For the official published version, see Lingua 133 (Sept. 2013), pp. 73–83. Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00243841
External Influences on English: From its Beginnings to the Renaissance, D. Gary Miller, Oxford University Press (2012), xxxi + 317 pp., Price: £65.00, ISBN 9780199654260
Lexical borrowing aside, external influences are not the main concern of most histories of the English language. It is therefore timely, and novel, to have a history of English (albeit only up to the Renaissance period) that looks at English purely from the perspective of external influences. Miller assembles his book around five strands of influence: (1) Celtic, (2) Latin and Greek, (3) Scandinavian, (4) French, (5) later Latin and Greek input, and he focuses on influences that left their mark on contemporary mainstream English rather than on regional or international varieties. This review looks at all chapters, but priority is given to Miller’s discussions of structural influence, especially on English syntax, morphology and phonology, which often raise a number of theoretical issues. Loanwords from various sources, which are also covered extensively in the book, will receive slightly less attention. Chapter 1 introduces the Indo-European and Germanic background of English and gives short descriptions of the languages with which English came into contact. This is a good way to start the book, but the copious lists of loanwords from Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, Low German, Afrikaans etc., most of which appear in English long after the Renaissance stop-off point, were not central to its aims. It would have been better to use this space to expand upon the theoretical framework employed throughout the book. Miller notes in a short paragraph in the preface (p. x) that the “different types of contact are analyzed within the framework of Trudgill (2010, 2011a, 2011b),” who distinguishes two main effects of contact: simplification and complexification. Simplification involves the reduction of grammatical categories and morphology as a result of adult second-language learning (e.g. attrition of complex or redundant inflectional morphology, agreement, and grammatical gender). Complexification results from situations of child language acquisition and bilingualism over a longer term, whereby new grammatical categories are introduced (e.g. new tense and aspect distinctions). Chapter 2 looks at the Celtic, Roman and Germanic background to English and begins by presenting a useful overview of the historical sources and archaeological studies. This is interspersed with research on British Celtic linguistic contacts. In the section on British and Pre-Celtic toponyms, Miller notes that “Celtic river names tend to be fewer in the (south)east and the Midlands where Anglo-Saxon settlement was most dense” (p. 17). Miller must mean the East Midlands. At any rate, he could just as well have said that all Celtic toponyms have this distribution, not just river-names (see the distribution map in Laker 2008: 24). Next, Miller remarks that there were very few Celtic loanwords in Old English. This is correct, but it might have been worth mentioning that the number increases in Middle English and Modern English dialects (Breeze 2002). Many of these later-attested words are likely to have been in use in Old English times too, bearing in mind that the Old English corpus is comparatively small, limited in its dialectal coverage, and was written by a tiny privileged strata in Anglo-Saxon society usually in a focused or standardised form. Interestingly, when he looks at Celtic grammatical influence, he deals with features found in Old English and Middle English, and even some that are characteristic of Early Modern English. When it comes to phonology, Miller again only makes references to changes in Old English. More consistency in presentation would have been desirable. Miller’s list of possible Celtic morphosyntactical features includes the Old English twofold paradigm of ‘to be,’ it-clefts, the development of the progressive, the (-)self reflexive, periphrastic do, and the northern subject rule. Some other features are mentioned only in passing without explanation or illustrative examples, e.g. “expanded ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses” (p. 39) and the “loss of the ‘external possessor’” (p. 40). It is shame that these two features were not discussed because they are found in all major varieties of Modern English (unlike, for example, the twofold ‘to be’ paradigm). Vennemann (2002, 2009) places them in the Old English period, though they are characteristic of Middle and Early Modern English texts. In contrast, Miller (p. 39) views the expanded verbal responses (e.g. Yes, I have/No, I can’t/I will etc.) as an 1 instance of recent influence, paying little attention to the fact that no sociolinguistic variation is found in Old English high-level literary documents and that these are most unlikely to have represented the spoken vernacular of the time. A further consideration here is that there are few texts with natural dialogues in Old English and Middle English, and the expanded responses are characteristic of natural spoken English. In contrast to most scholarship on early contacts, Miller apparently believes that Celtic influences found in Middle English are due to contacts in Middle English (e.g. “northern Middle English and Middle Scots likely borrowed from Brittonic the so-called northern subject rule,” p. 38 – this is not the usual view, nor would it make sense or have any motivation). Although the twofold ‘to be’ paradigm is mainly a feature of Old English, it is worth discussing in a little more detail as it has been the subject of many recent studies. In contrast to all other Germanic languages, Old English has two functionally distinct paradigms of the verb ‘to be’ in the present tense, reflecting a very similar situation in Insular Celtic languages. One paradigm, with b-initial forms, is used to indicate the habitual present or, sometimes, future reference, whereas non-b forms indicate the actual present. Compare the Late West Saxon forms with those of other Old Germanic languages in Table 1:
