The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

In fact, it would appear that one of the beauties of the English language is that with even the most tenuous grasp you can speak volumes if you show enough enthusiasm—a willingness to tootle with vigor, as it were.

Seeing how a lot of people use the language, I tend to agree with this.

Of course, every language has areas in which it needs, for practical purposes, to be more expressive than others. The Eskimos, as is well known, have fifty words for types of snow—though curiously no word for just plain snow.

Just like we have words to describe every part of the coconut palm but not a single one to refer to snow.

The reason for this is that the rules of English grammar were originally modeled on those of Latin, which in the seventeenth century was considered the purest and most admirable of tongues. That it may be. But it is also quite clearly another language altogether.

Reason why the language has such absurd rules, I'd wager.

English is said to have fewer of the awkward consonant clusters and singsong tonal variations that make other languages so difficult to master. In Cantonese, hae means “yes.” But, with a fractional change of pitch, it also describes the female pudenda.

Thank goodness for this.

To be bored to death in French is “être de Birmingham,” literally “to be from Birmingham” (which is actually about right).

Well, having spent three years of my life there, I don't quite know what to think about this revelation.

For one thing its pronouns are largely, and mercifully, uninflected. In German, if you wish to say you, you must choose between seven words: du, dich, dir, Sie, Ihnen, ihr, and euch. This can cause immense social anxiety.

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.”

Boy, talk about wordy but not that far from what it is eh?

And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man’s larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech.

Not a bad tradeoff.

Many authorities believe there is simply no connection between Basque and any other known language.

The theories have names that seem almost to be begging ridicule—the Bow-Wow theory, the Ding-Dong theory, the Pooh-Pooh theory, the Yo-He-Ho theory—and they are generally based in one way or another on the supposition that languages come ultimately from spontaneous utterances of alarm, joy, pain, and so on, or that they are somehow imitative (onomatopoeic) of sounds in the real world.

If onomatopoeia explains the origins of certain words even today, perhaps this is how the oldest ones began?

Indeed, as he increasingly masters his native tongue, he tries to make it conform to more logical rules than the language itself may possess, saying “buyed,” “eated,” and “goed” because, even though he has never heard such words spoken, they seem more logical to him—as indeed they are, if you stopped and thinked about it.

English speakers dread silence. We are all familiar with the uncomfortable feeling that overcomes us when a conversation palls. Studies have shown that when a pause reaches four seconds, one or more of the conversationalists will invariably blurt something—a fatuous comment on the weather, a startled cry of “Gosh, is that the time?”—rather than let the silence extend to a fifth second.

A rare exception is written Icelandic, which has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years ago, and if Leif Ericson appeared on the streets of Reykjavik he could find his way around, allowing for certain difficulties over terms like airport and quarter-pound cheeseburger.

The curses were nothing if not heartfelt. A typical one went: “Docimedes has lost two gloves and asks that person who has stolen them should lose his minds and his eyes.”

Ancient Romans didn't muck about with their curses.

Scip, bæð, bricg, and þæt might look wholly foreign but their pronunciations—respectively “ship,” “bath,” “bridge,” and “that”—have not altered in a thousand years.

Old English.

Norman society had two tiers: the French-speaking aristocracy and the English-speaking peasantry.

No wonder the French are considered hoity-toity to this day. LOL.

It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.

After all, do we really need fictile as a synonym for moldable, glabrous for hairless, sternutation for sneezing?

A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity, as evidenced by our peculiar affection for redundant phrases, expressions that say the same thing twice: beck and call, law and order, assault and battery, null and void, safe and sound, first and foremost, trials and tribulations, hem and haw, spick-and-span, kith and kin, dig and delve, hale and hearty, peace and quiet, vim and vigor, pots and pans, cease and desist, rack and ruin, without let or hindrance, to all intents and purposes, various different.

I suppose I can be accused of this as well.

Sometimes, just to heighten the confusion, the same word ends up with contradictory meanings. This kind of word is called a contronym. Sanction, for instance, can either signify permission to do something or a measure forbidding it to be done.

Occasionally when this happens the dictionary makers give us different spellings to differentiate the two meanings—as with flour and flower, discrete and discreet—but such orthological thoughtfulness is rare.

centuries. According to Baugh and Cable [page 227], as long ago as the sixteenth century English had already adopted words from more than fifty other languages—​a phenomenal number for the age.

One of our more inexplicable habits is the tendency to keep the Anglo-Saxon noun but to adopt a foreign form for the adjectival form. Thus fingers are not fingerish; they are digital.

This drift of meaning, technically called catachresis, is as widespread as it is curious. Egregious once meant eminent or admirable. In the sixteenth century, for no reason we know of, it began to take on the opposite sense of badness and unworthiness (it is in this sense that Shakespeare employs it in Cymbeline) and has retained that sense since. Now, however, it seems that people are increasingly using it in the sense not of bad or shocking, but of simply being pointless and unconstructive.

Egregious is a word that has fascinated me for this very reason.

A word that shows just how wide-ranging these changes can be is nice, which was first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and—by 1769—pleasant and agreeable.

This inclination to use affixes and infixes provides gratifying flexibility in creating or modifying words to fit new uses, as strikingly demonstrated in the word incomprehensibility, which consists of the root -hen- and eight affixes and infixes: in, -com-, -pre-, -s-, -ib-, -il-, -it-, and -y. Even more melodic is the musical term quasihemidemisemiquaver, which describes a note that is equal to 128th of a semibreve.

