Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, revised and expanded edition - Softcover

Lerer, Seth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0231174470 ISBN 13: 9780231174473

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Seth Lerer tells a masterful history of the English language from the age of Beowulf to the rap of Eminem. Many have written about the evolution of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, but only Lerer situates these developments within the larger history of English, America, and literature. This edition features a new chapter on the influence of biblical translation and an epilogue on the relationship of English speech to writing. A unique blend of historical and personal narrative, Inventing English is the surprising tale of a language that is as dynamic as the people to whom it belongs.

About this title

About the Author:

Seth Lerer is Distinguished Professor of Literature and the former Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego. He is known nationally for his audio and videotape series, The History of the English Language, for the Teaching Company.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

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INTRODUCTION: FINDING ENGLISH, FINDING US (excerpt)

I grew up on a street full of languages. I heard Yiddish every day from my parents and grandparents and from the families of my friends. There was Italian around the corner, Cuban Spanish down the block, Russian in the recesses of the subway station. Some of my earliest memories are of their sounds. But there were also words of what seemed to be my own family's making and that I have found in no dictionaries: konditterei, a strange blend of Yiddish and Italian calibrated to describe the self-important café set; vachmalyavatet, a tongue-twister used to signify complete exhaustion; lachlat, a cross between a poncho and a peacoat that my father pointed out one afternoon.

Still, there was always English, always the desire, in my father's father's idiom, to be a "Yenkee." My mother was a speech therapist in the New York City schools; my father, a history and English teacher. For the first decade of my life, we lived a dream of bettering ourselves through English. We tried to lose the accent of the immigrant. We memorized poetry. Days I would spend with Walt Whitman (de facto poet laureate of Brooklyn) until I was called in, O Captain-ing together with him straight to supper. I read Beowulf in junior high, and in the arc of Anglo-Saxon or the lilt of Chaucer's Middle English I found words that shared the Germanic roots of Yiddish. There was that prefix for the participle, ge-, in all those languages. If Grendel's mother was gemyndig, mindful, remembering, harboring a grudge, then so too was my mother. Everything in my family was gehacktet—ground up, hacked to bits, whether it was the chicken livers that we spread on toast or the troubles that beset us all (the Yiddish phrase "gehacktet tsuris," hacked up troubles, has always stayed with me. I think of Grendel's leavings -- the dismembered bodies of the Danes -- with no more apt phrase).

At Oxford, I studied for a degree in medieval English languages and linguistics. J. R. R. Tolkien and W. H. Auden had died only a couple of years before I arrived, and Oxford in the 1970s had an elegiac quality about it. Tolkien and Auden were the two poles of its English studies: the first philological, medieval, and fantastic; the second, emotive, modern, and all too real. My tutors were their students and their self-appointed heirs. I learned the minutiae of philology, details whose descriptions had an almost incantatory magic: Frisian fronting, aesh one and aesh two, lengthening in open syllables. I went to bed dreaming about the Ormulum and the orthoepists. And then, one evening in the spring of 1977, in some grotty dining hall, I heard the poets Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney read. Heaney got up, all red-faced and smiling, brilliant in his breath. He read poems about bog men -- ancient Germanic people who had been preserved in peat for fifteen hundred years. Twenty-five years later, I found in Heaney's Beowulf translation what I had felt on that evening: the sense that the study of the word revealed not just a history of culture but a history of the self. "I had undergone," Heaney writes of his study of Old English in the introduction to his Beowulf, "something like illumination by philology."

Philology means "love of language," but for scholars it connotes the discipline of historical linguistic study. For Seamus Heaney, or for you or me, philology illuminates the history of words and those who speak them. My goal in this book is to illuminate: to bring light into language and to life. Whether you grew up in New York or New Mexico, whether your first words were in this or any other tongue, you are reading this book in the language of an early-twenty-first-century American. Writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Washington Irving called America a "logocracy" -- a country of words. We all still live in a logocracy -- invented then and reinvented everyday by citizens of language like ourselves.

