Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [265]
Like English, Chinese and Malay have Subject-Verb-Object word order, and very little in the way of verb or noun inflexion. Words are simple, and complex senses result from stringing them together. By contrast, all the other languages we have considered have a high degree of inflexion, although Portuguese, in the form in which it established itself in Asia, has most of this stripped away.
The peculiarly conservative, and hence increasingly anti-phonetic, system is another facet of English that bears a resemblance to Chinese (though not to Malay—in any of the writing systems that have been used to represent it). As has happened with Chinese (and of course Egyptian), the life of English as it is spoken has become only loosely attached to the written traditions of the language. True, words are still written in the order in which they are spoken.* But spelling has not been revised to keep up with changes in pronunciation: hence the remains of gh, a combination of letters still found in many words, but nowhere keeping anything like its original pronunciation as [x], the ch in Scots loch; hence the bizarre spelling of the English tense vowels, seen in the words spelt mate, meet, mite, mote, mouth and mute, but which would be written meit, miit, mait, mout, mauth and miuwt if the letters were still being used vaguely with the values they had until the fifteenth century, values that they have largely retained in every other language that uses the Roman alphabet. As a result of the complexity of relation between spelling and sound, a large proportion of the primary teaching profession, in England at least, was until recently of the opinion that phonics are more confusing than helpful when teaching children to read and write: hence the notorious ‘Look and Say’ method, which essentially treated each word as if it were a Chinese character.
As with Chinese, one can say that, for learners, the English language has been literate too long.
Westward Ho!
The language I have learned these forty years,
My native English, now I must forego:
And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
Than an unstring’d viol or a harp;
Or like a cunning instrument cas’d up,
Or, being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony:
Within my mouth you have engaol’d my tongue,
Doubly portcullis’d with my teeth and lips;
And dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance
Is made my gaoler to attend on me.
I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,
Too far in years to be a pupil now:
What is thy sentence, then, but speechless death,
Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?
(The Duke of Norfolk, on being exiled) Shakespeare, Richard II, act I, scene iii
Norfolk’s words stand as the first example of an Englishman’s despair, now almost traditional, at the prospect of having to learn another language: could exile hold any greater terror? English was then a language spoken exclusively within the confines of the British Isles. When the words were written, most likely in 1595, there had been only a single English-speaking colony outside the British Isles, Ralegh’s 1586 colony at Roanoke, ‘Virginia’, and no one in England then knew if it was still in existence.*
Little by little, it was going to become more and more unnecessary for travellers from Britain to learn other languages, because English speakers were now to spread new settlements around the world, and many of those settlements were going to expand, to become—with Britain—among the largest, richest and most powerful nations on earth. The motives for British settlements over three centuries were various: the glory of the realm, gains from piracy, founding new utopias, wealth from agriculture or mining, trade, personal glory, a stirring of duty to spread the gospel, global strategy, windfall spoils from military victories, even in the end some sense of obligation to educate the native inhabitants. In this, they were unlike their greatest predecessors, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and the French, who were each moved by just one or a few of these.