Just as the Masters of Chancery were producing the first rational spelling system in English, something was going on to turn all their fine work on its head. This was the Great Vowel Shift, which did exactly what it said on the tin. Before the shift, English vowels had been much the same as their Continental neighbours. The word fine in English used to be pronounced with an ‘ee’ sound, like the Italian fino (‘fee-no’). If a fourteenth-century speaker of English had encountered a sentence like ‘I see my goat is lame—my cow too’, they’d have pronounced it approximately as: ‘Ee say mee gawt ays lahm—mee coo toe’

This sounds odd to us, but only because we’re not used to it. At least English used its vowels in more or less the way you’d expect given its ancestry. Then, for no known reason, the vowels decided to get up from their fixed positions and wander round till they settled again in new places. The Chaucerian ‘ee’ sound became the modern ‘eye’ sound, the Chaucerian ‘ay’ became the modern ‘ee’, and so on.

The process was both strange and not strange at the same time. In some ways, nothing much could be more ordinary. Language changes. If you want a scone, do you ask for a scohne or a sconn? If you talk about dust, do you use the southern ‘uh’ sound, or the shortened Yorkshire ‘oo’ sound? If a Brummie moves to a new part of the country—Liverpool, say, or Glasgow or Cornwall—they may well start to modify their vowel sounds, almost without noticing it. The Great Vowel Shift was in a way no odder than that—and bear in mind that it took place over two centuries, or the space of five or six medieval lifetimes.

On the other hand, the process is also a little odd. Why did English change so much and its closest neighbours little or not at all? And what propelled the movement? There is no shortage of theories. Social upheavals following the Black Death is one possibility. Another is that as the French-speaking ruling class came to speak English, there was a vogue for a kind of patriotic hypercorrection of French vowel sounds. But no one knows for sure. It’s just one of those things.

The one certainty, however, is that English spellings were fixed before, during and after the shift. A word like polite (around before the shift) simply saw its pronunciation change, from something like pol-eet to the modern pol-ite. But an almost identical word—police—which entered the language after the shift reflects the Continental ‘ee’ sound of its origin. The result, of course, is that there’s no way to tell in advance how a word should be spelled, or how a spelling should be spoken. Fine for those who grow up with the language; murder for those who have to learn it.

T as in pterodactyl

The first recorded reference to a pterodactyl is in Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. In it, Lyell predicts, ‘The pterodactyle might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.’ Whether pterodactyls could ever have been described as flitting is open to doubt, but what’s significant here is that new words have to be coined for new uses, and that one of the biggest creators of new words is science.

Scientists are only human. They want their coinages to have a bit of class—and what could be more classy than a bit of Latin or (still better) Greek? And since the ancient Greeks were fond of their initial Ps, our language is now adorned with pterodactyls and ptomaine and psychology and many others. The trouble with these introductions, of course, is that English tongues can’t really wrap themselves around such (to us) exotic constructions. So the pronunciation tends to be anglicized, while the spelling resolutely isn’t.

O as in bureau

The final great complicating factor for English is highlighted by the final letter of Shaw’s potato. Bureau is a French word. It has entered English with its pronunciation and spelling more or less intact, but because the French match up vowel sounds and letter combinations differently from us, their words only serve to baffle and complicate our spellings.

That’s not the only problem that can arise, however. Sometimes a new word entered the language—for example, nation, another French borrowing—and English tongues weren’t able to wrap themselves around the foreign sounds. So the French pronunciation, roughly na-see-o(n), becomes corrupted to the comfortable English nay-shun. Creations like this are hideously common. Do you want to guess how many ways there are to create the sh sound in English? You might play safe and say two or three. Or perhaps go wild and suggest five or six. The correct answer is in fact thirteen, as in shed, sure, issue, mansion, passion, ignition, suspicion, ocean, conscious, chaperone, schedule, pshaw and fuchsia.

Potato as in

That’s now every letter of Shaw’s potato accounted for. Shaw himself so disliked the mess of spellings that he left money in his will for a prize to be awarded for the best new alphabet to take care of English spelling. The winner was a chap called Kingsley Read. As Read saw it, a big part of the problem with English spellings is that there are too few letters for the number of sounds they need to make. There are forty-eight distinct sounds in English, and only twenty-six letters to do their work. The letter A, for example, has at least four jobs to do: ay as in able, a as in at, ah as in alms and or as in all. If English is to be easy to spell, then there should be one sound to a letter, one letter to a sound. Read’s alphabet, the Shavian alphabet, is a rather beautiful creation. It looks like this:

(That’s the start of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in case you missed it.) Alas, however, no one ever used Read’s alphabet. No one ever used Quickscript, his later modification of it. No one has ever used Readspel, Read’s final attempt to get people on his side. And no one ever will.

