as ‘spoon’. And if you still have a lingering feeling deep down that there is something especially spoonish about , then you should know that even in English, a spoon was not always a spoon …2
Perpetual Motion
Eppur si muove!
And yet it does move!
(Galileo Galilei, 1632)
There is a story about an Englishman, a Frenchman and a German who are debating the merits of their respective languages. The German starts by claiming: ‘German is off course ze best language. It is ze language off logik and philosophy, and can communicate viz great clarity and precision even ze most complex ideas.’ ‘Boeff,’ shrugs the Frenchman, ‘but French, French, it ees ze language of lurve! In French, we can convey all ze subtletees of romance weez elegance and flair.’ The Englishman ponders the matter for a while, and then says: ‘Yes, chaps, that’s all very well. But just think about it this way. Take the word “spoon”, for instance. Now you French call it a “cuillère”. And what do you Germans call it? – a “Löffel”. But in English, it’s simply called a “spoon”. And when you stop to think about it … isn’t that exactly what it is?’
The reason why the Englishman’s argument is so outrageous, of course, is that the names we use for things bear no inherent relation to the things themselves. Names are entirely arbitrary, and this is why ‘Löffel’ or ‘cuillère’ is just as good a designation for as ‘spoon’. And if you still have a lingering feeling deep down that there is something especially spoonish about , then you should know that even in English, a spoon was not always a spoon …
In the fourteenth century a monumental work appeared in English, a seven-volume history of the universe called the Polychronicon (a translation from the Latin of a work by a Cheshire monk called Higden). Somewhere deep in volume five, the Polychronicon describes how the Emperor Charlemagne spent ten whole years building a wooden bridge over the Rhine. But one day, shortly before Charlemagne’s death, the bridge was destroyed by such a conflagration that within three hours, ‘nought oon spone’ was to be seen floating above water. ‘Not one spoon’…? Well, the Polychronicon wasn’t really concerned with cutlery. At that time, ‘spoon’ just meant a thin piece of wood, a chip, or a splinter.
Initially, it seems odd that the meaning of ‘spoon’ has managed to change so much over a relatively short period of time. What is more, such somersaults in meaning may appear alien to the very purpose of language, namely providing a stable system of conventions that allow coherent communication. For how can speakers reliably convey their thoughts to one another if the sense of the words they use can suddenly change? It may therefore come as even more of a surprise that the leap in meaning that ‘spoon’ has accomplished is by no means a rare event. When one inspects the history of a language – any language – one soon discovers that change is not the exception but the rule.
This chapter will set out to expose what drives the transformations in all areas of language, and reveal how the changes can proceed without causing severe damage to effective communication. And ultimately, the motives behind language’s perpetual motion will point us on the right track for understanding the mechanisms of linguistic creation.
* * *
When one thinks of languages that are very different from one’s own, one tends to imagine exotic tongues from distant corners of the globe. But strangeness can be found much closer to home, by wandering in time instead. The English language, or rather the various ‘Englishes’ of the last millennium, is as good a testimony as any to the chronic variability of language, and one effective way of appreciating the extent of the changes is to look at how one supposedly immutable document has mutated through the centuries. Here is a short excerpt from the Book of Genesis, which relates the story of the Flood:
English around 2000
The Lord regretted having made humankind on the earth … So the Lord said: ‘I will wipe the human beings I have created off the face of the earth, people together with animals and reptiles and birds of the air, because I regret having made them’…
And God said to Noah ‘… Make yourself an ark of gopher wood … and cover it inside and out with pitch. For my part, I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy all flesh in which there is the breath of life.’
From modern, albeit literary English, let’s now jump four centuries back in time, to the year 1604, when King James I, newly installed on the throne of England, and desiring to soothe the religious strife that had plagued the realm for more than a century, commissioned the best scholars in the land to produce a translation of the Bible into the English of the day. Forty-seven scholars laboured on the text for the suitably biblical period of seven years, until finally, in 1611, what has come to be known as the King James Version was published:
English around 1600 (King James Version)
It repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth … And the Lord said: ‘I will destroy man whom I haue created from the face of the earth, both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the foules of the aire, for it repenteth me that I haue made them.’
And God said vnto Noah: ‘Make thee an arke of gopher wood … and [thou] shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And behold, I, euen I, doe bring a flood of waters vpon the earth, to destroy all flesh wherein is the breath of life.’
Because of the enduring prestige of the King James Version, its language still seems quite familiar, give or take a few thee’s and thou’s. But if one only ventures further back in time, to two centuries before King James commissioned his group of scholars, the going soon gets a little tougher. The first translation of the entire Bible into English was undertaken towards the end of the fourteenth century by a group of heretical scholars led by John Wycliffe, a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation who challenged the authority of the Church. Wycliffe and his associates worked on rendering the Bible into the vernacular of the day, to make the ‘law of God’ available to everyone who could read – an audacious undertaking for the time. Their translation finally appeared around 1390, a few years after Wycliffe’s death:
English around 1400 (Wycliffe Bible)
It forthou3t* him that he had made man in erthe. ‘I shal do awey,’ he seith, ‘man, whom I made of nou3t, fro the face of the erthe, fro man vnto thingis hauynge soule, fro crepynge beest vnto fowles of heuen; forsothe it othenkith me to haue maad hem.’
He seide to Noe: ‘Make to thee an ark of planed trees; and with ynne and with oute thow shal di3ten it with glew. Se, I shal lede to watres of a flood vpon the erthe, and I shal slee al flehs in the which spiryt of lijf is.’
