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

These are not so much Japanese as strings of Chinese characters in Japanese pronunciation. This did not inhibit their effectiveness.

Of course, Japanese imperialism was an extremely restless force, and did not stop here: for brief periods Japan also held parts of eastern Siberia as far as Irkutsk (1918-22), northern Sakhalin and the Lower Amur (1920-5), Manchuria (1931-45), north-eastern China (1934-45) and then, during the Second World War, the whole of South-East Asia, the East Indies, New Guinea, the Philippines and Burma (for various periods in 1941-5). But all these conquests were disputed, and so held on a temporary, military, basis. It was only in the older ‘formal empire’ that the Japanese had something of a chance to put down linguistic roots.

The French advice came from Michel Lubon, suggesting that Taiwan should be ‘a prefecture of Japan in future, if not now’, immediately subject to the Imperial Consitution, a solution reminiscent of France’s approach to Algeria. The British advice, from Montague Kirkwood, suggested viewing Taiwan as a colony with its own legislative council, and as many Taiwanese as possible as legislators, judges and administrators. Among other reasons, it was rejected on the grounds that the Japanese and Taiwanese belonged to the same race and used the same script (Chen 1984: 249-51).

As it was, the islands became part of the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (gaining independence in 1986), and their own languages still predominate; in 1998, the UN put their total population at 114,000, with some 3500 English speakers (Grimes 2000).

In this section, ‘Norman’ will include the governing classes of England and its dependencies from 1066 to 1399. Their vernacular was initially Norman French, also known as Anglo-Norman; but after 1154, the varieties of French spoken at court would have been more broadly based, since Henry II and his barons were based in Anjou, in south-western France. Thereafter the dynasty is known as Angevin.

These were an asset to their literary culture as much as to their politics. Although Arthur comes out of Celtic legend, it was Anglo-Norman literature which created the ideal of the gallant knight in shining armour, the chevaler , a word that originally meant ‘horseman’. In Old English knight (usually spelt cniht ) had just meant ‘lad’, hence someone young enough to fight, without overtones of cavalry, let alone chivalry.

After the first of these, Edward, in 1301, is supposed to have offered to give the Welsh a prince ‘born in Wales, and without a word of English’—then presented his own son, just recently bom at campaign headquarters in Caernarfon. The story, however, goes back only to the sixteenth century, and would be more credible if Edward himself had been a speaker of English rather than French. And his son had been born in 1284.

Calum Ceann Mór , ‘Big Head’, who reigned from 1059 to 1093. This was the famed Malcolm who had deposed and killed Macbeth.

It is all very reminiscent of the emotional, nostalgic and somewhat desperate tone of the defence for learning Latin itself, offered in the grammar schools of England in the middle of the twentieth century.

Characteristically conservative, the law held out longest: Law French did not finally disappear from the English courts until eliminated by an act of Parliament in 1733. By the same standard of retrospection, the law’s fondness for eighteenth-century wigs and gowns has still a century to run.

‘… in many the country language is impaired; some use a strange babbling, twittering, snarling, growling and gnashing.’

From another point of view, the dialects of English were a boon to a naturalistic author like Chaucer, who was the first to use them to give realism to dialogue. In The Canterbury Tales , the Reeve, himself scripted as a Norfolk man, tells a story of Cambridge students John and Aleyn, who are clearly lads from the North. And the Summoner and the Friar both keep breaking into broad Northern English (Robinson 1957: 686, 688, 704-5).

The basic linguistic features of this area were: using ō not ā in words like woe, stone, go —north of the Humber they kept the Old English ā; using y (i.e. ü, French u) and later i, in words like hill, sin, fire, mice —in Kent and East Anglia they said ē—and this explains most instances of the apparently gratuitous y in Caxton’s spelling; using the modal verb shall , as against Northumbrian sal; using pronouns, she, they, them, theyr , as against West and South Country heo, hy, hem, here. In verbs, the present participle and gerund generalised Southern and Midland - ynge , as against Northern - ande; the plural ends in - en or nothing: we speken, they use , as against the South Country we speketh, hy useth. In fact, the present tense of verbs became subject to a lot of confusion, since this - eth ending was also used as a third singular ending in the South, and is widely used as such in Shakespeare and the King James Bible: the wind bloweth, he goeth. Ultimately, this too was replaced, but by the - es ending, which had been used for every person but first singular in the North: I here , but thou/ he/ we/ ye/ they heres. (These details are gathered from Mossé 1962, who gives many more.)

And indeed in Welsh: Elizabeth I also authorised the publication of Y Beibl Cyssegr-lan , which was printed in London in 1588, and joined the Welsh translation of the Prayer Book ( Y Llyfr Gweddi Gyffredin ) in Welsh churches.

A corpus of texts that is usually mentioned in the same breath as the King James Bible, and accorded almost equal status in the textual definition of English, is the poetry of William Shakespeare. The two are almost exact contemporaries, this ‘Authorised Version’ of the Bible being compiled from 1604 to 1611, and Shakespeare writing from 1590 to 1611. But unlike the Bible, Shakespeare (first fully published in 1623) did not immediately become an iconic text of the English language, his reputation growing through the seventeenth century until it was fully canonised by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth. The Shakespeare phenomenon recalls the place of Homer in the history of Greek. Each was a poet of encyclopedic range and unchallenged quality but obscure identity, at or near the very foundation of the language’s main tradition of literary classics. Each seems to have acquired this status at least a century after he actually lived and composed. Each went on to have an overwhelming role in the heritage of his language, endlessly praised by critics and schoolteachers, and also to inform traditional ideas of the language community’s history. Perhaps this is best explained by emphasising that each of them is indebted more than most to a rich ancient tradition, Homer to that of the travelling bard or aoidós , Shakespeare to that of the strolling player. This was less remarkable to their contemporaries, who saw them in context, but somehow, as time went on, their works were felt to sum up the tradition, and so replaced it in memory.

Too many remarks proffered as comments on the nature of English, especially by writers, are thinly disguised praise of the traditions and aspirations of its speakers. Consider Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s words introducing the Oxford Book of English Verse: ‘Our fathers have, in the process of centuries, provided this realm, its colonies and wide dependencies, with a speech as malleable and pliant as Attic, dignified as Latin, masculine, yet free of Teutonic guttural, capable of being as precise as French, dulcet as Italian, sonorous as Spanish, and captaining all these excellences to its service.’ Or Walt Whitman: ‘Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race and range of time, and is the culling and composition of all. From this point of view, it stands for Language in the largest sense, and is really the greatest of studies’ (’Slang in America’, North American Review , 41, 1885). Such confidence may of course be useful in using the language eloquently. Any language carries a vast network of associations with the past, which grow in power as that past is remembered.