A short history of English words 1 page

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1042.

The Anglo-Saxon monk Bede, writing in his monastery in Northumbria in about the year 730, gives us an early account of those who first spoke the English language. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation , written in Latin, he tells us that the island ‘contains five nations, the English, Britons, Scots, Picts and Latins, each in its own peculiar dialect cultivating the sublime study of Divine truth'. And he goes on to explain how this situation came about.

The first arrivals, Bede says, were Britons (we would now call them Celts), and they gave their name to the land. The Picts then arrived in the north, from Scythia via northern Ireland. The Scots arrived some time later, and secured their own settlements in the Pictish regions. Then, ‘in the year of Rome 798' (= 43 AD), Emperor Claudius sent an expedition which rapidly established a Roman presence in the island.

The Romans ruled in Britain until the early 5th century, when Rome was taken by the Goths and military garrisons were withdrawn. Attacks on the Britons by the Picts and Scots followed. The Britons appealed to Rome for help, but the Romans, preoccupied with their own wars, could do little. The attacks continued, so the Britons came to a decision. As Bede recounts:

They consulted what was to be done, and where they should seek assistance to prevent or repel the cruel and frequent incursions of the northern nations; and they all agreed with their King Vortigern to call over to their aid, from the parts beyond the sea, the Saxon nation… Then the nation of the Angles, or Saxons, being invited by the aforesaid king, arrived in Britain with three long ships.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports their landing in Ebbsfleet (Pegwell Bay, near Ramsgate, Kent) in 449 AD. And within 250 years, it would seem from the earliest records, the language we now know as Old English (sometimes called Anglo-Saxon) achieved its distinctive character.

English vocabulary

Vocabulary is always a primary index of a language's identity, simply because there is so much of it. Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows that the pronunciation and basic grammar can be acquired relatively quickly, but the task of word-learning seems to have no end. Vocabulary is indeed the Everest of language. And it is a mountain that has to be scaled if fluency is to be attained.

In the case of English, the task has been made more complex by the range and diversity of its vocabulary — a reflection of the colourful political and cultural history of the English-speaking peoples over the centuries. To change the metaphor: English is a vacuum-cleaner of a language, whose users suck in words from other languages whenever they encounter them. And because of the way English has travelled the world, courtesy of its soldiers, sailors, traders and civil servants, several hundred languages have contributed to its lexical character. Some 80 per cent of English vocabulary is not Germanic at all.

English is also a playful and innovative language, whose speakers love to use their imaginations in creating new vocabulary, and who are prepared to depart from tradition when coining words. Not all languages are like this. Some are characterised by speakers who try to stick rigidly to a single cultural tradition, resisting loanwords and trying to preserve a perceived notion of purity in their vocabulary (as with French and Icelandic). English speakers, for the most part, are quite the opposite. They delight in bending and breaking the rules when it comes to word creation. Shakespeare was one of the finest word-benders, showing everyone how to be daring in the use of words.

So a wordbook about English is going to display, more than anything else, diversity and individuality. There are few generalisations that apply to the whole of its lexicon. Rather, to see how English vocabulary evolved, we must distinguish the various strands which have given the language its presentday character.

Germanic origins

We begin with the Germanic origins of the language, which can be seen in the early inscriptions that used a form of the runic alphabet widespread in northern Europe. Runes are found on monuments, weapons, ornaments and many other objects, including some very unusual ones (1 roe ). The Germanic character of English is also visible in the place-names of ancient Britain (2 lea ), and in the ‘little' words that show grammatical relationships (5 out , 10 what ). By the 7th century, we find the earliest surviving manuscripts in Old English, first in the form of glosses and then in texts of continuous prose, several displaying distinctive scribal abbreviations (3 and ). However, the actual name of the language is not recorded until the 10th century (13 English ).

Loanwords

English has never been a purely Germanic language. On the mainland of Europe, the Germanic languages had already incorporated words from Latin, and these arrived in Britain with the Anglo-Saxons. Latin then continued to be an important influence, introducing everyday words to do with plants and animals, food and drink, buildings, household objects and many other domains (6 street ). This vocabulary continued to expand, with the growing influence of missionary activity reflected in an increase in words to do with religion and learning. Old English also contains a few Celtic words (12 brock ) — not many, but enough to remind us of the earlier inhabitants of the island.

