This week, Fourth Estate publishes the paperback edition of This Little Britain, in which Harry Bingham argues for Britain’s leading role in making the modern world a richer, freer, more peaceful, and more democratic place. Taking a particular interest in the many exceptional things that Britain did first, or best, or most, or were the only ones ever to do, This Little Britain focuses on oddities that have spread across the world. Today’s extract focuses on language and literature.
On Language and Literature
SHAW’S POTATO
The playwright and would-be spelling reformer George Bernard Shaw famously pointed out that, using only common English spellings, we could write the word fish as ghoti:
F: gh as in rough
I: o as in women
SH: ti as in nation
Shaw couldn’t have been trying very hard, if this was the best he could come up with. If he’d turned his attention to the other half of Britain’s national dish, he could perfectly well have come up with ghoughbteighpteau for potato:
P: gh as in hiccough
O: ough as in though
T: bt as in debt
A: eigh as in neighbour
T: pt as in pterodactyl
O: eau as in bureau
Other languages have their eccentric spellings, of course, but English is in a league of its own. French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian all spell more or less as they sound. English just isn’t like that. If you heard individual words from this paragraph and were asked to write them out, how would you know to choose more rather than moor or maw? Know rather than no? Would rather than wood? Write rather than right or rite? Or rather than oar, ore or awe? Their rather than they’re or there? You rather than ewe? Course rather than coarse? But rather than butt? In rather than inn? For rather than four, fore or even (for those acquainted with the archaic term for Scottish gypsies) faw? The answer is that, of course, you couldn’t. But nothing happens without a reason, and the strange spellings of English have their reasons too, lurking deep in the heart of Shaw’s potato.
P as in hiccough
The first point to make is that language is human. It’s fallible. Or, not to beat about the bush, it’s full of cock-ups. One such error is hiccough. The word first pops up in Elizabethan English as hickop or hikup, an adaptation of the earlier hicket or hicock. Now it’s pretty clear from all these versions that the word was onomatopoeic, a fair attempt to catch the sounds of a hiccup in letters. But no sooner had the word decided to settle down than people started to assume that a hiccup was some sort of cough. And if a hiccup was a cough, then shouldn’t it be written that way: hiccough, not hiccup? The answer was no, it shouldn’t. Not then, and not now. The error grew nevertheless, until hiccough became at least as common as hiccup. The error is rejected by most dictionaries, but is still common enough that my computer spellcheck accepts both versions. Since people not dictionaries are the ultimate appeal court in these matters, then hiccough is certainly a real enough word, a mistake that’s passed the test of time.
O as in though
Most oddities of English have little to do with straightforward errors. A bigger problem is that English is a living language, and its strangest spellings are often left as residues, like tree rings marking out past phases of growth.
English spellings largely derive from a particular period in British history, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It’s possible to be as precise as this for the simple reason that for the three hundred years or so following the Norman Conquest English had mostly disappeared as a written language. When official documents needed to be written, they’d been written in French or Latin. Thus by the time that English began to reemerge from its long hiding, it was faced with the challenge of adopting a writing system almost, as it were, from scratch.
This could easily have been a recipe for disaster. People tended to spell as they pronounced, and regional accents of the time were very varied. There are more than five hundred spellings recorded for the word through. The word she had more than sixty, including:
- Scae
- Sse
- Sche
- Shae
- Se
- Che
- Shee
- Zhee
- Sheea
- Sheh
- Shey
- Sha
- Sso
- Sco
- Scho
- Schoe
- Show
- Sho
- Shoy
- Schew
- Schw
- Shoe
- Shou
- She
- Su
- Scheo
- Sheo
- Zhe
If you were writing just for your own friends, or to conduct business locally, perhaps none of this might have mattered. But as soon as official records and legal proceedings began using English too, then this kind of variation began to matter a lot; a common approach was called for. Naturally enough, London, home to the court and the senior echelons of the national bureaucracy, became dominant in imposing its spellings, in particular through the most senior bureaucrats of them all, the Masters of Chancery. Over time, they began to stamp their authority on the chaos. Out went all those scheos and sheeas and zhes, to be replaced by she. Out went ich (and many others) to be replaced by I. Because the movers and shakers of London spoke an English drawn mostly from London and the Midlands, our spelling is based largely on those accents.
Those early bureaucrats did a good job. Fifteenth-century English spelling was increasingly systematic and rational — a typical European language. Alas, however, no sooner had the spellings been fixed than pronunciations shifted. The spelling of words like through, rough and right is a perfectly accurate guide to the way these words used to be spoken. But the language has moved on, leaving these old medieval relics behind.
