The Mother Tongue (8 page)

The breakdown can be illustrated in two ways. First, the more humble trades tended to have Anglo-Saxon names (baker, miller, shoemaker), while the more skilled trades adopted French names ( mason, painter, tailor). At the same time, animals in the field usually were called by English names (sheep, cow, ox), but once 54

THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS

cooked and brought to the table, they were generally given French names (beef, mutton, veal, bacon).*

Anglo-Norman differed from the standard French of Paris in several ways. For one thing, Parisian French, called Francien, tended to avoid the "w" sound. So while the Normans pronounced
quit, question, quarter,
and other such words as if they were spelled
kwit, kwestion,
and
kwarter,
Parisians pronounced them with a hard "k" sound. Equally, standard French used
cha- in
some constructions where the Normans used
ca-.
Thus we have such differences as carry/charrier,
cauldron/chaudron, cattle/chattel.

(Our word
chattel
was adopted later.) The Normans used the suf-fixes
-arie
and
-orie,
while the French used
-aire
and
-oire,
which gives us such pairings as
victory/victoire
and
salary/saloire.
Anglo- Norman kept the
s
in words such as
August, forest,
and
beast,
while Francien gradually forsook them for a circumflex: Aout,
fora,
bête.
[All of these cited by Baugh and Cable, A
History of the
English Language,
page 176]

Norman French, like the Germanic tongues before it, made a last-ing impact on English vocabulary. Of the 10,000 words we adopted from Norman French, some three quarters are still in use—among them
justice, jury, felony, traitor, petty, damage, prison, marriage,
sovereign, parliament, govern, prince, duke, viscount, baron.
In

-countess, duke, duchess,
and
baron,
but not—perhaps a bit oddly—

king
and
queen.
At the same time, many English words were adopted into French. Sometimes it is not possible to tell who was borrowing from whom—whether, for example, we t00k
aggressive
from the Normans or they took their
agressiffrom
us, or whether the English
intensity
came before or after the Norman
intensity .
In other matters, such as syntax, their influence was less dramatic.

Only a few expressions like
court martial, attorney general,
and
body politic
reflect the habits of French word ordering.

* It should be noted that Burchfield, in
The English Language,
calls this distinction between field names and food names "an enduring myth" on the grounds that the French terms were used for living animals as well (he cites Samuel Johnson referring to a cow as "a beef "), but even so I think the statement above is a reasonable generalization.

55

THE MOTHER TONGUE

Because English had no official status, for three centuries it drifted. Without a cultural pivot, some place to set a standard, differences in regional usage became more pronounced rather than less. As C. L. Barber notes: "Early Middle English texts give the impression of a chaos of dialects, without many common conven-tions in pronunciation or spelling, and with wide divergences in grammar and vocabulary."
[The Story of Language,
page 152]

And yet it survived. If there is one uncanny thing about the English language, it is its incredible persistence. In retrospect it seems unthinkable to us now that it might have been otherwise, but we forget just how easily people forsake their tongues—as the Celts did in Spain and France, as the Vikings did in Normandy, and
as
the Italians, Poles, Africans, Russians, and countless others all did in America. And yet in Britain, despite the constant buf- Its lowly position almost certainly helped English to become a simpler, less inflected language. As Baugh and Cable note: "By making English the language mainly of uneducated people, the Norman conquest made it easier for grammatical changes to go forward unchecked." In Old English, as we have seen, most verbs were not only highly inflected, but also changed consonants from one form to the next, but these were gradually regularized and only one such form survives to this
day—was/were.
An explicit example of this simplification can be seen in the
Peterborough Chronicle, a
yearly account of Anglo-Saxon life kept by the monks at Peterbor-ough. Because of turmoil in the country, work on the chronicle was suspended for twenty-three years between 1131 and 1154, just at the period when English was beginning to undergo some of its most dramatic changes. In the earlier section, the writing is in Old English. But when the chronicle resumes in 1154, the language is immeasurably simpler—gender is gone, as are many declensions and conjugations, and the spelling has been greatly simplified. To modern eyes, the earlier half l00ks to be a foreign language; the 56

THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS

later half is unmistakably English. The period of Middle English had begun.

Several events helped. One was the loss by the hapless King John of Normandy to the French crown in 120 4. Isolated from the rest of Europe by the English Channel, the Norman rulers grad-ually came to think of themselves not as displaced Frenchmen but
as
Englishmen. Intermarrying between Normans and British con-tributed to the sense of Englishness. The children of these unions learned French from their fathers, but English from their mothers and nannies. Often they were more comfortable with English. The Normans, it must be said, were never hostile to English. William the Conqueror himself tried to learn it, though without success, and there was never any campaign to suppress it.

