The Mother Tongue (7 page)

Old English had seven classes of strong verbs and three of weak, 5o

THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS

and their endings altered in relation to number, tense, mood, and person (though, oddly, there was no specific future tense). Adjec-tives and pronouns were also variously inflected. A single adjective like
green
or
big
could have up to eleven forms. Even something as basic as the definite article
the
could be masculine, feminine, or neuter, and had five case forms as a singular and four as a plural.

It is a wonder that anyone ever learned to speak it.

And yet for all its grammatical complexity Old English is not quite as remote from modern English as it sometimes appears.

Scip,
boed, bricg,
and
poet
might look wholly foreign but their pronunciations—respectively "ship, "bath, "bridge," and " that"—have not altered in a thousand years. Indeed, if you take twenty minutes to familiarize yourself with the differences in Old English spelling and pronunciation—learning that i corresponds to the modern "ee" sound, that
e
sounds like "ay" and so on— ou can begin to pick your way through a great deal of abstruse looking text. You also find that in terms of sound values, Old English is a much simpler and more reliable language, with every letter dis-tinctly and invariably related to a single sound. There were none of the silent letters or phonetic inconsistencies that bedevil modern English spelling.

There was, in short, a great deal of subtlety and flexibility built into the language, and once they learned to write, their literary outpouring was both immediate and astonishingly assured. This Renaissance. "The light of learning then shone more brightly in Northumbria than anywhere else in Europe," Simeon Potter noted without hyperbole in his masterly study,
Our Language.
Had it not been for Alcuin much of our ancient history would almost certainly have been lost. "People don't always realise," wrote Kenneth Clark

[in
Civilisation,
page i8], "that only three or four antique manu-51

THE MOTHER TONGUE

scripts of the Latin authors are still in existence: our whole knowl-edge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne."

In fact, they were so closely related that they could probably broadly understand each other's languages, though this must have been small comfort to the monks, farmers, and ravaged women who suffered their pillaging. These attacks on Britain were part of a huge, uncoordinated, and mysterious expansion by the Vikings (or Norsemen or Danes, as history has variously called them). No one knows why these previously mild and pastoral people suddenly became aggressive and adventurous, but for two centuries they were everywhere—in Russia, Iceland, Britain, France, Ireland, Greenland, even North America. At first, in Britain, the attacks consisted of smash-and-grab raids, mostly along the east coast.

The famous monastery of Lindisfarne was sacked in 793 and the nearby monastery of Jarrow, where Bede had labored, fell the following year.

Then, just as mysteriously, the raids ceased and for half a cen-tury the waters around the British Isles were quiet. But this was, to dust off that useful cliché, the quiet before the storm, a period in which the inhabitants must have watched the coast with unease.

In 85o their worst fears were confirmed when some 350 heavily laden Viking ships sailed up the Thames, setting off a series of battles for control of territory that went on for years, rolling across the British landscape rather like two wrestlers, with fortune favor-ing first one side and then the other. Finally, after an unexpected English victory in 878, a treaty was signed establishing the Danelaw, a line running roughly between London and Chester, dividing control of Britain between the English in the south and the Danes in the north. To this day it remains an important lin-guistic dividing line between northern and southern dialects.

52

THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS

ries, with the people speaking a Norwegian dialect called Norn until well into the 1700s , of which some 1,500 dialect words survive to this day—but for the most part the two linguistic sides under-
scream, trust, lift, take, husband, sky.
Sometimes these replaced Old English words, but often they took up residence alongside them, adding a useful synonym to the language, so that today in as with
shriek
and
screech, no
and nay, or
ditch
and
dike,
and sometimes they went a further step and acquired slightly different meanings, as with
scatter
and
shatter, skirt
and
shirt, whole
and
hale, bathe
and
bask, stick
and
stitch, hack
and
hatch, wake
and
watch, break
and
breach.

But most remarkable of all, the English adopted certain gram-them, they had given their name to a French province, Nor-mandy. But unlike the Celts, they had abandoned their language and much of their culture and become French in manner and 53

THE MOTHER TONGUE

speech. So totally had they given up their language, in fact, that not a single Norse word has survived in Normandy, apart from some place-names. That is quite remarkable when you consider that the Normans bequeathed io,000 words to English. The va-riety of French the Normans spoke was not the speech of Paris, but a rural dialect, and its divergence from standard French be-came even more pronounced when it took root in England—so much so that historians refer to it not as French, but as Anglo- Norman. This, as we shall see in ,a moment, had important con-sequences for the English language of today and may even have contributed to its survival.

No king of England spoke En ish for the next 30o years. It was not until 1399, wit the accession of enry IV, hat England had g

a ruler whose mother ton ue was n is One by one English earls and bishops were replaced by Normans (though in some instances not for several years). French-speaking craftsmen, de-signers, cooks, scholars, and scribes were brought to Britain. Even so, for the common people life went on. They were almost certainly not alarmed that their rulers spoke a foreign tongue. It was a commonplace in the past. Canute from the century before was Danish and even Edward the Confessor, the last but one Anglo- Saxon king, spoke French as his first tongue. As recently as the eighteenth century, England happily installed a German king, George I, even though he spoke not a word of English and reigned for thirteen years without mastering his subjects' language. Com-mon people did not expect to speak like their masters any more than they expected to live like them. Norman society had two tiers: the French-speaking aristocracy and the English-speaking peas-antry. Not surprisingly, the linguistic influence of the Normans tended to focus on matters of court, government, fashion, and high living. Meanwhile, the English peasant continued to eat, drink, work, sleep, and play in English.