Scandinavia provided another source of words in the Anglo-Saxon period, but only after a considerable passing of time. The Vikings made their presence felt in Britain in the 780s, attacking the south coast and then the monasteries in the north. Conflict continued for a century, until the Treaty of Wedmore, around the year 880, between King Alfred and the Danish leader Guthrum, established an area of eastern England which, because it was subject to Danish laws, came to be known as the Danelaw. A few Old Norse words are found in Old English writings, but the vast majority are not seen until the 13th century. The earliest Middle English literature shows hundreds of Norse words in use (20 skirt , 22 take away ).

But the Latin and Norse elements in English are small compared with the huge impact of French in the Middle Ages — a consequence of the dominance of French power in England after 1066 and of French cultural pre-eminence in mainland Europe. Anglo-Saxon words could not cope with the unfamiliar domains of expression introduced by the Normans, such as law, architecture, music and literature. People had no alternative but to develop new varieties of expression, adopting continental models and adapting traditional genres to cope with the French way of doing things. The early Germanic vocabulary, reflecting an Anglo-Saxon way of life (4 loaf, 7 mead ), gave way to a French view of the world which affected all areas of life, from food (17 pork ) to law (18 chattels ), and introducing new forms of address (19 dame ). The new words usually replaced the old ones, but more often the old words survived, sometimes developing a different meaning (21 jail ) or stylistic use (30 royal ).

The international contacts made by British explorers, traders and travellers began as a trickle in the 14th century (33 taffeta ) and by the 16th century had became a flood (39 potato ). The renaissance of learning brought a renewal of contact with Latin and Greek, so much so that the number of classical words entering English actually generated huge controversy (41 ink-horn ). Not all welcomed the change in the language's lexical character. For some, the arrival of classical loanwords made the language elegant; for others, the effect was to make it alien. An argument in favour of keeping the Germanic character of English began in the 16th century and has been with us ever since (74 speech-craft ). But nothing has ever stemmed the flow of loanwords into the language, and the range was greatly increased by the global spread of English.

American English was the first major variety of the language to emerge outside of the British Isles. It did not take long before the early explorers began to use words from American Indian languages (45 skunk ), and these along with many others helped to develop an American identity (58 Americanism ). From the 17th century on, the geographical horizons of the language steadily expanded as the British Empire grew and English began to be adapted to meet the communicative demands of new cultures. A language soon shows the effect in its vocabulary of being in a new location, especially when we are dealing with such dramatically different parts of the world as India (48 lakh ) and Africa (62 trek ). A regionally distinctive English vocabulary involving thousands of items can emerge within just a few years. In addition to loanwords, the local culture will adapt native English words, giving them different forms and meanings (68 dinkum, 69 mipela ). The process of borrowing continues today, largely motivated by economic and cultural factors (70 schmooze, 78 robot, 96 sudoku ).

New varieties

The earliest records of English were inevitably formal in character, illustrating a ‘high style' of literary expression, or reflecting such specialised domains as religion, law and politics. The linguistic creativity of the Anglo-Saxon age is seen in its riddles (9 riddle ) and poetic forms (11 bone-house ), and illustrates an imaginative strand of expression that continued through Middle English (16 swain , 35 gaggle ) and Early Modern English, reaching a high point in the coinages of the Elizabethan era (43 bodgery, 44 undeaf ). The playfulness is no less important today, as shown by invented words (82 doobry, 83 blurb, 90 bagonise ), comic effects (84 strine ) and the creations of modern fiction (97 muggle ).

Doubtless Anglo-Saxon society demonstrated the same range of everyday colloquial expression that we have today — human nature hasn't changed so much in a thousand years — but almost all the texts that survive from the Old English period are formal or oratorical in character, and there is hardly any sign of the rhythms and vocabulary of ordinary conversation. Things begin to change in the 11th century. An informal, earthier vocabulary begins to appear in writing, and we see the origins of many modern taboo expressions (15 arse, 24 cunt, 47 bloody ), as well as words reflecting everyday sounds (23 cuckoo ), playful coinages (35 gaggle ) and a wealth of idioms (31 money ). English society in all its diversity is vividly represented in the writing of Chaucer and the other Elizabethan dramatists, notably Shakespeare, and it is not long before enthusiasts start collecting the colloquial words of their age, especially those belonging to the criminal fraternity (64 dragsman ), illustrating a fascination with slang that has continued to the present day (66 dude, 86 grand ).

