English Language
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An Undeceptions podcast. Enter. Squeeze me, please, lady. Yes, what is it?

I'm coming here for to be learning the English. You're early. Oh, no. I'm Ali. I beg your pardon? My name is Ali. Ali Nadeem. I'm coming here for to be learning the English. Ah, yes, yes. You wish to join our new class, English as a foreign language. Yes, please. And I'm hopping to be unrolled. Hopping to be unrolled? Like it say in your syllabus.

You mean hoping to be enrolled? That is what I said. Hoping to be unrolled. Yes, well I'm afraid you cannot be unrolled... ...enrolled until the English teacher arrives. Now she should be here in a few minutes. In the meanwhile, perhaps you would care to wait in the classroom. Go down the corridor, turn left at the bottom and wait in room five. Understand? No.

That's the 1970s British sitcom Mind Your Language, a comedy about a classroom full of students from different nationalities all learning English as a second language. Now, warning, it's politically incorrect. I mean, it is director Mark's favourite show. But it makes the point that English can sound very different depending on where you come from.

English is spoken as a first language by about half a billion people around the world. If you add those who speak English as a second or third language, we're talking about two billion people. But are they all speaking the same thing? What used to be called the King's English? More than half of the world's native English speakers are now in the US.

Maybe it should be called the President's English. Linguists agree that from country to country, ethnicity to ethnicity, people group to people group, there are wide variations in English pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary and grammar.

Director Mark wants me to add here that you can't even work at Undeceptions unless you're committed to the grammatical finesse known as the Oxford comma, which is true, but a little bit ironic given that the previous paragraph was written by Director Mark and it didn't have an Oxford comma. I noticed that. I'm so sad he's not here in the studio to be sprung. Pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, thanks. Researcher Al.

But I digress. Sort of. English has been in use for about 1500 years. It's changed so dramatically over that time that the original English, basically Anglo-Saxon, is almost unrecognizable to modern English speakers. And scores of "Englishes" have developed across the planet, each with its own claim to validity.

This has led to what are called Creoles, like Singlish, Chinglish, Denglish, Anglicans and other inter-languages, whose status is hotly debated by academics all over the world.

It seems that English, for all its caricature as the stuffy royal speech, has always been on the move. From the very beginning, it has constantly adapted, adopted and intermingled. And that's before we even think about the way the internet and text messaging has changed it. LOL.

English might just be the world's ultimate mongrel language, or maybe the Pac-Man of languages. Which may be why it's arguably also the language that's done most to spread Christianity around the world. Christianity, like English, is highly flexible. It's a culturally adaptive system. Thus, the history of English and the history of Christianity are in a sense intertwined.

I'm John Dixon, and this is the English version of Underceptions. Underceptions

This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by our friends at Zondervan Academic. You can get discounts on their special master lectures, video courses and free chapters of many of the books we talk about here on the pod by going to zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Don't forget to add Undeceptions.

Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, philosophy, science, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.

Okay. Yep. So tell me what you had for breakfast or lunch or something, just so I can see the level here. I had a British lunch today, which was toad in the hole, roast potatoes, gravy. At high table? Trifle. Yep. Tuesday is International Day, but today we went British. Okay.

I'm setting the recording levels and getting an insight into the life of an Oxford Don with one of the world's foremost experts on the English language. Simon Horriban is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at Magdalen College. I'm in what's called the new buildings where he is. They're new because they're only about 200 or 300 years old. He's in the same building C.S. Lewis had his office in.

He's the author of The English Language, A Very Short Introduction, and How English Became English, A Short History of a Global Language, both by Oxford University Press. There aren't many other people in the world who can say they literally wrote the book on English.

His many other books include Chaucer's Language, Bagels, Bumpf and Busses, A Day in the Life of the English Language, and my personal favourite, Does Spelling Matter? The answer is yes, by the way. But Simon is way more nuanced than I am about that sort of thing. So can you set the scene for us before there was English? What were people speaking and where did those people come from, given they're here in England?

Well, before the Anglo-Saxon tribes arrived and the language they spoke is the origin of what we call English, there were of course Romans speaking Latin and there were Celts speaking a Celtic language.

But what we think of as English then is the result of a group of Germanic tribes coming to Britain in the 5th century, bringing with them Germanic dialects that they were already speaking on the continent.

And it's the kind of interaction between those different but related dialects that is the result of what we call English, which goes back to the word for angles, the Anglo-Saxons, English, and it relates to a bit of Northern Germany from which they originated.