In the end, weird spellings are only a problem if that’s how you choose to see them. Part of the beauty of English is that its history is visible for all to see. It’s a hybrid between Anglo-Saxon rootstock and Franco-Latinate blooms. It’s a magpie language, acquisitive and reckless. It’s a human language, strewn with errors and eccentricities. It’s a living language, with vowels and pronunciations that shift from age to age. That won’t ever change. The question really is, who’d want it to?

DECLINING TO CONJUGATE

For English speakers, one of the most striking facts about learning other languages is how bloomin’ complicated they seem to be. A perfectly regular French verb has five different forms in its present tense alone. Adjectives have to vary depending on whether a noun is singular or plural, masculine or feminine. And French is easy. German has three genders, five cases. The Polish struggle with three genders and seven cases, and if that weren’t enough, their nouns, adjectives, numbers and pronouns all decline differently. Italian has fifty forms for each verb, ancient Greek more than three hundred, modern Turkish an eye-popping two million.

For we Brits, this complexity seems simply astonishing. We have two standard noun forms, singular and plural—dog and dogs, for example. We have four standard verb forms: bark, barks, barking and barked. Our adjectives don’t vary at all.* When we encounter a language with the complexity of Polish or Turkish, most of us find it simply stunning. It seems a wonder that Polish or Turkish toddlers ever manage to master the tongue at all.

To a linguist, however, the puzzle is a rather different one. English is a Germanic language, and the only one of its family to have lost almost all inflections. English is, in fact, about the least inflected language ever known. The reason for this has nothing to do with some form of linguistic evolution, from ‘primitive’ inflected languages to ‘modern’ uninflected ones. Rather, the answer has to do with that most English of solutions to precarious situations: muddle, fudge and compromise.

Back in 878, Alfred the Great defeated the Danish army at Edington. The battle checked the hitherto unstopped Viking advance, and enabled Alfred to go on to negotiate a peace agreement which divided the country into two. A line was drawn diagonally across England, running roughly from Chester to London. The area to the south of the line would remain under English rule; the northern part (the ‘Danelaw’) would be ruled by the Danes (though most of those ruled, of course, would be English).

Trade carried on across the line, very much as before. After Alfred’s son, Edward, had won back the Danelaw, then a common authority existed across the whole country, though pockets of Danish settlers were still widespread. Although frustratingly little is known about the pattern of Danish settlement, the likelihood is that significant numbers of Danes contined to come and settle across the eastern seaboard for the next two hundred years or so. Indeed, as late as the nineteenth century, linguists were recording language communities in Lincolnshire whose speech contained entire sentences that were effectively in Danish, not English. Old habits die hard.

Under these conditions—and largely in the east—Danes and English came into regular, daily, routine contact. The two communities would have been able to communicate with relatively little difficulty. Although the English spoke Old English and the Danes spoke Old Norse, the two languages were extremely close, rather in the way Norwegian and Swedish are today. The sentence ‘I’ll sell you the horse that pulls my cart’ translates as:

OLD ENGLISH: Ic selle the that hors the draegeth minne waegn

OLD NORSE: Ek mun selja ther hossit er dregr vagn mine

The main words of this sentence are pretty close. Sell translates as selle / selja. Horse is hors / hossit, and so on. The speakers of one group could fairly easily have guessed the broad meanings of the other party’s words. But what about all those word endings? The cases and genders, tenses, moods and the rest? The chances of a non-native speaker being able to guess the subtle implications of all those word endings would have been approximately nil.

So—and still only in the east—the word endings started to disappear. As traders and others sought to do business, Dane with English and vice versa, they simply started to drop the parts of the language that didn’t function for them. The process moved furthest and farthest in the areas where Dane and English lived closest together. In the west of the country, where Danish influence was minimal, a highly inflected version of English lasted right into the fifteenth century.