Regional vocabulary has also played its part in the increasing diversity of the language. Dialect variation can be seen from the outset (8 merry ), and as English came to be established in new geographical locations we see the proliferation of local words and phrases (26 wee, 42 dialect, 73 y'all ). During the Middle Ages, the need to facilitate communication between all parts of Britain led to the gradual emergence of an increasingly standardised form of written English. Several influential factors were involved, such as the arrival of printing (29 egg ), the growth of a national civil service, the popularity of major authors (such as Chaucer) and the prestige of biblical translations (37 matrix, 46 shibboleth ). The formation of a standard English, with an agreed spelling (32 music ), grammar (34 information ) and terminology (38 alphabet ), took several centuries, and at times was highly controversial, especially when people argued the case for spelling reform (40 debt ). Indeed, the controversies are with us still, as can be seen in words which still have variant spellings (51 yogurt ), the varying reactions to non-standard spellings (88 gotcha ) and debates over correctness in grammar (61 ain't ) and pronunciation (76 garage ).

Two views of vocabulary

Vocabulary is different from other areas of language, such as grammar and spelling, in that it offers us a direct insight into the social milieu, ways of thinking and cultural innovations of a period of history. Some words inform us about the structure of society (55 polite, 65 lunch ) or its social practices (49 fopdoodle, 53 tea, 95 jazz ). We encounter emerging professions (52 gazette ) and monitor progress in science (60 species, 75 DNA ) and technology (63 hello, 99 unfriend, 100 Twittersphere ). We are confronted with new attitudes and mindsets, as we see people looking critically at vocabulary (81 double speak, 89 PC, 93 cherry-picking ). When we explore the history of words, we find a window into society. It is a major theme of this book.

But there is a second way of looking at vocabulary: to examine the techniques the language makes available to build the words that form this history, and this strand also needs to be prominent in a wordbook. One important method, as we have already seen, is to borrow the words from other languages. But there are many other techniques of word formation. A Germanic language element can be combined with an element from another language, such as French or Latin (36 doable ). Words can be reduplicated (56 dilly-dally ), shortened (57 rep, 59 edit, 92 app ), conflated (67 brunch, 98 chillax ), compounded (91 webzine ) or abbreviated (79 UFO, 94 LOL ). A suffix can turn into a word (72 ology ), as can a prefix (87 mega ). Names can become words — first names (28 valentine ), surnames (85 Alzheimer's ), place-names (80 Watergate ) and product names (77 escalator ).

But perhaps the most interesting side to vocabulary is when the exploration of word origins (etymology) brings to light results that are unexpected or intriguing. We see people adapting the language in order to make sense of it (14 bridegroom ). We see extraordinary reversals of meaning over long periods of time (25 wicked ). We see confusions of meaning (50 billion ) and disputes over usage (54 disinterested ). And we see some totally unexpected links between words (27 grammar ). Not all word origins are known, and there have been some longstanding arguments (71 OK ). But every etymology at some point takes us by surprise. As I was researching each chapter of this book I learned something new about the history of English words — and you will too.

. Roe — the first word (5th century)

In the dry summer of 1929, the crew of an RAF aircraft took photographs of the site of the important Roman town of Venta Icenorum — ‘the market-place of the Iceni'. The site is about three miles south of Norwich, in Norfolk, next to the church of Caistor St Edmund. When the pictures were developed, a remarkable street-plan could be seen beneath the fields.

Archaeologists began to excavate the area and discovered a large Anglo-Saxon cremation cemetery on the high ground to the south-east. They found several urns containing remains, and one of them yielded an unexpected linguistic prize. Among a pile of sheep knuckle-bones, probably used as pieces for playing a game, was an ankle-bone (or astragalus ) from a roe-deer. And on one side of the bone were carved six runic letters. Turning these into the Latin alphabet, we get the word RAIHAN.

^{1. The runic letters carved into the surface of the roe deer's ankle bone found in the Roman town of Caistor-by-Norwich, Norfolk. The shape of the H rune is especially interesting. It has a single cross-bar, which was characteristic of a northern style of writing. Further south, the H was written with two cross-bars. It suggests that the writer may have come from Scandinavia.}

What could it mean? Linguists did a lot of head-scratching. It could be someone's name. An -n at the end of a word in the Germanic languages of the time sometimes expressed possession — much as 's does in English today. So perhaps the inscription says Raiha's or Raiho's , telling everyone that this piece belonged to him (or her). But a rather more likely explanation is that it names the animal it comes from: the roe-deer, a species that was widespread in northern Europe at the time.