Wycliffe’s may have been the first complete Bible to appear in English, but some parts of the Bible had been rendered into English as early as four centuries before. One of the first English translations was made at the turn of the first millennium, by Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham. Ælfric was celebrated as the greatest prose writer of Anglo-Saxon England, but for speakers of modern English, his language might seem just a tad odd:
English around 1000 (Translation of Ælfric)
Gode ofðuhte* ða ðæt he mann geworhte ofer eorðan … And cwæð: ‘Ic adylgie ðone man, ðe ic gesceop, fram ðære eorðan ansyne, fram ðam men oð ða nytenu, fram ðam slincendum oð ða fugelas: me ofðingð soðlice ðæt ic hi worhte.’
And God cwæð ða to Noe: ‘Wyrc ðe nu ane arc of aheawenum bordum and clæmst wiðinnan and wiðutan mid tyrwan. Efne ic gebringe flodes wæteru ofer eorðan, ðæt ic ofslea eal flæsc on ðam ðe is lifes gast.’
The four passages above reveal the waywardness of the ‘English language’ over the last thousand years, and highlight just how thoroughly it has changed. Geoffrey Chaucer, a contemporary of Wycliffe, was keenly aware of language’s mutability, and put it beautifully in his Troilus and Criseyde:
And as if to prove the point, Chaucer’s (and Wycliffe’s) English – from just over half a millennium ago – already looks ‘wonder nyce and straunge’. But go back a full ‘thousand yeer’, and Ælfric’s English is not merely strange – it sounds like double Dutch. Within a span of only about thirty generations, ‘English’ has undergone such a thorough overhaul that what is supposed to be one and the same language is barely recognizable. Indeed, Ælfric’s language seems so entirely foreign that one might need some convincing to accept that it even has anything to do with English at all. And yet, on closer inspection, and with a word-for-word gloss into modern English, it turns out that the two ‘Englishes’ have a lot more in common than meets the eye:
Armed with this gloss, it may become easier to accept that Ælfric’s language and modern English really do represent two stages of the same language. Quite a few words are the same (and, he, men), and others are much of a muchness (ofer ‘over’, fram ‘from’) or at least close enough to be identifiable: eorthan ‘earth’, geworhte ‘wrought’, cwæth ‘quoth’, fugelas ‘fowls’. Even so, the knowledge that Ælfric’s language really was the ‘English’ of a millennium ago only makes the extent of the changes seem more baffling.
Perhaps the most surprising feature of Ælfric’s English is that, like Latin, it had a complex case and gender system, so that nouns and even the definite article ‘the’ had an array of different forms depending on their role in the sentence and on their gender and number. Just consider how many different forms the article ‘the’ could assume even in the three short lines from the biblical passage above: thone man (‘the man’), fram thære eorthan ansyne (‘from the earth’s face’), fram tham men (‘from the men’), oth tha nytenu (‘to the animals’). Add to this the fact that the genders of nouns were just as erratic as in German today (‘earth’ was a ‘she’, for instance, but a ‘stone’ a ‘he’) and you can imagine that an earlier incarnation of Mark Twain wouldn’t have dared bat an eyelid at the complexity of any foreign case and gender system. To give an idea of the labyrinth of different forms in the English of Ælfric’s day, the set of endings for one class of nouns is shown below:
It is the case system, perhaps more than anything else, that makes Ælfric’s language appear so outlandish, whereas Wycliffe’s English seems much less peculiar, largely because by 1400 the case system had almost entirely disintegrated. But while the collapse of the case system was an enormous upheaval in the history of English, it was by no means the only change. One only need compare a short phrase from the four biblical passages above to appreciate that no area of English stood still for very long:
The first thing one notices is how words come and go over the centuries, with older words (like worhte ‘wrought’) dying out, and being replaced by new ones (maad). The expression of displeasure, for instance, seems to have been particularly moody. Ælfric uses a verb current at the time, and says me ofthingth (‘it displeases me’), but by 1400 the verb ofthink had begun to sound rather dated. Wycliffe could still expect his readers to understand it othenkith me, but by 1600 this verb had long been forgotten, and it repenteth me was used in its stead. Today, the verb ‘repent’ is still easily recognizable, but it nevertheless seems quite out of place in this particular context. Since the seventeenth century, ‘repent’ has undergone a complete role reversal: what the King James translators understood by it repenteth me is what we would render with ‘I repent (or regret) it’.
But it is not just the meaning of words that changes over time. Some of the basic features in the structure of English, such as the conventions of word order, also seem to have been rather unstable. We saw earlier that word order plays a crucial role in modern English, as it is the only means of distinguishing the subject (which comes before the verb) from the object (which comes after). But consider the order of words in Ælfric’s passage: me ofthingth ‘me displeases’ (for ‘it displeases me’), and ic hi worhte ‘I them made’ (for ‘I made them’). Clearly, Ælfric’s idea of which words should go where was different from ours.
Finally, the pronunciation of English words has also erred and strayed over the centuries, but these wanderings are only partially mirrored in the passages above, because of the conservative nature of the writing system. Only in a few cases, such as the word ic in Ælfric’s passage, can the changes in pronunciation be glimpsed from the spelling. Ic is in fact one and the same word as our modern ‘I’, and only looks so different because its pronunciation has changed so much. In the tenth century, ic was pronounced something like {itch}, but by 1400 the final {tch} had disappeared, and the word came to be pronounced {ee} (as in ‘bee’), and thus to be spelt as just ‘I’. In the writing system, ‘I’ has looked the same ever since, but the actual pronunciation of ‘I’ has continued to meander. During the fifteenth century, there was an upheaval in the pronunciation of many English vowels, which linguists call ‘The Great English Vowel Shift’. As a part of this shift, all long {ee} vowels turned into {ay} (as in modern ‘day’), so by the sixteenth century, ‘I’ came to be pronounced {ay}. And by the eighteenth century, {ay} changed further into the modern pronunciation {eye}.
