Category: English language

In the period immediately following the Norman Conquest of 1066, there were three main languages spoken in England ~ Old English (O.E.), Latin and French ~ and each served a particular function and part of society. After some inevitable intermingling, Middle English (M.E.) emerged as the new, enriched, multi-purpose tongue. Its French elements enabled the expression of fresh ideas, though it retained its O.E. base.

M.E. blossomed from approximately 1100 to 1450 and it doubled the lexicon from 50,000 to 100,000 words, an astonishing leap. It changed English grammar, pronunciation and spelling, the latter helped along by Caxton’s introduction of the printing press. Whereas O.E. relied on numerous word endings to convey meaning, M.E. did away with most of those and used prepositions and word order instead.

Many of our prefixes and suffixes originate from M.E., as do the auxiliary verbs ~ be, do, have. Consonant sounds began to have soft and hard versions and vowels changed too. The influx of French architects, artisans, musicians and other pre-Renaissance practitioners brought numerous words and phrases that appealed to English ears and were absorbed into the language, especially if there were no existing equivalent. By the end of the M.E. era, English was set fair for a burgeoning literary output.

(Top image: Hans at pixabay.com)

We mainly have the French to thank for many of our food words (like omelette and mustard), but our imports also include such delights as avocado and vanilla from Spain, cauliflower and spaghetti from Italy, and lager and noodles from Germany. From the Middle East we have hummus, yoghurt, spinach and coffee, but it is from France that English has adopted ‘café au lait’, ‘au gratin’ and all such fancy terms for what is valued as top-notch ‘cuisine’ or ‘cordon bleu’.

Calling butchered meat different names to those of the live animals certainly puts a psychologically comforting distance between them, but it seems to have arisen simply because the Norman Conquering nobility used these words in their English homes. Thus we have beef (Old Fr. buef) for cow meat, venison (Old Fr. venesoun) for deer, and pork and bacon (Old Fr. porc, bacon) for pig. Rabbit, hare, lamb and chicken escaped unaltered.

There are plenty of English idioms related to food. For example:-

• Take it with a pinch of salt
• That’s just sour grapes
• Know which side your bread is buttered
• There’s one bad apple in every barrel
• I don’t boil my cabbage twice
• You’re as nutty as a fruitcake!

(Image: world.openfoodfacts.org / CC BY-SA 3.0)

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in ‘British India’, a place he loved, settled awhile in the USA with his American wife Carrie, but lived mostly in England. He had a life full of “Triumph and Disaster”, to borrow a phrase from his celebrated poem of 1895, ‘If-‘, eventually published in 1910.  The complete line ~ “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same” ~ is etched above the players’ entrance at Wimbledon‘s Centre Court.

He began work as a journalist but after his first book, ‘Plain Tales from the Hills” (1888) was successful, he embraced a writing career, producing classics such as ‘The Jungle Book’ (1894), ‘Kim’ (1901) and the ‘Just So Stories’ (1902). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.

However, two of Kipling’s three children died tragically: his 6-year-old daughter Josephine from pneumonia after a transatlantic sea voyage in 1899 and his 18-year-old son John in war-torn France in 1915. Kipling had pulled strings to get John enlisted despite the lad’s poor eyesight. After this he never wrote children’s stories again. Kipling’s ashes are in Westminster Cathedral and his house in Sussex, Bateman’s, is open to visitors courtesy of The National Trust.

(Top image: Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

Lord Byron (George Gordon, 1788-1824) gave English literature the ‘Byronic hero’, seen in the novels of the Brontë sisters, for example. This figure has a rocky past which has made him cynical and moody, but he is dashing and devilishly attractive with a propensity for strong romantic attachment. He was created out of Byron’s own life experiences, which were plentiful, to put it mildly.