We can plot the history of the word roe . In Old English it appears several times as raha or ra . And it's seen in some place-names and surnames, such as Rowland (‘roe wood') in Derbyshire and Roeburn (‘roe stream') in Lancashire. The vowel changed to an oh sound in the Middle English period. So raihan could mean ‘from a roe'.

Why would anyone write such a thing? It was actually quite a common practice. An object, such as a sheath or a pot, would often display the name of its maker or what it was made of: ‘Edric made me'. ‘Whale's bone,' says the runic inscription on one side of the 8th-century Franks Casket. I can't imagine raihan could mean anything other than ‘roe', given that it's written on the only bone in the urn to come from a roe-deer. And if it does mean ‘roe', then this makes it a candidate for the first discovered word to be written down in the English language.

But is it an English word? The archaeologists dated the find to the 5th century, and it may even be as early as around 400. That would be well before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in 449 — the year we usually think of as marking the start of the Old English period in Britain. The Romans were still in the area then. So maybe the writer was an immigrant who spoke some other language?

There's evidence that at least some of the settlers in Caistor were from Scandinavia. Several of the urns are very similar to those found in Denmark and the nearby islands. So, imagine such a person settling in Norfolk around the year 400. He would have spoken some sort of early Germanic language, such as Old Norse. But it wouldn't have taken him long before he started to speak like the people he met in his new surroundings. Settlers have to adapt quickly, if they want to survive. And if he wrote a word down on an object being used in a game — ‘Find the Roe', perhaps? — then surely it would need to be in a form that the other players would understand.

When we do see ‘roe' in Old English, a couple of centuries later, it's spelled with a , not ai . So why did the writer use an i in raihan ? It might represent his original language. Or it might be an old-fashioned way of spelling the word he'd picked up in his new language. Or it might genuinely reflect the way he was pronouncing the word at the time. We'll never know for sure, but my feeling is that the Caistor astragalus , now in the Castle Museum in Norwich, is as close as we can get to the origins of English.

. Lea — naming places (8th century)

Most people never use the word lea . It's a poetic word, meaning a grassy meadow. I remember it especially from Thomas Gray's poem ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard':

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea…

I've never heard it used on its own outside of poetry. And yet we hear it and see it in a hidden form everywhere in daily life.

Lea is one of the commonest elements to turn up in English place-names. It comes from an Old English word leah (pronounced ‘lay-ah'), meaning an open tract of land, such as a pasture or meadow, natural or man-made. England was heavily forested in Anglo-Saxon times, and it was common practice to make a new settlement by chopping the trees down and starting a farm. If Beorn made a space in this way, it would be called ‘Beorn's clearing' — ‘Beorn's leah' — modern Barnsley .

The word turns up in many spellings. It's commonest as ley , but we see it also in such forms as leigh , lee , lees , lease , ly and lay . Sometimes it provides the whole name, as in places called Lea or Leigh . More usually it is just the way the name ends. But if lea is the final element, what does the first element mean?

Often it's the name of someone, as with Beorn. Someone called Blecca lived in the clearing now covered by modern Bletchley . Dudda lived at Dudley . Wemba lived at Wembley . They are mainly men. Just occasionally we see a woman's name: Aldgyth lived at Audley . And sometimes a whole tribe lived in the clearing. Madingley means the clearing where Mada's people lived.

The natural features of the clearing often prompted the name. In Morley the clearing was moorland; in Dingley it was in a dingle. The land must have been level in Evenley , rough in Rowley , stony in Stanley and long-shaped in Langley . Also common is a name where the first part describes the trees that used to grow there, as in Ashley , Oakleigh and Thornley . It can be tricky sometimes to work out what the tree-name is. The birch is hidden in Berkeley , the bramble in Bronley , the yew in Uley and the oak in the strange-looking Acle .

Some lea names refer to what grows in the clearing. It's obvious what this is in the case of Clover-ley ; slightly less obvious in Farleigh (ferns) and Ridley (reeds). And when the farming started, the name sometimes tells us what was grown (as in Wheatley and Flaxley ) or what animals were around (as in Durley , Gateley , Horsley and Shipley , for deer, goats, horses and sheep, respectively). Birds and insects are remembered too, in such names as Finchley , Crawley (crows) and Beeleigh .

