The Story of English in 100 Words Read online

  The Story of English in 100 Words

  Also by David Crystal

  The Cambridge Encyclopedia of language

  The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language

  The stories of English

  The fight for English

  Think on my words: an introduction to Shakespeare’s language

  Txting: the gr8 db8

  By hook or by crook: a journey in search of English

  A little book of language

  Evolving English: one language, many voices.

  Begat: the King James Bible and the English language

  Internet linguistics

  Just a phrase I’m going through: my life in language

  The Story of English in 100 Words

  David Crystal

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

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  British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 84668 427 2

  eISBN 978 184765 459 5

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  Contents

  Preface

  A short history of English words

  1 Roe – the first word (5th century)

  2 Lea – naming places (8th century)

  3 And – an early abbreviation (8th century)

  4 Loaf – an unexpected origin (9th century)

  5 Out – changing grammar (9th century)

  6 Street – a Latin loan (9th century)

  7 Mead – a window into history (9th century)

  8 Merry – a dialect survivor (9th century)

  9 Riddle – playing with language (10th century)

  10 What – an early exclamation (10th century)

  11 Bone-house – a word-painting (10th century)

  12 Brock – a Celtic arrival (10th century)

  13 English – the language named (10th century)

  14 Bridegroom – a popular etymology (11th century)

  15 Arse – an impolite word (11th century)

  16 Swain – a poetic expression (12th century)

  17 Pork – an elegant word (13th century)

  18 Chattels – a legal word (13th century)

  19 Dame – a form of address (13th century)

  20 Skirt – a word doublet (13th century)

  21 Jail – competing words (13th century)

  22 Take away – a phrasal verb (13th century)

  23 Cuckoo – a sound-symbolic word (13th century)

  24 Cunt – a taboo word (13th century)

  25 Wicked – a radical alteration (13th century)

  26 Wee – a Scottish contribution (14th century)

  27 Grammar – a surprising link (14th century)

  28 Valentine – first name into word (14th century)

  29 Egg – a dialect choice (14th century)

  30 Royal – word triplets (14th century)

  31 Money – a productive idiom (14th century)

  32 Music – a spelling in evolution (14th century)

  33 Taffeta – an early trade word (14th century)

  34 Information(s) – (un)countable nouns (14th century)

  35 Gaggle – a collective noun (15th century)

  36 Doable – a mixing of languages (15th century)

  37 Matrix – a word from Tyndale (16th century)

  38 Alphabet – talking about writing (16th century)

  39 Potato – a European import (16th century)

  40 Debt – a spelling reform (16th century)

  41 Ink-horn – a classical flood (16th century)

  42 Dialect – regional variation (16th century)

  43 Bodgery – word-coiners (16th century)

  44 Undeaf – a word from Shakespeare (16th century)

  45 Skunk – an early Americanism (17th century)

  46 Shibboleth – a word from King James (17th century)

  47 Bloody – an emerging swear-word (17th century)

  48 Lakh – a word from India (17th century)

  49 Fopdoodle – a lost word (17th century)

  50 Billion – a confusing ambiguity (17th century)

  51 Yogurt – a choice of spelling (17th century)

  52 Gazette – a taste of journalese (17th century)

  53 Tea – a social word (17th century)

  54 Disinterested – a confusible (17th century)

  55 Polite – a matter of manners (17th century)

  56 Dilly-dally – a reduplicating word (17th century)

  57 Rep – a clipping (17th century)

  58 Americanism – a new nation (18th century)

  59 Edit – a back-formation (18th century)

  60 Species – classifying things (18th century)

  61 Ain’t – right and wrong (18th century)

  62 Trek – a word from Africa (19th century)

  63 Hello – progress through technology (19th century)

  64 Dragsman – thieves’ cant (19th century)

  65 Lunch – U or non-U (19th century)

  66 Dude – a cool usage (19th century)

  67 Brunch – a portmanteau word (19th century)

  68 Dinkum – a word from Australia (19th century)

  69 Mipela – pidgin English (19th century)

  70 Schmooze – a Yiddishism (19th century)

  71 OK – debatable origins (19th century)

  72 Ology – suffix into word (19th century)

  73 Y’all – a new pronoun (19th century)

  74 Speech-craft – an Anglo-Saxonism (19th century)

  75 DNA – scientific terminology (20th century)

  76 Garage – a pronunciation problem (20th century)

  77 Escalator – word into name into word (20th century)

  78 Robot – a global journey (20th century)

  79 UFO – alternative forms (20th century)

  80 Watergate – place-name into word (20th century)

  81 Doublespeak – weasel words (20th century)

  82 Doobry – useful nonsense (20th century)

  83 Blurb – a moment of arrival (20th century)

  84 Strine – a comic effect (20th century)

  85 Alzheimer’s – surname into word (20th century)

  86 Grand – money slang (20th century)

  87 Mega – prefix into word (20th century)

  88 Gotcha – a non-standard spelling (20th century)

  89 PC – being politically correct (20th century)

  90 Bagonise – a nonce-word (20th century)

  91 Webzine – an internet compound (20th century)

  92 App – a killer abb (20th century)

