Pop culture exported from America, TV and the tabloid press have all played their role in the evolution of the English language. This was softened in a later edition out of respect for the lives lost in the attack.
STANDARD THROUGH THE AGES FULL
A 19th-century pamphlet on middle-class pronunciation teaches readers to drop the "h" in words such as "hospital", "herb" and "humour" a trend that's disappeared, with the exception of the American pronunciation of "herb".Ĭhanging sensibilities are also in evidence in a section on profanities, which includes a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, an edition of the Viz cartoon strip Sweary Mary and analysis on different newspapers' decisions on whether to quote expletives in full or use asterisks (The Guardian opts for the former The Times goes for the more demure route.) Another controversial editorial decision is put on display: the front page of The Sun newspaper on when an Argentine cruiser was sunk, with the famous headline "GOTCHA". Underneath a TV playing My Fair Lady, in which an upper-class gentleman gives elocution lessons to a Cockney flower girl, are books showing changing attitudes to socially acceptable grammar and pronunciation. The way people speak and write has always indicated more than what they want to express: it can also be an indicator of social status. There's a mixture of words that became widely used in English (such as "poppadam", although its spelling changed) and those that didn't ("hing: a repulsively smelling gum-resin which forms a favourite Hindu condiment") in Hobson-Jobson, a dictionary of 2,000 Anglo-Indian words written in 1886 that is also on display. Unlike the words for fabrics, which had no ready equivalent in English, these didn't catch on beyond the local population. "Godown" is used to mean warehouse, while measurements are recorded in "bigahs" and "cottahs". While the front page is written in standard English, the small ads have a few words from Indian languages thrown in, showing their use by the European population of the area. Nearby there's a copy of Hickey's Bengal Gazette, the first English-language newspaper in the Indian subcontinent. All became incorporated into standard English. The British Library owns all the books and logs from the East India Trading Company, so we're able to look at a British cargo list from India in 1724, which includes the words "chints" (from the Hindi), "gingham" (originally Malay) and "seersucker" (from Persian).
One section of the exhibition looks at words imported to (and exported from) India, Africa, America and Australia in the early days of the colonies. Trade, migration, social and political change and technology are a few of the ways that the language keeps changing, and as more and more of the world's population came to speak English as either a first or second language, it has continued to branch out into new hybrid forms. Middle English continued to evolve into the language as it is spoken today, with the invention of the printing press playing a big role in standardising spellings, but the evolution of the language didn't stop there. The story begins with an overview of the language's development, from the Old English spoken by the Germanic Anglo-Saxon tribes that supplanted Roman and Celtic languages, through its combination with Scandinavian dialects and then French during the reign of William the Conqueror. "I have seen these books individually before," said Crystal with awe, talking about four seminal translations of the Bible, "but I have never seen them side by side." Only a couple of books from the huge range on display were borrowed, the majority - books such as Dr Johnson's dictionary from 1755, a 1,000-year-old copy of Beowulf, and handwritten manuscripts by writers such as Betjeman and Pinter - came from the British Library's vast collection. No exhibition anywhere has been devoted to the entire history and present-day global use of the English language." Facts about these words and others were projected onto walls at the exhibition - entitled Evolving English - alongside priceless first editions, hand-drawn maps, Victorian posters and audio recordings of the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Muhammad Ali and Gandhi.Ībout 1.8 billion people around the world speak the language, but according to language expert David Crystal, who collaborated on Evolving English and wrote the accompanying book: "This is a first. The influence of Arabic and Asian languages on English is one strand in a spectacular new exhibition at London's British Library, which includes treasures such as the first English-language Bible, the first printed book in English and the first example of the ancient form of the language, on a medallion dating from 450AD.įor example, the word "admiral" made its way into English from Arabic in 1208, as did "almanac" in 1391, "jar" in 1592 and "sofa" in 1624.
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