Monday, June 23, 1997
'She coude speke
no frenshe'
by Dave Berger
[email protected]
Dateline: London, 1388. Geoffrey Chaucer, an unemployed, medium-ranking government official, sits twirling a quill and looking for inspiration out of his small, third-floor window. Below, the grimy River Thames creeps slowly past, carrying the city's refuse with it on its meandering journey to the North Sea. Later generations would know Chaucer's bawdy work as The Canterbury Tales, but here we must leave the frustrated author and focus our attention on one of the small sailing boats negotiating its way through the floating piles of debris (and the odd rotting carcasse), with a valuable cargo bound for Holland.
At first, all goes well and the current, tide and a freshening westerly breeze propel the small skiff towards its destination. But then, only about thirty miles into the journey, the boat finds itself becalmed off the Kent coast. One day stretches into two and the sailors, healthy young lads, are starting to feel a little sick of ship's biscuit and salted beef. One of their number rows ashore, his brief to obtain such fresh sustenance as is available in this remote land.
Stumbling upon a peasant's hovel, nestling below a small earthen bank, he 'axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys.' The peasant's wife looked blankly at this strange visitor and, politely and not a little worried, replied that she was sorry, but she 'coude speke no frenshe.' Eggs, you see, were still known as 'eyren' in this part of Kent and would remain so for another fifty years at least.
My thanks to American author, Bill Bryson, who reproduced the kernel of this story in his outstanding book, Mother Tongue -- The English Language. It was in fact first related by William Caxton, the father of English printing, in the preface to his 1490 work, Eneydos, as an illustration of the sort of misunderstandings between English dialects which were commonplace at the time. Of course, it was Caxton's very own technology -- the printing press -- which would go on to change all this over the next couple of hundred years or so.
This homogenisation of numerous strikingly dissimilar dialects into one language, English, brought with it huge benefits, not least intelligibility. However, it brought with it costs, too, and the most obvious of these was the death of the dialects themselves and the onset of a gradual, but inevitable descent into linguistic and cultural uniformity.
Today, the Internet is carrying on the process begun by Caxton, but at a warp speed unthinkable even a few years ago. The benefits are clear to see -- the huge availability of information, the capacity to communicate directly and relevantly, and the supreme equalising power of this unique medium. Ask me whether something which contributes to lessening the sum of human ignorance and increasing the sum of human understanding and communication is a good thing, and the answer will be a resounding 'Yes!' But ask me whether I shall mourn the inexorable decline in cultural diversity and the intrusion of the same global brand labels from Mali to Uruguay to Tonga and I shall hang my head sadly and sigh.
Don't get me wrong -- I am so excited by the Internet that sometimes I can't sleep at night. But what a double-edged sword it is and I must, I shall make a stand! So, in a dignified voice, taut with emotion and with the bells of mediaeval London ringing in my ears, you will hear me the next time I take my breakfast in a cafe, requesting 'a slice of mete and two eyren, please. Sunny side up.'
A Fool in Devon,
David Berger