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Chapter Four
Searching for Words
Guy took leave from the Features Department of his Sunday newspaper, and put his outside freelance work on hold. Sam simply gave up her job, without notice. Three days later, with a wad of airline tickets and itineraries, they left for Cape Town.
It was the way Sam would have “planned” it, in any event.
“Guy, I’m coming with you on one condition. You must tell me what’s eating you. . . or,” she threw up her hands in one of her extravagant gestures, “just promise to stop all this secretive brooding. Get out of yourself. Let’s have fun. You can collect exotic travel material for your features. Better still, join me in tracing and defining the world’s English-speakers, and hunting down the slithy toves gyring in the wabe, and the borogroves and mome raths.”
“You only need to peer into your looking glass for that, Sam”.
“That’s better old son. You’re chirping up already. . . though I don’t know how an ex-colonial like you is ever going to help me protect the English language.”
Guy forebore to tell her that he knew probably more about the English and their institutions than she ever would. He had interviewed Britain’s prime minsters and labour leaders, its top bankers and pop stars. He had dined with Lord Astor (the other one, at his castle in Hever) and with Beaverbrook (the younger, at the Houses of Parliament). He had played cricket and rugby at Oxford, and had drunk, drugged and gambled through the nights in the East End. He’d interviewed the writers and dramatists whom Sam would die to meet. He knew most of the key people among the cops, and the crime syndicates. He knew things that Samantha never dreamed of; things which disturbed some bureaucrats and a few important people ‘in-the-know’ in London. And he knew something
about the English homeland which threatened all their lives. A nightmare that he couldn't dream because reality kept him awake most nights. He needed time away from London and his news investigation.
“I think I’ll leave the linguists and philological detective work to you. I’m going to lie low and take it easy. Check up on some local histories, perhaps.”
Guy knew that the one way to get his mind off the London problem was to dabble with history. History wove truth and consequences, sin and innocence, contemporary stupidity and the wisdom of hindsight, and - yes, love and honour - into a single, comprehensible pattern. History took him out of himself, showing him, through the broad sweep of time and events, the purpose of his life and of the terrible thing he had stumbled on. He felt that by dipping his fingertips into the history of any distant land, he would find proper perspectives and redefine his own reluctant role.
Guy thought that Sam, on the other hand, was a gregarious, artistic animal who thrived on chatter; on flaunting herself and her superficial knowledge at every admirer. Sam loved the weight, the lightness, the worth of words with the passion of a poet or actor, but never with the precision of a pedantic.
“And I lu-u-urve the history of words,” she was saying to him, parodying the popstar version of a word which meant everything from fascination to fornication.
“Guy, you may focus on local colour and local history on this trip if you wish, but I want to tell you that you will learn more about history from words than you will from history books. Do you know what philologists have learned about the English from their words?”
Guy signalled his total ignorance and abiding interest with a helpless sigh.
“Did you know that language existed at least 40 000 years ago, and that ours can be traced back about 8 000 years, to the Danube Valley? We don’t know who the people were, but we know that they dispersed from that area about 6 000 BC. Over the centuries they spread their language from Bangladesh to Britain and from Sweden to Greece. English has a ‘common source’ for words like mother and father and other basics which it shares with half the world’s languages. The ‘common source’ spread east through Sanskrit, south-west through Greek, Latin and its descendants such as Italian, French and Spanish; and north-west through Germanic tongues of which English is one. Our common parent tongue, labelled Indo-European, appears in the Baltic and Slavonic languages, in Iranian, Armenian and many more.”
“Okay, what’s the Iranian word for father?”
“I don’t know, but there are famous ‘common source’ examples from Sanskrit. Take the Sanskrit word trayas. In Greek it is trias. In Latin tres. In English we pronounce it as three. In Sanskrit a king was rajan, in India rajah, in Latin regem.”
“Where does ‘king’ come from?”
“Developed somewhere in the Germanic or Anglican tribes, I suppose. It’s prehistoric - but words tell us a great deal about those times. The words ‘bread, cheese, ale’ come from the Germanic 4000 years ago. “Bread, cheese and ale’ were the main diet of Englishmen in the Middle Ages.” “Still is,” said Guy. My favourite pub meal is a Ploughman’s lunch”.
“There you are, then, your ‘typically English’ lunch goes back 4000 years to central Europe. But English as a language didn’t reach England until the Romans left in about 400AD. The English came across the North Sea at the invitation of the Brits - most of whom were Celts - who needed help against their local enemies. Centuries earlier, the Celts had pushed out of Britain the aboriginals - who were the Atecotti. The conquerors were the Britons, ruled briefly by the Romans. But after the Romans left, the Britons were threatened by the Picts - another branch of Brits who were in turn being helped by Irish immigrants called the Scotti. . . descendants of those aboriginal Atecotti, I suppose. You see how mixed up we all are in this country?”
“Held together by our common language? By all your words?”
“Not really,” said Samantha. “The mercenaries in England wouldn’t go back to their homes in Northern Europe, and their king named Artorius set up court in Colchester; the old town of Camulodunum - Camelot and kept the English in check in East Anglia. But when Artorius - King Arthur to you - died, the English gradually took over, and the Latin speaking Britons left for France.”
