for The Teaching of Writing class, 2020
Why, I might begin, is English so riddled with
contradictions? Why do similar words not have the same structures – “mouse” and
“louse” pluralize to “mice” and “lice”, so why does “house” pluralize to “houses”
while “dice” is the plural of “die” (and “douse” is an unrelated verb, not even
a noun)? Why do so many words just not follow the rules? We call such maverick words
“irregular”, but they’re so common that irregularity is practically the norm.
In the video game Katamari Damacy, I might illustrate, there is a ball, the eponymous katamari, which accretes objects to itself. As you roll the katamari over objects, they stick to it, and it grows, until you have grown it from accumulating pins and bugs to accumulating whales and skyscrapers. Why, then, is English such a linguistic katamari, accreting vocabulary to itself until it grows bloated and pendulous with exception upon irregular exception, in a way that other languages are not?
CONQUEST, I might declare, jabbing a finger in the air.
Conquest of the rest of the world by English invaders, obviously; we are all
well aware of this centuries-long history, whence we get words like “juggernaut”
(from Hindi “Jagannath”, “lord of the world”) and “barbeque” (from Arawakan
“barbacoa", “framework of sticks”) and “safari” (from Swahili and Arabic,
meaning “journey”).
However, I might amend, before its history of
conquering everyone else, England has an even longer history of being conquered
by other Europeans. The Romans; the Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons, and
Jutes; the Vikings; and, central to my point, the Norman French under William
the Conquerer. William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England, installed his
Norman cronies at all levels of the government, and instituted Norman French as
the language of law and governance. Meanwhile, the Anglo-Saxon peasantry
continued on as they always had, speaking Anglo-Saxon. Over the centuries, the
two languages merged into one creole, which became modern English. The
grammatical structure and about a quarter of our vocabulary remains Germanic
from the Anglo-Saxon, but much of the rest of our vocabulary is from Latin via
the French (and via later importation by scholars directly from Latin).[1]
English, I might exemplify, has, unusually among the
world’s languages, different words for many meats than the animals whose flesh those
meats are made from. “Pork” comes from Old French “porc”, while “pig” comes
from Anglo-Saxon “picga”. “Beef” comes from Old French “boef”, while “cow”
comes from Anglo-Saxon “cu”. Why? Because only the French-speaking Norman
nobility could afford to eat meat, while the Anglo-Saxon serfs raised the
animals for them! Picga in the Anglo-Saxon farmyard, porc on the Norman dinner table.[2]
Many of the baffling inconsistencies in English, I
might conclude, come from this imposition of Norman French upon Anglo-Saxon.
Most of the words that conjugate or decline in the middle, like “goose” → “geese”
and “throw” → “threw”, come from Anglo-Saxon, while the words that do so at the
end, like “duck” → “ducks” and “toss” → “tossed”, come from Norman French.
Anglo-Saxon has its own rules, separate from those of French vocabulary.
Germanic/Anglo-Saxon words, I might elaborate, have
long been considered by many English thinkers to be stronger, more emphatic,
and more earthy than namby-pamby, formal, and distant Norman French/Latin. Many
efforts or exemplifications have been made, some more serious than others, to
de-Latinize the language.[3] The linguist and novelist JRR Tolkien, for example,
wrote The Lord of the Rings with heavy reliance on the Anglo-Saxon words, in
part to read as stronger, but also because he was trying to simulate a native
English mythology, free of Continental influence.
It is this history, I might bring the lesson home, that
informs the choice that somebody made, at some point, based either on either a
scholarly or an instinctive understanding of this distinction, the decision
that the past tense of the new-fangled slang verb “yeet”[4] is not weak and formal Norman “yeeted” but strong and burly
Anglo-Saxon “yote”.
So, more
or less, would go the lesson, one I’ve been crafting in my head (and with my
friends and my partner, and on Twitter, and in a few different contexts in a
few different classes, and so on) since around the time I decided to become an
English teacher. Not in those specifics, necessarily – Katamari Damacy
and Lord of the Rings may be dated references already, let alone by the
time I get into teaching young people, and who knows how long “yeet” will last
in the lexicon – but in that general gist, for sure.
But this
is an etymology lesson, and halfway a history lesson – does this have a place
in the English classroom? Just how multidisciplinary is the modern high school
classroom?