T as in debt
The silent B in debt is another tree ring.
When the Masters of Chancery were working to fix the language, there was a debate between those who thought that all spellings should be phonetic, and those who wanted them to be based on sound etymology. The phonetic camp won out in most cases, but not in all. Debt has a silent B, simply because medieval scholars wanted to point out that the word has its origins in the Latin debere, to owe. So a silent B was added — and never mind the fact that the word actually came from the French dette, which never had a B anywhere near it.
This was a quirky way to justify introducing a totally needless letter, and it was based on a more than generous interpretation of etymology, but there was, at least, an etymological connection, however thin. Medieval scholars were, however, prone to finding connections to the Latin where none actually existed, so our language is littered with plenty of spellings that are unjustifiable on any level. Island doesn’t come from the Latin insula; it comes from an s-free Germanic root. (Compare modern German Eiland.) Anchor, rhyme, scythe, island, numb, ghost and many others derived their oddness from other errors fixed and perpetuated by Renaissance dictionaries.
A as in neighbour
All the problems so far mentioned fade into insignificance compared with the one identified by the A in Shaw’s potato.
Just as the Masters of Chancery were producing the first rational spelling system in English, something was going on to turn all their fine work on its head. This was the Great Vowel Shift, which did exactly what it said on the tin. Before the shift, English vowels had been much the same as their Continental neighbours. The word fine in English used to be pronounced with an ‘ee’ sound, like the Italian fino (‘fee-no’). If a fourteenth-century speaker of English had encountered a sentence like ‘I see my goat is lame — my cow too’, they’d have pronounced it approximately as: ‘Ee say mee gawt ays lahm — mee coo toe.’
This sounds odd to us, but only because we’re not used to it. At least English used its vowels in more or less the way you’d expect given its ancestry. Then, for no known reason, the vowels decided to get up from their fixed positions and wander round till they settled again in new places. The Chaucerian ‘ee’ sound became the modern ‘eye’ sound, the Chaucerian ‘ay’ became the modern ‘ee’, and so on.
The process was both strange and not strange at the same time. In some ways, nothing much could be more ordinary. Language changes. If you want a scone, do you ask for a scohne or a sconn? If you talk about dust, do you use the southern ‘uh’ sound, or the shortened Yorkshire ‘oo’ sound? If a Brummie moves to a new part of the country — Liverpool, say, or Glasgow or Cornwall — they may well start to modify their vowel sounds, almost without noticing it. The Great Vowel Shift was in a way no odder than that — and bear in mind that it took place over two centuries, or the space of five or six medieval lifetimes.
On the other hand, the process is also a little odd. Why did English change so much and its closest neighbours little or not at all? And what propelled the movement? There is no shortage of theories. Social upheavals following the Black Death is one possibility. Another is that as the French-speaking ruling class came to speak English, there was a vogue for a kind of patriotic hypercorrection of French vowel sounds. But no one knows for sure. It’s just one of those things.
The one certainty, however, is that English spellings were fixed before, during and after the shift. A word like polite (around before the shift) simply saw its pronunciation change, from something like pol-eet to the modern pol-ite. But an almost identical word — police — which entered the language after the shift reflects the Continental ‘ee’ sound of its origin. The result, of course, is that there’s no way to tell in advance how a word should be spelled, or how a spelling should be spoken. Fine for those who grow up with the language; murder for those who have to learn it.
T as in pterodactyl
The first recorded reference to a pterodactyl is in Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. In it, Lyell predicts, ‘The ptero-dactyle might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.’Whether pterodactyls could ever have been described as flitting is open to doubt, but what’s significant here is that new words have to be coined for new uses, and that one of the biggest creators of new words is science.
Scientists are only human. They want their coinages to have a bit of class — and what could be more classy than a bit of Latin or (still better) Greek? And since the ancient Greeks were fond of their initial Ps, our language is now adorned with pterodactyls and ptomaine and psychology and many others. The trouble with these introductions, of course, is that English tongues can’t really wrap themselves around such (to us) exotic constructions. So the pronunciation tends to be anglicized, while the spelling resolutely isn’t.
O as in bureau
The final great complicating factor for English is highlighted by the final letter of Shaw’s potato. Bureau is a French word. It has entered English with its pronunciation and spelling more or less intact, but because the French match up vowel sounds and letter combinations differently from us, their words only serve to baffle and complicate our spellings.
