The Oxford Linguistic History of English series lives on

Back in 2006, Oxford University Press published Don Ringe’s From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, which was billed as the first volume in a new OUP series called A Linguistic History of English. That particular book wasn’t so much a history of the English language that we know as a reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. Don Ringe is a major figure in Indo-European studies (as well as historical linguistics in general), and it was great to get a state-of-the-art reconstruction from his perspective.

The cover of the book The Development of Old English by Ringe and Taylor After enjoying that first volume, I would impatiently check the new arrivals shelf at the university library so I could read the second volume straightaway. Years passed, however, and nothing ever appeared. I had wondered if the series had been canceled, but now Oxford University Press finally unveiled the second volume: The Development of Old English, this time by Don Ringe and Ann Taylor.

This is over 600 pages of historical linguistics goodness. Ringe & Taylor reconstruct Proto-Northwest Germanic first, dedicating the first nearly two hundred pages to this intermediate language, and only then do they introduce the innovations of Anglo-Saxon. One area that gets unusually detailed coverage is Old English syntax, which is described with examples from the York–Toronto–Helsinki Corpus of Old English Prose. The authors base themselves loosely on generative linguistics, but they sought to avoid being bogged down in theory.

This is a major publication. It may not quite replace Roger Lass’s Old English: A Historical Linguistic Companion (Cambridge University Press, 1994) as a clarification of the odd paradigms and sound changes for people going back to Old English to study its literature, but it certainly represents a great reference for readers following Proto-Indo-European forward.

The languages of Czernowitz and old Bucovina

From my acquaintance with the life and work of Paul Celan – not to mention passing through on several occasions and seeing traces of its imperial past – I was aware that the former Austro-Hungarian town of Czernowitz was once home to a remarkable ethnic diversity, later erased as the surrounding province of Bucovina was ceded to Romania – whereupon it gained the name Cernăuți – and then the USSR and Ukraine for which it is now known as Chernivtsi. I was happy to discover Gregor von Rezzori’s memoir Blumen im Schnee (in English translation as The Snows of Yesteryear) which sheds much light on the changing demographics of the town. In reminiscing on his childhood nanny Cassandra, hired out of some remote village in the Carpathians, Rezzori makes the following comment on the languages that he heard spoken in his childhood:

She spoke both Romanian and Ruthenian, both equally badly—which is not at all unusual in the Bukovina—intermixing the two languages and larding both with bits from a dozen other idioms. The result was that absurd lingua franca, understood only by myself and scantily by those who, like her, had to express themselves in a similarly motley verbal hodgepodge. Even though it may be questioned whether I was actually fed at Cassandra’s breast, there can be no doubt that linguistically I was nourished by her speech. The main component was a German, never learned correctly or completely, the gaps in which were filled with words and phrases from all the other tongues spoken in the Bukovina—so that each second or third word was either Ruthenian, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Armenian or Yiddish, not to forget Hungarian and Turkish. From my birth, I heard mainly this idiom, and it was as natural to me as the air that I breathed.

How much things have changed in a century. Yiddish disappeared from Czernowitz with the genocide of its Jewish population in World War II. As Rezzori observes, German was already on the wane right after Trianon. From my experiences walking the streets of the city, it’s pretty much down to just Ukrainian, Russian and Romanian now. And while the intermixing of languages was simply accepted as a fact of life back then, today in at least southern (Romanian) Bucovina, the observation that a word in Romanian is of foreign origin is often taken as an insult.

Incomprehensible English

In Graham Greene’s 1940 novel The Power and the Glory the protagonist, a Mexican priest with some knowledge of English, comes across the following snippet of a poem and is utterly baffled by it:

I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.

While reading this on my Kindle (which I had thought would be most useful for foreign literature), I had to look up several of these words with the built-in dictionary: a coot is a medium-sized water bird; hern (which wasn’t even in the Kindle’s ample dictionary and had to be sought online) is an archaic variant of heron; bicker is used not in the sense of ‘to quarrel’ but rather in a previously unfamiliar sense of ‘(of water) flow or fall with a gentle repetitive noise; patter’. Only after consulting the dictionary could I understand that we are dealing with a river or stream.

These four lines turn out to come from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Brook” (find the poem here in the same anthology that Greene has the priest leaf through). The following stanza even throws in a thorp, another word that very few people know today.

I’m sure that Greene included this snippet not just because it would baffle foreigners, but also because it would challenge English speakers of his day as well. Considering that Greene was writing only a mere 85 years after the poet, it just goes to show how archaizing Tennyson’s style was.

Why Danish is impossible to understand (now with science)

I’ve mentioned here before the fearsome reputation that Danish has for other Scandinavians, namely by linking to the classic Uti vår Hage sketch purporting that even the Danes no longer understand each other.

I didn’t know that this lack of comprehension has been studied scientifically until I came across Take Danish – for instance ed. Henrik Galberg Jacobsen et al. (University Press of Southern Denmark, 2003), a collection of papers in honour of Hans Basbøll on his 60th birthday. Nina Grønnum contributes a paper titled “Why are the Danes so hard to understand?” that takes a theoretically rigorous look at the language, with lots of tables and charts. A comparison of the intonation of a given sentence in Danish and Swedish

She arrives at the following conclusion:

An abundance of vowels, weak syllable codas, unstressed syllables without any vowel sound, and fairly inexpressive prosody makes Danish a harder nut to crack perceptually than most languages which it otherwise is reasonable to compare it to.

Any trained linguist who has studied Norwegian or Swedish and finds that Danish is impossible to understand would profit greatly from this paper. Kamelåså!

The decline of German (and French) as languages of culture

In his book Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century, the late Eric Hobsbawm writes on the decline of Mitteleuropa as a sociocultural phenomenon. This remark on the disappearance of German as a language of pan-European culture struck me, being in line with some anecdotal musings that I have had for some time:

Equally, and perhaps even more significant, is the end of German linguistic hegemony. German is no longer the lingua franca of the educated from the Baltic to Albania. It is not merely that a young Czech meeting a young Hungarian or a Slovene will most probably use English to communicate with him or her, but that none of them can any longer expect the other to know German. It is that nobody who is not a native German speaker is now likely to use Goethe and Lessing, Hölderlin and Heine as the foundation of educated culture, let alone as the way from backwardness into modernity.

European literary culture has been massively affected by the change of the European lingua franca to English and increasingly nothing but English. I have always thought it remarkable how many European intellectuals born in the 1920s and 1930s were fond of Hölderlin, participating in his 20th-century resurgence even if they were from outside German-speaking countries proper. Hungarians and Italians upheld him as a poet to know. Now, a few decades on, Hölderlin may well be of interest only to those working in Germany, Austria or Switzerland.

It is not just German. I wonder if Samuel Beckett’s novels (namely the trilogy) have fallen so drastically into obscurity compared to his plays because the former were usually read on the continent in their original French, and now people are less likely to know French or at least read it for pleasure.

Phantom linguistics publications




Substrate speculations





Chad nede blesse me well before ich go them to
Perchaunce some felon spirit may haunt our house indeed,

Lamed and hunger storued, prycked vp all in Jagges






Amers, ‘Invocation’, 6






Prescriptivist ranting in the media, example #447



Ian Walton, Bedford


Then you get bizarre demands like this:

Daniela, Urbana, IL


Philip Graves, Stockholm, Sweden
