THE PRONOUN 8 страница

§ 335. Many new grammars of English were compiled in the age of " fixing the language". J. Wallis's GRAMMAT1CA LINGU/E ANGLI­CANS, which was first published in 1653, won European fame and ran through many editions before the end of the century. He owed much to his predecessors, but was original in the treatment of most problems. He believed that " by reducing the English too much to the Latin norm the grammarians have taught too many useless things about the cases of Nouns, and about the Tenses, Moods and Conjugations of Verbs, about government of Nouns and Verbs, etc., matters absolutely foreign to our language, producing confusion and obscurity rather than serving as ex­planations. Why should we introduce a fictitious and quite foolish col­lection of Cases, Genders, Moods and Tenses, without any need, and for which there is no reason in the basis of the language itself? " (By that time the grammatical structure of the English language was very sim­ilar to that of present-day English.)

§ 336. The grammars of the 16th c. were influenced both by the descriptions of classical languages and by the principles of logic. They wished to present language as a strictly logical system (incidentally, it was at that time that many logical terms, such as " subject" and " pred­icate", entered grammatical description). The main purpose of these grammars was to formulate rules based on logical considerations and to present them as fixed and obligatory; grammars were designed to re­strict and direct linguistic change. This type of grammars are known as " prescriptive" or " normative" grammars.

§ 337. One of the most influential prescriptive grammars was A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH GRAMMAR produced in 1762 by Robert Lowth, a theologician and professor of poetry at Oxford. In the preface to his book R. Lowth agreed with the charge that " our language is extremely imperfect", that it " offends against every part of grammar" and remarked that the best authors commit " many gross improprieties, which... ought to be corrected"; he complained that in spite of great achievements in literature and style, the English language had made " no advance in Grammatical Accuracy". " The principal design of a Grammar of any Language is to teach us to express ourselves with propriety in that Language; and to enable us to judge every phrase and form of construction, whether it be right or not. The plain way of doing this is to lay down rules and to illustrate them by examples."

R. Lowth's INTRODUCTION appeared in twenty-two editions be­fore the end of the century and was most effective in propagating the doctrine of correctness. R. Lowth distinguished nine parts of speech and made a consistent descriptions of letters, syllables, words and sen­tences. On logical grounds he condemned double negation as equivalent to the affirmative and " double comparison" (e.g. more better) as illog­ical; he objected to the confusion of who and whom, whose and which, adjectives and adverbs. Lowth believed in a universal logical grammar, _an(j thought that English was reducible to a system of logical rules. Thus natural usage was abandoned in favour of order, logic and system.

§ 338. Another prominent grammarian of that age, J. Priestley, deviated from the prescriptive aims of grammar and the dominance of Latin. He emphasised cus­tom as the just criterion for correctness and maintained that the business of Acad­emies fOT the preservation of national languages had never been to arrest what is always in the process of evolving. Nevertheless, like Lowth and other prescrip­tive grammarians, in his RUDIMENTS OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR (1761) and other works J. Priestley advocated not only correctness based on acceptable usage bill also laid down regular rules in preference to what looked less regular and systematic.

& 339. One of the most popular grammars in the prescriptive trend was an ENGLISH GRAMMAR ADAPTED TO THE DIFFERENT CLASSES OF LEARNERS written by Lindley Murray, an American, in the late 16th c. (1795). It ran fifty editions in its original form and over one hundred and twenty in an abridged version. For many years Murray's grammar was the most widely used manual at schools; no new grammars were produced unless they repeated Murray.

§ 340. The role of English dictionaries in this period of normalisa­tion was equally significant.

