Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

about the history of the language so you can understand how Anglo-Saxon turned into contemporary English. Now, two key events occurred, and these two events, when they occurred, must have seemed catastrophic, terrible. They did, however, prepare English to become what AlfonsoReyes called “the imperial language” of our century. 15 That is to say, Anglo-Saxon was a far more complicated language, grammatically, than contemporary English. It had, as does German and the modern Norse languages, three genders. In Spanish we have two, and already this is complicated enough for foreigners. There is no reason that a table,
mesa
, is feminine in Spanish, or a clock,
reloj
, is masculine, for example; each one has to be learned. But in Old English, like in German and the Scandinavian languages, there are three grammatical genders. It’s as if we had a masculine “moon” (“
el luna
”), masculine “salt” (“
el sal
”), masculine “star” (“
el estrella
”). Now, it is assumed that the masculine “moon” belongs to a very ancient era, an era of matriarchy, an era when women were more important than men. Women ruled over the family, and so the brighter light—the sun—was considered feminine, and in Norse mythology we have, analogously, a goddess of the sun and a god of the moon. Now, I read in
El imperio jesuítico
[
The Jesuit Empire
] byLugones—I assume Lugones is not mistaken—that the same thing happens in Guaraní, that in Guaraní, the sun is feminine and the moon is masculine. 16 It is curious how this has influenced German poetry, for in German the moon is masculine,
der Mond
, just as
mona
, moon, was masculine in Old English, and
sunne
, sun, was feminine. (In
Thus SpakeZarathustra
,Nietzsche compares the sun to a tomcat walking on a carpet of stars. But he does not say “eine Katze,” which could also be a she-cat, but rather “ein Kater,” a tomcat, a male. And he thought of the moon as a monk, not a nun, who gazes enviously at Earth.) So, grammatical gender, which is more or less random, influences poetry as well. And in [Old] English, the word for “woman” is neuter,
wif
, but there was a word,
wifmann
, and
mann
was masculine, so “woman” could be both masculine and feminine. In modern English, this is all much simpler. In Spanish, for example, we say
alto
,
alta
,
altos
, and
altas
; in other words, the adjectives change according to the grammatical gender. In English we have only “high,” which can mean
alto
,
alta
,
altos
, or
altas
, depending on what follows. Now, what was it that brought about this simplification, that made contemporary English a much simpler language, grammatically, though much richer in vocabulary than Old English? It is the fact that theVikings, Danes, and Norwegians settled in the north and the center of England. Now, Old Norse was similar to English. The Saxons had to communicate with the Norsemen, who had become their neighbors, and very soon, the Saxons began to mingle with the Norsemen, who were fewer in number. The Norse race blended with the Saxon race. They had to understand each other, so in order to do so, and as the vocabulary was already so similar, a kind of lingua franca emerged, and English became simpler.
    And this must have been quite sad for educated Saxons. Just imagine if suddenly we noticed that people said “
el
”
cuchara
, “
lo
”
mesa
, “
la
”
tenedor
, etcetera. We would think: “Darn, the language is degenerating, we have reached the epitome of pidgin.” But the Saxons, who would have thought the same, could not foresee that this would make English an easier language. Notice how today English has almost no grammar. It is the simplest dictionary there is, grammatically. The pronunciation is what is difficult. As for English spelling, you all know about proper names, that when somebody suddenly becomes famous, people don’t know how to pronounce the person’s name. For example, when SomersetMaugham began to write, people would say “Mogem,” because there was no way of knowing how it was pronounced. And then we have the letters left over from the old pronunciation. For example, we have “knife.” Why is there a
k
? Because in Old English this was pronounced, and it has remained like some sort of lost fossil. 17 And then we also have the word “knight” in contemporary English. This seems absurd, but it is because in Anglo-Saxon the word
cniht
meant “servant” or “attendant.” That is, [the initial
c
]