Читать книгу By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English - David Crystal, David Crystal - Страница 11

For every Horse or other Beast of Draught drawing any Coach, Sociable, Berlin, Landau, Chariot, Vis-a-Vis, Chaise, Calash, Chaise-marine, Curricle, Chair, Gig, Whisky, Caravan, Hearse, Litter, Waggon, Wain, Cart, Dray, or other Carriage, any Sum not exceeding One Shilling:

For every Horse, Mare, Gelding, or Ass, laden or unladen, and not drawing, the Sum of Sixpence: but if there shall be more than one such Horse, Mare, Gelding, Mule, or Ass, belonging to the same Person, then the Sum of Sixpence shall be paid for one of them only, and the Sum of Threepence only for every other of them:

For every Drove of Oxen, Cows, or Neat Cattle, any Sum not exceeding Five Shillings per Score, and so in proportion for any greater or less Number:

For every Drove of Calves, Pigs, Sheep or Lambs, any Sum not exceeding Three Shillings and Sixpence per Score, and so in proportion for any greater or less Number:

And for every Person crossing or passing on Foot, without any beast or Carriage, any Sum not exceeding Two-pence.

The sign shows the eighteenth-century liking for capital letters on nouns considered to be important – Coach, Mare, Pigs, Horse, Berlin, Person, Chaise…, of course, as these are the critical factors; but also Number, Sum, and Foot, which the sign-writer felt needed extra prominence. The fashion for noun capitalization died out by the end of the century.

After you’ve crossed the cob, quite suddenly you turn right for Portmeirion. You have to be on your toes not to miss the turning. If you encounter a sign saying Penrhyndeudraeth, you’ve gone too far. That name means ‘headland with two beaches’. In 1998 it became the first broadband-networked village in the UK.

Actually, you don’t have to go as far as Penrhyndeudraeth. Another sign just after the turning tells you that you’ve missed it.

The road down to the village winds for a mile through woodland and into the car park by the arched gatehouse which is the entrance to Portmeirion. You pay to get in, unless you’re staying there, or dining in the hotel. But it’s worth every penny. You’d have to travel to Portofino to have a comparable experience.

In his account of the development of Portmeirion, Clough Williams- Ellis describes his creation as full of ‘wilful pleasantries, calculated naivetes, eye-traps, forced and faked perspectives, heretical constructions, unorthodox colour mixtures, [and] general architectural levity’. That’s exactly what it’s like. There is cheeky joy everywhere.

Noël Coward was one of many literary visitors. He stayed for a week in the Watch House, arriving one Saturday and leaving the next. In between he wrote Blithe Spirit.

I called in to the Prisoner shop, and bought yet another book on the subject. As I left, I said ‘Be seeing you,’ to the man behind the counter. He said, ‘And you,’ through a thin smile. The rest of his face held an expression of extreme pity.

A sunny day, and Portmeirion was full of tourists. It’s a small place, really, with one steep windy road leading down to the sea, and innumerable recesses and side turnings beckoning you towards intricately landscaped gardens and visually teasing ornate façades. On a tall pedestal, at the head of the long flight of steps leading to the harbour, is a bronze statue of Hercules, standing in for Atlas, in a heroic kneeling pose, carrying a huge stone globe on his shoulders. Prisoner aficionados would of course see this as an allusion to the huge bouncing balloon-entities, controlled by the Village guardians, that prevented people escaping.

Thomas Telford turns up in Portmeirion. A tall building overlooking the piazza was erected in honour of the bicentenary of his birth, in 1957. They call it Telford’s Tower. Today it is a self-catering cottage for three.

The compact layout of Portmeirion tends to push people towards each other. That day in June it seemed there were more English accents per square metre here than anywhere else in the world. And foreign languages too. I heard five in as many footsteps.

I walked down to the water’s edge, by the hotel. A group in front of me were speaking Welsh. Having been listening to so many English accents, it took me a bit by surprise. And yet this is a corner of the traditional heartland of Welsh. Once upon a time it would have been English that caused the surprise on the banks of Cardigan Bay. And indeed, in some Gwynedd villages English is still the exception rather than the rule.

Welsh has been the success story of the twentieth century when it comes to plotting the future of the world’s endangered languages. And endangered they certainly are. It is thought that half the languages of the planet, some three thousand in all, are unlikely to survive to the end of the present century.

