Alexander Ellis on the chameleon nature of language

Alexander John Ellis (1814–90) was a musicologist, philologist and phonetician whose approach to language was systematic and descriptive. He gave primacy to speech over written forms, writing in chapter 1, vol. 1 of his magnum opus On Early English Pronunciation (1869–89) that “a real, living, growing language”:

has always been a collection of spoken sounds, and it is only in so far as they indicate these sounds that other symbols can be dignified with the name of language.

Henry Hitchings, in The Language Wars, says Ellis carried with him a variety of tuning forks (among other things kept in the 28 pockets of his greatcoat), the better to measure the pitch of musical instruments he encountered; and, perhaps, of voices – Ellis said a vowel sound “is properly a musical tone with a definite quality or timbre”.

A few lines after the quotation above comes an astute passage on the mutability of language:

Spoken language is born of any two or more associated human beings. It grows, matures, assimilates, changes, incorporates, excludes, develops, languishes, decays, dies utterly, with the societies to which it owes its being. It is difficult to seize its chameleon form at any moment. Each speaker as thought inspires him, each listener as the thought reaches him with the sound, creates some new turn of expression, some fresh alliance of thought with sound, some useful modification of thought with custom, some instantaneous innovation which either perishes at the instant of birth, or becomes part of the common stock, a progenitor of future language. The different sensations of each speaker, the different appreciations of each hearer, their intellectual growth, their environment, their aptitude for conveying or receiving impressions, their very passions, originate, change, and create language.

This view shows Ellis’s appreciation of just how immediate, dynamic, and democratically distributed is language change. Like it or lament it (or lose no sleep whatsoever over it), language change is something in which everyone plays a part whenever they speak or write to someone else.

On Early English Pronunciation is available on Google Books and the Internet Archive.

[image from Dr Wallich’s Studio, Kensington, 1868, part of the Tucker Collection, via the London Mathematical Society]

I guess that’s why they call ‘thats’ the ‘whose’

Reading a review of the 1983 fantasy film Hundra (a feminist knockoff of Conan the Barbarian), I came across a pretty unusual word, albeit one that almost looks perfectly normal. Film historian Paul Mavis, at DVD Talk, says the film’s creators:

set about to make a spoofy fantasy adventure thats focus would be on a gorgeous, blonde, man-hating super-warrior who was subservient to no one.

Few readers would pause over that thats: its meaning is clear in context, and it draws little attention to itself, its ungrammaticality thoroughly overshadowed by the line’s sensational imagery. Who’d be distracted by the subtle asymmetry of English’s relative pronoun system when there are man-hating super-warriors striding about?

The Power of Babel: Dialects are all there is

In my recent post on the evolution of LOL, I included a video of John McWhorter, who has been studying this feature of language. One of his books, The Power of Babel, finally reached the top of my to-read mountain (more of a range, really), and I recommend it highly.

The Power of Babel is a beautifully written and soundly researched history of language that conveys expertly how language changes and what pressures (internal and external) induce that change. Its focus, refreshingly, is not on English – or on any particular language – while pidgins and creoles get prominent coverage.

We get a strong sense from Babel of how artificial are the boundaries we tend to place around and within languages; better to think of it all as a big stew, or a self-pollinating net, its elements mixing all the time to varying degrees and at varying rates. The fun chapter titles give a rough indication of the book’s contents:

McWhorter has a talent for drawing clarity out of complication, leading to such nuggets as: “Dialects are all there is: the ‘language’ part is just politics.” (He makes a long, persuasive case for the truth of this proposition.) And I liked this line on grammar and social acceptability:

Any given language chooses from an infinite array of possible grammatical configurations, on which notions of respectability are arbitrarily superimposed, meaningless to people speaking the language or even dialect next door.

One last excerpt: a fine summary paragraph on the “ineluctable imperatives” that impel language transformation (McWhorter prefers this term to evolution in the context of language change):

Once it hits the ground, a human language must and will change. Because change can proceed in various directions, once a language is spoken by separate populations, it must and will diverge into dialects. Juxtaposed with other languages, human languages must and will mix. Torn down to its bare essentials, if needed as a medium of full communication, a human language must and will rise again as a new one.

For more information on the book’s contents and style, see Angela Bartens’s review at Linguist List.

A kempt back-formation

The word unkempt (untidy, dishevelled, slovenly, uncombed) is common enough, but kempt (tidy, neatly kept, combed) is much less so. I’m not sure why: it is itself a neat word, expressive and economical. Here’s an example from Denis Johnson’s great war novel Tree of Smoke:

At this point Jimmy Storm took notice of a patron sitting down to another table, a rather tall young Asian woman, prepossessing, strikingly kempt, sheathed in a glamour of silk . . .

