Say What? Read online

  Text copyright © 2009 by Gena K. Gorrell

  Published in Canada by Tundra Books,

  75 Sherbourne Street, Toronto, Ontario M5A 2P9

  Published in the United States by Tundra Books of Northern New York,

  P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2009928409

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher - or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency - is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Gorrell, Gena K. (Gena Kinton), 1946-

  Say what? : the weird and mysterious journey of the English language / Gena K. Gorrell.

  eISBN: 978-1-77049-079-6

  1. English language–History–Juvenile literature. I. Title.

  PE1075.G675 2009 j420.9 C2009-902917-0

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to my father,

  Jack Muir, who was always my best editor,

  and who taught me from the beginning

  that “Well, you know what I mean” is

  just

  not

  good

  enough.

  Language is the memory of the human race.

  — WILLIAM HENRY SMITH

  Contents

  Introduction: The Puzzle of English

  1 The Mother Tongue

  2 The Glory That Was Greece

  3 Echoes of Ancient Greek

  4 Britannia, Provincia Romana

  5 Amicus, Amice, Amicum

  6 Angles and Saxons and Vikings

  7 Alfred and the Vikings

  8 Riddles, Hymns, and Tales of Battle

  9 The Defeat of the English

  10 Tales of Cnihts and Fair Ladies

  11 How to Spell It? How to Say It?

  12 Making the “Good Book” Better

  13 Gloriana and the Bard

  14 Greener Pastures

  15 The War between English & English

  16 Britannia’s Heyday

  17 Words, Words, Words

  18 Looking Forward

  Timeline

  Appendix

  More about Sanskrit

  More about Greek

  More about Latin

  More about Old English

  Source Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Picture Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  THE PUZZLE OF ENGLISH

  Where on earth did the English language come from? Over a million words, and such weird spellings! Aren’t there any rules? Some words are spelled the same but said differently (“The wind made the flag wind around the pole”). Others are spelled differently but pronounced the same (“Did you bring enough stuff?”) How did English get so complicated?

  The answer is that English isn’t just the speech of one nation; it’s the memory of thousands of years of history. It tracks the places people came from and the places they went to; the adventures they had; the friends and enemies they made; the battles they won and lost. It marks the days when legions of Roman soldiers stomped onto England’s shore – the days when Viking warriors sailed their dragon boats across the sea to plunder British villages – the day a king of England was felled by an arrow on the battlefield and a foreigner seized his throne. As English changed and grew, it became a jumble of sounds and words and rules from countless languages and lands. And it’s still changing, still growing, every day.

  If you want an example, look at Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit. When Bilbo Baggins first meets the wizard Gandalf, the hobbit exclaims:

  Gandalf, Gandalf! Good gracious me! … Not the fellow who used to tell such wonderful tales at parties, about dragons and goblins and giants and the rescue of princesses …?

  That looks like plain English, doesn’t it? But gracious and princess both come from Latin – gratia, “kindness,” and princeps, “leader.” Dragon and giant are from Greek drakon and gigant. Fellow and wonderful come from the Norse spoken by those ancient Viking warriors. As for Gandalf, it’s Norse for “wand-elf”!

  English has words from languages so old that we barely know they existed. It has words from prehistoric tribes, and from today’s languages – from Hindi, Arabic, and Chinese; from the Choctaws in North America, the Guaranís in South America, and the Aboriginals in Australia. More than seventy percent of all English words were born someplace other than England. Spin a globe and put your finger down on almost any patch of land; English has words that come from there.

  That’s why the language can be so confusing and inconsistent. That’s why, for every rule about English, there’s a fistful of exceptions. And that’s why this is the richest, most international, most versatile language in the world.

  Where did language start in the first place? It must have been long before there were humans. Imagine primitive ape-creatures huddled together in a cave; they’d have to communicate somehow. They’d want some way to say, Give that back, it’s mine! or Move over, you’re standing on my foot! And the more they lived together, the more they’d need to say. Where’d you find those blueberries? Chase that rabbit over here and I’ll grab it. As they evolved into humans, and learned farming and other skills, their language would become more complicated: I’ll trade you half my honey next week for one of those catfish today.

  While early humans were developing languages, they were also migrating from place to place. Sometimes they were driven by changes in the weather, or by natural disasters like floods and forest fires. Sometimes they were moving away from hostile neighbors, or following the animals they hunted. For many reasons, groups of people were leaving one home territory and looking for another.

  By comparing certain languages and tracing their roots, finding similar words that seem to come from the same ancient, mysterious source, scholars have concluded that in the far distant past – maybe six or eight thousand years ago – some people were speaking a language that has now been lost. They had no writing (that we’ve found) so we have no records, and we know very little about who they were, or where and how they lived. They seem to have had words for snow and wolf but not for ocean, so their homeland was probably cold and far from the sea – likely somewhere in Central Europe. But that’s about all we can say. That, and one other thing: for some reason, small bands of these people migrated in different directions. They carried their language across Europe and Asia and even up into Scandinavia.

