Part III — Books on the English Language
I A History of Modern Colloquial English — By H. C. Wyld
I purposely refrained from saying “Philology” because it has a frightening sound. There is a feeling that the study of literature is directly hostile to a study of Philology, whereas the truth is that, as Professor Wyld says, “Rightly interpreted, language is a mirror of the minds and manners of those who speak it,” a point of view which cannot be sufficiently emphasised.
In the old days the study of language meant the chasing of umlaut and the tracking down of ablaut; to-day we find ourselves enticed into the study of modern colloquial English in these words:
“Together let us beat this ample field,
Try what the open, what the covert yield;
The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore,
Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;
Eye nature’s walks, shoot folly as it flies,
And catch the manners living as they rise.”
The study of language in H. C. Wyld’s History of Modern Colloquial English becomes “one line of approach to the Knowledge of Man,” and is vastly intriguing.
We find ourselves, for instance, trying to account for the great shifting in pronunciation between the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century in words of the “er” and “ar” type. Why did “sarvice,” “vartue,” “sarmon” die out, and “Derby,” “Berkshire,” “clerk” remain? Of course the great factor which nowadays destroys the value of vocabulary as a specific characteristic of a given regional dialect is the migratory habits of the population, and the war will have done more to ruin it than any amount of Elementary Education.
But we are concerned for the moment with curiosities. Why is “napkin” to be preferred to “serviette”? Why do not people who speak of “the influenza” say “the appendicitis”? Even so great an authority on social propriety as Lord Chesterfield talks of “the head-ach.” Where do shop-walkers get their “half-hose,” “vest” (for waistcoat), “neckwear,” “footwear” and similar words? What has happened to the word “genteel”?
“O damn anything that’s low”—“The genteel thing is the genteel thing”; but the fun lies in finding out what each age and each individual means or has meant by “genteel” and “low.”
It is with a certain sense of surprise that those who have never studied the English Language find that in mediæval times our ancestors gave the alphabet Continental values; those who have a smattering of literary history are equally surprised to find that Chaucer, “the Father of English Literature,” did not create the English of Literature; he found it ready to his hand and used it with a gaiety, a freshness, a tenderness and a humanity which has never been surpassed.
Those interested in Literature have ever looked upon the fifteenth century as an arid waste: in language, on the other hand, it is a period of intense importance. For one thing, there is a big increase in the number of people who can write, and therefore in the number of private documents that have come down to us. Freed from the shackles of the professional scribe, writing becomes a listening to actual people speaking, and so we find a great variety of spelling... we find that modern English is beginning... and there is of course the introduction of printing. It is to these old printers and to these old printers alone that we owe our persistence in clinging to an outworn system of spelling.
For four hundred and fifty years they have dictated to us how we are to spell, and a defence of our existing system which is completely unphonetic is defensible chiefly on the ground of custom, not at all for any pretended historical merit. If only Caxton had been a trifle more enterprising our spelling would have been less widely divorced from the facts of pronunciation.
In the sixteenth century we find that regional dialect disappears completely from the written language of the South and Midlands—almost every private letter contains a certain number of spellings which throw light upon pronunciation: “the tongue which Shakespeare spake” was the tongue which he wrote: and there is a definite unity between the colloquial language and the language of literature which is after all natural when we think how closely approximated to the action done was every word written by the Elizabethans who one and all seem to have been writers as well as soldiers, statesmen, politicians, sailors, merchant venturers and ambassadors.
“It is not for nothing,” says Professor Wyld, “that matters stood thus between the men of letters and the courtiers and the explorers in the age when Literary English was being made, or rather, let us say, when English speech was being put to new uses, and made to express in all its fullness the amazing life of a wonderful age, with all its fresh experiences, thoughts and dreams.
“If anyone doubts whether the language of Elizabethan literature was actually identical with that of everyday life, or whether it was not rather an artful concoction, divorced from the real life of the age, let him, after reading something of the lives and opinions of a few of the great men we have briefly referred to, ask himself whether the picture of Ascham, Wilson, Sidney, or Raleigh posturing and mourning like the Della Cruscans of a later age, is a conceivable one... if the speech of the great men we have been considering was unaffected and natural, it certainly was not vulgar. If it be vulgar to say whot for hot, stap for stop, offen for often, sarvice for service, venter for venture: if it be slipshod to say Wensday for Wednesday, beseechin for beseeching, stricly for strictly, sounded for swooned, attemps for attempts, and so on; then it is certain that the Queen herself, and the greater part of her Court, must plead guilty to these imputations.”