“You mean, the British are now French, and the North Germans are English?”
“Exactly. And linguistics prove it. Brittany, in France, is the main home of the Brits - but very few Franks became French. The Franks beat up the Romans, then the majority went back to Germany, leaving Paris and Lyon and Marsailles to the Latin-speaking Gauls.”
“And you learned all this, Samantha, by studying English words?”
“Yes, in a way. Because, soon after 600AD English began to be written down - thanks to Latin-speaking Christian missionaries. The Old English speak directly to us through their writings; through their laws, chronicles, and the contemporary tales which make up history.”
“But I thought Old English was dead.”
“Archaic. You’ll be lucky to find her or hyd of most of it. But the flaesc and ban; the blod and guttas remain. All our basic needs and emotions are expressed in words from Old English. We use them more than any others.”
“Right,” said Guy, “ but they were swallowed by medieval English, which in turn was displaced by Elizabethan English. And Shakespeare’s tongue was changed by Swift and Johnson, and that pompous fool Milton, and Fielding, who invented the novel, and by your Bronte sisters, and Jack London, Hemingway, and Gore Vidal. Every generation has changed our language, why do you think you should, or could, prevent any change of any single English phrase now?
“Guy, the answer to that you will see for yourself on our trip round the world. I”m not talking of change; I’m talking of strangulation and corruption.”
Guy’s attention slammed back into gear on the word corruption.
“What, precisely, will you be looking for during our trip, Sam?”
“I have a broad theory,” she said.
“Broad, of course. ‘Precise’ is not a word I should ever think of using with you,” grinned Guy, as she held up her hand to silence him.
“Guy, listen. My theory has an historical base. It is this: The English language reached its apex in the nineteenth century - note, I did not say zenith, which came in Shakespeare’s era. The words which English borrowed from around the world up to that time were not taken frivolously. The jewellery of our language was enhanced by keenly selected gems from every relevant place on Earth. And every man and woman of the nineteenth century used the English tongue carefully, and elegantly. The Brontes - remember Guy how we used to cycle on the Yorkshire moors, searching for Bronte atmosphere? - are an example. Jane Austen was the acme. And, incidentally, it was Aphra Behn, the first professional woman writer in English who probably invented the modern novel, and Daniel Defoe who got the credit. Anyway, almost all English-speakers, Guy, including mere men in lowly positions at home and in the colonies, spoke a language which was poetry. English was used to express nuances of thought, of emotions, of meaning which can hardly be expressed today except in grunts. English today is used merely for communication.
“Or for lecturing and hectoring.”
“Stop it, Guy, I’m being serious now. Written English around the world still has much to commend it - except in your newspapers, and in pop culture of course. But English today is appalling, at least as it is spoken, on radio, television, in cinema and in real life - because real life copies bad electronic art. And soon talking computers will be taking us further and further from the written word.
“My theory, Guy, is that our language is dying. I want on our journey - in the very short time we have between eating, sleeping, travelling and, I hope, fucking - I want to look for some of the causes and the symptoms of the death of the biggest finest language on Earth.”
Guy put cupped hands to his mouth and blew a noise somewhere between trumpet and raspberry.
Samantha responded: “Did you know that there must be 500,000,000 people on this planet who have English as their first language, and perhaps a billion more who use English as a second tongue, or as an international means of communication whether it be between Scandinavians and Zulus, or Russians and Bolivians. The English language is itself the most cosmopolitan on Earth, having borrowed words from every continent and from almost every culture. Its vocabulary of about half a million words is greater than any other. It is three times larger than French, for instance, and ten or more times greater than many other languages. It is growing at . . .”
She checked herself and changed the subject.
“Anyway, tell me what you intend to look for on this trip. . .precisely.” She made much of the pronunciation of ‘precisely’.
“I need to think, Sam. I need to plan. To regroup.”
“Now don’t start that again. You promised.”
“All right, then. I shall look for the local colour stuff for articles - but none of the tourist junk - and I shall try to glance at local history.”
“I’ll help you through words,” said Sam.
“I bet you will.”
So it was agreed, even before they rushed, still packing in a taxi, to Heathrow airport. Like two distinctly different birds, they would dabble, not together and certainly not precisely, in any bath of experiences they thought they might enjoy on their fleeting flight around the globe. Guy would keep notes. Sam would prosletyse the English language to anyone likely to listen to her (and - the way she looked - who wouldn’t, thought Guy). She would talk about all that her prejudices and interests had revealed in the previous 12 hours. She would be communicating spontaneously. Guy would merely write notes to which only seekers after geographic fact would pay any attention.
It seemed a fair sharing of burdens. They would be visiting five continents in six weeks. Over that territory, if not in that time, they were sure to find something important for their pursuits.
Guy had few illusions, however, about the spurious missions they had invented for themselves. And about their chances. He needed Sam, but he was not sure whether he wanted her as ‘cover’, and certainly not as lover. He did not want to analyse the relationship.
Samantha said: “You’re mad, you know Guy. An incurably dangerous romantic.”
“You’re wild, you know Sam. You’re a didactic pedant with dangerously immoral ideas.”
Perhaps what attracted them was the different scents of danger which each detected in the other.
They had no idea how dangerous the mix would prove.
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