  93 Cherry-picking – corporate speak (20th century)

  94 LOL – netspeak (20th century)

  95 Jazz – word of the century (20th century)

  96 Sudoku – a modern loan (21st century)

  97 Muggle – a fi
ction word (21st century)

  98 Chillax – a fashionable blend (21st century)

  99 Unfriend – a new age (21st century)

  100 Twittersphere – future directions? (21st century)

  Illustration Credits

  Word Index

  Preface

  How can we tell the story of the English language? There seem to be two main ways. The usual approach is to provide an overview, identifying general themes and trends within the major periods of development: Old English … Middle English … Early Modern English … Modern English. Authors give as many examples of usage within each period as space allows. It’s a method I’ve often used myself, in such books as The Stories of English. Its strength, to apply an old metaphor, is that readers obtain a clear view of the wood; its weakness is that they see very few of the trees.

  The opposite approach can be seen in the many popular wordbooks that present a series of interesting English words and phrases. One book on my shelves explores the origins of words in personal names, such as sandwich and frisbee. Another explores the origins of interesting idioms, such as it’s raining cats and dogs. I’ve used this method too, such as in my collection of international proverbs, As They Say in Zanzibar. Now we have the opposite strength and weakness: readers see lots of trees but do not obtain an overall picture of the wood.

  The present book brings together these two perspectives. It is a wordbook, as its chapter headings illustrate, but one with a difference. Every word has been selected because it tells us something about the way the English language developed. And in the course of exploring each one, I move from the particular to the general, relating the word to important themes and trends in the language as a whole. A sense of linguistic history is reinforced by the ordering of the chapters, which is broadly chronological. And the approach has its surprises. Words such as and and what are not usually included in wordbooks, but they too have a story to tell.

  It is, of course, a personal list. If you had to choose 100 words to represent the English language, they would certainly be different. These are mine.

  A short history of English words

  The Anglo-Saxon monk Bede, writing in his monastery in Northumbria in about the year 730, gives us an early account of those who first spoke the English language. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, written in Latin, he tells us that the island ‘contains five nations, the English, Britons, Scots, Picts and Latins, each in its own peculiar dialect cultivating the sublime study of Divine truth’. And he goes on to explain how this situation came about.

  The first arrivals, Bede says, were Britons (we would now call them Celts), and they gave their name to the land. The Picts then arrived in the north, from Scythia via northern Ireland. The Scots arrived some time later, and secured their own settlements in the Pictish regions. Then, ‘in the year of Rome 798’ (= 43 AD), Emperor Claudius sent an expedition which rapidly established a Roman presence in the island.

  The Romans ruled in Britain until the early 5th century, when Rome was taken by the Goths and military garrisons were withdrawn. Attacks on the Britons by the Picts and Scots followed. The Britons appealed to Rome for help, but the Romans, preoccupied with their own wars, could do little. The attacks continued, so the Britons came to a decision. As Bede recounts:

  They consulted what was to be done, and where they should seek assistance to prevent or repel the cruel and frequent incursions of the northern nations; and they all agreed with their King Vortigern to call over to their aid, from the parts beyond the sea, the Saxon nation … Then the nation of the Angles, or Saxons, being invited by the aforesaid king, arrived in Britain with three long ships.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports their landing in Ebbsfleet (Pegwell Bay, near Ramsgate, Kent) in 449 AD. And within 250 years, it would seem from the earliest records, the language we now know as Old English (sometimes called Anglo-Saxon) achieved its distinctive character.

  English vocabulary

  Vocabulary is always a primary index of a language’s identity, simply because there is so much of it. Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows that the pronunciation and basic grammar can be acquired relatively quickly, but the task of word-learning seems to have no end. Vocabulary is indeed the Everest of language. And it is a mountain that has to be scaled if fluency is to be attained.

  In the case of English, the task has been made more complex by the range and diversity of its vocabulary – a reflection of the colourful political and cultural history of the English-speaking peoples over the centuries. To change the metaphor: English is a vacuum-cleaner of a language, whose users suck in words from other languages whenever they encounter them. And because of the way English has travelled the world, courtesy of its soldiers, sailors, traders and civil servants, several hundred languages have contributed to its lexical character. Some 80 per cent of English vocabulary is not Germanic at all.

