by A. C. Gimson
(Text of a radio talk)
We've been speaking English for well over a thousand
years, and in that time the language has undergone some pretty radical changes.
Its Germanic ancestry is still apparent, but the path it has followed for the
past few centuries has tak‑ en it very far away from its linguistic
cousins. For one thing, the sound of English has changed out of all
recognition. King Alfred, if he were to reappear today, would have no success
at all in making himself understood or in under‑ standing us. If you read
a passage from the Bible, say from St. John's gospel (St. John 14, 22‑23),
in the pronunciation which we think was used about a thousand years ago you can
then read later versions of the same passage for comparison's sake.
Many of the words used then have disappeared, although
you may recognize one or two, such as "cumeth" and "fader".
There are great differences of grammatical structure, too. But I think it is
the pronunciation that particularly strikes the modern listener. Some sounds,
such as "y" in "Sylfne" and "ch" in
"drichten" are no longer in common use. And even when the sounds
themselves are not too un‑ familiar, a word often has a phonetic shape
completely different from its pre‑ sent form. For instance the modern
word "lord" was pronounced "hlavord". Words like this have
undergone a great deal of phonetic compression and weakening over the
centuries.
Let's jump four or five centuries and consider the
same passage in the Wiclif Bible, a sample of the speech from the end of the
fourteenth century. You'll find that enormous changes have taken place during
the five centuries since the earlier version. We can recognize this as the
language we speak today. The words have a much more familiar shape. Some of the
sound values may strike us as un‑ usual, "show",
"answered", "make", but I think Chaucer and I could have a
conversation, each using his own form of the language, even though there would
be moments of confusion or even total lack of intelligibility. But by and large
the sound of English at the end of the 14th century is well on the way to being
that of modern English. From now on, the progression towards our present‑day
pronunciation will be in more subtle stages.
The version of 1611 is written in the language of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries, set in a rather formal style.
Now it really is a question of modern English. This
last version is completely intelligible to our ears, you may even hear in it
echoes of present‑day regional forms of English. This is as it should be,
because most dialects have developed less rapidly than say London English. It's
worth noting, too, that it was at the beginning of the 17th century, that
English was exported for the first time, to America. And in many ways the sound
of modern American English is nearer to Shakespeare's than mine is.
It's clear then that the changes which have taken
place since 1600 have been comparatively slight. And they've happened more
slowly. There are many reasons for this: Communications became better, the printed
book began to have its effect, there was some standardization of spelling ‑
in the 18th century the great dictionaries of Samuel Johnson (1709‑1784),
Thomas Sheridan (1719‑1788) and John Walker (1732‑1807) were to
appear. So the differences between the sound system of the London region in the
late 18th century and that of today are of a minor kind. There are some, of
course ‑ we all know the fashionable pronunciation of "oblige"
as ["obleedge"] which have persisted for some time but was already
considered old‑fashioned. There was a long a sound in words like
"father", "half" and "bath", but to use the same
long sound in "after", "basket" and "plant" is
said by one writer to border on vulgarity.
The city of Rome was still called ["Room"],
there was no "h" yet in "herb" and "hospital". The
best speaker was still said to pronounce the "ing"‑ending as
"in" in a word like "longin'". Even more striking is the
occasional difference of accentuation. "Balcony" instead of
"balcony", "character" instead of "character",
"vertigo" instead of "vertigo", and so on. And a few
pronunciations of odd words which one doesn't come across today. "Chorister"
for instance, or "turquoise". But already in the 19th century the
"r"‑sound in words like "card" and "earth"
was gone for most Londoners, "entirely sunk", as John Walker said. And
the "hw"‑sound in words like "which" and
"white" was being replaced by a simple "w", "a feeble
Cockney pronunciation", Walker called it in 1791.
In all these 1000 years of change perhaps the greatest
developments and at the same time the most difficult to evaluate, have taken
place in our vowels. It's in the vowels, too, that there lie the principal divergences
in pronunciation. This may well be because vowels, whose quality we control
mainly by ear, are more difficult to hand on in a constant form from one
generation to another. In a way this instability is strange, because we have a
complex vowel system, in which many vowel oppositions operate to distinguish
words. Just think of the series: "heed", "hid",
"head", "had", "hard", "hod", and so
on.
And yet sometimes pairs do merge and we don't seem to
worry. For instance the vowels in words like "meet" and
"meat" used to be different at one time. But they came together in
the 17th century. And in the last 150 years, although very little has happened
to our consonantal system, our vowels have continued to change very slowly.
I have considered how the sound of English changed
over the last 1000 years or so. This process of change is still going on, and
I'd like to point out one or two of the directions which the language seems to
be taking now. But before we deal with the English of the mid‑20th
century, let's remind ourselves of the state of the language at the time when
the oldest of today's generations came onto the scene. An old recording of
Gladstone represents an educated formal way of speaking of nearly a century
ago.
