The Story of Speech and Language

301 Pages·1964·6.372 MB·

by  Charles Laurence Barber

T H E ST O R Y OF SP E E C H AND L A N G U A G E
FRANCE
THE STORY OF
SPEECH AND
LANGUAGE
C H A R L E S L. B A R B E R
Illustrations by 1
Diana Stradling
Thomas Y. Crowell Company
New York • Established 1834
Originally published in Great Britain under the title
The Story of Language
First published in the United States of America 1965
Copyright © 1964 by Charles Barber
All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced in any form, except by a reviewer,
without the permission of the publisher.
The illustrations are based, in part, on sources
acknowledged in the preface and, in part, on
studies of medieval illuminated manuscripts
and archaeological findings.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 65-13815
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
FOREW ORD FOR TH E AM ERICAN READ ER
received in England, The Story of Speech and
A l r e a d y w e l l
Language will - I think - be widely read, discussed, and en­
joyed in America. Some of the things Charles Barber has to say
about the state of ‘the King’s English’ and about the world
role of American English are sure to impress the American
reader, especially since they come from an Englishman.
And Americans like successful popularizers.
Until recent years, most laymen - and even most teachers
and students - have had to be content with ready-made
hand-me-down notions about the nature of language. The
dominant belief has been that we must cherish a set of ‘rules’
in grammar and usage, or else our language will collapse.
According to this view, there are intrinsically correct ways to use
shall, will; can, may\ like, as\ who and whom. Usually associated
with this attitude are such notions as it’s ‘bad English’ to end
a sentence with a preposition or start one with and\ slang is as
abominable as ain't\ it’s not safe to use newly coined expres­
sions like timewise until they have been accepted by the
authorities, nor to air a word without being sure of its preferred
pronunciation. And so The Times reports a flurry of reactions,
mainly negative, when a President of the United States uses
a ‘non-existent’ word like finalize, and Life runs an angry
editorial when a new edition of a standard dictionary ‘admits’
such coinings.
This traditional view finally has had to reckon with science
and democracy, both of which tend to question authority
and re-examine old taboos. After exhaustive research and field
work modern grammarians and linguists have come up with
entirely new concepts of language. The difference between the
old approach and the new is like the difference between astro­
logy and astronomy or alchemy and chemistry.
In the meantime the alert layman has sensed for himself
that there is something negative, unrealistic, and static -
maybe even undemocratic - about the conventional view. This
is manifest, for example, in my adult classes at New York Uni­
versity. Each year the students are less inclined to ask what is
‘safe’ and ‘correct’, much more concerned with understanding
the language-making processes. And when I ‘hosted’ a series
of broadcasts in which the guests and I discussed traditional
grammar in the light of today’s needs, the fan mail - from
lawyers, engineers, housewives, students - set a record for
non-political public affairs programs. The audience was
impatient with ‘don’t,’ eager for a positive, cultural approach to
the subject.
To help meet this growing popular interest - evident in
Australia, Canada, and Britain too - Dr Barber has written
this non-technical history of language. Starting with the crude
beginnings of human speech, he traces the rise of language
families, then focuses full attention on English. Using memor­
able examples, he leads you to widening perspective and
deepening insight. Did you know that a vulgar Latin word for
head, probably part of the Roman soldier’s slang, developed
into the respectable word for head in modern French? That
when a Hemingway writes he dove, he is using a more tradi­
tional form than a British author uses when he writes he dived?
And you will enjoy Dr Barber’s imaginary experiments, as
when he helps you understand one mode of writing by asking
you to let a drawing of an inn plus a drawing of an eye stand
for the word incite. Gradually, you will realize for yourself
that a language cannot be fixed, that in order to stay alive, to
meet the shifting needs of a changing world, language must
evolve.
You will be ready, then, to understand that in England, in
the mother country itself, educated people are now less
concerned with traditional distinctions between shall and will
and can and may; that ‘Received Pronunciation’, the dialect
of the upper classes and of their ‘public’ schools, no longer
enjoys uncontested prestige: even schoolmasters use without
embarrassment the educated form of their regional dialects.
You will understand why whom is heard less often among the
educated, just as other inflected forms have gradually died out
