Inventing English by Seth Lerer
mark beyer
The first few chapters of Lerer’s language history are esoteric to the casual reader because we get a deep look into Old English, and if you don’t already know, Old English is about as recognizable to today’s English speakers as Greek is to today’s English speakers. But for the accomplished philologist, perhaps, few will get a whole lot of usable education from the minutiae that Lerer writes about. None of this criticism precludes the very readability of Inventing English, because if you enjoy learning about languages, how words come into the lexicon, how they change meaning (and spelling) over time, and what connections you can find between this language and others, then this book is for you.
The esoterica include essays on Caedmon’s Hymn, Archbishop Wulfstan, the Peterborough Chronicle, and the examination of Old English dialects. You’ll read sentences such as, “The -um and -e endings signal the dative masculine singular forms of the adjective and noun, following the preposition.” … and … “Here, the adjectival ending has leveled to an indiscriminate back vowel plus an indiscriminate nasal.” While these sentences will prove bugbears to the uninitiated, other ideas the author expounds on will make dramatic connections between the past and present of our language: “Language change is a social phenomenon, and the chronicler’s choice of word, syntax, prosody, and diction have implications for the world of lived experience.” So true, even as we hear on the street language spoken by kids that is highly divergent from their parents. Sure, there is communication between this close generation gap, and the standards of the language remain so that we all can understand each other, but you only have to look at late-year Old English or Middle English text—written a mere six-hundred years ago—to find that we today would probably not recognize written English come six-hundred years from now if we had the chance to live that long.
The power of Leher’s history comes through his many individual essays (within chapter or written as whole chapters) on English language use by notable English writers. How they adopted language to work for their literary ambitions (and rhetorical, rhythmic, and alliterative devices) to create character and story; how they assumed language would work and so they worked the words into a shape that both told stories that people would be familiar with, and that would enthrall the people; and ultimately to call attention to themselves as poets (meter created the initial magic of language that we now understand lives in English lexicon and grammar) but a justly illuminated life through written and spoken language.
Here we find Chaucer (of course), but also his contemporary, Julian of Norwich (the female voice of literature who gave us “Revelation of Divine Faith”), and along through the ages such gifted word-guys as Milton, Spencer, Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, and onward through the 20th and into the 21st Century “MTV Generation” speakers and writers. Fun stuff, this is, because we get inside the pens and minds of these writers to see how (and sometimes why) they create beauty from letters, words, sentences, stanzas, paragraphs, poems, speeches, and novels. We meet the great characters of literature, too — Canterbury pilgrims, Satan, Hamlet and Lear, Huck Finn — who have helped invent the language that we living, working, speaking humans take on as our own.
And this is the very beauty of the English language, I think. That we can invent and re-invent, alter and reconstruct the language at various points (with many to come, I’m sure) to expand our ability to communicate makes the language dynamic as any science. To put a finer point on this important notion, English has more than 800,000 words in its lexicon, the highest vocabulary of all languages, with the next (German) having less than half that number; France has had an academy of language for centuries that kept a tight reign on lexicon growth.
English is the better for its thievery of all languages. But it’s real beauty has come from its speakers and writers, who have used the words to make story, create mellifluous sounds, shape our national identity, and forge fictional characters that we refer to with such ease we might be speaking of our sister or brother.
Inventing English by Seth Lerer
Columbia University Press
320 pages; $24.95
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