The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume 3 part 8 pptx

(Modern German has seen the re-institution of the /e/ v. /ε/ contrast on the basis of < ee> v. <a> spellings, at least for many speakers.) The continuing importance of Latin and the absence of a well-defined norm for English up to the eighteenth century meant that ‘good education’ became closely connected with ‘proper language’ comparatively late in the social history of English. True enough, Thomas Elyot referred to the impor- tance of choosing the right nurse to provide a pattern for proper pronunci- ation as early as 1531 – but he stressed the importance of good Latin even more (1531: 131–2). In the seventeenth century, lexicographers advertised their books as guides to good English, and Locke stated that proper English was a necessary part of the education of a gentleman. However, it was only in the times of Lord Chesterfield that this concern became dominant. From 1737 on, he wrote a long series of letters to his son of which at least fifty deal with questions affecting the English language (Neumann 1946): The language of the lower classes is, of course, to be avoided because it is full of barbarisms, solecisms, mispronunciations, and vulgar words and phrases, all of which are the marks of ‘a low turn of mind, low educa- tion, and low company ordinary people in general speak in defiance of all grammar, use words that are not English, and murder those that are’. (466, quoting Chesterfield’s Letters 701, 729) It was only through works like Johnson (1755) and Lowth (1762) that proper guidance could be provided on lingustic law and order. However, writers of guidebooks realised that their efforts might well be thwarted by the neglect or inability of the users. Trusler admits (1766: 18): Though Humoursom, instead of Humorous, be chiefly heard among the low People, (none of whom, in all Probability, will ever study this Book, to learn good English) yet, as there are few bad Expressions used by the Vulgar, but that sometimes make their Way into better Company, it is proper to take Notice that the Word, which implies Comical, is Humorous, and not Humoursom; the Signification of which last Word is Peevish, Froward, Hard to please. 6.1.4.3 Demographic facts Although there is of course no straight correlation between the currency of dialect and its evaluation on the one hand, and urbanisation and density of population on the other, a look at changes in demographic patterns between 1800 and 1900 can serve to throw into relief the sociolinguistic conditions that underlie my discussion. To the facts represented in figures 6.3 and 6.4 (from Darby 1973: 393, 676) should of course be added the Regional and social variation 465 increase of mobility (aided by modern developments in transport), educa- tion and communication. The maps also indicate that in 1800 there was little chance for lower-class urban dialects to develop outside London (if we assume that a population of a certain size is necessary for such varieties to emerge), but that the sit- uation had drastically changed by 1900. Manfred Görlach 466 0 100 km Persons per square mile 800 and over 400 – 799 200 – 399 100 – 199 Under 100 Population 1801 by registration districts Figure 6.3 Population of England, 1801. Based on H. C. Darby (ed.) A New Historical Geography of England, Cambridge University Press, 1973 6.1.5 The geographical scope: England and the problem of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and America At the beginning of the Early Modern English period variation in English was a problem confined to England. Harrison, in his introduction to Holinshed’s Chronicle, carefully distinguished between England and Scotland, attributing three languages to each: English, Welsh and Cornish Regional and social variation 467 0 100 km Persons per square mile 800 and over 400 – 799 200 – 399 100 – 199 Under 100 Population 1901 by registration districts Figure 6.4 Population of England, 1901. Based on H. C. Darby (ed.) A New Historical Geography of England, Cambridge University Press, 1973 as against Scots, Gaelic and Norn (1577; text in Görlach 1991: 233–6), and Mulcaster (1582: 256) has a similar (much-quoted) remark: Our English tung is ofsmall reatch, it stretcheth no further then this Iland of ours, naie not there ouer all. In fact, the effective anglicisation of Wales did not start until the sixteenth century, and Wales was still predominantly Welsh-speaking in the nineteenth century, and Cornish survived until the eighteenth. From Early Modern English onwards, the range of varieties of English therefore expanded in coherent areal speech communities which had English as a second language (ESL), with a gradual shift to native-language status (ENL) around the fringes first, and (in Wales) a speedier change from the period of early indus- trialisation onwards, i.e. after the end of Early Modern English. Where the shift to English was completed, local forms of it may still be characterised by accent, but have not developed into broad dialects, the language having been transmitted in its standard form, through schools and books. Scotland had developed a semi-independent standard before 1603, in the times of the independent kingdom, on the basis of educated Edinburgh usage. The question whether sixteenth-century Scots should be considered as a language, or rather as a dialect of English (and therefore part of this chapter) is impossible to decide unambiguously. When I had to decide whether or not to include Scots in my Introduction to Early Modern English,I tried to summarise the pros and cons as follows (Görlach 1991: 22): On the one hand, Scots fulfilled the critera usually assumed to be consti- tutive for a language: 1. It was a national language whose use coincided with the political bounda- ries of the Scottish kingdom. 