And did they come, I know there's loads of debate about why they came and how they came, was it an invasion, was it migration, but did they basically come because they saw the Roman Empire basically broke down here so there's an opportunity? That's right, yeah. And so they came and then they settled because the Romans had left and they sort of saw a kind of power vacuum and an opportunity to settle. These different tribes settled in different parts of the country.

And it's partly that that gives rise to the dialect variation that we find even back in the earliest form of English. Perhaps a more basic question, and maybe this can't be answered: how on earth do languages develop and, in a sense, overtake their linguistic forebears?

Well, I guess the thing to remember is that it's speakers that are important in that story rather than the languages themselves. And so it's partly to do with the fortunes of the speakers. So what happens is that speakers of those languages spread, they migrate, like the Anglo-Saxons did to come to Britain, and they move away from their areas of origin. And if they flourish, if they, you know,

put down roots and thrive, or perhaps conquer other groups such that their language is then taken over by those others in the same way that, for instance, Latin had been at an earlier stage, then the language spreads. And if in fact what they do is that they die out, then the language dies out.

Roughly speaking, the history of the English language is a three-act play. And the first act starts in the 600s and extends through to the 1000s.

This is the period when friend of the pod, the venerable Bede, writes his History of the English People, though he writes it in Latin. It's when the earliest work of English was written, Beowulf, an epic poem written in the style of a Germanic heroic legend, running over 3,000 lines. This is the era of Old English.

So Old English is the period from about 650 to around 1100. And that's the earliest recorded form of English as we think of it. So the earliest written records of English begin around that time. Is there such a thing as the first recorded English sentence or document? Probably the earliest recorded English word is 'raichan'.

which is scratched in runes on a bone. It's a runic inscription. It's worth remembering that the earliest recorded forms of Germanic were in the runic alphabet, not in the Roman alphabet. And it's a very ancient form of the word, which in Old English is 'ra', and in Modern English is 'ro', as in a roe deer.

And the bone that it's on is a bit of a skeleton of a roe deer. So somebody has found this and thought, "That's a bit of roe deer. I'll write on it the word Raihan." Unfortunately, those early inscriptions, they look fantastic, but they're not particularly imaginative. They tend to be just a description of what the thing is or who it belongs to or who carved the runes.

But that's really interesting because it is such an archaic form of the word that seems to point right back to proto-Germanic. Okay, I think it's time to hear a passage in Old English. And I'd like you to read the passage that I spotted on page two of your Oxford very short introduction to the English language. I just want to hear how it sounds. I'm sure my listeners would love to hear. Sure, okay. He quath sothletha summon hafda twegen sunnah

"Though quat sae yingra to his father, father sae lemme mine dal mynra achter they me to your birth." "Though dal the hame his achter." "Though after fayowem dagum, ealdesting yeyathreda sae yingra sunu, ond fayrdath raclicha on fayowlen richa, on forsbilde dda his achter, libenda on his yalsan."

I'm going to let listeners just hang with that and wonder what on earth it is. I think there are a couple of words people will go, oh, I think I know what that might be. And we'll come back to it in a version that they might understand. And I'll get you to say more about it. Hint, it's not Beowulf.

But you've got to know about Beowulf. As I said earlier, this is the classic work of Old English. It's a rollicking tale of a warrior hero named Beowulf who helps the king of the Danes, Hrothgar, defeat a terrorising monster called Grendel, which is not so terrifying a name. Anyway, Beowulf kills him by ripping his arm off.

Grendel's monster mum is horrified and pledges revenge, but Beowulf kills her too. He finds an ancient giant's sword in her underwater cave and decapitates her. We should maybe have had a warning at the top of the show. Beowulf is then elevated to become king of his own kingdom and lives happily ever after.

Not really. He reigns successfully for decades, but then he has to do battle with a dragon, of course. He kills the dragon with a dagger, but not before the dragon bites him and poisons him to death. The final part of the poem describes Beowulf's great funeral and his elaborate burial mound. Here's a snippet in modern English, read by who else than Yannick Laurie.

Then from the moorland by misty crags, With God's wrath laden Grendel came. The monster was minded of mankind, Now sundry to seize in the stately house. Under Welkin he walked, till the wine palace there, Gold hall of men he gladly discerned, Flashing with fretwork, not first time this, That he the home of Hrothgar sought.

Yet ne'er in his life-day, late or early, Such hardy heroes, such hall-thanes found! To the house the warrior walked apace, Parted from peace, the portal appended, Though with forged bolts fast, when his fists had struck it, And baleful he burst in his blatant rage the house's mouth. All hastily then,

O'er fair paved floor the fiend trod on. Eierful he strode. There streamed from his eyes fearful flashes like flame to see. He spied in the hall the hero band. Kin and clansmen clustered asleep. Hardy liegemen then laughed his heart.

