English Education

A rather pertinent sentence in the linguistic textbook that I’m editing today. (It’s slightly naughty of me to share it before it’s published, so please don’t tell anyone - although I don’t imagine many people out there are going to be part of the market for a book that’s going to cost well over a hundred quid!)

“Each generation acquires language anew, perceiving patterns, forming generalizations, repairing apparent irregularities, and extending constructions to new contexts and uses.”

This is really important to me. I had a “discussion” (OK … argument) with some chap on Facebook the other night, because he was trying to tell learners that words like ‘beth’, ‘ble’ and ‘haf’ should have accents on them because they had long vowels. In the end, it turned out that he’d been reading dictionaries from 1800 and thought that the language was ‘better’ then and that it had been ‘degraded’ since, through ‘anglicisation’. (He’s welcome to have that discussion - I just don’t think a board for people trying to learn modern Welsh is the place to have it.)

The important message is that when language is a living thing is constantly changes (and when you’re one of the people supposedly applying the ‘rules’ it’s sometimes hard to keep track of it - I know that’s the case for me in English). If it’s not changing and developing through use then it’s dead - fossilised.

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For every great language you have the users, who are the developers/innovators and then you have the police, who keep things in check. You need both. Languages change and they have to, but the police keep things in check and slow down the pace of change, so that it doesn’t all end up as giberrish. If the language police take full control, then they will help to fossilise the language, but I don’t think English has to worry too much about that at the moment.

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I have told this story before, but think it apposite. A teacher at my school was on holiday in Greece with her husband. They were booked on a coach trip. He realised he had forgotten his camera and rushed to fetch it. The driver seemed about to depart. The teacher (of Ancient Greek), in extremis, cried to the driver what, in English, would be ,“Charioteer! Hold your horses in check! My Lord is on his way!”
I thought, in Latin, you would probably have no choice but to say something like that, because Latin is dead!! Nobody would suggest remaking modern Italian! Nobody would seriously suggest remaking modern Greek, or for that matter, bringing back Chaucer’s English!!
p.s. I don’t say ‘beth’ with a long ‘e’!! I don’t think it should rhyme with ‘hen’ in "Mae’r hen ferch meddwl, “Beth?”

No - neither do I. I think this chap was a bit odd, to say the least…

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That is probably true since the advent of writing, but I don’t think a language ends up as gibberish without some sort of language “police”. For instance, the many creole languages all over the world would not have evolved if rules had been enforced. Similar for the many aboriginal languages in Australia. I guess you could say that the language community as a whole is a police force, if you stray to far from what is intelligible use within your community, people may no longer be able or willing to speak with you. I don’t think that means that the rules have to be prescriptive, but rather descriptive - and fluid, as you imply.

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I never really thought about unpoliced languages like Creole before. I think the printing presses in the Netherlands played a large part in English spelling as well didn’t they - wasn’t what originally spelled waht, but the printers thought it was inconsistent with when and where? I found this snippet on-line as well.

"The printing press brought with it the idea of correct spelling. But it also brought some new spelling confusion to English. For example, because many of the printers were Dutch, they used Dutch spellings for words like ghost, aghast, ghastly and gherkin, which keep their silent h to this day. Other words like ghospel, ghossip and ghizzard lost their Dutch over the years.

I don’t know if the Netherlands was also responsible in part for the loss of the Welsh K, that might have been printers in London?.

“K” was in fact common until the sixteenth century but was dropped when the New Testament was translated into Welsh. William Salesbury explained: “C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh
requireth”.

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I heard a very interesting talk from David Crystal on this very topic (that man knows his stuff!) As well as the Flemish typesetters there were those who added silent letters into words like ‘debtor’ to ‘help’ people remember its meaning (relating it to the Latin).

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the debt and the useless b is in this link, which give a lot of other interesting nonsense spellings in English - a lot of letters in English words have never actually been pronounced and have been added in over time!. I think many were trying to find Latin origins to words even if they didn’t have any.

http://blog.esl-languages.com/blog/learn-languages/english/english-spelling-complicated-irregular/

Quite - I think the idea was that Latin was the source of all that was erudite (of course some people still think that - a certain Mr B Johnson, for example) and so English must have come from it and people needed to be reminded of that. It’s a similar source to some of the made-up rules about English grammar such as not splitting and infinitive: applying Latin grammar to English after the fact.

It is interesting - I guess it was a way of legitimising and elevating English, so that it had some parity with the classics - raising it’s intellectual value amongst the elite.

In 1748, the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his son: “Classical knowledge, that is, Greek and Latin, is absolutely necessary for everybody … the word illiterate, in its common acceptance, means a man who is ignorant of these two languages.” - (from a Guardian story last year)

That’s why all this nonsense about extreme levels of competency in Grammar smacks so much of elitism I guess.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there (and rather usefully brought the thread back on topic!) The use of Latin and Greek was always a way of putting control of the language in the hands of the ruling elite (who were the only ones who could afford the education), which I suppose partly explains the attempts to subjugate the Welsh and other minority indigenous languages.

Still today people try to use language ‘superiority’ to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi, as can easily been seen on the parts of social media that are less friendly and respectful than these forums. (If I were on Facebook now, for example, some bright spark would come along and explain to me why ‘the hoi polloi’ is a tautology as ‘hoi polloi’ already contains the definite article, which I would of course know if I had a modicum of intelligence and education, etc., etc…)

So yes - language control as social control; that’s why every generation invents their own secret code.

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At a time when many young aristocrats did the Grand Tour and visited Rome, if not Athens, I find it amazing that they could hear and even speak Italian and still kid themselves that English had some connection with Latin!! Especially if they ever visited Germany or the Netherlands, as they could hardly have ignored similarities there! But then there is a myth about the British being descended from Brutus of Troy, isn’t there? If that were true we’d be speaking Greek!!!
p.s. re-Language Police, languages have always evolved! We would have much more difference between, say, Yorkshire and London or Bangor and Abertawe now if we had not invented radio and TV! When “The Talkies” first reached Britain, my Mam and her Mam went and hated the sound! It made everyone sound so strange!! They had never heard an American accent!!!

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