Of less
direct relevance to me, an English Education 7-12 student, but still an
intriguing question: what of the English as a Second/Next/Foreign Language
classroom – would just knowing that there really is some logic to the
inconsistencies help English language learners?
Is there a
most appropriate time to introduce this lesson – conspire with the social
studies teachers to teach this when they are covering medieval Europe, perhaps?
– though that was fifth grade when I was going through the system, a bit
earlier than I’m going to wind up qualified to teach.
Most
centrally of all, the question I shall focus most of my efforts upon: how
can teaching etymology and the history of English be best incorporated usefully
into teaching modern English grammar (syntax, spelling, vocabulary, etc.)?
I preliminarily begin
my quest with searches on
Buffalo State’s library system for “etymology teaching”, “etymology pedagogy”,
and their ilk.
My eyeball is immediately
seized by an article from 1693 by one Joseph Aickin, “M.A. and Lately one of
the Masters of the Free-School of London-Derry”. How does the English teacher
of the past feel about the present study of the English of the past?
It turns out, even
in his day, students of English were complaining of how ridiculous the language
is – “that Englishmen as well as strangers should account the English Tongue
intricat and difficile; and that they should think that it cannot be reduced to
Grammatical Rules”.[5]
And his response
was similar to mine: He thinks it makes sense, actually:
Besides it is the easiest tongue to be taught and learned in the world; for the Grammatical part of it, may be reduced to a very small volume: and it may be improv’d far beyond the Latine, Greek, or French: it being very fertile and fit for compositions. There is no difficulty at all in the parts of speech, for Nouns have for the most part but two endings, to distinguish their Numbers. There are but two genders. Verbs have but two endings, and but few irregular; all the moods are express’d by eight particles, the tenses by fourteen signs: the formation of the passive voice is made by the auxiliary verb, am; so that the whole Etymological part of the Grammar, is a very short and compendious business.[6]
…Except for the parts where it doesn’t:
for indeed the Orthographical part of the English Tongue is the most difficile; There are many defects in the Orthographical part of the Tongue: for the number of Characters, are not sufficient to express the several articulat sounds, we have, as may appear by the several sounds of the vowel a as in can, cane, call, man, &c. o likewise hath several different sounds, as in god, roll, come, &c. g hath two different sounds as in get and generation: t hath two as in time and nation, c hath two, as in censure and came. Besides custom hath obtained so far upon us, that we are forced to spell words according to the idiom of the Tongue, from whence they are borrowed: nay and most commonly we are forc’t to pronounce these words contrary to the genious of our Tongue; Besides as our Alphabet is defective, so likewise it is Superfluous, for either c or k are needed. Ph sounds the same with f. q might as well be expressed by cw since w e are forced to add u after q to asist it. Cs might found x. ts z. g and j are two letters of the same sound, whereas the one viz. g. might always expresse the sound of g in get: and the other viz. j the sound of g in generation and j in Jesus its natural sound: w indeed is a neat connexion of two single uu’s: but the sound might aswell be expressed by two single uu’s. Y might aswell be express’d by i vowel: when it is taken for a vowel. It would be a great ease to Children, if all the Letters were named from their proper force and sound. But a sudden remedy thereof, is not to be expected.[7]
Aickin is right:
English orthography is the most difficile (at least, I think, outside of
those languages which have hundreds of characters to keep track of). And he’s
right about the source of the problem: English is a linguistic katamari[8],
and we are forced to spell words according to the idiom of the tongue from
whence they are borrowed. We can’t blame just Anglo-Saxon and Norman French for
this one.
Perhaps my case
in the hypothetical lesson was overstated: the Norman Invasion only explains a
substantial chunk of English’s irregularity and is only a subset of what I now
hypothesize to be the ultimate twin causes of everything that’s weird or
interesting about English: conquest and trade (including the transfer of
scholarly ideas under “trade”). Still, the gist of the Norman Invasion more or
less fits into one lesson (so long as you omit irrelevant specifics like
individual battles); good luck covering all English conquests and trades in
less than at least a full year.
Whether or not
I’m inclined to overemphasize the Norman Invasion, the broader question remains
at issue. Aickin is of little help on the specific issue of teaching etymology
and the history of the language, except as an example – he offers only English
in his English class, and he even holds somewhat the opposite position from
what I’m trying to ascertain the efficacy of: he takes specific issue with the
standard schooling practice of his time, the teaching of Latin to the exclusion
of English (he does include in his text the teaching of “etymology”, but he
doesn’t seem to mean by that what we mean today)[9].