That’s not the only problem that can arise, however. Sometimes a new word entered the language — for example, nation, another French borrowing — and English tongues weren’t able to wrap themselves around the foreign sounds. So the French pronunciation, roughly na-see-o(n), becomes corrupted to the comfortable English nay-shun. Creations like this are hideously common. Do you want to guess how many ways there are to create the sh sound in English? You might play safe and say two or three. Or perhaps go wild and suggest five or six. The correct answer is in fact thirteen, as in shed, sure, issue, mansion, passion, ignition, suspicion, ocean, conscious, chaperone, schedule, pshaw and fuchsia.
Potato as in 
That’s now every letter of Shaw’s potato accounted for. Shaw himself so disliked the mess of spellings that he left money in his will for a prize to be awarded for the best new alphabet to take care of English spelling. The winner was a chap called Kingsley Read. As Read saw it, a big part of the problem with English spellings is that there are too few letters for the number of sounds they need to make. There are forty-eight distinct sounds in English, and only twenty-six letters to do their work. The letter A, for example, has at least four jobs to do: ay as in able, a as in at, ah as in alms and or as in all. If English is to be easy to spell, then there should be one sound to a letter, one letter to a sound. Read’s alphabet, the Shavian alphabet, is a rather beautiful creation. It looks like this:
(That’s the start of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in case you missed it.) Alas, however, no one ever used Read’s alphabet. No one ever used Quickscript, his later modification of it. No one has ever used Readspel, Read’s final attempt to get people on his side. And no one ever will.
In the end, weird spellings are only a problem if that’s how you choose to see them. Part of the beauty of English is that its history is visible for all to see. It’s a hybrid between Anglo-Saxon rootstock and Franco-Latinate blooms. It’s a magpie language, acquisitive and reckless. It’s a human language, strewn with errors and eccentricities. It’s a living language, with vowels and pronunciations that shift from age to age. That won’t ever change. The question really is, who’d want it to?
A WORLD OF SQUANTOS
In November 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers made landfall off Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. It wasn’t the best time of year to arrive. The New England winter was more ferocious than anything the predominantly East Anglian settlers were used to. Nor were the precedents exactly encouraging. The first British settlement in North America had disappeared without trace. The second (in Jamestown, Virginia) had survived, but only after terrible loss of life. The Pilgrim Fathers weren’t even well equipped. They were missing basic tools, and were astonishingly ignorant of both agriculture and fishing. Their prospects were lousy, and they knew it. In the words of the colony’s first governor,William Bradford:
And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men?
From that hideous wilderness stepped forth a miracle. In the words of William Bradford again:
Whilst we were busied hereabout,we were interrupted, for there presented himself a savage which caused an alarm. He very boldly came all alone and along the houses straight to the rendezvous, where we intercepted him, not suffering him to go in … He saluted us in English and bade us ‘welcome’.
The ‘savage’ who emerged from the Massachusetts woods had picked up a few words of English from visiting sailors, but the miracle hadn’t yet taken place. The man who bade the settlers welcome took them to meet a second man, Tisquantum, abbreviated to Squanto. And Squanto spoke English; not just a few words, but fluently. Captured by British fishermen some fifteen years before, Squanto had been carried off to London, where he’d learned English and received training as a guide and interpreter, before managing to escape home again on a returning boat.
The unlikelihood of this sequence of events is simply astounding. What are the odds that a bunch of under-skilled and under-equipped Englishmen should pitch up and find perhaps the most fluent native American speaker of English anywhere on the continent? Squanto didn’t just offer a taste of home. He taught the settlers the things they needed to know. He showed them how to sow their corn seeds with little bits of chopped fish for fertilizer. He taught them how to fish and how to distinguish what was edible from what was not. It’s quite likely that Squanto saved the colony.
The story makes a point. Back then, English was a minor language, with limited projection beyond England’s own boundaries. Today, it is the world’s own language. Back then, it was the unlikelihood of finding a Squanto which made his appearance so miraculous. Today, a traveller could pitch up almost any- where — any country, any coast, any continent — and hope to find some words of English spoken, by at least some members of the local community. The miracle today is not the rarity of English, but its universality.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that English has become the world’s most commonly spoken language. It hasn’t. A billion Mandarin Chinese speakers dwarf the 350 million or so native English speakers. But that misses the point. To be a global language is to be the preferred means of communication between two parties from different language communities, and it’s here where English is exceptional. On top of the 350 million native speakers, there are perhaps another 400 million speakers in former colonies, plus a billion or so speakers — from Japanese tourists to Swedish businessman — who have simply adopted the language as the simplest means of international communication. This number is growing all the time, not least in China, which will soon have more English speakers than the combined total of all English-speaking countries. No other language remotely compares with the global significance of English. Its lead is increasing all the time.