For the monster was minded, ere morn should dawn, savage, to sever the soul of each, life from body, since lusty banquet waited his will. Beowulf, of course, is the greatest text that survives written in Old English. We don't know who wrote it. We don't really know when it was written.

and it survives in a single manuscript, the date of which we don't really know. There's a lot that's unknown and disputed about the text. But it's hugely important, I suppose, because it shows Old English in a very developed stage of it as a kind of poetic medium. So this isn't just the language that was being spoken by Anglo-Saxons trying to go about their business.

in pre-conquest Britain. But it shows a language that had been, you know, in terms of things like the degree of poetic vocabulary that had been developed at that time and the way that the sort of metrical constraints had been developed. So we see the language being used in a very effective way. We'll put a link to the full text in Modern English in the show notes.

Act II is known as Middle English. If Act I was heavily influenced by the Germanic tradition, Act II owes something to the French. Sometimes you say that Old English stops at 1066, but of course no language changes suddenly overnight. So we say around about the year 1000. Why does the normal conquest have such an important impact on English? Well,

It's partly to do with the fact that William of Normandy came over with much of his entourage, who were then settled in this country, took over many of the positions of political power. French speakers replaced English speakers. It became the language of government. It became the language of administration. It became the language of the elite.

English continued to be used, but mostly by the sort of peasant classes who were illiterate and therefore it was largely a spoken language. And those who were using English were often then deliberately drawing words from French into English. So a lot of the old English

vocabulary simply gets replaced by the French equivalent at that point. So lots of... that's why Old English is often very hard to understand. Can you give us a couple of words that might illustrate, you know, the French influence over the English? So things like

We tend to think that words for members of your family, you know, kinship terms in languages tend to be very stable. And that's true in English, so that we have things like father, brother, mother. Those are all from Old English. You can trace them right the way back. But when you get to things like uncle and aunt and cousin, you know, which are slightly further removed from the, you know, the immediate nuclear family, those are French borrowings.

Is it also true that some of the now English words relating to fashion and food and art are French? Exactly, yeah. That comes a little bit later in the Middle English period. And it's only later in about the 14th century that we see another wave of French influence. And that is particularly to do with these areas of sort of French culture that were perceived as being highly prestigious. That's the period of poets like Geoffrey Chaucer, for instance, who uses a lot of...

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in 1343, give or take, and he died in 1400. He earned the reputation of being the father of English literature. He's best known for the Canterbury Tales, a collection of funny, sad, odd stories told by pilgrims in a storytelling contest while on their pilgrimage to, you guessed it, to Canterbury and the shrine of St Thomas Becket.

Chaucer intended to write over a hundred of these tales, but he only got through 24 before he died. "Though I speak plainly of this matter here, Explain to you their words and means of cheer, Nor though I use their very terms, nor lie; For this thing do you know as well as I: When one repeats a tale told by a man, He must report as closely as he can.

every single word as he remembers it, how vulgar it be or how unfit, or else he may be telling what's untrue, embellishing, even making up things too, he may not spare. Although it were his brother, he must as well say one word as another. Christ spoke very plainly in holy writ, and you know well there's nothing rude in it.

And Plato says to those able to read, The word should be the cousin to the deed. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer.

There are lots of records relating to Chaucer's life. Not one of them actually refers to him as a poet. He was an administrator. He worked initially as a page boy and then as a clerk, dealing with sort of making sure that the right amount of tax was paid on wool imports and exports. And then he was the clerk of the King's Works.

So he worked in and around the royal court. And then, you know, in his spare time, he was a poet. But what's significant about Chaucer is that at the time he's writing, the sort of mid to late 14th century is the point just when

English starts to become more of a significant language again. So French is starting to tail off that period I mentioned of where French words are being drawn into English. It's just the point at which French as a language itself is starting to lose its status in English. And that's partly to do with the fact that the French of England is seen as a rather provincial kind of dialect.

Chaucer says of his prioress, she has kind of courtly aspirations and we're told that she liked to speak French to sound posh, but she spoke the French of Stratford at the Bow, which is a place in Middlesex because the French of Paris, he says, was to her unknoa. She didn't know it. And that's the sort of, you get a lot of those kinds of slightly sort of, you know, those put downs where you speak French, but this terrible English French.

