Mugglestone - The Oxford History of English
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linguistic encounters
Away from south-east England, the ecology of languages had taken diVerent forms. Dutch merchants, for example, settled in the east of Scotland, from Edinburgh north to Aberdeen, and traded with Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges. In 1475, Flemish weavers formed a corporation in Edinburgh, and earlier Dutch military engineers had designed a catapult for use by the Scots against the English. Most of the words that were borrowed by the Scots from Dutch had, however, little currency outside Scotland; the great exception to this generalization is golf (<Middle Dutch kolf ). Farther north, in Shetland, another kind of multilingual community emerged, involving Norn (the variety of Norwegian spoken in Orkney, Shetland, and northern Scotland), English, and Dutch after the construction of a naval base by the Dutch to protect their herring Xeet. Multilingualism could, of course, be met with resistance. As English military and political power increased, eVorts were made to put down the use of other ‘national’ languages within Britain. In 1366, the statutes of Kilkenny required that in Ireland, descendants of English migrants should abandon the use of Gaelic on penalty of forfeiture of their property. (This law also forbade ‘fostering of children, concubinage or amour’ between English men and Irish women.) In Wales, in 1536, Welsh speakers were expelled from positions of power: ‘from hence forth no person or persons that use the Welsh speech or language shall have or enjoy any manner oYce or fees . . . unless he or they use and exercise the English speech or language’ (27 Henry VIII 20). In Cornwall, in 1549, Cornish people were compelled to become Protestants but denied liturgy in their own language; proponents of the law asserted that the Cornish should not complain since they had not understood services in Latin and so should be content not to understand them in English. In Scotland, through the ‘Statutes of Iona’ in 1609, the London parliament required inhabitants of the Western Isles worth the value of sixty cattle to put their sons (or, lacking sons, daughters) to school in English until they should be able to speak, read, and write the language ‘suYcientlie’. EVorts like these reXect an emerging intolerance for multilingualism, but none of these laws had an immediate and radically transforming eVect on the language ecology of Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland. Over the long-term, however, English overwhelmed these other languages, as Chapter 13 will further discuss.
Early modern English, as the examples above suggest, rested on a complex foundation of both multilingual practice and attitude. Many of the books which Caxton printed in the late Wfteenth-century were, for instance, transla-
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tions of Latin, Dutch, and French texts so that readers not adept in these languages could have access to them. Because he was eager for commercial success, Caxton printed the works he believed would be most popular, and he printed them in a form of English that he thought would reach the widest audience. Thus, as Chapter 5 has noted, printing became a force for uniformity, privileging not just English per se but certain kinds of English. On the other hand, such an account leaves out the importance of languages other than English in the early book trade. Caxton imported books in foreign languages from abroad to sell in Britain, and, of some ninety that he published in London, sixteen were in languages other than English. Commercially, Caxton and his immediate successors had a good sense of what would sell, and they did not limit their productions to English. Technically, these printers were not innovators, however, and they lagged behind their continental competitors. Not until 1519 were Greek types employed. Hebrew and Arabic faces followed much later in 1592 and 1617 respectively. But England was not wholly indiVerent to innovation. With a revived interest in the national past, antiquarians commissioned Anglo-Saxon types in 1567, and in 1571 Elizabeth I ordered the creation of an Irish face which was sent to Dublin so that a catechism could be printed in Gaelic. All of this activity is good evidence that there was a demand for books published in languages other than English.
In commercial and legal writing, French and Latin remained essential languages for practitioners even if none of the litigants or lawyers used these languages in speech. As a result, mixed-language texts continued to be composed in early modern English, as in the following examples of depositions from (respectively) 1514 and 1570:
1514. unus egipcius sibi publice dixit tuam fortunam congoscis for he that stantith by the schold jape the iii tymes er thou goo to thy bedd to thi husband. Et hoc allegat probare.
(‘A gypsy said publicly to her, You know your fortune, for he that stands beside you should fuck you three times before you go to your bed to your husband. And she oVers to prove this’.)
