Adjusting to the Changes to Our Language

The term “Modern English” can be a misnomer. English used by great writers such as Herman Melville and James Joyce is almost a completely different language from the one writers use today. While much of that has to do with vocabulary that isn’t used anymore, a good bit of it has to do with style—how writers say what they want to communicate.

Back then, life was more formal and so was the language everyone used. Wealthy educated people followed the British model while the common laborer used a lot of slang. Over the years, English has changed a lot. In fact, our language changes about every five years. New words come into common use as archaic ones get phased out. Another change, at times subtle, is punctuation. Semicolons are on their way out while dashes appear more frequently. And change remains continuous in English as the language adapts to the changing needs of those who use it.

As always, change is most easily seen in vocabulary. In its very early history, the Christianization of Britain brought such Latin words as angel, candle, priest, and school into English. From the Danish invasions came such basic words as they, their, them, skull, skin, anger, husband, knife, law, root, and ill. Following the Norman Conquest, people added many French words, such as dance, tax, mayor, justice, faith, battle, paper, poet, surgeon, gentle, flower, sun, to name just a few.

In the 17th century, Latin words poured into English as students studied more of it. Words such as industry, educate, insane, exist, illustrate, multiply, benefit, paragraph, and delicate, all came from Latin.

As English explorers like John Cabot and James Cook reached out to other parts of the world, they brought their language with them. It continued its habit of borrowing, drawing on Arabic for alcohol and assassin, Hebrew for cherub and kosher, East Indian for jungle and yoga, Japanese for tycoon, Spanish for adobe and canyon, and many other languages. The borrowing process continues today.

In the past 100 years, two things have greatly affected the development of the English language. The first was the rapid development of mass education and the resulting rise in literacy. The second is the advancement of science and technology. The more people able to read English in print, the greater their input. 

Today, through the explosion of electronic media, an even greater number of people have access to the printed word.  This is already causing our language to develop differently from one in which writers target only a special literary minority and in which people speak face-to-face.

The technological revolution of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has given English a burgeoning vocabulary of technical terms that have become a part of the common language almost overnight.

Changes in grammar since the 16th century, though minor compared with the earlier loss of inflections and the accompanying fixing of word order (see last week’s blog), have continued in today’s English. Reliance upon word order and function words has become even greater.

Questions in the form of Consents she? and negations in the form of I say not or I run not have disappeared, and have been replaced by the verb do, as in Does she consent?, I do not say, I do not run. And even these have become shortened by the use of contractions—a form forbidden by most English teachers—to I don’t say or I don’t run.

The use of the verb to be has become more common, as in He was shopping or We are studying, shortened further to We’re studying. Other changes include an increase in the number of verbs combined with adverbs or with prepositions, as in He looked up the word or She looked over her new garden. Similarly, writers now use nouns as modifiers of other nouns, as in college student, car radio, gas station, space flight.

English will continue to evolve and writers must stay abreast of the changes. While many are subtle, it doesn’t take much for writing to appear stale and antiquated in today’s high-tech world.

What Do You Know About Our Language?

As an American writer, you write in English. You’ve spoken and written in this language all your life. You take it for granted. But what do you really know about the English language?

Ask anyone who speaks English as a second language, and they’ll tell you how hard it is to learn. While Russian seems like a difficult language, it pales when compared with English. The reason our language is so complicated is that it’s actually derived from most of the European languages. You probably recognize certain French, Spanish, Italian and even Portuguese words. And you certainly know many German words, but did you know English also includes words from the Slavic languages, including Russian, the Scandinavian languages, especially Danish, and also Celtic.

English is directly descended from the language of the Germanic tribes—the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—who invaded the British Isles in the 5th and 6th centuries, driving out or absorbing the Celtic inhabitants after the Romans withdrew. We can date the three periods of our language—Old English, used until about 1100 A.D., Middle English, used from about 1100 to 1500 A.D., and Modern English—to this Anglo-Saxon invasion.

Old English consisted mainly of Anglo-Saxon words with a few Old Norse words thrown in. These came from the Vikings who invaded the British Isles in the 8th through the 10th centuries. This early form of English used inflectional endings similar to those used in modern German and a much freer word order than exists in Modern English. Thus, Old English depended upon changes in the forms, particularly the endings, of words to show their relationship to one another. Personal pronouns---I, me, my, mine and so on—are among the few types of inflection remaining in English today.

Middle English was a transitional form of our language influenced by the Norman Conquest in 1066. The Normans also were Vikings who settled in northern France and who had gradually exchanged their native Old Norse language for Old French, which contained Latin, Scandinavian, and French words to England. For nearly 400 years French was the major language of the ruling class while Old English became the language of commoners.

