Overview 29
Scotland had a stronger tradition of widespread education, and from an earlier date. The school-leaving age became fifteen in 1944 (Scotland 1947) and sixteen in 1972–3. In the United States, Canada and Australia, elementary education was becoming compulsory by the late nineteenth century. The first high school in the USA was founded in 1821. Schooling has obvious consequences for literacy, for knowledge of the English of other times and other places, for social contact, and – to varying degrees – for deliberate regulation of dialect and grammar and attempts at standardisation. Education changes language use.
The public schools (defined originally as ‘founded or endowed for the use of the public’, now ‘independent, not funded by the state, i.e. private’) grew up in all parts of England through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the schools of the governing elite,´ preparing boys for positions in government at home and in the empire, and for the universities and the professions. Their linguistic importance is considerable, since there appeared a non-localised accent – later known as Received Pronunciation (RP) – which was particularly fostered by these schools, whose pupils mostly lived in as boarders during term-time. From the late nineteenth century there were girls’ public schools too. In adulthood these people were disproportionately influential in British public life and later in broadcasting (which, arguably, is public life now). The importance of both RP and the public schools in England has waned since the mid-twentieth century, though it has by no means disappeared.
From the 1920s we can point to the cultural impact of America on the rest of the world, including the rest of the English-speaking world. The legacy of British influence and the continuing domination of America are mostly responsible for the phenomenon of English as a world language (see Section 9.3).
1.5The form of historical evidence
Until the late nineteenth century, everything we have of older states of the language comes to us in written form. The relationship between writing and speech is not always a direct one. Here we look at the form in which texts were transmitted and the various media used.
A writing system used by Germanic tribes from maybe the second century AD was the runic futhork, a system, originally of twenty-four letters, derived from contact with Italic peoples using an Etruscan alphabet. (This, like almost all such Mediterranean writing systems, was ultimately derived from a Semitic alphabet. The derivational histories of writing systems can be considerably different from those of the languages they are used to represent, not least because they are shaped by conscious creativeness on the part of individuals.) Runes were straight-sided symbols suitable for carving on wood or stone. The later history of the runic alphabet involves changes to the form and value of individual runes as well as their overall inventory, and they play a bigger role in the history of Scandinavia
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Figure 1.8 The Caistor runes (source: Page, 1973)
and its North Germanic languages than in England and English, where in fact the three-dimensional remains are hardly more extensive than the manuscript evidence of runes. The bone-carving shown in Figure 1.8 could be tentatively regarded as the earliest surviving fragment of the English language.
According to Page (1973: 19–21) it is the earliest (at latest, fourthor early fifth-century) surviving runic text found in England, in a cremation-urn at Caistor- by-Norwich, carved on a deer’s ankle-joint. Its six runes read ræ æn, possibly meaning ‘roe-deer’ – but the language (as well as the runes) may be North Germanic rather than pre-English.
The absorption of Anglo-Saxon England into the Church of Rome was followed by the creation of a new writing system for Old English. The missionaries who devised it naturally used the Latin alphabet. They augmented its nineteen main symbols <a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, y> to allow for OE phonological distinctions which the Latin alphabet couldn’t easily handle; the letters <k, q, x, z, œ> were also used, if rarely, while <i, u> each served both as vowel and semi-vowel/consonant, depending on the syllabic function of the sound represented. The principal additions were <Ææ> ‘ash’, <fiþ> ‘thorn’, <D− ð > ‘eth’ and <
> ‘wynn’, to give both upperand lower-case versions of these less familiar letters. Apart from eth or edh, a modern name (the contemporary name was ðæt ‘that’), the letter-names come from the runic alphabet, as did the actual shapes of thorn and wynn. A combined <ae> letter was sporadically used in Latin, and eth may have been of Irish origin. Just as in Modern English, combinations of letters – mainly digraphs – could become symbols in the orthographic system. Texts were handwritten on parchment – treated animal skin – or vellum, a higher-quality version made from the skins of kids, lambs or calves. Both were expensive materials, but durable. Script had letter-shapes which in some cases were surprisingly distant from those now used, for example <r> and <s>. The opening of a preface by King Alfred is shown in Figure 1.9.
Overview 31
Figure 1.9 Preface to Cura Pastoralis (source: Brook, 1955)
†DEOS− BOC SCEAL TO
IOGORA CEASTRE
ÆLFRed kyning hateð gretan pærferð biscep his pordum luf lice &freondlice
This book shall to Worcester
Alfred king commands [to] greet Wærferth bishop [by/with] his words lovingly and friendlily
‘This book is intended for Worcester. King Alfred sends loving and friendly greetings to Bishop Wærferth . . .’