Chaucer, as an administrator, he would have kept records in what was called Anglo-Norman, which was this dialect that had grown up, the Norman dialect of French, which came over with William of Normandy, but that was used as a kind of administrative language. And the French that had become fashionable was the Parisian French. So that English, as a consequence, starts to be more widely used. And we also get an emerging middle class approach

There's huge social changes in 14th century England because of the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, and a group that were completely disenfranchised start to acquire more sort of political and social capital. And those are people who are monolingual English speakers and who have a kind of appetite for literature in English. And that's really Chaucer's audience. So he's one of the first people to sort of recognize that writing in the vernacular has a potential.

So yeah, he's important for partly because he's somebody writing in English just at that point where it starts to take off again. So does a work, a great work like Chaucer's play a role in standardising a language like English? Or is it more that he's riding the wave? So he's just a pristine example of the best Middle English? Or do people, you know, then want to speak like Chaucer?

I think there's a bit of both. He gives it, he certainly, he's riding the wave in the sense that he's not responsible for the sort of, you know, English coming back in that way. But I think, but he does then create, you know, it gathers pace because of who he is and what he does. The advent of the printing press

One of the first books that Caxton printed in English when he came to Westminster and set up his press in 1476 was the Canterbury Tales. William Caxton, by the way, was a merchant in the 1400s. He might have been the one to introduce the printing press to England.

He printed over a hundred different titles, including the first English translation of Aesop's fables. Those pithy, ancient Greek moral tales like The Tortoise and the Hare and The Boy Who Cried Wolf. These massively influenced later children's literature.

Putting things like Chaucer and Aesop in print meant moving toward a standardised English. Caxton adopted the London dialect for obvious reasons, but through the publication of these books, that dialect went and influenced other regions throughout England. And hey presto, we're developing a unified English.

So, you know, I think it's part of that story as well. The printing press is another key factor in bringing about a kind of standardizing of the English language. And when Caxton is sort of, when he issues that, he uses Chaucer's name particularly about as how important he is as a kind of one of the first finders of the English language, somebody who, you know, who's sort of very instrumental in bringing it back and so on. So his name is definitely brought into that cause. Mm-hmm.

The other great text is of course the Bible. What is the earliest attempt to put it in English? Is it Tyndale or were there other attempts before William Tyndale? Well there was old English versions of the Bible and then of course there is Wycliffe in the 14th century

So there have been Old and Middle English versions before Tyndale comes along. And one of the features of Bible translation is that they quite often are borrowing from earlier translations. And that's partly because if somebody's already done it, then it's worth having a look at what they did, I suppose. But it's also because, of course, there's a sort of, it's a feature of the language of the Bible generally that it tends to be somewhat archaic.

And so looking back to earlier versions is a way of maintaining that kind of the continuity, but also giving it that kind of archaistic effect. Would Tyndale's translation be regarded as early modern? Yeah. Okay. But does it have a role in standardizing English? Or is the fact that he was such a controversial figure mean that it doesn't play that role?

Well, I mean, it certainly leaves a mark on translations of the Bible and also, you know, many of the idioms that he introduced, in fact, are ones that have survived, you know. But, you know, things like some of those phrases that we associate particularly with the King James Bible, like pride goes before a fall or out of the mouths of babes or by the skin of one's teeth. There's nothing new under the sun, fly in the ointment. You know, they got those direct from Tyndale.

So you could say, yeah, Tyndale, you know, he coined all those phrases and we still use them. By the 14th century, the curtain was beginning to fall on the French influence that gave us Middle English. Thanks to Chaucer and later Tyndale, the status of English begins to change. It's no longer just the language of the commoner, of the downtrodden.

English began to be used in more technical and expressive contexts, and the stage was set for the third act of our drama, The Rise of Early Modern English. It's the language of John Donne and William Shakespeare. Stay with us.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. I looked it up. Shakespeare had a working vocabulary of 54,000 words. 54,000 words in his working vocabulary.

We, today, in the United States, have a working vocabulary of 3,000 words. That's why when we read Shakespeare, we're like, "What light through yonder window?" Does this come on a DVD? If I'd have been born in the 1700s, presumably children had a bigger vocabulary than I had, which means I wouldn't even be able to recite fairy tales to kids, 'cause I'm not smart enough, you know? I'd have to be like, uh...

In time past, though not long ago, there lived pigs in stature little, in number three, who, being of an age both entitled and inspired to seek their fortune, did set about to do thusly.

That's comedian John Branion with his Shakespearean take on the three little pigs, in case the early modern English confused you. He called it a triune tale of diminutive swine, which I think is awesome. It's great fun and it comes complete with illustrations by Brett Hawkins. We'll put a link in the show notes.

