Advisory Opinions - Kevin Stroud Talks the History of English

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Kevin Stroud, creator and voice of the History of English podcast, joins David and Sarah for an exciting deep dive into the history of the English language and the roots of legalese. Stroud traces the complex history of Old English, Old Norse, French, and Latin words within the American legal system, and details the story behind the first written Old English code of law. Plus: What roles do poetry and alliteration play in the court? And why does language evolve so much over time?   Show Notes: -History of English podcast -Law of Æthelberht Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, you paid for it, so keep it. Try the other side. Get started at PHYS.ca. If you need some time to think it over, here's five seconds. Ah, do, da-da-dee-da, do-da-do-do. Certain conditions apply. Details at PHYS.ca. You ready? I was born ready. Welcome to the Advisory Opinions Podcast. I'm David French with Sarah Isger, and this is episode two of Nerd August. And this one is a real treat. This is a fascinating topic

with a fascinating guest. Sarah, do you want to introduce Kevin Stroud? Well, I found it really funny because in our episode one of Nerd August, I mentioned the history of stirrups, and we had a few listeners calling me out that I had gotten this from a podcast called The History of English Podcast that is hosted by Kevin Stroud, and they are exactly right. It was kind of a little Easter egg of what was going to come for episode two because we have Kevin Stroud here. This podcast is incredible. He's been doing it since 2012. There are 160 episodes. And David, he's a lawyer. So I thought we'd talk a little, even though it's Nerd August, a little law, but more

etymology, more history. And so History of the English Podcast is the name. He has bonus episodes. He even has an audio book on the history of the alphabet. I eat it all up. This is what I do in my car all the time. I go take drives now intentionally. So I was really looking forward to this episode. All righty. Kevin, thank you so much for joining us. It's weird because I just got out of my car and we were together. I mean, you didn't know you were there, but you were with me as you are in every car trip I take. And here you are. It's very exciting. Thank you. Well, that's how podcasting works. So I'm told anyway. And you normally podcast alone, you said.

Yeah, it's just me. Every aspect of the podcast is just me, from the concept, the research, the writing, the editing, the fixing the website. Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot. That's incredible. And you started this back in 2012, and you've been releasing about a pod a month. Yeah, it started off a little more frequently than that. It was actually about every other week. And I started in 2012. So it's been a decade. But the truth is, I actually started about a year before that because I spent about a year researching the podcast, the first part of it anyway, before I ever actually prepared an episode. So once I started writing and recording the episodes, I had enough research

kind of banked that I was able to maintain a regular schedule for the first few years. And what's happened over time is I've kind of caught up to my research. So the pace of the podcast has slowed down a little bit. So now it's typically once a month. Well, and you're a lawyer by training, education, and career. That's true. Yes. It's hard for me to believe, but it's been almost 30 years that I've been practicing.

I want to say, folks, since you can't see him, I can. He does not look like he's been practicing law for 30 years. So generally, for our August Nerd Specials, we don't talk about the law, but I thought it would actually be kind of fun to do a little bit of linguistic law, English history, and that maybe we should start in the Middle Ages with the dooms. What are the dooms, Kevin? Well, dooms, believe it or not, is the original English word for laws. And this may come as some surprise to a lot of your listeners, but the word law is not an English word, at least not originally.

It actually comes from the Vikings. It's an Old Norse word. And even a word like legal is not a native English word. It comes from Latin and French. And so to really get back to the original language of the law, we have to go back over a thousand years into the period of English that's called Old English and the period of England that's called the Anglo-Saxon period of England. And the old English Anglo-Saxon word for laws was domus. And over time, that word evolves into the word

dooms. And it actually is the source of the word doom today. If we feel doom and gloom, or if we think about doomsday, it comes from that same original word. And the connection has to do with the fact that the dooms were really just judgments rendered by the local assemblies. Whenever they heard disputes among the townspeople, they would render their judgment. That was the domus. And so really, you know, we have to think about this period as being so far back in time that we don't really have written legal opinions like today. You know, it's just sort of an oral judgment. And that's really what it was, just a judgment. long in 1066, they give English the word judgment and the word judgment day coming out of Christianity, which the Anglo-Saxons translate as doomsday or domus day. And so that's where the connection

comes from doom in the sense of doom and gloom or the end of the world. It comes from that word judgment day or it comes from the judgment day, which is translated into English as doomsday. But originally it was the dooms, and it may seem a little bit far removed from the language of the law today, but if you think about the word deem, if you deem something to be good or bad, it's really the same root word. It's another Old English word, but that version of it has survived. But doom only survives in the sense of doom and gloom. What about deed? Well, deed is an Old English word as well. Deed originally meant just a general deed,

