A history of the english language (стр. 4 из 8)
The effects of the Norman Conquest added new features to the regional and social differentiation of the language. New words, coming from French, could not be adopted simultaneously by all the speakers of English; they were first used in some varieties of the language.
The dialectal position of Middle English is basically a continuation of that of Old English. The most important extra linguistic fact for the development of the Middle English dialects is that the capital of the country was moved from Winchester (in the Old English period) to London by William the Conqueror in his attempt to diminish the political influence of native English.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s literary standing had greatly added to the prestige associated with written language in the London dialect.
The introduction of the printing by William Caxton was one of the most significant factors of the Standard English diffusion. This resulted in the spread of a single norm over most of the country, so much that during the 15th century it becomes increasingly difficult to determine on internal linguistic grounds the dialects in which a literal work is written.
CHAPTER 2. CHANGING CONDITIONS IN THE PERIOD OF STANDARDISATION OF THE LANGUAGE
2.1 The origins of Standard English
The variety which we now call Standard English is a result of combination of influences, the most important of which do not emerge until the Middle English period. There is no connection between West Saxon, the written standard of old English, and the modern Standard.
The political heart of the country moved from Winchester to London after the Conquest, and majority of the linguistic trends increasingly relate to the development of the capital as a social, political and commercial centre. A written standard language began to emerge during the 15th century and, following the detailed study of the dialectal characteristics of the period it is now possible to isolate several factors which contributed to its identity.
A literally standardized language appeared in the last part of the 14th century, based on dialects of the Central Midland countries, especially Northunptonshire, Hutingtonshire, and Bedfordshire. This is chiefly found in the large number of John Wycliffe’s manuscripts which have survived including sermons, tracts, plays, poems, and the different versions of the Wycliffe Bible, as well as several secular works. The Lollards spread this variety widely, even into South-West England, thus increasing its status as standard. In the long term it was unable to compete with quantity of material emanating from the capital; but its central Midland origins are nonetheless noteworthy (for the map of Middle English counties, see Appendix 1, p. 67) [27; 28; 53].
2.1.1 The Rise of Standard English
Out of the variety of local dialects there emerged toward the end of the 14th century a written language that in the course of the 15th century won general recognition and has since become the recognized standard in both speech and writing. The part of England that contributed most to the formation of this standard was the
East Midland district, and it was the East Midland type of English that became its basis, particularly the dialect of the metropolis, London. Several causes contributed to the attainment of this result.
In the first place, as a Midland dialect the English of this region occupied a middle position between the extreme divergences of the north and south. It was less conservative than the Southern dialect, less radical than the Northern. In its sounds and inflections it represents a kind of compromise, sharing some of the characteristics of both its neighbors [20].
In the second place, the East Midland district was the largest and most populous of the major dialect areas. The land was more valuable than the hilly country to the north and west, and in an agricultural age this advantage was reflected in both the number and the prosperity of the inhabitants. If we leave Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk out of account we are to all appearances leaving out of account not much less than a quarter of the whole nation. No doubt all inferences drawn from medieval statistics are exceedingly precarious; but, unless a good many figures have conspired to deceive us, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were at the time of the Conquest and for three centuries afterwards vastly richer and more populous than any tract of equal area in the West. Only the southern counties possessed natural advantages at all comparable, and they were much smaller. The prominence of Middlesex, Oxford, Norfolk, and the East Midlands generally in political affairs all through the later Middle Ages is but another evidence of the importance of the district and of the extent to which its influence was likely to be felt [20; 27; 53].
A third factor, more difficult to evaluate, was the presence of the universities, Oxford and Cambridge, in this region. In the 14th century the monasteries were playing a less important role in the dissemination of learning than they had once played, while the two universities had developed into important intellectual centers. So far as Cambridge is concerned any influence that it had would be exerted in support of the East Midland dialect. That of Oxford is less certain because Oxfordshire is on the border between Midland and Southern and its dialect shows certain characteristic Southern features. Moreover, we can no longer attribute to Wycliffe an important part in the establishment of a written standard. Though he spent much of his life at Oxford, he seems not to have conformed fully to the Oxford dialect. Supposedly, the dialect of Oxford had no apparent influence on the form of London English, which was ultimately adopted as standard. Such support as the East Midland type of English received from the universities must have been largely confined to that furnished by Cambridge.