Table 1: Present indicative of the verb ‘to be’ in Old Germanic languages
West Germanic North East Germanic Germanic Old English (WS) Old Frisian Old Old High Old Gothic actual habitual Saxon German Norse Sg. 1 eom bēo bim bium bim em im 2 eart bist biste bis(t) bist est is 3 is bið is is(t) ist es ist Pl. 1 sint, sindon bēoð send, sint sind(un) birum erom sijum 2 sint, sindon bēoð send, sint sind(un) birut eroþ sijuþ 3 sint, sindon bēoð send, sint sind(un) sint ero sind
As Miller makes clear (p. 30, 36, 40), there are different views on the origins of the Old English and Continental West Germanic paradigms. On the one hand, the blended paradigms of Old Frisian, Old Saxon and Old High German could indicate that there were originally two separate paradigms in West Germanic too, and these may once have had a similar semantic distinction as in Old English (though such a distinction, unsupported by a parallel one in ordinary verbs, would probably have been unstable). These days, this idea is closely associated with Schumacher (2009), who argues that there was originally only a single paradigm in Proto-Germanic based on the Proto-Indo-European athematic root present *h1es, as still in East and North Germanic. Only later in West Germanic, i.e. in varieties close to the Celtic speaking west, did a separate Germanic verbal root, originally with the meaning ‘become,’ develop under close contact with Continental Celtic. This situation was then apparently preserved in Old English through additional contacts with Brittonic, while other West Germanic languages developed mixed paradigms. The main criticism of this theory is that there is not a hint of any semantic distinction in the other older West Germanic languages, and the highly unusual blending of forms – especially in Old High German – has not been adequately explained. Alternatively, it has been suggested that a process of semantic bifurcation and paradigm building happened on British soil, either through division of an already mixed paradigm (as, e.g., in Old Saxon or Old Frisian), or through reinterpretation by Romano-Britons of variant verbal paradigms among Germanic speakers of different dialects. The problem with this theory is that scholars who offer such proposals are unwilling to offer any historical morphological analysis of the Old English paradigms. One observation that 2 has often been repeated (starting with Keller 1925) is that the Old English third singular form bið /biθ/ bears a close resemblance to its Old Welsh counterpart bid /bɨːð/ (< LBr. *bið /bið/), and that the short vowel of the Late British form is regular while the short vowel in the Old English form is an innovation. However, the short vowel in the Old English form could have arrived by analogy based on the 2nd singular form bist or the 3rd person actual present is (Seebold 1970: 113).1 What one would like to know is which forms, including the various alternative forms in Old English dialects, are the ones innovated “in the mouths and minds of English speaking Britons” (Keller 1925: 60, my translation) and which forms are inherited from West Germanic. By not supplying such details, further analysis and detailed linguistic evaluation of this thesis is seriously impeded. Schumacher (2009: 260), for his part, claims that the “synchronic irregularity of the paradigm of bið in Old English is so great that it must be due to inherited forms,” and this statement has so far gone unchallenged, also by Miller. What is evident is that the Old English double paradigm must have already developed at a very early stage. Indeed, I would describe it as a black sheep among all other suggested Celtic morphosyntactical influences: it alone occurs full-fledged in the earliest texts, while all other suggested features either first appear or become prominent in Middle English or later (Laker 2008: 28−29). Though it is true that nearly three centuries passed between the adventus Saxonum and the earliest written evidence, in which time two copula paradigms could have developed in Old English, the point is rather that all other suggested morphosyntactical features are rare or non-existent in Old English, instead being characteristic of Middle English period. In short, some explanation for the precocious appearance of this particular feature is required. To his credit, Miller (p. 36) proposes a solution in line with Trudgill (2011b), who thinks there was earlier adstratal bilingual interaction ca. 420−600, which resulted in complexification (i.e. in this case the development of two functionally distinct present indicative copula paradigms). However, there is a problem not mentioned by Miller: in a supposed (though highly unlikely) adstratal situation one would surely expect further transfer or borrowing of more linguistic features, especially Celtic loans. One way of getting around this problem would be to argue that the feature was either introduced or supported not by British Celtic but British Latin influence, which in all likelihood also had a similar functional distinction in the copula as did North Western Romance. At least with such a proposal many early Latin loans in early Old English could be cited as supporting evidence. An obvious weakness of the chapter on Celtic influence is the limited discussion of possible phonological influences, especially