The third act of the English language, early modern English, stretched from 1500 to 1800. The expansion of trade and travel during this period led to a vast number of new inclusions from languages like Italian, think parmesan and balcony, or Spanish, tobacco and banana, or Turkish, yoghurt and sherbet, and even Hindi, like pajama.

'Pajamas' truncated in Australian English to PJs or Jammies.

Then there's the influence of the European Renaissance, which gave English a ton of classical Greek and Latin words that we now think of as English, like democracy, which is just Greek for rule by the people, or biology, Greek for study of life, aqua, which is Latin for water, maternal, Latin for mummy, well, motherly anyway.

Colourful phrasal contributions in this period came straight from William Shakespeare. Stuff like A Wild Goose Chase from Romeo and Juliet, Break the Ice from Taming of the Shrew, and In a Pickle, The Tempest.

One of the biggest milestones of the early modern English period was the King James Version of the Bible, also known as the Authorized Version, because King James I authorized this translation alone for public use. The Times newspaper described this version of the Bible as a driving force in the shaping of the English-speaking world.

The authorised version has contributed as many as 257 phrases to the contemporary English language, more than any other source, including Shakespeare. Stuff like thorn in the side, straight out of the Bible, seeing eye to eye, the powers that be, drop in the bucket, labour of love, cast the first stone, skin of my teeth, and so on. So, of course, I asked Simon about it.

So let's talk about the AV, the Authorised Version. So it's the very beginning of the 17th century. Are we now in a period where people think there is a standard English and so you get this very authoritative Bible translation? I mean indeed, it's called the Authorised Version. So has English reached its pristine form at that point? Well, it's on the way, I would say.

The 18th century is probably the period that's most associated with the standardization of the language, but that's partly because standardization takes a long time and because the sort of final point on that journey is codification. And it's the 18th century where we start to get the emergence of grammar books and spelling books and dictionaries. Johnson's Dictionary, 1755 being the sort of the major one. And also the 18th century is the period where

people start to, where those kinds of anxieties about correctness start to really bed in. And I mentioned earlier the idea of an academy of English, and we see people like Jonathan Swift and Defoe and people coming up with the idea that there should be some sort of authoritative body that can legislate over what is acceptable and what's not.

Just on the same model of this academy. Did it survive this academy? It never took off. But the French one did, didn't it? But the French one did. It still exists? Exactly, it still does now. Yeah, exactly. We're referring to the Académie Française, the French Academy, the principal French council for matters relating to the French language. It was established in 1635 during the reign of Louis XIII.

and consists of 40 members. Still, they're called the Immortals and they're responsible for keeping the French language pure and publishing the official French dictionary. Some in England at the time wanted to do the same thing. But pure is the last word you'd use for the English language. I mean, pure itself comes from French.

Partly, I think what happened is that it fails partly because nobody could really decide who should sit on such a body. How should it work? What are the practicalities of it? How do you actually legislate? And partly because Dr. Johnson came along and Lord Chesterfield, who sort of belatedly had kind of patronized the dictionary, said, you know, I'm

I'm so impressed by all of this. I hand over all authority in the English language to Dr. Johnson. You know, you've got this kind of one man authority in a sense. So that doesn't really take off. So the 18th century, though, is the period of codification, the completion of that standardization process. But yes, certainly. Samuel Johnson's dictionary, called A Dictionary of the English Language, was published in two volumes in 1755 after eight gruelling years work.

There had been dictionaries before, but Johnson's definitions were more sound, it's generally agreed, and importantly, he offered evidence of usage with quotations going back a century or more. It's a method that was inherited by the full Oxford English Dictionary in 20 volumes, which I have on my shelf. And it not only gives the definition, it provides the oldest example of the use of the word.

Like the verb undeceive in the Oxford English Dictionary goes back to Florio in 1598, where it meant, and I quote, too clear, too free, to resolve from doubt. The noun undeceptions is first used in 1694 in a book called Greek Morals. The quote given is, at present, undeception is politic. It goes commonly betwixt two lights, whatever that means.

process. But yes, certainly, by the time of the early 17th century, we now see a much more kind of standardised form of the language. Printing is fully developed.

But at the same time, as I said, biblical language tends to be rather archaic. The Authorized Version deliberately set out to use what was best in the existing translations, so they were encouraged to look back. And as a result, what you get in the AV is something that's really quite archaic, even for the time that it was produced. Okay, so I want to hear the Authorized Version. Here is the point where, in the show, we will reveal that that Old English that you read

is this same passage you're about to read. But I wonder if you could just read us the AV version, maybe not the whole passage, but give us a little bit of a philological commentary. Use this passage to tell us about the history of English. Then he said, a certain man had two sons, and the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me. So he divided to them his livelihood.