In the 17th
century, learned discourse was still conducted in Latin – René “Renatus
Cartesius” Descartes published in Latin from the 1620s through ‘40s; Galileo
Galilei’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was translated
into Latin in 1635, 3 years after its initial publication in Italian[10];
Baruch “Benedictus” de Spinoza’s magnum opus, Ethics, Demonstrated in
Geometrical Order, was published in Latin in 1677; Sir Isaac Newton
published his Principia Mathematica in Latin in 1687. Although one might
notice that those esteemed gentlemen were each of a differing nationality from
all the others (only one of them English), giving them good cause to use a
common lingua franca; why not Latin?
On the other
hand, Aickin’s position, that English should be taught on its own merits, makes
sense in history – by the late 17th century, the turn-of-the-century
English works of William Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible (not
exactly the first English Bible ever, but the first major officially
Church-sanctioned English Bible) would have had time to grow established in the
canon of literature. Aickin would have been well-positioned to argue his case
that English is at least as good for literature, scholarship, and religion as Latin
or any other vernacular[11].
And, to be sure, history has demonstrated him correct, at least insofar as English
has taken over from Latin as the language of science[12].
Aickin is a
fascinating diversion, and the above digression could easily germinate another
example lesson in the history of the language, but he doesn’t exactly answer: How
can teaching etymology and the history of English be best incorporated usefully
into teaching modern English?
“Every standardized test that the student
takes from high school through college contains a section on word meanings. I
have found that a one-semester etymology course can raise the class vocabulary
average a full grade level”[13].
That’s more like it. J.D. Sadler: “Etymology and Latin Teaching”, 1970. In this
paper, Sadler is trying to recruit students to Latin classes, by discussing the
Latin roots of many English words. He gives a plethora of examples – without covering
the actual history of why English has all this Latin vocabulary.
If you were a
student of Latin, you could be forgiven for assuming that our Latin words come
from Roman rule over England in the first four centuries (as my Latin
textbooks, the Cambridge Latin Course, implied). But it turns out that Roman
Latin only had limited influence on Anglo-Saxon (as the Anglo-Saxons later
invaded Britain and imposed their own Germanic language on the Celts, mostly overwriting
the earlier Roman influence on the Celts), and most of these words come through
the Normans and later scholars importing Latin words![14]
Sadler’s article
also touches on teaching English etymology to improve student understanding of
Latin. Which does recall how I did well in my Latin classes – most Latin words
have English descendants, so if you have a large enough English vocabulary,
most Latin words are easily rememberable (and a smattering of Spanish
vocabulary picked up the slack) – so I agree with him here.
Similarly,
Rasinski et al. summarize existing research since Sadler: “Studies have
demonstrated the promise of teaching Latin and Greek roots in the intermediate
grades”, and go on to propose that Latin and Greek roots be taught even at
elementary levels – though, again, without their historical contexts.[15]
Moreover,
Hosseini et al. studied etymology as a technique for teaching vocabulary to
learners of English as a Foreign Language and determined that it compares
favorably in results to memorizing the dictionary definitions. Latin and Greek
etymology of English words helps every English learner, but especially native
speakers of Romance languages.[16]
Thus the
literature appears to have a broad consensus: learning etymology, in the form
of common roots and affixes, especially Latin and Greek ones, is beneficial for
learning English vocabulary. The answer to this part of the question is a
straightforward “yes”, seeming to require not a tremendous amount of
elaboration.
But I see no
mention being made of teaching the history of the language as context for that
etymological study. Perhaps the academy wants us to just stay in our lane as
English teachers and leave history to the history teachers.
So, the
unanswered part of the question remains: How can teaching the history of
English be best incorporated usefully into teaching modern English?
A few initially
promising, but ultimately fruitless, articles ensue in further explorations.
Then:
Aha, a find! Kate
Parry: “A language in common: an approach to teaching the history of English”.
Sounds perfect!
