The History of the
English Language

English 513, Spring 2014

Jack Lynch

Course Description

Hours: Monday, 1:00–2:30, Wednesday, 2:30–4:00, and by appointment (appointments are best).

Home: (609) 882-4642 (before 10:00 p.m.!).

E-mail: Jack.Lynch@rutgers.edu (the best way to reach me).

Description

Not an in-depth investigation of English philology, but a series of short readings from Old English through World English, with attention to the changing forms of the language. Each class will include a few textbook chapters on the history of the language, along with brief selections from literary works, many from the MA Exam reading list. We'll do very close readings of the texts against the linguistic background. Topics will include the difference between manuscript and print culture, theories of language, the search for “standard English,” lexicography, African American Vernacular English, profanity, hate speech, the place of English in colonial societies, and the rise of global English.

Course Requirements

• Written Assignments: There will be two argumentative and analytical papers, the first of around ten pages (2,500 words), the second either a new paper of around ten pages, or an expansion of your first paper to fifteen to twenty pages (3,500 to 5,000 words).
• Presentations: Each student will be responsible for leading the discussion on two of the works of literature on the syllabus. This isn't a formal presentation; instead, you'll be guiding the class through a discussion of the readings. Remember to focus on the linguistic features. Dry catalogues of facts (authors' birth and death dates, places of residence, schools attended, and so on) are unlikely to be of much interest. It's not only acceptable but desirable to draw attention to passages that you have trouble with.
• Readings: There is one required textbook, A Companion to the History of the English Language, ed. Haruko Momma and Michael Matto (cited below as M&M). There are also supplemental readings, which are available through Blackboard or on the Web. We are without a rare book collection in Newark, but I'd like the readings to be as close to unmediated as possible. All readings from printed works through the 1850s will therefore be from EEBO and ECCO, in facsimiles of their original published form. Feel free to consult modern editions in the more familiar typography and orthography when you like, but be sure to spend some time wrestling with the page images.

Schedule of Class Meetings

22 January

Introduction: Class business, &c., along with an introduction to some of the essential terms in linguistics, the basics of English morphology and syntax, and the place of English in the family tree of the Indo-European languages.

29 January

Introduction to Old English: It's impossible to get more than a nodding acquaintance with Old English in a class like this; it takes at least a semester to get even basic competence. Still, it's useful to know the fundamentals, and to see how the modern form of the language emerged from the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European family tree.

• M&M:
  • Chapter 6, “History of English Syntax”;
  • Chapter 12, “English as an Indo-European Language”;
  • Chapter 13, “English as a Germanic Language”;
  • Chapter 14, “Early Old English”;
  • Chapter 15, “Late Old English”;
  • Chapter 42, “The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Tradition.”
• Blackboard:
  • Selection from Beowulf (facsimile), from Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, fol. 132. Try to fight through it patiently, comparing it to the transcription (below), but don't expect to get a whole lot.
• Web:
  • Work through this thorough word-by-word glossing of Cædmon's Hymn;
  • Selection from Ælfric's Colloquy;
  • Selection from Beowulf (transcription). You can get help with the grammar here.

5 February

Introduction to Middle English: As we move into Middle English, after about AD 1100, we'll see important developments in morphology and a huge influx of words from Latin and French. Today's class involves close reading of the most important Middle English author and the best representative of London English.

• M&M:
  • Chapter 17, “Early Middle English”;
  • Chapter 18, “Late Middle English”;
  • Chapter 43, “‘In Swich Englissh as He Kan’: Chaucer's Literary Language.”
• Blackboard:
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, Ellesmere MS fol. 34^r;
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, Cambridge University Library MS Dd.4.24 fol. 40^r;
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, Oxford Corpus Christi College MS 198 fol. 45^r.
• Web:
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, The Miller's Tale, from The Canterbury Tales (c. 1390).

Exercise: Before reading the complete text on the Web, attempt to transcribe the opening lines of The Miller's Tale from the MSS on Blackboard. Then look at The Multitext Edition and collate the variants in the first ten lines of The Miller's Tale in all the MSS.

12 February

Middle English Dialects: Not all the action was in London. This class will look at other varieties of Middle English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — and with Margery Kempe, we're getting very close to Modern English.

