Mother Tongue: The English Language

Bill Bryson

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alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
When an American airline received anonymous telephone threats, the linguistics authority William Labov of the University of Pennsylvania was able to identify the caller as coming from within a seventy-five-mile radius of Boston. His testimony helped to clear a man from greater New York accused of the crime.
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alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
A sufficiently sophisticated computer could probably place with reasonable accuracy, sometimes to within a few miles, almost any English-speaking person depending on how he pronounced the following ten words: cot, caught, cart, bomb, balm, oil, house, horse, good, and water. Just four of these words—bomb, balm, cot, and caught—could serve as regional shibboleths for almost every American, according to the dialectologist W. Nelson Francis.
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alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling, and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
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alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
Spelling and pronunciation in English are very much like trains on parallel tracks, one sometimes racing ahead of the other before being caught up. An arresting example of this can be seen in the slow evolution of verb forms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that turned hath into has and doth into does. Originally -th verbs were pronounced as spelled. But for a generation or two during the period from (roughly) 1600 to 1650 they became pronounced as if spelled in the modern way, even when the spelling was unaltered. So, for example, when Oliver Cromwell saw hath or chooseth, he almost certainly read them as “has” or “chooses” despite their spellings. Only later did the spellings catch up.
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alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
Words adopted from France before the seventeenth century have almost invariably been anglicized, while those coming into the language later usually retain a hint of Frenchness. Thus older ch- words have developed a distinct “tch” sound as in change, charge, and chimney, while the newer words retain the softer “sh” sound of champagne, chevron, chivalry, and chaperone. Chef was borrowed twice into English, originally as chief with a hard ch and later as chef with a soft ch. A similar tendency is seen in -age, the older forms of which have been thoroughly anglicized into an “idge” sound (bandage, cabbage, language) while the newer imports keep a Gallic “ozh” flavor (bodinage, camouflage).
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alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
The k in words like knight and knave was still sounded in Shakespeare’s day, while words like sea and see were still pronounced slightly differently—sea being something roughly halfway between see and say—as were other pairs involving ee and ea spellings, such as peek and peak, seek and speak, and so on.
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alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
Since obviously there is no one around who heard English as it was spoken in the time of Chaucer and Caxton, how do we know all this? The answer is that for the most part we cannot know for sure. Most of it is based on supposition. But scholars can get a good idea of what English must have sounded like by looking at the rhymes and rhythms of historic verse and by examining the way words were spelled in letters and other snatches of informal writing. In this respect we owe a huge debt to bad spellers. It is from misspellings in letters of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that we can be pretty certain that boiled was pronounced byled, that join was gine, that merchant was marchant, and so on.
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alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
Before the shift house was pronounced “hoose” (it still is in Scotland), mode was pronounced “mood,” and home rhymed with “gloom,” which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. (The word has nothing to do with the modern word doom, incidentally. It is related to the domes- in domestic.)
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alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
There were other changes as well—most notably the loss of the Old English sound x, the throat-clearing sound of the ch in the Scottish loch or the German ach. The loss of this sound from English meant that others rushed to fill the vacuum, as in the Old English word burh (place), which became variously burgh as in Edinburgh, borough as in Gainsborough, brough as in Middlesbrough, and bury as in Canterbury.
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alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
Daisy was once day’s eye, good-bye was God-be-with-you, hello was (possibly) whole-be-thou, shepherd was sheep herd, lord was loafward, every was everich, fortnight (a word curiously neglected in America) was fourteen-night.
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