Most of the changes in pronunciation, however, are masked by the spelling. For cultural reasons that are extraneous to spoken language itself, the system of spelling we use today has remained pretty much frozen for at least 400 years, even though the pronunciation continued to drift during this time. So if one compares the King James passage with the modern translation, one could easily fall under the impression that for some reason changes in pronunciation came to an abrupt halt after 1611. But this is just an illusion. Take, for instance, the phrase ‘flood of waters to destroy all flesh’. The King James translators spelt this phrase precisely as we do (or more accurately, we spell it precisely as they did). But in fact, most of the words in this phrase would have sounded quite different then. In 1611, the word flood rhymed with good; waters had an audible {r}, and was pronounced roughly with the vowels of modern {matters}; and the word all sounded like our word {owl}.
The frozen spelling system also conceals changes in pronunciation that occurred even more recently. When reading Jane Austen or George Eliot, for example, one is tempted to assume that their characters sounded just like actors in BBC costume dramas. The reality was rather different, however. In 1902, the art critic Charles Eastlake reminisced about the speech of ‘old fellows’ forty years before, those people born around 1800 (the generation of Darwin and Disraeli), who would have been in their teens when Jane Austen’s novels first appeared. And particularly as he is referring to the genteel speech of the educated classes, their pronunciation of various words might seem rather surprising today:
Men of mature age can remember many words which in the conversation of old fellows forty years ago would sound strangely to modern ears. They were generally much obleeged for a favour. They referred affectionately to their darters; talked of goold watches, or of recent visit to Room; mentioned that they had seen the Dook of Wellington in Hyde Park last Toosday and that he was in the habit of rising at sivin o’clock. They spoke of Muntague Square and St Tummus’s ’Ospital. They would profess themselves to be their hostess’s ’umble servants, and to admire her collection of chayney, especially the vase of Prooshian blue.
So although the conventions of spelling might not have changed much for nearly four centuries, the peregrinations of pronunciation have carried on regardless. And it is precisely for this reason that English spelling is so infamously irrational. Just have a go at reading the following poem out aloud as quickly as you can:
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough, and through?
Well done! And now you wish perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead – it’s said like bed, not bead –
For goodness sake, don’t call it ‘deed’.
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt):
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there’s dose and rose and lose –
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front, and word and sword,
And do and go, and thwart and cart –
Come! Come! I’ve hardly made a start!
(From the Manchester Guardian, 1954)
So really, it is unfair to say that English spelling is not an accurate rendering of speech. It is – it’s only that it renders the speech of the sixteenth century.
It is clear, then, that no corner of the English language has remained protected from changes: sounds, meanings and structures all seem to have suffered from a curious inability to stay still. This inconstancy of English may seem surprising and eccentric, and one might be tempted to blame it on some particular predicament of its speakers: the wanderlust of a seafaring nation, perhaps, or the unsettling effects of mint sauce. Alas, the reason is much more prosaic, as there is nothing special about English in this respect – così fan tutte. When one traces the records of any other language with a sufficiently long history, a similar picture unrolls. A thousand years may be ‘but as yesterday when it is past’ for the Psalmist, but for the German language it has allowed ample time to roam:
GERMAN ∼ AD 1000
Uuanda fóre dînen ougon zênstunt zênzech iaro sint
samo so der gésterîgo dag, der feruáren ist.
Vnde so éin uuáhta.
GERMAN ∼ AD 2000
Denn tausend Jahre sind in deinen Augen
wie der gestrige Tag, wenn er vergangen ist,
und wie eine Wache in der Nacht.
For a thousand years in thy sight are
but as yesterday when it is past,
and as a watch in the night.
(Psalms 90:4)
And French has not exactly sat on its hands either:
LATE LATIN ∼ AD 400
Quia mille anni in oculis tuis
sicut dies hesterna
quae pertransiit
et vigilia nocturna.
FRENCH ∼ AD 1200
Kar mil an devant les tuens oilz
ensement cume li jurz d’ier
chi trespassa,
e la guarde en nuit.
FRENCH ∼ AD 2000
Car mille ans, à tes yeux,
sont comme le jour d’hier
quand il est passé,
et comme une veille dans la nuit.
The simple truth is that all languages change, all the time – the only static languages are dead ones.
* * *
The dramatic changes in languages will prove important, first and foremost because they will provide the major clues for how complex linguistic structures can arise. But as an added bonus, language’s perpetual motion also solves another problem: the babble of Babel. It transpires that languages did not need any divine intervention in order to proliferate, for given half a chance (and sufficient time), they multiply quite happily of their own accord. Just imagine two groups living in two neighbouring villages, speaking similar varieties of one language. With the passing of time, their language undergoes constant transformations, but as long as the two communities remain in close contact, their varieties will change in tandem: innovations in one village will soon spread to the other, because of the need to communicate. Now suppose that one of the groups wanders off in search of better land, and loses all contact with the speakers of the other village. The language of the two groups will then start wandering in different directions, because there will be nothing to maintain the changes in tandem. Eventually, their varieties will have strayed so far apart that they will no longer be mutually intelligible, and so turn into different languages.
Incidentally, the decision about when to start calling such varieties different ‘languages’, rather than ‘dialects’ of the same language, often involves factors that have little to do with the actual linguistic distance between them. An American linguist once quipped that ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’, and his point is illustrated by recent cases such as Serbian and Croatian, which before the break-up of the former Yugoslavia were regarded as dialects of one language, Serbo-Croatian, but afterwards were suddenly proclaimed to be different languages. So ultimately, the decision about whether something is a language or a dialect relies on what the speakers themselves consider it to be. But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can be called different languages.
