MARIA ZIJLSTRA:
With me, Maria Zijlstra, it's the finale here on Lingua Franca this week of this month's series inspired by an exhibition at the British Library called Evolving English. And a talk today about what has latterly been regarded rather negatively, and that's the incredibly influential A Short Introduction To Grammar With Critical Notes by the clergyman Robert Lowth, the first printing of which, in 1762, was followed by 45 more just in that century. And by the very same publisher as Samuel Johnson's also greatly significant A Dictionary Of The English Language. It was a boom period in publishing. And since England never had a language academy, spelling, pronunciation, elocution, how to use English and what its standards were were being worked out in practice. Something of a biblical scholar, particularly of Old Testament poetics, Lowth later rose to the position of Bishop of London, leading to some slightly snide comments from more contemporary critics that he'd made use of his elevated position to lend authority to his grammatical views, even suggesting that he claimed them to emanate from divine inspiration. Well, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade has a chair in English Sociohistorical Linguistics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. And greatly interested in where the rules of English grammar books have come from, she's taken a particular shine to Robert Lowth and has even become his defender. And currently a visiting fellow at Cambridge, one of the first things she did after crossing the water to England earlier this year was to go to see the exhibition Evolving English at the British Library. Right, Professor Tieken?
INGRID TIEKEN:
Yes, that's right. Because I've been teaching the history of the English language for a long time, 30 years or so, and I was so amazed to see all those manuscripts and all those early printed books that I sort of got sidetracked into spending a lot of time looking at those. But then I thought Lowth's Grammar has got to be here because it's so important. And, finally, we did find it. It was there. And, of course, I even own a copy of the grammar. Not a first edition, of course, but a later edition. And the first edition is a special edition because it was a kind of trial edition. Lowth never meant to write a grammar for the wider public, as it were. He wrote his grammar for his little boy, his son Thomas Henry. And he then wanted to have a few copies to be able to give to friends. So he contacted his publisher, Robert Dodsley. And the only way in which they could have more than one copy of a book is to have it printed. And the interesting thing is that Dodsley, he knew very well how the market works and what interest there was among the general public for works like this. So what he did at first was he had a look at the manuscript and had it refereed, as we would call it today, by some of his authors, and they suggested corrections and changes. And Lowth then produced a new copy and that was printed, but only in a small number, because Lowth wasn't so certain about all the things in his Grammar. You see, he's usually depicted as someone who knew it all, who had an agenda, as it were. But I think he comes across as being much less certain of himself than people think. So the first edition was published in only a small number of copies. I think about 250. And later on, it got published 1,000 copies at a time. And it's also bigger. And that was also the copy they had in the British Library. It's much bigger than you think, was the feeling I had. 'Is this really Lowth's Grammar? It's that big?' if you see what I mean. It is a quarto edition.
MARIA ZIJLSTRA:
Right. That's the original, then, the one that was printed in a very small print run, that was off the back of him wanting to provide this for his little eight year old son, who was homeschooled.
INGRID TIEKEN:
Four year old. Little bit younger.
MARIA ZIJLSTRA:
Oh, I thought he was eight, already.
INGRID TIEKEN:
Yes, at the time it was finally printed. But when he wrote it, he was much younger.
MARIA ZIJLSTRA:
Ah.
INGRID TIEKEN:
And that's really an interesting point, if you think about how young children were. And one of my PhD students has written a PhD on the rise of the children's grammar which were intended for very young children, before they went to school. In those days, they learned to read and write at home and then they were sent to school at the age of seven or thereabouts, and they would be taught grammar and grammar was Latin grammar. So what Lowth did, since my book was in the proof stage, I couldn't put that into my book, I came across two letters where he explained… I knew already that he'd written the grammar originally for his son, and that it was expanded to be published and later on expanded with comments from people who'd read the grammar and made all kinds of suggestions for it. So it grew. The second edition is bigger than the first edition. But in these letters that I came across, he explains that he wanted his son to know about grammar, so the grammatical terms — What is an adjective? What is a noun? — on the basis of the English language, so by the time he went to school, it would be easier for him to learn Latin grammar.
MARIA ZIJLSTRA:
So he was kind of building a bridge, an educational bridge for his son?
INGRID TIEKEN:
Yes. He was building a bridge for his son so privately. And Dodsley grabbed the opportunity of having what he thought was an authoritative grammar of the English language and then published it.
MARIA ZIJLSTRA:
So that Robert Dodsley, the publisher, he was the one who had his eye on the market and turned it into something that hadn't been intended at all by the author.
INGRID TIEKEN:
That's right. And he knew what people at that time would want to buy.
MARIA ZIJLSTRA:
Well, tell, though, why people wanted that at that time, because as a period, it's the age of industrialisation, there's a nouveau riche. There are people who can actually move around a bit in the social order and they didn't know the right way to say things, the right way to speak, the right way to put things in writing and they needed advice.