It’s always tempting to romanticize the language’s dominance, to start muttering about Shakespeare and Chaucer, the flexible euphony of our tongue. But Shakespeare, Schmakespeare. The world speaks English because of British gunboats (and emigrants) in the nineteenth century and American hegemony in the twentieth. If those Mayflower settlers had happened to speak Ubykh, a Caucasian language with eighty-one consonants and only three vowels, or perhaps Rotokas, a Papua New Guinea language with just six consonants and five vowels, then the world would quite likely be speaking those fine languages today.
Meanwhile, English is spreading in other ways too. The Oxford English Dictionary currently lists about half a million words. Its American equivalent, Webster’s, comes up with a roughly similar figure of 450,000. The two dictionaries have, however, much less of an overlap than you might guess. The OED contains more archaic or regional British terms,Webster’s more Americanisms. Putting the two dictionaries together would probably produce an expanded word count of some 750,000 words. (I say probably: no one has ever bothered to work it out.) But even this total excludes huge swaths of English. It excludes terms from the various world Englishes (Singapore English, Jamaican English, Indian English, etc.). It excludes much slang and regional dialect. It excludes acronyms, even those that are usually used as words (CIA, NATO, the EU, and so on). It excludes most flora and fauna. If all these were added in, the word count would probably reach a million. If all scientific and technical terms were added, the count might be twice that. By comparison, French has an ‘official’ dictionarybased word count of less than 100,000 words, German around 190,000.
The sheer scale of its vocabulary is one of the key reasons why other languages are fighting a hopeless battle to keep English terminology out. It is all very well for the Académie Française to invent new French terms to replace Anglo-Saxon intruders, autofinancement for cashflow, for example. But what about those million or so technical and scientific terms — bluetooth protocol, polypropylene, iPod, troposphere? Is the Académie really going to invent new terms for those and all 999,997 others? In 2004, The Economist quoted research which suggested that two-thirds of all Internet content is in English. Scientific and technical journals are also disproportionately anglophone. English isn’t just pushing other languages back, it’s eating into them too.
What of the future? There are roughly two schools of thought. The first takes Latin as its example. The break-up of the Roman Empire led to the break-up of the language. Romanian, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese litter the linguistic map, the ruined remains of a once great empire. Romanian and Portuguese speakers may both be speaking linear descendants of the same language, but the languages have long since become mutually unintelligible.
Is this the fate of English? There’s plenty of evidence to suggest it. After all, it’s already slightly misleading to speak of one single language called ‘English’. We have at the very least Indian English, American English, British English, Nigerian English, Philippines English, Canadian English, Pakistani English, Australian English, and so on. (The order of terms in that list might not be a conventional one, but it’s perfectly logical: the terms are arranged in descending order, by size of the English language community.) But this list describes broad types only. Within every genus, there is an abundance of species. Not just Scouse English, but Caribbean Scouse, Pakistani Scouse, Irish Scouse, and so forth. If you sat in a Singaporean student café, among students speaking their version of English, you probably wouldn’t understand what was being said. Perhaps the English break-up is already happening. Perhaps the rot has already set in.
Or then again, perhaps not. The counter-argument is simple: call it the eBay paradigm. In a world of highly competitive markets, eBay is rare and extraordinary in having virtually no meaningful competition. How come? Simply because eBay was the first, and as such it started out with the most buyers and the most sellers. Buyers naturally flock to the system with the most products to choose from. Sellers naturally gravitate to the outlet with the largest number of buyers. Unless eBay does something horrendous to mess up, its position is and will remain unrivalled.What’s true of beanie toys and second-hand clothes is all the more true of a universal language. If you’re an ambitious student keen to acquire a second tongue, which one does it make most sense to master? Obviously the one that gives access to the largest possible number of fellow speakers. So the larger the number of English speakers, the greater the incentive for others to learn it. Dominance feeds dominance.
There perhaps lies the real point about that Singaporean café. If you were sitting there, sipping your bandung and picking at your fish-head curry, it’s likely that your fellow diners would notice your difficulty in making sense of their conversation. So they’d probably just shift the way they spoke. From the idiosyncrasies of Singaporean youth English to something like an international Standard English. That Standard English would still be noticeably local in flavour. It would certainly be American tinted. But you’d understand it. They’d understand you. That’s the point of a universal language. It makes one world of us all: a world of Squantos.
OF COWS AND BEEF
The word Welsh derives from an Anglo-Saxon root, Wealas, which means slave or foreigner. There, in a nutshell, is all you need to know about the politics of sixth-century Britain. The incoming Angles, Jutes and Saxons had turned the native British Celts into foreigners in their own land; not quite slaves perhaps, but humiliatingly subject all the same.