That’s one language dying out somewhere in the world, on average, every two weeks.

About two thousand of those languages have never been written down. That’s the savage part. For when a language dies that has never been written down, it is as if it has never been. And that means the irretrievable loss of another unique vision of what it means to be human.

Many of those endangered languages have only a few dozen or a few hundred speakers. Welsh, by contrast, has over half a million. About a fifth of the people of Wales speak Welsh, and the numbers are steadily increasing. It is the only Celtic language to have done so well. The activism of the 1970s and the subsequent Language Acts, giving measures of protection to the language, helped enormously. Plus radio and TV channels in the medium of Welsh.

I sat in the stone boat next to the hotel and looked across the Dwyryd estuary. It was early afternoon, and the tide was coming in. Some people were walking on the estuary sands in the distance. They would have to watch out. The sea comes in very quickly here, and it’s easy to get cut off.

When was English first spoken along the banks of this estuary, I wondered. And when Welsh? And what was the language that was here before Welsh? Nobody knows how many languages have been spoken on earth since the human race developed the ability to speak. Some people think as many as 150,000. Maybe more. The six thousand or so we have left today are only a fraction of what may have been.

Sometimes you can see a trace of an earlier period of language inhabitation. In the territory between Spain and France you will find Basque, unrelated to any modern language, and in structure quite unlike the Indo-European languages surrounding it. People think it is the last example of the languages which were spoken in Europe before the invaders from Asia arrived.

The tide had almost reached the group walking on the sands, but they seemed oblivious. Some Portmeirion regulars were sitting nearby, bemoaning the way some people ‘don’t take any notice of the warnings’. The hotel staff were used to it. A man with a megaphone came out and bellowed. The walkers scuttled. I asked him whether this happened often. ‘Not so much these days,’ he said. ‘The time of the high tide is printed on the ticket.’

His accent wasn’t local, and I couldn’t immediately place it. ‘You don’t sound as if you’re from these parts, then?’ I asked. I can never resist an unfamiliar accent.

Nor an unfamiliar name. Once I was looking for a particular old edition of Hamlet, and called an antiquarian book company that I thought might have it. The person who answered the phone said she would look, and asked me to call her back. ‘Ask for Lassarina,’ she said.

I couldn’t stop myself. ‘That’s a lovely name,’ I said. And as I said it, I thought, she’ll think this is a come-on, so I hastily added, ‘You see I’m a linguist and I’m interested in the history of names and I’ve not come across that one before and do you know what it means and how do you spell it?’ Then I thought, that sounds totally implausible, even more of a come-on! But she reacted equably, and said she’d no idea, but thought it was Irish. She spelled it out, and told me her friends called her Lassie for short.

‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, and I rushed over to my bookcase, where I had some ‘origins of names’ books. There she was, Lassarina, an anglicized form of Gaelic Lasairiona, a combination of lasair and fion, ‘flame’ and ‘wine’. I picked up the phone and told her. She was delighted. People usually are when you do a bit of etymological digging on their behalf.

I thought that piece of mini-research might get me a discount on my Hamlet, but no such luck. Maybe if I’d called her Lassie… But I couldn’t do that to a non-canine.

Then, in one of those coincidences that make linguistic life worthwhile, I came across the name again a few weeks later. In Irish writer Padraic Colum’s collection of stories called The King of Ireland’s Son, published in 1916, there is a character called Lassarina.

‘I’m from near Norwich,’ the hotel man replied to my question about his origins. He pronounced it as a single syllable – ‘norrch’. He added: ‘Little place called Caistor.’

Caistor-by-Norwich. I knew it, Horatio. It’s famous – at least to people interested in English historical linguistics. It’s the place where they found the earliest runic inscription known in England. Caistor was originally a Roman base – the name comes from Latin castra, ‘fort’ – and in a cremation cemetery there they found the anklebone of a roe deer. It was probably used as a plaything – perhaps as part of a dice game – but what made it special was the inscription on the side: raihan, written in Germanic runes. Raihan means ‘roe deer’.

The shape of the H rune attracted especial attention. It has a single cross-bar. This is typical of the kind of runic writing found in northern parts of Europe. Further south they wrote H with two cross-bars, . This suggests that the person who wrote the inscription came from Scandinavia.

