Shakespeare's Influence on the English Language

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'Friend' in its verb form – 'befriend' having a slightly different meaning – was coined by Shakespeare 400 years ago. Only today it has made it into mainstream use (FB).

Shakespeare's neologisms amount to as many as 33,300, in fact. A neologism is a newly coined word or expression. That's more than twice the quotations than the next sighted author Walter Scott, and much more than Chaucer, the Bible, Milton, and so on.

Much of the evidence for this can be derived from the Oxford English Dictionary. 

The Oxford English Dictionary: A short historical sketch.

One of the great endeavours of Victorian and Edwardian scholarship, the dictionary was conceived in the late 1850s (outside Oxford) by a body called the London Philological Society. It was then established in Oxford in 1878 and brought to fruition only in 1928 after a long and bumpy ride. Editors of the Oxford English Dictionary set out to read through as many printed works as possible from all periods of the English language. They would then extract quotations from these works, showing how words had been used from their earliest occurrence to their latest, then deduce from these the senses of the words as manifested through their history.


The OED is unique; this aspect sets it apart from the many other dictionaries before and since. 

An extensive amount of etymological information can be found within each entry in the dictionary. See an example here.


Lexicographers, volunteers, and editors analysed not only letters, diaries, histories and newspapers, but also works relating to arts, sciences, commerce and crafts, as well as literary texts: poems, novels, plays, and so on. 

There did exist, however, a literary bias, partly owing to the predominate view that literature had an especially formative role in creating and preserving language (which prevails today to some extent), and, also, partly to a superior availability of literary texts. Other bias included race, class, and gender – there are lots of cultural assumptions enshrined in the OED, which is natural for the Edwardian and Victoria periods in which it was created, and which we would now think of as distinct cultural prejudices.

This feature was also true of the second edition, published in 1989, whose pre-1800s work was not updated. The second edition did, however, mark the digitalisation of OED and the publication of it on-line. The dictionary now for the first time could be reliably quantified, with greater search capabilities and efficiency, and one could see much more clearly the extent of Shakespeare's dominance throughout it.

The third edition is currently being worked on. Since the year 2000 it has covered about a third of the alphabet. The draft version is available on-line. There are lots of differences being introduced into the 3rd edition because of the new textual evidence the lexicographers have access to via electronic databases of all available historical texts: works published in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, and more contemporary works. Mentioned databases of now all periods of the history of the language, alongside such electronic search capabilities, are enabling a complete reanalysis of the OED.

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'All the great English writers of all ages'

were named by the OED's then chief editor, James Murray (d.1915) as his principal quotation sources. An additional bias, then, within the literary texts chosen to formulate the OED was given to those of Shakespeare, a virtually comprehensive treatment that was not meted out to any other writer, or text, of any period. 

OED's treatment of Shakespeare inescapably has been extraordinarily influential on histories of the language and on studies and editions of Shakespeare's work. Note the asterisks and other notations below used by editors to point out words and their senses in editions of his plays. Altogether, 2,000 lexemes (lexeme: a basic unit of language; the item recorded in the headword of the dictionary) made it into the OED of a recorded 20,000. That's one-tenth of his stock that were in new usage, a proportion matched by no other post-mediæval writer whose usages are recorded in the OED.

So the question is are these numbers and figures a just reflection of Shakespeare's contribution to the language, or do they rather reflect the cultural values of the lexicographers. Well, it must be the latter. But if so, to what extent? Now that OED is undergoing revision it is possible to begin to clarify the answer to this question. 

The sixty-four thousand dollar question is: is Shakespeare's reputation as linguistic innovator par excellence in the English language going to be sustained, increased, or undermined? Working this out is difficult, apparently, because of the two available editions, 2nd and 3rd, and their being merged together on-line – there are differing conventions between the two on dating, on selections of headwords, and more: in other words the difficulty lies in how each are presented, and in separating like from like.  

OED is now antedating about a third of the words attributed to Shakespeare. Some words can now be traced back as far as Old English, and before his time.

On the other hand, there are new neologisms, i.e. ones they hadn't recorded before, because they are reanalysing his life and finding more compounds than before. Take, for example, the line 'life in death' in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis: Adonis describes love as 'a life in death', which was construed later by another author to be a single compound, 'the nightmare life-in-death was she'. This word, 'life-in-death', as a compound, now merits its own entry, with Shakespeare as the creator. Others include compounds with 'never': never-erring, never-withering, never-surfeited. Also, 'Old-lad', 'old-son', are now first his. Moreover, in the neologism-full Love's Labour's Lost, quite a lot of its words turn out, in fact, to have been already used previously. Whereas, in contrast, Hamlet has lost quite a lot less neologisms attributed to Shakespeare, after the revision, as it proceeds.