an action, just someone who does good deeds. But it later, and of course, we still use the word in that sense. It's not related to the word doom at all. But over time, it did become associated with property transactions, because in the Anglo-Saxon and early Norman period of England, again, there were no written deeds in the sense that we have them today. It was more of a ritual where someone would swear an oath and agree to transfer property or rights to property. So there was the deed or the act of transferring property. And then later that term gets applied to the written document, which we know today as a deed. Another interesting aspect of that, this comes out of the Norman

period, early deeds were often written down on parchment when they did start to be written down. And they would be written down twice so that each party could keep a version of it. And they would cut the parchment into two parts, but they would do it with kind of a zigzag line so that the two parties would each have a copy that they could put together to make sure it matched, like a puzzle, you know, so that no one has a forgery. We make sure they match. Well, those zigzag lines kind of look like teeth. And if you think about the Latin word dentist for teeth, which we have in dentist and denture, that's where we get the word indenture from, which we still use as a deed or a legal document. Wow.

And David, by the way, he covers that one of the earliest, you'll, Kevin, have the full history of this. One of the earliest pieces of writing that we have in English is the domus of one of those Middle English kings. And there's, you know, not that many laws. I was wondering if you could just tell us like what some of those early laws looked like if you lived in, was that North Umbria or Kent? It's Kent. It's the laws of Ethelbert of Kent. And that document is considered to be the first document to be composed in the English language. Now, what survives today is a later copy that was made near the end of the Old English, Early Middle English period. So it was about five centuries later. But we know, given when that particular king lived,

he was one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon kings. And just given the timing of it, puts it around the year 600 AD or Common Era. So that would make it the oldest document in the English language. Now, of course, we're talking Old English here. So this isn't the language we speak today. It's the original version of it, but it's evolved so much over time. You would not be able, unless you had studied Old English,

you would not be able to read it or recognize it as English. But yeah, it's put together because it comes out of the church, really. because it comes out of the church, really. The Pope sends his missionary to England to convert the Germanic pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. And that particular missionary is named Augustine. And he arrives in Kent. He converts the king, Athelbert. And then they realized that this new church has to be protected. And so it was

really prepared, appears to have been prepared by the clerics who came with Augustine because it's written in the Latin alphabet. The Anglo-Saxons didn't, you know, they had an old runic Germanic alphabet that they used for inscriptions, but they didn't really write long documents in it. So this legal code is written in the Roman Latin alphabet that we still use today, basically. And it's based on the Germanic concept of what was called the war guild, which meant man payment. And the way it worked is if there was a conflict between two people, for example, if one person killed another person, the dispute could be resolved by having the person who committed the murder or that person's family make a payment to the victim's

family. And that was how disputes were often resolved. And so this is how the original Anglo-Saxon Old English legal code is written. There's a list of crimes and then the payment that has to be made for the crime. And it begins with the church. That's the biggest fees that are paid are if you do damage to the property of the church, which again is more evidence that Augustine had the code prepared. But then it goes into other things. If you are in a fight and you break a front tooth, it's worth a certain amount. But if you break a tooth, a molar, it's worth a different amount. I mean, that's how specific it is based on the particular damage that was done. But it's very thorough.

And again, it is the oldest known document prepared in English. So that's interesting. So it's monetary damages because your impression of a period like that is basically everything is the death penalty. Kill a man and you lose your life. Steal his chicken and you lose your life. Steal his chicken and you lose your life. But this sounds completely different from what one would expect. Well, there was a lot of capital punishment, but you have to remember you're coming out of more of a tribal tradition.

And if you weren't careful, these things turned into blood feuds. And you basically had chaos with different family groups constantly murdering the other family groups. And so this tradition is not limited to England. It really is common throughout the Germanic tribes of Northern Europe. And it was just a way of regulating that to provide kind of an off-ramp so that these things didn't spiral out of control. And so if someone is committing that type of offense, could be murder, could be an assault, could be other type of crime, there was a way to make a payment to resolve it. It didn't, by the way, you weren't necessarily required to accept the payment.