Anglo-Saxon rule didn’t extend merely to land and territory; it covered language too. Although a certain amount of intermarriage must have taken place between invaders and ‘slaves’, that intermarriage was reflected hardly at all in the spoken word. Virtually no Celtic words survived the onslaught, and those that did are telling. Modern English words such as tor, crag, combe, cairn, cromlech, dolmen and loch are all Celtic, and they all describe features of the landscape which simply hadn’t existed in the flatlands from which the invaders had come. The newcomers took the words they absolutely needed and ditched the rest. Only a few dozen Celtic words survive in English today.
While the Celts always referred to their invaders as Saxons, the newcomers themselves began to call themselves Anglii, their new country Anglia, and (in due course) their language Englisc. It’s that language which we speak today. Of the hundred most commonly used words in modern English, almost all are Old English in origin, including all but one of the top twenty-five. (In order: the, of, and, a, to, in, is, you, that, it, he, was, for, on, are, as, with, his, they, I, at, be, this, have, from. The Old Norse intruder in this list is they. The word the appears in this book some 5,850 times.) These twenty-five words make up about one third of all printed material in English. The top hundred words make up about a half. The first French-derived word doesn’t appear until number at seventy-six.
You can tell a lot about a society from the language it speaks. The language of the Anglii was domestic, rural, warlike, concrete. Words such as man, daughter, friend and son are Old English. So are dog, mouse, wood, swine, horse. So are plough, earth, shepherd, ox, sheep. So are love, lust, sing, night, day, sun. So are words such as so, are, words, such, as. The one linguistic invasion of real significance in those years was Christianity. As the pagan Anglo-Saxons began to convert to the new religion, new words (mostly Greek or Roman in origin) crept in to handle the new concepts: bishop, monk, nun, altar, angel, pope, apostle, psalm, school. The number of new words was small, less than 1 per cent of the existing vocabulary, but they extended the language by giving it ways of expressing new thoughts, new concepts.
With the language to do it, the Anglii began to produce a literature of their own, probably a great one. If people wanted to preserve their work, they wrote not in English but in Latin. As a consequence, most work that was written in English has been lost for ever. Fortunately, though, enough of the old literature has survived for us to get a feel of what was lost. Beowulf is the first great surviving work of literature written in English, a story of strange monsters and Dark Age realpolitik. Here, in Seamus Heaney’s translation, is the arrival of the monster Grendel at the feasting hall:
In off the moors, down through the mist-bands
God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
The bane of the race of men roamed forth,
hunting for a prey in the high hall.
Under the cloud-murk he moved towards it
until it shone above him, a sheer keep
of fortified gold. Nor was that the first time
he had scouted the grounds of Hrothgar’s dwelling —
although never in his life, before or since,
did he find harder fortune or hall-defenders.
This extract gives us the true feel of Anglo-Saxon: gritty, alliterative, forceful, direct. In Heaney’s words: ‘What I had always loved was a kind of four-squareness about the utterance … an understanding that assumes you share an awareness of the perilous nature of life and are yet capable of seeing it steadily and, when necessary, sternly. There is an undeluded quality about the Beowulf poet’s sense of the world.’
Warrior-like it may have been, but Anglo-Saxon almost died nevertheless — not just once, but twice. The first major threat came with the Viking invasions when, but for Alfred the Great, we might well have ended up speaking Norse, not English. The second near-death experience came with the Norman Conquest in 1066. Because the new king, William, had been hard up for cash, he’d paid for much of his help with pledges of English land. When victory came, those pledges were redeemed. All of a sudden, every position of power in England was filled by French speakers. The new noblemen spoke French. Bishops and abbots spoke French. The court spoke French. The king made a short-lived effort to learn English, then gave up and stuck to French. As an official language, English completely vanished. In its written form, its disappearance was almost total.
For centuries, a kind of linguistic apartheid reigned. English peasants continued to speak English. The court continued to speak French. But in between the top and bottom layers of society, mixing was inevitable, as Normans married English, as French babies were cared for by local women.At the level where the two societies met, the English language underwent the most rapid — and important — transformation of its life.
A torrent of new words poured in from the French, thousands of them, far more than had ever come from Norse or Celtic. The Normans brought a new kind of justice and administration to the land. Arrest, attorney, bail, bailiff, felony, fine, pardon, perjury and verdict all come from the French. They brought new concepts of chivalry: courtesy, damsel, honour, romance, tournament, chivalry. The arts, science, the domestic scene — all borrowed heavily from French words: music, paper, melody, grammar, calendar, ointment, pantry, lamp, curtain, chimney. And while the English worked the fields tending the oxen or cows, sheep, calves, deer and pigs (all English words), it was as often as not their French masters who got to eat the resulting beef, mutton, veal, venison and pork (all French ones).
