Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

The structure of English words is fairly straightforward: the inflexion system of Old English, reminiscent of Latin or Greek, has long been lost, and most words are either simple, or clearly composed of stem with a few prefixes and suffixes. [188]Irregularity in English grammar mostly concerns the details of how suffixes are applied to particular words (not man+s but men , not strike+d but struck). Main verbs may appear with sequences of smaller verbs called auxiliaries and modals ( be, have, do, shall, will, can, may, must ), which may be mirrored under rather complex conditions (e.g., He has been taken for a ride, hasn’t he? They have too, haven’t they? but Everybody seems to have, don’t they? ) Word order is crucial. In the simple sentence it is fairly rigidly Subject-Verb-Object ( You saw a tiger ), but a plethora of variations and nuances arise in questions and more complex sentences. Who saw a tiger? is still S-V-O, but then the fun begins: Such a tiger I saw! (O-S-V), Never have I seen such a tiger (Aux-S-V-O), Did you see a tiger? (Aux-S-V-O), What did you see? (O-Aux-S-V), What do you think you saw? (O-Aux-S-V-S-V), What do you think saw you? (S-Aux-S-V-V-O). This juggling with word order, though common in Germanic languages, was beyond the ken of grammar as developed by the Greeks and Romans, and hence as taught in medieval and early modern Europe. In fact, it was only in the 1950s that theoretical linguists found a fitting means to analyse it. Not surprisingly, it was only then that English became the prime subject for theoretical linguistics.

If we compare English to the other languages that have achieved world status, the most similar—as languages—are Chinese and Malay. Of course, we need to discount the main sources of its vocabulary: English has been in close touch all its short life with French and Latin; and since 1500 the education of very many of its elite speakers has involved Greek too. As a result these three languages have provided the vast majority of the words that have come into the language, whether borrowed or invented. But when the origins of its words—and hence their written look on the page—is set to one side, the amazing fact emerges that the closest parallels to English come not from Europe but from the far east of Asia.

Like English, Chinese and Malay have Subject-Verb-Object word order, and very little in the way of verb or noun inflexion. Words are simple, and complex senses result from stringing them together. By contrast, all the other languages we have considered have a high degree of inflexion, although Portuguese, in the form in which it established itself in Asia, has most of this stripped away.

The peculiarly conservative, and hence increasingly anti-phonetic, system is another facet of English that bears a resemblance to Chinese (though not to Malay—in any of the writing systems that have been used to represent it). As has happened with Chinese (and of course Egyptian), the life of English as it is spoken has become only loosely attached to the written traditions of the language. True, words are still written in the order in which they are spoken. [189]But spelling has not been revised to keep up with changes in pronunciation: hence the remains of gh , a combination of letters still found in many words, but nowhere keeping anything like its original pronunciation as [x], the ch in Scots loch; hence the bizarre spelling of the English tense vowels, seen in the words spelt mate, meet, mite, mote, mouth and mute , but which would be written meit, miit, mait, mout, mauth and miuwt if the letters were still being used vaguely with the values they had until the fifteenth century, values that they have largely retained in every other language that uses the Roman alphabet. As a result of the complexity of relation between spelling and sound, a large proportion of the primary teaching profession, in England at least, was until recently of the opinion that phonics are more confusing than helpful when teaching children to read and write: hence the notorious ‘Look and Say’ method, which essentially treated each word as if it were a Chinese character.

As with Chinese, one can say that, for learners, the English language has been literate too long.

The language I have learned these forty years,

My native English, now I must forego:

And now my tongue’s use is to me no more

Than an unstring’d viol or a harp;

Or like a cunning instrument cas’d up,

Or, being open, put into his hands

That knows no touch to tune the harmony:

Within my mouth you have engaol’d my tongue,

Doubly portcullis’d with my teeth and lips;

And dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance

Is made my gaoler to attend on me.

I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,

Too far in years to be a pupil now:

What is thy sentence, then, but speechless death,

Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?

(The Duke of Norfolk, on being exiled) Shakespeare, Richard II , act I, scene iii

Norfolk’s words stand as the first example of an Englishman’s despair, now almost traditional, at the prospect of having to learn another language: could exile hold any greater terror? English was then a language spoken exclusively within the confines of the British Isles. When the words were written, most likely in 1595, there had been only a single English-speaking colony outside the British Isles, Ralegh’s 1586 colony at Roanoke, ‘Virginia’, and no one in England then knew if it was still in existence. [190]

Little by little, it was going to become more and more unnecessary for travellers from Britain to learn other languages, because English speakers were now to spread new settlements around the world, and many of those settlements were going to expand, to become—with Britain—among the largest, richest and most powerful nations on earth. The motives for British settlements over three centuries were various: the glory of the realm, gains from piracy, founding new utopias, wealth from agriculture or mining, trade, personal glory, a stirring of duty to spread the gospel, global strategy, windfall spoils from military victories, even in the end some sense of obligation to educate the native inhabitants. In this, they were unlike their greatest predecessors, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and the French, who were each moved by just one or a few of these. The British were in this sense the universal exponents of European imperialism. [191]And the sheer variety of the motives could almost be parleyed into a claim of no motive at all. In 1883, the publicist Sir John Seeley was famously to claim: ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’ [664]This has well suited British conceits of their own virtuous innocence.

The first extensions of the English language across the Atlantic recall the stirrings of Sanskrit across the Bay of Bengal a millennium and a half before, when glamorous sāhasikāẖ pirates could scarce be distinguished from sādhavaẖ merchants (see Chapter 5, ‘The spread of Sanskrit’, p. 199). Britain was the last of the Atlantic-fronting powers to seek new fortune in the west, and it was not, at first, an easy game to break into. In the sixteenth century, when Spain was drawing vast profits from its mines in Mexico and Peru, and Portugal stitching up the trade of the Indian Ocean, when even France was exploring the extent of the St Lawrence river, England’s Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had supported a very few exploratory voyages across the North Atlantic which yielded nothing, hardly even a landfall. But Francis Drake had discovered a line that could be profitable, euphemistically known as the ‘taking of prizes’. In fifteen years from 1573 he alone had brought back, from a mixture of raids on Spanish ports, high-sea robberies of Spanish and Portuguese ships, and trading in the East Indies, booty to the value of three quarters of a million pounds, twice the annual tax revenues at the time; Elizabeth’s share was enough to clear the national debt in 1581, and provide another €42,000 to found the Levant Company (which went on to become the financial basis of the East India Company itself). [665]And he was not alone. From 1585 to 1604, at least a hundred ships set off every year to plunder the Caribbean, netting at least €200,000 a year. [666]