Linguistic diversity is thus a direct consequence of geographical dispersal and language’s propensity to change. The biblical assertion that there was a single primordial language is not, in itself, unlikely, for it is quite possible that there was originally only one language, spoken somewhere in Eastern Africa, perhaps 100,000 years ago. But even if this were the case, the break-up of this language must have had much more prosaic reasons than God’s wrath at Babel. When different groups started splitting up, going their own ways and settling across the globe, their languages changed in different ways. So the huge diversity of languages in the world today simply reflects how long languages have had to change independently of one another.
The different periods of separation between languages also explain why some languages are much more closely related than others. English, for instance, is more similar to Swedish, Icelandic, Dutch and German than it is to Polish, Albanian, Punjabi, Persian, Turkish, Yoruba (spoken in Nigeria) or Chinese:
Family tree of the Indo-European languages
The reason why English, Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages look so akin is that they all stem from one prehistoric ancestor, which linguists today call Proto-Germanic, so in fact they were all one and the same language until the beginning of the first millennium AD. (The term ‘Proto’ is a designation linguists use to refer to an assumed prehistoric language from which various attested descendants have sprung.) But once the Germanic tribes started spreading out from their original homelands in southern Scandinavia and along the North Sea and Baltic coasts, their speech varieties gradually began to diverge, eventually turning into different languages.
English and the Germanic languages are themselves related – more distantly – to many other languages of Europe and Asia. Ultimately, they go back to the same common ancestor as that of Italian, French, Spanish, Irish, Welsh, Russian, Lithuanian, Polish, Greek, Albanian, and even Armenian, Persian, Hindi and Punjabi. This ancestral prehistoric tongue, probably spoken around 6,000 years ago, is called by linguists Proto-Indo-European, because in the first few millennia BC the descendants of its speakers spread over an area stretching all the way from India to Europe (see map). So although it may not be immediately apparent to the naked eye, the second group of languages in the list above (Polish, Albanian, Punjabi, and Persian) are all related to English, albeit somewhat distantly, and are descended from the same forebear. But since English and Persian, for instance, must have parted company at least six millennia ago, the two languages have diverged so much that only a few basic Persian words are still immediately identifiable (for instance pedar ‘father,’ dokhtar ‘daughter’ or do ‘two’). So to the naked eye, the Persian or Albanian sentences above do not look much more similar to English than the ones from Turkish or Yoruba, which are not descended from Proto-Indo-European.
* * *
There should be little room left for doubt by now that mutability is not a secret vice of English or any other language in particular, but an epidemic of universal proportions. Nonetheless, the realization that change is a chronic condition that all languages suffer from only sharpens a fundamental question – why? Why are languages constantly on the move, and why can’t they simply pull themselves together and keep still?
The first reaction might be that the answer is glaringly obvious. The world around us is changing all the time, and naturally, language has to change with it. Language needs to keep pace with new realities, new technologies and new ideas, from ploughs to laser printers, and from political-correctness to sms-texting, and that is why it always changes. This line of argument may seem appealing at first, but when one looks at the actual changes close up, the picture becomes far more complicated. Take, for instance, this short phrase from the passages quoted earlier:
What new inventions or new ideas could have been behind the differences here? Which new technology, for example, could have sparked the change in sounds from ic {itch} to I {eye}? And which new ideology is responsible for the switch in the order of the words, from ‘them made’ (hi worhte) to ‘made them’?
Or let’s look at the question the other way round, and consider a language not burdened with any mod cons or even with ploughs, for that matter. Mbabaram was once the language of a small Aboriginal tribe in north-east Queensland, Australia, about fifty miles south-west from Cairns. In the 1930s an anthropologist recorded a list of a few words in Mbabaram, which seemed entirely different not only from all the neighbouring languages of the region, but from all other Aboriginal languages on the Australian continent – it was as if the Mbabaram tribe had somehow been parachuted into the north Australian rainforest from some faraway place, and there was even a theory that the Mbabaram were related to the extinct Tasmanians, thousands of miles to the south. In the 1960s, when a linguist started gathering more evidence about the language from the handful of old people who still could remember it (the last person who could speak some Mbabaram died in 1972), the decidedly ‘un-Australian’ nature of the language at first only seemed to be confirmed. And it took some ingenuity to recognize that Mbabaram was indeed closely related to the languages of the neighbouring tribes, only that its affiliation had been entirely obscured by sweeping changes in pronunciation that the language had undergone at some stage in its history: whole syllables had been chopped off, and new vowels had sprung up, so that, just as one example, a word originally pronounced gudaga ended up in Mbabaram as dog (which by sheer coincidence happens to mean … ‘dog’).
But if a language is supposed to change only in order to keep up with ploughs and laser printers, then why should the language of a small tribe of hunter-gatherers, who have never moved beyond stone age technology, be so unstable? It appears, then, that our first ‘obvious’ explanation for why language keeps on changing is not so convincing after all. Even if some changes in language come about in order to adapt to changing realities, these constitute only a minor part of the overall transformations that languages undergo. The main bulk of changes must stem from entirely different reasons.
There is a close runner-up in the list of ‘obvious’ explanations for why language changes so much, and that is the issue of contact. It is easy to imagine that languages change only because their speakers come into contact with speakers of other languages or dialects, and start borrowing words and expressions from one another. This line of argument seems especially tempting in the case of English, since although English is a Germanic language, about half of its vocabulary is not of Germanic origin but borrowed from various other languages, mostly Norman French and Latin. But while contact, ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, so to speak, is undoubtedly the source of a great many changes, and thus a much better explanation than ‘keeping up with laser printers’, it still cannot be held responsible for the sweeping changes in absolutely all languages, even those whose speakers have had hardly any exposure to other languages. And what’s more, even in the case of English, surely one of the most covetous of languages, a quick look at the changes, say from ic {itch} to {ee} to {ay} to {eye}, will soon reveal that many of them cannot just be put down to borrowing.
