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Future imperfect
The next thousand years of English
By Jan Freeman
Fretting about the state of the English language, at least among amateur practitioners, tends to concern itself with the sins of the recent past and the near future. We think in decades, not centuries; we've already forgotten that a couple of generations ago, the usage cops were scandalized to see ''awful'' and ''awesome'' - which once meant ''awe-inspiring'' - evolve into everyday hyperbole, used to describe foul weather or a fabulous pair of shoes. We've moved on to worrying that our children think ''momentarily'' means ''in a moment,'' and that our grandchildren will speak a nonsensical babble of ''like, anyways, totally, you know.''
How do I love thee?
Let me SPELL the ways.
c. 1000
''Nu ic, Beowulf, thec, secg betsta, me for sunu wylle
freogan on ferhthe... (''Now, Beowulf, thee of heroes best, I shall heartily love as mine own, my son.'')
- Beowulf
c. 1385
''If no love is, O god,
what fele I so?
And if love is, what thing
and whiche is he!
If love be good,
from whennes comth my wo?
If it be wikke,
a wonder thinketh me.''
- Geoffrey Chaucer,
''Troilus and Criseyde''
c. 1595
''This bud of love,
by summer's ripening breath
May prove a beauteous flow'r
when next we meet.''
- William Shakespeare,
''Romeo and Juliet''
1813
''Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed a little in love. ... It is something to think of, and it gives her a sort of distinction among her companions.''
- Jane Austen,
''Pride and Prejudice''
1850
''How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth
and breadth and height
My soul can reach ... ''
- Elizabeth BarrettBrowning,
''Sonnets from thePortuguese''
1876
''A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.''
- Thomas Hardy,
''The Hand ofEthelberta''
1893
''The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.''
- George BernardShaw,
''The Philanderer''
1920
''They lunched in a gay party of six in a private dining-room at the club, while Isabelle and Amory looked at each other tenderly over the fried chicken and knew that their love was to be eternal.''
- F. Scott Fitzgerald,
''This Side of Paradise''
1956
''Love me tender, love me sweet,
Never let me go.
You have made my life complete,
And I love you so.''
- Elvis Presley andVera Matson,
''Love Me Tender''
1998
''See I don't need no alcohol
Your love makes me feel ten feet tall
Without it I'd go through withdrawal
'Cause nothing even matters at all.''
- Lauryn Hill,
''Nothing Even
Matters''
c. 2000
''There was Your Humble Narrator Alex coming home from work to a good hot plate of dinner, and there was this ptitsa all welcoming and greeting like loving. But I could not viddy her all that horrorshow, brothers, I could not think who it might be.''
- Anthony Burgess,
''A Clockwork Orange''
(1962)
c. 4000 (?)
''Jus a little wyl back I ben ready to dy but now Im ready to live a littl and in joy with you so les call this place Hagmans Thril.''
- Russell Hoban,
''Riddley Walker''
(1979, set several
millennia in the future,
after a nuclear
holocaust)
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But the millennium is an invitation to take a longer view - in both directions - of our native tongue. Next year marks the 1,000th birthday of ''Beowulf,'' the most important of the few recorded works in Old English. In fact, the heroic poem about Beowulf's victory over the night-stalking, knight-munching Grendel is even older, but the survival of the sole manuscript copy, recorded circa 1000, surely warrants a celebration. Wear your boar's-head helmet and all your gold bracelets, and serve up plenty of mead.
Your guests won't be toasting one another in Old English, though, unless they've done their homework. The language of ''Beowulf,'' also sometimes called Anglo-Saxon, is a foreign language to 20th-century Americans, a Germanic dialect that came to England with the fifth-century invaders who drove out the native Celts. Old English remains the backbone of our language, and many of its words are with us today - ''freond'' is now ''friend,'' ''hwile'' has become ''while'' - but when you see a line like ''Nalaes hi hine laessan lacum teodan,'' you know you're a long way from the Gettysburg Address.
A millennium ago, no one could have imagined that this little dialect, spoken at the edge of the civilized world, would feed on the languages of England's successive conquerors, engulfing them and fattening itself till today it threatens to take over the world. And yet, so it happened: The Vikings came, saw, occupied, and left English a treasure trove of new words. In 1066, the Normans landed, and their rule made French the language of the leisure class; but 150 years later, the French were becoming English, and again the language of the conquered people was some 10,000 words richer.
By then it was Middle English, the language Chaucer would use, and recognizably kin to Modern English: ''And smale fowles maken melodye/That slepen al the nyght with open eye.'' Two centuries later we got the King James Bible and Shakespeare - the former good enough for generations of Bible readers, the latter accessible enough to furnish Monica Lewinsky with a valentine quotation for her favorite president. And by 1800, Jane Austen was writing novels that a book-loving teenager can read with pleasure today.
So what can we expect in the next 1,000 years? Well, all those little things word people are worrying about will probably happen within the next century: We'll say ''Everyone brought their own lunch'' (and even if you don't like the idea, you'll enjoy John McWhorter's defense of it in his recent book, ''The Word on the Street.'') We'll accept ''Who did you hire?'' - as ''whom''s doomsayers have predicted for decades. But these are trivial compared with the transformations of the past millennium and the possibilities of the coming one. In the year 3000, will anyone be able to read John Updike, or even Jacqueline Susann? Or will today's English be impenetrable to the non-scholar?
