English, but not as we know it

AH THE Bard of Avon.

The wonderful, inimitable yet to the majority incomprehensible Shakespeare. The above quotation is from Act 1 Scene 3 of Hamlet. It is Ophelia’s riposte to her brother Laertes’ lengthy and dogmatic monologue in which he advises his sister to stay away from that well-known lothario Prince Hamlet.

Ophelia listens respectfully to her brother but with this five-line quip suggests he might do well to keep his own lusty desires under control. No doubt, in its day Ophelia’s retort got quite the giggle from its audience, exposing as it does male double standards while at the same time mocking the sincerity of religious preaching and preachers.

But for the poor Leaving Certificate students, who on Thursday have to tackle questions on the play, there is probably nothing even remotely humorous about it.

So why then do we put them through it? After all it’s not really English, is it? “Shakespeare drove English in so many different dimensions,” says Robert Lane Greene, an American journalist with the Economist magazine and author of You Are What You Speak, a book on the politics of language.

“Just from the literary point of view he was one of the most important minds ever. If you think of this Englishman who wrote about a Jewish merchant in Italy or a black man struggling against prejudice in Europe — it’s just an amazing imagination. So his stories translate through time. But his thumbprint on English language is actually huge. He gave us many words that he used only for the first time.”

Greene, who speaks nine languages, says that many of those words that we now accept today were considered absolutely unacceptable back in Shakespeare’s time. For example, from the noun ‘author’ Shakespeare came up with the verb ‘to author’, much in the same way that Google has become ‘to google’.

So, when students leave their exam halls it might be of some comfort to know Shakespeare was a bit of a rebel or rule breaker in his day. And perhaps we should not worry so much if those same students text home after their exam to say: ‘done good I tink c u @ home’. It is surely all part of the ever changing organism that is language.

“The whole premise of my book is that people are very attached to their language or even their own form of the language, whether it’s their dialect or whatever,” says Greene. “It’s such a huge part of our identity. As soon as you open your mouth you reveal so much about yourself. So people who are sticklers for what we might call standard English are putting on display their mastery of a code that kind of gives them status. They’ve learned high status English. They’ve learned a bunch of rules and they can walk around judging people who break these little rules.”

But as Greene points out, these rules are really very new. In many cases the rules of language were made up or codified by those in power who wanted to unify people under the then new 19th century notion of the nation-state. Tuscan became Italian, Castilian became Spanish, upper class London English became English and through language countries and empires were thus defined.

Greene’s research has brought him to the conclusion that no type or dialect of English, Spanish or Italian is superior to another on any real basis other than sociological. And although he says that does not mean a language should not have rules, he explains that many of those rules, as well as being bogus, were laid down by “one stickler who managed to somehow stick around”.

What fascinates Greene are the colourful variations to those rules that are of course perfectly natural within the confines of a dialect. They have simply developed that way.

He uses the brilliant TV series The Wire, set in the US city of Baltimore, as an example.

“I watched The Wire recently with my wife who is Danish but speaks absolutely fluent English,” he explains. “But this was street Baltimorese and she needed the subtitles.”

The English of that particular series was so unusual to most of us as to merit a glossary with every newspaper review, but — and this is the crux of Greene’s argument — that English used in Baltimore is as relevant and as valuable as any other.

“What I would say is that English is like a bundle of features,” continues Greene. “And at its core are things that are common to all English dialects. Whether it be American English, Irish English or Baltimorese, they’ll have similar grammar, similar vocabulary and writing is pretty much standard, apart from some spelling differences.

“But around the edges things change quite a bit when you look at regions, when you look at class, when you look at register; the way you write a formal paper in comparison to how you write on Facebook, there are variations but that’s totally normal, not just in English but in every language.”

So is the Bard English? “Most people don’t want to say this out loud,” says Greene. “But going along to watch a play that’s written in English from 400 years ago is difficult. The syntax is different, the vocabulary is different, the grammar is different, it’s in verse. So unless you know the plot, it’s going to be quite difficult to follow. So your typical 17-year-old isn’t quite wrong when he or she says, ‘This isn’t English’ because it’s definitely not their English.”