January 31, 2007
The English Language: Yesterday and Today
John Fleming
Professor of English, Emeritus, Princeton University
Minutes of the 18th Meeting of the 65th Year
President Joseph Giordmaine called to order the 93 attending members of the Old Guard of Princeton for the 18th meeting of the 65th year at 10:15 a.m. John Marks led the invocation. John Rassweiler read the minutes of the previous week’s lecture given by Douglas Massey, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
There were no guests. Four visitors were introduced as follows: Paul Cruickshank introduced his wife Natalie; Bob Guenther-Mohr introduced his wife Lee; Harriet Chase introduced Ann Walker; and Lucien Yokana introduced his wife Ann.
President Giordmaine announced that there were still numbered keys for the picture of the Old Guard, which could be picked up at the end of the meeting.
Joseph Bolster introduced John Fleming, Professor of English, Emeritus, Princeton University, whose lecture was entitled The English Language: Yesterday and Today.
Professor Fleming began his lecture with the premise that the English language today enjoys a cultural prestige unique in history and pointed out the statistical fact that there are currently upwards of four hundred million native speakers of English, a number exceeded only by the number of native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. As huge as that number is, Professor Fleming suggested that this statistic is only the beginning of the power of English, because the number of people who use English as a second language is perhaps as great as the number of native speakers, resulting in about one billion people speaking, reading, and writing English every day; English is the international language of commerce, learning, science, technology, and the Internet. Professor Fleming postulated that the growth of the English language is unstoppable and that there is every reason to believe that it could become, quite literally, not merely a world language, which it already is, but the world language.
Professor Fleming suggested that the title of his presentation, The English Language: Yesterday and Today, is meant to provoke the listener to consider what is seldom explicitly acknowledged, that languages do have lives, and therefore also sadly deaths, and that they experience historical mutations that we may optimistically call “development” or pessimistically call “decay,” but which linguists are content to call simply “change.”
The unparalleled richness of the English language is the result of the extraordinary history of the English speaking people. Professor Fleming suggests that just as much of what we know today about animal and human life depends upon the study of material fossil remains, much of what we think were know about the linguistic life of English depends upon the study of linguistic fossil remains.
In examining some of these linguistic fossils, Professor Fleming proposed that English, like most western languages, must have derived from a common ancestor that linguists called “Indo-European.” The migratory speakers of this language took it from some unknown place eastward to the Indus Valley and westward toward the great river of Eastern Europe: hence its name Indo plus European. By the time written language appeared in Sanskrit in the ancient texts of India, in the Greek and then in the Latin of the West, such changes had come about in the Indo-European that only trained linguists are able to see the shared kinship of the derivatives; however, Fleming suggested that even the untrained eye can see certain patterns of similarity too recurrent to be the results of coincidence, and he mentioned, as examples, the roughly similar forms of words denoting mother and father and bread and butter.
Professor Fleming told us that because a one hour lecture is not much time for several millennium and multiple contents of linguistic history, he would need to make some long hops, which he certainly proceeded to do, supported with numerous examples, anecdotes, and delightful digressions. From the prehistoric times in what could be loosely called Germany, Fleming traced the evolving form of Indo-European called Primitive
Germanic, which eventually fragmented and morphed into Low German, High German, Dutch, Frisian, Flemish, the Scandinavian languages and Yiddish, among others, to the invasion of the British Isles by the varied Germanic tongues, to the documentation by the great British historian Bede in the 8th century that the invaders were of three tribes, Angles, Saxon and Jutes, and thus the invented term Anglo Saxon used in England between the sixth and the twelfth centuries.