And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with prodigal living. But when he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in that land, and he began to be in want. Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything."

But when he came to himself, he said, how many of my father's hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger. I will arise and go to my father and will say to him, father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.

So what you can see here, I think, is for a start, quite a lot that is actually very similar to the Old English passage that we looked at, even though, you know,

They don't sound the same and they don't always look the same. Many of the words are still there, you know, the word 'man', Old English 'mon', 'sons', Old English 'sonna'. Notice it's got a different ending on it because it belongs to a different declension. So they're different endings like I was talking about. Father, obviously. The word 'father', exactly, spelt slightly differently, sounds slightly different, 'fadder' and 'father'.

and the younger, the yingra, after fiawam dagum, dative plural, a few days. But, you know, they're still obviously the same words. Sometimes the words are the same in modern English, but they've changed their meaning, which can be a bit tricky. So in the Old English, we've got fada selami, give me the portion. That's the verb Old English selan, which survives as modern English selan.

And in Old English, it just meant to give. So it's quite a significant difference. Actually, that change probably came about through contact with Old Norse because they had a similar verb in Old Norse, but they used it to mean to exchange goods with money rather than to hand somebody something. So you can imagine some kind of unpleasant encounters where somebody says, you know, sell me that horse. You think that they're going to give it to you and they think that you're going to buy it from them.

So some changes in meaning, even though the words have survived,

But you can also see here a number of replacements of words. So that there are, you know, things like the word prodigal, which of course we particularly associate with this passage, which is a Latin borrowing. And we've got the word certain, which is again another Latin word, a portion. We've got a country from the French word. I was about to ask any French. Okay. Yeah. So it's all there. Yeah, exactly. You can see all of the sort of in miniature. Yeah.

you know some of that variety in English let's press pause I've got a five minute Jesus for you the parable of the prodigal son is one of the best known of Jesus stories it was told to two different audiences as the introduction to the parable in Luke 15 tells us it says now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus but the Pharisees and teachers of the law muttered this man welcomes sinners and eats with them and then he told them

So you've got sinners gathering around, you've got Pharisees muttering that Jesus is friends with them. So Jesus explains himself with this parable. Now, just as there are three characters in the parable, you've got a young son, an old son, and a father, Jesus has pretty much three points.

The first is he wants to clarify what a sinner really is. The young son in the parable obviously represents the sinners. And as such, it gives us a glimpse into how Jesus defined sin. We often think of sin as vices, but actually Jesus' definition is a little less convenient, a little more unsettling. The way Jesus describes it is this. The younger son said to his father, Father, give me my share of the estate. So he divided his property between them.

Not long after that, the youngest son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in prodigal living. That's what gives us the prodigal son. So here's the thing. This young boy demands his share of the inheritance, leaves and spends it all on himself. He wanted all of the father's goods and didn't want the father.

So if that's how Jesus wants to depict a sinner, that means sinners are those who stake a claim on all of God's things and then spends them on themselves at a distance from God. We want all of creation and nothing to do with the Creator. And this is why so-called good people can still be sinners in Jesus' eyes.

So when the son returns in Jesus' storytelling, we expect a story of judgment, of anger. But Jesus not only has an unsettling definition of sin, he's got this really striking definition of God. There are so many beautiful elements here. It says, So he, the young son, got up, went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him, was filled with compassion for him. He ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

Think of this, this is Jesus' depiction of God as a father who runs, embraces, kisses before the kid has blurted out his apology. And then instead of placing restrictions on the boy as kind of punishment, we might say penance,

This father lavishes gifts on the boy. Jesus goes on, This is Jesus' description of God. The first sign of someone returning to God.

there will be forgiveness, embrace. And God's not in the business of depriving us of life, but he is an embracing, forgiving, celebrating parent. But Jesus isn't finished. There's a third character in the parable that often gets left aside when this is retold. It's the older brother who obviously represents the Pharisees in the audience.

The older son then is a great insight into how Jesus thought of religion. And this is how Jesus tells the story. The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out to him and pleaded with him.

But he answered his father, look, all these years I've been slaving for you, never disobeyed your orders, yet you never even gave me a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him. So by his own confession, this older son adopts the stance of a slave to a master, not a son to a father. And I think Jesus' point is that's what religion does. It locks you up with rules.

