities as poets. In 1599 he acclaimed ‘the treasure of our tongue’, and wondered which other nations it might soon ‘enrich’. He spoke with confidence of ‘the greatnes of our stile’ and of English as ‘our best glorie’. The language was a prized asset and, potentially, an instrument of conquest. By 1628, when the nineteen-year-old John Milton wrote his poem ‘At a Vacation Exercise’, which begins with the words ‘Hail native language’, this attitude had hardened.

  This was a significant change, for throughout the sixteenth century anxieties about English beset writers and commentators. Disputes over the language’s use were incessant, as were concerns about its inferiority. Now, though, it was its inferiority to Latin and Greek, rather than to French, that occupied the disputants. A recurrent concern was English’s lack of expressive resources. The writers of the period were often brilliantly loquacious, but their notions of what one could and could not do with English were made up as they went along. The most contentious issue in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was the expansion of the English word-stock. Its substance was changing. Around 1570, writers started to worry that their works might not last because of the impermanence of vocabulary. Edward Brerewood, who wrote a study of the diversity of languages and religions, was unusual in finding little cause for alarm in the language’s changes. ‘There is no language,’ he declared, ‘which … is not subiect to change.’ One of the reasons for this, he saw, was that people grow ‘weary of old words (as of old things)’.4

  Yet at the same time, beginning in about 1580, another theme developed – the eloquence of English. Important and original works were beginning to be written in the language, by writers such as Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. Devices of Classical rhetoric were being zealously cultivated by English authors. English vocabulary had lately been augmented by significant adoptions from Latin and Greek. Additionally, there was a growing sense that the language was not just in need of regulation, but worthy of it.5 The resourceful authors of the Elizabethan period used language as though it were something new and ecstatic. Here, and in the Jacobean period that followed, there were outstanding talents writing for the theatre (Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe), along with poets such as John Donne, ambitious experimenters in prose (Francis Bacon, for instance), and theorists of both literature and language.

  Gone was the sense of English being fit for few purposes. In 1582 Richard Mulcaster, the highly regarded headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School in London, wrote that English had ‘so manie uses, bycause it is conversant with so manie people, and so well acquainted with so manie matters’. Even in classrooms where the speaking of English was forbidden, many teachers were at pains to ensure that their pupils, translating Latin into English, crafted English prose of high quality.6 The functions of English were becoming more varied, and so, as Mulcaster recognized, was its audience. Hitherto there had not been a great deal of learned writing in English, but that, he saw, could be changed.

  It is worth pausing to remember that at this time English was spoken only in England and parts of southern Scotland, as well as by small numbers in Ireland and Wales. It was little valued elsewhere. Its pr
esent diffusion was not even the stuff of fantasy. Yet Mulcaster saw that ‘all kindes of trade’ and ‘all sortes of traffik’ were beginning to make English ‘a tung of account’. ‘I love Rome, but London better,’ he wrote. ‘I favor Italie, but England more, I honor the Latin, but I worship the English.’7 In the seventeenth century, this sense of English’s ‘account’ would dramatically increase: English began to be exported, and the language that was planted abroad developed in different ways there.

  To many of its users, Renaissance English seemed alarmingly plastic. ‘Thou hast frighted the word out of his right sense, so forcible is thy wit,’ says Benedick to his sparring partner Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. Beatrice’s wit is not the only thing springing words from their medieval cages in this late-1590s play. Thou, incidentally, had in Old English been used when addressing only one person, and you when addressing more. By the sixteenth century, this had changed; the difference was social, with thou expressing intimacy or possibly condescension, while you was chillier or more respectful. The distinction disappeared in the seventeenth century from written English, and from most spoken English also, though one may still hear it in Yorkshire – it is memorably frequent in Barry Hines’s novel A Kestrel for a Knave, set in 1960s Barnsley. By contrast, other languages in Western Europe continue to draw such a distinction: in some, notably French, it is important, while in others, such as Spanish and Swedish, the formal address is now not much used. Today’s yous, widely heard in Ireland, and youse, heard on Merseyside and in Australia, revive and make explicit the difference between the plural you and the singular. So, too, does the American y’all.