Mugglestone - The Oxford History of English
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bilingual clerks had integrated many borrowings into English: ‘Abuses of dustucks by Company’s gomasthas and banians noticed. To prevent it, all dustucks to be registered and returned after speciWc time’ (‘Abuses of passes by Company’s native agents and Hindu traders noticed. To prevent it, all passes to be registered and returned after speciWc time’). In addition to ephemeral loanwords like those found in this passage, the bureaucratic style had evolved the near total omission of articles and other ‘small’ grammatical markers and had embraced the passive voice (in which the grammatical agents become as invisible as John Company’s). Documents of British India abound with grammatical shortcuts and loanwords of this kind, and this special ‘insider English’ appeared with nearly equal frequency in legal papers or commercial transactions among both anglophones and compradors or ‘native agents’ (< Portuguese comprador ‘buyer’ [1615]).
Social roles assigned to native peoples in south Asia produced borrowed words that gained some enduring usage in the wider community of English: coolie (‘labourer’), lascar (‘sailor’), nabob (‘person of great wealth and inXuence’), sepoy (‘soldier’), subahdar (‘oYcer in command of sepoys’).
The technology of international trade also abetted change in English. With the introduction of the telegram and cablegram, abbreviated commercial communication gained a new reason for brevity: messages were charged by the number of words they contained. A solution to this problem was found by the AngloAmerican Code and Cypher Company and published in a dictionary at the end of the nineteenth century. It contained such entries as Anes (‘Must have answer immediately’). One four-letter word thus stood for the four ordinary words, producing a 75 per cent reduction in the cost of sending this message. Such a saving could only arise in a culture already bent on the idea of brevity and abbreviation and that had already reduced the eight-word sentence upon which the four-word version is built: ‘I must have an answer from you immediately’.3
science and english
As ‘natural philosophy’ turned into science, English changed in response to new impulses. A ‘plain’ style emphasizing nouns expressed the doctrines of the Royal Society (see p. 240–1), and new thoughts required new terms. On the intersection of the old and the new ways of expression appeared An Historical Relation of the
3 See further R. W. Bailey, Nineteenth-Century English (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 59.
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Island Ceylon in the East Indies, published in 1681 under the name of Robert Knox but strongly inXuenced by the ideas of Robert Hooke, secretary of the Royal Society. Knox had suVered a ‘Detainment of 19 years 6 months & 14 days’ in Ceylon, much of it spent in the fastness of Kandy, a city high in the central mountains which would resist outside colonial inXuence into the nineteenth century. Knox became Xuent in Sinhalese and acquainted with the customs, Xora, and fauna of the island. When he was Wnally released from ‘detainment’, he returned to England with a collection of biological specimens, some of them preserved in British collections today. As a scientiWcally-minded adventurer, Knox was a wonderful informant for Hooke who was discouraged by the abysmal state of systematic knowledge of the natural world, even that which might easily ‘be obtain’d from divers knowing Planters now Residing in London’.
Knox was thus a source of precious knowledge. He himself saw his experience in terms of religion: exile and estrangement. But Hooke saw the pages of Knox’s story as opening a world of science: anthropology, geography, plants and animals, government, religious beliefs. And in helping Knox prepare his story for publication, Hooke did his best to use the ‘native’ words for the exotic novelties reported in it: perahera (‘a celebratory procession’), dissava (‘a district governor’). Knox’s book is cited 93 times in the OED, and most of the borrowed words from Sinhalese appear there for the Wrst time: Kittul and talipot (‘kinds of palm’), wanderoo (‘a kind of monkey’). What is intriguing about this case is that the new science wanted to use borrowed words to give authenticity to these new exotica, a far cry from the impulse that had earlier led to the North American robin having only the slightest resemblance to the European one. (The English robin is a small linnet; the American one a large thrush.) Having two quite diVerent birds named with the same word was bad science, and Hooke wanted to avoid it.
The inXuence of science on the English vocabulary can be traced by an examination of the elements in the periodic table. The ones known and valued before the dawn of chemistry have English names (even if they are borrowed at some early time): gold, silver, lead. The new chemistry produced exotic novelties inXuenced by Germany and France. Thus cobalt Wrst appears from German in 1683; oxygen from French in 1789; and then, through the principles leading to the ‘International ScientiWc Vocabulary’ based on ‘new’ Latin, to potassium and sodium coined in 1807 by Humphrey Davy on the foundation of English potash and soda. As the periodic table Wlled up through discovery or synthesis, word formation became even more creative—for instance, uranium (1805) from the name of the planet; lawrencium (1961) from the name of the scientist Ernest O. Lawrence.
