Every American is born to a rich endowment which for most of us, sad to say, remains largely undervalued, ignored, and uncultivated through the course of our lives. I refer to our native inheritance of the English language. English is the world’s most important language. This is not a boast or an aesthetic judgment but a simple cultural, political, and economic fact. Since cultural, political, and economic realities change over time, this linguistic reality may change in time. But it has held true for much longer than the lifetime of anyone reading this essay and is likely to remain true into the foreseeable future. It is nearly criminal that so many Americans know so very little about the nature and history of this marvelous gift. I am tempted to write a few little pieces on this topic off and on over the coming months.
Language is more than words, but words are a good place to start an appreciation of the genius of evolved English. To say that we have lots of them is an understatement—or even possibly litotes. The cultural guardians of the French language have been ferocious in preserving what they regard as its purity and correctness, trying to nip in the bud incipient invasions from the likes of le week-end. The English language, on the other hand, and especially American English, which now calls the shots, is a magpie tongue. We have no difficutly at all with fin-de-siècle. Sounds classy. We beg, borrow, or steal all the words we can. That is one reason why the English lexicon (vocabulary, word-hoard) is so much richer than the French. This statement, too, is merely statistical. Line up the Oxford English Dictionary and the Grand Robert side to side and you’ll see what I am talking about.
For a language to be a major borrower, it has to have neighbors who force words upon it or who have words based in things it wants or need to borrow. That is, vocabulary growth is often the product of vigorous cultural exchange brought about by contact, be that military, missionary, or commercial. The British Isles in the period 500 to 1500 reveal a particularly rich and complex linguistic development. Its ancient population of Celtic-speakers was overwhelmed by Continental invaders speaking various related Germanic dialects and largely physically expelled from what we now think of as England. A substantial Celtic-speaking population in Wales and a tiny, vestigial one in northern Scotland, remain to this day. Cornish, another Celtic tongue, once continuous with the Breton tongue along the French western coast in Brittany, and spoken in the southwest of England, became effectively extinct in the eighteenth century. In England itself there were in cultural competition significantly different dialectical versions of English, with that of Wessex (what might be call the Middle Southwest of England) eventually becoming a kind of cultural standard.
Over several early centuries, especially in the north and in coast regions, there were repeated military migrations (that is, invasions) from bellicose people who in the history books often get lumped together as “Vikings”, who spoke various versions of Scandinavian Germanic. The English of the north of England is to this very day replete with Scandinavian “loan words”. From Old Norse alone we get such common words as awkward, bag, club, die, egg, flag…and so on through all the rest of the letters of the alphabet. But English was barely being consolidated in the British Isles when a much more disastrous invasion overwhelmed the land: the Norman Conquest. The Normans (Northmen) were yesteryear’s Vikings whose Scandinavian (Germanic) dialects had over time been overwhelmed by the French (Romance) speakers they had conquered. The French-speaking Norman invaders of England occupied practically all the high offices of church and state, so that a comparatively small French -speaking upper-class lorded it over a much larger English-speaking lower class. By the time this was settling out in the age of Chaucer (late fourteenth century), English was emerging triumphant, with its old Germanic vocabulary richly expanded with a huge trove of French words. The animal that gave you wool could be a sheep or a mutton. The sky might be blue or azure. Thus English “naturalized” a very large number of French words while retaining their older Germanic equivalents. There was another large infusion of new vocabulary in the Renaissance, this one engineered by scholars who invented thousands of high-brow and technical terms (much of the language of medicine, for example) on the basis of Greek and Latin models. Shakespeare and other writers sometimes make fun of the pedantic excesses of some of these “inkhorn terms”.
Almost all cultural exchange leads to linguistic borrowing, as people encounter new foods, new geographical features, new social structures, new and different situations. Beginning in the sixteenth century British sea power, which went practically everywhere, returned to its little island with a linguistic bonanza as copious and eclectic as the anthropological artefacts in the Pitt-Rivers museum. British settlers in America, surrounded by a new topography, a new flora, a new fauna, and a large variety of indigenous people speaking a variety of languages that described them, developed English versions of hundreds of Indian words. Quite similar was the experience of other English-speaking colonials in many other parts of the world.
Very soon, probably even before 1800, the structural distinctions of American English began to appear: flashy, transgressive, careless, democratic. Americans seemed eager to apply their penchant for superlatives to their language, to press words beyond the obvious. H. L. Mencken, author of The American Language, still a classic, has many interesting remarks on this subject. When an Englishman made a drink composed of whisky and soda water, he called it a “Whisky and Soda.” Really. The same drink in America had to be at the very least a “high ball”, with local variations. Call it a “Cincinnati Sidewinder” if you feel the urge. Some of our greatest unsung poets were start-up etymologists. In the days when I taught Old English I used to give my students the following challenge. Let’s pick a weird word from our reading in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. (One highly successful choice, I remember, was wifcuthu, a dirty word describing the activity of some uncouth chieftan when shacked up with a woman.) The idea was simply to start using the chosen word, in appropriate context but without further definition or explanation, in casual conversation. The goal was to introduce and “jump start” the word into the campus vocabulary. We often say what we hear other people saying, whether we actually know what it means or not. When I was quite young, I wrote a Valentine for my teacher. “Will you be my Valentine? Can you be my concubine.” I had no idea what a concubine was, of course; but it sounded like a great word. Abraham, Solomon, David, and some Levite in the Bible were into concubines, so I knew it had to be all good.
