How does one of the twentieth century's great thinkers help us illuminate one of its great paradoxes? What does Sartre contribute toward clarifying the problem of thinking about history as it has emerged in the late twentieth century? After a century and a half of celebrating and living by the idea of progress, amidst staggering scientific-technological progress, almost no one in the West continues to believe in progress. In the current climate of intellectual disillusionment no serious thinker is willing to defend Bury's formulation that the world is slowly advancing in “a definite and desirable direction” leading to a “condition of general happiness”that will “justify the whole process of civilization.” On the one hand, the postmodernist temper shows, as Lyotard says, “incredulity toward metanarratives” such as the idea of progress. On the other, the current mood seems sympathetic toward negative metanarratives - those that suggest that things are getting worse. Witness, for example, the remarkable success of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, or the works of Christopher Lasch - which suggest that as time goes by, we are losing the most vital of values, attitudes, and skills. The negative mood is starkly captured in Theodor Adorno's claim: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one that leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.”

Even though Sartre repeatedly emphasized the divergences between Hegel and himself, this chapter discusses their convergences. It will be seen, moreover, that these often conflict with Sartre's own stress on the differences between them.

Sartre does not refer to Hegel in his early works; he seems to have become familiar with him only from Being and Nothingness onward, where Hegel, along with Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, is one of his chosen interlocutors and adversaries. This essay deals with certain specifically philosophical aspects of the debate: the conception of being-for-itself and being-for-others in Sartre and Hegel. Being and Nothingness also discusses the dialectical conception of nothingness. Juliette Simont has analyzed this question in an important footnote to her article "Sartre et Hegel: le probleme de la qualite et de la quantite." I shall not therefore return to it directly.

In Sartre's analysis of being-for-itself and for-others, the most significant references are to the two Logics (the Science of Logic and the first part of the Encyclopedia) and to the Propédeutique. Sartre's perceptiveness with respect to these dry texts leads one to conjecture that he had more than a merely academic knowledge of Hegel - did he perhaps discuss him with some of Kojève's pupils, with Jean Wahl, Lefèbre, and Hartmann, authors of a collection of selected texts from Hegel, Hyppolite, and Maurice de Gandillac? It is possible, but as yet unproven.

Introduction

Middle English

The period covered by this volume, conventionally Middle English, is of special importance for the history of the language – for precisely the reasons suggested by the adjective ‘middle’. It marks the transition between English as a typologically ‘Old Germanic’ language and English of the type now familiar to us. These four centuries are particularly rich in radical and system-transforming changes in both phonology and morphology; they also provide a much richer corpus of evidence than Old English, both in numbers of texts and regional spread.

During this time as well, linguistic (along with political) dominance shifted from Wessex in the south-west to the south-east and particularly the southeast midlands, and the roots of today's standard dialects were laid down. The wider regional variety of texts allows us to examine more specimens of more dialect types than we could earlier; this is made even more helpful by another general characteristic of the period: the profound isolation of regional writing traditions. There was not, until quite late, much in the way of strong influence from any regionally localised standard or Schriftsprache.

In later Old English times, even regions far from the political centre in Wessex often showed West Saxon influence; after the Conquest anyone who wrote in English normally wrote in his own regional dialect, according to more or less well-defined local conventions, some of them of great phonological informativeness. This lack of standardisation also encouraged orthographic experimentation; and we have some very useful ‘eccentric’ texts like the Ormulum (see 2.1.3), whose authors have to one degree or another ‘invented’ their spelling systems, and in the process told us a great deal about aspects of linguistic structure that tend to be invisible in less fluid traditions.

Beginnings of the study of Middle English

Traditionally, the start of Middle English is dated in 1066 with the Norman Conquest and its finish in 1485 with the accession of Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch. Both dates are political and historical, and the events they represent may have an impact on the development of the English language in the longer term but they are hardly appropriate as guides to the dating of periods in it. In any case language does not change as abruptly as such stark dates would suggest and the whole matter of when Middle English began and ended depends on the features which are regarded as significant in marking a change in the language. The period is called ‘Middle’ English because it falls between Old and Modern English. To most people today Middle English has seemed closer to Modern than to Old English for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most important of these has been the influence of Geoffrey Chaucer. His reputation as the ‘Father of English Poetry’ has meant that many people have some familiarity with Middle English through his writings. More importantly, his work has been almost constantly available since Caxton issued the editio princeps of The Canterbury Tales in 1476. Each subsequent century has seen its great editor of Chaucer (Ruggiers 1984) and these editors have kept Chaucer and Middle English very much in the public eye. The only other author who comes anywhere near Chaucer in this respect is Malory, whose Le Morte Darthur was published several times in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Introduction