In the end, though, the Easterners had the advantage of geography. London, Oxford and Cambridge all fell, more or less, into the eastern zone, and those three centres of cultural power ended up dictating the language the rest of the country would speak. In consequence, English went from being an ordinarily inflected language to one with almost no variation at all: the pidgin product of an uneasy peace.

How should one interpret this change? Almost certainly as a historical-linguistic quirk. Just one of those things. Yet it’s hard to avoid a nagging sense of something further. There have been plenty of instances in which two similar linguistic communities have travelled and traded, mixed and mingled, yet English is exceptional in its lack of inflection. Were those early English exceptional in their desire to trade rather than fight, in their willingness to rub along with alien folk? The evidence falls a mile short of being conclusive, yet those same traits would prove to be reasonably prominent national characteristics many centuries down the road. Possibly, and only just possibly, those same traits were present way back in Anglo-Saxon times; that linguistic oddity their only surviving trace.

Whatever the answer to that particular conundrum, the inflections never came back. They are still eroding, very slightly, today. Whom has almost given way to who. The regional dialect thou makes(t) for the standard you make has just about vanished too. Those wonderful Danish-speaking Lincolnshire folk have been obliterated by the BBC and universal education and the internal combustion engine. (Though Lincolnshire dialect is still rich in words and phrases from Old Norse.)

This simplified, simplifying language offers one huge benefit to the world. To its billion and a half non-native speakers, English spelling is nothing but a plague and a torment. English inflections, by contrast, are now so simple you could learn them all in a minute, and still have time to put the kettle on.

* With one exception: blond and blonde.

A WORLD OF SQUANTOS

In November 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers made landfall off Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. It wasn’t the best time of year to arrive. The New England winter was more ferocious than anything the predominantly East Anglian settlers were used to. Nor were the precedents exactly encouraging. The first British settlement in North America had disappeared without trace. The second (in Jamestown, Virginia) had survived, but only after terrible loss of life. The Pilgrim Fathers weren’t even well equipped. They were missing basic tools, and were astonishingly ignorant of both agriculture and fishing. Their prospects were lousy, and they knew it. In the words of the colony’s first governor, William Bradford:

And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men?

From that hideous wilderness stepped forth a miracle. In the words of William Bradford again:

Whilst we were busied hereabout, we were interrupted, for there presented himself a savage which caused an alarm. He very boldly came all alone and along the houses straight to the rendezvous, where we intercepted him, not suffering him to go in…He saluted us in English and bade us ‘welcome’.

The ‘savage’ who emerged from the Massachusetts woods had picked up a few words of English from visiting sailors, but the miracle hadn’t yet taken place. The man who bade the settlers welcome took them to meet a second man, Tisquantum, abbreviated to Squanto. And Squanto spoke English; not just a few words, but fluently. Captured by British fishermen some fifteen years before, Squanto had been carried off to London, where he’d learned English and received training as a guide and interpreter, before managing to escape home again on a returning boat.

The unlikelihood of this sequence of events is simply astounding. What are the odds that a bunch of under-skilled and under-equipped Englishmen should pitch up and find perhaps the most fluent native American speaker of English anywhere on the continent? Squanto didn’t just offer a taste of home. He taught the settlers the things they needed to know. He showed them how to sow their corn seeds with little bits of chopped fish for fertilizer. He taught them how to fish and how to distinguish what was edible from what was not. It’s quite likely that Squanto saved the colony.

The story makes a point. Back then, English was a minor language, with limited projection beyond England’s own boundaries. Today, it is the world’s own language. Back then, it was the unlikelihood of finding a Squanto which made his appearance so miraculous. Today, a traveller could pitch up almost anywhere—any country, any coast, any continent—and hope to find some words of English spoken, by at least some members of the local community. The miracle today is not the rarity of English, but its universality.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that English has become the world’s most commonly spoken language. It hasn’t. A billion Mandarin Chinese speakers dwarf the 350 million or so native English speakers. But that misses the point. To be a global language is to be the preferred means of communication between two parties from different language communities, and it’s here where English is exceptional. On top of the 350 million native speakers, there are perhaps another 400 million speakers in former colonies, plus a billion or so speakers—from Japanese tourists to Swedish businessman—who have simply adopted the language as the simplest means of international communication. This number is growing all the time, not least in China, which will soon have more English speakers than the combined total of all English-speaking countries. No other language remotely compares with the global significance of English. Its lead is increasing all the time.

