nd The History of the English Language, 2 Edition Parts I–III Professor Seth Lerer THE TEACHING COMPANY ® PUBLISHED BY: THE TEACHING COMPANY 4151 Lafayette Center Drive, Suite 100 Chantilly, Virginia 20151-1232 1-800-TEACH-12 Fax—703-378-3819 www.teach12.com Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2008 Printed in the United States of America This book is in copyright. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of The Teaching Company. Seth Lerer, Ph.D. Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University Seth Lerer is the Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He holds degrees from Wesleyan University (B.A., 1976), Oxford University (B.A., 1978), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1981), and he taught at Princeton University from 1981 to 1990, when he moved to Stanford. Dr. Lerer has published 10 books, including Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton University Press, 1993) and Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia University Press, 2007), and he is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and reviews. Professor Lerer has received many awards for his scholarship and teaching, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Beatrice White Prize of the English Association of Great Britain, the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and the Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford. ©2008 The Teaching Company. i Table of Contents The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition Professor Biography.....................................................................................................................................................i Course Scope................................................................................................................................................................1 Lecture One Introduction to the Study of Language...............................................................................2 Lecture Two The Historical Study of Language......................................................................................6 Lecture Three Indo-European and the Prehistory of English.....................................................................9 Lecture Four Reconstructing Meaning and Sound.................................................................................12 Lecture Five Historical Linguistics and Studying Culture.....................................................................15 Lecture Six The Beginnings of English...............................................................................................18 Lecture Seven The Old English Worldview.............................................................................................21 Lecture Eight Did the Normans Really Conquer English?......................................................................25 Lecture Nine What Did the Normans Do to English?............................................................................28 Lecture Ten Chaucer’s English.............................................................................................................31 Lecture Eleven Dialect Representations in Middle English......................................................................34 Lecture Twelve Medieval Attitudes toward Language...............................................................................37 Lecture Thirteen The Return of English as a Standard................................................................................40 Lecture Fourteen The Great Vowel Shift and Modern English....................................................................43 Lecture Fifteen The Expanding English Vocabulary.................................................................................46 Lecture Sixteen Early Modern English Syntax and Grammar....................................................................49 Lecture Seventeen Renaissance Attitudes toward Teaching English..............................................................52 Lecture Eighteen Shakespeare—Drama, Grammar, Pronunciation..............................................................55 Lecture Nineteen Shakespeare—Poetry, Sound, Sense................................................................................58 Lecture Twenty The Bible in English.........................................................................................................61 Lecture Twenty-One Samuel Johnson and His Dictionary.................................................................................64 Lecture Twenty-Two New Standards in English.................................................................................................67 Lecture Twenty-Three Dictionaries and Word Histories......................................................................................70 Lecture Twenty-Four Values, Words, and Modernity.........................................................................................73 Lecture Twenty-Five The Beginnings of American English...............................................................................76 Lecture Twenty-Six American Language from Webster to Mencken...............................................................79 Lecture Twenty-Seven American Rhetoric from Jefferson to Lincoln..................................................................82 Lecture Twenty-Eight The Language of the American Self.................................................................................86 Lecture Twenty-Nine American Regionalism.....................................................................................................89 Lecture Thirty American Dialects in Literature........................................................................................92 Lecture Thirty-One The Impact of African-American English........................................................................95 Lecture Thirty-Two An Anglophone World.....................................................................................................98 Lecture Thirty-Three The Language of Science...............................................................................................102 Lecture Thirty-Four The Science of Language...............................................................................................106 Lecture Thirty-Five Linguistics and Politics in Language Study....................................................................110 Lecture Thirty-Six Conclusions and Provocations........................................................................................113 ii ©2008 The Teaching Company. Table of Contents The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition Timeline....................................................................................................................................................................117 Glossary....................................................................................................................................................................120 Biographical Notes...................................................................................................................................................124 Bibliography.............................................................................................................................................................126 ©2008 The Teaching Company. iii iv ©2008 The Teaching Company. The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition Scope: This course of 36 lectures surveys