The significance of the find to linguists is that it dates from around the year ad 400. The Anglo-Saxons did not arrive in Britain until 449. This person was using a Germanic language in East Anglia well before the well-known Germanic invasions began.

East Anglia is the place to be if you are looking for early evidence of the English language. In 1981 a farmer found a gold bracteate – a kind of medallion, fashioned with eyelets so that it could be worn around the neck – at Undley Common, near Lakenheath in Suffolk. It dates from around ad 475, within a generation of the Anglo- Saxons arriving. It seems to be modelled after an old Roman coin from the time of Constantine the Great in the early fourth century. It shows a helmeted head of the emperor next to a she-wolf suckling two children – presumably a representation of the story of Romulus and Remus.

And there is an inscription: a sequence of runes, written around the edge from right to left. Transliterated into the Latin alphabet, the runes say gægogæ mægæ medu. It would have been pronounced roughly ‘ga-gog-a ma-ga may-doo’. Inscriptions are often sentences. If so, this is the oldest known sentence in the language which would one day be called English. But what does it mean?

The second and third words aren’t a problem. Mægæ probably comes from mæg, ‘kinsman, companion’. Depending on how the ending is interpreted, the sense is either ‘of a/the kinsman’ or ‘to a/the kinsman’. Medu is likely to be an early form of the word med or meord – meaning ‘reward’. The closest modern equivalent is the archaism meed. An alternative suggestion is that it is something to do with the drink, ‘mead’.

Scholars have puzzled over the first word. It has an unusual phonetic shape, with its three gs, suggesting it might be a nonsense word – a magical formula, perhaps, or a tribal shout of some kind. The form gagaga has been found on a sixth-century spear-shaft from Kragehul in Denmark, suggesting a battle-cry. And lots of magic words use a reduplicated sequence of sounds: abracadabra, alakazam, hocus pocus… Wizzo the wizard (aka American magician Marshall Brodien) says ‘Doodee, doodee, doodee’ to get a trick to work.

On the other hand, it could be a real word. There are words in Old English with three gs in them, such as gegongan (‘conquer’), gegogud (‘relying on’), gegegnian (‘meet’). And there are words with similarities in form to which gægogæ could relate. The first syllable might be a prefix, an early form of ge–, which is common in Old English (as it is in modern German). The root of the word, –go–, might be related to a word such as geomrian, ‘lament’. The ending might be a marker of femaleness. Thinking along these lines, the Swedish linguist Bengt Odenstedt suggested the reading ‘howling female wolf’, referring to the picture on the bracteate. There have been other interpretations.

If Odenstedt is right, then the inscription could mean ‘this howling she-wolf to a kinsman [is] a reward’. It’s certainly a plausible interpretation. But it’s no more than a well-informed guess.

The Undley Bracteate, as it is called, is now in the British Museum, in the study collection of the Department of Medieval and Modern Europe. Other coins in the museum collection show runic inscriptions too, but they are usually even less decodable. The hope is that, as more finds are made, the semantic clues will increase, and things will become clearer. But often the finds just add even more puzzles.

In August 1997 a man with a metal detector found a gold coin at Billockby, a few miles north-west of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. It is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It was a tremissis – a coin with the value of one-third of a solidus – thought to date from around ad 670. A number of coins of the same general type had been found previously – including one at Caistor – but this was the first to display a runic inscription.

The solidus had been used in the Roman Empire since the time of Emperor Constantine, and would stay in use until the tenth century. We remember it in modern English in several words, such as solid, solidarity – and soldier. Roman soldiers were paid with the solidus.

The inscription is very faint in places – perhaps through wear and tear, or perhaps it was badly stamped when the coin was made. It is possible to make out a sequence of l, t, o, e, and d, and there may be an i at the beginning and an h or g at the end. Nobody has any idea what this might mean.

‘I know Caistor,’ I said to the man from the hotel. I should have said ‘know of’, I suppose, for I have never been there; but it’s a curious fact that when you study the linguistic history of a place, you quickly develop a sense of intimacy about it. I do feel I ‘know’ Caistor. It’s much more than ‘know of’.

I was spared an interrogation, however, because a loud bell sounded, and the man dashed away to deal with it. Maybe it was a fire alarm. People at the Portmeirion hotel would be especially sensitive to that. The present hotel isn’t the one that was originally developed by Clough Williams-Ellis. That burned down during the night of 5 June 1981. It didn’t reopen until 1988.