You could refuse it and go to a blood feud if you wanted to. But there was at least some type of mechanism for preventing everything from turning into chaos, basically. So one question I have, as you're talking about things that are 7th century, 8th century, moving into the Norman conquest, how confident are we in these early languages? What kind of body of written work are we dealing with here? And when do we start to become sort of more confident? When do we start to have much more surviving written records? And that's one thing that I'm always quite intrigued by, especially, you know, the more you dive into antiquity, we speak with a lot of confidence about how language

was. What's the basis of the confidence? Most of the confidence comes from the written record. So the more writings we have, documents that we can review, the more confident. And I say we, I should qualify everything here by saying I'm not a linguist um i'm you know i'm an attorney i'm a podcaster but i've spent over a decade now you know reading and researching this and it's something that i take very seriously so you know but i do want to put that little caveat on it but yeah it's based on the written record and that's one of the good things about old english is that we have a written record going back to the 7th century. Most other Germanic languages don't have that record for another three or four centuries after that, some later than that. So we can take English pretty far back, about 1,500 years.

And of course, when you're dealing with Latin, you can go all the way back, you know, into the classical Latin period and other languages even further than that. You know, I should note that most European languages and several of the major languages of South Asia, including Northern India, are all related. Historical linguists have studied it, and they're confident that there was an original proto-language that was spoken 4,000 or 5,000 years ago called Proto-Indo-European, but that's not a written language. That has to be reconstructed based on modern languages and the way sounds have changed, and that's a little bit more speculative. But for Old English, we do have a written record, again, pretty much from the beginning. As far as the way it was

pronounced, that's a trickier question. And ultimately, I suppose you can say no one can say for certain. But we have to keep in mind, as I noted, when the Roman Latin alphabet was applied to English, it was just applied wholesale. They took the letters of the Roman alphabet and the sounds that each letter represented, and they applied it to English. English spelling was much more phonetic really until about 500 years ago. And that's true throughout the Old English period, throughout the Middle English period. That includes Geoffrey Chaucer. Up until around the time of Shakespeare, linguists are pretty confident that the spelling of words generally represented the way that they were pronounced. And there are some exceptions. What's interesting also is you can actually trace local accents in England. And if you know much about England, you'll know that

there's tremendous diversity in accents. Almost from one town to the next, the accent changes. And based on where these documents were written, they can see consistent features. The way one scribe would have pronounced a word is consistent with another if it comes from that area. But then you go 100 miles away and the scribes are spelling those words differently with different vowels. So there is some conjecture involved, but there's a lot of consistency when you look across the written record. And so that helps linguists with a certain amount of confidence that they can reconstruct the way Old English was pronounced. And there's wild sound shifts that happen as well. And they happen at different parts of the European continent, different from England

maybe. And so one of the things that's fascinating me that you'll bounce back and forth is we will have a word that started out the same, but because a sound shift happened in English before it happened in French, we basically have two versions of the same word that are pronounced differently. One pre-Norman conquest that we had sort of kept through English, and then we're going to get a different version of it with a different sound shift after 1066. Those get really fun. And that's one of the fascinating things about English, because English is sometimes described as a mutt language. It combines elements from so many different languages. And that really makes it fascinating. It's hard to put any specific numbers on it, but somewhere around 30% of the English vocabulary comes directly from Latin, and about 30% comes directly from French. So if you account for that, that means well over half of the English vocabulary comes from Latin or French. English is not a romance language, though. It's a Germanic language.

So you have underneath that, that kind of baseline of common Germanic words. I always like to say that little children speak Old English. Of course, that's not really true, but the Old English words that survived the past thousand years are the very simple common words that children tend to learn first. So basic numbers, you know, one through ten, hundred thousand, your basic body parts, you know, head, eye, nose, teeth, that kind of thing. Family relations, close family relations, mother, father, brother, sister. These are the simple words that have survived. And when we speak in very simple, plain terms, and this gets back into legal English, when we try as lawyers to speak in simple words, we tend to use older words from Old English. And I should also mention Old Norse. I

mentioned the word law comes from Old Norse because England was invaded by Vikings in the 8th and 9th and 10th centuries. So we have actually a fair number of Norse words mixed in with Old English, but those are our simple basic words. And then we have, after 1066, we have the Norman Conquest. We have this layer of French words that come in. And then we have, of course, on top of that, Latin words, especially in legalese. So we have these two different registers to pull from. And yeah, there's some commonality. You mentioned, I mentioned like mother and father. You know, father, we also borrowed that word from Latin and French.

In Latin, the word is pater. So we have the word paternal and paternalistic and patriarchy, other senses of the word father. But if you think about it, those are more elevated words. When we speak of paternalistic legislation, it's kind of different from your father, which is much more just, you know, plain and simple. And that occurs in legalese too, because if we skip forward a little bit, you know, English law, it began with the very simple, the dooms, domus, those simple words. Then the Norman French arrive in 1066, William the Conqueror, Battle of Hastings. For the next three centuries, really, the language of law and government was

Latin and French. It begins as Latin and then the law turns into French about in the 1200s. So now, by the time you get into the 1200s, every legal proceeding in England is conducted in French. It's not in English. And when the law is written down, it's written down in Latin. And this becomes a problem because most of the people, they don't speak Latin or French. The common people speak English. And this is a problem because when their cases go to court, to trial, And this is a problem because when their cases go to court, to trial, they don't know what's going on. And in the late 1300s, there's a law passed called the Statute of Pleading, where Parliament says, enough with French, you got to speak English in court from now on. But it was ignored. By and large, we know from the written evidence that lawyers who tend to be very conservative in the language they use, they didn't want to abandon those familiar French and Latin terms that they had used for several centuries.