1570. Margaria nicolson singlewoman contra agnete blenkinsop vxor Robert in causa diVamacinois videlicet hyte hoore a whipe and a cra cart/ and a franc hoode/ waies me for ye my lasse wenst haue a halpeny halter for ye to goo vp gallygait & be hanged/
(‘Margaret Nicolson, spinster, against Agnete Blenkinsop, wife of Robert, in a case of defamation, namely that she should be whipped behind a cart and [she was] a ‘French hood.’ ‘Woe is me, my lass, do you want a halfpenny noose for you to go up to the Gallowgate and be hanged’.)
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Scriveners who recorded these statements faced a demanding task of balancing the (increasingly conventional) Latin frame of the proceeding with the literal transcript (in English) of what had been said.
In the early modern period, London continued to be a magnet for migration, and many migrants spoke languages other than English. Interpreters must have had plenty to do on the interfaces of these languages—even though they seldom come to the foreground in the written records. Diplomatic and royal visits from abroad brought crowds of foreigners—especially from France and Spain—and these occasions too required translators. Trade with Germany, the Baltic nations, and Russia increased, and these contacts in turn left marks on the vocabulary of English—for instance, beluga (‘whale’), severuga (‘sturgeon’), and tsar (‘ruler’), all words borrowed from Russian in the sixteenth century.
english out and about
One of the great ‘facts’ about English in the early modern period is that the language was used in exploration and conquest, and it is usual in histories of the language to display for admiration and wonder the exotic borrowings into the native tongue from languages spoken at a great distance from Britain. What is seldom made prominent in these conventional histories is that these explorings Wrst took place nearly a century after the beginning of European expansionism; in this respect, the English followed the Spanish and the Portuguese (for instance) with a series of freebooting raids on the principle that it was easier to steal from the riches looted from the new world after they had been accumulated by other Europeans rather than competing for treasures on the ground. Precisely the same idea illuminates the empire of words. It was far easier for English people to pluck new (and exotic) vocabulary from Latin, Spanish, or Portuguese books once the sharp edges of its foreignness had, in a sense, already been rubbed oV. Nearly all the famously ‘American’ words come into English from one of these languages— for example, chocolate, maize, potato, and tomato.
go-betweens
A representative Wgure in this late-coming expansion of English is the mariner John Hawkins whose exploits were celebrated and generously rewarded in his
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lifetime (Figure 12.1). On his Wrst voyage in 1562–63, he sailed to the west coast of Africa where he captured two Portuguese vessels and their cargo of human beings. These captives he transported to Hispaniola and sold as slaves to the Spanish; he returned to England with goods which were sold for a great proWt. His subsequent voyages were similarly successful (and unscrupulous), and they
Fig. 12.1. The crest of John Hawkins (1532–1595), who pioneered the triangular trade that connected England, Africa, and the Americas. In 1562–63, he kidnapped some Africans who had been enslaved by the Portuguese, sold them to the Spanish in the New World, and returned to England flush with profit. After a second, and similarly successful, voyage, he was granted the coat of arms reproduced above. It shows the British lion bestriding the waves, and the crest, above, a ‘demi-Moor, or negro’ chained. Freebooting by Hawkins and those who followed in the slave trade profoundly changed the mixture of languages into which England had become immersed.
Source: Reproduced by permission of the College of Arms, MS Miscellaneous Grants 1, f.148.
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occurred both before and after the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588, a naval action in which he was celebrated for serving. From the viewpoint of multilingualism, however, Hawkins is perhaps not so interesting a Wgure as those who accompanied him on his travels and who could speak the Portuguese, Spanish, and other European languages required for the success of the expeditions. Even more interesting are those who bridged the gap between the Europeans and these newly encountered African people.