2. It had developed a literary/written standard. 3. The court at Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews provided a norm of written (and presumably also of spoken) Scots. 4. There are several statements extant indicating that some users considered Scots an independent language (cf. Bald 1926). On the other hand, the weight of these criteria is diminished by the increasing convergence of Scots with English in the course of the period; and there are other factors which argue against independent language status: 1. The reciprocal intelligibility of Scots and English was not seriously endangered even when the two were furthest apart (in spite of the remarks made above). Manfred Görlach 468 2. Structural differences were most marked in phonology/orthography and – in some texts – in lexis, but much less so in inflexion and syntax. 3. Educated speakers remained conscious of the common descent of Scots and Northern English, and of the close historical relationship between Scots and English in general. It can therefore be argued that Scots is and always has been a sub-system of English, whose incipient separation from Early Modern English was slowed down as a consequence of political, economic and cultural factors in the sixteenth century and finally blocked by the adoption of English as the written (and, later, the spoken) language of higher prestige (cf. McClure 1994). Ireland had an old (medieval) English-speaking community, which sur- vived into the Early Modern English period (and right into the nineteenth century) mainly in ‘The Pale’ just north of Dublin and in County Wexford, where its archaic character was noted as early as 1577 when Stanihurst com- mented upon it in his contribution to Holinshed. Further dialects (mainly Western English and Scots) were transported with the settlers of the Ulster Plantation, where they are still distinct as Mid-Ulster English and Ulster Scots. Later anglicisation of Ireland, mainly from Cromwell onward, had a non-standard English input, but without any regional bias; the more typical features of Hiberno-English are due to a combination of incomplete second-language acquisition by speakers of Irish Gaelic and the settlers’ and administrators’ dialects. Although the Irish brogue became a butt of irony for educated London society in the eighteenth century (including comment by Irish emigrants such as Swift) and thus came to be a stylistic variety within British English (cf. the texts assembled in Bliss 1979), it is not included in my discussion. (Also compare earlier stage Irish English spoken by Macmorris in Shakespeare’s Henry V, 6.3.4.2 below.) Dialects were also transported to the North American continent. However, even where settlers came from mainly one area (the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ came predominantly from the Midlands) there was the expected ‘colonial levelling’ (Trudgill 1986 and cf. the early statements collected in Matthews 1931) so that only in very isolated pockets did British dialects have a chance to survive (such as Southwestern English dialects in out-of- the-way Newfoundland fishing communities). In a few other places, the provenance of the input may still be detectable (Scots and Irish in the Appalachians/Ozarks, disputed dialect and Hibernian English features in Caribbean creoles), but these components were fused with other elements in the proverbial ‘melting-pot’ so that it now takes a historical linguist to identify them. Regional and social variation 469 Apart from Ulster, only Orkney and Shetland saw the expansion of the Scots language, but even here this was replaced by school English in the eighteenth century, as also happened in the Gaelic-speaking Highlands after the abortive 1745 rising. The spread of English within Britain and further abroad is, then, quite different from the situation in extraterritorial German settlements – all dialect-speaking, even though Standard German is normally available through the church and the schools. The reason for the greater homoge- neity of spoken English around the world is certainly partly that English had achieved greater unity, at least as a formal written language, by the time it came to be transplanted so that dialect speakers had a common denom- inator of ‘correctness’ if they wished to conform linguistically. 