Part 20 (2/2)

I

_A HISTORY OF MODERN COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH_--BY H. C. WYLD

I purposely refrained from saying ”Philology” because it has a frightening sound. There is a feeling that the study of literature is directly hostile to a study of Philology, whereas the truth is that, as Professor Wyld says, ”_Rightly interpreted, language is a mirror of the minds and manners of those who speak it_,” a point of view which cannot be sufficiently emphasised.

In the old days the study of language meant the chasing of umlaut and the tracking down of ablaut; to-day we find ourselves enticed into the study of modern colloquial English in these words:

”Together let us beat this ample field, Try what the open, what the covert yield; The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore, Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar; Eye nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies, And catch the manners living as they rise.”

The study of language in H. C. Wyld's _History of Modern Colloquial English_ becomes ”one line of approach to the Knowledge of Man,” and is vastly intriguing.

We find ourselves, for instance, trying to account for the great s.h.i.+fting in p.r.o.nunciation between the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century in words of the ”er” and ”ar” type. Why did ”sarvice,” ”vartue,” ”sarmon” die out, and ”Derby,”

”Berks.h.i.+re,” ”clerk” remain? Of course the great factor which nowadays destroys the value of vocabulary as a specific characteristic of a given regional dialect is the migratory habits of the population, and the war will have done more to ruin it than any amount of Elementary Education.

But we are concerned for the moment with curiosities. Why is ”napkin”

to be preferred to ”serviette”? Why do not people who speak of ”the influenza” say ”the appendicitis”? Even so great an authority on social propriety as Lord Chesterfield talks of ”the head-ach.” Where do shop-walkers get their ”half-hose,” ”vest” (for waistcoat), ”neckwear,”

”footwear” and similar words? What has happened to the word ”_genteel_”?

”O d.a.m.n anything that's low”--”The genteel thing is the genteel thing”; but the fun lies in finding out what each age and each individual means or has meant by ”genteel” and ”low.”

It is with a certain sense of surprise that those who have never studied the English Language find that in mediaeval times our ancestors gave the alphabet Continental values; those who have a smattering of literary history are equally surprised to find that Chaucer, ”the Father of English Literature,” did not create the English of Literature; he found it ready to his hand and used it with a gaiety, a freshness, a tenderness and a humanity which has never been surpa.s.sed.

Those interested in Literature have ever looked upon the fifteenth century as an arid waste: in language, on the other hand, it is a period of intense importance. For one thing, there is a big increase in the number of people who can write, and therefore in the number of private doc.u.ments that have come down to us. Freed from the shackles of the professional scribe, writing becomes a listening to actual people speaking, and so we find a great variety of spelling ... we find that modern English is beginning ... and there is of course the introduction of printing. It is to these old printers and to these old printers alone that we owe our persistence in clinging to an outworn system of spelling.

For four hundred and fifty years they have dictated to us how we are to spell, and a defence of our existing system which is completely unphonetic is defensible chiefly on the ground of custom, not at all for any pretended historical merit. If only Caxton had been a trifle more enterprising our spelling would have been less widely divorced from the facts of p.r.o.nunciation.

In the sixteenth century we find that regional dialect disappears completely from the written language of the South and Midlands--almost every private letter contains a certain number of spellings which throw light upon p.r.o.nunciation: ”the tongue which Shakespeare spake” was the tongue which he wrote: and there is a definite unity between the colloquial language and the language of literature which is after all natural when we think how closely approximated to the action done was every word written by the Elizabethans who one and all seem to have been writers as well as soldiers, statesmen, politicians, sailors, merchant venturers and amba.s.sadors.

”It is not for nothing,” says Professor Wyld, ”that matters stood thus between the men of letters and the courtiers and the explorers in the age when Literary English was being made, or rather, let us say, when English speech was being put to new uses, and made to express in all its fullness the amazing life of a wonderful age, with all its fresh experiences, thoughts and dreams.