But eventually, by the time we get to the 1400s, those plain simple English words start to come back in again, and lawyers are using English in court again. But now they have a problem. Which word do you use? You've got an established Latin or French word with an established legal meaning that you can rely on, but now everyone's speaking English in court again. If you go with a plain, simple English word, it might not convey the same legal meaning. So the solution was to put them together, to pair them up. And it's really amazing, as you look across the language of the law, how often we combine a simple plain Old English or Old Norse word with a French word or a Latin word. Think about law and order.

Law from Old Norse, order from French. I'll give you several of these because they're fun. Breaking and entering. Breaking is Old English, entering French. To acknowledge and confess. If you've ever seen a legal document, you'll see that wording. Fit and proper. Fit is Old English, proper French. To deem and consider. To hide and conceal, give and grant in a deed. What about aid and abet? Aid and abet are both French and Latin words. But that gets into another issue I'll talk about also because it has to do with alliteration.

But that's another feature of legalese. But a couple more of these examples. Yeah. another feature of legalese, but a couple more of these examples. Yeah. In a deed, sale and transfer of property, land and tenements, to make and enter into an agreement. That one's so true. That one's ridiculous. You have a free and clear title. And I used to do a lot of estate planning. and I used to do a lot of estate planning. So in my deeds would contain language like, I give, devise, and bequeath all of my right, title, and interest to this certain piece of property to someone.

Well, give, devise, and bequeath. Give is Old Norse. Devise is Old English. Bequeath is French. Right, title, and interest. Right is Old English. Title and interest is French. Right title and interest. Right is Old English. Title and interest is French. So this becomes just a standard feature of legalese where early modern lawyers in the early modern period, 1500s, 1600s into 1700s, they're trying to account for these two different

languages, these two different legal traditions, and the way that the words were used in those traditions, and their solution was just to combine them. And it creates a bit of a nightmare today for people trying to read legal documents, but it's that way for a reason. Another example, by the way, since I did a lot of wills, last will and testament. Your last will is Old English, testament is Latin. So you mentioned something about alliteration i'm very interested in that so this is another feature of modern legalese maybe not as obvious but it's at least arguable that it goes back to old english

so let's go back in time again to the anglo-son period. Are we going to do Beowulf? Let's do Beowulf. Yes. It's interesting because I was going to touch on Old English poetry, and that's the most famous poem of Old English. Old English poetry is different from most modern poetry, and let's say poetry after the Norman Conquest, in that it relied on alliteration. So the French really bring the idea of rhyming poetry, where we repeat sounds at the ends of words. But the traditional Germanic poetry was the opposite. It repeated sounds at the beginning of words.

So it was, you know, it alliterated. And so a poem like Beowulf, you know, does that. Hwa-twe, ga-ra-den-a, en-ger-da-gum. There's just certain repeating sounds. The hwa-twe at the beginning, you know, it does that. Hwa-twe, ga-ra-den-a, en-ger-da-gum. There's just certain repeating sounds. The hwa-twe at the beginning, you know, ger-da-gum at the end is repeating. It's just the way Old English poetry worked. Well, in those early assemblies,

those early legal assemblies, one of the ways in which legal disputes were settled or resolved is the person bringing a claim against someone else would have to swear an oath that they were, you know, the person did whatever the crime was. And these oaths were kind of standard language, but they were often worded in a way that they kind of had that same type of alliteration. And the thing was, there's a certain magical aspect to the oath. Because if the person swearing the oath messed up, if they stuttered or stammered or

made a mistake, then the oath was deemed to be invalid because it was deemed that God had interfered and said the person wasn't telling the truth. So you not only had to repeat the oath as written or as recited traditionally, but you had to do it perfectly when you did it. Well, then once that person swore an oath, the other person would have to swear in response. They would answaru, which is where we get the word answer from. The legal system works the same way today. You file a complaint, the other party files an answer, right? Well, this is what happened in Old English.