‘Fire’ was the symbolic meaning of one of the runes: <, called cen (pronounced ‘cane’). An Old English poem has been preserved, in which each symbol in the runic alphabet is given a poetic gloss. This is what the poet has to say about cen. (The p and ð letters are pronounced as modern ‘th’.)

Cen byp cwicera gehwam, cup on fyre

blac ond beorhtlic, byrnep oftust

ðærhi æpelingas inne restap.

‘The torch is known to everyone alive by its pale, bright flame; it always burns where princes sit within.’

Time was passing, and I had to move on. I had to be in Hay-on-Wye that evening. The sands in the estuary were rapidly disappearing. The family that had been walking there had reached the harbour wall, and were talking furiously amongst themselves. I didn’t recognize the language. Maybe it was Basque.

As I walked up the hill towards the car park a man passed me wearing a huge Prisoner badge with a penny-farthing bicycle and a number 6 on it. That was another mysterious thing about the Village. A penny-farthing bike would appear here and there for no apparent reason.

There is something especially dehumanizing when people are given numbers instead of names. It doesn’t take a television programme to tell us that. We have seen it in the form of the labels and tattoos which identify incarcerated victims everywhere.

I suppose the practice of giving names to houses arose from a desire to avoid the impersonal effect of house numbering. That’s understandable. It’s the naming of streets by numbers that has always puzzled me. First Street, Second Street, Tenth Street, Thirty-Eighth Street… Why would anyone choose such an unimaginative and mechanical method of locating where they live?

It seems to be an American practice. Europeans don’t go in for it. On the contrary. Mainland European cities tend to personalize street locations as much as possible. Place Victor Hugo in Paris. Schillerstrasse in Berlin. Queen Caroline Street in London. Albert Cuyp Market in Amsterdam. The comparative literature critic George Steiner thinks that this is one of the major features of a European –as opposed to a New World –mindset. Europeans, he asserts, ‘inhabit echo-chambers of historical, intellectual, artistic, and scientific achievements’ as they walk through the streets of the cities of Europe.

Mind you, the Americans make up for it by being highly personal when they name towns and cities. There are twenty-three states in the USA which have a city called Washington.

The American practice of multiplying place-names can get confusing, though. There is a Wyoming city in Ohio and an Ohio city in Illinois. There are Californias in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. A city called Iowa is in Louisiana; the city of Louisiana is in Missouri; and Missouri City is in Texas.

By contrast, the British tend to shy away from naming towns and cities after people. There is no city in England called Shakespeare or Chaucer or George or Elizabeth. And there is certainly no tendency in the UK to follow the Russian fashion, where a whole town might be renamed following someone’s special achievement. After the death of the world’s first astronaut Yuri Gagarin in 1968, the town of Gzhatsk near his birthplace was renamed Gagarin in his honour.

Things were different in Anglo-Saxon times. Then a common way of naming a place was to name it after the tribal chief who lived there. Thus, we have Reading – ‘the people of Raed’or ‘Raeda’–and Dagenham – ‘Dacca’s homestead’. The Danes did the same: Grimsby is the village where Grimr lived.

The Welsh go in for person-names too. Llanfair – ‘Mary’s Church’. Porthmadog – ‘Madog’s Harbour’. Caergybi – ‘Cybi’s Fort’.

Portmeirion? Port + Meirion, from Meirionydd –Merioneth in English –the old name of the county in which the village is located. It can be traced back to the name of a fifth-century Welsh prince.

It’s always a risky business trying to make a generalization about names. There are always exceptions. For instance, for years I’d laboured under the illusion that if a person’s name had an initial in the middle, the letter must stand for a specific name. Then I encountered President Harry S. Truman.

I spent a week once trying to discover what the ‘S’ stood for. Finally, in his daughter’s autobiography, I found out. It appears that Truman’s parents had difficulty deciding which of his two grandfathers to name him after. One was called Solomon and the other was called Shippe. The identical initial presented a solution. Harry was called Harry S, and it was left up to the two sides of the family to interpret the initial as they wished.

I looked back across the village before getting in my car. Times have changed since they filmed The Prisoner. The green-painted wooden dome which acted as Number 2’s residence was replaced in the early nineties by a new copper dome. But all shall be well. It will eventually turn verdigris green once again.