  Once their communities became separated, their ways of speaking slowly began to differ, creating a whole family of languages that we describe as Indo-European. One version, Celtic Indo-European, is the source of modern Welsh, and of the Gaelic spoken in Ireland and Scotland. Farther south, Greek Indo-European developed into ancient and then modern Greek. The Indo-Iranian form is the foundation of most languages of India, Pakistan, and Iran. Italic Indo-European gave rise to Latin, which gave rise to Italian, French, and Spanish. The Slavic version is the basis of Russian, Bulgarian, and Polish. Germanic Indo-European is the root of Dutch, most Scandinavian languages, German and Yiddish – and English. And these are only a few examples. Altogether, the roots of the languages spoken by a
bout half the people in today’s world reach back to the Indo-European tongue of those unknown people so long ago.

  How much Sanskrit is hiding in your kitchen? The ancient Hindus cooked with pippali (berry), sarkara (grit), and crngaveram (powdered horn-body, an antler-shaped root). The Greeks called these seasonings peperi, sakkharon, and ziggiberis. We know them as pepper, sugar, and ginger. (Do you see where the artificial sweetener saccharin gets its name?)

  One of the earliest Indo-European languages that we have in written form is Sanskrit. In India, Hindu scriptures called the Veda were written in Sanskrit about 3,500 years ago. (Veda is Sanskrit for “knowledge.”) Sanskrit was the language of India’s court and literature 2,500 years ago, and although it’s not used in daily speech any more, it’s still part of Hindu religious ceremonies.

  Although modern Indo-European languages have been developing separately for thousands of years, and now seem very different from one another, it’s intriguing to track down the similarities. For example, the Sanskrit words for one, two, three, are pronounced eka, dvi, tri. Compare those ancient words to these:

  And look at the “family tree” for this word:

  Sanskrit and its descendants – such as Latin, Ancient Greek, and early French and Germanic languages – gave English more than just vocabulary. They also left fragments of their grammar, ghosts that lurk behind our sentences like scraps of faded photos in a family album. These odds and ends can be puzzling, even frustrating, but they deserve respect. They come from the dawn of the English language, and long before.

  One of the greatest Hindu gods, Shiva (SHEE-vah), appears in Sanskrit texts over two thousand years old. Shiva can take various forms, some kind, some cruel and dreadful. Here he appears as the four-armed Lord of the Dance, surrounded by a fiery halo representing the cycle of creation, destruction, and rebirth, and trampling a demon to symbolize the end of evil.

  Greece is a smallish country, about the size of England – and like England, it was once the heart of an empire. At its height, starting around 500 BCE (Before the Christian Era), Greece boasted magnificent architecture, painting, and sculpture. Its poets and playwrights were renowned across Europe. Education was greatly prized, and orators (public speakers) who were logical and eloquent were celebrated as heroes.

  As the Greeks sailed their ships along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, setting up colonies to trade their wine, olive oil, and pottery for products such as wheat and metals, their language became known as far away as Spain and North Africa.

  In the mid-300s BCE, the brilliant military campaigns of the young king Alexander the Great spread Greek civilization and culture to even more distant lands – down the Nile River through Egypt, and east into India.

  (photo credits 2.1)

  The Greek language was used in government as well as in fashionable, artistic circles. It was also handy as a lingua franca – a common language understood by traders and travelers from many different places.

  One reason for the success of the language was the Greek alphabet. Earlier cultures had found ways to write words, but their systems were generally very complicated and required a lot of fancy symbols, usually based on pictures. All those symbols were hard to learn, and they weren’t easy to copy out, either.

  This pillar marks the tomb of a high-ranking priest-scribe at an Egyptian pharaoh’s court more than four thousand years ago. The Ancient Egyptians had about seven hundred hieroglyphic signs, each representing a consonant or a mix of consonants. (They didn’t write vowel sounds.) The symbols inside the cartouche (oval line, upper left and middle right) represent a flowering reed, a feather, a hare, and water, and spell out the pharaoh’s name. Hieroglyphs were elegant and decorative, but only a few people – mostly priest-scribes — could read them. (photo credits 2.2)

  But another ancient civilization – the Phoenicians, who lived about where Lebanon is now – had had the brilliant idea of using a handful of simple signs to represent consonants. (The Phoenicians and the Egyptians didn’t bother writing vowels.) The Greeks had adapted this system sometime around the 800s BCE, adding a few vowels and other sounds and ending up with about twenty-four letters. And there it was: a quick, efficient way to write a letter or a shopping list or a poem, and so easy that a schoolchild could learn it. And this set of letters began: a, b – alpha, beta.

  What word can you make out of A-B-C-D? Abecedarian, meaning something related to the alphabet, or someone learning it. “Isn’t little Sally clever? She’s only three, and already she’s an abecedarian.”