They would answaru, they would swear in response, and they would have their own oath that they would have to swear, and they'd have to do it perfectly. But that type of oath, again, had that type of alliteration. In fact, anticipating that we would talk about it, I actually have an example of that oath written down. I'm going to try to read it. This Old English is, without practicing, it can be tricky, but it says, by the way, the person that they're swearing against is named Edward. I gave him the name Edward because it's an Old English name. It reads,

On thonet richten, etch eamon shilthi, ather ye dare, ye dictus, ather tictlan, dæmi tith. Basically means, by the Lord, I am guiltless, both in deed and counsel of the charge, which Edward accuses me. But there's alliteration in there. Ye dera yedictus at thara tictlan de me tict. There's certain repeating sounds. Well, this became another feature of English, of legal English. If we think about a modern oath, the most well-known part of most modern oaths occurs when the person swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Now, that's a modern English legal phrase, but it uses the same type of alliteration.

And it's not just the repeating of the word truth. Listen closely to the repeating T's and TH sounds. I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It runs throughout that whole phrase. And it's, again, it's very similar to the way the Old English Oath worked with repeating certain sounds. It made it easier to memorize,

just like with the poets who had to repeat Beowulf, those long poems, they remembered it through alliteration. Well, the people swearing those oaths had to help them remember it, because you use the same type of alliteration. But it also has impacted other aspects of legalese. You mentioned aid and abet.

I'll give you some more. Each and every, have and hold, clear and convincing evidence, part and parcel of land. And in a deed, you have the rest, residue, and remainder of your estate. There are tons of these in legal English where you just have the same kind of repeating sounds and language. The reason I ask that is because the longer I was a practicing lawyer, the more that I found myself naturally lapsing into alliteration when I spoke. And even when I would talk to a jury, I would make my points with alliteration. And that just piqued my interest when you said that because I was thinking, why has my mind become like that? And that makes a ton of sense.

Yeah, it's the things you don't really realize until someone kind of pulls the curtain away and says, oh, there it is. And then you suddenly recognize that that's really what sparked my interest in the podcast, going back to being an attorney and doing a podcast about the history of English. Some people say, why did you do that? Well, for me, it was because I was fascinated about the history of English, not as an academic, but just as someone who had to use the language on a day-to-day basis. And of course, a lot of my practice was dedicated to drafting legal documents. And I was constantly faced with these dilemmas about which word to use. And I'm an advocate and a believer in plain English and trying to make the language of the law simpler so more people can access it. But you constantly deal with that struggle between those fancy Latin and French words and the simple plain English. And where do you draw that line?

And that's what always fascinated me. And that's what always fascinated me. And I knew enough about the history of English to know that in most of those cases, I was choosing between a simple old English word and a Latin or French word. And that's what always kind of sparked my interest. And then, as I said, you notice things like the alliteration, the pairing of the words from different languages. And suddenly, legalese starts to make a lot more sense when you put it into its historical context. So if you as a lawyer, we all in law school, we're reading cases

from sort of English common law time, they're incredibly hard to read. They're in English, not in Middle English, not in Old English, They're in Modern English, and they're very difficult to follow, even though each individual word we could certainly define. And it reminds me so much of the English language being sort of this molten lava, or rather not molten lava. It's always molten. It never dries. It's sort of always moving a little bit. And I was thinking about this yesterday because I try to use correct grammar to my two-year-old so that he learns good grammar instinctively rather than having to learn it later in school, which is much, much harder, as I myself think. And I think the word farther is almost dead. And the word further is going to represent, you know, we've had this,

is going to represent, you know, we've had this, you know, furthermore, further is sort of the metaphorical, non-literal length, and farther is supposed to be a mile farther to go. Right. But I'm not sure we're saying farther anymore, and it kind of sounds weird. And that's typical with the language. And at some point, you just have to accept that the language, And at some point, you just have to accept that the one consistent of language is change. And that's true from the very beginning. And there's not really much you can do to stop it. But yeah, that type of thing happens all the time.

And I have to admit that I'm the same way. I mean, I almost always use further. I almost never use farther. But again, that's just the beauty of the language in a way. I mentioned Middle English. As you go back in time, the further back in time you go, the more you need a glossary or a translator. I think about Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. A lot of people are familiar with that. They may have had to read it in school. And I suspect most people probably read a modern

English translation. But I know there are some people who do read it in the original Middle English. But if you read it in the original Middle English, what you're going to find in most cases is you'll have the original Middle English on one side of the page, and then on the other side, there'll be a glossary where words will have to be translated, because that's simply what happens over time is words fall out of use. And of course, meanings change, and many words just stop being used altogether. And so that was the case. But then some survive. Do we know why some survive and others die out of use, like 300 years from now?