English lexicography made outstanding progress in the 18th c. Works concerned primarily with the explanation of " hard words" continued to be brought out in great numbers, e.g. DICTIONARY OF HARD WORDS by E. Coles in 1676. In 1730 Nathaniel Bailey compiled DIC- TIONARIUM BRITANNICUM, A MORE COMPLEAT UNIVERSAL ETYMOLOGICAL ENGLISH DICTIONARY THAN ANY EXTANT, which was a distinct improvement on its predecessors. Bailey's diction­ary contained about 48, 000 items, which is more than Samuel Johnson included in his famous work. Through Johnson, who used Bailey's DICTIONARIUM as the basis of his own, N. Bailey influenced all subsequent lexicographical practice. But the greatest achievement of the 18th c. English lexicography is certainly connected with the name ol Dr. Samuel Johnson.

§341. Samuel Johnson was one of those 18th c. scholars who be­lieved that the English language should be purified and corrected. With this object in view he undertook to compile a new dictionary based upon the usage of recognised authorities. In the two volumes of his DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1755) he included quotations from several hundred authors of the 17th and 18th c. The entries of his dictionary contain definitions of meaning, illustrations °f usage, etymologies, and stylistic comments. He regulated current Usage by giving precise definitions, which, as a rule, were noticeable improvements upon those given by his predecessors. For illustration ^read the definitions of the word husband:

HUSBAND n (etymology and quotations follow) 1. The correlative to wife, a man married to a woman.

2. The male of animals.

3. An economist, a man that knows and practises the method of frugality and profit. Its signification is always modified hy some epithet implying bad or good.

4. A tiller of the ground, a farmer.

Alongside such full definitions with the principal meanings accu­rately explained, Johnson's DICTIONARY gives some naive descrip­tions, which are olten quoted as illustrating his prejudices, e.g.:

OATS — a grain which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people.

PENSION — an allowance made to any one without equivalent; in England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.

His DICTIONARY contained a special section devoted to grammar, which deals with orthography and accidence. He distinguished between two pronunciations of English words: " one cursory and colloquial, the other regular and solemn". His well-known recommendation on pronun­ciation runs as follows: " For pronunciation the best general rule is to consider those the most elegant speakers who deviate least from written words." The grammatical part proper is very short, since he confines his description to inflections (hence, e.g. the verbs for him have only two tenses, past and present).

The weight of Johnson's authority was so great that later writers did not dare to deviate from the spellings and meanings prescribed by the DICTIONARY; even today some authors blame him for fixing Eng­lish spelling and thus making it conservative. The Dictionary passed through many editions and revisions and was drawn upon freely by nu­merous successors.

The grammars and dictionaries of the lfith c. succeeded in formulat­ing the rules of usage, partly from observation but largely from the " doc­trine of correctness? ', and laid them down as norms to be taught as pat­terns of correct English. Codification of norms of usage by means of conscious effort on the part of man helped in standardising the language and in fixing its Written and Spoken Standards.

Growth of the Spoken Standard

§ 342. As shown above the Written Standard had probably been fixed and recognised by the beginning of the 17th c. The next stage in the growth of the national literary language was the development of the Spoken Standard, The dating of this event appears to be more problematic.

Naturally, we possess no direct evidence of the existence of oral norms, since all evidence comes from written sources. Nevertheless, valuable information has been found in private letters as compared to more official papers, in the speech of various characters in 17th and ISth c. drama, and in direct references to different types of oral speech made by contemporaries.

It seems obvious that in the 18th c. the speech of educated people differed from that of common, uneducated people — in pronunciation, •n the choice oi words and in grammatical construction. The number i educated people was growing and their way of speaking was regarded a_S coirect. Compositions on language gave diverse recommendations aimed improving the forms of written and oral discourse. Some authors advised people to model their speech on Latin patterns; others banned-borrowing mannerisms and vulgar pronunciation. These recom- _mendations could only be made if their authors were — or considered themselves to be — in a position to distinguish between different forms of speech and label them as " good" or " bad". Indirectly they testify to the existence of recognised norms of educated spoken English.