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What makes these ‘scientiWc’ words of special importance is that their users abhorred ambiguity and were willing to suVer the jeers of etymologists or the scorn of the lay public as they used exotic vocabulary. A paraphrase of the slogan of the founders of the Royal Society shows just how much this kind of English was (and is) set apart from the usual fortunes of language change—so many meanings; just so many words.
a various language
On both sides of the anglophone Atlantic, from the mid-eighteenth century forward, there was, as Chapter 9 has explored, an unprecedented interest in ‘propriety’ and ‘correctness’. Of the 187 books concerned with linguistic etiquette published in the anglophone world in the eighteenth century, 32 were published before 1750 and 155 after. This Xood of new publications, beginning at mid-century, supported Wnely nuanced judgements about the ‘genius’ of English and what properly belonged to it. Most attention was devoted to varieties within the community of English speakers, but commentators were also fascinated by the ‘otherness’ of the English inXuenced by foreign languages.
In Jamaica, the African-descended part of the population was of particular interest, as Edward Long reported in his History of Jamaica in 1774:
The Negroes seem very fond of reduplications, to express a greater or less quantity of anything; as walky-walky, talky-talky, washy-washy, nappy-nappy, tie-tie, lilly-lilly, fumfum; so bug-a-bugs (wood ants); dab-a-dab (an olio made with maize, herrings, and pepper), bra-bra (another of their dishes), grande-grande (augmentative size, or grandeur), and so forth. In their conversations they confound all the moods, tenses, cases, and conjunctions, without mercy: for example, I surprize (for I am surprized), me glad for see you (pro, I am glad to see you; how you do (for how d’ye do?), me tank you; me ver well; etc.
Linguistic analysis is not sophisticated here. For instance, fum-fum means a ‘Xogging’ and, like dab-a-dab, is thought by subsequent observers to have been inXuenced by an African language. Yet the writer recognizes that this is English ‘larded with the Guinea dialect’, and he identiWes particular West African languages from which some borrowings come.
When usages like these crossed a cultural divide, they became even more a matter of interest. Here is another observation about Jamaica, this one—by Lady Nugent—recorded in 1802:
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The Creole language is not conWned to the negroes. Many of the ladies, who have not been educated in England, speak a sort of broken English, with an indolent drawling out of their words, that is very tiresome if not disgusting. I stood next to a lady one night, near a window, and, by way of saying something, remarked that the air was much cooler than usual; to which she answered, ‘Yes, ma-am, him rail-ly too fra-ish’.
In this example, readers are presumed to know how ‘creole’ sounds: him for it and a diphthong rather than a simple vowel in really and fresh.
Increased travel and exposure to new voices led to diVerent ideas about what constituted ‘foreign’ English. So Benjamin Silliman, a young American, toured Britain in 1805–6, and encountered a youth, the son of an English ‘planter’ in Tobago, who was on his way to school to be ‘Wnished’. Silliman described the youth’s English as ‘broken’ and his narrative reveals just how innocent many English people were about their language as used abroad. A high-table of Cambridge dons could not be persuaded that Silliman had grown up in New England since his speech seemed, to them, indistinguishable from that of young men brought up in south-east England. While ‘creole’ might be recognizable, most other varieties of English seemed not to rise to cultivated attention.
In the manifesto for romanticism published by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798, there was a declaration that poetic language ought to be the ‘real language’ of humble people. Though these two poets did not indulge in dialect verse or draw upon the resources of ‘foreign’ English, others did so enthusiastically. Maria Edgeworth in Ireland, Walter Scott in Scotland, and Thomas Chandler Halliburton in Canada all became proliWc and imaginative writers employing the vernacular. Halliburton is of particular interest because his cast of characters, performing in New England and Atlantic Canada, was polyglot: Dutch, Germans, French, African-Americans, Native Americans. These voices were assigned to comedy and satire; characters who spoke in ‘accented’ English were often ‘low’ or ‘rustic’. But they were also made articulate in new ways, and treated as fully human (in comparison to the notions of ‘barbarism’ that had weighed down views of ‘exotic’ foreign languages in earlier times). Such innovations in literature arose from the romantic idea that language and culture were intricately linked, and, even if the characters were ‘low’, they might be wise.