Things are so confusing that even native users have shown signs of mental fatigue and left us with two forms meaning the same thing: flammable and inflammable, iterate and reiterate, ebriate and inebriate, habitable and inhabitable, durable and perdurable, fervid and perfervid, gather and forgather, ravel and unravel.

Not a native user myself but yeah, that's plain annoying.

For the record, when bits are nicked off the front end of words it’s called aphesis, when off the back it’s called apocope, and when from the middle it’s syncope.

But scholars can get a good idea of what English must have sounded like by looking at the rhymes and rhythms of historic verse and by examining the way words were spelled in letters and other snatches of informal writing. In this respect we owe a huge debt to bad spellers.

Chef was borrowed twice into English, originally as chief with a hard ch and later as chef with a soft ch. A similar tendency is seen in -age, the older forms of which have been thoroughly anglicized into an “idge” sound (bandage, cabbage, language) while the newer imports keep a Gallic “ozh” flavor (bodinage, camouflage).

Until well into the nineteenth century, zebra was pronounced “zebber,” chemist was “kimmist,” and Negro, despite its spelling, was “negger” (hence the insulting term nigger).

The speakers are unconsciously trying to distance themselves from their parents’ foreign accents. Yiddish speakers tended to have trouble with certain unfamiliar English vowel sounds. They tended to turn cup of coffee into “cop of coffee.” The presumption is that their children compensated for this by overpronouncing those vowels. Hence the accent.

As Mario Pei has noted, no two people in any language speak the same sounds in precisely the same way. That is of course what enables us to recognize a person by his voice. In short, we each have our own dialect.

In Australia, people eat cookies, not biscuits; politicians run for office, not stand as in Britain; they drive station wagons rather than estate cars; give their money to a teller rather than a cashier in a bank; wear cuffs on their pants, not turnups; say mail, not post; and cover small injuries with a Band-Aid rather than a plaster. They spell many words in the American way—labor rather than labour, for instance—and, perhaps most significantly, the national currency is the dollar, not the pound.

These forms are used all the time, but only in well-defined situations. Parents and other elders use them with children, but children never use them with their parents or elders, only with other children, while teenagers use them among their own sex, but not with the opposite sex.

Those captured as slaves suffered not only the tragedy of having their lives irretrievably disrupted but also the further misfortune of coming from one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the world, so that communication between slaves was often difficult. If you can imagine yourself torn from your family, shackled to some Hungarians, Russians, Swedes, and Poles, taken halfway around the world, dumped in a strange land, worked like a dog, and shorn forever of the tiniest shred of personal liberty and dignity, then you can perhaps conceive the background against which creoles like Gullah arose.

* However, unlike America, Australia has three layers of social accent: cultivated, used by about 10 percent of people and sounding very like British English; broad, a working-class accent used by a similar number of people (notably Paul Hogan); and general, an accent falling between the two and used by the great mass of people.

So this is why that not all Aussies sound like, well, Aussies.

Chinese writing is immensely complicated. The basic unit of the Chinese written word is the radical. The radical for earth is and for small is . All words in Chinese are formed from these and 212 other radicals. Radicals can stand alone or be combined to form other words. Eye and water make teardrop. Mouth and bird make song. Two women means quarrel and three women means gossip.

Fascinating stuff.

To this day in China, and other countries such as Japan where the writing system is also ideographic, there is no logical system for organizing documents. Filing systems often exist only in people’s heads. If the secretary dies, the whole office can fall apart.

The ideographs are pronounced differently in different areas but read the same—rather in the way that 1, 2, 3 means the same to us as it does to a French person even though we see it as “one, two, three” while they see it as “un, deux, trois.” An equally useful advantage of written Chinese is that people can read the literature of 2,500 years ago as easily as yesterday’s newspapers, even though the spoken language has changed beyond recognition. If Confucius were to come back to life today, no one apart from scholars would understand what he was saying, but if he scribbled a message people could read it as easily as they could a shopping list.

It is a disarming reflection of their determination and ingenuity that they have become such a technological powerhouse with such a patently inefficient system of orthography.

That's the Japanese for you.

Similarly, if you’ve ever wondered how on earth a word spelled one could be pronounced “wun” and once could be “wunce,” the answer in both cases is that Southern pronunciations attached themselves to East Midland spellings. Once they were pronounced more or less as spelled—i.e., “oon” and “oons.”

In short, the silent letters of most words today are shadows of a former pronunciation.

Benjamin Franklin spoke for many when he complained that if spelling were not reformed “our words will gradually cease to express Sounds, they will only stand for things, as the written words do in the Chinese Language”

Noah Webster not only pushed for simplified spelling, but lobbied Congress to make it a legal requirement—turning America into the only country in history where deviant spelling would be a punishable offense.

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin—​a language with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either.

Joseph Priestley, the English scientist, grammarian, and theologian, spoke perhaps most eloquently against the formation of an academy when he said in 1761 that it was “unsuitable to the genius of a free nation. . . . ​We need make no doubt but that the best forms of speech will, in time, establish themselves by their own superior excellence: and in all controversies, it is better to wait the decisions of time, which are slow and sure, than to take those of synods, which are often hasty and injudicious” [quoted by Baugh and Cable, page 269].

No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The New York Times once had a boss who wouldn’t allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning . . . ​and so on.

Well, so much for my reliance on manuals of style then.

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.

One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees.