Review: The Multilingual Origins of Standard English. Edited by Laura Wright (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Multilingual Approach to the History of Standard English
Multilingual Practices in Language History: English and Beyond, 2018
This paper focuses on three developmental stages in the history of English which are apparent from a multilingual perspective but which are currently omitted from textbooks: the late medieval mixed-language business system, the fifteenth century tip-point when the switchover to English was imminent, and the subsequent shift to Proto-Standard English. (Written several years ago; I would now refer to this as the supralocal stage.)
Introduction to The Multilingual Origins of Standard English
The Multilingual Origins of Standard English, 2020
This collaboration by nineteen historical linguists shows why the current textbook explanations of the origins of Standard English are incorrect (Part One, the Orthodox Version), and suggests an alternative explanation (Part Two, the Revised Version). The nutshell Revised Version is: Over the fourteenth century, living standards rose, enabling a new class of people to find their voice. Monolingual English, shaped by its Anglo-Norman antecedent, was the written record of the trading classes.
A Critical Look at Previous Accounts of the Standardisation of English
The Multilingual Origins of Standard English, 2020
Twenty years ago, handbooks discussing the origins of Standard English gave the impression that its beginnings were well understood. Readers were told that Chancery Standard was based on Central Midlands writing (or East Midlands, if they were reading an older textbook). Handbooks which went into more detail classified Chancery Standard's evolution as stemming from Type 4 of four prototypical Types into which London Middle English writing had been divided, which was writing from the King's Office of Chancery. The actual mechanism of how Standard English supposedly focussed and diffused both geographically out from the Midlands (whether East or Central) and through different text-types was not detailed. That all that had been originally explicitly stipulated under the label 'Chancery Standard' were spellings for twenty-one common words, the third-person plural pronoun forms they/their, and the-inde/-ende/-ande morpheme, was not specified. Syntax, morphology, sentence structure, social context and discourse norms, pragmatics, word-choice, register, text-types, reduction of variation, reduction of abbreviations and suspensions, the abandonment of letter-graphs thorn and yogh, and the multilingual backdrop-the convention of keeping accounts in mixed-language Anglo-Norman/Medieval Latin/Middle English, the continuing custom of alternating passages of monolingual Anglo-Norman and Medieval Latin, and the rise of Neo-Latin as a politico-scholarly medium of international communication - these were barely mentioned. This chapter traces the 'East Midland' explanation back to 1873, and shows how successive scholars have misunderstood and embroidered the theme.
Multilingual practices in medieval Britain: reflections on the scholarship of the last twenty years
Multilingual practices in medieval Britain, 2024
This chapter considers research published over the last two decades on the linguistics of medieval multilingualism as evidenced in all sorts of text types, including work published by our honorand and her collaborators. As historical multilingualism has now become such a burgeoning field, Pahta's contribution to the use of corpus-building and searching for evidence of historical multilingualism can be seen as pioneering. The research considered in this chapter reveals the ubiquity of multilingual practices, the discourse-organizing functions of code-switching, the functional properties of switches, the relevance of abbreviations and their frequency, and the major contribution of Romance borrowings to nuancing the English lexicon. Code-switching, in particular, played an important role in vernacularisation processes, accompanying the shift from French to English in the fifteenth century, and as an intermediate stage in the shift from Latin to English in civic records. Further, work has been carried out on multilingual practices involving Middle Dutch, Old Norse,
Medieval English: The state of the language
Neophilologus, 1995
In the last few decades several large-scale data-oriented projects in the field of English historical linguistics have been undertaken. One is the Dictionary of Old English project in Toronto with its spinoffs, such as computerised texts and concordances. Another one is the Helsinki Corpus of Diachronic Texts, partly based on the Toronto material. The Old and Middle English parts of the Helsinki Corpus are at present undergoing syntactic tagging (in the case of the Old English material, with the help of morphological coding). The Helsinki corpus also includes Early Modem English texts, but a more extensive corpus of Early (and Late) Modern English is now being prepared by Edward Finnegan and Douglas Biber. Furthermore, electronic texts for complete works of more and more individual writers are becoming available.