”If anyone doubts whether the language of Elizabethan literature was actually identical with that of everyday life, or whether it was not rather an artful concoction, divorced from the real life of the age, let him, after reading something of the lives and opinions of a few of the great men we have briefly referred to, ask himself whether the picture of Ascham, Wilson, Sidney, or Raleigh posturing and mourning like the Della Cruscans of a later age, is a conceivable one ... if the speech of the great men we have been considering was unaffected and natural, it certainly was not vulgar. If it be vulgar to say _whot_ for _hot_, _stap_ for _stop_, _offen_ for _often_, _sarvice_ for _service_, _venter_ for _venture_: if it be slipshod to say _Wensday_ for _Wednesday_, _beseechin_ for _beseeching_, _stricly_ for _strictly_, _sounded_ for _swooned_, _attemps_ for _attempts_, and so on; then it is certain that the Queen herself, and the greater part of her Court, must plead guilty to these imputations.”

The individualism in spelling which still to a certain extent prevailed in the sixteenth century enables us to collect from written works, to a far higher degree than at present, the individual habits of speech which the writer possessed. The result of an examination of the writings of this age, from this point of view, is that we see that there existed a greater degree of variety in speech--both in p.r.o.nunciation and in grammatical forms--than exists now.

One particularly valuable doc.u.ment which Professor Wyld makes use of is the diary of Henry Machyn, a sixteenth-century tradesman who gossips at random in the vernacular of the middle-cla.s.s Londoner with no particular education or refinement. Like the Wellers, he confuses his _v's_ and _w's_: _wacabondes_, _wergers_, _walues_, _welvet_, _woyce_, _voman_, _Vestmynster_ are examples. He misplaces his initial aspirates, _alff_, _Amton Courte_, _ard_, _Allallows_, _elmet_, _alpeny_, _hanswered_, _haskyd_, _harme_: his is the largest list of ”dropped aspirates” in words of English, not Norman-French, origin which Professor Wyld has found in any doc.u.ment as early as this. _As_ as a relative p.r.o.noun, _good ons_ for _good ones_, _syngyne_ for _singing_, _wyche_ for _which_ and _watt_ for _what_ are valuable signs. Machyn lets us into more secrets of contemporary speech than does any other writer of his period: he is marvellously emanc.i.p.ated from traditional spelling, which makes him a wonderful guide to the lower type of London English of his time.

When he gets to the seventeenth century the ordinary reader of to-day feels that the writers of that period begin for the first time to speak like men and women of his own age; both in spirit and in substance we have reached our own English; by the time we reach Sir John Suckling and Cowley we scent a colloquial modernity which is altogether foreign to the soaring periods of Milton, the eccentricity of Sir Thomas Browne or the didactic aloofness of Bacon. Dryden was conscious of great differences between the speech of his own time as reflected in writing, especially in the drama, and that of the Elizabethans. He attributes the change and ”improvement” to the polish and refinement of Charles II.'s Court. He congratulates himself that ”the stiff forms of conversation”

had pa.s.sed away; his charges against the older age are merely charges against the archaic and unfamiliar. To be obsolete in his eyes was to be inferior. Hence his attempt to modernise Chaucer and improve on Shakespeare. These strictures of Dryden about English refer primarily to literature, but they are applicable to the colloquial language. If literary prose style changes it is because the colloquial language has changed first.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century we have Swift's instructive treatises on the English of his day and of the age before, which is diametrically opposed to Dryden's theories. But it is important to notice that among the hosts of solecisms to which he objects he does not quote what we should expect him to quote. Why does he not mention _Lunnon_, _Wensday_, _Chrismas_, _greatis_ (greatest), _respeck_, _hounes_ (hounds)? The reason is that they were so widespread among the best speakers that he himself didn't notice anything wrong with them.

His strictures are those of the academic pedant, Dryden's are those of the man of the world.

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