• M&M:
  Chapter 19, “Varieties of Middle English.”
• Web:
  • Selections from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1375);
  • William Langland, prologue to The Vision of Piers Plowman (c. 1360–90);
  • Margery Kempe, selections from The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1438).

19 February

Early Modern English: The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries mark the transition from Middle into Modern English. We'll read a few texts that are looking both backwards and forwards in time.

• M&M:
  • Chapter 20, “Early Modern English”;
  • Chapter 21, “Varieties of Early Modern English.”
• Blackboard:
  • Thomas Malory, selection from The Book of King Arthur, chapters 1–6, in [Le morte darthur] (Westminster, 1485), STC 801;
  • Edmund Spenser, book 1, cantos 1–2, of The Faerie Queene: Disposed into Twelue Books, Fashioning XII. Morall Vertues (London, 1590), STC 23081a.
• Web:
  • Matthew 25 as translated by Wycliffe, Tyndale, and the KJV translators;

26 February

No Class: I'll be away at a conference.

5 March

Manuscript Culture and Print Culture: The development of the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century coincided roughly with the beginnings of Modern English. Today we'll look at the influence the new technology has had on the language, and try to understand early modern expectations about textual stability.

• M&M:
  • Chapter 28, “Early Modern English Print Culture”;
  • Chapter 44, “Shakespeare's Literary Language.”
• Blackboard:
  • William Caxton, selection from Eneydos, i.e., Here fynyssheth the boke yf Eneydos, compyled by Vyrgyle, which hathe be translated oute of latyne in to frenshe, and oute of frenshe reduced in to Englysshe by me wyll[ia]m Caxton, the xxij. daye of Iuyn. the yere of our lorde. M.iiij.Clxxxx. The fythe yere of the regn of kynge Henry the seuenth (Westminster, 1490), STC 24796;
  • William Shakespeare, selection from Hamlet (c. 1600) from Q1 (1603), Q2 (1604), and F1 (1623);
  • Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, selection from William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (1987);
  • John Donne, “At the round earths imagin'd corners,” “Death be not proud,” “Song” (“Goe, and catche a falling starre”), “The Flea,” and “The Extasie,” from Poems, by J.D. VVith elegies on the Authors Death (London, 1633), STC 7045.

12 March

The Quest for Standard English: The notion that the English language needs “protection” from “corruption” was widespread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as people began to call for governmental regulation on the language itself. We'll also focus on the nature and purpose of dictionaries, with the benefit of a visit to class by Peter Sokolowski, lexicographer and editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster.

• M&M:
  • Chapter 11, “Johnson, Webster, and the Oxford English Dictionary”;
  • Chapter 30, “Class, Ethnicity, and the Formation of ‘Standard English.’”
• Blackboard:
  • Daniel Defoe, selection from An Essay concerning Projects (London, 1697), Wing D832, ESTC R234825;
  • Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for Correcting . . . the English Tongue (London, 1712), ESTC T42805;
  • Samuel Johnson, The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1747), ESTC T116686 (note that pp. 35–36 are incorrectly bound after p. 32);
  • Samuel Johnson, Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755), ESTC T117231 (the copy on ECCO is partly illegible; supplement it with this transcription);
  • Yr Humble Svt, chapter 10 (“Sabotage in Springfield: Philip Gove Stokes the Flames”) of The Lexicographer's Dilemma.

First Paper Due.

19 March

No Class: Spring Break.

26 March

Theories of Language: Philosophizing about language isn't a new pastime. Seventeenth-century Britons were fascinated by the problems posed by language. Some thought it was possible to develop a perfect language; others thought that language inevitably distorted meaning.

• Blackboard:
  • Thomas Sprat, selection from The History of the Royal Society (1667);
  • John Wilkins, selection from An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668);
  • John Locke, selection from An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690);
  • Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, part 3, chapter 5 (London, 1726), ESTC T139451.

2 April

Bad Words: We'll consider obscenity, profanity, hate speech, and political correctness, with a visit from Jesse Sheidlower, lexicographer and author of The F-Word.