One such gap-bridger—although a man not celebrated for truthfulness—is David Ingram, a sailor from Essex who accompanied Hawkins on his third voyage of 1567. On this occasion, Hawkins’ vessels were surprised by a Spanish force near Veracruz in Mexico, and only two small ships of Hawkins’ Xotilla remained to bring the survivors back to England. Given the crowding and lack of provisions, a hundred men were set on shore and left to fend for themselves. Most went south. Ingram and two companions went north. The three of them claimed to have walked through the heart of North America, arriving one year later at Cape Breton (in what is modern-day Canada) where they found a French vessel to bring them back to Europe. While there seems to have been some scepticism about this tale at the time—the British geographer Richard Hakluyt published Ingram’s Relation of his journey in his own anthology of travel writings, The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), and then dropped it from the 1599 edition—much of what Ingram wrote was plausible and even convincing. (His references to abundant silver, crystal, and rubies may have been invented to foster investment in further travel to the new lands.) Attention to language in Ingram’s report reveals what a late sixteenth-century audience would expect to hear on the subject. Like most of his contemporaries, Ingram supposed that only one language was spoken by the inhabitants of this vast (and richly multilingual) territory. If he had actually been there, he would have known better. Six sample words are listed and glossed to represent ‘the language of some of the Countreis’: gwando (‘a word of salutation’), caricona (‘a king’), caraccona (‘a lord’), fona (‘bread’), carmugnar (‘the privities’), kerucca (‘the sun’). These seem hardly suYcient to have facilitated the long walk, and they provide no deWnite impression of the nature of the cultural encounter. In fact, these six ‘Welsh-sounding ‘‘Indian’’ words’ were intended to give authenticity to Ingram’s tale—among the theories of origin of the North Americans was that they were a lost tribe of Welsh. But Ingram’s story almost immediately struck many readers as bogus.2 These ‘Indian’ words were, however, plausible to his readers.
2 See D. B. Quinn, Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500–1625 (London: The Hambleton Press,
1990), 404.
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One European word Ingram uses is authentically connected with the new world—cannibal:
The people in those Countreys are professed enemies to the Canibals or men eaters: The Canibals do most inhabite betweene Norumbega, & Bariniah, they haue teeth like dogs teeth, and thereby you may know them.
Cannibal was a word introduced into colonial discourse by Columbus himself, and its origin is squarely American since it is a borrowing into Spanish of the Arawak word caniba (‘person’). As an etymologist with a cause, Columbus connected caniba with khan and declared that the Caribs were none other than ‘la gente del Gran Can,’ that is, the people of the Grand Khan, whose rich palaces and mines lay just over the horizon.
Thus Ingram’s Relation oVers an example of a meandering route by which many expressions from the Americas entered English. Reported by Columbus, caniba gained a Spanish form, Canibales, and then a neo-Latin one: Canibalis. The word arrived in English in 1553 in a translation into English of travel writings composed by a German and published in Latin.
ScientiWc study of American languages began at the same time that Ingram’s Relation became known. Thomas Harriot, an Elizabethan genius, was assigned as ‘geographer’ in an expedition to Roanoke (in present-day North Carolina). Harriot had already learned some Algonquian from two Amerindian men who had been brought to England for a short visit in 1584, and he went to Roanoke equipped, according to a note he jotted down later, with the sentence: Kecow hit tamen or ‘What is this?’. After a year in America during 1585–6, Harriot had devised a sophisticated orthography and become Xuent in the language. On his return, he composed A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia which was published separately and then incorporated into Hakluyt’s anthology of Navigations. This work printed two words that are attested in the OED as Wrst used in the Report : cushaw (‘a kind of squash’) and werowance (‘a chief’).
Evidence of this kind gives a very misleading picture of the multilingual world of English and the key Wgures in it: the bilinguals. English empire building in the sixteenth century was often hasty and opportunistic. On the continent, the empire builders took a longer view. The Portuguese, for example, exiled men to West Africa where they were expected to father bilingual children who, as grown-ups, could be employed as translators. Before his 1517 expedition to the Yucatan peninsula in search of the Mayan civilization, the Spanish conquistador Hernan Corte´s (Captain-General of the Armada) similarly sought out Spanish castaways who had been abandoned in the Yucatan long enough to become Xuent in Maya. In 1536, the French Explorer of the St Lawrence, Jacques Cartier, left two
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boys behind; if they survived, they would be turned into translators. English colonists beneWted from such persons, though not in so calculated a way. In 1613, an East India Company vessel kidnapped two ‘Souldanians’ from the Cape of Good Hope for training as intermediaries. Cory, the one who survived, Xourished as a translator from his return to southern Africa in 1614 until his death in 1627. One nearly contemporary report characterized Cory’s pitiful homesickness during his residence in London: ‘For when he had learned a little of our Language, he would daily lie upon the ground, and cry very often thus in broken English: Cooree home go, Souldania go, home go’.