given that large-scale second language acquisition is proposed. The general lack of influence in Miller’s account seems out of sync with what is known about second language acquisition in present-day situations of even tutored learning, e.g. Eckman (2004: 515): “it has been widely accepted that the learner’s L1 influences the acquisition of L2 phonology, even by those who doubt L1 influence in the area of syntax.” This is ultimately why it is easy to recognise so many foreign-influenced English varieties around the world almost completely on the basis of phonological accent not syntax (see Ioup 1984 for experimental data). The problem is that when we are dealing with sound changes in the past we are essentially interpreting changes in spelling, and only phonological changes tend to be registered orthographically. Therefore, while retroflex consonants may be one of the most characteristic features of Indian English, such a highly distinctive phonetic development would be invisible in the historical record were it an early historical change. On the other hand, a merger or confusion of two phonemes, such as can often be observed among Japanese speakers of English, would (and indeed does) sometimes reveal itself in writing. What we mainly have to do with when looking at external influences on English sounds, then, are phoneme mergers and splits, because these tend to show up in written texts. Such radical changes tend to be few in number, and they are usually restricted to particularly hard-to-acquire phonemes (from the perspective of speakers’ L1). There is, however, one important observation by Miller that can be explored here, namely that “A British substrate more like primitive Irish, according to Schrijver (2009), was responsible for the shaping of
1 The short vowel in the Old Frisian and Old High German 1.Sg bim is also unexpected. This is usually thought to come from the reconstructed earlier form *im, as in Gothic im (Table 1). 3 the Old English phonological system” (p. 59). Miller has clearly warmed to this idea and repeats it in the concluding chapter, “Celtic influence on English phonology seems to have been on pre-historic Old English via an Irish-like substrate” (p. 234). In other words, Miller argues that Celtic influences on Pre-Old English phonology were substratal and via an Irish-like substrate, while Celtic influences on Pre-Old English morphosyntax were adstratal and via a British-like adstrate. This is a highly original approach to say the least. It should be recalled, however, that Parsons (2011) and many others before him have not found anything Irish in the phonological forms of Romano-British place-names, and no other Celtic scholars have identified specifically Irish traits in the Medieval British languages either. Nonetheless, it is worth examining the proposal in a little more detail. Essentially, Schrijver (2009) argues that three well-known Old English conditioned changes resulted from Old Irish like influence: breaking, i-mutation and velar mutation. All these changes are in evidence in the earliest texts and therefore run parallel to the appearance of the two ‘to be’ paradigms in Old English. Compare the selected examples and suggested dates of the changes in (1)–(3):
(1) Breaking = diphthongisation of front vowels before /x/ and, to a more limited extent, velarised /r l/ in consonant groups Examples: *feh- > feoh ‘cattle’, *werþan- > weorþan ‘become’ *æld- > eald ‘old’ Date: Probably before 450 (Miller p. 59)
(2) i-mutation = fronting of all back vowels and diphthongs and raising of /æ/ by /i/ or /j/ in the following syllable Examples: *mūsiz > mȳs ‘mice’, *fōtiz > foet/fēt ‘feet’, *saiwiz > sǣ ‘sea’ Date: 6th or 7th century (Miller, p. 60)
(3) Velar mutation = diphthongisation of the short vowels /i, e, æ/ by /u/ or /ɑ/ in the following syllable Examples: *limu- > liomu ‘limbs’, *eβura- > eofor ‘boar’, *ælu- > ealu ‘ale’ Date: 7th or 8th century (Miller, p. 66)
It is impossible to give a full description of Schrijver’s theory here, but basically he argues that in Late British there was a phonetic difference between palatal and velar consonants, which expressed itself through the intrusion of a preceding palatal or velar glide. Because of this, when Britons began to acquire and speak Pre-Old English, some specific Pre-Old English consonants were heard as either palatal or velar by Britons, and vowels that preceded these consonants gained an intrusive palatal or velar glide respectively.2 At some slightly later stage, this phonetic effect was phonemicised, for it is reflected in the Old English orthographic system, which was surely based on phonemic distinctions rather than phonetic ones. Some would argue that Schrijver’s proposal is problematic from a methodological point of view, especially given the heavy reliance on phonetic reconstruction. Apart from this, a number of other specific issues need further clarification before this thesis can be accepted. First, Irish-like influence has yet to explain the different estimated dates of the changes: breaking seems to have been a very early, possibly Pre-Conquest development, while i-mutation and velar mutation took place between the sixth and eighth centuries. Second, Irish-like influence has yet to explain why breaking could affect both long and short vowels (1), while velar mutation only affected short vowels (3). Third, it is yet to be explained how similar changes in Continental Germanic varieties tie in with the Old English developments. For example, the Old Frisian conditioned changes known as breaking, i-mutation and velar mutation are very similar in type to those in Old English (Bremmer 2009: §48, §45, §51). Are the Old Frisian changes to be attributed to an Irish-like substrate too? It could be argued that the changes in Old English and Old Frisian do not seem completely unexpected from a phonetic point of view (at any rate,