the history of the English language, from its origins as a dialect of Germanic- speaking peoples, through the literary and cultural documents of its 1,500-year span, to the state of American speech of the present day. In addition to surveying the spoken and written forms of the language over time, the course also focuses on larger social concerns about language use, variety, and change; the relationship between spelling and pronunciation; the notion of dialect and variation across geographical and class boundaries; the arguments concerning English as an official language and the status of standard English; the role of the dictionary in describing and prescribing usage; and the ways in which words change meaning, as well as the manner in which English speakers have coined and borrowed new words from other languages. The course is in three parts. Part I focuses on the development of English in its earliest forms. We begin with the study of Indo-European, the posited 5,000-year-old original from which the modern and classical European, Iranian, and Indian languages emerged. From Indo-European, the lectures move to the Germanic branch of languages and to the Anglo-Saxons who settled the British Isles beginning in the 5th century. Old English emerges as the literary vernacular of the Anglo-Saxons and flourishes until the Norman Conquest in the mid-11th century. The interplay of English, French, and Latin from the 11th to the 15th centuries generates the forms of Middle English in which Chaucer, among others, wrote, and gives us a sense of a trilingual medieval British culture. Part II begins with the reemergence of English as an official language after the decline of French in the 15th century. This set of lectures charts the changes in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary that distinguish Middle English from Modern English (in particular, the Great Vowel Shift). It looks closely at the rise of an English literary vernacular, especially in Shakespeare, Milton, the King James Bible, and the dictionary of Samuel Johnson, and it suggests some ways in which we can trace changes in word meanings by using the resources of historical dictionaries. Part III focuses on American English and the modes of studying the history of the language today. The lectures explore the rise of American dialects, differences between American and British pronunciation and usage, and the emergence of distinctive American voices in literature, social criticism, and politics. The languages of African- Americans and the place of English as a world language texture our appreciation of the varieties of what English has become, and the course concludes with some provocations on the scientific study of language, the rise of linguistics as an academic discipline, and the possible future of English in society. ©2008 The Teaching Company. 1 Lecture One Introduction to the Study of Language Scope: The purpose of this course is to trace the development of the English language from its earliest forms to the present. To do so, we need a working notion of what language is and how it changes—we need to know the subject of our study. We also need to develop certain tools for studying that subject—we need a method. And we need to know what questions to ask about the English language, both in its historical forms and in its current usages—we need a point of view. In this lecture, we will defer for the moment the larger questions of subject and method and concentrate on point of view. Many of us are interested in the history of language because it may help us answer questions we have about language and society today. Questions about the standardization of English, about English as an official language, and about the relationships among spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and style are all ones we may have asked since grade school. This lecture surveys the content and approaches of the course as a whole by framing these questions historically. It anticipates many of the issues we will explore in detail in later lectures. It also provides a set of reference points for recognizing that, even in the welter of technical detail sometimes necessary to the historical study of English, issues of language and behavior vital to our lives are always behind this study. Outline I. What is English? Where did it come from? Where is it going? In these lectures, we will look at some of the ways in which the English language developed from Old to Middle to Modern English and how the study of language in the 19th−21st centuries has affected the ways in which we think of ourselves as speakers of the language. A. Among the many questions we must ask in this study is: Precisely what is the English language? Let’s begin by looking at some passages from different periods in English. 1. The first selection we hear is in the Northumbrian dialect of Old English, the poetry of Caedmon, from about the year 680. 2. The second selection is the famous opening lines from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in Middle English at the end of the 14th century. 3. Finally, we hear Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, written by Shakespeare in the late 16th century. B. In this course, we will not simply trace how the language changed from Old to Middle to Modern English, but we will explore methods for the study of language. We will also look at problems that motivate the historical study of English, as well as texts and contexts that may help us understand the origins of English, its literary and cultural artifacts, and the future of the language. II. Many debates in the study of English today have also been at work in the past. The first of these is: Should there be a “standard English”? A. As early as the 10th century, teachers in the church schools of Anglo-Saxon England argued about this same issue. Some claimed that rules should be established for spelling, pronunciation, dialect, and usage. B. In the later medieval period, from the 13th to the 15th centuries, questions arose about what constituted a standard. Should it be the speech of London or another region? Should it include French words? C. In the 16th and 17th centuries, pedagogues and pedants debated whether a standard should be grounded in university education. D. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these debates were played out in the courts, schools, and official loci of royal administration. E. American English also invites us to ask questions about a standard: Should we use a regional standard as a model, or should we take standards from learning and education? III. Questions about standards lead us to another central question of this course: Should the study of language be prescriptive or descriptive? 2 ©2008 The Teaching Company. A. A dictionary ostensibly records certain aspects of a language, such as spelling, meaning, pronunciation, and usage. But by recording such descriptions of words, we are also codifying them, and thus, the descriptions become prescriptions. In other words, they become statements of how we should speak and write rather than information about how we actually do speak and write. B. From the Anglo-Saxon period to the present, people have asked whether or not language behavior should be prescribed. 1. When we look at the history of dictionaries, we are looking at the ways in which particular authors, editors, and scholars adjudicate between the need to describe a language as they perceive it and their positions as regulators or legislators of a language. 