Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [292]
* Latin titles of prayers, ‘Spirit of the Lord’, ‘Salvation of the people’, ‘Hail Holy Mother’, following naturalised French forms of ‘Take pity’, (Greek) ‘Lord, have mercy’, ‘Our Father’.
† Robert Wace, a Norman from Jersey, was commissioned in the 1160s by King Henry II to write a celebration of Norman history, named for its patriarch Rollo (i.e. Rou). This was to parallel his earlier Roman de Brut, on Britain before the Normans (likewise supposedly founded by Brutus). This section tells of the different demeanours of the English and Normans on the night before Hastings, 1066; but it also neatly illustrates the different roles of English, Norman French and Latin in Norman England.
* In this section, ‘Norman’ will include the governing classes of England and its dependencies from 1066 to 1399. Their vernacular was initially Norman French, also known as Anglo-Norman; but after 1154, the varieties of French spoken at court would have been more broadly based, since Henry II and his barons were based in Anjou, in south-western France. Thereafter the dynasty is known as Angevin.
* These were an asset to their literary culture as much as to their politics. Although Arthur comes out of Celtic legend, it was Anglo-Norman literature which created the ideal of the gallant knight in shining armour, the chevaler, a word that originally meant ‘horseman’. In Old English knight (usually spelt cniht) had just meant ‘lad’, hence someone young enough to fight, without overtones of cavalry, let alone chivalry.
* After the first of these, Edward, in 1301, is supposed to have offered to give the Welsh a prince ‘born in Wales, and without a word of English’—then presented his own son, just recently bom at campaign headquarters in Caernarfon. The story, however, goes back only to the sixteenth century, and would be more credible if Edward himself had been a speaker of English rather than French. And his son had been born in 1284.
† Calum Ceann Mór, ‘Big Head’, who reigned from 1059 to 1093. This was the famed Malcolm who had deposed and killed Macbeth.
* It is all very reminiscent of the emotional, nostalgic and somewhat desperate tone of the defence for learning Latin itself, offered in the grammar schools of England in the middle of the twentieth century.
* Characteristically conservative, the law held out longest: Law French did not finally disappear from the English courts until eliminated by an act of Parliament in 1733. By the same standard of retrospection, the law’s fondness for eighteenth-century wigs and gowns has still a century to run.
† ‘… in many the country language is impaired; some use a strange babbling, twittering, snarling, growling and gnashing.’
* From another point of view, the dialects of English were a boon to a naturalistic author like Chaucer, who was the first to use them to give realism to dialogue. In The Canterbury Tales, the Reeve, himself scripted as a Norfolk man, tells a story of Cambridge students John and Aleyn, who are clearly lads from the North. And the Summoner and the Friar both keep breaking into broad Northern English (Robinson 1957: 686, 688, 704-5).
* The basic linguistic features of this area were: using ō not ā in words like woe, stone, go—north of the Humber they kept the Old English ā; using y (i.e. ü, French u) and later i, in words like hill, sin, fire, mice—in Kent and East Anglia they said ē—and this explains most instances of the apparently gratuitous y in Caxton’s spelling; using the modal verb shall, as against Northumbrian sal; using pronouns, she, they, them, theyr, as against West and South Country heo, hy, hem, here. In verbs, the present participle and gerund generalised Southern and Midland -ynge, as against Northern -ande; the plural ends in -en or nothing: we speken, they use, as against the South Country we speketh, hy useth. In fact, the present tense of verbs became subject to a lot of confusion, since this -eth ending was also used as a third singular ending