Albion's Seedlings

Confessio Amantis

Canterbury Tales

Thanks Lex. I was going to put links but figured they were superfluous. Mea culpa.

Hwaet? or perhaps I should say Eala!

The first great literary works in English were written hundreds of years earlier. Beowulf, the Dream of the Rood, the Battle of Maldon, the Wanderer, etc. Old English is English.

Old English is English? And Ancient Greek is modern Greek? And Ancient Russian is Russian? Not really. Very very different. Old English or Anglo-Saxon, as it used to be called cannot be read without a dictionary. Chaucer requires the odd glossary. And what of all the French additions?

Old English is English?

I think the langueage he is talking about is Old Anglo Saxon, or in other words a version of Old High German.

Btw, the first recorded instance of the German language being called 'Deutsch', or rather 'thiutisk', was written 786 in an account from Brittanic Mercia. Thiutisk menat 'common language', that is any language that wasn't Latin, or a Romanic or Slavic language.

Actually, the language spoken by the people in 1344 was Middle English, which is markedly and profoundly different from Old English or Anglo-Saxon (Old German). The language spoken in court and by the aristocracy was French. The language spoken in church was Latin.

The story I learned in graduate school while studying medieval romance was that sometime in the 1340s, Edward II, King of England and Duke of Normandy, while vacationing in France came across a lovely young lady named Isabella. He fell madly and passionately in love, so he grabbed her, took her to England, married her, and made her his Queen.

In France, some other Duke, who had been promised Isabella in an arranged marriage, went to the King of France and complained, saying something like, "Wah! Edward stole my girlfriend!"

So the King of France sent Edward a letter summoning him to court to explain himself. To which Edward replied, "I'm the King of England. I don't come to your court." The King of France responded, "You may be the King of England, but you're also the Duke of Normandy. And as long as you are the Duke of Normandy, you will come when your King calls." To which Edward replied, "Well, then I'm not the Duke of Normandy anymore, and by the way I declare war on France."

And he did, invading and conquering 3/4 of the territory and damn near claiming the throne. Edward had all the French speaking courtiers thrown out of England, had all the laws translated into English and declared English to be the official national language of the country. In the Year of Our Lord 1350.

30-odd years later Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written, doubtless to pay tribute to Edward after his death. And in 1400 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were published.

"Deutsch," "Dutch," and "Teutonic," come from the Indo-European *teuta- meaning "the people." It is actually only found in the western branches of PIE (Italic, Celtic, and Germanic), but likely has some close antecedent in PIE, and thus "qualifies," as it were, as an Indo-European construction. Ralf Goergens is not incorrect in including "thiutisk," which is probably the Germanic root (Watkins 2000).

You will note that tribes everywhere refer to themselves as "The People," "The Folk," or "The Real Beings."

GawainsGhost gives a nice summary, to which I would add the following:
1. The Norman conquerors were already Germanic "North-men" who spoke a French dialect which incorporated more Germanic sounds (hard 'c,' 'w' instead of 'gu').

2. The Norman aristocrats had settled in pretty well over two centuries and liked their own dialect, thank you very much. They often spoke English (for use with servants and tradesmen) and wrote some Latin as well.

3. Many of the English picked up Norman French, and the terms of government and authority were imports in any case. This varied greatly by region.

4. When people learn a second language, they often strip it down. English lost most of its inflectional endings, and Norman French became even more different from Parisian French. The anecdote related by GG sums up what was happening with the language as well. Paris considered itself "real France," and its language "real French." The Normans, uh, disagreed.

5. English gradually went underground as a literary language by 1150 (The last English entry in the Peterborough Chronicles is 1154 - I think.) But the farther you were from London and Kent, the more it remained the dominant language.

6. By the early 14th C, the Norman aristocrats had built a fair number of hard 'c' castles, not chateaux, and were in good position to resist any further French intrusion by the dam' Parisians. The Normans held much of the power, but were torn between their Parisian and Anglo-Saxon sympathies.

It is said of China that they defeat their few invaders by absorbing and transforming them. In the British Isles, this absorption is at least partly true. The invading Normans, tribal cousins of the Anglo-Saxons, initially imposed French language and ideas. Over time, it became unclear who had conquered whom. For us, as their cultural (and sometimes biological) descendants, it worked out brilliantly: Italic learning and institutions superimposed on Anglo-Saxon egalitarianism.

I am really grateful, BTW, to have a chance to contribute something more than snippets to a discussion here.

Old English is indeed very different from modern English. Ancient Greek is indeed very different from modern Greek. I know this, having studied both Old English and Ancient Greek. (And no, Old English is not the same as Old High German.) I merely made the modest, and to me obvious point, that English literature has a longer and more glorious history than was claimed by Helen.