It has become the modern convention to print editions of OE texts with modern word division and letter shapes, usually incorporating <æ, þ, ð > into the font but replacing <
> by its later equivalent, <w>.
After the Norman Conquest there were significant changes in handwriting, in the inventory of letters and in the phonological values some of them represented. Here we note merely the principal changes in inventory. Wynn, eth and ash were lost by the thirteenth century. The digraph <uu> crystallised into the single letter <w>; <k, q, x, z> came into more general use; and scribes started distinguishing systematically between two forms of <g>, an open shape based on the Insular script, < >, and <g> from the rounded Carolingian handwriting introduced from the continent in the eleventh century; the former is now called yogh, pronounced [jɒg] or [jɒx], the second pronunciation handily encapsulating its two commonest values. Yogh and thorn both died out around the fifteenth century, the latter generally being replaced by <th> but surviving long enough to be represented in early printing founts as <y>, especially in the common pairings ye ‘the’ and yt ‘that’, leading to the pseudo-archaism of Ye Olde Worlde Shoppe and the like: the definite article was never genuinely pronounced with initial [j]. Yogh was usually replaced by one of <y, g, gh>, depending on the sound it represented, but its latest shape was indistinguishable from one form of <z>, leading to odd spellings for the Scots names Dalziel [ di el] and Menzies [ m ŋ s] – now generally interpreted outside Scotland, of course, as names whose historic pronunciations (if known) are odd. The last changes in alphabetic inventory were the systematic separation of <i, j> and of <u, v>, completed by the end of the eighteenth century. (Although non-alphabetic, certain currency symbols and items like <@>, originally an abbreviation, are arguably beginning to function in computer-mediated systems on a par with letters and digits.)
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The two premodern authors who are widely read, at least in schools, are Chaucer, who wrote in the late fourteenth century, and Shakespeare, around 1600. Chaucerian manuscripts predate the decisions made by early printers which helped to codify English spelling, while Shakespeare’s plays were first published before the changes in linguistic sensibility and printing technology which made it normal for every word to be thought of as having a unique public spelling. For commercial and pedagogic reasons it is common to modernise Chaucer’s scribes’ use of <u, v, i, j, þ>, while Shakespeare is not often presented in the actual spelling of his printers. Original spelling is not the hardest of barriers to the understanding of older texts, but it is an obvious and, for many, an alarming one.
Most spellings are now fixed in the standard language, though different British publishing houses prefer one or other of <judgement judgment>, <recognizerecognise>, and there are a few other permitted variants. More noticeable but still relatively superficial are the differences settled on by the United States and Britain: <color colour>, <center centre>, and so on. The other national standards mostly adhere to the British conventions, though Canada’s position is complex. Specifically American spellings generally codify (a modest subset of) the recommendations of the lexicographer Noah Webster (1758–1843), who avowedly sought to demonstrate America’s independence of Britain in this respect. Other spelling issues will be handled in Chapters 2 and 5.
Two technological developments are of great importance. From the end of the fifteenth century paper became available in England as a much cheaper substitute for parchment and vellum, whose cost had meant that unneeded manuscripts would be scraped clean for re-use in monastic scriptoria. Paper was not re-usable (Lyall, 1989), so the amount of surviving material goes up from then on. Around the same time printing with movable type began to offer an alternative to scribal copying and would lead eventually to much wider availability of books than had previously been possible. With wider readership goes wider literacy, and there are implications too for standardisation of practice which will be followed up in Chapter 5, especially Section 5.3.2.
London-based newspapers appeared from 1621, provincial from 1690. The Civil War in the middle of that century had greatly stimulated demand. By early in the next century daily papers were being produced and mailed nationally in Britain. The distribution of newspapers is bound up with the development of postal and transport systems, both briefly considered below. In the nineteenth century, high newspaper circulations were associated with printing on an industrial scale. By then journalism had become truly influential. As Carlyle wrote in 1841:
Burke said there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters’ Gallery
. . . there sat a fourth Estate more important far than they all.
American papers sprang up soon after Independence and likewise went on to become a central part of American culture. However, geographical and political considerations meant that there has never been a national press in the USA to the extent found in Britain.