And they're like, actually, there were two pronunciations of this, further and farther. You know, I don't know. 20% of those words we still use. Exactly, Sarah. But then 80% we don't.

Why did the 20% survive? I don't know that we can say for certain. It's just the natural process of language, especially with history. There are certainly external events that contribute to that. If we go back to Old English, modern scholars have estimated that about 85% of the vocabulary of Old English has disappeared over time. Now, I mentioned the common words have survived, you know, the numbers and basic body parts, that type of thing. But all the other, you know, words of Beowulf that make it almost impossible to read Beowulf today are words that disappeared. Well, we can account for much of that because of the Norman Conquest.

disappeared. Well, we can account for much of that because of the Norman Conquest, the fact that French kind of pushes English out of the way for about three centuries so that only the most common simple words survive that. And then the other thing you get once you get into the Middle English period is this flood of French and then later Latin words and Greek words into the language to the point that the language was becoming overwhelming by the time you get into the 1400s and 1500s. And once you get into the 1500s, you get into something called the inkhorn debate, which was a debate among scholars of England about all these fancy words that nobody could read anymore. You would read these documents written in quote-unquote English, but half the words were these super fancy

Latinate words that had eight syllables and nobody knew what they meant, and scholars started to just rail against it. What we ended up taking in the end was kind of a middle approach. A lot of those words disappeared over the course of the 1500s and 1600s because they were considered too fancy or highfalutin and they just sort of disappeared. But as we know, a lot of them survived. As I said, about 60% of the vocabulary is Latinate, Latin or French. So it's just a sort of a random process and it's hard to account for why things change the way they do

and to put it into any kind of simple structure. It's just the way the language worked, in English especially, because English has a tendency to borrow words from other languages in the way that most other languages don't tend to do that. So we're constantly absorbing words, but almost inevitably that means losing words. constantly absorbing words, but almost inevitably that means losing words. Because you can look at a dictionary, Merriam-Webster's dictionary, and there's a ton of words in it. As you flip through it though, there are going to be a lot of words in there you don't recognize and never use. Well, those words are still hanging on in that dictionary, but many of them have already disappeared from the language. And eventually some of those later revisions are going to drop those words. And unless you have a massive 10-volume OED that captures every word ever used in the language, you realize that the language we speak is very different from the

language that was spoken four or five centuries ago, not just in grammar and pronunciation, but just the words we use have changed. not just in grammar and pronunciation, but just the words we use have changed. So question I've got, a portal opens in the space-time continuum. I have the recipe for penicillin in my hand, and I want to go back in time and save people from all those infectious diseases, when would they be able to understand me? How early? How early? They're going to burn you as a witch, David, first of all. Well, I know.

When they understand you, you're not going to fare well. When can I at least plead my case before I'm set on fire? He has a great episode about witches also worth noting. Well, and I have an episode on the Black Death as well, which also impacted English in some interesting ways. I guess the short answer is it kind of depends on where you're going when you go back in time. Are you going to London or are you going to Northern England or the West Country?

Because again, I don't think people realize how much variation there was. Even in the Middle Ages, English writers were saying, people in the South of England can't understand what those people in the North of England are saying. So there's tremendous dialectical diversity at the time. But let's assume that you're going back into, say, London, which is really more the precursor of modern English that we speak today, you would probably have to go back to 1400s, maybe 1300s. I may be being generous here to say around the time of Chaucer. I think that, here's the thing about Chaucer, if you read or hear someone reading Middle English,

and that's what we're talking about here is Middle English. When you first hear it spoken, you think, what in the world is that? It sounds vaguely familiar as English, but I'm not sure it's English. Maybe it's some weird English accent or dialect. But the more you listen to it, the big difference between Middle English and Modern English was the pronunciation. The vowels of English shifted around in the 1400s and 1500s so that words in English started to be pronounced completely differently than the way they had been before. The vowel sounds changed. So what happens is, as you go back into Middle English, you have to kind of attune your ear to the different vowels. But it's relatively easy to do.

