Authors: Bill Bryson
Sometimes the early explorers took Indians back to Europe with them. Such had been the fate of the heroic Squanto, whose life story reads like an implausible picaresque novel. He had been picked up by a seafarer named George Weymouth in 1605 and carried off – whether voluntarily or not is unknown – to England. There he had spent nine years working at various jobs before returning to the New World as interpreter for John Smith on his voyage of 1613. As reward for his help, Smith gave Squanto his liberty. But no sooner had Squanto been reunited with his tribe than he and nineteen of his fellows were kidnapped by another Englishman, who carried them off to Málaga, and sold them as slaves. Squanto worked as a house servant in Spain before somehow managing to escape to England, where he worked for a time for a merchant in the City of London before finally, in 1619, returning to the New World on yet another exploratory expedition of the New England coast.
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Altogether he had been away for nearly fifteen years, and he returned to find that only a short while before his tribe had been wiped out by a plague – almost certainly smallpox introduced by visiting sailors.
Thus Squanto had certain grounds to be disgruntled. Not only had Europeans inadvertently exterminated his tribe, but twice had carried him off and once sold him into slavery. Fortunately for the Pilgrims, Squanto was of a forgiving nature. Having spent the greater part of his adult life among the English, he may well have felt more comfortable among Britons than among his own people. In any case, he
settled with them and for the next year, until he died of a sudden fever, served as their faithful teacher, interpreter, ambassador and friend. Thanks to him, the future of English in the New World was assured.
The question of what kind of English it was, and would become, lies at the heart of what follows.
We whoſe names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereigne Lord, King James, by ye grace of God, of Great Britaine, France and Ireland, King, defender of ye faith, etc., haveing undertaken for ye glory of God and advancement of ye Christian faith, and honour of our King and countrie, a voyage to plant ye firſt Colonie in ye Northerne parts of Virginia, doe by theſe presents Solemnly, and mutualy ... covenant and combine our?elves togeather into a civil body politick for our better ordering and preſervation and furtherance of ye end aforeſaid ...
So begins the
Mayflower Compact,
written in 1620 shortly before the Mayflower Pilgrims stepped ashore. The passage, I need hardly point out, contains some differences from modern English. We no longer use S interchangeably with s, or
ye
for
the
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A few spellings –
Britaine, togeather, Northerne
– clearly vary from modern practice, but generally only slightly and not enough to confuse us, whereas only a generation before we would find far greater irregularities (for example,
gelousie, conseil, audacite, wiche, loware
for
jealousy, council,
audacity, which
and
lower).
We would not nowadays refer to a ‘dread sovereign’, and if we did we would not mean by it one to be held in awe. But allowing for these few anachronisms, the passage is clear, recognizable, wholly accessible English. Were we, however, somehow to be transported to the Plymouth colony of 1620 and allowed to eavesdrop on the conversations of those who drew up and signed the
Mayflower Compact,
we would almost certainly be astonished at how different – how frequently incomprehensible – much of their spoken language would be to us. Though it would be clearly identifiable as English, it would be a variety of English unlike any we had heard before. Among the differences that would most immediately strike us:
I am monarch of all I survey ...
From the centre all round to the sea.
Different as this English was from modern English, it was nearly as different again from the English spoken only a generation or two before in the mid-1500s. In countless ways, the language of the Pilgrims was strikingly more advanced, less visibly rooted in the conventions and inflections of Middle English, than that of their grandparents or even parents.
The old practice of making plurals by adding
-n
was rapidly giving way to the newer convention of adding – s, so that by 1620 most people were saying
knees
instead of
kneen, houses
instead of
housen, fleas
instead
offlean.
The transition was by no means complete at the time of the Pilgrims – we can find
eyen
for
eyes
and
shoon
for
shoes
in Shakespeare – and indeed survives yet in a few words, notably
children, brethren
and
oxen,
but the process was well under way.
A similar transformation was happening with the terminal
-th
on verbs like
maketh, leadeth
and
runneth,
which also were
increasingly being given an
-s
ending in the modern way. Shakespeare used
-s
terminations almost exclusively except for
hath
and
doth.
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Only the most conservative works, such as the King James Bible of 1611, which contains no
-s
forms, stayed faithful to the old pattern. Interestingly, it appears that by the early seventeenth century even when the word was spelled with a
-th
termination it was pronounced as if spelled with an
-s.
In other words, people wrote ‘hath’ but said ‘has’, saw ‘doth’ but thought ‘does’, read ‘goeth’ as ‘goes’. The practice is well illustrated in Hodges’
Special Help to Orthographie,
which lists as homophones such seemingly odd bedfellows as
weights
and
waiteth, cox
and
cocketh, rights
and
righteth, rose
and
roweth.
At the same time, endings in
-ed
were beginning to be blurred. Before the Elizabethan age, an
-ed
ending was accorded its full phonetic value, a practice we preserve in a few words like
beloved
and
blessed.
But by the time of the Pilgrims the modern habit of eliding the ending (except after
t
and
d)
was taking over. For nearly two hundred years, the truncated pronunciation was indicated in writing with an apostrophe –
drown’d, frown’d, weav’d
and so on. Not until the end of the eighteenth century would the elided pronunciation become so general as to render this spelling distinction unnecessary.
The median
t
in
Christmas, soften
and
hasten
and other such words was beginning to disappear (though it has been re-introduced by many people in
often).
Just coming into vogue, too, was the
sh
sound of
ocean, creation, passion
and
sugar.
Previously such words had been pronounced as sibilants, as many Britons still say ‘tissyou’ and ‘iss-you’ for
tissue
and
issue
.
The early colonists were among the first to use the new word
good-bye,
contracted from
God be with you
and still at that time often spelled ‘Godbwye’, and were among the first to employ the more democratic forms
ye
and
you
in preference to the traditional
thee, thy
and
thou,
though many drifted uncertainly between the forms, as Shakespeare himself did, even sometimes in adjoining sentences, as in
1 Henry IV:
’I love thee infinitely. But hark you, Kate.’
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