2 If Britons were able to perceive a palatal or velar difference in Pre-Old English consonants, I submit that the supposed distinction, if it existed, must have been phonemic rather than phonetic in Late British. Unfortunately, Miller expresses no opinion on the matter. 4 a proposal of a completely unconditioned change would provide an even stronger case for influence). Because Miller does not reveal his opinions on any of these matters, I did not find his coverage of the topic very insightful. I would also have appreciated some discussion of alternative ideas in this context too, such as those found in articles by Daunt (1939) and Liberman (2007). Although Miller sees Irish-like substratal influence as the most plausible case of Celtic influence on early English phonology, I would argue that several changes in Medieval English dialects reflect generally accepted properties of Late British and Old Welsh phonology. What is more, early Medieval English loans that entered Medieval Welsh sometimes show the very same alterations (Laker 2002, 2009b). The problem seems to be that these changes are often northern, and Miller has a strong desire to explain northern developments by Norse influence, often in contradiction to Trudgill’s theoretical insights, which he claims to adopt in the book (preface). Unlike other chapters which deal fairly consistently with one of the five strands of influence identified by Miller in the introductory chapter, Chapter 3 begins by going over the Celtic background again and then provides a short historical overview of the Old English period, with additional information on some loanwords. From an organisational perspective, it would perhaps have been easier for the reader if the material in this short chapter had simply been shoehorned into Chapter 2 on Celtic influences and Chapter 4 on Latin and Greek influences. That way, the dissection of five main influence types would have fallen into five well-rounded and easily navigable chapters. Chapter 4 provides a very comprehensive survey of the Greek and Latin loans that entered Germanic and Old English. Here Miller is interested in the dates at which these loanwords entered Germanic and Old English. In doing so, Miller gives a useful, and for the most part reliable, survey of phonological changes in Old English. (My main criticism would be that Miller’s idea about the different chronology of glide deletion and i-mutation in West Saxon and Anglian dialects is not adequately explained and no references are given, pp. 60–61.) The rest of this chapter provides a periodisation of the individual loanwords based on their phonological form and sphere of use. This part reads like a dictionary. While this may detract from the readability of the volume, it possibly adds value to it as a source of reference. In fact, much important work is reviewed that has so far been published only in German, and is not always widely available. The appendix to this chapter offers on a single page an overview of the different periods of borrowing with associated Latin and (Pre-)Old English sound changes. This is a very welcome addition, given the mass of details provided on the individual loans. Chapter 5 looks at Scandinavian influence. It begins with several references to Sykes’ popular genetics book (2007): “Oisins comprise 72.9% of the Y-chromosomes in Scotland, which is 15.4% Wodan and 8.8% Sigurd. The main Pictish area, Grampian, is 83.5% Oisin, 11.8% Wodan, and 2.4% Sigurd. This is similar to Wales with 83.2% Oisin, 11% Wodan , and 1.4% Sigurd, except that Pictland Wodans are not the same as the Viking Wodans from Norway […]” (p. 92). Such proofs pepper this and the earlier chapters on Celtic influence, and Miller uses this evidence to add weight to many of his linguistic assumptions. More caution should have been exercised. The clan names given by Sykes are not generally accepted terms for the DNA types and should not appear as such in a serious scientific monograph of this type. Worse still, Sykes did not provide any details on the analytical or statistical methods he employed in the project. He identifies particular clans with particular haplotypes, but he does not reveal how he did so. This is why Campbell (2007) is right to point out that this makes a critical review of his conclusions next to impossible, even by geneticists. The general opinion in the field is that if someone has some genuine results, they will also want to publish them in a peer-reviewed journal. The fact that Sykes has not done this so far signals that his analyses would be unlikely to pass peer review, and for this reason Miller should view them as suggestive rather than authoritative. In the rest of the chapter, Miller surveys Scandinavian influences on place-names, the lexicon, phonology, morphology and syntax. Scandinavian influences on British toponomy and on the English lexicon are well researched, but there have been some recent disagreements on how Norse loans should be interpreted from a contact-linguistic perspective. In particular, Lutz (2012) argues that Scandinavian borrowings in late Anglo-Saxon England reflect Danish dominance, in much the same way that French loanwords during the Middle English period mirror French authority and control. One reason is that Norse 5 loans such as law and earl indicate extended foreign rule. Another is that intense borrowing led to the large-scale replacement of native vocabulary, and not only by words like law and earl but also by a great deal of basic vocabulary (dirt, egg, freckle, weak, take, they etc.). Miller agrees that Scandinavian borrowing was superstratal during the