"What of all the French additions?" Yes, the character of the language changed radically. Who would deny it? Interestingly, it had then recently been changed greatly by a process (as many claim) of creolisation with the Old Norse ('Danish tongue') of the Danelaw, which had effects on both vocabulary and grammar.

Whether you agree that "Old English is English" is a matter of taste, really - are you a lumper or a splitter? I prefer to see English history and literature as more of a unity than some others, and hold the division at 1066 as less important, a mere caesura, compared to the coming of the English to Britain in the 5th century.

Unfortunately, the question of whether modern readers can read a past version of their language with or without a dictionary has become applicable to more recent stages. Most people would not be able read early 19th century English (correctly, understanding words in their proper sense - e.g., a 'rout' is a dance) without a glossary; and Chaucer would be nearly as closed a book as Aelfric.

I appreciate the Assistant Village Idiot's erudite contribution to the topic under discussion. That notwithstanding, I do not want to get into an etymological history of the English language.

The facts remain: at the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), the "English" people spoke Anglo-Saxon or Old German. By 1350 (when English was declared the official language), the "English" people spoke an entirely different language.

Something happened over the 300-odd years after William the Conqueror. The language changed. Yes, it did drop inflections and instead substituted word order (i.e., S-V-O) to denote meaning. It also borrowed heavily from the vocabulary of French, Latin, and Scandinavian, as well as other languages.

Since word meaning is determined by word order, any word from any language, put in the proper place in a sentence, becomes an "English" word. Thus, English ceased being a normal language and became instead a meta-language, a language of languages. And it has been absorbing words from other languages ever since.

For this reason, today English has well over 1.2 million vocabulary words, from just about every other language. The second largest language, in terms of vocabulary, is German with just 250,000 words. (I don't even know how many words Spanish has, but I suspect it isn't anywhere near that many.)

Shakespeare (Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford) added over 10,000 words by himself, 3,000 of his own invention. Through his contribution, English became not just a language of using words, but a meta-language of making words.

Today, it is the Language of Money. (The real money is making money, just as the real language is making words.) It is also the international language of business, commerce, communication, and law.

We can all thank Edward II for that.

gawainsghost:

The numbers you refer to are very intersting. Do you have a cite for those figures? I would like to look at the sources for them.

An enjoyable discussion! Thanks to everybody for their contribution. It seems that we have reached a dead end, however -- the answer to "can we call the language spoken by the pre-Conquest English (or "Anglo-Saxons") English? The answer seems to depend on how the term "the same language" is defined. (This is almost as good as America's former president-philosopher's famous explanation "that depends on what the definition of 'is' is".)

With all respect to Gawain's Ghost, when he says The facts remain: at the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), the "English" people spoke Anglo-Saxon or Old German. By 1350 (when English was declared the official language), the "English" people spoke an entirely different language. that's not literally true. Substantial portions of the everyday vocabulary of Middle English are the same as, or very direct evolutionary products of, their preceeding Old English words. (I also tend to call the pre-1066 English "English", for the simple reason that that's what they called themselves from quite early on. I prefer to call their language "Old English" because if they were in fact English people, it makes sense to call their language English too. The "Old" modifier adequately separates it from later versions of the language.)

He is right about the grammar -- one could (as some linguists do) regard Middle English as the product of a double pidginization-creolization process, first with Norse and then with Norman French. Pidgins tend to strip out case endings and substitute word order and auxiliaries, as English did. Creolization fixes the pidgin as a new, self-replicating language.

In the end it comes down to (as has been noted) whether you are a lumper or a splitter, and whether you prefer to emphasize continuity or change. Since I think that continuity in the history of the English-speaking people has been under-emphasized for a long time now, I prefer to correct in the direction of re-emphasizing continuity. Recent reseach, such as that presented in James Campbell's The Anglo-Saxon State (2000) continues to validate the continuity position. So, in my book, Old English it is, and the pre-Conquest English are English.

Now as to the Oxfordian position on Shakespeare, that's a whole 'nother topic. Helen, would you happen to have an opinion on that?

Who the heck is Oxfordian?

An Oxfordian is an adherent of the theory that Shakespeare's plays were in fact written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, and that the acttor Shakespeare was just a front.

Once the Plantagenet Dynasties in both England and France lost their rather tenuous hold of England, the usage of Norman French in the English upper class began to disappear.

Meanwhile, the adaptation of French and Norman words into the English language grew.

Overall though, the proper usage of Norman French in England was a cultural fluke.