Finally, a third ‘obvious’ explanation for why language should change so much is that people are progressive creatures who value novelty and improvement and thus set about trying to renovate and improve language. But this idea is a complete non-starter. As we’ll see in the next chapter, when people bother to think about changes, they generally portray them as a great danger to language (as well as to society, if not the whole of civilization) and condemn them as slack, slovenly or just plain wrong. If anything, the weight of censure and authority conspires to prevent language from changing. And yet, it does move!
* * *
All the obvious explanations, therefore, fall short of accounting for the sheer scale of the changes. It seems that languages need neither nudging from the Joneses nor the gadgetry of ploughs in order to be transformed, for they keep changing, even without the slightest provocation, and even in spite of people’s best intentions. But if all these external reasons fail to explain the changes, then there must be something in language itself which makes it so unsteady. There must be something inherently unstable in the very way in which we communicate, some element of volatility which drives language into a state of inner restlessness, and gives it itchy feet. But what?
The conundrum of change has been one of the enduring puzzles in the study of language, and it preoccupied linguists throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. But only in the last few decades have linguists finally managed to make significant progress in cracking it. Like any respectable whodunit, the mystery of change turned out to have three main elements: a suspect – who is really behind the changes? a motive – why should whoever is doing it be doing it? and finally the toughest question of all, the get-away – how do the perpetrators get away with these changes, without causing devastating damage to communication?
Tracking down the suspect may at first seem a rather difficult mission, since it’s quite hard to think of anyone who is really trying to change language. (Are you?) But the identification turns out to be fairly straightforward, since although no one in particular is changing language, it is in fact all of us who bring about the changes, even if we never wish to. There are a great number of things that people bring about without ever intending to. Just think of traffic jams. Nobody has ever set out on their daily commute with the express purpose of creating one, and yet each driver contributes to the congestion by adding one more car to an overcrowded road.
But unintended changes don’t always have to be harmful. Imagine two public buildings with an overgrown field lying directly between them. The only road connecting the buildings winds its way lengthily around the field, so people who have to walk from one building to the other start crossing the field as a short-cut. The first person to do so tries to make his way through the long grass, and people who come afterwards find the track which the first person has made the most inviting way through, because some grass and bracken have already been trodden down. As more and more people cross the field, more and more vegetation is trampled, so that eventually the track turns into a nice clear footpath. The point is that no one in particular created this footpath, and no one in particular even intended to. The path did not emerge from some project of landscape design, but from the accumulated spontaneous actions of the short-cutters, who were each following their own selfish motives in taking the easiest and quickest route.
Changes in language come about in a rather similar fashion, through the accumulation of unintended actions. These actions must stem from entirely selfish motives, not from any conscious design to transform language. But what could these motives be? This is a rather more involved question, and doing justice to it will occupy us in the next few chapters. But in essence, the motives for change can be encapsulated in the triad economy, expressiveness and analogy.
Economy refers to the tendency to save effort, and is behind the shortcuts speakers often take in pronunciation. As we shall see in the following chapter, when these short-cuts accumulate, they can create new sounds, just like the new footpath cutting through the field. Expressiveness relates to speakers’ attempts to achieve greater effect for their utterances and extend their range of meaning. One area where we are particularly expressive is in saying ‘no’. A plain ‘no’ is often deemed too weak to convey the depth of our unenthusiasm, so to make sure the right effect is achieved, we beef up ‘no’ to ‘not at all’, ‘not a bit’, ‘no way’, ‘by no means’, ‘not in a million years’, and so on. But as we shall see later on, the results of this hyperbole can often be self-defeating, since the repetition of emphatic phrases can cause an inflationary process that devalues their currency.
The third motive for change, analogy, is shorthand for the mind’s craving for order, the instinctive need of speakers to find regularity in language. The effects of analogy are most conspicuous in the errors of young children, as in ‘I goed’ or ‘two foots’, which are simply attempts to introduce regularity to areas of the language that happen to be quite disorganized. Many such ‘errors’ are corrected as children grow up, but some innovations do catch on. In the past, for example, there were many more irregular plural nouns in English: one bōc (book), many bēc; one hand, two hend; one eye, two eyn; one cow, many kine. But gradually, ‘errors’ like ‘hands’ crept in by analogy on the regular -s plural pattern. So bēc was replaced by the ‘incorrect’ bokes (books) during the thirteenth century, eyn was replaced by eyes in the fourteenth century, kine by cows in the sixteenth.
The following chapters will take a much closer look at the different motives for change, and explore their effects on language in much greater depth. Economy and expressiveness will feature first, and the third part of the triad, analogy, will be the subject of Chapter 6. But for the moment, and even without going into all the details, the reasons for language’s chronic inner restlessness should be beginning to come into focus. Different forces, powered by different motives, keep pulling and pushing language in different directions, and in such a complex system, these constant thrusts ensure that the whole never stays still.
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Having formed an idea of both the suspect and the motives, we are left with the third and trickiest part of the whodunit: how do speakers ever let language get away with it? Why are changes not brought up short and stopped in their tracks? At first sight, there seem to be all the reasons in the world why society should never let the changes through. After all, the primary purpose of language is to allow effective communication, a flow of ideas and information between minds. And since the names we use for things are just arbitrary conventions (a spade would be just as good a name for a spoon as a spoon would be for a spade), the only way to achieve coherent communication is if the system of conventions is agreed upon and adhered to by everyone. So if the rules and regulations of language can keep on changing all the time, surely its very purpose is under threat. English, for instance, has changed almost beyond recognition within less than thirty generations, but how could this mutation have proceeded without causing a breakdown in communication along the way?