  English is also a playful and innovative language, whose speakers love to use their imaginations in creating new vocabulary, and who are prepared to depart from tradition when coining words. Not all languages are like this. Some are characterised by speakers who try to stick rigidly to a single cultural tradition, resisting loanwords and trying to preserve a perceived notion of purity in their vocabulary (as with French and Icelandic). English speakers, for the most part, are quite the opposite. They delight in bending and breaking the rules when it comes to word creation. Shakespeare was one of the finest word-benders, showing everyone how to be daring in the use of words.

  So a wordbook about English is going to display, more than anything else, diversity and individuality. There are few generalisations that apply to the whole of its lexicon. Rather, to see how English vocabulary evolved, we must distinguish the various strands which have given the language its presentday character.

  Germanic origins

  We begin with the Germanic origins of the language, which can be seen in the early inscriptions that used a form of the runic alphabet widespread in northern Europe. Runes are found on monuments, weapons, ornaments and many other objects, including some very unusual ones (1 roe). The Germanic character of English is also visible in the place-names of ancient Britain (2 lea), and in the ‘little’ words that show grammatical relationships (5 out, 10 what). By the 7th century, we find the earliest surviving manuscripts in Old English, first in the form of glosses and then in texts of continuous prose, several displaying distinctive scribal abbreviations (3 and). However, the actual name of the language is not recorded until the 10th century (13 English).

  Loanwords

  English has never been a purely Germanic language. On the mainland of Europe, the Germanic languages had already incorporated words from Latin, and these arrived in Britain with the Anglo-Saxons. Latin then continued to be an important influence, introducing everyday words to do with plants and animals, food and drink, buildings, household objects and many other domains (6 street). This vocabulary continued to expand, with the growing influence of missionary activity reflected in an increase in words to do with religion and learning. Old English also contains a few Celtic words (12 brock) – not many, but enough to remind us of the earlier inhabitants of the island.

  Scandinavia provided another source of words in the Anglo-Saxon period, but only after a considerable passing of time. The Vikings made their presence felt in Britain in the 780s, attacking the south coast and then the monasteries in the north. Conflict continued for a century, until the Treaty of Wedmore, around the year 880, between King Alfred and the Danish leader Guthrum, established an area of eastern England which, because it was subject to Danish laws, came to be known as the Danelaw. A few Old Norse words are found in Old English writings, but the vast majority are not seen until the 13th century. The earliest Middle English literature shows hundreds of Norse words in use (20 skirt, 22 take away).

  But the Latin and Norse elements in English are small compared with the huge impact of French in the Middle Ages – a consequence of the domi
nance of French power in England after 1066 and of French cultural pre-eminence in mainland Europe. Anglo-Saxon words could not cope with the unfamiliar domains of expression introduced by the Normans, such as law, architecture, music and literature. People had no alternative but to develop new varieties of expression, adopting continental models and adapting traditional genres to cope with the French way of doing things. The early Germanic vocabulary, reflecting an Anglo-Saxon way of life (4 loaf, 7 mead), gave way to a French view of the world which affected all areas of life, from food (17 pork) to law (18 chattels), and introducing new forms of address (19 dame). The new words usually replaced the old ones, but more often the old words survived, sometimes developing a different meaning (21 jail) or stylistic use (30 royal).

  The international contacts made by British explorers, traders and travellers began as a trickle in the 14th century (33 taffeta) and by the 16th century had became a flood (39 potato). The renaissance of learning brought a renewal of contact with Latin and Greek, so much so that the number of classical words entering English actually generated huge controversy (41 ink-horn). Not all welcomed the change in the language’s lexical character. For some, the arrival of classical loanwords made the language elegant; for others, the effect was to make it alien. An argument in favour of keeping the Germanic character of English began in the 16th century and has been with us ever since (74 speech-craft). But nothing has ever stemmed the flow of loanwords into the language, and the range was greatly increased by the global spread of English.

  American English was the first major variety of the language to emerge outside of the British Isles. It did not take long before the early explorers began to use words from American Indian languages (45 skunk), and these along with many others helped to develop an American identity (58 Americanism). From the 17th century on, the geographical horizons of the language steadily expanded as the British Empire grew and English began to be adapted to meet the communicative demands of new cultures. A language soon shows the effect in its vocabulary of being in a new location, especially when we are dealing with such dramatically different parts of the world as India (48 lakh) and Africa (62 trek). A regionally distinctive English vocabulary involving thousands of items can emerge within just a few years. In addition to loanwords, the local culture will adapt native English words, giving them different forms and meanings (68 dinkum, 69 mipela). The process of borrowing continues today, largely motivated by economic and cultural factors (70 schmooze, 78 robot, 96 sudoku).