Category: English language

Shakespeare‘s play, ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark’ (c.1602) is one in which almost everyone is killed, including Hamlet himself. By Act III, Scene I, he is grieving the murder of his father by his father’s own brother, i.e. his uncle, who then not only claims the crown but also marries his widowed sister-in-law, Hamlet’s mother. His father’s ghost is urging him to take revenge and two of his friends are intent on betraying him. Oh, and there’s an unresolved love interest.

That is the context for the famous monologue “To be, or not to be, that is the question”, in which Hamlet weighs up the pros and cons of living or dying. On the one hand, dying is the escape from all of life’s problems; on the other hand, it is a journey into the unknown and it could be worse than living, therefore we must carry on. He is not holding Yorick’s skull at this point ~ that comes in Act V’s graveyard scene.

Some of the lines from the monologue have entered common usage, such as:

• “shuffle off this mortal coil”
• “to sleep, perchance to dream”
• “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”
• “ay, there’s the rub”.

(Top image [cropped]: Derek Winterburn at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Doris Lessing (1919-2013) had an eventful life and drew on her multi-faceted experiences to write about women in all types of situation. A feminist icon of the 1960s and 1970s, she grew to distance herself entirely from the feminist movement as it evolved. In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and has won many other honours, though she declined a Damehood.

The themes of her novels include freedom, women’s lives and issues in former British colonies. She lived in Iran and Zimbabwe until she was twenty-nine when, with two failed marriages behind her, she moved to London. She had direct experience of poverty and the clash of cultures. She had also delved into other ideologies, having at one time joined the Communist party. She was anti-racist, anti-apartheid, anti-war and anti-nuclear arms.

Her writing skills moulded this wealth of life events into stories with powerful messages. ‘The Golden Notebook’ (1962), with its psychological explorations, was ground-breaking in its structure, but Lessing’s own favourite was said to be her 5-part ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’ (1979-83), written in her ‘space fiction’ phase. She continued writing almost to the end. ‘Alfred and Emily’ (2008) was partly a re-imagined life of her parents had WW1 not happened.

(Image: In Memoriam Day at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC 2.0)

The language of the court is that which is spoken by the aristocracy. It is deemed to be the most prestigious and proper, hence the term ‘the Queen’s English’ (or ‘the King’s English’) to denote the best form of English. This was not really a concern until the advent of printing and the need to standardise spelling and grammar.

Latin was introduced by the Roman occupiers and the Catholic Church via the Bible, so it was the language of authority for many centuries, though it never displaced the English spoken by the majority of the population in their various dialects. Then, after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the Normandy dialect of French began to be spoken by aristocrats, though again, it did not replace English but eventually merged with it, giving us 29% of our language derived from French (alongside 29% from Latin, 6% from Greek, etc.).

In the sixteenth century it was decided that speaking the right sort of English was an important asset and the best exemplars were at the royal court, in the English translations of the Bible and, new at that time, dictionaries. Standard English thus began to emerge and the accent used in royal circles was the most desirable.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

J.R.R. Tolkien, CBE (1892-1973), was the author of the epic fantasy trilogy ‘The Lord of the Rings’ (1954-5) and its precursor ‘The Hobbit’ (1937). Both of these grew out of his earlier creation of an imaginary world in ‘The Silmarillion’, which was published posthumously. In its pages lie the foundation of the history, characters and language that Tolkien skilfully weaved from his studies of Old English and Old Norse legends.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien lost his father at age four and his mother at age twelve, whereupon he and his younger brother came under the guardianship of a Catholic priest. Tolkien was an excellent scholar and went on to Oxford to study Classics and English Literature, but spent most of his time learning languages, including Greek, Latin, Spanish, Finnish, Welsh, Icelandic, West Frisian and Gothic. He later became an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon and then English Language & Literature.

It was the 1960s’ hippie flower-power movement in the USA which caught onto the environmental, linguistic, mythical and theological themes of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and boosted its sales, currently standing at 150 million copies. Along with ‘The Hobbit’, at 100 million, Tolkien boldly revived a storytelling genre of depth and ancient imagery with huge success.

(Image: Michael Matti at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC 2.0)

Robert Browning (1812-89) spent much of his life financially supported by family while he pursued his desire to be a poet, which he achieved to great acclaim. Born in London, he was partly home-schooled and immersed himself in his father’s library of almost six thousand books. From these he gained his knowledge of the classics and off-beat historical tales.

He had some of his work published in his early twenties, but it took a little while for him to find his niche. This was to be the dramatic or philosophical monologue, whereby the first-person narrator divulges insights and confidences to the reader. An exception was ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin‘ (1842), written for a friend’s son.

He lived with his parents until 1846, during which time he wrote many of the ground-breaking poems that were to fuel his later success. He then married the poet Elizabeth Barrett and they eloped to Italy, where they remained until she died in 1861. He did not write much in this period. On his return to England, he resumed his writing and became famous, particularly with the twelve volumes of the novel-length poem ‘The Ring and the Book‘ (1868-9). Browning Societies sprang up to publish study aids for his work.