One only needs to think about the effects of change on other complex systems to grasp the severity of the threat. Just imagine what it would be like to drive, if the Highway Code kept on changing while you were on the road. There is a story I once heard in Norway about what happened a few decades ago, when the traffic system in neighbouring Sweden underwent a complete reorganization. Originally the Swedes drove on the left, but since all surrounding countries drove on the right, the government decided that Sweden must keep up with the times. The switch-over was set for one day in 1967, and a massive publicity campaign was launched to inform drivers about the impending change. But as the deadline drew nearer, the government grew nervous, fearing that chaos would ensue on the first few days after the change. So, the story goes, it was hurriedly decided to revise the plans and take a softly-softly approach. In the first week, only lorries and buses would drive on the right, and everyone else would still drive on the left …
Whether apocryphal or not, the implications of this story are clear. Evidently, speakers cannot all switch over from one form to another at exactly the same moment, so how is it that fatal crashes don’t ensue? If the rules of the communication system are allowed to keep on changing, why are there no serious misunderstandings at the time when the changes are taking place? Take the change in the verb ‘repent’, which ‘flipped’ its meaning, so that when a seventeenth-century speaker said it repenteth me, what he really meant was not ‘it repents me’, but rather ‘I repent it’. How could this change of direction proceed without causing accidents along the way?
At first, one might imagine that such a strange flip was only possible because ‘repent’ is a fairly rare word, used in restricted contexts. Perhaps there were no complete write-offs because the change occurred on some small deserted country lane, but surely such a change of direction would be unthinkable on a busy motorway. It may therefore come as a surprise that several other verbs underwent a similar flip in English, including the verb ‘like’, which by anyone’s standards is not a small country lane. Suppose one wants to translate into modern English the following fifteenth-century sentence: ‘This is my loved son that liketh me.’ The obvious translation would run on the lines of ‘this is my beloved son who likes me’. But that would be quite the wrong way round, since what the sentence actually meant was ‘this is my beloved son, whom I like’. Originally the verb ‘like’ was not a weaker synonym for ‘love’, but rather meant ‘to please’ or ‘to be pleasing to’, so the phrase ‘he liketh me’ meant ‘he is pleasing to me’, or in the modern sense of ‘like’: ‘I like him’. This older meaning of ‘like’ was still frequently used by Shakespeare at the turn of the seventeenth century:
HOST: The music likes you not?
JULIA: You mistake; the musician likes me not.
(The Two Gentlemen of Verona)
Translated into modern English, this would mean:
HOST: Don’t you like the music?
JULIA: You’re wrong, I don’t like the musician.
But today the older sense seems entirely alien. At some stage, and in broad daylight, the verb ‘like’ – surely one of the more common and crucial verbs in the English language – flipped from one sense to the other, apparently without creating a whole series of real-life trouser-role comedies about who really likes whom.
An even more puzzling example concerns the transformation of the verb ‘resent’. In 1677, for instance, Isaac Barrow, Newton’s teacher and predecessor in Cambridge, wrote in one of his sermons: ‘Should we not be monstrously ingratefull if we did not deeply resent such kindness?’ And in the following century, a certain Bishop Warburton wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘I was sure that this instance of his friendship to you would ever be warmly resented by you.’ Contrary to first impression, however, these are not anachronistic attempts at Wildean wit, for neither of these authors intended any irony. In their day, the verb ‘resent’ simply had a different meaning, and could do the work of our modern ‘appreciate’ or ‘feel grateful for’ – exactly the opposite of its sense today. So somehow, the verb managed to make a U-turn in its meaning, again with no evidence of things going haywire along the way.
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The meaning of words is not the only area of language where such changes could be expected to throw spanners in the workings of communication, for sweeping transformations in pronunciation should surely be equally obstructive. Imagine, for instance, a change in sounds that systematically turns every p in its path into an f. Even assuming that there was a thoroughly good motive for such a change (let’s not worry for now about what that motive might be), can one really imagine that such a transformation would ever be allowed to pass the censors and catch on in English? Does it seem likely that in fifty years’ time, respectable people will start throwing farties, go on ficnics in the fark, and will in all seriousness say things like ‘could you flease fass the feas’? Surely, such a change would never be tolerated, since otherwise, how would anyone be able to tell the difference between pork and fork, please and fleas, ‘The Duke shot a pheasant’ and ‘The Duke shot a peasant’?
But as unlikely as it may seem, this very change from p to f has already occurred, not in some exotic tribal tongue, but in English itself, albeit in the fairly distant past. Take a look at the following list of English words, and their counterparts in Danish, Italian and French:
The words in each row are clearly ‘cognates’ (they derive from the same root in the prehistoric ancestor of all four languages, Proto-Indo-European) so any differences in pronunciation between them must stem from sound changes that occurred in the histories of the individual languages. And while a few other changes are evident, one difference sticks out in particular: wherever Italian and French have a p, English and Danish have an f instead. By comparing such cognates from all the attested daughter languages of Proto-Indo-European, linguists have worked out that all the words above originally began with a p: ‘fish’, for instance, was *peisk or *pisk in Proto-Indo-European, and ‘foot’ was *ped. (The asterisk is a conventional way to mark words that are not attested in actual documents, but reconstructed on the basis of comparisons between the daughter languages.) And while Italian and French still retain the initial pristine p, in the history of English and Danish (and, in fact, of all the other Germanic languages), the p’s have somehow wandered into f’s.
