8.The first person to print a book in English

It is sometimes suggested that our vocabulary is vast because it was made to be,

simply because of the various linguistic influences that swept over it. But in fact

this love of variety of expression runs deeper than that. It was already evident in

the early poetry of the Anglo-Saxons that they had an intuitive appreciation of

words sufficient to ensure that even if England had never been invaded again her

language would have been rich with synonyms. As Jespersen notes, in Beowulf

alone there are thirty-six words for hero, twelve for battle, eleven for ship—in

short, probably more than exist today.

It is true that English was immeasurably enriched by the successive linguistic

waves that washed over the British Isles. But it is probably closer to the truth to

say that the language we speak today is rich and expressive not so much because

new words were imposed on it as because they were welcomed.

Thanks to the proliferation of English dialects during the period of Norman rule,

by the fifteenth century people in one part of England often could not understand

people in another part. William Caxton, the first person to print a book in

English, noted the sort of misunderstandings that were common in his day in the

preface to Eneydos in 1490 in which he related the story of a group of London

sailors heading down the River "Tamyse" for Holland who found themselves

becalmed in Kent. Seeking food, one of them approached a farmer's wife and

"axed for mete and specially he asked after eggys" but was met with blank looks

by the wife who answered that she "coude speke no frenshe." The sailors had

traveled barely fifty miles and yet their language was scarcely recognizable to

another speaker of English. In Kent, eggs were eyren and would remain so for at

least another fifty years.

A century later the poet George Puttenham noted that the English of London

stretched not much more than sixty miles from the city. But its influence was

growing all the time. The size and importance of London guaranteed that its

dialect would eventually triumph, though other factors helped—such as the fact

that the East Midlands dialect (its formal name) had fewer grammatical extremes

than other dialects and that the East Midlands area was the seat of the two main

universities, Oxford and Cambridge, whose graduates naturally tended to act as

linguistic missionaries.

Chaucer's was the language of London—and therefore comparatively easy for us

to follow. We may not instantly apprehend all the words, but when we see theprologue of The Canterbury Tales we can at the very least recognize it as

English:

When that Aprille with his shoures sote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertue engendred is the flour

Compare that with this passage in the Kentish dialect written at about the same

time: "And vorlet ous oure yeldinges: ase and we vorleteth oure yelderes, and ne

ous led nat, into vondinge, ac vri ous vram queade." Recognize it? It's the last

sentence of the Lord's Prayer, beginning, "And forgive us our trespasses… ." As

the Chaucer authority David Burnley notes, many of the poet's contemporaries

outside London were still using spellings and phrasings that "make their works

scarcely intelligible to us without special study." [Chaucer's Language, page 10]

Some of the dialects of the north were virtually foreign languages—and indeed

can sometimes still seem so.

This was a period of the most enormous and rapid change in English, as Caxton

himself noted when he wrote: "And certaynly our langage now used varyeth

ferre [far] from that which was used and spoken when I was borne." Caxton was

born just twenty-two years after Chaucer died, yet in the space of that time the

English of London moved from being medieval to modern. The difference is

striking. Where even now we can understand Chaucer only with a fair lavishing

of footnotes, Caxton can be as easily followed as Shakespeare. Caxton's

spellings often look curious to us today, but the vocabulary is little changed, and

we can read him at more or less normal speed, as when he writes: "I was sittyng

in my study [when] to my hande came a lytle booke in frenshe, which late was

translated oute of latyn by some noble clerke of fraunce… .

Even so, English by Chaucer's time had already undergone many consequential

changes. The most notable is that it had lost most of its inflections. Gender had

disappeared in the north of England and was on its knees in the south.

Adjectives, which had once been inflected up to eleven ways, now had just two

inflections, for singular and plural (e.g., a fressh floure, but fresshe floures), buteven here there was a growing tendency to use one form all the time, as we do today.

Sometimes words were modified in one grammatical circumstance but left

untouched in another. That is why we have knife with an f but knives with a v.

Other such pairs are half/halves, grass/ graze, grief/grieve, calflcalves.

Sometimes there was a spelling change as well, as with the second vowel in

speech and speak.

Sometimes the pronunciation changed, as between bath and bathe and as with

the "s" in house becoming a "z" in houses. And sometimes, to the eternal

confusion of non-English speakers, these things happened all together, so that we

have not only the spelling doublet life/lives but also the pronunciation doublet

"lives" and "lives" as in "a cat with nine lives lives next door." Sometimes, too,

conflicting regional usages have left us with two forms of the word, such as fox

with an f, but vixen with a v, or given us two spellings for words, such as phial

and vial. And sometimes, as we shall see later, they left us with some of the

mostly wildly unphonetic spellings of any language in the world.

Although East Midlands was the preeminent dialect, not all East Midlands forms

triumphed. The practice in London of placing -n or -en on the end of present

indicative verbs was gradually driven out by the southern practice of using -th,

so that loven became loveth, for instance, and this in turn was eventually driven

out by the northern -s or -es ending, as in the modern form loves. Why this

northern provincialism should gradually have taken command of a basic verb

form is an enduring mystery. It may simply be that the -s form made for

smoother spoken English. In any case, by Shakespeare's time it was much more

common in speech than in writing, though Shakespeare himself freely used both

forms, sometimes employing goes, sometimes goeth.