In Trinidad in 1844 appeared a vernacular text purporting to be ‘an overheard conversation’ between ‘a creole of the colony’ and a gentleman who was ‘one of the Immigrants from North America’:
She—Me Gaad, dis da really big building far true—he big more dan two church— three chapel and one meeting house put together. What he far, me wonder—St. James Barracks fool to he. Wha’ go lib dere me want for know.
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He—Why Marm, I guess as how them Government Folks as are very deceptious in every country, Britishers as Americans, give out that is intended for a new Government House and Court House—that may do very well for you, natives—but I reckon I have’nt been reared in one of the principal Cities of the United States and visited all the other worth seeing, to be taken in that sort of way. No, I guess this child knows a trick worth two of that any day, catch a ‘coon asleep and then you’ll Wnd me rather obliverous about the eye lids—but not afore that I guess.
(The building under discussion turns out to be a penitentiary ‘where they lock up all the people as is too good to put in a goal, but too bad to be allowed to be at large in the streets’.) Both of these characters are African-descended, and ‘Eavesdropper’—the pseudonym employed by the reporter of this conversa- tion—is condescending to them. Yet the American visitor to Trinidad, however much his pompous speech is characterized by malapropisms, is still the spokesperson for satire on the ‘deceptious’ nature of governments. And the woman to whom he speaks is herself capable of wise and sceptical observation: ‘dese ‘Merican people rally speak very droll English, but dey clever people, clever for true’. In short, there seems to be enough linguistic snobbery to go round.
This mid-nineteenth-century example represents a broad movement within the English-speaking community for writers to adopt ‘foreign’ accents and dialects for satiric purposes. Fools and clowns in earlier times had been allowed considerable liberty for poking oral fun (and even criticizing) the powerful and their literary descendents began to do the same in print. In the United States ‘Davy Crockett’, a wild frontiersman based on a real person, was developed in the 1830s as a way for the uneducated to mock the pretence of the learned, for the ‘westerners’ to assert themselves against the patricians of the Atlantic-coastal cities, and for the exuberant to shame those who were hidebound by their own gentility. Most of these voices were presented in newspapers, and most of them are now forgotten—except, perhaps, for their extraordinary pseudonyms: Josiah Allen’s Wife, Bill Arp, Josh Billings, Hans Breitmann, Sut Lovingood, Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, Carl Pretzel, Seba Smith. Except for just one of these subversive humorists, Mark Twain, none are commonly read nowadays, but the American example of this work inspired imitation elsewhere, particularly in late nine- teenth-century Scotland where newspaper humour in the vernacular was also the mouthpiece for a variety of causes—anti-Imperial critiques, advocacy of the working class, anti-clericalism, and various progressive causes: ‘Oor mere men buddies in their wise stupidity hae declared that weemen shall hae nae vote . . .’).4
4 See further W. Donaldson, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland: Language, Fiction, and the Press (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986), 183.
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Here the satirist, a woman, uses the vernacular (and an oxymoron) to denounce the pig-headedness of men. In the twentieth century, this use of the distinctive Scots vernacular became part of a nationalist programme to celebrate Scotland and decry the inXuence of south-eastern English culture on it.
Of course the voices of the ‘foreign’ could also be held up for ridicule, as in, for instance, Charles G. Leland’s Pidgin-English Sing-Song (1900) or Arnold Wright’s Babu English as ’tis Writ (1891). Publications like these are deeply stained with the taint of racial superiority, but nowadays they seem less oVensive than quixotic in their belief that only some forms of English were worthy of respect. At the same time, there was a developing taste for dialect humour in the music halls and vaudeville theatres, and guides appeared so that amateurs could also join in the fun, as in The Dime Dialect Speaker: A ‘Talking’ Collection of Irish, GermanEnglish, Cockney, Negro, Yankee, and Western Vernacular Speeches (1879). As never before, the copious variety of voices became the vehicle for humour and satire.
english international, ltd.