Described as a latter-day playboy-superstar, Byron travelled Europe and died of fever in Greece at just 36. Though London-born he was brought up by his erratic mother in Aberdeenshire then returned south to be educated at Harrow and Cambridge. Despite his deformed lower right leg he ‘got around’ and took innumerable lovers. He was briefly married and had one legitimate child, computing pioneer Ada Lovelace. Tellingly, Byron’s publisher burned the manuscript of his memoirs after his death!

Byron’s most famous poems include ‘She walks in beauty’ , ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimmage’, ‘Don Juan’ and ‘So, we’ll go no more a-roving’, with the first of these hailed as an exemplar of Romanticism:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of  cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes; ….&c.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

In his time, William Blake (1757-1827) was viewed by some as a nutcase. It was not until a generation after his poverty-stricken death that his poetry and illustrations received acclaim. By then, of course, Blake’s habit of seeing spiritual visions and of recounting conversations he had had with ‘the other side’ did not loom so large in the mind when considering his work. Indeed, he is now deemed a revolutionary genius in terms of imaginative literature, and the New Age movement of the 1960s held Blake in high esteem.

He lived in London, a city he loved, for all but three years of his adult life. He left school at age 10 and started work as an engraver at 14. He continued in this trade, working at home using a printing process he devised himself which printed both text and illustration in one pressing rather than separately.

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His most famous poem, ‘Jerusalem’, was set to music during WW1 and it is regarded as England’s anthem. ‘The Tyger’, ‘Auguries of Innocence’ and ‘The Dance of Albion’ are other well-loved examples. They evoke imagery that may have seemed eccentric in the early 19th century but appeals to those contemplating life’s meaning two centuries later.

(Top image of William Blake self-portrait: Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

Many of the common themes used in English fiction can be played out in a garden setting. The circle of life, coming of age, romance, survival, growth, healing, learning, good-versus-evil ~ all have been placed against the backdrop of a space which is both controlled and natural, even wild, and although privately-owned with boundaries, gates and shelters, yet open-air for others to see. Each of these characteristics lend themselves to symbolism in garden-themed literature.

Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (1605) is an early example of ‘flower-power’ though the action takes place in a wood, not a garden. Cottage gardens were still primarily agricultural in those times, but by 1813, Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ attributes the splendid tastefulness of Mr Darcy’s estate grounds as a key factor in Elizabeth’s change of heart towards him.

Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865) describes a beautiful garden which Alice is desperate to reach and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s ‘The Secret Garden’ (1911) features a hidden garden that revives the reclusive Colin and softens the stuck-up Mary. Another much-treasured example of our garden-related reverie is ‘Tom’s Midnight Garden’ (1958) by Philippa Pearce, in which a time-slip portal transports the 12-year-old Tom to a fascinating garden where he begins to mature.

(Image – ‘Door to the Secret Garden’: Alan Walker at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Old English (OE) was spoken from the 6th to the 11th centuries in England and southern Scotland. Many of our most common words originate in OE. It evolved from an existing base with a little influence from the Latin of the Augustine monks who arrived in 597. For example, some of the rounded letters of the Latin alphabet were incorporated into OE.

OE was more complicated than modern English. It had gendered nouns, numerous inflections and the word order was less structured. The remnants of OE poetry appear to show that our ancestors enjoyed playing with the sounds of their language.

There were four dialects: Kentish, West Saxon, Mercian and Northumbrian. Thanks to Alfred the Great, Mercian became the standard, but Northumbrian was the tongue of the early OE poets, including Cædmon of Whitby, regarded as the ‘father of English sacred song’. The following is ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’, written in the 660s/70s:-

Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard
Now shall we honour heaven-kingdom’s warden
Metudæs maecti end his modgidanc
The might of the creator and his purpose
Uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuaes
The work of the glory-father as he for each wonder
eci dryctin or astelidæ
The eternal lord created the beginning.