Gradually, English reasserted itself. French remained, until 1362, the language of Parliament and, for somewhat longer, of the courts, but only for official purposes—rather like Latin in the Cath-olic church. For a time, at least up until the age of Chaucer, the two coexisted. Barnett notes that when the Dean of Windsor wrote a letter to Henry IV the language drifted unselfconsciously back and forth between English and French. This was in 1403, three years after the death of Chaucer, so it is clear that French lingered.

And yet it was doomed.

By late in the twelfth century some Norman children were hav-ing to be taught French before they could be sent away to school.

[Crystal,
The English Language,
page 173] By the end of the four-teenth century Oxford University introduced a statute ordering that students be taught at least partly in French "lest the French language be entirely disused." In some court documents of this period the syntax makes it clear that the judgments, though ren-dered in French, had been thought out in English. Those who could afford it sent their children to Paris to learn the more fash-ionable Central French dialect, which had by this time become almost a separate language. There is telling evidence of this in
The
Canterbury Tales,
when Chaucer notes that one of his pilgrims, the Prioress, speaks a version of French known only in London,

"For Frensh of Paris was
to
hir unknowe. - The harsh, clacking, guttural Anglo-French had become a source 57

THE MOTHER TONGUE

of amusement to the people of Paris, and this provided perhaps the ultimate—and certainly the most ironic—blow to the language in England. Norman aristocrats, rather than be mocked for persever-ing with an inferior dialect that many of them ill spoke anyway, began to take an increasing pride in English. So total was this reversal of attitude that when Henry V was l00king for troops to fight with him at Agincourt in 1415, he used the French threat to the English language as a rallying cry.

So English triumphed at last, though of course it was a very different language—in many ways a quite separate language—from the Old English of Alfred the Great or Bede. In fact, Old English would have seemed as incomprehensible to Geoffrey Chaucer as it does to us, so great had been the change in the time of the Nor-mans. It was simpler in grammar, vastly richer in vocabulary.

Alongside the Old English
'motherhood,
we now had
maternity,
with
friendship
we had
amity,
with
brotherhood, fraternity,
and so on.

Under the long onslaught from the Scandinavians and Normans, Anglo-Saxon had taken a hammering. According to one estimate

[Lincoln Barnett, page 97], about 85 percent of the 30,000 Anglo- Saxon words died out under the influence of the Danes and Nor-mans. That means that only about 4,500 Old English words survived—about i percent of the total number of words in the
Oxford English Dictionary.
And yet those surviving words are among the most fundamental words in English: man,
wife, child,
brother, sister, live, fight, love,
drink,
sleep, eat, house,
and so on.

They also include most of the short "function" words of the lan-guage:
to, for, but, and, at, in, on,
and so forth. As a result, at least half the words in almost any sample of modern English writing will be of Anglo-Saxon ori gin. Accordin g to another study cited by day we have an almost instinctive preference for the older Anglo- Saxon phrases. As Simeon Potter has neatly put it: "We feel more at ease getting a
hearty welcome
than after being granted a
cordial
reception."

It is sometimes suggested that our vocabulary is vast because it 58

THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS

was made to be, simply because of the various linguistic influences that swept over it. But in fact this love of variety of expression runs deeper than that. It was already evident in the early poetry of the Anglo-Saxons that they had an intuitive appreciation of words suf-ficient to ensure that even if England had never been invaded again her language would have been rich with synonyms. As Jes-persen notes, in
Beowulf
alone there are thirty-six words for hero, twelve for battle, eleven for ship—in short, probably more than exist today.

It is true that English was immeasurably enriched by the suc-cessive linguistic waves that washed over the British Isles. But it is probably closer to the truth to say that the language we speak today is rich and expressive not so much because new words were im-posed on it as because they were welcomed.

THANKS TO THE
proliferation of English dialects during the period of Norman rule, by the fifteenth century people in one part of England often could not understand people in another part.

William Caxton, the first person to print a book in English, noted the sort of misunderstandings that were common in his day in the preface to
Eneydos in
1 490 in which he related the story of a group of London sailors heading down the River "Tamyse" for Holland who found themselves becalmed in Kent. Seeking food, one of them approached a farmer's wife and "axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys" but was met with blank looks by the wife who answered that she "coude speke no frenshe." The sailors had trav-eled barely fifty miles and yet their language was scarcely recog-nizable to another speaker of English. In Kent, eggs were
eyren
and would remain so for at least another fifty years.