Much the same uncertainty attaches to the influence of Chaucer. It was once thought that Chaucer's importance was paramount among the influences bringing about the adoption of a written standard. And, indeed, it is unbelievable that the language of the greatest English poet before Shakespeare was not spread by the popularity of his works and, through the use of that language, by subsequent poets who looked upon him as their master and model. But it is nevertheless unlikely that the English used in official records and in letters and papers by men of affairs was greatly influenced by the language of his poetry. Yet it is the language found in such documents rather than the language of Chaucer that is at the basis of Standard English. Chaucer’s dialect is not in all respects the same as the language of these documents, presumably identical with the ordinary speech of the city. It is slightly more conservative and shows a greater number of Southern characteristics. Chaucer was a court poet, and his usage may reflect the speech of the court and to a certain extent literary tradition. His influence must be thought of as lending support in a general way to the dialect of the region to which he belonged rather than as determining.
A later and much larger group of diverse manuscripts include the work of Chaucer and Langland. These texts in their different ways represent London English of around 1400, but the amount of variation of their displays suggests that they cannot be called standard, in any strict sense. Not even Chaucer’s writing traditionally thought to be a precursor of modern Standard English, exercised a specific influence on the form this standard took – nor it is likely that poetic usage would ever influence general usage in any real way. It can be hardly doubted though that Chaucer’s literary standing would have greatly added to the prestige associated with written language in the London dialect.
The final factor in the emergence of the southern literary standard was the development of printing. This resulted in the spread of a single norm over most of the country, so much that during the 15th century it becomes increasingly difficult to determine on internal linguistic grounds the dialects, in which a literal work is written- apart from the northern dialects, such as Scots, which retained their written identity longer [20; 27; 28; 53].
2.1.2 The importance of London English
By far the most influential factor in the rise of Standard English was the importance of London as the capital of England. Indeed, it is altogether likely that the language of the city would have become the prevailing dialect without the help of any of the factors previously discussed. In doing so it would have been following the course of other national tongues – French as the dialect of Paris, Spanish as that of Castile, and others. London was, and still is, the political and commercial center of England. It was the seat of the court, of the highest judicial tribunals, the focus of the social and intellectual activities of the country. In the practicalities of commerce the London economy was especially important as an engine of communication and exchange which enabled ideas and information to be distributed and business to be done across an increasingly extensive, complex and varied field. Patterns of migration at this time cannot be fully reconstructed, but clearly London drew in a constant stream those whose affairs took them beyond the limits of their provincial homes. They brought to it traits of their local speech, there to mingle with the London idiom and to survive or die as the silent forces of amalgamation and standardization determined. They took back with them the forms and usages of the great city by which their own speech had been modified. The influence was reciprocal. London English took as well as gave. It began as a Southern and ended as a Midland dialect. By the 15th century there had come to prevail in the East Midlands a fairly uniform dialect, and the language of London agrees in all important respects with it. It is undoubtedly that the importance of the eastern counties, pointed out above, is largely responsible for this change. Even such Northern characteristics as are found in the standard speech seem to have entered by way of these counties. The history of Standard English is almost a history of London English.
In the latter part of the 15th century the London standard had been accepted, at least in writing, in most parts of the country. Its prestige may possibly be reflected in the fact that Mak the sheep-stealer in the Towneley Plays attempts to impose upon the Yorkshire shepherds by masquerading as a person of some importance and affects a “Southern tooth.” Considerable diversity still existed in the spoken dialects, as will be apparent from what is said in the next paragraph. But in literary works after 1450 it becomes almost impossible, except in distinctly northern texts, to determine with any precision the region in which a given work was written. And in correspondence and local records there is a widespread tendency to conform in matters of language to the London standard. This influence emanating from London can be seen in the variety of English used in documents of the national bureaucracy as written by the clerks of Chancery. By the middle of the century a fairly consistent variety of written English in both spelling and grammar had developed, and as the language of official use it was likely to have influence in similar situations elsewhere. With the introduction of printing in 1476 a new influence of great importance in the dissemination of London English came into play. From the beginning London has been the center of book publishing in England.
2.1.3 The importance of Chancery Line
The most important area for the development of writing standards is that of London and its immediate environs. The London dialect is portrayed in broad terms as one which turned from being an essentially Southern dialect to one which became an East Midland one. However, it is possible to be much more specific about various standards within the London area itself. These may be associated with different types of work so that in the Chancery scribes developed their own standard which was by no means constant since it changed with time, whereas other standards developed in association with particular scribes who wrote literary and other works. The copying of manuscripts often produced mixed dialects or Mischsprachen as one scribe superimposed his own conventions on those of the manuscript he was copying, but this is something which is more particularly associated with literary and didactic texts since these are the texts which are copied most frequently. They are also the texts read most frequently today. It might be said that each local standard draws its conventions from a pool which consists of traditional, national and local features, with the local and traditional features being more important at first and the national gaining in importance as the 15th century progresses. In London itself it is perhaps surprising that so much standardization is found, for although one might expect such standardization in religious houses with their traditions, London is characterized by secular copying. As far as it is probable to tell, secular scribes worked individually on a piece-work basis, though they might occasionally have teamed up to form a loose co-operative. However, many individual scribes may, like Hoccleve, have worked for a major organization such as the Chancery during the day and done private copying at other times. Hence even in secular private copying the process of standardization would gradually manifest itself.