2. As we will see in later lectures, the dictionary of Samuel Johnson (1755) became, in many ways, the fulcrum on which previous and subsequent lexicons have balanced. IV. Very often, what dictionaries or other authorities prescribe are not just habits of pronunciation or forms of spelling but categories of grammar. Many people wonder why English grammar is seemingly so simple. A. Modern European languages have grammatical gender, case endings, and so on. Why did English move from a highly inflected language in Old English to a relatively uninflected language in Modern English? B. The answer to this question dovetails with other narratives about pronunciation and spelling. 1. Grammar and case endings reflect the ways in which people at one time spelled and pronounced words. 2. Later in the course, we’ll see that habits of pronunciation and spelling may have changed grammar; in other words, people stopped pronouncing case endings or stopped spelling words as they were spoken, and started spelling them according to convention. V. Anyone who comes to English as a child in school or as an adult who speaks another language is invariably confronted by the strangeness of its spelling. A. English has many “silent” letters and clusters of consonants or vowels that seem to be mutable, giving us different sounds in different contexts. Why is that the case? B. English spelling has remained historical and etymological. In other words, English, by and large, preserves older forms of the language by using conservative spelling. The result is such words as knight, knee, knife, marriage, and enough. C. We will also see how pedagogues in the 17th and 18th centuries sought to regulate and control spelling by what they imagined to be etymology—respelling words as if they were Latin words. Examples include debt and doubt. D. The history of English shows a gradual separation between spelling and speech. VI. The topic of speech brings us to another question: Why do we pronounce words as we do? The history of English pronunciation is the history of sound changes. A. How do we know how Old English or Middle English was pronounced? As we’ll see, a variety of resources are available to us, including spellings, textbooks, poetry, and the work of scholars from the 16th century forward. B. As we know, English also sounds different in different regions. One theme of this course will be the nature of regional dialects. These existed in the British Isles from the very beginning. C. Later in the course, we’ll look at how we recover dialect sounds, at the relationship between regional dialects and a national standard, and at the impact of regional dialects on the development of a standard. VII. What happens when contact occurs between different dialects or languages? A. Speakers of Old English came in contact with the French during the Norman Conquest. That contact irrevocably changed the sound, sense, vocabulary, idiom, and structure of the vernacular. B. In the 15th−18th centuries, explorers from England and elsewhere in Europe came in contact with speakers of other languages. New words were introduced into English, bringing with them changes in the structure and idiom of the language. C. Such changes could also affect pronunciation. The Great Vowel Shift of the 15th and early 16th centuries, for example, may have resulted from a variety of different dialects coming into contact with each other, ©2008 The Teaching Company. 3 from the loss of French as the prestige language in late-medieval England, and from the need to recreate among an educated, literate elite a form of pronunciation that would replace French as a prestige form of language. D. When we look at languages and contact, we also need to look at translation. Is translation the word-for- word mapping of one language onto another, or is it something else? One of the key texts in the study of translation is the Bible. VIII. The translation of the Bible into Old English, Middle English, and Modern English brings us to yet another phenomenon—archaism. A. This term relates to the circumstances in which a writer would want the language to look and feel old, in which a translation can give us evidence of the history of language embedded in it, and in which a text of a given time reflects the teaching of an earlier time. B. In the case of the King James Bible in particular, we’ll see the impact this highly formal and archaizing form of English prose had on later writers, especially American writers of the 19th century, such as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Joel Chandler Harris. IX. What we see in the history of English is a collection of texts and influences and a story of contacts, but we also see a history of our own speech and the literature we read and remember. One of the arguments of this course is that to understand the history of English is to understand, in many ways, the history of our own culture and society. A. Whatever we may believe about the relationship between language and mind, language and society constitute a bond of personal expression. Many of the texts that we will look at in this course concern creation, including the creation of the world in “Caedmon’s Hymn,” the creation of spring in the opening lines of Chaucer, and the possibility of un-creation in Hamlet. B. We always create ourselves in language. We will see in this course that attention to the history of the English language through literary texts focuses our attention on the imaginative space of self-creation. X. Let’s embark on this study with a roadmap of the remainder of the course. A. We’ll begin with issues of method—how language is studied and how we define the discipline of historical linguistics. We will look at how sounds are produced in the mouth (articulatory phonetics), how earlier forms of language are reconstructed by scholars (comparative philology), and at the study of language in society (sociolinguistics). B. We will also delve into the prehistory of English, the period of Indo-European, probably 4,000 or 5,000 years in the past. The words of this culture passed into the languages that descended from it, such as the classical languages Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, as well as modern languages, ranging from Hindi and Farsi in the east to Celtic, Germanic, and Romance languages in the west. 1. The study of Indo-European will introduce us to scholars of language, who began to recognize in the 18th and 19th centuries that links existed among living languages. 2. We will also see that the study of Indo-European is a study of society; we can reconstruct, through the study of language, the social environments that gave rise to the Europeans and Western Asians. C. Out of this Indo-European matrix emerged Germanic-speaking peoples in the north of Europe who developed the languages of Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, and England. We’ll learn how the Germanic languages spawned English and how the relationship between the Germanic peoples and the Roman imperium gave rise to certain attitudes toward language and culture and to certain words that still survive in English today. D. Old English will be the next component that we look at, the world of the Anglo-Saxons—of Caedmon, the historian Bede, and Beowulf. In particular, we’ll see how Old English applied the techniques of older Germanic poetry to create a vivid, imaginative framework for the expression of religious and mythological poetry. E. With the Norman Conquest, we’ll explore the contact between English and French, the rise of Middle English, and the emergence of French as a prestige language. For much of the Middle Ages, the British Isles was a trilingual culture of English, French, and Latin. 4 ©2008 The Teaching Company.