Professor Fleming then described the 1066 invasion of the Normans, who because they had lived in France at one point, brought with them a Romance vernacular close enough to French to be called that. The political reign resulting from the Norman invasion super- imposed Norman French upon a population of Old English speakers. What was political and social disaster for the English became a type of linguistic bonanza for the English language. The result was an amazing mutation of the English language which overwhelmed French largely by absorbing it, specifically manifested by the enormous evolution of vocabulary, resulting in English coming to have at least two nouns to dominate many of the things of daily life, for example the livestock of the pasture having the names cow, sheep and pig, and the food at the table having the names beef, lamb, and pork. The opulence of the English vocabulary derives from this kind of double, even triple and quadruple, dipping carried on over many centuries.
Jumping to the Renaissance, Fleming highlighted the new attitude that came with the technology of the printing press with moveable type, resulting in the English language being enriched during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with artificial classicisms from the writings of Greek and Latin scholars, thus, for example, the word masticate used by the more learned Englishmen for the basic word chew.
Professor Fleming then hopped to a discussion of the process by which the English language came to be spread across the globe; the process of cultural encounter in its colonist, missionary, and commercial forms, of course, had a profound impact on the English vocabulary. This fact can be judged by the range of our American English vocabulary. When English speakers arrived in North America, for example, the existing Indian languages were numerous and variegated, but for the most part feeble from a cultural point of view. Although many thousands of words came into the American English vocabulary, almost all of them were in the specialized and localized categories of place names and topography, a phenomena also seen when English speakers encountered French in Louisiana and Spanish in the southwest and California.
Toward the end of his lecture, Professor Fleming suggested that every educated reader should read a simple word or two a day from the Oxford English Dictionary and once or twice a month should undertake one of the harder words, which he noted often command an essay of a page or two of fine print. He then went on to give an example of the complicated and incomplete etymology of the pronoun she with the eventual admission that the there is no universally accepted knowledge of how this most common and important word in our language came about. (This recorder would respectfully suggest that the origin of this pronoun be chalked up to one of the many positive mysteries connected with the feminine gender!)
Professor Fleming ended his lecture with a speculation related to his thesis concerning the power and richness of the English language, i.e., that the word English will come in time to mean not a particular language, but just as the word Kleenex has become the word for a paper tissue of any manufacturer, English will come to be used as the word for language itself, with the superscript “C” within a circle that means a registered trade mark of the English speaking people.
Nine members asked questions.
Respectfully submitted,
Marcia E. Bossart
There were no guests. Four visitors were introduced as follows: Paul Cruickshank introduced his wife Natalie; Bob Guenther-Mohr introduced his wife Lee; Harriet Chase introduced Ann Walker; and Lucien Yokana introduced his wife Ann.
President Giordmaine announced that there were still numbered keys for the picture of the Old Guard, which could be picked up at the end of the meeting.
Joseph Bolster introduced John Fleming, Professor of English, Emeritus, Princeton University, whose lecture was entitled The English Language: Yesterday and Today.
Professor Fleming began his lecture with the premise that the English language today enjoys a cultural prestige unique in history and pointed out the statistical fact that there are currently upwards of four hundred million native speakers of English, a number exceeded only by the number of native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. As huge as that number is, Professor Fleming suggested that this statistic is only the beginning of the power of English, because the number of people who use English as a second language is perhaps as great as the number of native speakers, resulting in about one billion people speaking, reading, and writing English every day; English is the international language of commerce, learning, science, technology, and the Internet. Professor Fleming postulated that the growth of the English language is unstoppable and that there is every reason to believe that it could become, quite literally, not merely a world language, which it already is, but the world language.
Professor Fleming suggested that the title of his presentation, The English Language: Yesterday and Today, is meant to provoke the listener to consider what is seldom explicitly acknowledged, that languages do have lives, and therefore also sadly deaths, and that they experience historical mutations that we may optimistically call “development” or pessimistically call “decay,” but which linguists are content to call simply “change.”
The unparalleled richness of the English language is the result of the extraordinary history of the English speaking people. Professor Fleming suggests that just as much of what we know today about animal and human life depends upon the study of material fossil remains, much of what we think were know about the linguistic life of English depends upon the study of linguistic fossil remains.
