Free The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson Page B

Condell, taken the considerable trouble of assembling an anthology of his work, the famous First Folio, in 1623, seven years after his death, sixteen of his plays would very probably have been lost to us forever. As it is two have been: Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won.
    Not a single Shakespeare manuscript survives, so, as with Chau-cer, we cannot be sure how closely the work we know is really Shakespeare's. Hemming and Condell consulted any number of sources to produce their folio—printers' manuscripts, actors'
    promptbooks, even the memories of other actors. But from what happened to the work of other authors it is probable that they have been changed a lot. One of Shakespeare's publishers was Richard Field and it is known from extant manuscripts that when Field published the work of the poet John Harrington he made more than a thousand changes to the spelling and phrasing. It is unlikely that he did less with Shakespeare, particularly since Shakespeare himself seemed singularly unconcerned with what became of his work after his death. As far as is known, he did not bother to save any of his poems and plays—a fact that is sometimes taken as evidence that he didn't write them.
    There have been many other more subtle changes in English since Shakespeare's day. One has been the rise of the progressive THE MOTHER TONGUE
    verb form. Where we would say, "What are you reading?, Shake-speare could only say, "What do you read?" He would have had difficulty expressing the distinctions contained in "I am going," "I was going," "I have been going," and "I will (or shall) be going."
    The passive-progressive construction, as in "The house is being built," was quite unknown to him. Yet it goes without saying that this scarcely slowed him down.
    Even in its greatest flowering English was still considered in many respects a second-rate language. Newton's Principia and Ba-con's Novum Organum were both published in Latin. Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia in Latin. William Harvey wrote his treatise on the circulation of blood (written in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death) in Latin. Edward Gibbon wrote his histories in French and then translated them into English. As Baugh and Cable note,
    "The use of English for purposes of scholarship was frankly ex-perimental."
    Moreover in Shakespeare's day English had yet to conquer the whole of the British Isles. It was the language of England and lowland Scotland, but it had barely penetrated into Wales, Ireland, and the Scottish Highlands and islands—and would not for some time. (As recently as this century Britain was able to elect a prime minister whose native tongue was not English: to wit, the Welsh-speaking David Lloyd George.) In 1582, the scholar Richard Mul-caster noted glumly: "The English tongue is of small account, stretching no further than this island of ours, nay not there over all."
    He had no way of knowing that within less than a generation English would be transported to the New World, where it would begin its inexorable rise to becoming the foremost language of the world.

    5.
    WHE E WO 1' DS
    COMB FROM
    I F YOU HAVE A MORBID FEAR OF PEA-
    nut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia. There is a word to describe the state of being a woman: muliebrity. And there's a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis. If you harbor an urge to look through the windows of the homes you pass, there is a word for the condition: crytoscopophilia. When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of falling, there is a word for it: it's a myoclonic jerk. If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, with-out saying flat out that is has a circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon. There is even a word for a figure of speech in which two connotative words linked by a conjunction express a complex notion that would normally be conveyed by an adjective and