By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal
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early afternoon, and the tide was coming in. Some people were walking on the estuary sands in the distance. They would have to watch out. The sea comes in very quickly here, and it’s easy to get cut off.
When was English first spoken along the banks of this estuary, I wondered. And when Welsh? And what was the language that was here before Welsh? Nobody knows how many languages have been spoken on earth since the human race developed the ability to speak. Some people think as many as 150,000. Maybe more. The six thousand or so we have left today are only a fraction of what may have been.
Sometimes you can see a trace of an earlier period of language inhabitation. In the territory between Spain and France you will find Basque, unrelated to any modern language, and in structure quite unlike the Indo-European languages surrounding it. People think it is the last example of the languages which were spoken in Europe before the invaders from Asia arrived.
The tide had almost reached the group walking on the sands, but they seemed oblivious. Some Portmeirion regulars were sitting nearby, bemoaning the way some people ‘don’t take any notice of the warnings’. The hotel staff were used to it. A man with a megaphone came out and bellowed. The walkers scuttled. I asked him whether this happened often. ‘Not so much these days,’ he said. ‘The time of the high tide is printed on the ticket.’
His accent wasn’t local, and I couldn’t immediately place it. ‘You don’t sound as if you’re from these parts, then?’ I asked. I can never resist an unfamiliar accent.
Nor an unfamiliar name. Once I was looking for a particular old edition of Hamlet, and called an antiquarian book company that I thought might have it. The person who answered the phone said she would look, and asked me to call her back. ‘Ask for Lassarina,’ she said.
I couldn’t stop myself. ‘That’s a lovely name,’ I said. And as I said it, I thought, she’ll think this is a come-on, so I hastily added, ‘You see I’m a linguist and I’m interested in the history of names and I’ve not come across that one before and do you know what it means and how do you spell it?’ Then I thought, that sounds totally implausible, even more of a come-on! But she reacted equably, and said she’d no idea, but thought it was Irish. She spelled it out, and told me her friends called her Lassie for short.
‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, and I rushed over to my bookcase, where I had some ‘origins of names’ books. There she was, Lassarina, an anglicized form of Gaelic Lasairiona, a combination of lasair and fion, ‘flame’ and ‘wine’. I picked up the phone and told her. She was delighted. People usually are when you do a bit of etymological digging on their behalf.
I thought that piece of mini-research might get me a discount on my Hamlet, but no such luck. Maybe if I’d called her Lassie… But I couldn’t do that to a non-canine.
Then, in one of those coincidences that make linguistic life worthwhile, I came across the name again a few weeks later. In Irish writer Padraic Colum’s collection of stories called The King of Ireland’s Son, published in 1916, there is a character called Lassarina.
‘I’m from near Norwich,’ the hotel man replied to my question about his origins. He pronounced it as a single syllable – ‘norrch’. He added: ‘Little place called Caistor.’
Caistor-by-Norwich. I knew it, Horatio. It’s famous – at least to people interested in English historical linguistics. It’s the place where they found the earliest runic inscription known in England. Caistor was originally a Roman base – the name comes from Latin castra, ‘fort’ – and in a cremation cemetery there they found the anklebone of a roe deer. It was probably used as a plaything – perhaps as part of a dice game – but what made it special was the inscription on the side: raihan, written in Germanic runes. Raihan means ‘roe deer’.
The shape of the H rune attracted especial attention. It has a single cross-bar. This is typical of the kind of runic writing found in northern parts of Europe. Further south they wrote H with two cross-bars,
The significance of the find to linguists is that it dates from around the year ad 400. The Anglo-Saxons did not arrive in Britain until 449. This person was using a Germanic language in East Anglia well before the well-known Germanic invasions began.
East Anglia is the place to be if you are looking for early evidence of the English language. In 1981 a farmer found a gold bracteate – a kind of medallion, fashioned with eyelets so that it could be worn around the neck – at Undley Common, near Lakenheath in Suffolk. It dates from around ad 475, within a generation of the Anglo- Saxons arriving. It seems to be modelled after an old Roman coin from the time of Constantine the Great in the early fourth century. It shows a helmeted head of the emperor next to a she-wolf suckling two children – presumably a representation of the story of Romulus and Remus.
And there is an inscription: a sequence of runes, written around the edge from right to left. Transliterated into the Latin alphabet, the runes say gægogæ mægæ medu. It would have been pronounced roughly ‘ga-gog-a ma-ga may-doo’. Inscriptions are often sentences. If so, this is the oldest known sentence in the language which would one day be called English. But what does it mean?
The second and third words aren’t a problem. Mægæ probably comes from mæg, ‘kinsman, companion’. Depending on how the ending is interpreted, the sense is either ‘of a/the kinsman’ or ‘to a/the kinsman’. Medu is likely to be an early form of the word med or meord – meaning ‘reward’. The closest modern equivalent is the archaism meed. An alternative suggestion is that it is something to do with the drink, ‘mead’.
Scholars have puzzled over the first word. It has an unusual phonetic shape, with its three gs, suggesting it might be a nonsense word – a magical formula, perhaps, or a tribal shout of some kind. The form gagaga has been found on a sixth-century spear-shaft from Kragehul in Denmark, suggesting a battle-cry. And lots of magic words use a reduplicated sequence of sounds: abracadabra, alakazam, hocus pocus… Wizzo the wizard (aka American magician Marshall Brodien) says ‘Doodee, doodee, doodee’ to get a trick to work.
On the other hand, it could be a real word. There are words in Old English with three gs in them, such as gegongan (‘conquer’), gegogud (‘relying on’), gegegnian (‘meet’). And there are words with similarities in form to which gægogæ could relate. The first syllable might be a prefix, an early form of ge–, which is common in Old English (as it is in modern German). The root of the word, –go–, might be related to a word such as geomrian, ‘lament’. The ending might be a marker of femaleness. Thinking along these lines, the Swedish linguist Bengt Odenstedt suggested the reading ‘howling female wolf’, referring to the picture on the bracteate. There have been other interpretations.
If Odenstedt is right, then the inscription could mean ‘this howling she-wolf to a kinsman [is] a reward’. It’s certainly a plausible interpretation. But it’s no more than a well-informed guess.
The Undley Bracteate, as it is called, is now in the British Museum, in the study collection of the Department of Medieval and Modern Europe. Other coins in the museum collection show runic inscriptions too, but they are usually even less decodable. The hope is that, as more finds are made, the semantic clues will increase, and things will become clearer. But often the finds just add even more puzzles.
In August 1997 a man with a metal detector found a gold coin at Billockby, a few miles north-west of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. It is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It was a tremissis – a coin with the value of one-third of a solidus – thought to date from around ad 670. A number of coins of the same general type had been found previously – including one at Caistor – but this was the first to display a runic inscription.
The solidus had been used in the Roman Empire since the time of Emperor Constantine, and would stay in use