On the whole, these new words didn’t replace the older English ones, they sat alongside them. That’s why the language now has so many alternatives: the fancy French model and the plainer English one. For example, the English ask sits beside the French question, interrogate, demand. The English king rubs shoulders with royal, regal, sovereign. We have English hands but do French manual work. For three hundred years such words poured over the Channel, leaving English immeasurably enriched, a different language.
It wasn’t just new words, it was new ways of writing too. Compare these two bits of verse, one French, one English.
Foy porter, honneur garder
Et pais querir, oubeir
Doubter, servir, et honnourer
Vous vueil jusques au morir
Dame sans per.
(I want to stay faithful, guard your honour / Seek peace, obey / Fear, serve and honour you / Until death / Peerless lady — Guillaume de Machaut.)
And the English one:
Summer is y-comen in,
Loude sing, cuckoo!
Groweth seed and bloweth mead
And spring’th the woode now —
Sing cuckoo!
Ewe bleateth after lamb,
Low’th after calfe cow.
Bullock starteth, bucke farteth.
Merry sing, cuckoo! (Anon)
The French verse is smooth, melodious, liquid. It is clever writing. Its themes are courtly love, honour and chivalry; its principal sound effect coming from that smoothly repeated soft rhyme. The English verse is the exact opposite. It’s earthy, lusty and crude. It talks about animals and farts. It’s a language at home in the fields, not the court. It uses rhyme, but does so not in a smooth and flowing way like the French, but in a way designed to make the most of the natural swing and rhythm of spoken English. That old Anglo-Saxon taste for alliteration is still there (calf / cow, bullock / buck). This is a language that enjoys its own sound effects; the one thing it won’t do is stay polite and well mannered.
The point isn’t that one form of writing is better than the other. The point is that English writers suddenly faced a huge expansion in their choice of how to write. They could be lusty, earthy, crude, jaunty. Or they could be Latinate, posh, abstract, clever. Or, like Chaucer and Shakespeare, they could mix and match, moving from the earthy to the sublime and back again. That expressive richness has been the language’s greatest resource, and it has been core to the achievements of its greatest writers.
That choice of how to write is still with us today. Britain’s two best-known poets of recent times have been Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin. Here is Ted Hughes, writing about a ewe having problems giving birth:
I caught her with a rope. Laid her, head uphill
And examined the lamb. A blood-ball swollen
Tight in its black felt, its mouth gap
Squashed crooked, tongue stuck out, black-purple,
Strangled by its mother. I felt inside,
Past the noose of mother-flesh, into the
slippery Muscled tunnel, fingering for a hoof …
This is Anglo-Saxon in modern clothes. Hughes is earthy, concrete, in-yer-face. He uses compound nouns, alliteration and thumping stresses. It’s verse that lives in the fields, and raises two fingers to the court.
Here, in contrast, is the way Philip Larkin writes about animals — in his case, retired racehorses.
Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps
Two dozen distances sufficed
To fable them: faint afternoons
Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,
Whereby their names were artificed
To inlay faded, classic Junes …
This is pure French. The language is Latinate, high-flown, smooth and elegant; a language comfortable with the Royal Enclosure, not the dung and straw of the stable yard.
In short, English became — and remained — a language in which you could swear like a German, or seduce like a Frenchman. You could make war using one vocabulary, and philosophize with another. No other European language has that suppleness, that blend of Germanic directness and Latinate elegance. If our literary tradition is as great as any in the world, then that greatness owes much to the language that gave it birth.
HALF-CHEWED LATIN
It began with the Black Death.
In Bristol, where it struck first in 1348, some 45 per cent of the population died. Across the country, the death toll was lower, but still vast. As the country fell dying, the only growth industry was that of burial, and since priests were constantly in contact with the sick and dying, the death rate among the clergy probably exceeded even that of the general population. In January 1349, the Bishop of Bath and Wells wrote, ‘Priests cannot be found for love nor money … to visit the sick and administer the last sacraments.’ Since those last sacraments would have been viewed as of vital importance in Catholic England, the problem was a serious one. Dreadful times bring drastic remedies. The bishop went on to say that, in the absence of a priest, it would be proper for the dying to confess their sins to a lay person or even (steady on!) ‘to a woman if no man is available’.