§ 343. The earliest feasible date for the emergence of the Spoken Standard suggested by historians is the late I7th c. Some authorities refer it to the end of the normalisation period, that is about a hundred years later — the end of the 18th c. The latter date seems to be more realistic, as by that time current usage had been subjected to conscious regulation and had become more uniform. The rules formulated in the prescriptive grammars and dictionaries must have had their effect not only on the written but also on the spoken forms of the language.

The concept of Spoken Standard does not imply absolute uniformity of speech throughout the speech community — a uniformity which, in fact, can never be achieved; it merely implies a more or less uniform type of speech used by educated people and taught as " correct English" at schools and universities. The spoken forms of the language, even when standardised, were never as stable and fixed as the Written Standard. Oral speech changed under the influence of sub-standard forms of the language, more easily than the written forms. Many new features coming from professional jargons, lower social dialects or local dialects first entered the Spoken Standard, and through its medium passed Into the language of writing. The Written Standard, in its turn, tended to re­strict the colloquial innovations labelling them as vulgar and incorrect and was enriched by elements coming from various functional and liter­ary styles, e.g. poetry, scientific style, official documents. Between all these conflicting tendencies the national literary language, both in its written and spoken forms, continued to change during the entire New English period.

§ 344. The geographical and social origins of the Spoken Standard' were in the main the same as those of the Written Standard some two hundred years before: the tongue of London and the Universities, which in the turbulent 17th c. — the age of the English Revolution, further economic progress and geographical expansion — had assimilated many new features from a variety of sources. Intermixture of people belonging to different social groups was reflected in speech, though the rate of changes was slowed down when the norms of usage had been fixed. The flourishing of literature enriched the language and at the same time bad a stabilising effect on linguistic change.

Thus by the end of the 18th c. the formation of the national literary English language may be regarded as completed, for now it possessed both a Written and a Spoken Standard.

The Modern Period. Varieties of English in Britain in the 19th and 20th c,

§ 345. The main functional divisions of the national English language, which bad been lormed by the 19th c., were its standard or literary forms and its sub- standard forms.

The literary language comprised a great number of varieties (or " forms of existence"). It had a Written and a Spoken Standard; within the Written Standard there developed different literary and Functional styles: the belles-lettres style (with further differentiation between poetry, prose and drama), official style, news, paper and publicistic style, scientific prose style.^[14] Within the Spoken Standard we can safely assume the existence of more formal-and less formal, colloquial varie­ties which bordered on the sub-standard forms of the language. We can also posit the existence of modified local Standards used by educated people but displaying certain local colouring (the term " Regional Modified Standards", proposed by H, C. Wyld implies that despite some differences these forms of speech belong to Stand­ard English).

Literary English found its ideal representation in the works of English authors of the 19th c. Sub-standard forms of the language — local dialects and lower social dialects — were mainly used for oral communication. During the 18th c._t when conformity to the rules of correctness and high style were looked upon as a primary merit, writers were not inclined to employ the non-prestige types of local speech. Characterisation through dialect, which sometimes occurred in the drama of the Renaissance, had [alien into disuse. In the 19th c. literary tastes changed and writers began to take a greater interest in the region­al dialects and in folklore. Non-standard forms of the language were recorded in the speech of various characters to show their social rank and origin.

§ 346. Two varieties of English in Great Britain distinguished from Standard English—Scottish and Anglo-Irish — claimed to be literary tongues. Scottish Eng­lish reemerged again into literary eminence, after a decline in the 17th c., in the poetry of Robert Burns (1759—1796). The literary tradition was not given up in the 19th c.: a series of poets employed the Scottish dialect in depicting the griev­ances of the common people. For the most part, however, Scottish English was used lor oral intercourse by the less educated people, while a Regional Modified Standard displaced it in other functions. As elsewhere the local dialect was trans­formed into a social local dialect used by the lower classes.