As for the view of English beyond Britain, the tentative optimism of the eighteenth century gave way to a new view of ‘global English’, an outlook in which conWdence turned into triumphalism. A turning-point in this emergent idea occurred in January 1851 when the great philologist Jacob Grimm declared to the Royal Academy in Berlin that English ‘may be called justly a language of the world: and seems, like the English nation, to be destined to reign in future with still more extensive sway over all parts of the globe’. Soon translated from German to English, Grimm’s opinion became a commonplace and the math- ematically-minded computed the increase, both biological and cultural, that would lead English to sweep around the world. Dozens of comments expressed this wisdom: ‘The English tongue has become a rank polyglot, and is spreading over the earth like some hardy plant whose seed is sown by the wind’, as Ralcy Husted Bell wrote in 1909.5 Such views led to a new perspective on multilingualism: those who did not know English should set promptly about learning it! As later chapters in this volume further explore, English-speakers did not need to Wnd a niche in the multilingual world; they could, instead, bestride it.
5 R. H. Bell, The Changing Values of English Speech (New York: Hinds, Noble and Eldredge,
1909), 35.
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One linguistic consequence of this ideological change was to reduce the importation of borrowed words into English. Various factors make it diYcult to be precise about this development since there are diYcult questions when some words enter the language, Wnd few users, and survive only in dictionaries. But one can gain an impression of what happened by consulting the enduring new words introduced into English decade by decade. In the Wrst ten years of the twentieth century, such words as these appeared: adrenaline (like television, representing the nomenclature of science), aileron (like much of the terminology of aviation—fuselage, for instance—introduced from French), okapi (like panda introduced from languages where the creatures were found), and various political terms that would resonate over the next century (like lebensraum from German or pogrom from Russian). Words from the 1990s are very rarely borrowed from other languages; instead, the most common practice is to form words from existing English elements: babelicious (< babe þ delicious), cybercafe´ (< cyber netics þ cafe´), website. Borrowings from foreign languages quickly yielded to home-grown synonyms: tamagotchi (< Japanese ‘lovable egg’) almost immediately became cyberpet.
Lexicographers associated with the Oxford English Dictionary have declared that 90,000 ‘new words’ were introduced in the twentieth century. Only 4,500 of these ‘new words’ were foreign borrowings. In the twentieth century, while there came to be far more speakers of English than ever before (see further Chapters 13 and 14), far more of them were multilingual, and far more people were likely to have their neologisms recorded in a way that would be accessible to lexicographers. Yet, paradoxically, there were far fewer borrowed words than in any century since the Norman Conquest. On the other hand, exportation of English words penetrated languages everywhere. Here are words that appear in nearly all the major languages of Europe; in many of them, they are fully integrated to the grammar and pronunciation of the recipient language: biker, carpool, fairness
(‘justice’), gimmick, high (‘intoxicated’), OK, second-hand, shredder, wild card. Beyond Europe, only the most puristic (or isolated) language communities show resistance to English. Okay is an expression found hundreds of times in websites written in Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish.
Before the mid-twentieth century, it was unusual to Wnd code switching and language mixture in works of Wction or drama, a decision doubtless made on the grounds that too many demands made on monolingual readers would reduce sales. A common method for giving a taste of foreign language was, for instance, used by Hemingway, as in his For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940): ‘ ‘‘No es nada,’’ she said. ‘‘A bridge is nothing’’.’ Here, simultaneous translation or paraphrase provided suYcient Xavour to the text.
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In the post-colonial world, creative writing for multilingual audiences Xourished where readers (or viewers) could appreciate it. In Anglophone communities where many languages are in widespread use, dramatic performances for stage or television have achieved sophisticated eVects through the use of several languages. Some plays oVer the option of scenes not in English (for instance, Kee Thuan Chye’s Malaysian play, We Could **** You, Mr. Birch). Others employ scripts with a mixture of languages (for instance, Stella Kon’s monologue for a Singaporean audience, Emily of Emerald Hill, employs fragments in Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay, Hindi, and even African-American English of the American south). Such works make local use of global English.