And once you start hearing someone speak enough and you account for those little vowel changes, it suddenly starts to make sense. So I think if I dropped you in late 1300s England during the time of Chaucer, at first you would not know what anybody was saying. But after you were there a day or two, your ear would become accustomed to it. And I think you could probably communicate on some basic level. I should also mention an interesting side note. I talked about the Vikings arriving in England,

late 700s, early 800s. They spoke a different language. They spoke, quote, Old Norse, which is the precursor of modern, you know, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and so on, the Scandinavian languages. Yet, it was far enough back in time that it's thought that their language was close enough to Old English that they could communicate with the Anglo-Saxons without too much difficulty. So even though they spoke different languages, they could still communicate. And that's the thing. If you go back in time,

the further back in time you go, the easier it is for people who speak different languages to communicate because they all came from this common source. I've read somewhere that Americans actually sound more like original, when I say original English speakers, I guess I'm probably referring to more of that post-Middle English vowel shift, maybe Shakespeare's time, that a true Shakespearean accent would sound more American, that basically British English has sort of continued to evolve in those sound shifts

and we're kind of frozen in 1776, 1750 or whatever. And so we're better. I'd like to say that we're better. I'm wondering if you think we're better. I don't think we're better because here's what I said earlier. Language is always changing. And this creates a myth within English, within American English, which is that American English is somehow inferior to British English. That's what upsets me. That's what I want to push back against. Because British English is somehow older. We think of that as the language of Shakespeare because when we see Shakespeare performed on stage, it's presented usually with a modern RP, received pronunciation accent. That, however, is not the way people spoke in early modern English during the time of Shakespeare. What

has happened is that American English has evolved, but so has the English of England. And so neither language today is the language of Shakespeare. And in fact, there are people who have kind of reconstructed how Shakespeare spoke. They call it original pronunciation. And there are actually performances of Shakespeare's plays given in original pronunciation or OP. And the comment that people typically give when they hear it for the first time is that it sounds like a blend of American English, British English, and Irish English. And that's exactly what it should sound like because that's the language that was spoken

right before those three branches of English split. They really kind of split in the 1600s and 1700s. So again, that's why I said if you go back in time, you should hear sort of a combination and that's what you hear. Now, the American features that have survived, and this is true in Ireland as well, is the distinctive R sound. So whereas we would say birth with an R in modern British English, Southern British English, they would say, birth. There's no real R in there. That loss of the R sound occurred in England really in the 1700s after American English was established.

So that's one thing that people listen when they hear Shakespeare's plays performed in original pronunciation, they notice those very distinctive American or you can even think of it as Irish R's in there, that you wouldn't hear in modern received pronunciation. You don't hear on the stage today when those plays are given. But there are some other features as well. We think about what's a very posh English accent. They say bath instead of bath, right? Well, that's a more recent development in southern England. Back in the time of Shakespeare, people said bath, like Americans Well, that's a more recent development in southern England. Back in the time of Shakespeare, people said bath, like Americans say, and like they say in the north

of England, by the way, they say bath too. Bath and poth and cloth is a recent innovation. You think about the ends of words, we would say secretary with a distinct syllables at the end, where someone from England would say secretary. They just sort of blend it as tree instead of terry. Again, American English preserves the older pronunciation where there was distinct syllables. Southern British English has slurred it. But American English has changed too. That's why you can't say we speak the language of Shakespeare. The point is that all English dialects are constantly evolving. The most conservative English dialects, by the way, are in Northern England into Scotland. So if you really wanted

to hear someone speaking something akin to or closer to Middle English, or at times even Old English, go into places like Newcastle, Geordie, accent there, Southern Scotland, you'll hear some of the older vowel sounds. When people say hoose and moose instead of house and mouse, that's the way people pronounced it in Old English. I've got a question. And two questions. One, I go back to, I'm sorry, I'm obsessed with time travel now in this conversation. So it's 1776, and I'm listening to the debates in the Continental Congress, or I'm listening to George Washington address his troops.

Does Washington sound more like Anthony Hopkins or John Wayne? Well, that's a great question. We don't know because, again, we don't have recordings. And this is a really tricky one. The answer is probably sounds... Who's speaking? Which founding father is speaking? So we're talking about Washington now.

Washington may have sounded more like Blackbeard. And the reason I say that, I'm joking a bit. Let's talk about American accents for a second. Washington's from Virginia. He speaks presumably with a Southern American accent. The early writings in American English suggest there wasn't much of a north-south divide at the time. People who traveled around the colonies, actually what they say, Sarah, is that Americans in the colonies speak better English than the people back home

in England do. These were English travelers. Because if you think about it, in England, there's just tremendous diversity of dialects from one region to the next. When people move to the colonies, they're mixing together, and the rough edges get worn away. So what you end up with is a much more standard form of English spoken in the colonies. Think about Australia. One of the things about modern Australian English is there isn't much dialectical diversity there. There's a little bit. Some people have very broad, you know, Steve Irwin kind of accent, some a little more standard,

