English language244

 English language has its origins in about the fifth century A.D., when tribes from the continent, the Jutes, the Saxons, and then the larger tribe of Angles invaded the small island we now call England (from Angle-land). Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, is preserved in Beowulf (c. A.D. 800). Middle English developed following the Norman invasion of 1066, exemplified in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1400). Modern English, dating from the sixteenth century, is exemplified in the plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616). From the time the Pilgrims landed in America (1620), the language began to take its own course in this "New World." Expressions like "fixing to," which had never been used in England, were "cropping up" (an expression going back to Middle English) in the colonial press by 1716.

So the American Revolution (1775–1783) not only created a new nation but also divided the English language into what H. L. Mencken, author of the classic study The American Language; An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, called "two streams." These streams diverged to produce different words with the same denotation (the American "trunk" of a car is a "boot" in England), different pronunciations for the same words (the American sked-ju-el is the British shed-ju-el), and different spellings (theater vs. theatre, labor vs. labour).

By 1781, the word "Americanism" had been coined by John Witherspoon, a Scottish clergyman recruited to become president of Princeton University. These Americanisms, Witherspoon wrote, were not "worse in themselves, but merely …of American and not of English growth." The separation of the "two streams of English" was already noticeable. In his usual acerbic manner, Mencken applauded the American resistance to rules: "Standard [British] English must always strike an American as a bit stilted and precious" (p. 774).

Judgment by Language: the Shibboleth

Once there is any kind of "standard," people could begin passing judgment (that's spelled "judgement" in England) based on what was deemed "correct." One of the first recorded instances is the "shibboleth" test in the Old Testament. Hebrew, like all other languages, had many dialects, and the twelve tribes of Israel did not always pronounce words in the same way. Thus, when the Gileadites "seized the fords of the Jordan" (Judg. 12:5–6), it was not enough to merely ask those who wished to cross the river "Are you an Ephraimite?" They needed a test to distinguish the enemy. They used pronunciation, and those who said "sib-bo-leth" instead of "shib-bo-leth" were slain.

Americans are by and large more tolerant of language differences than the English. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), the Englishman who wrote Pygmalion (on which the musical My Fair Lady was based), wrote, "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him." Shaw was, like Mencken, a great debunker and exploder of pretension. "An honest and natural slum dialect," he wrote, "is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically un-taught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club" (Mencken, p. 775).

Dialects: the Branches of the Stream

Shaw's comment raises a point worth highlighting: we all speak a dialect. If English, in Mencken's phrase, divides into "two streams," British and American, there are within those streams many creeks and branches (two Americanisms according to Witherspoon). Both Cockney and "the Queen's English" are, after all, dialects of British English, although one carries more prestige.

Likewise, we have many dialects in the United States. Mark Twain, in his prefatory note to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tells us that there are at least seventeen distinguishable dialects in the novel. In the early twenty-first century we find many dialects of American English as we move from the New York Bronx to Charleston, or from the Midwestern plains to the San Fernando Valley (home of the "valley girls"), or from Chicago to New Orleans (is that pronounced with the stress on the first or the second syllable: ore-leans or ore-lens?) Is there such a thing today as a "standard" American language?

Guides to Correctness

Certainly there have been those willing to provide guidance to the public on "correct" usage of the language. America's most famous lexicographer, Noah Webster, published his "Blue-backed" American Speller soon after the Revolution, teaching not only spelling but also pronunciation, common sense, morals, and good citizenship. His first dictionary (1806) was one of several (the first in English being Samuel Johnson's in 1755), but when Webster died in 1843, the purchase of rights to his dictionary by Charles and George Merriam led to a new, one-volume edition that sold for six dollars in 1847. This edition became the standard. Except for the Bible, Webster's spelling book and dictionary were the best-selling publications in American history up to the mid-twentieth century.

Webster's spelling book (often marketed with the Bible) molded four generations of American schoolchildren, proclaiming what was "right" without apology. In contrast, The American Heritage Dictionary of the late twentieth century offers guidance based on a survey of its "Usage Panel," a group of respected writers and speakers who are asked what they find acceptable. In the third college edition (1997), the editors note drastic changes in the Panel's attitudes. More and more of the old shibboleths are widely accepted. For example, in 1969 most of the Usage Panel objected to using the words "contact" and "intrigue" as verbs, but by the 1993 survey, most had no problem with either (though "hopefully" and "disinterested" remained problematic for most). Language, if it is spoken, lives and changes (in contrast to a "dead language" such as Latin, which does not evolve because it is not spoken). As with a river, so with language: you never put your tongue to the same one twice.

Lexicographers now present their dictionaries as a description of how the language looks at a particular time rather than as a prescription of what is "correct." The constant evolution of language makes new editions necessary. Many people have come to use the word "disinterested" to mean "uninterested" instead of "without bias"; therefore, despite objections of purists, it does in fact mean that. "Corruption" or change?

Likewise with pronunciation. In the 1990s, the word "harass" came into frequent use in the news. Americans had traditionally put the stress on the second syllable: he-RASS. This pronunciation, according to The Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide (1999), "first occurred in American English and has gained wide acceptance over the last 50 years." But reporters on television during the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings, in which he was accused of "sexual harassment" by Anita Hill, tended to prefer the pronunciation HAR-ess, "the older, more traditional pronunciation [which] is still preferred by those for whom British pronunciation is a guide." There are many influences on our shifting language habits.

Simplification Movement

Pragmatic Americans have often sought to simplify the language. The Simplified Spelling Board, created in 1906, sought to simplify the spelling of words like "though." "But tho their filosofy was that simpler is better, they cood not get thru to peepl as they wisht." The Chicago Tribune began to simplify spelling in their publication in 1935, but the American public would not send their brides down the "aile" nor transport their loved ones' caskets in a "herse," so the attempt was largely abandoned with a few exceptions, such as "tho," "thru," and "catalog." Spelling, after all, has often been used as a test of intelligence and education. It also reflects the history of the language. The word "knight" carries with it the echoes of Chaucer's Middle English pronunciation: ka-nick-te.

Another major impediment to spelling reform is the association of phonetic spelling with illiteracy: while the reformers may "ake" to "berry" those men and "wimmen" who "apose" them, those who write of the "kat's tung" open themselves to ridicule. Mencken declared, however, that "American spelling is plainly better than English spelling, and in the long run it seems sure to prevail" (p. 483).

Growing Vocabulary

One distinctive aspect of the English language is its tendency to absorb foreign words. English-speaking peoples (many of them explorers and adventurers) have adopted and adapted terms from many languages. Loanwords come from many foreign languages, sometimes directly, sometimes through other languages: dirge (Latin), history (Greek), whiskey (Celtic), fellow (Scandinavian), sergeant (French), chocolate (Spanish), umbrella (Italian), tattoo (German), sugar (Arabic), kowtow (Chinese), banana (African), moccasin (Native American).

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