Usually, however, the appearance of translators was the result of accident rather than policy. In 1621, three months after their arrival in what is now Massachusetts, a man emerged from the forest speaking Xuent English and oVering assistance to the Pilgrims. He was Tisquantum, a native of the area who had earlier been kidnapped by the English, sold into slavery in Spain, emancipated to London, and returned to New England.
As traYc increased, so did the number of bilinguals. Describing his travels to the east, another adventurer, Peter Mundy, gave currency to words associated with China. Unlike many travellers, he described the translators who had helped him and his companions:
The aforesaid interpreter was a Chincheo, runaway From the Portugalls att our beeing att Macao, who spake a little bad language. There is another Named Antonio, A Capher Eathiopian Abissin, or Curled head, thatt came to and Froe aboutt Messages as interpreter, little better then the other, runawaie allsoe From the Portugalls to the Chinois, it being an ordinary Matter For slaves on some Discontent or other to run away From their Masters; and beeing among the Chinois they are saVe, who make use of their service.
This report—describing events in 1637—does not make it clear just where the linguistic shortcomings of these translators lay, whether in their Portuguese or their Cantonese (the language of Macao). What is signiWcant, however, is that both men were out of place. The Wrst was from Fukien province (‘Cincheo’) which had suVered an imperial decree closing its maritime trade with the consequence that its ambitious people were dispersed all over south-east Asia. The second translator was, if anything, even farther from home since he was a sub-Saharan African and thus both racially and linguistically isolated. People like these two, living on the cultural divide, lubricate the surfaces of the languages in contact and help them rub oV on each other. Without the misplaced Chinese translator and the multilingual helper from southern Africa, the English would have been almost entirely helpless.
Not all these expeditions were commercial or political. The early modern era witnessed vigorous eVorts to convert native peoples to Christian practices. One
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such missionary, Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, had arrived in New England in 1631. Almost immediately he set out to learn the local language and in 1643 he published (in London) his Key into the Language of America. Full of information about cultural contact, this little book shows the inXuence of an ardent Puritan on a willing convert. Using the familiar trope of the death-bed confession, Williams described the last days of his friend Wequash, a Pequot: ‘He replyed in broken English: Me so big naughty Heart, me heart all one stone! . . . I had many discourses with him on his Life, but this was the summe of our last parting untill our generall meeting’. Throughout his book, Williams shows deep respect for native peoples and even upbraids the English for lacking the generosity he sometimes found among them.
Another of the remarkable early eVorts at Christian evangelism was the hard work of John Eliot, a Puritan minister, who learned the Algonquian language of Massachusetts Bay, and, with the help of a convert, translated the entire Bible (from Genesis to Revelation), publishing it in 1663. Eliot faced enormous diYculties in making the cultural context accessible, and to do so he relied frequently on inserting English loanwords into Algonquian:
Kah Saboth paumushaumoouk, Mary Magdelene, kah Mary okasoh James kah Salome, taphumwog weetemunge spicesash, onk peyaog, kah wuilissequnouh.
(‘And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him’ Mark 16:1.)
The names in this selection make it look more ‘English’ than it really is, but the borrowings of sabbath and spices are clearly apparent, and the paratactic style of the English source (with linkages using kah ‘and’) is exported to the translation. While only a handful of Native Americans became deeply literate in their own language, many preachers—both English and Native—became Xuent in preaching and reading aloud. Even the most casual encounters with this kind of language introduced ideas about literacy and the value of written documents where they had not been known before.