Journal of English Linguistics, 2001
The third of the four chronological volumes in the six-volume Cambridge History of the English Language (CHEL) covers roughly three centuries of linguistic history, from the introduction of printing in England by William Caxton to the American Declaration of Independence. This is the first period in the history of English for which both manuscript and printed records exist, it is the first period of intense scholarly interest in the state of the language, and it is also the first period for which we have abundant contemporary testimony regarding linguistic issues. CHEL III includes a general editor's "Preface" by Richard Hogg (xi-xv); an "Introduction" by the volume's editor, Roger Lass (1-9); and chapters on "Orthography and Punctuation" by Vivian Salmon (13-55), "Phonology and Morphology" by Roger Lass (56-186), "Syntax" by Matti Rissanen (187-331), "Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics" by Terttu Nevalainen (332-458), "Regional and Social Variation" by Manfred Görlach (459-538), "Literary Language" by Sylvia Adamson (539-653), a glossary of linguistic terms (654-69), individual bibliographies for each chapter, and an extensive index. As in the previous CHEL volumes, most chapters can stand alone as separate monographs. The individual contributions are unified chronologically but not theoretically; the only shared theoretical approach is the sensible attempt to avoid paradigm-specific formalisms. "Orthography and Punctuation" by Vivian Salmon is an informative and well-structured survey of the cultural circumstances, debates, and choices that changed English orthography from the medieval, rather chaotic, and localized scribal practices to essentially the modern set of conventions. It was during Early Modern English that multiple new punctuation marks were introduced and that most of the rules in force today were devised and enriched. The chapter separates the influence of printers and printed books from the impact of the learned orthoepic discourse in the formation of spelling patterns, with Mulcaster's 1582 Elementarie as the major divide between the premodern and the modern state of affairs. The eight decades from 1582 to the 1660 Restoration emerge as the most significant forma
The Oxford Handbook of the History of English
2012
This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than ever before, and to rethink standard assumptions about language history and the methods and approaches to its study. In 68 chapters from specialists whose fields range from statistical modeling to acoustic phonetics, this handbook presents the field in an innovative way, setting a new standard of cross-theoretical collaboration, and rethinking the evidence of language change in English over the centuries. It considers issues of the development of Englishes, including creole and pidgin varieties. It presents various approaches from language contact and typology and rethinks the categorization of language, including interfaces with informat...
The Cambridge History of the English Language: Vol. III--1476 to 1776
Journal of English Linguistics, 2001
The third of the four chronological volumes in the six-volume Cambridge History of the English Language (CHEL) covers roughly three centuries of linguistic history, from the introduction of printing in England by William Caxton to the American Declaration of Independence. This is the first period in the history of English for which both manuscript and printed records exist, it is the first period of intense scholarly interest in the state of the language, and it is also the first period for which we have abundant contemporary testimony regarding linguistic issues. CHEL III includes a general editor's "Preface" by Richard Hogg (xi-xv); an "Introduction" by the volume's editor, Roger Lass (1-9); and chapters on "Orthography and Punctuation" by Vivian Salmon (13-55), "Phonology and Morphology" by Roger Lass (56-186), "Syntax" by Matti Rissanen (187-331), "Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics" by Terttu Nevalainen (332-458), "Regional and Social Variation" by Manfred Görlach (459-538), "Literary Language" by Sylvia Adamson (539-653), a glossary of linguistic terms (654-69), individual bibliographies for each chapter, and an extensive index. As in the previous CHEL volumes, most chapters can stand alone as separate monographs. The individual contributions are unified chronologically but not theoretically; the only shared theoretical approach is the sensible attempt to avoid paradigm-specific formalisms. "Orthography and Punctuation" by Vivian Salmon is an informative and well-structured survey of the cultural circumstances, debates, and choices that changed English orthography from the medieval, rather chaotic, and localized scribal practices to essentially the modern set of conventions. It was during Early Modern English that multiple new punctuation marks were introduced and that most of the rules in force today were devised and enriched. The chapter separates the influence of printers and printed books from the impact of the learned orthoepic discourse in the formation of spelling patterns, with Mulcaster's 1582 Elementarie as the major divide between the premodern and the modern state of affairs. The eight decades from 1582 to the 1660 Restoration emerge as the most significant forma