As far back as 200 years ago, linguists discovered that a change from p to f must have occurred in Germanic, but for almost a century and a half they could not grasp how such a change could ever get under way. After all, why should this transformation be any more feasible in prehistoric times than in the present day? In an effort to discover how such changes could proceed, linguists tried to scan the historical records for clues. The Germanic change of p to f lay lost in prehistory, of course, so obviously it could not be observed directly. But even when linguists looked for evidence from sound changes that occurred during the historical period, they found to their chagrin that for some reason the changes could never be observed in progress. All that could be made out from the records was a stage before a certain change had started, and a stage some generations later, after the change was completed. The records never seemed to illuminate the elusive process in between, when the transformations were actually taking place.
The linguists of the nineteenth century devised a brilliant theory to explain their way out of this predicament, and to account for why they failed to catch those sound changes in the act. Trying to observe sound changes, they claimed, was like trying to observe a tree growing: the progress of change is so slow that the naked eye can only detect it by comparing the language at two distant points in time. Speakers started off with a proper p, and then over generations – so the theory ran – the sound inched towards something just a bit closer to an f, and then a little closer still, until, a century or more later, the sound finally reached a real f. In 1933, Leonard Bloomfield, the leading American linguist of the time, summed up this view with confidence: ‘The process of linguistic change has never been directly observed,’ he assured his readers. ‘Such an observation, with our present facilities, is inconceivable.’ The theory was doubly attractive, since at a stroke it managed to explain not only why linguists were failing to observe changes in progress, but also how the changes were allowed to proceed in the first place. Because the changes happen slowly and imperceptibly, speakers do not get confused by them, and in fact, they don’t even notice them, and so no one tries to stop them in their tracks.
As ingenious as the theory was, it had only one slight drawback: it had little foothold in reality. While vowels may be able to slide continuously from one into another, with consonants like p and f this idea makes no sense, for where are all the phantom sounds that are supposed to exist somewhere in between the two? Even granted that the combination pf could be claimed as a milestone half-way between p and f, then how should the sound which is two-thirds of the way be pronounced? And if such a mysterious fluffy sound does exist, why is it that one never finds it around in any language today? There are plenty of languages with a p, a fair few with an f, but why is it that one doesn’t find languages which just at the moment happen to have a sound that is five-sixths of the way in between?
It is easy to poke fun at the theory of gradual sound change, but for decades no one managed to come up with a better alternative. Until, that is, it turned out that the solution had been lying right under everybody’s noses all along. Of course it is possible to observe the changes in progress – one just needs to know where to look. Only in the 1960s did linguists finally realize that in order to observe the elusive changes in action they should not delve into ancient records, but go out on to the streets and listen to what is happening in the here and now. And once linguists finally started to take in what was going on around them, the answer was not long in coming.
Consider again the change from p to f, which seems so implausible today. If I predicted that in fifty years’ time signs will read ‘fick-fockets will be frosecuted’, one would, quite rightly, greet this prediction with disbelief. But now let’s test out a different forecast: suppose I suggested that in fifty years’ time th will turn into f, so that people will say ‘it’s going to funder on Fursday, I fink’. Would you treat that prediction with the same incredulity? In all probability, you wouldn’t, and the reason why not is the solution to the mystery of how change is ever allowed to proceed in language.
If you are familiar with the way English is spoken in Britain, you will know that even today, some people say fink and Fursday. These pronunciations are already a feature of English, or at least of some people’s English. And because they are already a part of the established variation, it is much easier to imagine how such pronunciations might one day become the norm: they will simply become more and more common, and eventually take over. The key to the mystery of change, then, is variation. Language is not a monolithic rigid entity, but a flexible fuzzy system, with an enormous amount of ‘synchronic’ variation (that is, variation at any given point in time). There is variation between the speech of people from different areas, of different ages, different sexes, different classes, different professions. The same person may even use different forms depending on the circumstances: ‘fink’ to mates in the pub, but ‘think’ to the boss at work. And it is through variation that changes in language proceed, for what really changes with time is the frequencies of the competing forms. So if, at some future date, English moves from th to f, this will not be after a long period during which the sound th gradually creeps closer and closer to an f. It will simply be because more and more people will say f instead of th, until in the end th will become so rare that people will just forget about it.
Indeed, if we were able to nip back in time and roam the streets of a Germanic village, say sometime around 400 BC, just when p was changing to f, we would undoubtedly hear the two pronunciations side by side. Older and more genteel people might say ‘pisk’ (fish), but young and trendy folk would say ‘fisk’. In all probability, we would also hear the older generation fuming about the careless and vulgar pronunciation of the young. But if we stuck around for a generation or two, we would gradually hear fewer and fewer people saying ‘pisk’, and more and more saying ‘fisk’, until eventually, no one would have a clue what a ‘pisk’ was.
This answer to how changes manage to proceed in language may seem quite cheeky. Not to put too fine a point on it, I am claiming that people can cope with the chaos of change over the years (that is, with ‘diachronic variation’), simply because they can cope with the even greater chaos of synchronic variation, the diversity at any one point in time. The ability to deal with synchronic variation is an essential part of our knowledge of language. We can cope not only with ‘Thursday’ and ‘Fursday’, but also with ‘eether’ and ‘eyether’, ‘dreamed’ and ‘dreamt’, ‘shedule’ and ‘skedule’, ‘am I not?’ and ‘aren’t I?’ and thousands of other variations in sounds, meanings and structures. When it comes to language, we are all incredibly good drivers – all of us have been trained to race in the streets of Naples, and this is why we don’t crash head-on into one another all the time.