And as a result, this son has a stunted grasp of the father's mercy. He says, "You never even gave me a goat to celebrate." When the reality was everything that the father had was his. That's exactly what Jesus says. "My son," the father replied, "you are always with me and everything I have is yours." But here's the point. This is what religion does. But it's not what Jesus was about.

Jesus was about inviting the wayward to experience forgiveness, love, celebration. You can press play now. 68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into a financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash AnglicanAid.

and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions.

So English is like, from what you're saying, it's the Pac-Man of languages. Do you remember the computer game Pac-Man? Just gobbles up everything it comes into. Is that true of all languages or was there something about this place and this people or its history that just gobbled up words and became the great Pac-Man of language? Yeah, that's an interesting question.

I mean, I think one of the things that... So it's the case that in Germanic languages generally don't really typically borrow many words from other languages. So if you think about modern German, it tends not to rely on loan words, but rather to create new words from within its resources. And that's how Old English typically worked. So what happened? Well, one thing is, of course, that...

the Norman Conquest happened and we get lots of borrowing. But I think also another thing that changed dramatically was the structure of English, which is also to do with the Norman Conquest and the change from Old to Middle English. But as a result of that, it's much easier to borrow words because structurally the language can just accommodate them because they don't have to then be accommodated into a whole series of different case endings.

And that, I think, is a big part of it, is that English just becomes more readily susceptible to borrowing. In many cases, we've become so familiar with borrowed words that we don't notice them anymore. Entrepreneur from the French. Yacht from the Dutch. Pharaoh from the Greek. But the real headache begins when you try and spell these words from the mongrel English language. Here's comedian Gallagher.

Well, let's take the word bomb. B-O-M-B, right? Bomb. Bomb. B-O-M-B? All right. T-O-M-B. Tom? No. Toon. All right. T-O-M-B. Toon. C-O-M-B. Coom?

All right, C-O-M-B, comb. P-O-M-B, poem? No. P-O-E-M, home. All right, P-O-E-M, poem. H-O-E-M, home? No. H-O-M-E. All right, H-O-M-E, home. S-O-M-E, some? No. Some. All right, S-O-M-E, some. N-O-M-E, numb? No. N-U-M.

"M.B."

International people say English is one of the hardest languages to learn. Why is that? Well, I suppose, I mean, one thing I think is that whether a language is hard or difficult to learn does depend a bit on what your native language is. So we tend to think that learning in Fletchland is much harder because we're native English speakers and we're not used to it. But that may not be true for others. I think another way in which English is very difficult is it's so unphonetic.

that learning to read and write it is a bit of a nightmare compared to say Spanish or Finnish, which are highly phonetic or Arabic. So there are different aspects of learning a language. And of course you still do have to have that some way of conveying that grammatical information.

So that we may have ditched inflectional endings, but that means that word order has become much more important in modern English. So you have to get the words in the right order or it doesn't make sense. Whereas of course, Germanic languages with their inflectional endings, you've got more freedom to move things around. So that there are different kinds of rules that you have to acquire.

This brings us to the inherent challenge of the English language. It's flexibility and change. The Oxford English Dictionary has about 600,000 word entries. It's astonishing. But a Google Harvard study from 2010 estimated that actually there are over a million English words. And that number is going to climb, they reckon, by hundreds if not thousands every year.

The Oxford English Dictionary has to play catch up. So they've recently added cosplay. That's to dress up in a costume as a character. I'm not going to read the rest of the lines because it has to do with anime and manga and all these things Director Mark is into. And then there's front lash, a reaction to a backlash, and spidey sense. I like that. It's a supernatural ability or power to perceive things beyond.

We often think that producer Kayleigh has spidey sense. But with additions comes losses. I asked Simon about one of the most annoying losses in the English language.

Well, let me just ask you the simple question about the loss of the distinction in English between a singular and a plural 'u' because there are hardly any other languages in the world that have lost a distinction between singular and plural 'u'. We see 'u' and we have no idea if it's singular or plural.

Yeah, exactly. So that goes back to... So in Old English, you've got "thu" and you've got "ye". Then in Early Modern English is "thou" and "ye". And those two in Old English are just used as singular and plural. But in Middle English, they start to be used to

So you can use the plural form to refer to a singular person as a mark of respect, deference. In the same way that you would say in German, with "ze" or in French with "vous". I mean it's to do with contact with French actually and the way that French culture was perceived as being prestigious and this is a mode of address that is seen as being decorous and therefore was adopted in English. And as a consequence, the "thou" pronoun

the singular one, is seen as being familiar and informal. And also if you want to be deliberate

deliberately disrespectful to somebody. And that's the system that Shakespeare inherits in the early modern period. And you can see that that's become very much codified because there's an example, for instance, in Twelfth Night where Toby Belch is advising Sir Andrew Aguecheek how to write an insulting letter. And he says, if thou vowsed him thrice, it will be well. You know, it's actually a verb to vow somebody.

