Kate Burridge in Daylesford

Language change is interesting, so I considered myself lucky to be in Daylesford recently for the Words in Winter festival and able to attend a talk on this topic by Professor Kate Burridge, linguist and radio commentator.

She started by showing us the rate of change is not constant.

For centuries the norm was rapid change in spoken English. For instance, between the times of Chaucer (fourteenth century) and of Jonathan Swift (early eighteenth century) there was such a massive change that Swift's readers would have had difficulty reading Chaucer.

She read the first lines of the Prologue from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales - in the accent of the time, I might add!

Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr;
When Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye
That sleepen al the night with open ye -
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages -
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

In contrast, when she read the opening to Swift's Gulliver's Travels, we had no trouble understanding the text.

My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, and eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued four years.

Out of interest, after typing this quote, I spell-checked it, and Word thinks it is acceptable modern grammar.

The rise of written English as the pre-eminent form is the reason behind this slowing of the rate of change. When most business and study and social interaction occurred through spoken English, people didn't mind language changing, as long as they could understand each other. But we, with almost universal literacy, are strongly influenced by the way a word is written, visualising it as we say it, and this makes us resist change.

It was a great talk and has given me lots to think about.

verbing - using a noun as a verb

I’ve read a new word lately. It’s the verb to Milo. Weird. I noticed it on the label of my new tin of this delicious drink.



I presume it’s an advertising campaign hoping to cash in on the impact of verbing, the use of a noun as a verb. Some people get upset when language is altered in this way, but it’s just one one of the ways languages change and adapt to modern life. It's often the subject of discussion on the Net.

It’s an old process - Shakespeare, for instance, was a master of the art and examples abound of his use of verbs as nouns. I read somewhere that he introduced nearly three thousand new words into the language. He loved using nouns as verbs. For instance, ‘I’ll unhair thy head’ or ‘the thunder would not peace at my bidding’. Other verbal expressions first used by Shakespeare and now accepted as good English are to champion, to humor, to elbow and to rant.

Henry Bolingbroke, in the play “Richard II”, says of his enemies that he will make sure that ‘Destruction straight shall dog them at the heels’. If you have ever been followed around your house by your dog, nudging at your calf, you know the image that Shakespeare conveyed so succinctly.

However, I can’t see the new verb, to Milo, catching on. In fact when I went to the wesite on the label of the tin, the promotion of this campaign was already finished!