If you doubt that your own driving skills really merit this flattery, think of the following simple case. Suppose you see two elderly ladies coming out of the theatre, and from their animated conversation you catch the word ‘wicked!’ Of course, you would automatically assume that the ladies thoroughly disapproved of the performance. But if behind the two ladies there were two teenage girls, and one said to the other ‘wicked!’ you would probably interpret her mood very differently. In a hundred years’ time, when the original meaning of ‘wicked’ has all but been forgotten, people may wonder how it was ever possible for a word meaning ‘evil’ to change its sense to ‘wonderful’ so quickly. But for us who are in the midst of it, the variation does not seem to cause too much angst. We judge the meaning by drawing information from the context, from what we know about the speaker and from what we infer about their intentions. And more often than not, we get it right. Sometimes, the contradictory meanings even rub shoulders for centuries: a word like ‘fast’, which started off meaning something like ‘secure’, or ‘not moving at all’, later developed the contrary sense ‘moving quickly’. Both meanings have survived until this very day, but we still manage to get along all right, apparently without too many serious mishaps.
This is not to say that there never are any head-on collisions. Take this report of a crash caused by a recent change in the pronunciation of vowels by some younger speakers of British English. The following conversation was recently overheard in a university cafeteria. A student came to the canteen and asked for ‘a cake’. ‘Wha’ sor’a cike d’yer want, love?’ replied the dinner lady at the counter. The student looked rather at a loss, and repeated: ‘No, just a cake, a cake! A caka-cala…’
But although such prangs do occur, they seem to be remarkably rare given the actual chaos on the roads, and this is a tribute to our skills in coping with variation. Exactly the same skills must have allowed speakers in the past to cope with those changes that in retrospect seem so improbable. Recall the flipped verb ‘like’, for instance. To modern ears the change from ‘it likes me’ to ‘I like it’ seems unlikely, but from the perspective of the seventeenth century it was just another case of synchronic variation. Shakespeare may have used ‘like’ in the older sense (‘the musician likes me not’), but in fact, he also uses ‘like’ in the modern – flipped – meaning. In Othello, for instance, the musicians are told: ‘the general so likes your music, that he desires you, for love’s sake, to make no more noise with it.’ Listeners in Shakespeare’s time must have employed the same skills to work out the question of who likes whom, as we do to decide the meaning of ‘wicked’ or ‘fast’. As the seventeenth century progressed, however, the older sense of ‘like’ became rarer, and eventually disappeared altogether. Because we are no longer used to coping with this particular instance of variation, the change in meaning looks like a dangerous swerve on a busy motorway. But for the speakers then, the gradual petering out of the old meaning would have barely been noticeable.
The verb ‘resent’ is a similar case in point, since what seems today an about-turn in its meaning felt like nothing of the sort for speakers in the seventeenth century. At the time, ‘resent’ could mean either ‘take with a good feeling’, or ‘take with a bad feeling’, or more accurately, it could mean take with any feeling, as the following examples from letters of Charles I illustrate:
The misfortune of our forces in the north we know is resented as sadly by you. (1644)
Let the army know that we highly resent this their expression [of loyalty] to us. (1647)
And although those were especially turbulent times in England, there is no evidence that the flexibility in the meaning of ‘resent’ contributed significantly to the miseries of the period, or to Charles’s unhappy end. Later, however, as the seventeenth century drew to a close, the positive sense of ‘resent’ gradually faded away. While speakers at the time would hardly have noticed it, nearly four centuries on this creates the appearance of a complete U-turn.
* * *
The most important discovery we have made so far is that language is in a perpetual state of flux. While no one in particular seems to be going about changing it, a few deep-rooted motives that drive all of us (economy, expressiveness, analogy) create powerful forces of change and ensure that sounds, meanings and even structures are always on the move. And while our capacity to accommodate synchronic variation means that we are often hardly aware that one form is usurping another, changes can proceed so quickly that after just a few centuries a language can hardly recognize itself when leafing through the old family albums.
So far, the processes of change may have appeared somewhat chaotic. Not only does everything change, but these changes seem to proceed in random and unpredictable directions, as if anything could turn into anything else, entirely at whim. The word ‘resent’ took a U-turn from a positive meaning to a negative one, but the word ‘wicked’ is now lurching in exactly the opposite direction, from a negative to a positive sense. Similar examples of the haphazard nature of change are not hard to come by. The word ‘adder’, for instance, started out in life as ‘nadder’ and shed its initial n some time in the fourteenth century (when the phrase ‘a nadder’ was misheard as ‘an adder’). But the word ‘nick-name’ turned in exactly the opposite direction: having started out as an ‘eke-name’, it picked up an n through a similar misinterpretation (‘an eke-name’, meaning an ‘also-name’ was misheard as ‘a nick-name’). Changes in the past tense of English verbs don’t seem to follow a very reliable compass either: help, for instance, started out with an irregular past tense healp, but took on a regular form helped. The verb dive, on the other hand, started with a regular past tense dived, but is nowadays taking a plunge in the other direction, and turning into an irregular dove. All these apparently shambolic developments may give the impression that there is as much logic to the course of language change as there is to the vagaries of fashion. Hemlines go up and down, but it would be hopeless to look for any sense behind the fluctuations.
Nevertheless, despite the apparent bedlam, there is also a very different face to language change: though this be madness, yet there is method in’t. On closer inspection, it turns out that amid the chaos of random vacillations, a distinct element of regularity can be discerned in language’s motion. The following chapters will reveal how language after language, in wave after wave, drifts along the same channels of change, and in exactly the same direction. To take one example, the sound change from p to f, which blew over the prehistoric settlements of the Germanic tribes, appears to have made its presence felt not only in Germanic, but in dozens of other languages across the globe. A change in the opposite direction, however, from f to p, is practically unheard of.
In what follows, our focus will stay almost exclusively on these regular and recurrent paths of change, and rarely veer towards the sporadic and more unpredictable types. The rationale is fairly straightforward: the clues to how linguistic structures rise and fall will be found not in chaos but in order, within those predictable and systematic aspects of change. Of course, the random elements will always be there somewhere, buzzing around in the background. But they can just be ignored as white noise, and need not distract us from enjoying the music.