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COPYRIGHT 2004 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
This paper suggests that diglossia in caste-like Anglo-Saxon societies consisted of O[E.sub.H] used by a very, small elite of largely Continental Germanic ancestry and O[E.sub.L] spoken by the bulk of the population. These shifted from British (Low) Latin and Late British to Old English (OE) after the Anglo-Saxon Conquest, in some areas over a period of about 300 years. It is hard to guess what the spoken language of the users of O[E.sub.H] was like and how great the gap between the spoken and written language was. The latter, through intensive networking, was kept remarkably constant over the entire OE period. Speakers of O[E.sub.L] are likely to have produced the attrition of inflections in the NP and the acquisition of aspectual distinctions in the VP. This surfaced in writing only after the whole-sale replacement of the Anglo-Saxon elite by the Normans. Cross-language contact linguistic research has shown that bottom-up language shift of large population groups is likely to produce grammatical (and phonological) contact phenomena in the target language rather than lexical ones. It is therefore claimed that Middle English started to be spoken as a low variety of English not after the Norman Conquest, but not long after the Anglo-Saxon Conquest.
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As we all know, the Anglo-Saxon period is the longest period in the history of the English language. By its external political demarcations (fifth century AD to the end of the eleventh century AD), Anglo-Saxon culture was present for around 600 years in the island of Britain. (1) This is a very long period, indeed. Within this period, Anglo-Saxon culture had a written presence for about 400 years. I would assume that Old English was enscripted in alphabetical characters around the beginning of the seventh century, with the impact of Christianization which started from both ends of the island, north and south. According to the Venerable Bede, Saint Augustin landed in Kent in 597 AD at the request of Pope Gregory the Great (ca. 540-604 AD) and Lindisfarne ("Holy Island") was founded by Saint Aidan in 634 AD. Aidan came from the island of Iona (Inner Hebrides) and was a representative of the Irish Church. The entire conversion process of the Anglo-Saxons lasted from 587-681 AD, coming to a close when Saint Wilfrid converted the South Saxons of the Isle of Wight to Christianity. And with Christianity came of course the acquisition of the cultural technology of writing. The Northern scriptoria exerted a lasting effect on the writing of Old English right up to the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, as the invariable use of the so-called "insular script" for the writing of Old English demonstrates, a script which is Irish in origin.
Interesting evidence of the process of the enscripting of Old English in the Northern cultural province is, for instance, provided by Bede's well-known story of Caedmon and the divine inspiration of the beginning of Old English literature (HE IV.23). Caedmon's poems were orally composed and later taken down in writing by the monks of Whitby. Bede says that Caedmon composed his songs in sua, id est Anglorum, lingua (Colgrave and Mynors 1969: 414), i.e. in English. But his name bears witness to his British ancestry.
A short side remark: it is interesting to note that the name of Caedmon is an Anglicization by oral loan of a Brittonic hero's or warrior's name, evidenced among the British princes in the seventh century. *Catu-mand-os in Brittonic meant 'war horse' or 'war pony'. (2) There is, for instance, the Cata-man-us inscribed stone in Anglesey, which has been securely dated to the first hall of the seventh century. (3) The Old English spelling (and pronunciation) of this Brittonic name is interesting, since both unstressed syllables of the compound *Catu-mand-os are dropped, by syncope of the composition vowel and by apocope of the inflectional ending (> Late British Cad[mu]ann, with lenition of the originally intervocalic */m/as*/v/in the environment of the voiced stop/d/) (cf. Coates (2002: 16)). This conforms to the historical development of Brittonic morphology during the four centuries the Britons lived under Roman rule. During that period, unstressed syllables were affected both by syncope and apocopy. Brittonic shed its inflectional endings in the NP, with the sole exception of number marking (singular and plural). (4) So Bede spelt and the monks and nuns of Whitby heard and pronounced the heroic Brittonic name of their cowherd as Caedmon. In today's Welsh, the name Cadfan is pronounced/'kadvan/. (5)
According to Bede's story (HE IV.24), Caedmon's religions poems were orally composed. These poems were later committed to parchment by the monks as were other poems which have been preserved in the Old Northumbrian dialect from about the eighth century (Caedmon's Hymn, Bede's Deathsong, Leyden Riddle, Ruthwell Cross). In his letter to his fellow teacher Cuthwin, Cuthbert diaconus writes that Bede was occupied by translating the Gospel of St. John and Isidor's book on De natura rerum into Old English (Colgrave and Mynors 1969: 582). Unfortunately, these translations have not survived. No doubt, Old Northumbrian was a fully-fledged literary language.
The written Old English language appears to have been or to have been kept remarkably constant over the entire period of Anglo-Saxon writing, in spite of the change of a few spelling conventions. These represented, among other things, both a further development and a Germanicization of the spelling because of the introduction of runic symbols into the Latin-derived alphabet (th > [thorn], uu > p). The dialectal variations are remarkably few. The oldest texts from Northumbria (seventh/eighth century) and the late West Saxon texts some three hundred years later (eleventh/twelfth century) show surprisingly little typological change of the grammatical structure of the language. This suggests that strong efforts were made to keep the written language unchanged. The late Anglo-Saxon efforts to this effect under the Benedictine Reform have been recently documented by Lucia Kornexl (2000) and Mechthild Gretsch (2001, 2003). It seems that the theocratic elite of late Anglo-Saxon England deliberately enforced the standardization of Old English as a means of political control, which was exposed to the threat of political disintegration at the hands of the Vikings. The Viking administration under King Knut and archbishop Wulfstan, however, followed suit in maintaining the West Saxon written standard. Written standard Old English only began to crumble during the reign of Henry I (1100-4135). The late annal entries in the Peterborough Chronicle, for instance, show that in Peterborough the OE written standard was only given up after 1121. The language of the First Continuation, covering the years 1122 to 1131, is still strongly influenced by the OE written standard, but already shows current features of the spoken language. But the annals of the Final Continuation, dealing with the years 1131-1154, are "incontrovertibly Middle English" (Clark 1970: lii) in lexis, morphology and spelling.
The earliest Middle English texts give evidence of a great typological change. With apparent suddenness appeared the drift away from syntheticity to analycity. All Germanic languages are subject to this drift, but here it appeared with particular strength. The general pattern of the accelerated typological drift in the early Middle English period was as follows: English was well ahead of the other Germanic languages and the North of England was well ahead of all other Middle English dialects in the spread of analyticity and of other linguistic innovations. Why was this so? Why this seemingly sudden und accelerated development?
Four possible scenarios have been proposed to explain this sudden shift from Old English to Middle English: three language internal scenarios and one external scenario, internal referring to systemic linguistic changes and external meaning "language contact."
One infernal answer to the question of sudden change in grammatical profile is, according to Robert M.W. Dixon (1997:67 ff.), the recourse to the punctuated equilibrium model. Is the sudden change from Old English to Middle English an example of a punctuated development? The punctuated equilibrium model claims that the rate at which languages change need not be constant. Languages may change or evolve very little over long periods of time and then, all of a sudden, they may be subject to radical typological changes.
equilibrium period [right arrow] sudden punctuation
Dixon writes: "I suggest that many types of change within a language are not gradual but rather happen fairly suddenly, often within the space of...
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