§ 347. The English language in Ireland displayed sharper differences from British English than the Scottish dialect, as for several hundred years it devel­oped in relative isolation from the monopoly. Despite the attempts to revive the Celtic tongue, Gaelic, or Irish (which was one of the major issues in the vigorous struggle for home rule in the 19th c.), by 1900 a variety of English with a strong Irish accent, known as the " brogue", had become the main language of the popu­lation. Some authorities regard Anglo-Irish as a separate geographical variant of English possessing an independent national Standard, others treat it as a local dialect. Anglo-Irish is the official language of Northern Ireland and Eire and also the language of literature, school and universities.^[15]

§ 348. Dialectal division in England proper in the 19th and 20th c. was rough* ly the same as before since it goes back to the age of feudalism, particularly to Early ME. The dialects are distinguished by counties or shires, e. g. the dialect of Somersetshire, the Yorkshire dialect. They are usually grouped under the following main headings: the Southern dialects, subdivided into East- and West-Southern; the Midland dialects subdivided into Eastern, Central, and Western; (the term Midland is also used as an equivalent of Central); the Northern dialects.

A map of Modern English dialects

Among the social dialects of particular interest is London's Cockney. 16th c. spellings testify to the existence of Cockney in the age of Shakespeare. Cockney ^Uas used as a lorm of oral speech by the lower ranks of the Londoners throughout the New English period and was looked npon as a social handicap in the 19th c (recall PYGMALION by G. B. Shaw).

Geographical Expansion of the English Language from the 17th to 19th c. English Outside Great Britain

§ 349. In the last three hundred years the English language has ^extended to all the continents of the world and the number of English speakers has multiplied.

î ai

We may recall that in OE and Early ME periods the English dialects were confined to part of the British Isles: they were spoken in what j_s known as England proper; from the 13th to the 17th c. the English lan­guage extended to the whole of the British Isles with the exception of some mountainous regions in Wales, Nothern Scotland and some parts of Ireland.

j; The number of English'speaking people grew: at the end of the Hth c. it is estimated at one and a half or two millions; by 1700 English had over eight million speakers. In the course of two centuries of British expansion overseas, colonisation and emigration to other continents, the number of English speakers increased at such a high rate that by 1900 it had reached one hundred and twenty three million.

§350. England's colonial expansion to the New World began in the late 16th c. when her first colonies were set up in Newfoundland (1583). But the real start came later: in 1607 the first permanent settle­ments were founded in Jamestown and in 1620 the famous ship " May­flower" brought a group of English settlers to what became known as New England. These Puritan fugitives from the Stuart absolutism came from the London area, from East Anglia and Yorkshire; later colonists came from other regions, including Scotland and Ireland. Immigrants to the Southern areas were of a higher class origin; they received vast stretches of land from the kings of England and gave rise to the Southern " aristo­cratic" slave-owning plantators. Many immigrants from Great Britain settled in the West Indies, which.became a par t of the British Empire in the 17th c.

The colonists spoke different dialects of English. In North America those dialects gradually blended into a new type of the language, Ameri­can English; contacts with other languages, especially Spanish in the South and French in Canada, have played a certain role in its develop­ment.

American English was first proclaimed to be an independent lan­guage by Noah Webster (1758—1843), a schoolmaster from Connecticut. In his DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1828), the first in the world-famous series of " Websters", he showed the differences in vocabulary and pronunciation between the English of Britain and the English of the new independent state (after the War for Independence, which ended in 1783); Am E, in his opinion, was a pure uncorrupt de­scendant of Chaucer and Shakespeare, while Br E had been spoiled by linguistic change. He admitted, though, that the two types of English were basically identical.