6.1.6 Historical sociolinguistics and the problem of sources Much of the best tradition of historical linguistics has always taken the social and political realities of earlier stages of the language into account. In this respect, books like Wyld (1936), Horn & Lehnert (1954) and Jespersen (1909–49) are relevant to our topic. However, there has only recently been a group of studies that actually claim the title of sociohistor- ical linguistics; three of these studies cover our period and are at least partly in our field: Romaine (1982) is an attempt to correlate linguistic variables (indicative of ‘anglicisation’) with sociolinguistic factors, here represented by four text types in sixteenth-century Scots, her main concern being to account for different distributions of relative pronouns. While the study is of impres- sive depth and rigour, it fails to do sufficient justice to some sociohistori- cal factors: for one thing, the Early Modern English ‘input’ is not analysed, and further, it remains open what social distinctions the four text types are taken to represent since we do not learn much about authors and their intentions, addressees and patrons, formal restrictions deriving from text- specific decorum or about the relevance of sources (in the case of the translation here analysed). Devitt (1989), on a quite similar topic, is an advance over Romaine, since Devitt takes into account more linguistic variables and more text types, which are interpreted as specimens of written communication within social frameworks and functions as far as these can be reconstructed. Both authors have, significantly, chosen a field where, with two related and lin- guistically similar standard languages clashing under quite well-known con- ditions, and amply documented, individual features can be plausibly Manfred Görlach 470 ascribed to one of the two systems and ‘interference features’ be easily detected, counted and interpreted with regard to the writer’s motives, and possibly correlated with what is known about both writer’s and addressee’s social status features. Tieken (1987) was in a more difficult position when investigating the social relevance of ‘empty’ do in eighteenth-century texts. As school-book knowledge has it, the feature ought to have been dead by the end of the seventeenth century, and it generally was in respectable prose. (Pope objected to it even in verse, where it served metrical convenience.) However, while we can certainly agree with the author that do in affirmative non-question sentences is an indicator of informality, it is difficult to pin down its social relevance. (Compare, for lexis/phrasing, Wyld’s (1936: 22) remarks on the surprising outspokenness and absence of genteel diction in many upper-class women in the early eighteenth century.) The number of smaller studies illustrating the impasse of sociolinguis- tic interpretation of historical data – even for quite well-documented com- munities – could be multiplied. One of the more impressive ones is Labov’s claim to have identified possible mergers, semi-mergers or non-mergers of vowel phonemes in sixteenth-century educated London English (1975; the topic is taken up in Harris 1985 and in Lass this volume). We are forced to admit that there cannot have been general mergers of, say, ea [ ε] and ai [ 1 ] in the sixteenth century, if the two sounds have separate histories in the later standard. However, it is quite a different matter how this non-merger is to be interpreted in social terms. Hart, one of the astutest observers of the emerging standard and certainly aware of sociolinguistically relevant distinctions, does have this merger (if we can trust his painstaking transcription) and claimed it was part of ‘the best English’, possibly becoming entrapped in a self-introspective (dialect-based?) fallacy – or that there was still more than one form of ‘best English’. But even where the evidence is very clear, its social interpretation may not be. How much tolerance is there towards linguistic variation in a given society, and can we assume that there are universal or common regularities in degrees of acceptance, or must the choice offered within a system charac- terised by variability sooner or later lead to functional differentiation – how long can variation be neutral? And how much credit can we give to the state- ments of language-conscious participant observers, many eager for linguis- tic law and order, and some coming to the battlefield with axes to grind? Generations of schoolmasters and orthoepists insisted on a phonic rep- resentation of written < h >, even when the majority of speakers had / ø / or / f / in word-final position or before / t / (type high: height, laugh: laughter). Regional and social variation 471 Now Elizabeth I, not only competent in at least five languages, but also edu- cated by Roger Ascham as her tutor, spells the word rhymes as righmes in her translation of Boethius of 1593 (text in Görlach 1991: T20/99) – an indi- cation that she could not have pronounced words like night with / x /, or else she would not have put gh in where it did not belong (taking igh as an unam- biguous spelling for the diphthong developed from ME / i /). What do we make of the evidence that the queen herself did not pronounce her / x /s properly (cf. Lass this volume: 3.5.1)? What of the fact that the very unusual spelling cannot have seemed correct even at a time when spelling was much more variable than later? (We do in fact have indications that spelling did not matter as much, as a sociolinguistic indication of proper education, as it did from the eighteenth century on with people like Lord Chesterfield.) Phonology provides a long list of features that were stigmatised in certain speech communities and periods but are not so now, or vice versa. Instances are: /h/-dropping, which came to be discredited only from the late eight- eenth century onwards (Milroy 1983) the /oi ϭ ai/ merger in noise: nice, which was apparently common in edu- cated speech in the eighteenth century, but became provincial in the nineteenth (cf. Lass this volume: 3.4.2.6); /-n/ for -ng, which was common in unstressed syllables, and remained so in conservative RP as late as about 1900, but is now a highly stigma- tised feature in most formal varieties of English. On the other hand, pronunciations that led to modern standard British English (RP) great and dance were strongly disliked when first used. All this serves to show that scholars can go badly astray if they extrapo- late uncritically from their own speech to describe earlier phases of English – or other geographical varieties. 