The title of this chapter, ‘The literary language’, suggests that there is a clear division between literary and non-literary languages in the Middle English period. As is true of any period in English, there exists a highly literary style at one end of the spectrum and an equally clear non-literary style at the other end, but in between there are so many gradations that it is difficult to draw a precise boundary between them. One can, however, say that if one were to attempt to draw such a boundary, it would for the Middle English period be drawn in a rather different place from the one which we would recognise as appropriate for the modern situation. Today literature is traditionally regarded as both an exclusive and an evaluative term; works which lack an aesthetic structure or an emotional appeal are readily dismissed as being not literature. The growth of a book-buying market has led to literature being advertised and sold as something quite separate from other printed material. The word literature comes ultimately from Latin littera, ‘that which is written’, and this definition reflects Middle English attitudes to literature more adequately than contemporary ones do, though the beginnings of a modern attitude can be traced at the end of the medieval period. It is in the fifteenth century that literary texts like the Canterbury Tales begin to be produced by themselves in de luxe manuscripts as though they were special texts which needed a specialized form of reading. Until that time, and in most cases long afterwards as well, literary texts appeared with other written material in compendia of one type or another. What we would now classify as literary texts do not have a different status in presentation or format.

Dialect method and the study of Middle English

Introduction

The most striking fact about Middle English is that it exhibits by far the greatest diversity in written language of any period before or since. Before 1100 – in the Old English period – extant written sources for the study of variation are rather sparse, and much of the Late Old English literary output is in a relatively invariant West Saxon literary language. Similarly, close to the end of the Middle English period (in the fifteenth century), we witness the rise and subsequent spread of a relatively uniform written variety – the beginnings of ‘standard English’. From that century onward, the vast bulk of printed documents is in this variety, regardless of the geographical provenance of the author: documents do not readily betray their region of origin, and the dialectal diversity that continued to exist in speech is suppressed in writing. For this reason, much of our knowledge of Early Modern English variation depends much more on indirect evidence, such as contemporary commentaries on pronunciation (on which see especially Dobson 1968), and much less on variable forms attested in the texts themselves. For written Middle English, on the other hand, our access to variation is direct, and it is this primary source that we use to reconstruct the diversity of spoken Middle English.

Variability in written Middle English is very wide-ranging at every linguistic level: spelling, morphology, syntax and lexicon. There are also several non-linguistic dimensions in which this variation can be observed. Of these, the geographical and chronological dimensions are most immediately obvious: texts from different areas are different, and later texts differ very markedly from earlier ones (for some examples see Lass in this volume).

Introduction

In many ways ‘Middle’ is an appropriate term for the syntax of the period that will be the subject of discussion in this chapter. As Roger Lass says in chapter 2 (section 2.2) of this volume, ‘middle’ indicates the transitional nature of the language in this period; ‘transitional’, of course, only with hindsight. Lass further refers to the typological use of the term ‘middle’ within the family of Germanic languages, representing among other things a language with a relatively ‘poor’ inflectional system. Translated into syntactic terms, a ‘middle’ language tends to have a fairly strict word order, and to make greater use of periphrastic constructions; i.e. it relies more heavily on auxiliary verbs, prepositional phrases, etc.

Compared with the Old English period, when the syntax of the language was relatively stable (see vol. I, section 4.1), the Middle English period is indeed one of change. Much has been written about the causes of the rapid loss of inflections, which started in the Late Old English period in the northern part of the country and which was more or less concluded in the fourteenth century with the exception of some enclaves in the extreme south. Without doubt the fact that Old English had initial stress played a role. It must have contributed to the neutralisation of vowel qualities in inflectional endings and their almost total subsequent demise. However, when we consider the fact that other Germanic (initial-stress) languages did not all lose their inflections, it cannot have been a decisive factor.

Sources and methodology

General principles

Names, whether of places or of people, have by definition a distinctive standing vis-à-vis the language at large. Although ultimately derived from elements of common vocabulary (not necessarily that of the language they currently grace), they have become emptied of their original etymological denotation; and this is true even for those whose form still coincides with that of the related lexical items: no-one expects to find cattle wading across the river at Oxford and, should a Mr Butcher actually be in the meat trade, the coincidence almost excites mirth.

