I was slightly put off this gentle rambling about the
English language when, on
page four, Bryson repeated the old
Urban Legend: the Eskimos, as is
well known, have fifty words for types of snow. Then he later
refers to Tolkien as
the author of the Hobbit trilogy;
possibly technically correct, but a rather bizarre choice of
description.
But there is some good entertaining stuff here. The best part of the
book is the middle section, where Bryson covers the history of the
English language, enlivened with good examples. We learn about the
origins of English pronunciation and spelling vagaries, illustrated
with phrases like 'a cat with nine lives
lives next door' (he also notes the contrasting pronunciations
of mouth as a noun and mouth as a verb), and factoids like
conflicting regional usages have left us
with two forms of the word, such as fox with an f, but
vixen with a v, and that
a napron became
an apron, and even that
an ekename became
a nickname. The history lesson
helps explain why the spelling is so ... idiosyncratic:
English
spellings were becoming fixed just at the time when the language was
undergoing one of those great phonetic seizures that periodically
unsettle any tongue. The result is that we have today in English a
body of spellings that, for the most part, faithfully reflect the
pronunciations of people living 400 years ago. ... the silent letters
of most words today are shadows of a former pronunciation. ... But it
didn't end there. When in the seventeenth century the English
developed a passion for the classical languages, certain well-meaning
meddlers began fiddling with the spellings of many other words in an
effort to make them conform to a Latin ideal. ... A final factor ...
is that we not only freely adopt words from other cultures, but also
tend to preserve their spellings.
After the history lesson, and some acidic comments on the damage
done by meddling amateur grammarians, and
split infinitives in
particular, Bryson moves on to talk about the use of English around
the world. For example, the rather alarming statement that
this package will self-destruct in
Mother Earth is merely a helpful comment on a Japanese product,
explaining that it is biodegradable.
The final chapters on Names, Swearing, and Word play, are a bit more
disjointed, and feel more like a collection of articles stitched
together. But there are enough amusing and informative stories
throughout to make this a pleasant enough way to pass a couple of
hours.
Other choice quotes:
Today we have
two demonstrative pronouns, this and that, but in
Shakespeare's day there was a third, yon, which denoted a
further distance than that. You could talk about this hat,
that hat, and yon hat. Today the word survives as a colloquialism,
yonder, but our speech is fractionally impoverished for its
loss.
(Other languages possess even
further degrees of thatness. As Pei
notes, 'The Cree Indian language has a special that [for]
things just gone out of sight, while Ilocano, a tongue of the
Philippines, has three words for this referring to a visible
object, a fourth for things not in view and a fifth for things that no
longer exist.')
Quite a
number of words that we've absorbed no longer exist in their place of
birth. For example, the French do not use ... panache
...
although
English is a Germanic tongue ..., there is almost no language from
which we have borrowed fewer words than German. Among the very few are
kindergarten and hinterland. We have borrowed far more
words from every other European language, and probably as many from
several smaller and more obscure languages such as Inuit. No one has
yet come up with a plausible explanation for why this should be.
One might argue that, it being a Germanic
language, so many of the common words and concepts are therefore
already in English, as any etymological dictionary will show. Yet
actually there are many more borrowings, and semi-translations, than
the two Bryson notes. What about blitz(krieg), coffee-klatsch,
doppelganger, ersatz, flak, gestalt,
gestapo, glockenspiel, lager, langlauf,
lebensraum, lederhosen, leitmotiv, liebfraumilch,
liverwurst, marzipan, meerschaum pipe, nazi,
poltergeist, pretzel, pumpernickel, sauerkraut,
schadenfreude, snorkel, wanderlust, zeitgeist?
One could even make an argument for frankfurter, hamburger
and rottweiler. And there are several technical terms, not in
common use maybe, but certainly in everyday use by mathematicians,
physicists, and the like, such as bremsstrahlung, eigenvalue/vector,
entscheidungsproblem, festschrift, gedankenexperiment,
gegenschein, pH. (I'm not making these up: I have used
all of them at one time or another!) At the other extreme of
formality, some of the Yiddish we borrow, like kibitz, klutz,
kvetch, schlep, schmaltz, was itself borrowed
or derived from German.
The U.S. Army
in 1974 devised a food called funistrada as a test word during
a survey of soldiers' dietary preferences. Although no such food
existed, funistrada ranked higher in the survey than lima beans and
eggplant
perhaps
nothing speaks more clearly for the absurdities of English
pronunciation than that the word for the study of pronunciation in
English, orthoepy, can itself be pronounced two ways.
With the
disappearance of the halfpenny, the English are now denied the rich
satisfaction of compressing halfpennyworth into haypth.
although it
is true to say that these [pronunciation
changes] constituted some of the
most sudden and dramatic changes English had ever undergone, we should
not lose sight of the fact that we are talking about a period that
spanned, even at its most rapid, a couple of generations. When Chaucer
died in 1400, people still pronounced the e on the end of
words. One hundred years later not only had it become silent, but
scholars were evidently unaware that it ever had been
pronounced. In short, changes that seem historically to have been
almost breathtakingly sudden will often have gone unnoticed by those
who lived through them.
It is hard
to say which is the more remarkable, the number of influential people
who became interested in spelling reform or the little effect they had
on it.
when looked
at globally, most of our spellings cater to a wide variation of
pronunciations.
Consider the
curiously persistent notion that sentences should not end with a
preposition. The source of this stricture, and several other equally
dubious ones, was one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century clergyman
and amateur grammarian whose A Short Introduction to English
Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly
influential life both in his native England and abroad. It is to Lowth
we can trace many a pedant's most treasured notions: the belief that
you must say different from rather than different to
or different than, the idea that two negatives make a
positive, the rule that you must not say 'the heaviest of the two
objects', but rather 'the heavier', the distinction between shall
and will, and the clearly nonsensical belief that between
can apply only to two things and among to more than two. ...
Perhaps the most remarkable and curiously enduring of Lowth's many
beliefs was the conviction that sentences ought not to end with a
preposition. But even he was not didactic about it. He recognized that
ending a sentence with a preposition was idiomatic and common in both
speech and informal writing. He suggested only that he thought it
generally better and more graceful, not crucial, to place the
preposition before its relative 'in solemn and elevated' writing.
Within a hundred years this had been converted from a piece of
questionable advice into an immutable rule. In a remarkable outburst
of literal-mindedness, nineteenth-century academics took it as read
that the very name pre-position meant it must come before something -
anything.
...
Until the eighteenth century it was
correct to say 'you was' if you were referring to one person. It
sounds odd today, but the logic is impeccable. Was is a
singular verb and were a plural one. Why should you take a
plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer - surprise,
surprise - is that Robert Lowth didn't like it.