(Top image: Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)

The Great Vowel Shift (GVS) is the reason we may find Old and Middle English difficult to grasp. It is also a major factor in the perplexing idiosyncracies of Modern English spelling which make the language non-phonetic. The GVS took place over two to six centuries (historians differ on this) and was more or less complete by 1700.

It was a scattered process which occurred in stages with intermediate transitions, contributing to the variety of dialects around the country. It had the greatest effect in south-east England in the fifteenth century. One theory is that this was a time when the English aristocracy wanted to drop French and Latin and take on English as a show of independence. In doing so, they influenced the way it was spoken. However, the spellings stayed the same, as printing had already started.

A few examples of the vocal changes include:

• “c-ah-t” →cat
• “t-ee-da” →tide (final ‘e’ became silent)
• “m-eh-t” →meat
• “b-eh” →be
• “ann-y” →any
• “m-oo-d” →mode
• “b-oo-t” →boat
• “h-oo-s” →house

Linguists explain it as ‘raising’ the position of vowel sound production in the mouth. This video gives an idea of how pre-GVS pronunciation would have sounded:-

(Top image: Ian S at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Enid Mary Blyton (1897-1968), born in London, was our most-loved and prolific author of children’s literature. Emerging from her own unhappy childhood, Enid used stories to entertain and educate children as to the ideal family life. They contain plenty of moral guidance and focus on children’s resilience, loyalty and creativity. Her worldwide audience found them spell-binding and adorable, and she is the fourth most translated author, with editions in ninety different languages.

Enid’s first marriage to a book publisher helped advance her career, but she was always determined to write her stories, producing thousands of them over her forty-year career.  She did not plan any of them, just typed what she saw in her mind’s eye. At her peak in the 1940s-50s, she was writing ten thousand words a day and fifty books a year.

‘Noddy’ and the ‘Famous Five’ are the most well-known of her many series. The genres included mystery, adventure, nature, religion and fairy tales, typically set in farms, circuses, boarding schools, islands and castles. Although some critics have attempted retrospectively to attach the ‘politically incorrect’ label to her work, it continues to sell and to appeal to the inner world of children’s imaginations.

(Image: peonyandthistle at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

For a man who excelled in, adored and taught mathematics, it was an amazing recognition of his wide-ranging intellectual output in print for Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. He wrote more than seventy books, bringing the elegance of mathematics, logic and philosophy to a broader audience, as well as posing social, moral, political and theological questions for us all to ponder.

Russell was orphaned at three years of age and was home-tutored until he went to Cambridge University in 1890. His grandfather had been Prime Minister twice, for which he was made an Earl, a title which made its way down to Bertrand. He spent most of his working life lecturing at Cambridge but was once fired for his anti-WW1 campaigning.

His philosophical thinking was analytical and incisive, and he is remembered for his thought-provoking talks and essays, including his unswerving logic on the non-existence of God. Here are just two of his innumerable pithy observations:

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

(Top image: Bill Nicholls at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote the poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner‘ as the first entry in the book he co-authored with his friend, William Wordsworth. This was entitled ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and it marked the start of the Romantic phase of English literature in 1798.

The poem, comprising 143 verses and seven parts, was innovative in that it was a work of imagination, full of descriptions of the sea and sky, and themes of the spiritual and psychological. It can be seen as a parable, in which the ancient mariner’s sinful deed (killing an albatross) has dreadful consequences for him and all his companions. The mariner (the “grey-beard loon”) only survives by appreciating the life of all creatures, “both great and small”. However, he is doomed to a “life-in-death”.

It has given us the expression ‘an albatross round your neck’, meaning the burden of shame and guilt that stays with you when you make a big mistake. Another one is ‘water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink’, which is a slight misquotation from the poem. The hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ (1848) borrows from a verse and the penultimate line is also sometimes used: “a sadder and a wiser man”.

(Image: klimkin at pixabay.com)

Although there are several ways to construct a future meaning in English, there is no stand-alone future tense. We share this apparent oddity with many other languages ~ German, Swedish, Fijian, Afrikaans, Persian, to name but a few. English verbs take four forms. For example: speak(s), speaking, spoke, spoken. There is no further adjustment we can make to the root verb, speak. These forms give us the present and past, but not a future tense.

Here are the most common ways to talk about the future in English:-

Naturally, the context of the sentence should indicate which time period is appropriate and additional information such as ‘tomorrow’, ‘next year’ or ‘on Wednesday at 2pm’ is extremely helpful. There are many other languages with no tenses at all ~ Indonesian, Malaysian, Mandarin Chinese and many native American languages, for instance. These rely entirely on the context, so English is not unusual at all in this respect.

(Image: rawpixel.com)