The Chancery hand developed in Italian chancelleries in the 13th century and spread to France in the early 14th century. Later in that century it spread to London, and the standardization of the handwriting went hand in hand with the standardization of the spelling.
The Chancery clerks fairly consistently preferred the spellings which have since become standard. The documents in this anthology show the clerks trying to eliminate the kind of orthographic eccentricity found in the Privy Seal minutes, the petitions passed on to them for entering in the rolls, and most of the documents printed by Chambers and Daunt. At the very least, we can say that they were trying to limit choices among spellings and that by the 1440’s and 1450’s they had achieved a comparative regularization.
Among examples of this regularization process they note that such is the preferred Chancery form which had ousted sich, sych, seche and swiche. Which replaced wich. The auxiliary verbs appear more regularly in their modern forms: can, could, shall, should and would. Furthermore it is difficult to detect spellings used by the Chancery scribes that can be described as phonetic. In other words a standardized spelling was developing which was divorced from the immediate phonetic environment so that sound and spelling were becoming two separate, if parallel, systems (for more details see Appendix 2, p. 68) [24; 27; 28].
2.2 The Middle English Spelling and Sounds
What is immediately noticeable is the extraordinary diversity of Middle English spelling – far greater than that found in Old English.
This situation results from a combination of historical, linguistic, and social factors. The sociolinguistic impact of the French invasion, the continuation of the processes of sound change which began in Anglo- Saxon times, and the considerable growth and movement in population during the medieval period, especially in the south-east of the country, all helped to influence the shape of the writing system. The change is quite dramatic. There is a marked contrast between the diverse and idiosyncratic forms used at the beginning of the period and the highly regularized system of spelling which begins to appear in the 15th century, in the work of the Chancery scribes and William Caxton [28].
2.2.1 Changes in Spelling due to the introduction of French scribal tradition
The striking change in the written language of England during the 12th century was, to a considerable extent, a matter of mere spelling. After the Norman Conquest children ceased to be regularly taught to read and write English, and were taught to read and write French instead. When, therefore, the mass of the new generation tried to write English, they had no orthographical traditions to guide them, and had to spell the words phonetically according to French rules. They used ch instead of the old c, when it was pronounced as in cirice ‘church’. The sound of the Old English sc in sceamu ‘shame’, which did not exist at that time in French, was rendered by ss,ssh,sch, or sh. The French qu took the place of hw. The f between vowels [v] was replaced by u or v (these being still, as long afterwards, treated as forms of one and the same letter, used indifferently for vowel and consonant). The Old English symbol æ was dropped, its place being taken by a or e. The sound of the Old English y, in the dialects where it survived, was expressed by u; and that of the Old English long u was written ou, as in French.
Of course these changes did not take place all at once. It is not to be supposed that no one ever read an Old English Manuscript and there was, for a long time, some mixture of the traditional spelling with the new one. Some few English sounds admitted of no tolerable representation in the French alphabet; and for the expression of these the native characters were retained in use. The letters, þ, ð and
were used, though often blunderingly, even by scribes who, in other respects, were thoroughly French in their spelling; though often the sounds were awkwardly rendered by t, th, ht, or d, and u. And in the 12th century, though the continental variety of the Roman alphabet was generally used for writing English, it was found convenient to retain the native form of the letter g for those two of its sounds that the French g lacked, namely, those of gh and y (as in year). A new letter was thus added to the alphabet, and, though it came to be written 
exactly like the contemporary form of z, it preserved its name ‘yok’ until the 14th century. It may be remarked in passing that the ambiguity of pronunciation of this letter has misled modern writers into calling the author of the Brut Layamon instead of Laghamon; the incorrect form, however, has become too well known to be displaced. In addition to the two original values of the ‘yok’, it very early obtained a third use, being employed (without indicating any change of pronunciation) instead of the Old English h in certain positions, as in kni[x]t, ibro[x]t, rou[x], for which the older spelling was cniht, gebroht, ruh.