Umm, when did the Plantagenet lose their tenuous hold of England. Took a good few centuries - the Lancastrians and the Yorkists were still Plantagenets. Or do you mean the country became a completely ungovernable entity? There was a nasty civil war going on for most of the (15. but that was run by the Plantagenets mostly.

It took less time to lose their hold of France but even that was prolonged and painful. In short, I don't know what you mean by tenuous.

Jim,
Oxfordian as opposed to Baconian. Any evidence that the Earl of Oxford could actually write? Somewhere there is an essay by Chesterton in which evidence is found not only for Bacon writing Shakespeare but, finally, for Shakespeare writing those wordy essays of Bacon's. Me, I hold with William Brown of the "Just William" tales: "'course it's Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet. Stands to reason. It says Shakespeare on the front cover." William Brown ought to be a great hero of the Anglosphere.

My father in law is an Oxfordian. That particular dogmatism is perfect for a certain type of person, who likes to have an argument based on incomplete facts that can never be added to, which is therefore literally interminable, since we are all looking at the exact same set of facts and reaching different conclusions. It is more than a little cult-like.

Your William Brown sounds like the archetypical plain, blunt Englishman. We need a few million of those right now.

OK, here is the Wiki about the Just William Stories for we poor Americans who until now have been denied the acquaintance of this young gentleman.

William Brown is definitely one of the truly great characters in English children's literature and, of course, that means that adults read the books as well. There is an absolutely smashing story about elections when one of the Outlaws, Henry, who always knows everything because his aunt tells him things explains the difference between the parties. Tories want to make everyone's life better by keeping things just the same; Liberals (hah, those were the days) want to make things better by changing them a bit; Socialists want to take everyone's money away and Communists want to kill everyone. A better summary I have yet to hear. Naturally, William becomes the Communist candidate.

Well, I don't see how anyone can look at the language of Beowulf and the language of Chaucer, and come to the conclusion that they are the same language. "Old" English uses letters, words and irregular verb forms that had been abandoned by the time of "Middle" English. The fact that both were spoken in "England" (or is it Angle-land?) is neither here nor there.

I also don't see how anyone who has examined the evidence can come to the conclusion that Edward de Vere did not write the poems and plays of Shake-speare. But I refer all those who are interested, and have an open mind, to The Mysterious William Shakespeare by Charlton Ogburn Jr., which is the definitive text. The research is meticulous, and the argument irrefutable. But perhaps even more convincing is The Monument by Hank Whittemore, which has been just recently published. It provides conclusive evidence that the Sonnets were written during the time of Southampton's imprisonment in the Tower of London and are constructed as a monument to him. Whittemore even assigns many of the sonnets to specific dates.

As to the idea that "Oxfordianism" is a dogmatism based on "incomplete facts," that is one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever read, obviously written by someone who has no familiarity with the complete facts. Excuse me, but what part of the fact that the Second Quarto of Hamlet (which is autobiographical) was published in 1604, the year of De Vere's death, and bearing the Blue Boar, the symbol of the House of De Vere, on the cover is incomplete?

Simply saying "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare" is like saying Mark Twain wrote Mark Twain. Except of course that Mark Twain didn't write Mark Twain; Samuel Clemmens did. Mark Twain did not exist, except as a pseodonym. The same is true for Shake-speare.

The buffon the Stratfordians claim wrote the greatest works of English literature was actually named Guillermo Shagsper (he was a distant cousin of De Vere on his mother's side, who for some inexplicable reason received a stipend from Queen Elizabeth). He was a burgher, or a dealer in bagged commodities, not an actor. (Although he did own a small percentage of the Globe and may have appeared on stage in minor, non-speaking roles.) He never attended any school anywhere and could not read or even write. In fact, the first biographer of Shakespeare interviewed Shagsper's oldest surviving daughter, who told him, "My father didn't write poetry."

On the subject of Williams, does anyone know which languages William Wallace spoke (or Robert Bruce)?

Well, I don't see how anyone can look at the language of Beowulf and the language of Chaucer, and come to the conclusion that they are the same language. "Old" English uses letters, words and irregular verb forms that had been abandoned by the time of "Middle" English. The fact that both were spoken in "England" (or is it Angle-land?) is neither here nor there.