Even the experts don't know, and they know it. ''It's likely that English will have changed substantially by 2500 or 3000, just because no language ever stays put for 500 years,'' says Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of ''The Language Instinct'' and ''How the Mind Works.'' But today's widespread literacy, he notes, ''could be a wild card,'' helping to slow the pace of change: Just as the invention of printing stuck us with some odd spellings that happened to be current at the time, the very ubiquity of the written language could help stabilize it.
History supports his caution, having made fools of many a confident prognosticator. ''If, in the Middle Ages, you had dared to predict the death of Latin as the language of education, people would have laughed in your face,'' notes David Crystal in his 1997 book ''English as a Global Language.'' Closer to home, there have been warnings since the American Revolution that British and American English would diverge into mutually unintelligible dialects. Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster believed the split was inevitable; Shaw's Professor Henry Higgins, of course, thought it had already happened.
Anthony Burgess looked into the future in the 1962 novella ''A Clockwork Orange'' and saw a turn-of-the-century England terrorized by violent youths speaking a Slavic patois Burgess called ''nadsat.'' (Yes, Burgess was writing fiction, but he was serious: He once told an interviewer he expected to see tins of human meat in supermarkets by 2001.) In fact, what we've got is mallspeak and TV-speak - a lot more boring, but a lot less scary.
English has not only remained one language, it has extended its reach, thanks to its dominance in television, movies, computer technology, and other sciences, and to the sheer economic power of the United States. Every morning on BBC radio you can hear statesmen and spokeswomen from Asian, African, and European countries speaking adequate-to-fluent English. Worldwide, billions of people have some exposure to the language; depending on what you mean by speaking English, some 400 million to 1.5 billion people may qualify as English-speaking. These include the mother-tongue speakers - Canadian, British, Australian - as well as people in one of the more than 70 countries, such as India and Ghana, that give English some special recognition. English seems poised to become the world's second language, the one most people learn alongside their mother tongue.
That may sound like good news for native speakers of English - especially for Americans, who are mostly monolingual and who enjoy being citizens of the world's most powerful nation, language aside. ''Americans have never had much reason to speak foreign languages well,'' says McWhorter, who teaches linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. ''The little scene in old Berlitz books where a family walks around the capitals of Europe using a phrase book is long obsolete.'' Any tourist who's ever tried to practice her fractured French on a Parisian, only to get a response in condescending English, knows how right McWhorter is.
But a life of complacent monolingualism is hardly an ideal. You may not aspire to read Caesar or Cervantes in the original, but even a beginner's acquaintance with other languages can be a revelation. English is not the only language, you find, with inexplicable idioms and inconsistent spellings. Other languages have different ways of letting us know where to find the subject and the verb. Americans can say some things more economically than Peruvians or Russians or Japanese, other things not at all. In a first-year German class decades ago, one of my fellow students was shocked to find that part of the verb came at the end of a sentence. He raised his hand and asked in astonishment, ''But they don't really think that way, do they?'' In the 21st century, nobody should arrive at college in such a state of innocence.
There's another risk to the English takeover: When the language is spoken everywhere, who says it's ''our'' language? Within a generation, Crystal predicts, there will be more people speaking English in India than in Britain. When the world speaks our language, it will be everyone's language, available to be reshaped and modified to suit the needs of very different cultures. (Of course, it has to remain understandable, or it won't be English. But another nation's ''English'' might be similar enough for communication, yet different enough to wound Americans' pride, as our innovations have miffed the British.)
We make fun of the French for trying to ban foreign words, and congratulate ourselves on the flexibility and expressiveness of our patchwork tongue. But the growth of a truly global English, added to the pressures of the US debate over bilingualism, could provoke a protectionist backlash. Maybe the English Academy dreamed of by Dryden, Swift, and other 18th-century men of letters - a body entrusted with protecting the language - will become a reality at last.
On the other hand, the communications technology could make the globalization of English a bloodless revolution. Crystal imagines a World Standard Spoken English, a common language that would unite peoples without displacing local languages or dialects. Just as we speak different versions of English to our bosses, our children, and our buddies, the citizens of the world would use one language at home, another in international life.
Even a peaceful transition to World English, though, would be a mixed blessing. The spread of English will surely hasten the extinction of less-used languages, which are already withering rapidly. At least we, unlike previous generations, have the means to preserve records of the doomed dialects (assuming our tapes and CDs will not themselves go extinct). But a language lost is like a species lost, gone forever, and with it a set of insights into the way people think.
And it's impossible to guess what the world may be like when we've taught it to speak, if not to sing, in perfect harmony. If English, a few centuries hence, is ''part of a rich multilingual experience for our future newborns, this can only be a good thing,'' concludes David Crystal. ''If it is by then the only language left to learn, it will have been the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known.''
Jan Freeman, an assistant editor of the Globe Magazine, writes The Word column for the Sunday Focus section.
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