Parry teaches a
course on English literature, which she structures into three parts, which she
calls European, Neo-European, and Non-European. European is the history of the English
language up until the Age of Exploration, before England started colonizing
everything (which, one might observe, covers the overwhelming bulk of recorded history,
not to mention all of human prehistory, though Parry consciously eschews
teaching any prehistory); Neo-European covers English settlers and colonists
and invaders elsewhere; and Non-European
covers everybody who’s been forced, more or less against their will, to speak
the language – primarily, those who dwelt upon land colonized by Europeans and
persons forced to migrate at the end of a whip, into servitude under English
speakers. [17]
Parry aims her
focus strongly at the side of history where Zinn’s People’s History
dwells, that which has often been neglected in mainstream education but has
come into vogue recently, the history of that informs the English(es) her City
University of New York students tend to speak. Even though the European
category forms the overwhelming bulk of time, not to mention of development of
the language, Parry focuses at least equal attention on the Non-European
category. She likes to use primary and literary sources, but, as she points out,
“literary sources […] have an inbuilt bias. Their authors must be literate,
which means that before the nineteenth century nearly all those who wrote in
English belonged to a minority that was at least relatively wealthy and
relatively close to the centers of power.”[18]
I say Zinn-style history has been neglected in mainstream education, but really, the lesson I outlined at the beginning of this paper was also neglected in my education – not once in all my history classes from kindergarten through secondary school, much less in any English classes, were the name “William the Conquerer” or the term “Norman Invasion” so much as mentioned in passing. I first encountered reference to this series of events through a video game, Crusader Kings II, which I first played as an adult, years after having acquired a bachelor’s degree. (Virtually all of what I know about history – indeed, everything outside of the Revolutionary War, which was all any of my history classes ever covered, with the exception of a vague overview of Medieval Europe in fifth grade and a barest surface-level survey of the entire history of the entire world, called “Global Studies”, in ninth grade – I have learned, from a variety of sources, since leaving school. My beef with the state of history pedagogy, at least as it was inflicted upon me in ‘90s and early ‘00s America, could stock a butcher’s shop for a year. But I am studying to be an English teacher, not a history teacher.)
Parry’s focus on
the development of the language from the perspective of the oppressed is one I
hadn’t considered, and which should probably inform future lessons... just not,
perhaps, William the Conquerer – except insofar as the native Anglo-Saxon dwellers
in England found themselves on the oppressed side of history under Norman boots,
at the points of Norman swords.
It does come to
mind that the Anglo-Saxons themselves had invaded the native Celts only half a
millennium prior, not to mention the Roman occupation of the first few
centuries. Is there a point to be made that even the English have a long
history of having been oppressed? Perhaps England is as the schoolyard bully
who only inflicts upon his peers what has been inflicted on him at home. Or
does that simply muddy the dominant “England has oppressed everyone forever”
narrative?
Here's an
interesting lesson, from Parry:
My students do a substantial amount of work, however, on documented changes in English spelling, grammar, and vocabulary, through a series of assignments in which they examine in detail two biblical verses as translated by Ælfric in c. 1000, by the Wycliffites in 1375, by Tyndale in 1525, and by the King James translators in 1611 (Burnley 2000). They have first to transcribe their verses (I tell them that they must pretend to be medieval monks), then gloss each word of the two earlier versions (which requires using the Oxford English Dictionary extensively as well as the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary of Bosworth and Toller) and write about the changes that they have observed in the language through doing these exercises[19]
This recalls the
Aickin-based rudiments of a lesson, above. It doesn’t sound very fun – a
bit tedious, in fact – but it’s for sure interesting. (It would probably be
improper to pick any of the really fun verses, like the part where Jesus gets
hangry at an out-of-season fig tree and curses it to barrenness[20],
or the part where the prophet Elisha sics two she-bears to maul forty-two
youths who were calling him names[21],
or the randiest parts of Song of Solomon, or the most psychedelic parts of Revelation.)
Parry’s teachings
seem a solid basis for borrowing ideas from, but only as history of English qua
history of English. Would her work inform learners of the English language, its
grammar and vocabulary?
At this point, we
have now explored teaching the history of English, as pertaining to the earlier
question of teaching etymology, so the portion of the question that remains is:
How can the above be best combined and incorporated usefully into teaching
modern English?