As the concluding chapter in this volume will further explore, in the twentyWrst century, the membrane separating English from the other languages is ever more permeable. Consider the following extract from a resume of a Hong Kong actor:
Tomcatt Playwright/ Director/ Performer
Tomcatt, aka Luen Mo Fay, joined Hong Kong Commercial Broadcasting Company Limited in 1995 as copywriter. She was transferred to CR2 as program host in 1997. She initiated and hosted the Wrst Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Radio Program ‘‘Boys and Gals.’’ She was also involved in the creative process of idclub.com and
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crhk.com.hk as Creative Director. She is a freelancer for 2 years now. She owns an erotic column in ‘‘Pepper’’, the monthly magazine. Her work in ‘‘Sister’’ has been awarded the CertiWcate of Excellence in the Media Graphics Award 2002, Category Book/ Editorial Magazine—Inside Page (Series). Other than writing, she is also involved in a lot of theatre productions and playback theatre. She is the membership secretary in Hong Kong of the International Playback Theatre Network (IPTN) and professional member of International Association of Theatre Critics (Hong Kong). (Tomcatt, 2004)
To a person unable to read the Chinese version, the text above the translation is bewildering. Yet in many respects it resembles those mixed-language texts we examined early in this chapter. There is no apparent reason why some portions occur in English and others do not. It is simply another form of the hybridity that has impacted English (and languages in contact with it) from the earliest times.
References and Suggestions for Further Reading
How many languages do you need?
Wright (2002) and Schneider (2003) discuss in detail the patterns and consequences of linguistic accommodation across language barriers.
Traversing language boundaries
The origins of English place names are treated in fascinating essays which introduce the dictionaries compiled by Ekwall (1960) and Mills (1998). Aelfric’s Life of St. Oswald, with its account of Oswold’s role as ‘wealhstod’, can be found in Skeat (1890). Unfortunately the documentary record is so fragmentary that it is diYcult to state with certainty the role and impact of multilingualism in Old English times. Toon (1983), however, oVers interesting ideas about the role of group identity in the ecology of English. The best account of bilingualism in Old English times is provided by Kastovsky (1992: 299–338); after a minute review of the evidence (and the scholarship) he reaches a cautious position: ‘Thus it seems reasonable to conclude that there was a certain amount of bilingualism, notably with the oVspring of mixed marriages or secondand thirdgeneration settlers . . .’ (p. 330). Middle English multilingualism has come in for renewed scrutiny, and Short (1979) is particularly useful.
Apart from the sources cited above, the most comprehensive recent account of borrowings from foreign languages in the period is provided by Burnley (1992a). Texts with language mixture are anthologized (among other places) in Harding and Wright (1995), and Cusack (1998); the extract on p. 337 is taken from Wenzel (1994: 70), while
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Wright (1996: 183) is the source of the mixed-language extracts from the London Bridge account books on the same page.
Linguistic encounters
Murison (1971) examines Dutch-Scots contact, and its lexical consequences. Policies to encourage the spread of English through the British Isles are documented by Blank (1996), especially pp. 126–68, and by Bailey (1985). Moore (2002a: 404–5) is the source of the mixed-language texts cited here.
English out and about
Early modern English and the expansion of English beyond Europe is the subject of innumerable articles and monographs. The North American experience is described authoritatively by Karttunen (2000) and by Kupperman (2000).
Go-betweens
Quinn (1990) provides a thorough account of the voyages described here. Ingram’s discussion of cannibals can be found in the facsimile edition of Ingram’s Relation (1966: 558). Salmon (1996) discusses the linguistic signiWcance of Thomas Harriot; Harriot’s speciWcally linguistic writings, including his orthography, unfortunately remained virtually unknown until the last quarter of the twentieth century. See also Quinn (1985) for an account of Harriot’s Briefe and True Report. The tale of South African Cory echoed through the English imagination for more than two centuries; it appears in Maria Edgeworth’s novel Leonora (1806). A thorough account of this man in fact and fable is found in Merians (2001: 87–117), which is also (p. 94) the source of the quotation on p. 344 . The history of Tisquantum is given in Karttunen (2000). Bolton (2003) gives fascinating details about the contact between the English and the Chinese from 1637 forward; it is to him that I owe the story of Peter Mundy. The quotation on p. 344 is taken from the edition by Temple (1919: 192). The (1997) facsimile edition of Williams (1643: A7r) is the source of the quotation which, on p. 345 of this chapter, describes the last days of Wequash. Carew’s comments on the English talent for acquiring new languages can be found in Camden (1984: 40).
English expands
The anonymous writer with whom this chapter begins published Some Thoughts on the English Language in 1766; the cited extract is taken from p. 95. Bureaucratic and legal English is mostly neglected once historians of English get beyond the scribes of the late medieval Court of Chancery.