but there's not much regional variation in Australia. And it's thought that that's kind of the way it was in the American colonies based on the early reports. But there was a little bit of variation. in the early reports, but there was a little bit of variation. And a lot of the early settlement, for example, in Massachusetts, in Boston area, came from southeastern England, which had an early non-rhotic accent. They didn't pronounce their R's. Now, it hadn't spread across England yet. It was confined to that corner of England. That's where a lot of those early settlers in Massachusetts came from. That's part of the reason why you still have that very distinctive non-Rothic accent in Boston today, where people say, it kind of comes from that. Well, in the South, a lot of the early settlers came from the West

country of England. And so they came from the same parts of England that produced a lot of the early sailors and a lot of the early pirates. And they had a rhotic accent. We think about pirates are, you know, that's a stereotype. But there is certain similarities, it's thought, between the early accents of the south and the west country of england and the best evidence of that is near where i grew up which is the outer banks of north carolina and the tidewater region of virginia where they have a very specific accent called the hoitoider accent which means high tide or high tide but they instead of saying i like we would say high tide they say hoito. That's the same way it's pronounced in the West Country of England. So what happened on these outer banks and these islands off the coast is the settlers came and they stayed there and they were isolated.

They didn't communicate with the mainland very much. So some of their dialect features, you want to talk about Elizabethan English, that's about as close as you're going to get is some of these accents along the Outer Banks because they were settled in the 1600s and 1700s and remained largely isolated. And you can hear dialect features today. In fact, some people think that the dialect of the Outer Banks and Tidewater region is really just a slight variation of the West Country accent. And some linguists don't even really consider it American English. They consider it the only American dialect or dialect spoken in America that's not really American English. It's really an offshoot of British English. Okay. I can't believe we're out of time. This is awful. Last legal thoughts or nuggets for us before we let you go.

Well, I don't have a lot. I mean, I will say that the podcast that I do is chronological, and I am currently in the mid to late 1500s. So I'm just now in the early modern English period. And I am getting ready to tackle Shakespeare, which is going to be one of the most challenging parts of the podcast series. But one of the recurring themes of the podcast that keeps coming up is the way that legal English was shaped by the changes that I talk about. It's something that I've touched on from time to time. And I'm going to continue to do that as I move forward. And so, other than just encouraging your listeners to check it out, it's a lot. I've been doing it 10 years. There are 160 episodes, I know. But I think there are bonus episodes. In fact, I recently did a series of bonus episodes. This is my Patreon, I should note, on Legal

English because I had enough, a lot of people, a lot of listeners were requesting more information on that. But, you know, it's just something that I think is a fascinating topic. The way I present it is sort of half history, half English. So if you find the English part boring, maybe the history part will keep you interested. If you find the, you know, the other way around, if you maybe the history part will keep you interested. If you find the other way around, if you find the history boring, maybe the language will keep you interested. But it's always a balance in the podcast. And I would invite and encourage your listeners to check it out if they think they would find it interesting. Well, at least one person here finds it to be the most

interesting. And I think you do balance the history and the language so perfectly and telling, I don't know, I sort of explain it to people as telling the history of the world to some extent through language, which is really, really fun. That's the idea. Ultimately, I call it the history of English, but it's really kind of the history of the people who spoke the English language and the precursors of the English language. And it's rooted in the basic idea that there's a fundamental connection between language and culture and history. The language we speak reflects the history that we have. And English is a wonderful

language because it's kind of a time capsule. It captures so many different words from so many different periods of English. And the way we pronounce words reflects the way they were pronounced when they were borrowed in. And that's something that I enjoy exploring in the podcast. But yeah, it's fun. It's a lot, but hopefully you'll continue to listen and make it all the way through Shakespeare with me and everybody else. How many Shakespeare episodes are we gonna get? I have no idea.

I have no idea. It could be one or two and I would make half my audience angry if I only did two episodes. It could be 20 that I'd make the other half angry for doing 20 episodes. So it'll be somewhere I'd make the other half angry for doing 20 episodes. So it'll be somewhere in between. We'll see how it goes. I need this to start lingering because as you said, we're already in the late 1500s. At some point, you run into the present.

I don't want to contemplate what happens then. I can't not have this as part of my life. So slow down, Kevin. I will. Too fast. I'll take my time. I've gone from every other week to once a month. So maybe I'll just start doing it once a year or something. No, no, no. That's not what I meant. That's not at all what I meant. That's the wrong slow down. Well, thank you so much, Kevin. Deeply appreciate you coming on. That was fascinating stuff. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it. And we'll take a quick break to hear from our sponsor today, Aura. Ready to win Mother's Day and cement your reputation as the best gift giver in the family? Give the moms in your life an Aura digital picture frame preloaded with decades of family photos. She'll love looking back on your childhood memories and seeing what you're up to today. Even better, with unlimited storage and an easy to use app,

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