It’s always tempting to romanticize the language’s dominance, to start muttering about Shakespeare and Chaucer, the flexible euphony of our tongue. But Shakespeare, Schmakespeare. The world speaks English because of British gunboats (and emigrants) in the nineteenth century and American hegemony in the twentieth. If those Mayflower settlers had happened to speak Ubykh, a Caucasian language with eighty-one consonants and only three vowels, or perhaps Rotokas, a Papua New Guinea language with just six consonants and five vowels, then the world would quite likely be speaking those fine languages today.

Meanwhile, English is spreading in other ways too. The Oxford English Dictionary currently lists about half a million words. Its American equivalent, Webster’s, comes up with a roughly similar figure of 450,000. The two dictionaries have, however, much less of an overlap than you might guess. The OED contains more archaic or regional British terms, Webster’s more Americanisms. Putting the two dictionaries together would probably produce an expanded word count of some 750,000 words. (I say probably: no one has ever bothered to work it out.) But even this total excludes huge swaths of English. It excludes terms from the various world Englishes (Singapore English, Jamaican English, Indian English, etc.). It excludes much slang and regional dialect. It excludes acronyms, even those that are usually used as words (CIA, NATO, the EU, and so on). It excludes most flora and fauna. If all these were added in, the word count would probably reach a million. If all scientific and technical terms were added, the count might be twice that. By comparison, French has an ‘official’ dictionary-based word count of less than 100,000 words, German around 190,000.

The sheer scale of its vocabulary is one of the key reasons why other languages are fighting a hopeless battle to keep English terminology out. It is all very well for the Académie Française to invent new French terms to replace Anglo-Saxon intruders, autofinancement for cashflow, for example. But what about those million or so technical and scientific terms—bluetooth protocol, polypropylene, iPod, troposphere? Is the Académie really going to invent new terms for those and all 999,997 others? In 2004, The Economist quoted research which suggested that two-thirds of all Internet content is in English. Scientific and technical journals are also disproportionately anglophone. English isn’t just pushing other languages back, it’s eating into them too.

What of the future? There are roughly two schools of thought. The first takes Latin as its example. The break-up of the Roman Empire led to the break-up of the language. Romanian, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese litter the linguistic map, the ruined remains of a once great empire. Romanian and Portuguese speakers may both be speaking linear descendants of the same language, but the languages have long since become mutually unintelligible.

Is this the fate of English? There’s plenty of evidence to suggest it. After all, it’s already slightly misleading to speak of one single language called ‘English’. We have at the very least Indian English, American English, British English, Nigerian English, Philippines English, Canadian English, Pakistani English, Australian English, and so on. (The order of terms in that list might not be a conventional one, but it’s perfectly logical: the terms are arranged in descending order, by size of the English language community.) But this list describes broad types only. Within every genus, there is an abundance of species. Not just Scouse English, but Caribbean Scouse, Pakistani Scouse, Irish Scouse, and so forth. If you sat in a Singaporean student café, among students speaking their version of English, you probably wouldn’t understand what was being said. Perhaps the English break-up is already happening. Perhaps the rot has already set in.

Or then again, perhaps not. The counter-argument is simple: call it the eBay paradigm. In a world of highly competitive markets, eBay is rare and extraordinary in having virtually no meaningful competition. How come? Simply because eBay was the first, and as such it started out with the most buyers and the most sellers. Buyers naturally flock to the system with the most products to choose from. Sellers naturally gravitate to the outlet with the largest number of buyers. Unless eBay does something horrendous to mess up, its position is and will remain unrivalled. What’s true of beanie toys and second-hand clothes is all the more true of a universal language. If you’re an ambitious student keen to acquire a second tongue, which one does it make most sense to master? Obviously the one that gives access to the largest possible number of fellow speakers. So the larger the number of English speakers, the greater the incentive for others to to learn it. Dominance feeds dominance.

There perhaps lies the real point about that Singaporean café. If you were sitting there, sipping your bandung and picking at your fish-head curry, it’s likely that your fellow diners would notice your difficulty in making sense of their conversation. So they’d probably just shift the way they spoke. From the idiosyncrasies of Singaporean youth English to something like an international Standard English. That Standard English would still be noticeably local in flavour. It would certainly be American tinted. But you’d understand it. They’d understand you. That’s the point of a universal language. It makes one world of us all: a world of Squantos.

LITERATURE

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