Well, as I said, it all depends on what definition of "language" you are working with. Five hundred years generally does introduce changes into a living language; certainly the Conquest introduced radical changes. Other languages, however, experienced complete shifts in their writing systems; Vietnamese from Chinese characters to Latin letters; Turkish from the Arabic to Latin alphabet. Nobody contends that they are not the same language. If you compare an Anglo-Saxon text to a Middle English version of the same text (say, the Lord's Prayer) and then compare both of them to an unquestionably different language, say latin, the continuity is clear. For the case for the continuity of pre- and post-Conquest England and the English people, see in particular James Campbell's The Anglo-Saxon State

As for the Shakespeare-Oxford-Bacon controversey, I haven't made a detailed study of the issue and don't have a definitive opinion on it. Thank you for giving those references; that's generally the way we do things on this blog, and we all benefit thereby.

However, when you say I also don't see how anyone who has examined the evidence can come to the conclusion that Edward de Vere did not write the poems and plays of Shake-speare: Well, maybe not, but there are long shelves full of books by smart people who managed to not come to the same conclusion. I'd have to read a few pro and con before trying to come to a conclusion.

And I do think Helen was being humorous.

Of course there are a good many "educated" (read credentialed) people who refuse to believe that De Vere wrote Shake-speare--they have an industry to protect. Think of the enormity of it. All the books written over the last two hundred years, biographies, critical interpretations, PhD disertations, educational materials (textbooks, posters, handouts), productions of plays and movies, not to mention the tourism at Stratford Upon Avon.

How would you feel if you spent several years of rigorous study and tens of thousands of dollars on a degree in Shakespeare, only at the end of it all to find out that everything you learned was wrong? Could you admit it? No. You're too psychologically and economically invested in the fraud.

Be that as it may, here are some of the "smart people" who could not believe that the buffoon on the frontispiece of the First Folio wrote the poems and plays: Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Derek Jacoby, just to name a few.

Oh, I forgot Ben Johnson, who in the dedicatory poem opposite the frontispiece clearly stated the fraud in the first two lines--"This figure you see here put / It was for gentle Shakespeare cut." Johnson was far too careful a poet to not know what he was saying. He deliberately chose the word "figure", which in Elizabethan English meant caricature. And he deliberately used an off-rhyme or eye-rhyme in "put" and "cut" to signify that though the caricature may look like Shakespeare, it doesn't sound like him.

Also, if you examine the caricature there is a mysterious line along the cheek that does not conform to any facial feature. And the eyes are wrong. This gives the appearance of a theatrical mask to the face, signifying that removing it reveals the true face of the poet/playwright. Ogburn provides a detailed analysis of this often unnoticed charactistic of the frontispiece.

But the real proof is in the Sonnets. Whittemore conclusively reveals the hidden structure of the 152 poems--26 sonnets addressed to a young man imploring him to marry, 100 sonnets corresponding to the 100 days Southampton spent in the Tower, 26 sonnets adressed to the Dark Lady, forming a pyramid that make up the monument. This structure presents strong, I (and Whittmore) would say irrefutable, evidence that Southampton was in fact the son of De Vere and Elizabeth, and thus the rightful heir to the throne. Why else would James have Southampton imprisoned during his coronation, if not because of a legitimate claim to the throne?

Most interesting in this regard is Ogburn's analysis of Venus and Adonis, the first poem published by "William Shake-speare." In Ovid's original poem, it is Adonis who seduces Venus. But in Shake-speare's translation, it is Venus who seduces Adonis, moreover and most significantly, it is revealed that she is his mother. Ogburn argues that this suggests Elizabeth seduced the young De Vere, who was a ward of the state and thus she his Queen Mother. The publication of the poem scandalized Elizabeth in the court, an affront she could not and would not forgive, which is perhaps why she commanded that he never be associated with the name Shakepeare and that their son would not ascend to the throne.

All of this adds serious complexity to the plays and poems themselves. Peter Soccio, in Shakespeare's English Kings, analyzes the history plays in the context of political propaganda (which they were), designed to strengthen the Tudor dynasty and support the Anglican Church. Historically, all of the kings, with the notable exception of Henry VIII, were Catholic, but in the plays the spout Anglican propaganda.

In conclusion, you cannot understand Shakespeare if you do not know who he was. The poet is the poem, just as the singer is the song. If you mistake the identity of the poet, you miss all the allusions, and there are many, to the political intrigue involved at the court. Eva Turner Clark, in Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare's Plays, explicates these allusions most effectively.

If you get Shakespeare wrong, you get the entire Renaissance wrong.

I see no p[oint in arguing about de Vere, Gawain. I have not read the Oxfordian literature and nothing you have said makes me feel that I want to. The repeated use of the word buffoon and selected quotes are not particularly attractive. But beyond that, I don't know.