initial conquests, but thinks that later loans reflect more of a symbiosis of peoples and languages on equal terms (p. 97). A major complication in this debate is that, unlike the French, the Vikings only held sway over half of the country (excepting a few decades in the eleventh century). Following the Treaty of Wedmore (ca. 886), Danish law prevailed in the North and East of the country, while there was West Saxon rule in the South and West. Lutz’s arguments for superstratal influence in the Danelaw area do not seem especially controversial, also given the fact that the numbers of loans in this area far outnumber those in other areas. At the very least, Norse influence must have been more superstratal in the Danelaw than outside of it. But was there Norse superstratal influence outside Danelaw territory? One way of shedding light on the matter would be to see how Norse loanwords are used in the West Saxon texts. Are such words replacing Old English ones, or are they simply being used to report on matters in the Danelaw? (In the same way as, for example, Arabic words are used in English to refer to laws, practices and ranks in the Islamic world.) Miller’s initial investigation suggests that legal words and terms denoting ranks in society, such as law, outlaw, fellow, hustings, thrall (pp. 110–111), were typically used in West Saxon to refer specifically to laws and societal terms in the Danelaw. While in broad agreement, Lutz (2012: 511–12) notes that at least some terms, e.g. law and earl, gradually started to replace native terms in all of England towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. As for phonology, very little influence, if any, on the English sound system can be cited. Miller mentions the once-popular idea that OE hēo “she” changed to ME scho/she etc. under Scandinavian influence, but he agrees that it is no longer accepted (p. 119). More promising, it seems, is the notion that Old English palatalised consonants were depalatalised under Scandinavian influence. For example, it is sometimes thought that Old English /tʃ/, which did not exist in Viking Norse, was replaced with /k/. The only evidence for such a development appears to be in place-names. As evidence, Miller considers names containing the Latin castra ‘fortification (pl.),’ which must have been pronounced /kastr/ (or similar) in Late British (Coates 2006: 8). This place-name element, which also gained some currency as a general term for a city in Old English, is no doubt an insular-period loanword on account of its absence from other Germanic languages and dialects. Miller observes, as others have before, that most English place-names contain the form chester (e.g. Winchester), some have the form cester (e.g. Leicester), but those situated in the focal area of Scandinavian influence have the form caster (e.g. Doncaster), as in Map 1. Much could be said about these names, but I will simply add that Scandinavian influence is not able to explain all instances of caster in the focal area. For example, Miller draws attention to the place-names Casterton (Cumbria), Muncaster (Cumbria) and Lancaster (Lancashire) (p. 129), but these are located in the North West. These areas were not annexed by Anglo-Saxons until the mid-seventh century, which is long after palatalisation of velars was active as an Old English sound change.3 At the very least, the caster names in the north-west of England – already about a third of the caster names – continue the assumed British pronunciation (Laker 2007: 169–171).
3 i-mutation (2) is generally considered to mark the end point of palatalisation in Old English, and this change is already seen on the Harford Farm Brooch dated to the mid-seventh century or earlier (Bammesberger 2003). It should also be borne in mind that changes often occur in speech long before they appear in writing. 6
Map 1. Chester/Caster/Cester place-names in England (< L castra ‘fortification)
Miller turns his attention to vowels and suggests that the /a/ rather than /o/ vowel in Modern English man, bank, land, hand results from Scandinavian influence. This is certainly not the standard view. In Old 7 English there was vacillation between and
(4) Common-gender plurals (Miller, p. 132) a) OE -as, -a, -e, -an b) ON *-az/*-ez (sic)
Miller might be correct in thinking that Norse influence had an impact on the spread of the -(e)s plural in English, but his portrayal of the Old Norse forms is incorrect and misleading. Although the final consonant in the supposed Old Norse forms *-az/*-ez was probably close to [z] in Proto-Germanic, this cannot be pleaded for Viking speech in ninth-century Northumbria, where it is thought to have been a voiceless or palatal /r/ (often represented in Germanic studies as R). Whether this R could have been interpreted as /s/ by Northumbrian Old English speakers is most doubtful, especially since Old Norse loans that contained the consonant were never rendered with s but always with r in Old English. It is also worth pointing out that the increased use of plural -s is a recent western North Sea Germanic feature because it also extended its limited earlier use over a much wider range of nouns in Coastal Dutch (in contrast to standard Dutch and traditional inland varieties of Dutch). For example, in standard Dutch the general rule is to add the plural suffix -en to monosyllabic forms, but plurals with -s are numerous in dialects of East and especially West Flanders (dweils ‘mops’, stiers ‘steers’, mols ‘mills’, zweins ‘pigs’, zoons ‘sons’, honds ‘dogs’ etc., see Devos & Vandekerckhove 2005: 68). While its original locus in Flemish was rather small, -s gained ground throughout the centuries after about 1200 (Marynissen 1994).4 The question for me is whether the tendencies for the spread of the -(e)s plural that are already observable in Old English could also be a feature of early simplification or overgeneralisation in the North