Most sources say kempt is a back-formation from unkempt, which has been around for centuries. In Middle English unkempt took the form unkemd – from un- + kembed (or kempt), past participle of kemb “to comb”. Comb gradually replaced kemb except in isolated dialectal use.

We find kemb in Chaucer: “His longe hair was kembed behind his back.” In Old English it was cemban; the American Heritage Dictionary says this is derived from the Germanic form *kambaz, originating in the Indo-European root gembh- “tooth, nail”.

Jack Winter’s comical essay How I Met My Wife is full of unusual and improbable words created by removing negative prefixes, and sure enough he makes use of kempt: “Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.” Various poems exploit the same terrain.

But kempt, as we’ve seen, can also be used with a straight face; contemporary examples may be browsed at Wordnik, many of them in the compound adjective well-kempt:

On the whole, she was not much cleaner or any better kempt than the ragamuffin boy. (Margaret Peterson Haddix, Uprising)

With his thick gray hair, salt-and-pepper beard, and aviator glasses, he looked like a well-kempt Jerry Garcia. (Paul Elie, ‘The Velvet Reformation’)

[Image shows a Scythian comb, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I think its handle is a metaphor for knotty hair.]

Peppercorn rent

I saw a curious phrase used in John Clay’s fine biography R. D. Laing: A Divided Self (Hodder & Stoughton, 1996). Laing and colleagues were looking for new premises for their experimental psychotherapy, and Kingsley Hall in London’s East End was a possibility. (It would become “a hallowed shrine of the counter-culture movement”.) Clay writes:

Sid Briskin visited and reported back favourably. Then he and Laing, both dressed soberly, went to visit the trustee of the building, Sidney Russell, Laing mentioning his working-class Glasgow background to provide credibility. Russell was convinced and offered them a five-year lease at a peppercorn rent.

Peppercorn refers to the dried berry of the pepper plant, and the word later became generalised, or semantically broadened, to also mean “a small or insignificant thing” (AHD4), “something trifling” (Collins), “anything very small or insignificant” (Random House), etc.

Peppercorn rent is a phrase in its own right, dating back several centuries, meaning a very low, nominal or token rent given as “a simple acknowledgement that the tenement virtually belongs to the person to whom the peppercorn is given”, as Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable has it. But this negligible financial exchange was once quite literally pepper-based.

Oxford Dictionaries labels the phrase British and say it originates in a once-common practice of “stipulating the payment of a peppercorn as a nominal rent”. Merriam-Webster has similar information: (1) “a rent formerly often stipulated in deeds and consisting in supplying a certain amount (as a pound) of black peppercorns at stated intervals”; (2) “a merely nominal rent in kind operating to keep alive a title.”

There’s a little more history on peppercorn rent (and rose rent!) in Curious English Words and Phrases, and some legal notes at Wikipedia. Before reading the book on Laing, I don’t think I’d ever noticed it before. Are you familiar with the phrase, or have you ever paid a peppercorn rent?

[image source]

Folktale diffusion and ethnolinguistic variation

I’ve been stop-starting my way happily through Celtic Fairy Tales and More Celtic Fairy Tales, two late-19thC collections by the great Australian folklorist Joseph Jacobs, combined in a plump Senate paperback and handsomely illustrated by John D. Batten:

Link love: language (50)

I suddenly notice I’ve done 50 of these. To mark the occasion, here’s a bumper set of 25 luscious language-related links. Happy browsing.

Firn, crud, sastruga: a flurry of words for snow.

Keep on the grass: a library lawn.

Punning: more than a mere linguistic fillip.

Fisher Price synaesthesia.

Why borking caught on as an eponym.

A report on the American Dialect Society’s words of the year.

(And on that subject, see Keanu Reeves.)

Words of the year in other languages.

The problems with Orwell’s Politics and the English Language.

The language of lullabies.

In praise of books.

Suppletion, or, How come the past of go is went?

What’s a Z really worth? Re-evaluating Scrabble scores.

Shooting dead people in ambiguous headlines.

Adjective, participle, or gerund?

Problems with parallelism.

Poo or poop?

Silenc: visualising text without its silent letters.

Language diversity and death in New York.

Copy editors killed in style war violence.

The rebirth of Australia’s indigenous Kaurna language.

Typographic myth-busting: What’s a ligature, anyway?

On linguistic chauvinism and integration.

Teach yourself morphology.

The evolution of British Sign Language (a short, personal documentary).

[previous language linkfests]