These eVorts took place at a time when the prevailing opinion among the English was that they were especially skilful at learning new languages and eager to bring home the linguistic ‘treasures’ found abroad. Writing at the very beginning of English expansionism outside Europe, Richard Carew, a poet and antiquarian whose work has already been discussed in Chapter 8, celebrated this genius for acquiring languages: ‘. . . turne an Englishman at any time of his age into what countrie soever allowing him due respite, and you shall see him proWt so well that the imitation of his utterance, will in nothing diVer from the patterne
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of that native language’. Williams, Eliot, and many other migrants deserved the praise that Carew oVered them.
english expands
The boundary between early and late modern English is not marked by any event as memorable as the Conquest in 1066 by the Norman French or the introduction of printing in 1476. In most histories of the language, the boundary of 1700 has been chosen partly because of the roundness of the number, and partly because historians discern in the death of the poet John Dryden (who died in that year) the end of the copiousness of the English renaissance and the commencement of plain-spoken modernity as represented by a next-generation writer like Joseph Addison. It is also an era in which the optimism of a Carew about learning foreign languages sank into the background to be replaced by the notion that English was spreading around the world and hence was suYcient by itself. As one anonymous writer wrote in 1766 as he reviewed (and refuted) allegations against the language:
The last objection that occurs to me at present, is, that our tongue wants universality, which seems to be an argument against its merit. This is owing to the aVectation of Englishmen, who prefer any language to their own, and is not to be imputed to a defect in their native tongue. But the objection, if such it be, is vanishing daily; for I have been assured, by several ingenious foreigners, that in many places abroad, Italy in particular, it is become the fashion to study the English Tongue.
It would not be long before the old idea that English people were adept at foreign languages had been stood on its head. The new idea, emergent in the middle of the eighteenth century, was that English was destined to be a ‘world language’ and that those who did not gain it as a birthright would learn it as a necessity. Not until the middle of the nineteenth century, however, was this idea widely embraced as part of the orthodoxy of English. Then it developed into a stubborn resistance to multilingualism that continues, to a lessening extent, down to the present.
Other conventional ideas were changing too. Adventurers no longer expected, as the earlier narratives of Ingram and his contemporaries had promised, that gold, silver, and rubies could be plucked from the ground (or pilfered from the Spanish). Adventurers became far less common. It was instead merchants who came to the centre of the ideas of the multilingual world. And then the bureaucrats.
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Borrowed words from this period tended to become less venturesome and more commercial. This development can be seen through the perspective of the market for woven goods, a principal source of export wealth before the midnineteenth century. Early names came from places in England associated with the production of these weaves: worsted, for instance, from a place in Norfolk, or kersey from a village in SuVolk. Cultural history can be seen through the growing internationalization of these names. Here is a selection with the dates of Wrst occurrence as found in the OED: arras (< Arras ‘a town in northern France’, 1397), holland (1427), calico (< Calicut in India, 1505), brocade (< Spanish, 1556), mohair (< Arabic, 1570), jersey (< jersey worsted, 1583 <from the Channel Island), muslin (< Mosul, Iraq, 1609), vicuna (< Spanish, 1622), seersucker (< Persian, 1622), denim (< serge de Nıˆmes, < Nıˆmes ‘a town in southern France’, 1695), chenille (< French, 1738), astrakhan (<Russian, 1766), cashmere (< Kashmir, 1822), chine (< China through French, 1852), khaki (< Urdu, 1879).
Commerce embedded in colonialism produced yet more inXuence of other languages on English. In south Asia, the East India Company became John Company, and the great lexicographers of this part of the empire—Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell—provided a suitably local etymology for it in their celebrated
Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, Wrst published in 1886:
. . . It has been suggested, but apparently without real reason, that the phrase is a corruption of Company Jaha¯n, ‘‘which as a Wne sounding smack about it, recalling Sha¯h Jeha¯nn and Jeha¯nagı¯r, and the golden age of the Moghuls’’ . . . . And Sir G. Birdwood writes: ‘‘The earliest coins minted by the English in India were of copper, stamped with a Wgure of the irradiated lingam, the phallic ‘Roi Soleil.’ ’’ The mintage of this coin is unknown (? Madras), but without doubt it must have served to ingratiate us with the natives of the country, and may have given origin to their personiWcation of the Company under the potent title of Kumpani Jehan, which, in English mouths, became ‘John Company’.
The relevant entry in the dictionary concedes that these etymological speculations are ‘without real reason’, but these fantastic ideas do connect an obvious English phrase with the Moguls and, by the puissant symbol of the lingam on the coin, with the sexual potency of John Company.
commerce in (and about) english
As multilingualism became more specialized, borrowing from other languages increased. An entry in a minute book prepared in India in 1761 shows that