Free The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson Page B

because they were welcomed.
    Thanks to the proliferation of English dialects during the period of Norman rule, by the fifteenth century people in one part of England often could not understand people in another part. William Caxton, the first person to print a book in English, noted the sort of misunderstandings that were common in his day in the preface to Eneydos in 1490, in which he related the story of a group of London sailors heading down the River “Tamyse” for Holland who found themselves becalmed in Kent. Seeking food, one of them approached a farmer’s wife and “axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys” but was met with blank looks by the wife who answered that she “coude speke no frenshe.” The sailors had traveled barely fifty miles and yet their language was scarcely recognizable to another speaker of English. In Kent, eggs were eyren and would remain so for at least another fifty years.
    A century later the poet George Puttenham noted that the English of London stretched not much more than sixty miles from the city. But its influence was growing all the time. The size and importance of London guaranteed that its dialect would eventually triumph, though other factors helped—such as the fact that the East Midlands dialect (its formal name) had fewer grammatical extremes than other dialects and that the East Midlands area was the seat of the two main universities, Oxford and Cambridge, whose graduates naturally tended to act as linguistic missionaries.
    Chaucer’s was the language of London—and therefore comparatively easy for us to follow. We may not instantly apprehend all the words, but when we see the prologue of The Canterbury Tales we can at the very least recognize it as English:
    When that Aprille with his shoures sote
    The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
    And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
    Of which vertue engendred is the flour.
    Compare that with this passage in the Kentish dialect written at about the same time: “And vorlet ous oure yeldinges: ase and we vorleteþ oure yelderes, and ne ous led naȝt, in-to vondinge, ac vri ous vram queade.” Recognize it? It’s the last sentence of the Lord’s Prayer, beginning, “And forgive us our trespasses . . .” As the Chaucer authority David Burnley notes, many of the poet’s contemporaries outside London were still using spellings and phrasings that “make their works scarcely intelligible to us without special study” [ Chaucer’s Language, page 10]. Some of the dialects of the north were virtually foreign languages—and indeed can sometimes still seem so.
    This was a period of the most enormous and rapid change in English, as Caxton himself noted when he wrote: “And certaynly our langage now used varyeth ferre [far] from that which was used and spoken when I was borne.” Caxton was born just twenty-two years after Chaucer died, yet in the space of that time the English of London moved from being medieval to modern. The difference is striking. Where even now we can understand Chaucer only with a fair lavishing of footnotes, Caxton can be as easily followed as Shakespeare. Caxton’s spellings often look curious to us today, but the vocabulary is little changed, and we can read him at more or less normal speed, as when he writes: “I was sittyng in my study [when] to my hande came a lytle booke in frenshe, which late was translated oute of latyn by some noble clerke of fraunce. . . .”
    Even so, English by Chaucer’s time had already undergone many consequential changes. The most notable is that it had lost most of its inflections. Gender had disappeared in the north of England and was on its knees in the south. Adjectives, which had once been inflected up to eleven ways, now had just two inflections, for singular and plural (e.g., a fressh floure, but fresshe floures), but even here there was a growing