Overview 33
Not just printed material is affected by the introduction of paper: letters too become more common. Already from the fifteenth century we have the first significant numbers of surviving letters written by traders and merchant families rather than just by kings, noblemen, ecclesiastics and monks. Letters now were written in many cases by their authors rather than by professional scribes. Sending them was still a matter of finding a trusted courier. National delivery systems for letters were developed between 1635 and 1720 from what had been the king’s postal service (hence ‘Royal Mail’), though with charges paid for by the recipient. From the late seventeenth century pre-paid postal delivery services were set up within London (1680) and other towns, from 1784 a national mail coach service began, and by 1840 a cheap, uniform, national pre-paid service was introduced in Britain – nearly 170 million letters were posted in that year – followed soon by a cheaper book post. Mail trains in the US first ran in 1832 and by 1860 were very important. The first US postage stamp was issued in 1847. The cumulative effect of such developments on the volume of mail and on the numbers of letter-writers and readers can be imagined. Here for the first time was a significant means of two-way communication across large distances. By 1900 there were 2.3 billion letters posted annually in the UK; or, to take another figure, there were 88 postal items per capita in the UK in 1900, and 95 in the USA. By now maybe 20 billion items are posted annually in the UK.
In small parts of the academic community from the 1970s and in general use from the 1990s, electronic mail has again transformed the speed and cost of two-way written communication, with potentially wider effects on the style and vocabulary of English than that other technological development of the same period, the facsimile (fax) machine. Widespread electronic mail (e-mail) drove the early development of the internet, on which so much communication now depends, including instant messaging. It is too early to tell whether significant linguistic changes (at least outside their own particular technological medium or commercial niche) will be caused by, say, hypertext on the worldwide web and elsewhere, e-books rather than conventional print, or abbreviated text messaging between mobile (= cellular) phones, though the last-named is already infiltrating the language of e-mail at least. An increasing amount of writing since the 1970s, personal and public, has been done on word processors. Moreover, the effects of spell-checkers, grammar-checkers and predictive completion of part-typed text may turn out to have some influence on knowledge and usage of English, as too will the spread of technologies which allow people to speak to and listen to machines rather than type on to keyboards and read from screens.
Of course the linguistic effects of these writing technologies are dwarfed by developments in transmission of the spoken word. The telephone entered local use around the turn of the twentieth century, and by the turn of the twenty-first in the developed world was very widely available, offering direct dialling to individuals both within and between countries. Mobile or cell phones are the current big growth area. (In the developing world, telephones are typically available to a minority of the population, with ownership as low as a twentieth of the figure in
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the most developed countries, according to one 1998 estimate.) The telephone is relevant to the history of the language as an important form of linguistic contact, but it may be having other, less predictable effects, such as the widely remarked ‘telephone voice’ (the expression is known from at least 1920), almost a kind of code-switching. Much more recently, developments in business practice have placed up to 2 per cent of the British workforce in ‘call centres’, often in areas where employment costs are low (Scotland, the northeast of England, etc.). Indeed many call centres servicing the UK are now located even further from most of their customers, in Ireland or India for instance, though attempts may be made to conceal this. The language of call centre operatives is often subject to rigid scripting (see Cameron, 2000). This, then, is an increasingly frequent if rather strange kind of interdialectal contact.
The telephone is a two-way, one-to-one medium. Broadcast radio and television are one-way, one-to-many media, and their commercial development (radio from the 1920s, television essentially from the 1950s, though there were smallscale experiments before the Second World War) has transformed modern societies. Even in stable and isolated communities broadcast media have created widespread, if partial, familiarity with many varieties of spoken English, with a possible contribution to standardisation and to change.
All these sound media are essentially ‘live’. Mechanical and electronic recording media have also been of immense importance. Early (cylindrical) phonograph and (flat) gramophone discs were used for speech as well as music from the late nineteenth century, and records give us our earliest direct non-written evidence for historical states of the language, developing towards our own day through the compact disc and other technologies to give increasingly faithful reproduction. From around 1930 optical recording of soundtracks in the ‘talkies’ gives us much more widespread evidence of speech sounds. Tape recording developed from the 1920s to the 1940s and by the 1950s was portable enough to allow easy recording outside the studio. Significant corpora of recorded speech date from the 1950s, with really big collections starting to be made from the 1990s. Large collections of written material have also been made in electronically readable form. There are, for instance, huge amounts of newspaper writing, and there are systematic, balanced collections of different genres, as in the British National Corpus. Semiautomatic methods of transcription of speech, together with techniques of tagging (labelling for word class) and/or parsing (assigning structural analyses), mean that the academic study of naturally produced language is increasingly the study of speech as well as of writing.
Like television, sound films constitute a major engine of cultural – including linguistic – influence, both within nation-states and across the international English-speaking world. As for traffic between English and other languages, there has apparently been relatively little linguistic influence into English as a result of mass media, at least as far as Britain and the USA are concerned, though of course a great deal from. A recent Dictionary of European Anglicisms (Gorlach,¨ 2001) surveys sixteen languages and, to take two examples, cites the English word