§ 351. The expansion of English to Asia is mainly connected with the occupation of India. India was one of the main issues in the colonial struggle of European powers in the 18th c. The conquest of India had been prepared by the activities of the East Indian trade company found­ed in the 17th c. In the late 18th c. Britain secured partial control over the administration in some of the Indian provinces. In the first half of the 19th c. India became a British colony and Britain acquired other possessions in Asia, turning them into colonies, dominions or protecates. Thus the English language extended to many areas in Asia, the language of the state and writing. ^aS s 352. Australia was a place of deportation of British convicts since the Ы^е 18th c. A flow of immigrants were attracted to Australia, at first by the free grants of land, later — by the discovery of gold. The hulk of the population in Australia, as well as in New Zealand, came from Great Britain; their language is regarded by some linguists as an independent geographical variant of English, though its difference from gr E is not great: it is confined to some peculiarities of pronunciation

and specific words.

§ 353. British penetration into Africa was a lengthy affair that extended over the 19th c. In consequence of financial dependence on British capital, Sudan and Egypt fell under British political control. Tropical Africa and South Africa were raided by the British navy, as sources of slave labour for America and the West Indies. Trade companies were supported by open warfare, and in a long series of wars many Afri­can territories fell under British rule. Cecil Rhodes and H. Kitchener undertook to extend British territories, so as to connect Cairo and the Cape colony by a stretch of British land. Numerous conflicts with the Dutch settlers in South Africa led to the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902, which established the supremacy of the British. All these events were accom­panied by the spread of English to new areas.

§ 354. In the course of the 20th c. Great Britain lost the greater part of its possessions overseas and the use of the English language was re­duced. We should distinguish between countries with an English speak­ing population (or with a large proportion of English speakers) and countries in which English is used only as the state language, the main language of the press, radio and literature. The distinction, however, is not always possible, for in both groups of countries part of the popu­lation is bilingual, and the proportion of English speakers cannot be precisely estimated. The list of countries with an English-speaking pop­ulation outside the British Isles includes the United States of America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the South African Republic.

QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS

efforts made by men-of-letters in the " Normalisation period" to ston the changes and improve the language. ^p

6. Commentjm the following quotations:

J. Hart (1570): " The flower of the English tongue is used in the Court of London."

G. Puttenham (1589): "... ye shall therefore take the usual speach of the Court, and that of London whithin IX myles, and not much above I say this but that in every shyre of England there be gentlemen and others that speake but specially write as good Southerne as we of Middle, sex or Surrey do, but not the common people of every shire..." Dis­cuss the social and geographical basis of the literary English language.

Chapter ХЩ

SPELLING CHANGES IN MIDDLE ENGLISH. RULES OF READING

§ 855. The most conspicuous feature of Late ME texts in comparison with OE texts is the difference in spelling. The written forms of the words in Late ME texts resemble their modern forms, though the pronunciation of the words was different. Before considering the evolution of English sounds one must get acquainted with the system of ME spelling in order to distinguish between sound changes and graphical changes.

Jn the course of ME many new devices were introduced into the system of spelling; some of them reflected the sound changes which had been completed or were still in progress in ME; others were graphic re­placements of OE letters by new letters and digraphs.

§ 356, In ME the runic letters passed out of use. Thorn — p — and the crossed d— were replaced by the digraph //i, which retained

the same sound value: [0] and (3]; the rune " wynn" was displaced by " double u" — w -—; the ligatures se and ce fell into disuse.

§ 357. After the period of Anglo-Norman dominance (lith—13th c.) English regained its prestige as the language of writing, though for a long time writing was in the hands of those who had a good knowledge of French. Therefore many innovations in ME spelling reveal an influ­ence of the French scribal tradition. The digraphs ou, ie, and ch which occurred in many French borrowings and were regularly used in Anglo- Norman texts were adopted as new ways of indicating the sounds iu: l, [e: ], and [tj ].