6.1.7 Reconstruction There is nothing wrong, in principle, with using diachronic evidence to reconstruct earlier dialects (although the linguist cannot hope to reconstruct full systems of subvarieties – let alone their social and stylistic ‘meaning’). It will be helpful to show a few cases in which the principle has been use- fully applied (or is awaiting judicious application) to Early Modern English varieties: (a) The publication of LALME (McIntosh et al. 1986) seems to cry out for a scholar to relate the Middle English data to the nineteenth- and twen- tieth-century data collected in EDD and modern atlases, fitting in the Manfred Görlach 472 evidence we have of Early Modern English regional differences. (But note that LALME concentrates on spelling to the virtual exclusion of other linguistic levels.) (b) The stability of dialect boundaries, or rather, the shift of the ‘isophones’ of individual features has been adequately treated for ‘the Southwest’, ‘Watling Street’, the ‘Humber–Ribble line’ and the English–Scottish border. For periods less well documented, as Early Modern English often is, we can extrapolate the movement of receding or advancing features. (c) Transported varieties of Early Modern English, spreading first to Scotland and Ireland, later to America (both to New England and to the Caribbean), have developed into new varieties of English whose features – through all the haze of language contact and colonial levelling – throw some light on varieties of Early Modern English, especially where the geographical and social provenance of settlers, and their educational and religious backgrounds are fairly well known. (d) Structural insights derived from regional and social variation in English of various periods can not only supplement our data, but also interpret them. Whether all this should be subsumed under sociohistorical linguistics is a matter of label. One of the most convincing illustrations of the principle appears to be Lass’s conclusion, based on the development of the long high vowels in northern dialects, that the Great Vowel Shift cannot be explained by means of a drag-chain hypothesis (Lass this volume: 3.3). All evidence of this kind has to be handled with very great care, but it seems that the chances of successful reconstruction are much better for Early Modern English than for other periods, since so much more linguistic and sociohistorical data are available and can be correlated. 6.1.8 The contribution of Early Modern English dialects to the standard language There is no comprehensive study of the topic, so any account must be incomplete and partly conjectural. The following generalisations would seem to need verification very urgently, but they can still contribute towards the setting up of hypotheses for comprehensive investigations. The processes by which the English standard came to be established at a very early date (compared with other northern European countries) suggest that the ‘fusion’ happened in the fifteenth century, and that regional features had no great chance of being accepted into the standard after 1500; such ‘influences’ are rather to be expected, especially as far as pro- nunciation and syntax are concerned, in ‘vertical’ diffusion, i.e. they reflect an interchange of coexisting social and stylistic varieties within London English. Regional and social variation 473 Lexis is slightly different. An individual item (or a variant pronunciation of an existing word, say kirk for church) can easily be adopted from a dialect if there is some justification for it, e.g. in the designation of a local object or custom. However, the number of such internal loanwords is very low in English: this is certainly a consequence of the way standardisation pro- ceeded, and the scant evidence is therefore in stark contrast to the great number of regional items in Modern German. Three types of such bor- rowings can be distinguished: (a) A few words were restricted to Early Modern English dialects, but later lost their regional flavour, apparently via adoption into the supraregional language: clever, tidy. (b) Other words came through literature where they were often used to des- ignate dialect (e.g. ‘northernisms’ in Spenser), but when adopted into the common language shed both their regional and literary connotations: hale (from Spenser), weird (through Shakespeare), glamour, gruesome, raid (from Scott – the richest source). (c) Finally, there were a great number of words referring to plants, tools, etc. in the language of farmers, artisans and sailors. Although most of these were not accepted into Standard English, there are quite a few that remained in use in the special jargon of the trades, with or without addi- tional regional restrictions (cf. expressions for ‘vessels’: fat/vat, keg, keeve ‘tub’, South West). The apparently very limited interchange (in contrast to the vast influence of Standard English on the dialects) is an important indicator of the inequality of the standard and various forms of non-standard language in Early Modern English times, and also of the circumstance that other focal areas – comparable, for instance, with the capitals of small dukedoms in Germany – were lacking in England after 1400. Note that the interchange was much more frequent between sociolects (their speakers being in more frequent contact); for instance, words might become acceptable when they lost their stigma through the rise to power of the speakers with whom they were associated (cf. 6.4). 