Perhaps it was this new DIY approach to dying which fostered new ways of thinking, or perhaps it was simply the collision between hard times and a complacent Church. At all events, the age produced its revolutionary, an Oxford scholar named John Wyclif. Wyclif began to compare the Church he saw around him with the words of scripture, and he found the Church wanting. He wrote, ‘Were there a hundred popes and all the friars turned to cardinals, their opinions on faith should not be accepted except in so far as they are founded on scripture itself.’
Logically, then, if scripture was so important, it should be available to everyone — and available in English, not Latin. In our own secular times, it’s hard to get overexcited by such a suggestion, but in a world where it was not altogether clear whether Church or state exerted more power,Wyclif ’s proposal was revolutionary, a clear threat to the status quo.
Wyclif didn’t just talk about what ought to be done, he made sure that it was done. A group of scholars, working in line with Wyclif ’s doctrines, began to translate the Bible. It was by no means the first time in European history that a vernacular translation had been produced, but it was the first time that a complete translation had been produced by serious scholars working in explicit defiance of Church doctrine. To offer a contemporary analogy, it was as if Wyclif and his fellows were seeking to introduce the freedoms of the Internet to a society that had long known only state-owned media. The English language was the battering ram. The result, one day, would be the Protestant Reformation itself.
Yet for all Wyclif ’s thundering denunciations of the Church, those first attempts at translation were oddly timorous. It was just as if, when it came to the point, the translators didn’t quite have the nerve to leave the original text behind. Here, for instance, is a chunk taken from the first psalm.
Blisful the man, that went not awei in the counseil of unpitouse, and in the wei off sinful stod not; and in the chayer of pestilence sat not, But in the lawe of the Lord his wil; and in the lawe of hym he shal sweteli thenke dai and nygt.
Even putting aside the archaic spellings, this text reads more like half-chewed Latin than proper English. But it was a start. Its authors must have recognized the weakness of that early version, because no sooner had the first translation been finished than a new and better one was begun. Those translations were transcribed by hand, then disseminated by wandering Lollard preachers. (Lollard, from the Middle Dutch word meaning ‘a babbler of nonsense’, came to be applied pejoratively to all Wyclif ’s followers, who then came to embrace the term enthusiastically.)
In a land where books were rare and precious, where the language of salvation had always been incomprehensible to the vast bulk of the population, those Bibles must have been the most extraordinary experience: liberating, poetic, exciting, inspiring. Many parish priests, indeed, would have understood next to nothing of the Latin that they had so solemnly intoned in church. With Wyclif ’s new Bibles, weavers and housewives were suddenly being let into knowledge of God’s word itself, secrets that had previously been the property of only a tiny handful.
Inevitably, of course, the movement was suppressed.Wyclif ’s manuscripts were burned and the Lollards themselves arrested, often killed. But just as today the tide of technology tends to favour the Internet over those seeking to erect barriers against it, so too did the invention of the printing press shift things decisively in favour of revolution.Wyclif ’s translations had had to be copied, slowly and painfully, by hand. Those that came after him in England and (particularly) Germany could churn out copies by the thousand. Costs fell, print runs increased. By 1526, William Tyndale, heavily influenced by Martin Luther, printed three thousand copies of his English language New Testament, then sold each copy for as little as four shillings. The authorities could no more track down and burn each copy than they could order trees to hold their leaves in autumn. An English-speaking God had finally, decisively arrived.
As far as British exceptionalism is concerned the story ends there. An Englishman, John Wyclif, inaugurated a movement that would lead to the most important development in the Christian Church since the split between Catholic and Orthodox. That movement then shifted its centre of gravity eastwards to Germany, and England played no more than a secondary role in what followed. Yet to end the story at that point leaves off, at least from a literary point of view, its conclusion.
As we know, Henry VIII broke with Rome and, on his death, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, converted the English Church into a genuinely Protestant one, something it had not been during Henry’s reign. During the six-year reign of Edward VI, around sixty new versions of the Bible were released.More followed under Elizabeth, then James. Compared with the old days, this was liberation indeed, but a troubling one all the same. It was all very well to write the gospels in the language of ploughboys, but the translations couldn’t all be equally good. Which ones were right, which wrong? It was time to set up a committee.
The committee in question was a bureaucrats’ daydream. Fifty-four translators were appointed, split across six working groups, who toiled away for six years. The results were fed into yet another committee, a review committee, comprising scholars from Oxford, Cambridge and London. The review panel spent nine months in honing their texts. The result of their labours, the Authorised Version of the Bible (or the King James Bible), could have been a bureaucratic disaster, a hotchpotch of muddle and compromise. It was nothing of the sort. It has become, deservedly, one of the great monuments of English.