Compare the use of these digraphs in some borrowed and native ME words: ME double f'dublel from О Fr double and ME out |u; t) from OE ut (NE double, out); ^[16] ME chief Ufe: f) from French and the na­tive ME thief (NE chief, thief); ME chaumbre t'tjaumbral, chasen ['t[a: z3nj (NE chamber, chase) from French, and native ME child (t.fH< jJ, ME much [mutj'j. The letters j, k, v, and q were probably first used in imitation of French manuscripts. The two-fold use of g and c, which has survived today, owes its origin to French: these letters usually stood w (ds J and [s} before front vowels and for [g J and (k] before back _vowels; cf. ME gentil Idgeri'til ], mercy Imer'sil and good [go; d], cours Iku: rs] (NE gentle, mercy, good, coarse).

§ 358. Other alterations in spelling cannot be traced directly to French influence though they testify to a similar tendency: a wider use of digraphs. In addition to ch, ou, ie, and th mentioned above Late ME notaries introduced s/i (also ssh and sch.) to indicate the new sibilant rn e.g- ME ship (from OE scip), dg to indicate (d3 ] alongside / and g (before front vowels), e.g. ME edge ['edjs 1, joye I'dsoia], engendren len'dsendran J (NE edge, joy, engender); the digraph wh replaced the OE sequence of letters hw as in OE hwset, ME «Aa? [hwat J (NE what). Long sounds were shown by double letters, for instance ME book (bo: к 1, sonne ['sunns] (NE book, sun), though with vowels this practice was not very regular, e.g. long [e: ] could be indicated by ie and ее, and also by e, cf. ME thief [Ge: f], feet [fe: t], meten Гте: 1эп] (NE thief, feet, meet). The introduction of the digraph gh for 1x1 and [x'l helped to distinguish between the fricatives [x, x' 1, which were preserved in some positions, and the aspirate [h]; cf. ME knyght [knix'tl and ME he [he: ] (NE knight, he); in OE both words were spelt with h: OE cnieht, he.

§ 359. Some replacements were probably made to avoid confusion of resembling letters: thus о was employed not only for lo] but also to indicate short [ul alongside the letter u; it happened when и stood close to n, m, or v, for they were all made up of down strokes and were hard to distinguish in a hand-written text. That is how OE munuc became ME monk, though it was pronounced as Imurjk] and OE lufu became ME love I'luvaT (NE monk, love). This replacement was facilitated — if not caused — by the similar use of the letter о in Anglo-Norman.

The letter у came to be used as an equivalent of i and was evidently preferred when i could be confused with the surrounding letters m, n and others. Probably у acquired the new sound value [i, i: ] when the OE vowels [у, y: ] shown by this letter had changed into [i, i: ] (see § 375). Sometimes, however, y, as well as до, were put at the end of a word for purely ornamental reasons, so as to finish the word with a curve; ME nyne ['ni: na], very fveri], my [mi: ] (NE nine, very, my), w was inter­changeable with и in the digraphs ou, au, e.g. ME doun, down [du: n] and was often preferred finally: ME how Ihu: ], now [nu: ], lawe ['laua), drawen ['drauanl.

§ 360. The table on p. 186 summarises the peculiarities of spelling in Late ME. It includes the new letters and digraphs introduced in ME and the new sound values of some letters in use since the OE period (the other letters of the English alphabet were employed in the same way as before.)

For letters indicating two sounds the rules ol reading are as fol­lows.

< j and с stand for Ids) and Is 1 before front vowels and for [g] and Ik] before back vowels respectively (see the examples in § 357).

У stands for [jj at the beginning of words, otherwise it is an equi

valent of the letter i, as in NE, e.g. ME yet [jet 1, knyght [knix't j, also veyne or wine ['veinaj (NE yet, knight, vein).

The letters th and s indicate voiced sounds between vowels, and voiceless sounds — initially, finally and next to other voiceless con­sonants: ME worthy I'wurfli], esy ['s: zi], thyng [0ig], sorwe ['sarwa] (NE worthy, easy, thing, sorrow). Note that in ME — unlike OE — this rule does not apply to the letter /: it stands for the voiceless if] while the voiced Iv] is shown by v or и; cf. ME feet [fe: t] and vayn [vein] (NE feet, vain).