(Top image [cropped]: Paul Walker at Flickr.com / CC BY-SA 2.0)

With the advent of social media it has become all too apparent that many people are unaware of the correct use of apostrophes and they also do not differentiate words that sound the same. English has a lot of these, but they do have different meanings so it should, in theory, be easy to choose the right one. Yet here are some of the most commonly misused words:

It is easy to see how the confusion arises: your and you’re do sound exactly the same, it is quicker to type your for all occurrences and besides, everyone will hear it correctly in their heads.

Linguistics expert David Crystal (1941-) in ‘The Fight for English’ (2006) explains the problem with children learning the difference between it’s and its thus: if an apostrophe shows belonging, as in the cat’s paw, then it follows that the paw of it should be it’s paw. The logic is admirable!

(Image: pikrepo.com / Public domain)

T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot (1888-1965) is hailed as the 20th century’s most influential poet, recognised in the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.  He wrote in his spare time, being employed in London at Lloyds Bank for eight years from 1917, followed by forty years at publishers Faber & Faber.

Born in the USA, he attended Harvard University and the Sorbonne in Paris before moving finally to London after spending one year at Oxford University in 1914. He obtained British citizenship in 1927, had two marriages to English women and converted to the Church of England from Unitarianism. His ground-breaking poem was ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) which seized the attention of a British society trying to recover from the horror of WW1 and aching for change.

Eliot’s new style of piecing together fragments where every word had to earn its place was a welcome relief from pre-War flowery verbosity. Although the poem laid bare the nation’s daily struggles, it gave hope for the future. In more recent times, Eliot is famous for his ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’ (1939), which Andrew Lloyd Webber turned into ‘Cats: The Musical’ after persuading Eliot’s widow, Valerie, that her husband’s words lent themselves perfectly to the project.

(Top image: Archivo Historico Sinaloa at Flickr.com / Public domain)

With an estimated million or more words in the English language now, you would think that no-one would ever be fumbling for the right word to use. However, this happens all the time in everyday speech due to the demand of instantaneous recall or the lack of familiarity with the conversational topic. In UK English we have various colloquialisms to help us out of this situation.

Of course, as this is spoken English, there are no standard spellings for many of these made-up words. Even in literature, it is rare to see them in dialogue since the author has time to re-draft, edit and substitute words to propel the story. Therefore, the words below could be spelt or hyphenated in other ways, but they are all synonyms for the all-encompassing ‘thing‘, meaning an artefact, action, matter, event, issue or attribute:

• thingamy / thing-ummy
• thingamybob / thingamabob
• thingamyjig / thingamajig
• doodah
• whatsit
• whatsitsname / whatsaname / whassaname
• whatchamacallit
• gubbins
• thingy
• ..y’know..

These may be accompanied by gestures such as clicking the fingers, as if to conjure up the correct word. In this 1942 song written by Thompson & Heneker, we hear Gracie Fields (1898-1979) not quite knowing all the technical jargon but being sure where everything goes!

(Top image: pxhere.com / CC0)

There were probably two related Indo-European tongues with Semitic layers in Britain before Old English. One was mainly in the hilly west and developed into Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Manx and Cornish. In the eastern flatlands adjacent to now-flooded Doggerland, this was mixed with languages of northern Germany and Old Frisia, which included parts of Denmark and the Netherlands.

Modern Lithuanian is thought to be the most similar to an original Indo-European language from which the Germanic group grew. Then came the West Germanic sub-group and the Anglo-Frisian branch as populations spread north-west over the European continent and Britain. After Doggerland was flooded and the English Channel was formed, possibly as late as 3,800BC, the island people were largely separated from European linguistic influence, for a while at least.

Anglo-Frisian came about through several changes in vocalisation. It includes the Old Frisian languages and the languages of Britain. This means that English shares its roots with Dutch, German, Yiddish, Frisian, Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian and Faroese. Only a quarter of present-day English words are Germanic but these do tend to be the ones most often used. Furthermore, many linguists consider Dutch to be the easiest language for native English-speakers to learn.

(Image: Row17 at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)