Andrew. Will either of you bear me a challenge to him? Toby. Go, write it in a martial hand. Be cursed and brief. It is no matter how witty, so it be eloquent and full of invention. Taunt him with the license of ink.

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 2.

It's an example that they really used it. But then the corollary of that is that to use thou with somebody can be over-familiar or insulting.

And so as a consequence, people began to default to the plural form, the polite form. And so that becomes more common. And the 'thou' form is only saved for particularly significant moments. I mean, in Troilus and Crusader, Chaucer's great love poem, where you have the love between those two, they always call each other by the plural pronoun, apart from one moment.

To that Cressid answered right at once, and with a sigh she said, "Oh heart dear, the game truly has so far now gone, that Phoebus shall first fall from his sphere, and every eagle with a dove pair, and every rock out of its place start, before Troilus out of Cressid's heart. You are so deep within my heart engraved,

That if I wished to turn you from my thought, As sure as I hope God will my soul save, Were I to die in torture, I could not. And, for the love of God that has us wrought, Let in your brain no other fantasy creep, So that it brings death to me.

And that you should have me as fast in mind as I have you, That I would you beseech, and if I knew in truth that's what I'd find. God could not himself me new joy teach, But my heart, without more speech, be true to me, Or else it were a woe, for I am thine, by God and my truth so. Troilus and Crusade, Geoffrey Chaucer

You know, and that's a really significant moment because he's switching to the really familiar and intimate pronoun. And then, of course, you've also got the Quaker movement who believe that there should be no kind of hierarchies amongst the Christian Brotherhood. And they deliberately use the thou pronoun as a kind of marker. And because of that association, thou also becomes slightly marked.

And so as a consequence, you becomes much more the default pronoun. And as a result, thou just falls out of use entirely. Apart from in religious usage, you still get it in the authorized version. It's part of that same process of archaization. But it's incredibly helpful because they actually translate the Greek singular with an English singular. Yeah, exactly. And that distinction is completely...

gone. You know, where Jesus says, you are the light of the world. Is that you, Simon, or is it yous, as we say in Australia? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, that's a nice example of a number of ways in which English speakers, you know, different varieties of English speakers have tried to compensate for that loss.

I finished my interview with Simon Horobin by trying to resolve some important debates about English. Debates I have with friends, with my colleagues, with Americans.

I want to do a rapid fire. Okay. It's not often I get to... Can I say pass? No, you have to give me your gut feeling, okay? I've got a professor of English in the room. You've just got to resolve all these disputes. Right. Honor. Should it have a U or not? Yes. Synthesize. Z or S? S. Why?

That's just how I spell it. Oh well, then it must be right. The Oxford comma, yes or no? Please, please, please. Yes. Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you. It's the OUP style guide, so I have to go with it. Okay. Can you explain once and for all the difference between the words affect and effect? Well, affect is to do with emotion and effect is to do with having some kind of impact upon something. Good.

Are my students listening? Explain why we mustn't say Simon and myself sat down. Well, because it's the subject, so you need the subject pronoun. Excellent. Single quotation marks or double quotation marks? Single. Double inside the single. Beautiful. Is irregardless a word. Is it ever okay to start a sentence with and or but?

Sometimes. Whoa, there you heard it here first. Why is it correct to say a great green dragon and not a green great dragon? Because of our adjective order in English has certain complex rules about the order in which you should place size and colour. And I know that

A younger Tolkien got picked up on that by his mother. And that was why he became a professor of English language at Oxford, to try and answer that question. And perhaps finally, and much is on the line here, Oxford English Dictionary or Merriam-Webster? OED, always. Correct. Simon Horriban, thank you so much for your time. Thanks very much. Thank you.

If you like what we're doing, please head to Apple Podcasts and give us a review in your best English.

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Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Anime Munger Hadley. Alistair Belling is a writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveson remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DiMarco is our chief finance and operations consultant, editing by Richard Humwe. Our voice actor today was Yannick Laurie. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth out.

And that's before we even think about the way the internet and text messaging has changed it. Lol. Again, Director Mark. Lots of love. That's what it means, right? All right. Okay, back to the point.