A Sociolinguistic History of British English Lexicography

Heming Yong, Jing Peng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000429480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A Sociolinguistic History of British English Lexicography traces the evolution of British English dictionaries from their earliest roots to the end of the 20th century by adopting both sociolinguistic and lexicographical perspectives. It attempts to break out of the limits of the dictionary-ontology paradigm and set British English dictionary-making and research against a broader background of socio-cultural observations, thus relating the development of English lexicography to changes in English, accomplishments in English linguistics, social and cultural progress, and advances in science and technology.

It unfolds a vivid, coherent and complete picture of how English dictionary-making develops from its archetype to the prescriptive, the historical, the descriptive and finally to the cognitive model, how it interrelates to the course of the development of a nation's culture and the historical growth of its lexicographical culture, as well as how English lexicography spreads from British English to other major regional varieties through inheritance, innovation and self-perfection.

This volume will be of interest to students and academics of English lexicography, English linguistics and world English lexicography.

1 The Latin roots in English dictionaries and the inception of English lexicographical culture

Owing to its surprisingly rapid growth over different periods of time, particularly subsequent to the Industrial Revolution, Britain turned itself from an isolated island nation to the northwest of European continent into a magnificent empire that dominated territories over 140 times larger than itself for around 300 years. For almost 200 years, it remained the world’s first super power from the 18th century to the early 20th century and exerted such long-term unparalleled impacts upon political, economic, cultural, scientific and military aspects of world life. The magic rise of America in the New World enabled it to share and eventually supersede Britain’s leading role in the international arena after the Second World War.

The continuous strengthening of power and prosperity of America and Britain over the past centuries has endowed English with its international prestige and its unshakable status as an effective medium of international communication and has transformed it into the world’s genuinely globalized language for international trade and commerce and for transmission and communication in science and technology. It has also given English lexicography the cutting edge in both theoretical and practical explorations. English lexicography boasts a history of over 1,200 years, counting approximately from the appearance of The Leiden Glossary, but it has its deep roots in the Latin language and the making of Latin glossaries and dictionaries as well as Old English and the making of Old English glossaries and wordbooks.

1.1 The origin and development of the English language – from Old English to Middle English

English, which has its deepest roots in Anglo-Frisian dialects spoken by the Germanic peoples of Northern Europe from the mid-5th to the 7th centuries, was developed from Old English and spread far and wide with the gradual shaping of the sun-never-setting British empire, initially through territorial expansion and colonization, and in modern times through reinforcement and consolidation of Britain and America’s international importance in political, economic, cultural and military arenas.

As a modern international language, English has reached out to different parts of the world, unprecedented and unparalleled in the scope of its use, in the areas of its penetration, in the profoundness of its impacts and in the number of speakers. Present-day English boasts 375 million speakers who use it as the first language, second to Chinese and Spanish when viewed from the number of native speakers and only next to Chinese when the number of non-native speakers is taken into account. A look-back survey upon the English language around 1,500 years ago gives a completely different picture presenting its evolution from a mixture of British isle vernaculars and northwest Germanic dialects to a modern powerful medium of international communication.

Almost nothing can be found in ancient English literature in relation to the languages used in the British Isles prior to the Anglo-Saxon invasion, and the earliest known reference to the inhabitants of Britain might have come from the records Pytheas, a Greek geographer, kept about his voyage of exploration around the British Isles in the 4th century bc. Recent findings from the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain, known as the AHOB project, have revealed that humans lived in Britain over 800,000 years ago. However, the first occupants the ancient literature now available suggests are probably the Celts, who migrated to the British Isles from the northern part of continental Europe around 500 bc. They spoke the Celtic language, with their initial settlements in Ireland, and they later migrated to Scotland. This is known as the first “intrusion” by the Indo-Europeans.