The individualism in spelling which still to a certain extent prevailed in the sixteenth century enables us to collect from written works, to a far higher degree than at present, the individual habits of speech which the writer possessed. The result of an examination of the writings of this age, from this point of view, is that we see that there existed a greater degree of variety in speech—both in pronunciation and in grammatical forms—than exists now.
One particularly valuable document which Professor Wyld makes use of is the diary of Henry Machyn, a sixteenth-century tradesman who gossips at random in the vernacular of the middle-class Londoner with no particular education or refinement. Like the Wellers, he confuses his v’s and w’s: wacabondes, wergers, walues, welvet, woyce, voman, Vestmynster are examples. He misplaces his initial aspirates, alff, Amton Courte, ard, Allallows, elmet, alpeny, hanswered, haskyd, harme: his is the largest list of “dropped aspirates” in words of English, not Norman-French, origin which Professor Wyld has found in any document as early as this. As as a relative pronoun, good ons for good ones, syngyne for singing, wyche for which and watt for what are valuable signs. Machyn lets us into more secrets of contemporary speech than does any other writer of his period: he is marvellously emancipated from traditional spelling, which makes him a wonderful guide to the lower type of London English of his time.
When he gets to the seventeenth century the ordinary reader of to-day feels that the writers of that period begin for the first time to speak like men and women of his own age; both in spirit and in substance we have reached our own English; by the time we reach Sir John Suckling and Cowley we scent a colloquial modernity which is altogether foreign to the soaring periods of Milton, the eccentricity of Sir Thomas Browne or the didactic aloofness of Bacon. Dryden was conscious of great differences between the speech of his own time as reflected in writing, especially in the drama, and that of the Elizabethans. He attributes the change and “improvement” to the polish and refinement of Charles II.’s Court. He congratulates himself that “the stiff forms of conversation” had passed away; his charges against the older age are merely charges against the archaic and unfamiliar. To be obsolete in his eyes was to be inferior. Hence his attempt to modernise Chaucer and improve on Shakespeare. These strictures of Dryden about English refer primarily to literature, but they are applicable to the colloquial language. If literary prose style changes it is because the colloquial language has changed first.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century we have Swift’s instructive treatises on the English of his day and of the age before, which is diametrically opposed to Dryden’s theories. But it is important to notice that among the hosts of solecisms to which he objects he does not quote what we should expect him to quote. Why does he not mention Lunnon, Wensday, Chrismas, greatis (greatest), respeck, hounes (hounds)? The reason is that they were so widespread among the best speakers that he himself didn’t notice anything wrong with them. His strictures are those of the academic pedant, Dryden’s are those of the man of the world.
But for a study of seventeenth-century colloquial English we are directed to the letters in the Verney Memoirs. Just as in the sixteenth century Henry Machyn’s diary was more to our purpose than the work of any great man, so are the Verney Papers in the seventeenth century the eternal joy of the philologist. A large proportion of the letters are written by ladies, and it is from these that we get the greater number of departures from the conventional spelling which shed so much light upon pronunciation. If they spell phonetically it is not because their talk was more careless, but because they read less and were therefore unfamiliar with the orthodox spelling of printed books. To spell badly, it must be remembered, was no fault in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. From them we get this common form of pronouncing ar for er—sartinly, desarve, sarvant, sarve, presarve, divartion, larne, marcy; from them we get gine for join, byled for boiled, oblege for oblige, seein, missin, comin, disablegin, lemonds, night gownd; they shorten have to a; they say between you and I and he is reasonable well agane.
This free and easy pronunciation and grammar which are characteristic of fashionable English down to the middle of the eighteenth century is partly due to the intimate relation that existed between the ruling classes who visited their estates in the country and came directly into contact with regional speech. “It is just this constant touch with country pursuits and rustic dialect which distinguished, and still distinguishes, the upper classes from the middle-class dwellers in the town.”
We owe a good deal to a phonetician called Cooper, whose Grammatica Anglicana was published in 1685. From him we see that line and loin had the same pronunciation. Ant and aunt, Rome and room, Noah’s and nose, Walter and water, doer and door, pulls and pulse, shire and shear—these show us at once how closely the real rustic of to-day gets to the fashionable speech of two hundred years ago. He then gives us pronunciations which he would have his readers avoid as barbarous: ommost for almost, wuts for oats, fut for foot; but it is pleasant to find that Mr Cooper is pleasantly free from that gross and besetting sin of the schoolmaster to describe an ideally “correct” English.
This omission of the “l” (in Walter) is extended by another “phonographer” in 1701 to St Albans, Talbot, falcon, almanac, almost, Falmouth, falter: apparently too, in his time, the au sound which most of us have kept in sausage and because extended then to auburn, auction, audience, august, aunt, austere, daunt, fault, fraud, jaundice, Paul and vault.