This is a book about inventing English (invent, from the Latin invenire, to come upon or find). Each of its chapters illustrates how people found new ways to speak and write; how they dealt with the resources of language of their time and place; and how, through individual imagination, they transformed those resources into something uniquely personal. These chapters may be read in sequence, as you read a textbook or a novel; or they may be read as individual essays, each one suitable for bed or as a pause in the day's tasks. My book, therefore, is less a history of English in the traditional sense than it is an episodic epic: a portable assembly of encounters with the language. Each episode recalls a moment when a person or a group finds something new or preserves something old; when someone writes down something that exemplifies a change; when the experience of language, personally or professionally, stands as a defining moment in the arc of speech.

All of us find or invent our language. We may come up with new sentences never heard before. We may use words in a unique way. But we are always finding our voice, locating old patterns or long-heard expressions, reaching into our thesaurus for the right term. And in inventing English, we are always inventing ourselves -- finding our place among the welter of the words or in the swell of sounds that is the ocean of our tongue.

And this, it seems to me, is what is new about this book -- its course between the individual experience and literary culture, between the details of the past and the drama of the present, between the story of my life I tell here and the stories you may make out of your own. Histories of the English language abound, and different readers find themselves in each. Scholars research and write out of the great six-volume Cambridge History of the English Language. Teachers work from textbooks such as Albert C. Baugh and Thomas M. Cable's History of the English Language. The interested public has had, for the past half century, books ranging from Mario Pei's The Story of the English Language, to Anthony Burgess's A Mouthful of Air, Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue, and the illustrated companion to the PBS series The Story of English. A university professor such as David Crystal has sought wider audiences for his arguments in The Stories of English. And I have spent the last decade addressing listeners and viewers of my lecture series prepared for the Teaching Company, The History of the English Language. I have spoken to college students, adult education classes, social clubs, and professional organizations. The fact remains that people of all vocations or politics are fascinated by the history of English, and my book invites the reader to invest in his or her (and my own) fascination with the word.

I think that we are fascinated by English not only because of how it has changed over time but because of how it changes now. Within a single person's lifetime, words shift their meaning; pronunciations differentiate themselves; idioms from other tongues, from popular culture, and from commerce inflect our public life. English is in flux. E-mail and the Internet have altered the arc of our sentences. Much has been made of all these changes: by the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg in his provocative radio and newspaper essays (collected in his book, The Way We Talk Now), or by the journalist William Safire in his weekly New York Times Magazine column. For all the nuance of their observations, however, neither of these commentators (nor really anyone else) locates our current changes in the larger history of English. The shifts we see today have historical precedents. Our debates about standards and dialects, politics and pronunciation recall arguments by pedagogues and poets, lexicographers and literati, from the Anglo-Saxon era of the tenth century, through the periods of medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society. This book therefore grows out of my conviction that to understand a language it is necessary to appreciate its history. We speak and spell for reasons that are often lost to us. But we can rediscover these reasons.

This book recovers answers to our current questions, and it illustrates how language is a form of social behavior central to our past and present lives. Throughout its historical survey, this book sets out to raise some basic questions for the study of our language -- questions that have been asked at all times in its history.

Is there, or should there be, a "standard English"? Should it be defined as the idiom of the educated, the sound of the city-dweller, the style of the business letter? As early as the tenth century, teachers in the monastic schools of Anglo-Saxon England asked this question. Some claimed there should be rules for spelling, speech, and usage. Such rules were grounded in a particular dialect of Old English -- the one that was geographically central to the region of the king's court and the church's administration. Similar attentions to dialect and standards were the subject of debates throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Was there, asked teachers and students alike, a particular regional form of English that should form a national standard? Should we write the way we speak? Should speech display one's education (and thus something that could be learned) or should it reveal one's class and region (and thus something that reflected birth)? In asking questions such as these, teachers and scholars throughout history have raised another major question. Should the study of language be prescriptive or descriptive? Dictionaries, for example, record spelling, pronunciation, meaning, and usage. Are they simply recording habits of language or are they also codifying them? Isn't any description also a prescription? When we present the features of a language -- and when we do so through authoritative venues such as dictionaries, school texts, or public journalism -- are we simply saying how we speak and w...

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0231174470
• ISBN 13: 9780231174473
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352