On the one hand, this semantic detachment promotes cross-cultural survival: some Present-Day ‘English’ place names are traceable to Celtic forms at least two millennia old, a few even suspected of going back to pre-Celtic times; some ‘English’ baptismal names have Hebrew origins. On the other, it lays names open to phonological attrition, for no more of any form need survive than is required for acting, in context, as an unambiguous signal or pointer. Name compounds are thus subject to early obscuration, to having their unstressed syllables reduced more drastically than similar ones of analogous ‘meaningful’ forms, and to being ‘folk-etymologised’ (Lass 1973; Coates 1987; Colman 1989a and b; Clark 1991). As well as complicating the etymologising process, this makes name material an unreliable guide to the incidence and the chronology (though not the nature) of general sound changes; it raises, indeed, a possibility of there having been specifically onomastic changes, related to the general ones but carrying them further (see further below, pp. 593–4).

Lexis

Of all linguistic concepts, that of ‘word’ is the most fundamental, possessing a quality of homely familiarity which is lacking in more technical terms like ‘phoneme’, ‘morpheme’ or even ‘syntax’. Words seem to have a reality either as pronunciations or as written characters, they have grammatical rules for combination, and they have meanings: and for everyday purposes we require little more than this in order to discuss them adequately. Yet, as soon as words become the object of serious study requiring more precise definition, it is apparent that our complacency is ill-founded. Difficulties are encountered in describing with precision what constitutes that composite of form and meaning we call a word. Our ready acceptance that words can be misspelt, mispronounced or inappropriately combined confirms that their use is governed by linguistic rules, but we assume too easily that such rules are founded on an ability to recognise words as the fundamental unit of analysis. In any period this is a troublesome business, but especially so in Middle English.

That written Middle English presents a problem in the definition of any individual word by its orthographic form is a fact vividly apparent to anyone who has ever used a computer to search a text. The machine's capacity to recognise forms is relatively inflexible, but inflexibility is not characteristic of scribal spelling. The scribe who, in the late fourteenth century, wrote MS Cotton Nero A.x, Art. 3, refers within a few lines of each other to þyn aunt and þy naunt, reflecting an uncertainty about word boundaries which is sometimes exploited in the patterns of alliterative verse: ‘And worisch him as namely as he myne awyn warre’ (Wars of Alexander 582).

Introduction

Dialectology is the study of varieties of speech and variation in language. Dialectologists work to make correlations between linguistic features (phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical) and such extralinguistic facts as place of origin, race, sex, social status. In doing so, we identify individual varieties – idiolects – and relate them to dialects, the more general patterns of speech communities. When undertaking the study of a contemporary speech community, the dialectologist has living informants and modern devices for collecting data. Studies of historical varieties depend on less direct methods. The main sources of information are written records and conjectures about older varieties based on comparisons of surviving dialects. Linguists interested in earlier varieties of English are fortunate that the English language has been written for over a thousand years. Those records attest several clearly distinct historical varieties, compare the Old English of Beowulf with Chaucer's Middle English or Shakespeare's Early Modern English. More subtle distinctions within periods, as between Chaucer and the Pearl/Gawain, are also evident. This chapter will be an investigation of the modern methods used to extract as much information as possible from ancient written records.

Given its name and rather narrow focus, Old English dialectology might at first seem a subject very remote from day-to-day human affairs. Speakers of a language are, however, by their very nature unselfconscious ‘students’ of speech varieties. Early in life we begin that ‘training’ by identifying and learning to imitate the wide range of speech habits and styles we encounter in our nurturing environments.

Introduction

The term literary language can be used in various senses, reflecting the different meanings of the word literature, and the area of discourse usefully designated by it will vary from one period to another. For the period up to 1100 there is little value in applying the broad and etymological sense of the word ‘literary’ or ‘literature’, meaning ‘all that is written down’ in contradistinction to oral discourse: to do so risks, on the one hand, excluding poetry, since the special language of verse was largely developed without benefit of writing and a number of the surviving poems probably originated in oral conditions; and on the other hand, including too much to be useful, since virtually all our evidence for the language of the time, at all levels, comes from written documents. At the other extreme, a more restricted definition of literature as imaginative composition would be in danger of excluding much that is worth attention and including some texts of little linguistic or literary interest because they happen to deal with imaginary fictions. I use the term ‘literary language’ here to cover the language of all verse and of the more sustained and ambitious writing in prose, especially those texts which reveal a concern with the selection and use of language.

Political history and language history

Bede begins his story of the Anglo-Saxon invasions and settlements of Britain as follows(it seems more appropriate here to quote from the Old English translation than from the original Latin text):