William Baker in 1724 gave us in his Rules for True Spelling and Writing English, an instructive list of what he called “words that are commonly pronounced very different from what they are written”! Stomick, spannel, Dannel, venison, medson are noteworthy.
From the middle of the eighteenth century there are signs of a reaction against a laxity in pronunciation, influenced perhaps by Lord Chesterfield and Doctor Johnson.
Johnson, we know, favoured the “regular and solemn” rather than the “cursory and colloquial.”
It is to be noticed in passing that all the “reforms” in pronunciation and grammar which have passed into general currency in colloquial English during the last hundred and fifty years have come from below and not from above, in the first instance. This accounts for what some of us look on as the offensive vulgarity of the modern pronunciations of waistcoat, often, forehead, landscape, handkerchief, due to a wish to speak correctly. So our pronunciation of gold, servant, oblige, nature, London, Edward, etc., would in their turn have struck our grandfathers as offensive vulgarisms.
The later eighteenth century and the early nineteenth seem to have favoured a very serious turn of mind. It is really extraordinary to think of the hold which Jane Austen exerts over us when we come to analyse the total absence of brilliance, humour, pointedness or charm of any kind that marks the conversation of her characters. The charm and the genius lie in the author’s handling of these second-rate people, but she represents them as they actually were. These are actually the conversations of living people. All the little pomposities and reticences, the polite formulas, the unconscious vulgarisms, the well-bred insincerities of the age are here perfectly displayed. The Bennets, D’Arcy’s, Wodehouses, etc., pronounced their words kyard, gyearl, ojus, Injun, comin’, goin’, and so on. Lady Catherine de Burgh probably said Eddard, tay, chaney, ooman, neigb’rood, lanskip, Lunnon, cheer (chair) and perhaps goold, obleege and sarvant.
Professor Wyld quite rightly waxes indignant over the rise of bogus pronunciations, based purely on the spelling, among persons who were ignorant of the best traditional usage until they obtained currency among the better classes. “It would be desirable,” he says, “to run these monstrosities to earth, when it would probably appear that many had their origin among ignorant teachers of pronunciation.” “It would be an interesting inquiry,” he says in another place, “how far the falling off in the quality of prose style among the generality of writers after the third quarter of the eighteenth century is related to social developments. An East Indian director is said to have told Charles Lamb (of all men!) that the style the Company most appreciated was the humdrum, thus doubtlessly voicing the literary ideals of the rising class of bankers, brokers, and nabobs whose point of view was largely to dominate English taste for several generations.”
It is worth remembering that the change in pronunciation of a host of words like heat, meat, eat, ease, sea, speak, cheat, dream, deceit from hate, mate, ate, ase, say and so on is not in the nature of a sound change, but is merely the abandonment of one type of pronunciation, and the adoption of another, a very common phenomenon.
It was a visit to The Beggar’s Opera that made me think the following sentence worthy of comment. The present-day vulgarism of dropping the initial aspirate was not widespread much before the end of the eighteenth century, and it made one wince to hear an otherwise good actor so far go out of his part as to drop “h’s” where the original would never have done so. The restoration of an aspirate in humour is a trick of yesterday. The gap in the evidence between Machyn and two hundred years later is remarkable. The practice which did exist in Machyn’s day in London must have been confined to a limited class. The wrong addition of h is far more noticeable.
In a most diverting final chapter Professor Wyld dilates on colloquial idiom, and reminds us how impossible it would be for us, if we were transported into the sixteenth century, to know how to greet or take leave of those we met, how to express our thanks suitably, how to ask a favour, pay a compliment or send a polite message to a gentleman’s wife. We should be at a loss how to begin and end the simplest note, whether to a friend, relative or stranger. We should hesitate every moment how to address the person we were talking to.
Readers of Ford Madox Hueffer’s Ladies whose Bright Eyes, and those who saw When Knights were Bold, will realise what infinite amusement can be called up by imagining oneself driven to talk on level terms with our ancestors.
Professor Wyld opens up the subject by giving characteristic specimens of modes of greeting, farewells, compliments, endearments, angry speeches, oaths, affectations and so on, all of which are entertaining and enlightening. We find, for instance, most of our modern formulas in letter-writing in use before the end of the first half of the seventeenth century.
For anyone in the least interested in the sources and development of his own language there is no book which will whet his appetite to pursue the subject still more deeply than Professor Wyld’s History. It has the added advantage that scholars will find in it plenty of material for further research; but everyone should read it for the flood of light it sheds on what we fondly imagined to be good taste, on what is falsely thought to be “the correct thing,” and most of all because it shows us still another way of “catching the manners” of other ages “living as they rise.”