4 Although there are now a large number of s-plurals in West Frisian, this is demonstrably due to contact, mainly with Dutch. It is first found in Old West Frisian, with the name of a particular kind of currency/coin known as the clincker (1440) (Rolf Bremmer, p.c.). 8 (similarly, the -es genitive which is also a feature of Old English a- and i-stem nouns). Such an account would chime with Trudgill’s (2010) interpretation of simplifications in the North, which Miller generally omits from the discussion. By attributing changes and simplifications in nominal morphology largely to Scandinavian influence, Miller clearly assumes that Britons learned Old English inflectional morphology largely intact (even though it was for the most part highly redundant and ambiguous, see Benskin 2001: 107–115). This is especially unlikely in the North, where historians, archaeologists and even linguists are in agreement that the ratio of Anglo-Saxons to native Britons was at its lowest, and therefore the probability of imperfect learning of difficult-to-acquire inflectional morphology is very strong (Trudgill 2010).5 Miller attributes the following syntactical developments to Scandinavian contact: the phrasal genitive, reflexive (-)self, omission of the conjunction that, contact relatives, preposition stranding and relative clauses, preposition stranded passives, and changes in word order. In some cases, Miller argues that various internal and other external influences played a role. For example, “Celtic was responsible for loss of the Germanic reflexive sik in Old English,” but the idea for the -self construction in English “was innovated with Jutland Danish” (p. 138). Actually, *sik was lost throughout the North Sea Germanic languages, i.e. in Old Frisian and to some extent also Old Saxon and Old Low Franconian (see Vennemann 2013: 139−141, who thinks that contacts with Celtic and, in the final analysis, Semitic languages brought about the loss of the distinct reflexive in these varieties). Hence it is quite wrong of Miller to single out loss of *sik in Old English.6 The North Sea Germanic languages as a whole stopped using the distinctive reflexive particle and started using personal pronouns to express the reflexive relationship, whereby it is usually clear from the context whether a pronoun such as him is used as an object pronoun (him) or reflexively (himself). However, for the sake of precision, the word self sometimes followed personal pronouns to indicate reflexivity categorically, and this is already evident in Old English (5):
(5) him leofre wære þæt he hiene selfne acwealde him.DAT rather were.SUBJ.SG that he him.ACC self.ACC killed ‘he would rather kill himself’ (c.890 Old English Orosius 9.101.24)
Often this use of -self is claimed to have an emphasising function in such constructions, not least because - self was, and still is, used for emphasis on pronouns in Germanic languages in general. This idea is no doubt partly true, but the functions of -self have not always been looked at objectively or in great detail, and in many cases it is difficult to see a particular reason why emphasis or stress is present.7 At any rate, the development of the -self reflexive in English has sometimes been accredited to Celtic influence (e.g. Vezzosi 2005), because the construction is largely parallel to that found in Medieval and Modern Brittonic languages (e.g. Middle Welsh fy hun(an), dy hun(an), y hun(an) ‘myself, yourself, himself [lit. his self]’ etc.). Miller dismisses the Celtic contact hypothesis, due to the fact that a parallel development took place in the Old Jutland dialect of Danish. He (p. 137) offers the example in (6):
(6) fyrræ en the aff giuæ ath hielpæ thæm sielff sooner than they off give.3PL to help.INF them self ‘before giving up helping themselves’
5 Cf. Härke (2011: 14): “It is widely accepted that in the north of England, the native population survived to a greater extent than in the south, and that Germanic immigration was largely limited to the elite level.” 6 The rare genitive reflexive form sīn is sometimes found in Old English, especially in poetry. It is not clear why this particular form survived while all others were lost. 7 It may well be possible that there are differences in usage among certain scribes. King Alfred’s Orosius appears to contain quite a large number of -self reflexives, and it is notable, too, that in this text the progressive is used much more frequently than is usually the case in Old English. These two features could yet lend support for the notion that the Orosius translator was a Cornishman (Breeze 1991). 9 (a1241 Jyske Lov 3.63)
Not mentioned is the fact that the very same feature is found in Medieval and Modern Frisian and Dutch varieties too. Indeed, one wonders whether at least some of the claimed features in Old Jutland Danish are more likely contact-induced areal features shared with North Sea Germanic. This would at least explain why a great many features cited by Miller are found in Jutlandic but not in other Nordic varieties. Many examples of self-reflexives could be cited from Old and Early Middle Dutch (cf. ONW and VMNW); two are given below (7)–(8):
(7) cuning Salemon machoda himo seluemo king.NOM.SG Solomon make-3.SG.IND.IPFV him.DAT.SG self-DAT.SG eynan disk a-ACC.SG table.ACC.SG ‘King Solomon made himself a table’ (c1100 Leiden Willeram [North Holland] 052.01)
(8) Hine mochte hem seluen niet dorsteken 3.M.SG.NOM-NEG can.3.SG.IND.PST him.ACC.SG self-ACC.SG NEG stab.INF ‘he was unable to stab himself to death’ (1285 Rijmbijbel [West Flanders], p. 234, r. 28-31)