However, if you don't understand Shakespeare, you don't understand Shakespeare, by which one means a great deal more than hidden applications in plays or poems. Incidentally, all of them seem to have been explained by other people to mean that it was Bacon who wrote a great deal of the stuff. It is the body of work that matters. But the Renaissance is still there and you can understand it without knowing anything about de Vere. That's just silly. It didn't even start in England.

No, the Renaissance did not start in England, but it was brought to England by De Vere after his tour of Europe. Prior to his return, England was a backward, medieval culture. De Vere brought the fashion, music, art and theater he found in Italy and France to the Elizabethan court. His gift of perfumed gloves to Elizabeth was much beloved.

It should be noted that Shagsper never left London and had absolutely no understanding of the Italian Renaissance, not to mention the geography of Italy or the Greek islands.

De Vere not only transformed the stage but the entire culture of England, as well as enriching the English language. In fact, it was under the direction of Elizabeth, who realized the usefulness of the theater in educating the populace and promoting nationalism, that he did so. Talk about using the English language as a political weapon.

By the way, De Vere was born Lord High Chamberlain and as such was solely responsible for writing, producing and directing the plays performed at court and at the Globe.

Guillermo Shagsper was an illiterate, uneducated burgher, but he was De Vere's distant cousin. He was used as a foil because it was forbidden for a nobleman to publish prior to ten years after his death. And he was paid a yearly stipend of 1000 pounds by Elizabeth for being Shakespeare's foil.

The more one looks at the real evidence, the more obvious it becomes.

"Guillermo Shagsper"? I know there are problems with Shakespeare's spelling -it is a running joke in that brilliant novel "No Bed for Bacon" - but this is pathetic. Where did you get that?

Furthermore, perfumed gloves do not Renaissance make. A good many ideas and influences managed to make their way across the Channel before de Vere's travels. Other people travelled, too, back and forth.

You do your case no justice by the rather hysterical tone you seem to adopt.

Well, this is what I'm talking about. Guillermo Shagsper is the legal or Christian name of the clown pictured in the frontispiece to the First Folio, the illiterate burgher that everyone who hasn't done any research or doesn't know any of the facts believes is "William Shake-speare," the author of some of the greatest works of literature in history.

And while we're on the subject of names, can anyone explain why the poet/playwright would hyphenate "Shake-speare"? Since there are no birth records of anyone ever being born with that name, one would assume the author chose the spelling deliberately to signify a psuedonym. That the name "Shake-speare" bears some resemblance to "Shagsper" more than strongly suggests why this illiterate was chosen to be the foil for the poet, and paid rather handsomely by Elizabeth for it, besides the fact that he was De Vere's distant cousin on his mother's side.

But for anyone who is interested, the etymology of the pseudonym, which the poet refers to as "his invention" in the Sonnets, is illuminating. The surname is a tribute to Athena, Goddess of Wisdom and patron goddess of theater and the arts, who was born fully formed in complete battle armor. She sprang from the head of Zeus, brandishing a spear. Hence, the hyphenated name "Shake-speare." (It should be noted that in contemporary newspapers, Edward de Vere was praised as a poet and playwright--"the best for comedy"--and described as one who "shakes a spear." Not that someone who has never done any research at all would ever know that.) The first name is doubtless a reference to William the Conqueror, first King of England.

Thus, the pseudonym declares, with the first publication, the name of the poet who would not only conquer but completely transform the stage, literature and the English language as a whole, as William had conquered and transformed England before him.

That being said, it is sad, pathetic really, to read the derisive comments of small-minded people who have absolutely no knowledge and have done no research whatsoever pretend to speak with authority on a subject. But I suppose that--complete ignorance--is what passes for credibility among the intellectualoids.

Ahem:

April 26, 1564
William Shakespeare's baptism
The baptism of 'Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere' is recorded in the register of the Holy Trinity Parish Church, in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Shakespeare in its various forms is a very common name in that part of England. Doesn't necessarily mean he wrote the plays. It was probably Queen Elizabeth but do stop going on about the name.

hey every body..it is nice to see intresting disucession about languages old english and new english..but the question is do all the varities of english exist now aday like indian english..amricen english..aust english and so consider to be as old as the old english.. or are they just only spoken english at the same time who has the right to say that english is owned by british or even by american..one very confusing issue we have today is what called global englishes when english is now with form of all not singular...indian say we have our indian english like kurchu argued..prof pennycook for example and his arguemnts about english and its varities robert phillipson in his book linguistics impreailism..who owns the language who has the right to own it..when english is spoken by 74 countries and spoken by people who english consider to be their second language....one thing i would like to say here..is english the killer of indigous languages..do the political factors assioccited to the processes of language death? i leave these questions for u to answers

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