In examining some of these linguistic fossils, Professor Fleming proposed that English, like most western languages, must have derived from a common ancestor that linguists called “Indo-European.” The migratory speakers of this language took it from some unknown place eastward to the Indus Valley and westward toward the great river of Eastern Europe: hence its name Indo plus European. By the time written language appeared in Sanskrit in the ancient texts of India, in the Greek and then in the Latin of the West, such changes had come about in the Indo-European that only trained linguists are able to see the shared kinship of the derivatives; however, Fleming suggested that even the untrained eye can see certain patterns of similarity too recurrent to be the results of coincidence, and he mentioned, as examples, the roughly similar forms of words denoting mother and father and bread and butter.
Professor Fleming told us that because a one hour lecture is not much time for several millennium and multiple contents of linguistic history, he would need to make some long hops, which he certainly proceeded to do, supported with numerous examples, anecdotes, and delightful digressions. From the prehistoric times in what could be loosely called Germany, Fleming traced the evolving form of Indo-European called Primitive
Germanic, which eventually fragmented and morphed into Low German, High German, Dutch, Frisian, Flemish, the Scandinavian languages and Yiddish, among others, to the invasion of the British Isles by the varied Germanic tongues, to the documentation by the great British historian Bede in the 8th century that the invaders were of three tribes, Angles, Saxon and Jutes, and thus the invented term Anglo Saxon used in England between the sixth and the twelfth centuries.
Professor Fleming then described the 1066 invasion of the Normans, who because they had lived in France at one point, brought with them a Romance vernacular close enough to French to be called that. The political reign resulting from the Norman invasion super- imposed Norman French upon a population of Old English speakers. What was political and social disaster for the English became a type of linguistic bonanza for the English language. The result was an amazing mutation of the English language which overwhelmed French largely by absorbing it, specifically manifested by the enormous evolution of vocabulary, resulting in English coming to have at least two nouns to dominate many of the things of daily life, for example the livestock of the pasture having the names cow, sheep and pig, and the food at the table having the names beef, lamb, and pork. The opulence of the English vocabulary derives from this kind of double, even triple and quadruple, dipping carried on over many centuries.
Jumping to the Renaissance, Fleming highlighted the new attitude that came with the technology of the printing press with moveable type, resulting in the English language being enriched during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with artificial classicisms from the writings of Greek and Latin scholars, thus, for example, the word masticate used by the more learned Englishmen for the basic word chew.
Professor Fleming then hopped to a discussion of the process by which the English language came to be spread across the globe; the process of cultural encounter in its colonist, missionary, and commercial forms, of course, had a profound impact on the English vocabulary. This fact can be judged by the range of our American English vocabulary. When English speakers arrived in North America, for example, the existing Indian languages were numerous and variegated, but for the most part feeble from a cultural point of view. Although many thousands of words came into the American English vocabulary, almost all of them were in the specialized and localized categories of place names and topography, a phenomena also seen when English speakers encountered French in Louisiana and Spanish in the southwest and California.
Toward the end of his lecture, Professor Fleming suggested that every educated reader should read a simple word or two a day from the Oxford English Dictionary and once or twice a month should undertake one of the harder words, which he noted often command an essay of a page or two of fine print. He then went on to give an example of the complicated and incomplete etymology of the pronoun she with the eventual admission that the there is no universally accepted knowledge of how this most common and important word in our language came about. (This recorder would respectfully suggest that the origin of this pronoun be chalked up to one of the many positive mysteries connected with the feminine gender!)
Professor Fleming ended his lecture with a speculation related to his thesis concerning the power and richness of the English language, i.e., that the word English will come in time to mean not a particular language, but just as the word Kleenex has become the word for a paper tissue of any manufacturer, English will come to be used as the word for language itself, with the superscript “C” within a circle that means a registered trade mark of the English speaking people.
Nine members asked questions.
Respectfully submitted,
Marcia E. Bossart