This reflexive use in Dutch and Frisian seems to have grown in popularity over time. If in Modern West Frisian a verb is obviously reflexive, the addition of -sels ‘self’ is redundant and, unless some special emphasis is required, not added, e.g. ik skamje my ‘I’m ashamed (lit. I shame me)’. In all other cases, the -sels forms (himsels, harsels etc. ‘himself, herself’) are strongly preferred or obligatory (Tiersma 1999: 60). Coastal Dutch dialects, such as South Hollandic and West Flemish, also utilise either mezelf ‘myself’, jezelf ‘yourself’ as a reflexive form. To some extent, then, it looks like we are dealing with a gradual process of lexical qualification, and lexical qualification of pronouns is relatively common in the Germanic languages. For example, in plural formation we find addition of ‘all’ (y’all), ‘ones’ (yunz) and ‘guys’ (you guys) in English, ‘lie(d)e/lu(d)e = people’ (jullie, hulle) in Dutch and Afrikaans, and possibly man, men (iemma(n), jimme) in Frisian (Howe 1996). As such, external influence is probably not necessary per se to account for the -self forms. Nonetheless, the reflexive use of -self appears to have accelerated at a faster rate in English, and over a much wider area, than in Dutch and Frisian, and this could be due to an additional boost of Celtic influence. The same use of -self as an intensifier and a reflexive was, and still is, found in Brittonic languages, and it would have been natural for Britons, and even Welsh and Cornish speakers who acquired English much later, to overgeneralise a construction that was not only similar but identical to their own. Another point made by proponents of the Celtic hypothesis is that the Continental Germanic forms are blends of an object pronoun + self, whereas in English a tendency arose, at least in the first and second persons (but also dialectally in the third person forms) to nominalise the possessive pronoun + self (i.e. in English it is not meself or youself but myself and yourself, as in Welsh). This development of the first and second person forms, in contrast to the third person, is probably partially to do with the resulting phonetic similarity of object and possessive forms when unstressed, following the loss of final -n before consonants in the possessive forms mī(n) and thī(n), which shows up in eleventh-century texts (Jordan 1974: §172). Finally, it is worth reflecting on the fact that Dutch dialects of Zeeland, Utrecht, North Brabant and Antwerp also developed reflexive forms using possessive pronoun + eige(n) ‘own,’ which are essentially the same as the Welsh and English forms, i.e. m'n/j'n/z'n eige ‘my/your/his own,’ but do not appear to derive from
10 external influence. These forms are basically used all the time in reflexive usage in these dialects,8 which is again comparable to the obligatory use of -self-forms in reflexive usage in English. Chapter 6 deals with French influences. Miller argues convincingly that the traditional view of separating an early period of Norman French influence from a later one of Central French influence is oversimplistic (p. 150). He then offers an extensive survey of loans, with discussion of their phonological forms in relation to dialect type, before evaluating the status and cultural spheres of the loans. One well- known feature is the Modern English lexical alternation between animal (< English word) and meat (< French word), i.e. pig/swine–pork, ox/cow–beef, sheep–mutton etc. Miller keeps his discussion short, but he is right to point out that the distinction did not become completely fixed until the eighteenth century, adding that a “thorough study of the history of these terms would be welcome” (p. 168). Fortunately, such a study has just been published (Kornexl & Lenker 2011). Miller also provides excellent surveys of the French morphological legacy and of the numbers of French words borrowed over time. Massive French borrowing started about 1200 and reached a high around 1300 (p. 161). Miller is very skeptical about French having an influence on English syntax, but his discussion of several suggested features in the space of two pages is too brief to be useful. One possible candidate that Miller mentions, albeit lexical in nature, is the old-fashioned relative marker the which. This was often used in late Middle English and is sometimes thought to reflect Old French liquels. However, Miller warns that the form is matched in Danish (unfortunately, he does not say how it got there). It is also matched in Dutch. Schönfeld (1970: §122) points out that the form in Middle Dutch and, though somewhat dated, in Modern Dutch is likely to be French influenced, especially as it has always been restricted to formal written language. In English the matter is not completely settled, but it is clear from various studies that “relative particles appear to be borrowing-prone” (Matras 2007: 61). It is rather surprising that Miller does not discuss or even mention various suggestions of French phonological influence that have been aired. One popular proposal has been the development of a voicing contrast in fricatives – especially the contrast /f/ vs. /v/ – which Minkova (2011: 51) places mainly in the period 1300−1500. This is too late, considering that there was substantial French borrowing in the early 1100s and massive borrowing by about 1200. For an alternative view that also puts British Celtic into the equation, see Laker 2009a. Miller could also have said something about the development of different word accent patterns in English (see Lutz 2009). Chapter 7, on later Latin and Greek influences, starts with an extremely long introduction that goes over already-covered ground, such as British Latin and Latin in Old English, rather than focusing particularly on the later Middle Ages and