1066 The newly married couple were lucky. In their first two months together they’d known an endlessness of new feelings, and felt the bliss of being enoughly happy. What hearthotness (mania)! What fleshbesmittingness (carnal attraction)! Now, after a summer that was beweepingly (lamentably) short, they were in a sound house, had sound friends, and a sound working life.
According to a recent book on the subject, this is how we might talk if the Battle of Hastings had gone the other way – as it nearly did.1 After the Norman Conquest, ordinary people continued to speak English, since begengness of wordhoard (the application of vocabulary) is down to folk, but the governmental and social elites spoke French, while contracts and the courts were conducted in Latin.
In time this official vocabulary infiltrated the vernacular, in some places displacing perfectly good English words, but in others settling alongside them, so that eventually ‘English’ had almost as many loan words drawn from French and Latin as it had words originating in Old English. This is one reason why English has such a huge wordhoard (the other is the need for new words to accommodate the science done predominantly in English-speaking countries – see 10 June).
Where French- or Latin-derived words have survived alongside English words meaning at least roughly the same, what’s the result – pointless redundancy or expressive enrichment? Guides to good style often favour English over ‘French’, because since 1066 the latter has been the voice of officialdom. So (to take an actual example from the Plain English Campaign’s website): ‘High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process’ could be stated more simply in English as: ‘Children need good schools if they are to learn properly’.
The limit to this argument is that where the English word has survived alongside, and not been displaced by the French or Latin loan word, it’s usually for a reason. ‘Sight’ and ‘vision’, for example, don’t have exactly the same meaning; the latter often implies moral, intellectual or aesthetic values – invisible things that (on one level) are out of sight. The same goes for ‘till’ and ‘cultivate’, ‘win back’ and ‘redeem’, ‘beginning’ and ‘origin’, and thousands of other such binaries in the expanded language.
In ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946) George Orwell offered five rules for clear composition, among which was: ‘Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.’ Yet who recognised the limits of plainness better than he? In Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) the Party is working on a form of English in which synonyms are being erased in order to extinguish ambiguity and make ‘crimethink’ impossible. Push plain English too far, and you may wind up with Newspeak.
3 David Cowley, How We’d Talk If the English had Won in 1066, Sandy, Bedfordshire: Bright Pen Books, 2009.