  The Greeks were seen as highly cultured, and experts in life’s little pleasures — good food, fine wine, music, and romance. They decorated pottery bowls and vases with scenes from daily life, historical events, and the endless shenanigans of their gods. (photo credits 2.3)

  After Alexander died suddenly when he was only thirty-three, his empire began to collapse. In time, the remnants of Greece were swallowed up by the Roman Empire. But the Romans themselves had been nourished by the culture of Greece. The Roman alphabet was derived from the Greek alphabet. The Roman language, Latin, had been influenced by Greek. Roman literature was patterned after the works of Greece. Educated Romans were expected to be fluent in Greek; for less privileged people, Greek plays, poems, and speeches were translated into Latin. Children of wealthy Roman families studied under Greek tutors, and often completed their education by traveling in Greece.

  “The art of speaking enchants the soul,” declared Plato (427?-347? BCE), a writer and philosopher, and one of the most famous Greeks. He also pointed out that “An orator’s virtue is to speak the truth.” (photo credits 2.4)

  The Greek gods lived on Mount Olympus and led soap-opera lives of passion, deceit, jealousy, and revenge. Nemesis was a goddess who punished those who were evil, arrogant, or vain. Today, a nemesis is a supreme enemy or destroyer. (Harry Potter is Lord Voldemort’s nemesis.)

  In Greek mythology, when Halcyone found her drowned husband’s body on the shore, she was so heartbroken that she drowned herself. Halcyone and her husband were turned into kingfishers, birds that were thought to nest on a calm sea. That’s why calm and peaceful times are called halcyon (HAL-see-on) days.

  In the centuries that followed, the writings of the ancient Greeks – myths, fables, plays, and philosophy – shaped European society. Well into the 1800s, people could hardly claim to be educated unless they read at least a little Greek.

  The Greek alphabet often shows up in our maths and sciences: beta blockers are a class of medications, gamma rays are a kind of electromagnetic radiation, and pi (π, the Greek letter p) is a ratio used in math involving circles. The leaders of an animal pack are the alpha female and alpha male. A triangular airplane wing, or the triangle of a spreading river-mouth, is a delta, after the capital Greek D, ∆. (You can find the whole Greek alphabet in “More about Greek,” at the end of this book.)

  Iota was the name of the Greek i, the smallest letter in their alphabet. In English an iota is the smallest possible amount (“She hasn’t got an iota of talent!”) Our word jot comes from iota, and means the same thing. And when we “jot down a note,” we are writing as little as possible.

  We borrow Greek words to create all kinds of new meanings. The Greek for circle, kuklos, shows up in bicycle, cyclone (a circular storm), and recycling (using over and over). From naus, ship, we get nautical (related to ships and sailing), navigable (passable by ships – “Is that river navigable?”), and astronaut (“star-sailor”). From hudor (water) come dehydrated (deprived of water), hydraulic (powered by water), and hydroponics (growing plants in water without soil). Knowing a little Greek can help you figure out a lot of English words, even if you’ve never seen them before.

  The Greeks had two versions of the letter o. One was omicron (o), or o-little (as in “microscope,” for seeing little things). The other was omega (Ω), or o-big (as in “megacity,” big city). Since omega was the last letter of the Greek alphabet, “My dog knows every trick from alpha to omega”
means Rover knows all the tricks from A to Z - in other words, absolutely everything.

  In Ancient Greece, male athletes practiced their exercises naked (gumnos). We still call a room for athletics a gymnasium.

  The Greek alphabet may have been simple, but the language certainly wasn’t. It was highly “inflected” – that is, words changed depending on how they were used. A noun could have many forms, because if you wrote “This crocodile stole the fish from that crocodile and gave it to another crocodile,” the ending on “crocodile” was different each time, depending on what role that particular crocodile played in the action. If you said “These crocodiles” you needed a whole different set of endings, for the plural. And if you talked about one lion (leon) or two lions instead of one or two crocodiles, you needed two more sets of endings, because words ending in os (like krokodilos) didn’t have the same endings as words ending in on (like leon) – in the singular, or in the plural!

  In Ancient Greek, kroke means “stones” and drilos means “worm” — so a worm-shaped animal that liked to sunbathe on stony shores was called a krokodilos. (photo credits 3.1)

  And that’s only the beginning. All nouns also had gender. Grasshopper was masculine but flea was feminine. Soup was masculine but dessert was neuter (neither masculine nor feminine). So if you described some animal as large (megas), the ending on megas depended on how many animals you meant, and whether they were masculine or feminine or neuter, and what role they played in the action!

  And verbs were no easier. We say come and coming and came, and we add a few auxiliary verbs (such as was, will, or had). A Greek verb could have as many as two hundred different forms, depending on the tense (past, present, future, etc.), the voice (active or passive), how many people were involved, and so on.