Renaissance in line with the chronological structure of the book. Towards the end of the chapter, Miller provides a solid overview of various Latin and Greek affixes that are used in word formation. Miller points out that “Any influence beyond the lexicon and word formation is doubtful” (p. 221), but his discussion of suggested influences found in written language is too brief. Likewise, there is no mention of phonological influence, though it could be argued that some Latin influences on English spelling have ultimately had an influence on some standard pronunciations. Miller also broaches the topic of standardisation. Here there are two main streams. First, there was standardisation of Middle English especially in the fifteenth century. For a while there were competing standards in Middle English, but it was the administrative “Chancery Standard” at Westminster that won out because it had institutional support. Miller notes that the “Chancery Standard originated,” neither in the Chancery, nor in the Privy Seal Office, but in the “Signet Office of Henry V [1413–22]” (p. 210). But all this is known because of one scholar’s groundbreaking research, which ought to have been cited (Benskin 1992). Also, the time of development of Westminster English could easily have been narrowed down a little more. It is known that the Signet Office began writing royal missives in English rather than French following Henry V’s invasion of France in August 1417 (Benskin 1992: 80). The second strand of standardisation results from the publication of grammars and usage guides in the eighteenth century, which naturally falls
8 To search for various syntactic variables and view maps, see The Syntactic Atlas of Dutch Dialects (Barbiers et al. 2006). For additional information on Zeelandic dialects, see Van Driel (2004: 60). I am grateful to Michiel de Vaan (Leiden) for details on Dutch dialect usage. 11 outside the renaissance period. Miller (p. 210) remarks that Robert Lowth (1710–1787) is “frequently mentioned as an arch-prescriptivist,” who imposed Latin grammatical rules on English.9 However, a more careful reading of Lowth’s grammar, as a result of much recent research (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2011), shows that “Lowth’s useful stylistic observations were misinterpreted and became dicta carved in granite among his linguistically less sophisticated followers” (p. 211). Finally, Chapter 8 wraps up the book by reviewing its main results: French and Latin provided heavy lexical influence; Scandinavian provides both structural and lexical influence; and Celtic basically only influenced English in terms of its structure. Miller also uses the final chapter to identify some remaining problems. One of these is loss of grammatical gender in English: “loss of gender is variously attributed to Scandinavian, French, or both (Miller 1997)”. This last observation illustrates a point touched upon earlier. Miller states in the preface that the “different types of contact are analyzed within the framework of Trudgill (2010, 2011a, 2011b).” But in doing so Miller adopts Trudgill’s ideas about Celtic-induced complexification and skirts around his insights on Celtic-induced simplification, namely that second language acquisition by adult Britons led to a reduction of inflectional morphology and loss of grammatical gender. Miller’s statement (cited above) would imply that Britons acquired the complex and usually redundant Old English inflectional morphology very well, and that only later Scandinavian and French contacts brought about its destruction. This is clearly an implausible proposition, as Trudgill (2010, 2011a, 2011b) explained already. Elsewhere, however, Miller does accept the view that there could have been a combination of early Celtic and later Norse influence in the North.10 In conclusion, this is the first history of the English language to focus exclusively on external influences. Miller covers a mesmerisingly large range of lexical, morphological and syntactical influences (less so phonology). His discussions are not limited to generally accepted instances of external influence but also extend to less well-known and disputed cases. Original research and ideas on difficult points are offered throughout, and these will help to generate further discussion and refinement. Overall, it is a valuable contribution to current scholarship on early English linguistic contacts, and it will serve as a useful resource for teaching and research.
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9 The notion of Lowth as an arch-prescriptivist is often overstated. Criticism of Lowth in recent times has been mainly limited to the internet. One such site was set up by a certain Scott E. Kapel, who posted a short essay he had written for a History of English undergraduate module at university. Unfortunately, in the same essay Kapel (1996–97) rather irreverently accused Lowth of being a fool. Though nothing more than a poorly written term paper, it has since been rebuked and ridiculed by university professors. Anybody can upload a term paper, and much worse, to the internet, but serious linguists should not take such things to heart. Suffice it to say that Kapel’s website has now been taken down. 10 Trudgill (2010: 33) clearly accredits this double reinforcement idea to White (2002, 2003), and White’s papers are very well known in the field. Nonetheless, Miller prefers to attribute the idea to Trudgill (p. 39, 147). 12 Breeze, A. C. 1991. 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Winter, Heidelberg, pp. 29–45.
Stephen Laker Faculty of Languages and Cultures, 744 Moto’oka, Nishi-ku, Fukuoka 819-0395, Japan E-mail address: [email protected]
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