As I’m running
into a bit of a wall, source-wise, let us take stock. What have we accomplished
so far? We have, among other things, determined that Latin and Greek etymology
is useful for teaching modern English; and we have explored how to teach
history of English. Perhaps our quest is now to simply construct a transitive
argument, connecting the teaching of history of English to the teaching of
etymology, and thereby determining: “We have determined that Latin and Greek
etymology is useful for teaching modern English, and we (will) have determined
that history of English is useful for teaching etymology, so therefore history
of English is useful for teaching modern English.” (The possibility remains open
that there is not much overlap between the portions of history of English that
are useful to teaching etymology and the portions of the teaching of etymology
that are useful to teaching modern English, but I’m content to leave that
possibility dangling.) What we need now, to complete the argument, is to
determine if history of English really is useful for teaching etymology. On the
one hand: obviously yes. On the other hand: let’s see if we can find some
support for this obvious thing.
Fred Robinson’s
article, “The History of English and Its Practical Uses”, covers both etymology
and history. I first found it to back up my existing understanding of
Anglo-Saxon and the Norman invasion[22],
but it’s good for other purposes, as well. It is not about teaching
etymology through teaching history, but it does teach etymology through
teaching history, so at least I have an example of this working well. (He also
draws a new-to-me distinction, which could be further explored in the lesson I
sketched out while writing about Aickin, between the Latinate words that come
to us via Norman French and the Latinate words that come to us through the
coinages of late-medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment scholars.) Robinson,
therefore, is an example of an apparently effective pedagogical technique, not
a study of the effectiveness of pedagogical techniques, so the answer to
question of “how”, then, has currently become “as Robinson does.[23]
Summing up,
then:
I have
determined that etymology and the history of English clearly have a place in
the English classroom, and the latter can inform the former; that etymology, at
least, has a place in the English as a Second/Next/Foreign Language classroom, though
I haven’t specifically answered whether simply knowing that there is a logic to
English can help English language learners; I have not addressed specifically
when this history of English should be taught, though for etymology it seems fine
to sprinkle it through every vocabulary lesson.
As for the centralmost question: How can teaching etymology and the history of English be best incorporated usefully into teaching modern English grammar (syntax, spelling, vocabulary, etc.)? I have dug up a few examples[24] that seem effective and interesting to me, through I have turned up little scientific study of the assessment-based results of this specific pedagogical technique. This, then, is the traditional point where one might say “Further study is warranted.”
Further
study is warranted.
Aickin, J. (1693). THE English Grammar: OR, The
ENGLISH TONGUE Reduced to Grammatical Rules: Containing The Four parts of
Grammar, [etc.]. London: M.B. Retrieved from
https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/vfepa5/alma999210693104813
Hosseini, E., Sarfallah, S.,
Bakhshipour, F., & Dolatabadi, H. R. (2012, September). The Impact of
Using Etymological Analysis on Teaching Vocabulary to EFL University Students.
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2(9), 1868-1876.
doi:10.4304/tpls.2.9.1868-1876
Parry, K. (2018). A language
in common: an approach to teaching the history of English. Word, 64(1),
1-8. doi:10.1080/00437956.2018.1425185
Rasinski, T. V., Padak, N.,
Newton, J., & Newton, E. (2011). The Latin-Greek Connection: Building
Vocabulary Through Morphological Study. The Reading Teacher, 65(2),
133-141. doi:DOI:10.1002/TRTR.01015
Robinson, F. C. (2004, July
1). The History of English and Its Practical Uses. The Sewanee Review, 112(3),
376-395. Retrieved October 26, 2020, from
https://suny-bsc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01SUNY_BSC/7q3gmc/cdi_proquest_journals_212014859
Sadler, J. (1970, December).
Etymology and Latin Teaching. The Classical World, 64(4), 117-120.
doi:10.2307/4347341
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
yeet, v. to throw from oneself with great force
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
Not his words.
[9]
[10]
I love the central conceit of Galileo’s Dialogue – he’s practically
like, “Here are two opposing worldviews, equal in weight, which I present
without bias or opinion, and also one of them is espoused by a character named
Imbecile.”
[11]
[12]
One could argue, accurately but perhaps sophomorically, that the current most
common language of science (and everything, and everyone) is, in fact, binary
code.
[13]
[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]
[18]
[19]
[20]
Matthew 21:18-22
[21]
2 Kings 2:23-24
[22]
I found Robinson at roughly this point in writing the paper, just before
beginning to piece together a final conclusion – my example lesson was
initially from my own recollections of previously-read sources, not new-to-me
sources, and I tucked the Robinson citations in well after the writing of that
section.
[23]
[24]
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