over the past iooo years.
You will be sobered, if not surprised, to learn that Dr
Barber, and presumably other English linguists, feel that
leadership in reshaping English as a world language is passing
to us. Englishmen recognize strong American influence not
only in their vocabulary but also in their changing pronuncia­
tion. Will these influences and changes tend to destroy British
English? In some ways, Dr Barber feels, they may actually
help to save it!
It was America - respecting all regional dialects, refusing
to grant top prestige to any one dialect - that led the way in
large-scale dialect mixing. This crossbreeding has created a
new flexibility, a new vitality. This American attitude, Dr
Barber says, ‘would be a sensible one . . . to adopt toward the
varieties of English as a whole’.
W alter J ames M iller
Division of General Education
New York University
PREFACE
T his is a book about the history of language: about the
process of change which goes on continually in any language
which is actually in use. It is intended for the reader without
any previous knowledge of the subject, and does not require
any technical equipment. Nor does it require any knowledge
of foreign languages, though of course these are always a help.
Since every reader has an intimate, if unsystematic, knowledge
of his own language, I have centred the book on English, and
the second half of it is in effect a history of the English language.
The first half deals with more general topics, such as the
nature of language, its origins, the causes of linguistic change,
and language families.
Although the book is intended for the general reader, I have
not hesitated to introduce a certain number of technical terms,
but I have tried to explain these in non-technical language,
and have also brought them together in a Glossary at the end
of the book. A number of these technical terms occur in the
first chapter; you may find this less interesting than some of
the later parts of the book, but it is worth trying to master it,
because it will make many later things a good deal clearer. I
have however denied myself such technical aids as phonetic
and phonemic transcriptions, since I thought these required a
bigger effort than the average reader would wish to make.
And I have sometimes made simplifications in transcribing
words from other languages (e.g. Sanskrit). Indeed, some
simplification is inevitable in a book of this kind.
I have included in different places a fair number of short
passages of English from various periods, in their original
spelling, to show concretely what linguistic change means.
Where I give modern translations of such passages, I aim at
giving a ‘crib’, not at producing idiomatic modern English.
In a book covering such a wide field as this, it is impossible
to acknowledge all the many sources and authorities that have
PREFACE
been drawn on in one way or another. Indeed, for many
familiar ideas I should be hard put to it to say what the
original source was. Acknowledgments are however made to
the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:
W. Heffer and Sons Ltd, for permission to adapt my
Figures 2 and 3 from diagrams in An Outline of English
Phonetics, by Daniel Jones; the Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, for permission to reproduce my Figure 5 from
Garrick Mallery’s Picture- Writing of the American Indians, in
the Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the
Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; Routledge and
Kegan Paul Ltd, for permission to adapt my Figure 7 from a
diagram in A Study of Writing, by I. J. Gelb; the Syndics of
the Cambridge University Press and the Delegates of the
Oxford University Press, for permission to quote a passage
from The New English Bible; the Council of the Early English
Text Society, for permission to quote a passage from Parson
Haben’s Sermon, printed in their volume The Fraternitye of
Vacabondesy by John Awdeley, edited by Edward Viles and
F. J. Furnivall; Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd, and Harcourt,
Brace and World, Inc., for permission to quote a passage from
the novel By Love Possessed, by James Gould Cozzens.
I am also grateful to Mr Stanley Ellis, M.A., of the Uni­
versity of Leeds, for providing the material for Figure 9, and
to the Survey of English Dialects, from whose archives the
material came.
CO N TEN TS
CHAPTER
PAGE
F oreword for the A merican Reader
Preface
"*I W hat is L anguage? . . .
II
T he Origin of L anguage and the Invention
of W riting . . . 27
III T he F lux of L anguage . 51
70
IV L anguage Families . .
V T he Indo-European L anguages 79
103
V I T he G ermanic L anguages .
121
V II Old English . . .
VIII 142
T he V ikings in England .
IX
T he N orman C onquest . 150
167
X M iddle English . . .
XI 188
Early M odern English .
XII 205
English in the S cientific A ge
XIII 224
English as a W orld L anguage
239
X IV Changes in M eaning . .
XV
English T oday and T omorrow 257
268
G lossary . . . .
283
Suggestions for F urther Reading
287
Index . . . . .