Speaker Malcolm Johnson 1,000 years of the English language

Malcolm said that he had been fascinated by English language all life. He studied it at university and then taught it both in school and as a lecturer.

The British language is a much more useful tongue as there are 200,000 English words but only 100,000 in French and Spanish. In particular, France has a college to suppress foreign words appearing in the language where in English we embrace them for example cul-de-sac.

As part of his talk Malcolm said that he would concentrate on 60s in successive centuries.

Pre 1066 the main language of the country was Anglo Saxon i.e. a Germanic language and before that Roman it was. But over the years different settlers had caused different regional dialects. He gave example of pre 1066 language which was not comprehensible to the modern ear.

When the Norman's came they didn't change language to English because too difficult for William. This meant that the upper class spoke French, the church and Middle England spoke Latin and the peasants spoke English. Because of this coexistence of French and English the language expanded and English we took a lot of French names e.g. mutton beef chamber. Also, old English became a much simpler language as they removed a lot of rules orally e.g. no gender case or plurals other than adding an S. Over 200 years the Lord’s prayer changed but at that time adjectives came after the noun.

By 1362 English replaced Latin in schools and Chaucer wrote Canterbury Tales in English. The spellings were idiosyncratic, and all the letters were pronounced unlike in French. But there were still had some French influences. This was also the time when the “Great Vowel Shift” started which is still going on today.

In the 1450’s and 60’s print presses were invented. Caxton started printing in the 1460’s but Northern English very different to Southern English. This caused Caxton to create received English based on the dialects spoken in London Oxford and Cambridge. He also started formal spelling so that everyone would understand the same thing.

In the 1560s the Renaissance period started and both Shakespeare and James 1st were born. The Renaissance created another problem by referring to Latin and putting new letters in words such as the b in debtor and s in Island. Shakespeare used words in print for first time including adding “in” or “un” to the front of a word to mean the reverse of the original. He also made some nouns into a verb e.g. a beggar or to beggar. The King James Bible again formalised the language. Particularly sayings "strength to strength" and “out of the mouths of babes” came from this edition of the bible.

In 1660 John Dryden complained words were always changing. He was backed up by Jonathan Swift. He tried to fix the language in stone. But this wouldn't work because new things were always being invented, Samuel Johnson’s dictionary came out, but he said can't fix a living language.

In the 1760s Robert Lowth started creating grammatical rules e.g. you shouldn’t not split the infinitive. His book was very popular and was reprinted many times.

1860’s sees Charles Dickens who was no respecter of language. He was the first novelist to do serials in newspapers. He completed sentences without verbs. During this period many new words came into print e.g. boredom and funky.

The 1960’s saw Lady Chatterley Lover permitted to be published. It had been written in 20s but was banned until Penguin won a court case. This decade also saw the start of the death knell for Grammar schools. Grammar schools taught grammar, but Comprehensive schools didn't.

What will the 2060’s bring? Malcolm asked will be changes such as bath becoming baaath.

He gave an example of the word Mondegreen invented 1954 by Sylvia Wright the last line of a piece of prose should have read “and laid him on the green” but she thought it had been read as “and lady mondegreen”. Thus the word Mondegreen now means a misunderstood meaning.

For further reading he recommended Bill Bryson’s book on language The Mother Tongue – English And How It Got That Way.