The Mother Tongue (9 page)

This was a period of the most enormous and rapid change in English, as Caxton himself noted when he wrote: “And certaynly our langage now used varyeth ferre [far] from that which was used and spoken when I was borne.” Caxton was born just twenty-two years after Chaucer died, yet in the space of that time the English of London moved from being medieval to modern. The difference is striking. Where even now we can understand Chaucer only with a fair lavishing of footnotes, Caxton can be as easily followed as Shakespeare. Caxton's spellings often look curious to us today, but the vocabulary is little changed, and we can read him at more or less normal speed, as when he writes: “I was sittyng in my study [when] to my hande came a lytle booke in frenshe, which late was translated oute of latyn by some noble clerke of fraunce. . . .”

Even so, English by Chaucer's time had already undergone many consequential changes. The most notable is that it had lost most of its inflections. Gender had disappeared in the north of England and was on its knees in the south. Adjectives, which had once been inflected up to eleven ways, now had just two inflections, for singular and plural (e.g., a fressh floure, but fresshe floures), but even here there was a growing tendency to use one form all the time, as we do today.

Sometimes words were modified in one grammatical circumstance but left untouched in another. That is why we have
knife
with an
f
but
knives
with a
v.
Other such pairs are
half/halves, grass/graze, grief/grieve, calf/calves.
Sometimes there was a spelling change as well, as with the second vowel in
speech
and
speak.
Sometimes the pronunciation changed, as between
bath
and
bathe
and as with the “s” in
house
becoming a “z” in
houses.
And sometimes, to the eternal confusion of non-English speakers, these things happened all together, so that we have not only the spelling doublet
life/lives
but also the pronunciation doublet “lÄ«ves” and “lÄ­ves” as in “a cat with nine lives lives next door.” Sometimes, too, conflicting regional usages have left us with two forms of the word, such as
fox
with an
f,
but
vixen
with a
v,
or given us two spellings for words, such as
phial
and
vial.
And sometimes, as we shall see later, they left us with some of the mostly wildly unphonetic spellings of any language in the world.

Although East Midlands was the preeminent dialect, not all East Midlands forms triumphed. The practice in London of placing
-n
or
-en
on the end of present indicative verbs was gradually driven out by the southern practice of using
-th,
so that
loven
became
loveth,
for instance, and this in turn was eventually driven out by the northern
-s
or
-es
ending, as in the modern form
loves.
Why this northern provincialism should gradually have taken command of a basic verb form is an enduring mystery. It may simply be that the
-s
form made for smoother spoken English. In any case, by Shakespeare's time it was much more common in speech than in writing, though Shakespeare himself freely used both forms, sometimes employing
goes,
sometimes
goeth.

Casualness of usage and style was a hallmark of the Middle and early modern English periods. Chaucer sometimes used
doughtren
for the plural of
daughters
and sometimes
doughtres,
sometimes
yeer
and sometimes
yeres.
Like other writers of the period, he appeared to settle on whichever form first popped into his head, even at the risk of being inconsistent from one paragraph to the next.

But, I must quickly interject, a problem with interpreting Chaucer is that none of his original manuscripts survive. Everything we have of his was copied by medieval scribes, who sometimes took extraordinary liberties with the text, seeing themselves more as editors than as copyists. At the same time, they were often strikingly careless. For example, the Clerk's Tale contains the line “Ther stood a throop of site delitable,” but in various manuscripts
site
is rendered as
sighte, syth, sigh,
and
cite.
It is impossible at this remove to know which was the word Chaucer intended. Literally scores of such confusions and inconsistencies clutter the manuscripts of most poets of the age, which makes an analysis of changes in the language problematic. It is often noted that Chaucer's spelling was wildly inconsistent:
Cunt,
if you will forgive an excursion into crudity (as we so often must when dealing with Chaucer), is spelled in at least five ways, ranging from
kent
to
quainte.
So it isn't possible to say whether the inconsistency lies with Chaucer or his copyists or both.

Other forms, such as plural pronouns, had yet to settle. Chaucer used
hi, hem,
and
her
for
they, them,
and
their
(
her
for
their
survived up to the time of Shakespeare, who used it at least twice in his plays). Similarly
his,
where we now use
its,
was the usual form until about 1600, which is why the King James Bible is full of constructions like “If the salt has lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?” Similarly,
which
was until about the same time often used of animate things as well as inanimate, as in the form of the Lord's Prayer still used in England: “Our Father which art in heaven.”

In Old English there were at least six endings that denoted plurals, but by Shakespeare's time these had by and large shrunk to two:
-s
and
-en.
But even then the process was nowhere near complete. In the Elizabethan Age, people sometimes said
shoes
and sometimes
shoen,
sometimes
house
and sometimes
housen.
It is interesting to reflect that had the seat of government stayed in Winchester, rather than moved the sixty miles or so to London, we would today very probably be talking of six housen and a pair of shoen. Today there are just three of these old weak plurals:
children, brethren,
and
oxen.
However, even though
-s
(or
-es
after an
-sh
spelling) has become the standard form for plurals, there are still traces of the complex Old English system lurking in the language in plurals such as
men, women, feet, geese,
and
teeth.