In 55 bc, the Romans started to invade the British Isles, with their domination lasting for almost five centuries. The collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century caused their withdrawal from the Isles. What fell upon the Celts following the withdrawal of the Roman army was relentless plunder and occupation by the Picts in northern Scotland and the Scots in Ireland. As can be inferred from the Ogham inscriptions that came down from the 4th century, the Picts and the Scots spoke the Celtic language. According to Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in his fight against the Picts and the Scots, Vortigern, probably a king of the Britons and the “superbus tyrannus”, asked his continental relatives Hengist and Horsa for assistance but ended up by taking refuge in North Wales. Around 499, three Germanic tribes – the Jutes, the Angles and the Saxons from northwest Europe – started their conquest in the British Isles and established their kingdom with their own cultural and economic centres. This situation lasted until the early 11th century.

Between the 9th and 11th centuries, Great Britain did not become peaceful as a result of foreign occupation and continued, on the contrary, to suffer from continual plundering assaults by its north European neighbours. Though they came from different parts of north Europe, there were no significant differences between the languages they spoke. After their settlement in the Isles, the Jutes, Angles and Saxons became by and large a united nation generally known as Angles. The dialects and vernaculars they used gradually converged into a new language – the Anglo-Saxon language, i.e. Old English (449–1100). Owing to several centuries’ intensive Roman and north European contacts, Old English borrowed considerably from Latin and the Scandinavian languages. Part of the borrowings have already become the core vocabulary in modern English, for example, words of Latin origin such as street, kitchen, kettle, cup, cheese and wine and words of Scandinavian origin such as anger, cake, call, can, come, die, egg, fellow, folk, get, give, hear, house, leg, man, mine, mother, odd, over, raise, ride, see, skill, sky, summer, take, they, thing, think, ugly, under, wife, will, window and winter.

Old English is by nature a synthetic language rather than an analytic language. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and pronouns were all highly inflected word classes, with the first three classes distinguishing between the strong and weak forms. A large proportion of Old English words originated from the Germanic languages, but only about 15 percent remain as present-day English vocabulary, chiefly formed through compounding, prefixing and suffixing. Word classes were mainly distinguished by grammatical means, and sentence meanings were largely determined by inflections instead of word order in the sentence so that word order was not so rigid as it is in modern English (Fennell, 2005:59).

The Norman Conquest, which took place in the ending period of Old English, exerted unprecedented influences upon the English language and culture in both depth and breadth and marked the transition of Old English into Middle English (1100–1500). Unlike the invasions by the Vikings, what the Norman Conquest brought to the British Isles was, rather than advanced culture, predominating power, tight control and the French gentry. The Norman French dialect they spoke gradually developed into an English-style Norman French. Over a considerably long period of time subsequent to the Norman Conquest, English, Latin and French were in simultaneous circulation. Latin was mainly the Church language, Norman French was the language used by government and English conceded to become the language of the majority of native inhabitants.

From the early 13th century, the British gradually got over the tight Norman French control, and in the 14th century a series of events expedited the heightening of the social status of English and its readoption in political and religious affairs. By the end of the 14th century, poems written in English came out in large numbers, which laid the solid foundation for English to become the literary language. Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), the greatest Middle English poet, composed most of his works in English, though he continued to write in both French and English. Official documents and minute records started to be produced in English, and Henry VI spoke in English when he ascended the throne in 1399. By the early 15th century, English got firmly established as the general language of all walks of life in the British society.

A textual comparison between Old English and Middle English demonstrates significant transformation in the latter, chiefly reflected in the gradual simplification and even disappearance of inflections, the more stabilized word order and the obvious intensification of language contact and borrowing. All this indicates that Middle English was undergoing a transformation from the synthetic type of language into the analytic type.

1.2 The socio-cultural background of Britain prior to the 16th century

A review of English evolution over the past 1,500 years or so shows that it has never existed independently of itself and has maintained its intimate contact with the languages of continental Europe. As indicated in 1.1, throughout its transformation from Old English into Middle English, English was influenced by all major socio-cultural British events, of which foreign invasions constituted the principal part. Those events brought with them not merely deplorable occupations but led Britain on the way to the glory of today. What follows is a rough scuttle through those major historical events that have exerted direct impacts upon the formation and evolution of the English language and the inception and development of English lexicographical culture so as to trace the interactive links of British English lexicography to the English language, culture and society.