6.2 Attitudes 6.2.1 Introductory comments How did people react to variation in Early Modern English, and how far did they correct their speech, selecting from the varieties available the ones most appropriate to situation and purpose? (At least in written usage we must take into account that the educated were guided by the Manfred Görlach 474 [...]... which the caprice of Custom is apt to get the better of analogy’ (1769: 59, 104; quoted from Leonard 1929: 141–2 – not in the first edition of 1761) In fact, almost all the important eighteenth-century writers reflecting on the state of the English language discuss the problem of the two opposed principles of reason and usage, preferring the one or the other, or looking for compromises between them (cf the. .. desideratum in the same letter, as also a review of the loan words and the possibility of reviving old English words in their stead (cf Osselton 19 58: 1 23) 1674 For John Ray’s Collection see 6 .3. 3 below 1 682 The antiquarian Sir Thomas Browne followed in the Camden tradition; his Certain Miscellany Tracts include no VIII on the topic Of Languages and Particularly of the Saxon Tongue’ (in Bolton 1966: 70 82 ) He... that dialects, the speech of the lower classes and the ‘defects’ of non-native speakers all come to be classified as ‘vices’: Nay in the very metropolis two different modes of pronunciation prevail, by which the inhabitants of one part of the town, are distinguished from those of the other One is current in the city, and is called the cockney; the other at the court-end, and is called the polite pronunciation... or other of the inferiour sort’) regardless of region the old poets (‘for their language is now out of vse with vs’) ‘Northern-men beyond the riuer of Trent’ (because even the language of the well-educated of this region shows some interference from the northern dialect) However, it was not at all easy to establish a consensus, and the later history of English grammatical thinking shows that most... On the other hand, incompetent handling of Latinisms became a distinctive feature of the sociolect of those who had ‘small Latin and less Greek’ The use of inkhorn terms in the speech of students and other more educated persons is contrasted with the bungling malapropisms characteristic of the lower sociolects (6.4.1) 6.2.2 .3 French French had lost its second -language functions as the medium for the. .. opinion in 1 589 (121) He was even more explicit in stating which sub-types of Southern English ought to be avoided (cf Görlach 1990: 99), namely the language of: (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) the people in the ‘marches and frontiers’ and ‘port townes’ (because of language mixing) the universities (because of Latinate diction) rural areas the lower classes ( of a craftes man or carter, or other of the inferiour... identification of such syntactic calques see Görlach 1991: 126 30 ; and see Adamson, this volume. ) The proper mastery of these styles became the object of language education and thereby a sociolinguistic mark of the well-bred in contradistinction to the less educated, the slow reader, bad speller and clumsy user of syntax Latin (on top of developments that would have happened as a result of the functional... in the Throat’ – the first account of the ‘Northumbrian burr’ (cf Wakelin 1977: 40–1) 1 7 38 Jonathan Swift includes the Devonshire knight Sir John Linger in his Polite Conversation ‘speaking in his own rude dialect, for no other 497 Manfred Görlach reason than to teach my scholars how to avoid it’; the satire is rather on the town-bred affectation of the ‘scholars’ than any uncouthness on the part of the. .. diction and non-literary language, thereby anticipating the tenets of classicism (Davies 1970) Such hard-won stylistic expansion, which made possible the correlation with levels of formality, stylistic sophistication and appropriateness for individual genres was utilised in the eighteenth century There is probably no period in the history of the English language when the influence of the best writers’ on... use of dialect for ‘literary’ purposes are very early compared to other European countries In the eighteenth century interest in, or at least tolerance of, dialect appears to have further increased – if it conformed to the Augustan idea of decorum The so-called revival of Scots as a literary medium by Allan Ramsay and others happened after the shock of the union of the parliaments in 1707, i.e the . reflecting on the state of the English language discuss the problem of the two opposed principles of reason and usage, preferring the one or the other, or looking for compromises between them (cf. the. of region (e) the old poets (‘for their language is now out of vse with vs’) (f) ‘Northern-men . . . beyond the riuer of Trent’ (because even the language of the well-educated of this region. by the increasing convergence of Scots with English in the course of the period; and there are other factors which argue against independent language status: 1. The reciprocal intelligibility of