Similarly, verbs have undergone a long and erratic process of regularization. Chaucer could choose between
ached
and
oke, climbed
and
clomb, clew
or
clawed, shaved
and
shove.
In Shakespeare's time
forgat
and
digged
were legitimate past tenses. In fact, until well into the seventeenth century
digged
was the more common (as in Shakespeare's “two kinsmen digg'd their grave with weeping”). As recently as 1751, Thomas Gray's famous poem was published as “Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard.” Seventy years later the poet John Keats could write, “Let my epitaph be: here lies one whose name was writ on water.” So the invariable pattern we use today—
write, wrote, written
—is really quite recent.

The common pattern in these changes was for the weak verbs to drive out the strong ones, but sometimes it worked the other way, so that today we have
torn
instead of
teared
and
knew
rather than
knowed.
Many of these have become regularized, but there are still 250 irregular verbs in English, and a surprising number of these are still fluid—so that even now most of us are not always sure whether we should say
dived
or
dove, sneaked
or
snuck, hove
or
heaved, wove
or
weaved, strived
or
strove, swelled
or
swollen.

Other words underwent changes, particularly those beginning with
n,
where there was a tendency for this letter to drift away from the word and attach itself to the preceding indefinite article. The process is called metanalysis. Thus a
napron
became an
apron,
a
nauger
became an
auger,
and an
ekename
became (over time) a
nickname.
By a similar process, the nicknames Ned, Nell, and Nan are thought to be corruptions of “mine Edward,” “mine Ellen,” and “mine Ann” [cited by Barber, page 183].

But there were losses along the way. Today we have two demonstrative pronouns,
this
and
that,
but in Shakespeare's day there was a third,
yon
(as in the Milton line “Him that yon soars on golden wing”), which suggested a further distance than
that.
You could talk about this hat, that hat, and yon hat. Today the word survives as a colloquial adjective,
yonder,
but our speech is fractionally impoverished for its loss. Similarly Shakespeare in
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
was able to make a distinction between
hair
and
hairs
that is effectively lost to us today when he wrote, “Shee hath more haire than wit, and more faults than hairs.”

(Other languages possess even further degrees of thatness. As Pei notes, “The Cree Indian language has a special
that
[for] things just gone out of sight, while Ilocano, a tongue of the Philippines, has three words for
this
referring to a visible object, a fourth for things not in view and a fifth for things that no longer exist”) [Pei,
The Story of Language,
page 128].

Some of the changes since Shakespeare's time are obvious.
Thee
and
thou
had already begun a long decline (though they still exist in some dialects of northern England). Originally
thou
was to
you
as in French
tu
is to
vous. Thou
signified either close familiarity or social inferiority, while
you
was the more impersonal and general term. In European languages to this day choosing between the two forms can present a very real social agony. As Jespersen, a Dane who appreciated these things, put it: “English has thus attained the only manner of address worthy of a nation that respects the elementary rights of each individual” [
The Growth and Structure of the English Language,
page 251].

The changing structure of English allowed writers the freedom to express themselves in ways that had never existed before, and none took up this opportunity more liberally than Shakespeare, who happily and variously used nouns as verbs, as adverbs, as substantives, and as adjectives—often in ways they had never been employed before. He even used adverbs as adjectives, as with “that bastardly rogue” in
Henry IV,
a construction that must have seemed as novel then as it does now. He created expressions that could not grammatically have existed previously such as “breathing one's last” and “backing a horse.”

No one in any tongue has ever made greater play of his language. He coined some 2,000 words—an astonishing number—and gave us countless phrases. As a phrasemaker there has never been anyone to match him. Among his inventions: one fell swoop, in my mind's eye, more in sorrow than in anger, to be in a pickle, bag and baggage, vanish into thin air, budge an inch, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, the milk of human kindness, remembrance of things past, the sound and the fury, to thine own self be true, to be or not to be, cold comfort, to beggar all description, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, to be cruel to be kind, and on and on and on and on. And on. He was so wildly prolific that he could put two catchphrases in one sentence, as in Hamlet's observation: “Though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honored in the breach than the observance.” He could even mix metaphors and get away with it, as when he wrote: “Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.”

It is terrifying to think that had not two faithful followers, the actors John Hemming and Henry Condell, taken the considerable trouble of assembling an anthology of his work, the famous First Folio, in 1623, seven years after his death, sixteen of his plays would very probably have been lost to us forever. As it is two have been:
Cardenio
and
Love's Labour's Won.

Not a single Shakespeare manuscript survives, so, as with Chaucer, we cannot be sure how closely the work we know is really Shakespeare's. Hemming and Condell consulted any number of sources to produce their folio—printers' manuscripts, actors' promptbooks, even the memories of other actors. But from what happened to the work of other authors it is probable that they have been changed a lot. One of Shakespeare's publishers was Richard Field and it is known from extant manuscripts that when Field published the work of the poet John Harrington he made more than a thousand changes to the spelling and phrasing. It is unlikely that he did less with Shakespeare, particularly since Shakespeare himself seemed singularly unconcerned with what became of his work after his death. As far as is known, he did not bother to save any of his poems and plays—​a fact that is sometimes taken as evidence that he didn't write them.