• M&M:
  • Chapter 29, “Issues of Gender in Modern English”;
• Blackboard:
  • John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “A Satyr on Charles II,” “To the Post Boy,” and “Song” (“I Fuck No More Then Others Doe”);
  • Henry Miller, selection from Tropic of Cancer (1934);
  • George Orwell, selection from 1984 (1949);
  • Margaret Atwood, selection from The Handmaid's Tale (1985);
  • Jesse Sheidlower, introduction and selected entries from The F-Word;
  • Randall Kennedy, chapter 1 (“The Protean N-Word”) of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word;
  • Geoffrey Hughes, chapter 1 (“Defining Political Correctness”) of Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture.

9 April

Demotic Language: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries see new attitudes toward linguistic formality in literature: where literary writing, especially poetry, was once associated with a “high” tone, poets began experimenting with what Wordsworth called “a selection of language really used by men.”

• M&M:
  • Chapter 25, “American English to 1865”;
  • Chapter 26, “American English since 1865.”
• Blackboard:
  • Robert Burns, preface, “To a Mouse,” and glossary, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1786), ESTC T91548;
  • William Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed. (London and Bristol, 1800), ESTC T146537;
  • Walt Whitman, introduction and “Song of Myself,” from Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1855) (The whole volume is on Blackboard; read just the introduction and pp. 1–56);
  • Irvine Welsh, “A Soft Touch” and “Granny's Old Junk” (1995).

16 April

African-American Vernacular English: Probably the most interesting American variety of English — interesting for linguistic, sociological, and literary reasons — is African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), sometimes called Black English or Ebonics. We'll look at several literary representations of AAVE (remembering that these may be biased in any number of ways), and discuss some of the modern controversies on its place in the modern curriculum.

• M&M:
  • Chapter 27, “American English Dialects”;
  • Chapter 50, “Migration and Motivation in the Development of African American Vernacular English”;
• Blackboard:
  • Paule Laurence Dunbar, “A Negro Love Song” (1895) and “When Malindy Sings” (1896);
  • Zora Neale Hurston, selection from Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937);
  • James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” (1979);
  • Toni Morrison, selection from Beloved (1987).
• Web:
  • Joel Chandler Harris, “How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox” (1883);
  • Charles Chesnutt, “Po' Sandy” (1888);
  • Langston Hughes, “Weary Blues” (1923, performed 1958);
  • Amiri Baraka, “Black Art” (1966, performed 1967);
  • Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “Whitey on the Moon,” from Small Talk at 125th and Lennox (1970).

23 April

Pushing the Limits: Modernist writers in the early twentieth century explored new conceptions of meaning and the relationship between words and things. The investigation was continued in the 1970s and '80s by poets in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement, who also took inspiration from postmodern theories of language.

• M&M:
  • Chapter 46, “Joyce's English”;
  • Chapter 47, “Faulkner's English”;
  • Chapter 59, “Cognitive Linguistics.”
• Blackboard:
  • Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1923);
  • William Faulkner, selection from The Sound and the Fury (1929);
  • Virginia Woolf, selection from The Waves (1931);
  • James Joyce, selection from Finnegans Wake (1939);
  • Bob Perelman, “Seduced by Analogy” (1981).

30 April

Global Englishes: In Shakespeare's day, English was spoken by a few hundreds of thousands of people, almost all on a cluster of islands off the northwest coast of Europe. Today it is the first language of hundreds of millions, and used by more than a billion people all over the world — in fact, native speakers now constitute a minority of English speakers. The center of gravity of the English language moved from Britain to the United States around 1850, and is now shifting again, with many varieties of English assuming new importance.

• M&M:
  • Chapter 39, “South Asian English”;
  • Chapter 40, “English in the Caribbean”;
  • Chapter 41, “English in Africa”;
  • Chapter 51, “Latino Varieties of English”;
  • Chapter 55, “World Englishes in World Contexts”;
• Blackboard:
  • Chinua Achebe, selection from “The African Writer and the English Language” (1964);
  • Linton Kewsi-Johnson, “Inglan Is a Bitch” (1980);
  • Ken Saro-Wiwa, selection from Sazaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1985);
  • Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (1987);
  • Amy Tan, “Mother Tongue” (1990);
  • Junot Dias, selection from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2000).

Final Paper Due.