Place-names are an integral part of a language, and should always be represented in a wordbook. Lea is an example of an Anglo-Saxon place-name element. Other such elements are:

ham — ‘homestead', as in Birmingham and Nottingham

ing — ‘people of', as in Reading and Worthing

ceaster — ‘Roman town, fort', as in Chester and Lancaster

tun — ‘enclosure, village', as in places ending in -ton or -town

Each wave of invaders brought its own naming practices. The Vikings settled all over the eastern side of England, establishing hundreds of villages ending in -by — the Norse word for ‘farmstead' — as in Derby , Rugby and Grimsby . Several French names (such as Beaulieu and Devizes ) arrived in the early Middle Ages.

We always have to be careful, though, when exploring place-names. Often words with different origins have ended up with the same spelling. For example, rivers named Lea or Lee are hardly going to mean ‘forest clearing'. We have to look for the meaning of water names elsewhere. There was a Celtic form lug -, meaning ‘bright or light', which was also used as the name of a deity. So River Lea may originally have meant ‘river dedicated to the god Lugus' or simply ‘river which was bright and sparkling'.

. And — an early abbreviation (8th century)

Early in the 8th century, monks at the monastery of St Augustine in Canterbury wrote out a long list of English translations of Latin words, in roughly alphabetical order. Towards the end, in the section on words beginning with U, we find the Latin phrase ultroque citroque — in modern English we'd say ‘hither and thither'. The scribe must have been feeling tired that day, because he glosses it wrongly as hider ond hider . The second h should have been a d . But the phrase is interesting for a different reason: ond is an old way of spelling and . Doubtless the Anglo-Saxons used the word a lot in their speech, as we do today; but in these ancient glossaries we see it written down for the first time.

Why get so excited over a ‘little word' like and ? In most wordbooks, it's the ‘content words' that attract all the attention — the words that have an easily statable meaning, like elephant and caravan and roe . The books tend not to explore the ‘grammatical words' — those linking the units of content to make up sentences, such as in , the and and . That's a pity, because these ‘little words' have played a crucial role in the development of English. Apart from anything else, they're the most frequently occurring words, so they're in our eyes and ears all the time. In our eyes? The four commonest written words in modern English are the , of , and and a . In our ears? The four commonest spoken words are the , I , you and and . In Old English, and is there from the very beginning, and when it appears it's often abbreviated.

We tend to shorten very common words when we write them. It is becomes it's . Very good becomes v good . You becomes u (especially in internet chat and texting). Postscript becomes PS . The shortened form of and is so common that it's even been given its own printed symbol: &, the ‘ampersand'. The modern symbol is historically a collapsed version of the Latin word et : the bottom circle is what's left of the e , and the rising tail on the right is what's left of the t . The word ampersand is a collapsed form too: it was originally and per se and — a sort of shorthand for saying ‘& by itself = and'.

When did people start shortening and ? We find it in some of the earliest Old English manuscripts. It's written with a symbol that looks a bit like a modern number 7, but with the vertical stroke descending below the line. In some documents, such as wills and chronicles, where strings of words are linked by ‘and', we can see 7s all over the page. They're especially noticeable when they appear at the beginning of a sentence.

And at the beginning of a sentence? During the 19th century, some schoolteachers took against the practice of beginning a sentence with a word like but or and , presumably because they noticed the way young children often overused them in their writing. But instead of gently weaning the children away from overuse, they banned the usage altogether! Generations of children were taught they should ‘never' begin a sentence with a conjunction. Some still are.

There was never any authority behind this condemnation. It isn't one of the rules laid down by the first prescriptive grammarians. Indeed, one of those grammarians, Bishop Lowth, uses dozens of examples of sentences beginning with and . And in the 20th century, Henry Fowler, in his famous Dictionary of Modern English Usage , went so far as to call it a ‘superstition'. He was right. There are sentences starting with And that date back to Anglo-Saxon times. We'll find them in Chaucer, Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Macaulay and in every major writer. And God said, Let there be light … Joining sentences in this way has been part of the grammatical fabric of English from the very beginning. That's one of the lessons the story of and teaches us.

. Loaf — an unexpected origin (9th century)

Something to eat; something to drink. Words to do with nutrition always play an important part in language history. In particular, the essential role of bread in society, known since prehistoric times, is reflected in a variety of idioms. In English, it can stand for ‘food', as in breadwinner and the plea for daily bread (in the Lord's Prayer). It can mean ‘money'. It can identify a state of mind (knowing on which side one's bread is buttered ) or a level of achievement (the best thing since sliced bread ).