We see that from Hamlet, the verb 'pander' (newspapers are pandering to people's baser instincts: to gratify or indulge an immoral or distasteful desire or taste or a person with such a desire or taste) was first used in Chaucer's Troilis and Crisyde as the main character (as a noun), Pandare.


More questions arise yet. Have some words remained and been more readily accepted into the language because of the value of neologisms? Are some neologisms more interesting than others? 

It is easy to see this new revision of the OED is changing the lexical landscape as far as Shakespeare is concerned. 

The phrases below are quite common in modern English; have you heard of any? Ask any native speaker of English what they mean, and whether they knew Shakespeare coined them!

Break the ice.

Come what may.

Good riddance!

As luck would have it.

The be-all and end-all.

The world's my oyster.

A wild-goose chase.

The long and the short of it.

A sorry sight.

Play fast and loose.

In one fell swoop.

Not slept one wink.

Neither rhyme nor reason.

Love is blind.

Laughing stock.

Laugh (oneself) into stitches.

In a pickle.

Tis high time.

For goodness' sake.

Forever and a day.

Eaten me out of house and home.

Dog will have his day.

Dead as a doornail.

Refuse to budge an inch.

Bated breath.

All that glitters is not gold.

Glimpse inside the Globe Theatre here in this truly great television documentary on English.

sources: prefaces of the first and second editions of the Oxford English Dictionary; podcast Shakespeare and the Oxford English Dictionary spoken by Charlotte Brewer (involved in language research projects at Oxford University and in their new MST in the English language); http://www.pathguy.com/shakeswo.htm .

Professional development | Book Club Class 4.0 – WSI

Last night's Book Club class went really well despite its low turn out of just three learners. Using a trusty teacher's aid of mine 'Literature by Alan Duff & Alan Maley' I had earlier in the day sketched out a comic strip depicting a short scene from Jules Verne's Around The World In Eighty Days.

A scene in which Phileas Fogg, servant, and Parsee girl are accosted at just the moment they are to quit  India, and many a misadventure there, to start for Asia, by a police officer. Swiftly, they are taken by horse and carriage and locked up without much more than that 'at half-past eight you will appear before a judge'… I had skimmed through it on the bus, between private lessons, before going to work at the language institute in the hope of finding something entertaining for the evening's class. 

I was looking for a scene I would not have to grade too heavily for my elementary learners. Now I know having finished the book that this scene is, actually, plot-critical, and it worked well to gather suspense in the class.

At the institute (now finished with my private lessons) I sat down to grade the page I had selected and to decide what I should sketch. Thirteen pictures completed the scene.

 

                                               

Firstly, the learners were given a variety of clippings of texts from a variety of sources and asked to decide which two of them where  taken from literary sources, such as a play, novel, or short story, and which weren't. After five minutes learners had worked together to underline textual evidence in order to prove their findings. Five more minutes and learners were matching authors with titles (I put these up on the whiteboard), and then those to the sample texts they had at their tables.

From Literature by Alan Duff & Alan Maley: 

'This activity encourages close attention to what is actually said in the text. In looking for clues, and in marking features of the language, the students are learning how to use the text itself in discussion. Focusing on the particular helps to discourage vague theorising.'   

From this point, as I thought learners were ready and engaged enough to invent their non-vague stories, I handed out completely arbitrary pictures of people, places, and objects. Ten minutes passed as they thought of stories and made notes, individually. I asked of them to guess each other's stories only by looking at the pictures, and asked that the learner who had thought it up reply only 'yes' or 'no' to the other's questions in order to encourage practice making questions; not only that but also enough speculative thinking to tie in with the activity that followed this. Finally, learners revealed their stories.

'A story can be sparked off by very small details – a smell, a gesture, a sudden sound, or a chance remark [...] The purpose of the introductory activity (Stage one) is to put the students in the right frame of mind for speculation, by inviting them to devise their own stories from a few visual pointers. The pictures suggest a framework which they can fill in as they like.' 

I elicited anything the learners might know about Jules Verne's Around The World In Eighty Days. I introduced the scene before giving them the comic strip. I handed out photocopies of the sketches I had done out-of-sequence, and asked them to suggest what might happen in the story, and to put them in their correct order. A few minutes passed and I read a few lines of the text to help them along and then they spent a few minutes revised their suggestions.

'In Stage two, the activity becomes more controlled. The students are not inventing, but recreating a story from pictures. But they do not have the text. The challenge, then, is to build up a plausible story in their own words. 

For a final listening stage and to confirm predictions I read to them the page I had chosen on the bus in the morning. I walked over and picked it out in full view from our new library of 20 or so books which I've contributed to the institute, hoping to gain some interest in it.

Here, we were supposed to talk about the 'what', 'how', and 'why' regarding the next events of the story, but time was not permitting, and anyway the most developmental - and most important - stages of the lesson had already passed. I did, however, take the opportunity to let them know they could at any time borrow from the library.

sources: p.19, 89 of 'Literature by Alan Duff & Alan Maley'.