The secret of its success was a simple one. All the committees, but most especially the final review committee, paid close attention to what would sound good when read aloud. Furthermore, keeping to their mandate of making scriptures accessible, the translators stuck to a honed-down lexicon of just eight thousand words. (Shakespeare, by contrast, uses some twenty thousand.) The result was grand, spare, sonorous and easy to understand. Here, for example, are the famous words from John’s Gospel, given in some of the major versions of the Bible up to this point:
AN ANGLO-SAXON VERSION (995): ‘God lufode middan-eard swa, dat he seade his an-cennedan sunu, dat nan ne forweorde de on hine gely ac habbe dat ece lif.’
WYCLIF (1380): ‘For god loued so the world; that he gaf his oon bigetun sone, that eche man that bileueth in him perisch not: but haue euerlastynge liif.’
TYNDALE (1534): ‘For God so loveth the worlde, that he hath geven his only sonne, that none that beleve in him, shuld perisshe: but shuld have everlastinge lyfe.’
KING JAMES (1611): ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Sonne: that whosoever beleeveth in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.’
Among these different versions, Wyclif ’s words, with their strange spellings and disconcerting rhythms, seem to us like ancient history. The Anglo-Saxon is ancient history. Tyndale’s version rings out almost as clear and modern as the King James version. But it is only in its final appearance that these lines find their feet; meaning, rhythm and weight coming together in perfect balance.
That Bible in that version is one of the great monuments of our, or any, literature. It, every bit as much as Shakespeare, has shaped the language we use today.Whether we are fruitful and multiply or are at our last gasp, whether we serve two masters or cast our pearls before swine, whether we live by bread alone or off the fat of the land that flows with milk and honey, then in this den of thieves (for by their fruit shall we know them) we are quoting the Bible. If we have ears to hear, if nation should rise against nation, if we pass by on the other side, if we kick against the pricks, if we are full of good works or a law unto ourselves, if we say, ‘Doctor, heal thyself,’ and if we take up our beds and walk (doubtless escorting the poor whom we have always with us), if we are present in spirit, if we suffer fools gladly, if we cry ‘Oh death, where is thy sting?’ then (be of good cheer) we are quoting the Bible. In short, where two or three are gathered together, we can but find that we live, move and have our being in the world that Wyclif, Tyndale and the King James translators created.
The influence of that Bible lies in far more than just a couple of hundred famous phrases. As I was writing this chapter, I happened to pick up a copy of my third novel, The Sons of Adam, where I came across the following sentence: ‘Tom would be happy if all the kings of the earth had been turned overnight into ordinary people: shoe-shine boys, oil-riggers, commercial travellers, bums.’ That phrase ‘the kings of the earth’ is straight from the Authorised Version (Revelation 6:15 if you care to check) and it isn’t standard English today. ‘All the kings in the world’ would be more normal, or perhaps even ‘Every king on the planet’. But I had wanted a grander phrase than that, something to point up a contrast with the ‘ordinary people’ that followed. I’ve probably never read the relevant bit of Revelation and I certainly didn’t consciously reach for the language of King James, yet because I was after something sonorous, grand and spare, my subconscious took me there anyway — just as thousands of other writers have been led, wittingly or unwittingly, to the exact same source. That’s influence. That’s greatness.
Remove the tart from the oven and carefully crack the quail’s eggs evenly over the pancetta layer (the shells have much more give than our more familiar brittle chicken shells). Return to the oven for just long enough for the eggs to solidify, which will be 4 or 5 minutes. The pancetta should now be getting crisp and dark too. It is a matter of a few minutes, though, so keep a close eye on the oven.
Today on Fifth Estate we feature a special Q&A with Bob Miller, President and Publisher of HarperStudio in New York. Launched last year, HarperStudio has been hailed as a radical and innovative experiment challenging traditional publishing models. Recently, we were given the chance to ask Bob a few questions about himself and his latest publishing venture. 
traditional royalty). We’re also trying to get booksellers to buy non-returnably, and focusing our marketing online. The lower advance/profit share approach has meant that out of the first 50 titles we’ve acquired, more than 40 have been generated from some direct relationship with an author, as opposed to from winning an auction in a multiple submission. We’ve managed to entice several major booksellers into going non-returnable with us, but we’ve had to offer a choice of returnable/non-returnable, since the mass merchant accounts won’t consider non-returnable, and many of the indies can’t afford the risk. We’re having a lot of fun with the online marketing, and some early successes. But we clearly aren’t the only publishers working in that direction.