"Overstrained"; his voice may sound old‑fashioned,
though you may not be able to say precisely why you have this impression. It
may be, of course, that you know some very old people who still talk like this.
And this raises a point which is important to bear in mind, whenever it's a
question of the pronunciation of a particular time in history. There'll always
be present at the same time at least three distinct ways of speaking, those of
the very old, the middle aged and the young. And this will be true, though in
varying degrees, whatever the regional or social situation. It means that three
people alive at the same time may have in their speech features of
pronunciation which are representative of nearly two centuries of English. Today
the very old may have sounds typical of the mid‑19th century, and the
young may give hints at what the general sound of English will be in 2050. This
is why it's necessary when talking about the pronunciation of a particular
period to specify not only the geographical area we're dealing with, but also
the age group.
As I said, the speech of the young usually foreshadows
that of the future. It's also normal for the speech tendencies of the young to
be despised and condemned by the older generation. This is as true today as ever
it was. Now let's come down to detail and have a look at the way things are
going now.
As I've said before, the consonants don't seem to be
changing very much, there may well have been a time, a century or more ago,
when the "r" and "w" pair looked like coalescing. "Red
wine" might then have become something like ["hed hine"], and
"reed" and "weed" would have become identical. But except
in childish or defective speech and also in some aristocratic forms of English,
we seem to maintain the distinction pretty consistently.
The case of "h" is an interesting one. It
occurs in modern English only before vowels and has, what is sometimes called,
a low functional load because of this. It might have been expected to disappear
before now. Indeed it has in most regional forms of English, though not,
curiously enough, in America. Many experts believe that it continues to exist
in educated English only because it's such a powerful social marker. And nobody
gives speech more social significance than the English.
But if "h" hangs on for social reasons, the
"hw" sound, which can distinguish "witch" from
"which" has a very tenuous claim to survival, at least in the English
Home Counties. Here the sound "hw" showed signs of disappearing two
or three centuries ago, and did in fact cease to exist for the majority of
speakers. It's now associated for many people of this region not so much with
educated speech, but with beautiful speech. And so it has achieved a strange
status of being an optional extra to the standard system.
But if nothing spectacular has happened to the
consonants, the vowels haven't stopped changing. I mentioned the fact that
vowels are particularly liable by their nature to be unstable, but that one
might expect the vital vowel oppositions in the language to be maintained. Yet
the vowel system seems to be less important to Englishmen when they communicate
than the consonant framework. "I can talk to you for quite a long time
using only one vowel, but provided I keep the rhythm and the consonants you can
understand what I say fairly easily."
You may know someone who uses only one vowel quite
effectively, but it means that in matters of communication we allow a latitude
to vowels which we don't to consonants. Vowels have a social importance which
is all their own, but that's another matter. So we can expect vowel qualities
to change radically, and they do.
Take the case of the word "home" in the
London region. A thousand years ago it might have been pronounced
["harm"], Chaucer would have said something like ["horm"],
and Shakespeare ["hohm"]. Gladstone would have had a slight glide in
the vowel, ["houm"]. And there are many older people in this region
of the coun‑ try who still have this sound. But today's middle generation
is more likely to say "haom", and the younger people say
["herm"] or even ["heoom"]. So at the present moment we can
hear various educated forms of "home". Or again, consider the
diphthong in a word like "day". How often do you hear announcers say
"today"? Much more often it's ["toda"]. In fact, many of
our diphthongs seem to be levelling out in this way. It's almost usual today to
talk of a "tubeless tar" rather than "tyre", and the
"Tar of London" just like "tar" on the road. Most of us are
conscious that people say these things, we're not always aware that we say them
ourselves. Very often we dislike them intensely. But it's difficult to realize
that we're simply caught up in a steady current of vowel change.
Not only do vowels change their quality, sometimes
there is uncertainty as to which of two vowels is to be used in a particular
class of words. For instance a long ["aw"] was well established in
words like "off", "cross" and "cloth", but during
the last fifty years or so the short "o" sound has been used more and
more, so that now we're at least in sight of the forms "off",
"cross" and "cloth" becoming universal.
And finally, the accentual patterns of words are
changing. For instance, out of a group of nearly 500 students whom I asked last
year, only a very few said "controversy", over 90 percent said
"controversy". The same is true of the more traditional
"formidable", "exquisite", "hospitable",
"despicable", they have be‑ come or are becoming
"formidable", "exquisite", "hospitable",
"despicable". Pro‑ tests form the older generations won't
prevent these changes taking place. Per‑ haps the rate of change is
slower now, we're all exposed to the standardizing influences of radio and
television, and these can hardly fail to exert some braking effect. But I
suspect that a BBC announcer of the 21st century may well introduce the news
rather like this: "This is the BBC home service, here is the nine o'clock
news."