Coshocton library explores English language history

Meghan Cox Gurdon says in "The Enchanted Hour," “There is music and antiquity in our words. Ordinary language that you and I use has come to us from the deep past, handed across generations through speech and print.”

To speak of English’s history, we must first speak of its parent. It has descended from “Proto-Indo-European," an academic term for a language whose modern descendants include not only English, but also languages from Icelandic to Iranian. Academics are certain these many languages and cultures have had a common ancestor in the distant past, but a 400-year-long hunt for that ancestor has only recently been able to yield significant fruit.

Some of the words archaeologists and linguists have painstakingly reconstructed in Proto-Indo-European, especially the most basic, will already sound familiar to you, including “ma” for “mom.” Our strong verbs, which change vowels instead of endings like a regular modern verb, come from here — write, writing, written, wrote, rather than modern English’s more common walk, walking, walked.

On the British Isles, two Proto-Indo-European daughter languages collided. Proto-Germanic tribes like the Angles invaded and named the south part of the British Isle Anga-lund, England, and so we have englisc, Old English, starting around 550 CE. Proto-Celtic words in English largely now remain in place names like Kent. However, the place names that do survive were often imported to the Americas including Ohio.

At first glance Old English bears little resemblance to our modern language. Written Old English has no spaces between words, punctuation, capitalization or consistent spelling. Yet every time we see “ye olde” on a sign trying to look old, we see an echo of letters that no longer exist. What modern folks tend to see as “ye” is actually “the,” rendering the letter Old English eth.

Starting in the mid-1100s, Middle English begins the shift of linguistic power to London. By this time the Norman Conquest had begun, starting when William the Conqueror invaded in 1066. The Normans had been Vikings by way of Southern France, so they brought with them a strong Latinate and French influence.

It is in this developing Middle English of Southern England, Chaucer’s English, that we first see something in the sounds languages make within words, which we in Coshocton often still do today: the merging of many vowels into one vowel sound. We say “pin” and mean pin, pen and even pan sometimes.

It is Shakespearean London, however, that is the birthplace of our modern language. Shakespeare speaks to us in Early Modern English of the 1400s. The chasm between Old English and Early Modern English is far vaster than that between Early Modern English and us.

Linguists and historians refer to this time as “the Great Vowel Shift.” Prior to the Great Vowel Shift, Early Modern English would have been majority rhotic, meaning it leaned heavily on its “R’s” after vowels, as we still do in Coshocton today. Non-rhotic English, meanwhile, occurred largely post-Vowel Shift, like British English.

Out of the American Revolution during this time came several convictions — and one English-language-obsessed Founding Father. Noah Webster served in the United States military during the American Revolution. Shortly thereafter in 1778, he graduated from Yale University.

After the American Revolution, Webster promptly decided to “reform” the American language. America, Webster said, “must be as famous for arts as for arms.” His "American Spelling Book" was commonly known as "Webster’s Blue Back Speller." Scholars note this book was one of the most influential pieces of reading in early America, along with the "Declaration of Independence." It was available even in this area, where it was sold in Adams Mills by 1817 for a single bushel of wheat from an average farmer. This was, after all, Webster’s primary purpose — democratic literacy.

If Shakespeare’s language is often that which we speak, Webster’s is what we read and write.

The full program on this topic, Cat Got Your Tongue: A History of the English Language, will be held Wednesday, Feb. 18 at 5:45 p.m. at the Coshocton County District Library. For more information and to register for the program, stop by the library, visit www.coshoctonlibrary.org or call 740-622-0956.