Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [293]
* And indeed in Welsh: Elizabeth I also authorised the publication of Y Beibl Cyssegr-lan, which was printed in London in 1588, and joined the Welsh translation of the Prayer Book (Y Llyfr Gweddi Gyffredin) in Welsh churches.
† A corpus of texts that is usually mentioned in the same breath as the King James Bible, and accorded almost equal status in the textual definition of English, is the poetry of William Shakespeare. The two are almost exact contemporaries, this ‘Authorised Version’ of the Bible being compiled from 1604 to 1611, and Shakespeare writing from 1590 to 1611. But unlike the Bible, Shakespeare (first fully published in 1623) did not immediately become an iconic text of the English language, his reputation growing through the seventeenth century until it was fully canonised by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth.
The Shakespeare phenomenon recalls the place of Homer in the history of Greek. Each was a poet of encyclopedic range and unchallenged quality but obscure identity, at or near the very foundation of the language’s main tradition of literary classics. Each seems to have acquired this status at least a century after he actually lived and composed. Each went on to have an overwhelming role in the heritage of his language, endlessly praised by critics and schoolteachers, and also to inform traditional ideas of the language community’s history. Perhaps this is best explained by emphasising that each of them is indebted more than most to a rich ancient tradition, Homer to that of the travelling bard or aoidós, Shakespeare to that of the strolling player. This was less remarkable to their contemporaries, who saw them in context, but somehow, as time went on, their works were felt to sum up the tradition, and so replaced it in memory.
* Too many remarks proffered as comments on the nature of English, especially by writers, are thinly disguised praise of the traditions and aspirations of its speakers. Consider Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s words introducing the Oxford Book of English Verse: ‘Our fathers have, in the process of centuries, provided this realm, its colonies and wide dependencies, with a speech as malleable and pliant as Attic, dignified as Latin, masculine, yet free of Teutonic guttural, capable of being as precise as French, dulcet as Italian, sonorous as Spanish, and captaining all these excellences to its service.’ Or Walt Whitman: ‘Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race and range of time, and is the culling and composition of all. From this point of view, it stands for Language in the largest sense, and is really the greatest of studies’ (’Slang in America’, North American Review, 41, 1885). Such confidence may of course be useful in using the language eloquently. Any language carries a vast network of associations with the past, which grow in power as that past is remembered.
* I should reassure linguists reading this that I am consciously ignoring the structure latent in the vast amount of vocabulary borrowed from, or constructed out of, Latin, French and Greek.
* To my knowledge, only the Japanese ’kanbun’ tradition of marking up classical Chinese text to be read out just as if it were in Japanese has had the chutzpah to dispense with that basic convention.
* It, and the island of Croatoan, to which it famously but mysteriously decamped, were actually on the coast of modern North Carolina. The few survivors, merging with local Algonquian speakers, were to drop their English in the seventeenth century. But English did survive in the follow-up colony at Jamestown, whose capital was later moved to Williamsburg.
* It is interesting to note that one major motive for Rome and Russia, the drive