The Roman Invasion Latin, a classic language that was originally a dialect spoken in Latium in the Italian Peninsula, developed through the power of the Roman Republic into the dominating language first within the Italian territories and then beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire. With the waning power and influence of the Roman Empire around the 5th century, Latin was losing ground as a dominant medium of oral communication in its neighbouring countries but continued to be used only in the central regions of the European continent and evolved into varieties and branches, hence the modern Roman language family. It must be noted that Latin was then still the general language for academic communication in Europe for well over 1,000 years, though it was not spoken in the neighbouring territories.

Latin influence upon English may be traced to 55 bc, when Julius Caesar led his troops and conquered the British Isles. Subsequently, for several hundred years, the Romans annexed two-thirds of southern Britain into their empire. Latin, as the language of the conquerors, was introduced into the British Isles and became spread in the regions where the Roman forces were stationed. In 50 ad, Claudius (10 bc–ad 54), the Roman emperor, led his troops into the Isles. They slaughtered the Celts, drove them to remote regions and made Great Britain part of their empire until the Roman troops retreated in 410. The Roman domination continued for several hundred years but the Celtic language persisted in its use by the Romans, their descendants and a small number of Celts. In addition, the Roman troops came from various regions and spoke languages that differed from each other in some aspects, which explains why Latin influence upon Old English over that period was limited to only a few Latin borrowings.

The Anglo-Saxon Invasion The withdrawal of the Roman troops from the British Isles left Britain with a great deal of power vacuum, and the internal and external factors of the British Isles, as indicated previously, triggered off the Anglo-Saxon invasion.

Around 449, the Jutes, the Angles and the Saxons landed on the British Isles. They expelled the native inhabitants to remote areas and forced their languages and ways of life upon the conquered people. The Jutes were the first group of invaders among the Germanic tribes, and they settled down in Kent. They were followed by the Saxons, who occupied Wessex and Sussex on the south of the Thames River and the Angles, who occupied the vast land from the north of the Thames River to the Scottish highland. Consequently, there emerged in the history of Britain the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms – Northumbria, Mercia, Essex, East Anglia, Wessex, Sussex and Kent.

It can be inferred from the names of the seven kingdoms that Essex, Wessex and Sussex were Saxon settlements, that East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia were Anglo settlements and that Kent was the settlements of the Jutes. Among them, Kent was originally the major cultural and economic centre, but by the 7th and 8th centuries, Northumbria replaced Kent as the centre because of its academic prosperity. The central role was later shifted to Mercia and eventually to Wessex, which lasted until the early 11th century. The Anglo-Saxon invasion exerted prolonged, profound and extensive influence upon the shaping of British nation and Old English. The Germanic tribal languages merged to form Old English in the end.

The introduction of Christianity into the British Isles The introduction of Christianity into the British Isles is an event of paramount importance in the Anglo-Saxon cultural history. In 596, Pope Gregory I (c. 540–604) sent St Augustine (?–c. 604), together with his missionary delegation, to the British Isles, with the intention of preaching Christianity. Four years later, St Augustine was appointed the first Archbishop of Canterbury, and there ensued Christian churches, Celtic churches, monasteries and numerous followers. By the end of the 7th century, England had become a major force of the Christian family.

However, the transmission of Christianity in England did not go smoothly. Rather, it met with occasional frictions and even conflicts between the St Augustine faction and the Celtic Church faction. With the wider spread of Christianity, the struggle between the two factions for the dominating position became inevitable and fierce. In 664, the church convention was held to determine the Easter and baptizing rituals to be practiced in conformity with the Roman customs, which suggested that the British churches would follow the Roman and European continental practices. The introduction of Christianity into Britain produced immeasurable effects upon the British social life, morals and values and English language and culture.

The intrusion by the Vikings Peace did not completely come with the Germanic occupation of the British Isles, which were instead plundered from time to time by the Vikings. From 787 to the 11th century, the Vikings, who were treated as heretics, started their continual intrusions upon the churches and monasteries in the British Isles, and two of them left...