INGRID TIEKEN:
That's right. And at that time, in the middle of the 18th century, you see already that people need advice on how to improve their language. They didn't want to be regarded as lower-class, as it were. This was the time when people, if they wanted to get on in life, were dependent on patrons. And you never knew who could help you along, socially speaking, I mean. So if you offended someone, then they might not be willing to speak up for you in a certain situation.
MARIA ZIJLSTRA:
Well, his reputation much later and certainly nowadays, he's always described as being this really hidebound rules man who was a complete… What's the word? ..prescriptivist.
INGRID TIEKEN:
Yes. I describe him as 'an icon of prescriptivism'. That is how he got to be looked at today, which is due to the fact that we have a different opinion about what linguistics should be. So we think, and I agree with that, of course, we think that the business of linguistics is to describe and not to prescribe. So rather than saying what is wrong or what is right in the language, it should just describe what people do. If people say 'It is me' all the time, then surely 'It is me' is correct. And you don't have any business, as a grammarian, to say, 'No, it should be "It is I" because "It is I" is the way it was in Latin and it is the way it is in logic. So that is correct'. So we have a very different attitude to linguistics.
MARIA ZIJLSTRA:
But isn't the problem, though, that that way in which he's been portrayed isn't actually what he was about? He was about actually describing what people do and saying, 'Well, these are mistakes because a better way of doing it is this', rather than being so completely hidebound and rules bound?
INGRID TIEKEN:
Yes. And he says so himself. He says, 'I'm not concerned with…' He doesn't use those terms. But he's not concerned with the system of the language. And he advises people in his preface. He says, 'If you are interested in the system of the language, you should read Harris's Hermes, which is concerned with that. I'm concerned with the language at the level of usage. So I want to show what is…' Well, he doesn't actually say 'what is correct', but his grammar is there to… It does two things. It describes the categories of grammar, so what is a noun, what is a sentence, what are strong verbs and what are the forms of the strong verbs. And at the same time, in his footnotes, but they're only footnotes, of course, so they could be ignored, if you were just interested in the grammar itself, in the footnotes, he shows what happens if you don't stick to those grammatical rules, then you make mistakes. And why they are grammatical mistakes.
MARIA ZIJLSTRA:
So it's an analysis? He's analysing the language, then?
INGRID TIEKEN:
I think he's analysing the language. So my point is also that it is unfair the way he's been looked at by more than linguists who say that he's prescriptive and therefore wrong and he shouldn't have been doing what he was doing. But I think his grammar has a strong basis in actual usage. And he says 'On the basis of those mistakes…' He regards them as mistakes, as errors, this is what it should be. So, yes, it is unfair — to relate to your earlier point — to look at Lowth and what he was doing, what he was trying to do, from a modern perspective. What makes people irritated by modern linguists, what they find irritating about his grammar is precisely those footnotes. They see it as someone who is wagging his finger. 'This is wrong. It should be this, that or the other.' But they forget to see… And there's one rule that has always cited for this and that's his rule against preposition stranding. You know, when prepositions are used at the end of sentences, as in, this is an example from his Grammar, 'Harris is an author whom I'm much delighted with', with the preposition at the end. But he points out that there are different types of discourse, if you like, in formal usage. The informal usage does allow for preposition stranding, and informal usage, you'd better avoid it. And that has been taken by many people today as being a very strong condemnation of preposition stranding. But I think what he's doing there, he's much more subtle. And he does that in his own language, too, I've discovered. That's something I try to do in my book. He, himself, distinguished in using some forms which were alright in informal usage, so when he was writing to his own wife, for instance. But you should not use them when you are writing to, let's say in his case, the Archbishop of Canterbury. So he knew that different styles required different usage. And that, I think, makes him really a modern linguist.
MARIA ZIJLSTRA:
Well, the thing is that there's almost a sense of moral vindication in this book.
INGRID TIEKEN:
Yeah, well, I did try to put things right in a sense. Not in a sense. That's what I've been trying to do in my book, because I wanted to show that you should be less prescriptive. You should look at things in their context and that could give a very different picture of what's actually going on, rather than repeating what is in the textbooks over and over again, because that is what has been happening over the past 50 years or so, I think.
MARIA ZIJLSTRA:
On the phone from Clare Hall up at Cambridge in the UK where she's currently a visiting fellow, Professor Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, a kind of a knightess in shining armour, methinks, rescoring the much maligned Robert Lowth through her diligent scholarship. Her book The Bishop's Grammar: Robert Lowth And The Rise Of Prescriptivism is from the Oxford University Press. And for Lingua Franca here at abc.net.au/rn, I'm Maria Zijlstra.