Jonathan Hope

Rats, bats, sparrows and dogs: biology, linguistics and the nature of Standard English

Introduction Linguistic historians of English like to claim that they have the nature and origin of Standard English nailed. The standard, as any fule kno , is a non-regional, multifunctional, written variety, historically based on the educated English used within a triangle drawn with its apexes at London, Cambridge and Oxford. Even more specifically, the propagation of this ‘incipient’ standard can be linked to a particular branch of the late medieval bureaucracy: the court of Chancery. At least, that is the standard account of the rise of Standard English in most classrooms and textbooks. In a series of articles on business texts, however, Laura Wright has now challenged the second part of this account, pointing out that the central governmental bureaucracy is not the only place where the necessary conditions for standardisation obtained; and other chapters in this book offer further evidence of a growing unease with the status of ‘Chancery Standard’ as the simple and sole source of Standard English. In this chapter, I want to question the first part of the standard account – and in particular the general theoretical basis of the hypothesis, which I take to be the evolutionary, family-tree model of language change. I claim that linguists have tended to accept what I will call the ‘single ancestor-dialect’ hypothesis (the SAD hypothesis), not because the linguistic data supports it (in fact it does the opposite), but because the family-tree metaphor demands it.

Shakespeare and language: an introduction

Shakespeare and language is an area of study that here includes style, speech, sound and sex. As the foremost Shakespeare publication, Shakespeare Survey has been well placed to reflect trends and developments in academic approaches to Shakespeare and to language and this collection of essays considers the characteristics, excitement and unique qualities of Shakespeares language, the relationship between language and event, and the social, theatrical and literary function of language. A new introduction, by Jonathan Hope, explicates the differences between Shakespeares language and our own, provides a theoretical and contextual framework for the pieces that follow, and makes transparent an aspect of Shakespeares craft (and the critical response to it) that has frequently been opaque.

Who invented 'gloomy'? Lies people want to believe about Shakespeare

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Shakespeare was a coiner of new words. From popular websites, to the most serious academic journals, his creativity with neologisms is celebrated as something that reaches to the core of his genius. But what if we check the evidence for these claims? The rise of digital research tools, from the electronic Oxford English Dictionary to portals that allow us to search tens of thousands of Early Modern books, means that anyone with an internet connection can repeat, and better, the searches made by the OED’s original army of readers in the nineteenth century. In seconds, we can do what it took them years – and far more thoroughly and extensively. The results are bad news for those who rest their case for Shakespeare’s eminence as a writer on his supposed invention of words like ‘gloomy’, ‘eyeball’, ‘undress’, ‘radience’, and hundreds of others. Shakespeare did not invent words. Not any. Not one that we have been able to find so far. Keywords : Shakespeare’s language, early modern English, lexical creativity, neologisms, Shakespeare’s vocabulary myth

Multi-Retranslation Corpora: Visibility, Variation, Value, and Virtue

Variation among human translations is usually invisible, little understood, and under-valued. Previous statistical research finds that translations vary most where the source items are most semantically significant or express most ‘attitude’ (affect, evaluation, ideology). Understanding how and why translations vary is important for translator training and translation quality assessment, for cultural research, and for machine translation development. Our experimental project began with the intuition that quantitative variation in a corpus of historical retranslations might be used to project quasi-qualitative annotations onto the translated text. We present a web-based system which enables users to create parallel, segment-aligned multi-version corpora, and provides visual interfaces for exploring multiple translations, with their variation projected onto a base text. The system can support any corpus of variant versions. We report experiments using our tools (and stylometric analysis) to investigate a corpus of forty German versions of a work by Shakespeare. Initial findings lead to more questions than answers.