As the Normans became culturally and politically separated from Europe, their association with the English-speaking common people gradually led to the resurrection of English as the spoken language of all classes. For example, beef (boeuf), mutton, and venison—words of French origin—describe meat cooked and served at the table while cattle, sheep, and deer—words of Anglo-Saxon origin—describe meat on the hoof in the field.

Word order became the principal means of conveying meaningful relationships among words in a sentence in Middle English. At the same time, the number and importance of  articles, prepositions, and conjunctions grew. During the Middle English period, the dialect spoken in London emerged as the basis for standard English. Also, most of the major writers of the late Middle Ages used it. And at the time, there wasn’t a single literary language. Goeffrey Chaucer, an English writer of the period, wrote his Canterbury Tales in the dialect of London of Middle English.

The shift from Middle English to Modern English occurred during a series of pronunciation changes known as the Great Vowel Shift. As a result of these changes which took place between 1350 and 1550, English began to sound more as it does today.                        

The invention of the printing press had a positive effect on the development of English. Printing, and the subsequent increase in people who could read and write, tended to slow change and foster greater stability and standardization in both the spoken and written language. The downside was that word spelling became more confusing because of the Great Vowel Shift.  Sir Thomas Mallory wrote Morte d’Arthur, his famous tale of King Arthur, during the early years of Modern English.

Modern English adapts to the changing needs of writers who use it. And while most of the changes occur in vocabulary, modern usage has changed forms and uses of punctuation, and even sentence structure.

Next Week: I’ll be looking at some of the ways English has changed since the 19th century.

The Fate of Punctuation

This past week, the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary folks announced they had added over 150 new words, including hashtag and selfie—words increasingly used by many people in social networking—to the classic volume. Even though a word may have become popular in usage, it takes a while for it to make it to the big leagues and the dictionary. You might say this also applies to spelling. But the same doesn’t go for punctuation or English usage. Their acceptance comes from continued correct or incorrect usage. The more they’re used, the sooner their use becomes acceptable by the public. But the process can take a long time.

The French have their National Academy, which acts as a watchdog over their language. For anything, including punctuation, to be used in the French language, it must first be approved by the National Academy. Unfortunately, the United States doesn’t have any such watchdog institution.

Every profession has rules and writing is no different. To be successful at writing—and for many that means getting published—you need to know and follow the rules, and that includes the rules for punctuation.

Some beginning writers feel they need to ignore these as a way these as a way of developing their own style. But every artist, including writers, starts by learning the basics. The unique thing about writing is that it’s a language art. And in order for everyone to communicate clearly, every language has usage rules, including those for punctuation. While you may be communicating in English, the same would apply if you were writing in Spanish, French, German, or any other language.

However, many beginning writers are led astray by the blatant ignoring of basic rules by published professionals, all in the name of style. Many big name writers do this to attract attention to their work. And their publishers go along with it because these writers make lots of money for them. In these cases, ignoring the traditional rules of punctuation is profit based rather than language based.

What some famous writers don’t realize is the effect their work has on writers who look up to them. They don’t see that they have a responsibility to all those that follow them to present their work in the best possible light.

So how did all this miss-use start? Email seems to be the culprit in most cases. Since its inception, there have been no rules governing how anyone writes anything in their messages. Originally used by academics to exchange notes, Email quickly evolved into the message medium for college students, who saw this it as a way to defy the rules of the English language which they had to adhere to in their studies. Soon this ignoring of the rules spread downward to high school students. And the problem got worse since Email had no rules, communication with it became an “anything goes” concept. Even today, most people still aren’t sure if they should adhere to good English usage or just do whatever they want.

Punctuation—or the lack of it— soon became a problem in other types of writing. Some Email users used no punctuation while others wrote in phrases instead of coherent sentences. Both came about because student users and soon everyone viewed Email as a personal communication medium in which both the sender and receiver knew each other fairly well. Soon all users adopted a casual style to Email.

But then something began to happen. That same casual style used in Email messages began to appear in articles, stories, and even books. If a lot of people used this style in their Emails and in online forums, many writers assumed it was okay to use it in their work. But in many cases it isn’t okay because not using the right punctuation, for example, can prevent clarity and ease of reading. Good examples include using two forms of punctuation at the end of a sentence when only one will do (?!) or (!!!!!) or using punctuation marks incorrectly, such as using an ellipse (...) outside of quotation marks to trail off the end of a sentence. While the latter may not be confusing to the reader, the former certainly is.