Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 12 (2021) Issue 1, pp. 11-37
Mother Goose as a Resource in Teaching Historical Linguistics
Dallin D. Oaks (Brigham Young University, Provo (Utah) USA)
Abstract
Mother Goose and other nursery rhymes as authentic texts are valuable resources that can be used effectively to illustrate historical English language change. Even though these nursery rhymes contain some forms, structures, and word meanings that differ from the language of today, the texts are sufficiently recent that they are intelligible to modern audiences. This article will illustrate the relevance and usefulness of nursery rhymes in teaching about principles of language and language change, such as voicing, phonological processes, factors motivating phonological change, as well as actual changes in the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and lexicon of English.
Keywords: Mother Goose, nursery rhymes, linguistic teaching, historical linguistics
1 Introduction
In his biography, A Roving Commission: My Early Life, Winston Churchill, who would later become the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, recounts a humorous story about his unsuccessful efforts as a very young boy to learn Latin. Shortly after entering a boarding school, he was given a list of the Latin case forms for mensa ('table') and told to memorize them. Apparently, the teacher had not explained the purpose or function of the different case forms for conveying the relationships between sentence elements. Among the case forms young Winston was to memorize was the vocative case. When he inquired what the vocative form mensa was used to express, his teacher told him it was the form to use “in addressing a table” or “speaking to a table”. Churchill then responded, “But I never do”. His teacher did not take this response well (Churchill 1930: 10-11). For young Winston, however, the communicative value of learning a form for addressing a table wasn’t clear.
Language teachers now generally recognize the value of authentic or real texts rather than artificially contrived passages when teaching students a foreign language. Perhaps it would be possible to imagine a poetic context in which someone could address a table, but to the young Churchill, this was nonsense. The matter of speaking to a table is not likely to be found in an authentic text, even a literary one. Churchill’s reaction to an unnatural and contrived use of language occurred in a language acquisition setting, where he was to learn Latin. But the use of authentic texts can also be important in pedagogical settings where a course is not designed to teach a language but instead to teach about a language. Such settings would include the linguistic and philological courses that teach about the forms, structures, varieties, and historical development of languages. In some cases, the students in these courses are even native speakers, or at least very fluent, in the modern version of the language they are learning about.
This paper will look at some authentic texts in relation to instruction in the history of the English language, whether as its own course or as a unit within an introductory linguistics course. Although the use and application of authentic texts in this type of pedagogical setting may be different in some ways from the language acquisition setting, such texts can still play an important role as they provide for contextualization, memorability, and capturing student interest.
When teaching about the history of the English language, instructors need to teach about a variety of linguistic concepts and frameworks such as types of syntactic and semantic changes, Grimm’s Law, and phonological processes that have shaped the development of various forms. As instructors consider which kinds of authentic texts could be used to illustrate such information effectively, they should not overlook one perhaps seemingly unlikely resource: “Mother Goose rhymes,” as they are commonly known in the United States – perhaps more commonly called “nursery rhymes” in Great Britain (Delamar 1987: 2, Vocca 2001: 560). In this article, these labels will generally be used interchangeably. (1)
Mother Goose rhymes or nursery rhymes are generally short, literary passages that have traditionally and commonly been recited to young, native English-speaking children or read to them in some of those quiet, shared moments between parents and children, often at bedtime. The Mother Goose or nursery rhymes include such texts as Jack and Jill and Humpty Dumpty. Although nursery rhyme texts often display carefully constructed language features and sometimes fanciful content matters, they are authentic texts that were generally not fashioned to teach the language but rather to amuse and entertain. Of course, it is not suggested here that those who teach about the history of the English language should rely exclusively or even primarily on Mother Goose rhymes for their examples. But it is suggested that Mother Goose rhymes be recognized as a valuable resource that teachers keep prominently in mind.
The use of Mother Goose or nursery rhymes to illustrate historical changes in the English language carries some advantages. First, they are familiar. Although they may not be as commonly transmitted between parents and children as they once were, most students in history of the English language courses or introductory linguistics courses will be acquainted with at least a few of them, or at least recognize the genre or type of collection. And in the case of a few of the specific texts like Jack and Jill, some students will even have near-verbatim knowledge of their wording. This allows for a meaningful cognitive interaction between what is already familiar in these authentic texts and the new information that the instructor wishes to share about the language that is exemplified in these texts. When students can reflect on language principles from a course involving the history of the language and recognize their manifestation in nursery rhyme texts with which those students are already familiar, the reality of what is taught can be made stronger in their minds.
These familiar Mother Goose or nursery rhymes can also have the added advantage of memorability. This memorability is not just found in the fact that students may already have memorized some of the texts, but also in the fact that the Mother Goose texts generally contain rhymes and sometimes rhythms and alliterations that will enhance their memorability, even for students who have previously not been acquainted with them. (2) In addition, as new concepts are linked to memorable nursery lines, those new concepts are also made more memorable through association. Moreover, because so many of the Mother Goose rhymes are widely known and referenced throughout the culture, students will continue, even after their college course, to occasionally encounter some of the specific texts that were used for exemplifying different linguistic concepts and principles, thus reminding the students of and reinforcing course concepts and principles that have been taught.
Another advantage of the Mother Goose rhymes as authentic texts is that they are often short, providing brief and completely self-contained passages. Even some of the longer ones, like Old Mother Hubbard, are somewhat episodic, lending themselves well to the use of shorter excerpts that still maintain their coherence.
One more advantage of the Mother Goose rhymes is that while they are generally older texts, displaying some linguistic features that have since evolved in the language, the texts are still linguistically understandable and accessible. In the forms by which people know them, they generally don’t reach back more than a few centuries. Opie & Opie put the percentage of nursery rhymes that are “definitely found recorded” prior to 1600 at just 2.3%, and the percentage that are “probably identified” at 4.2% (1997: 7). This would likely indicate that their forms, as they appear in published sources, rarely if ever reach back further than the Early Modern English period (about 1500 to 1700). A significant result of this is that although they contain some phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic differences from the language of today, which can be discussed as examples of historical change, the texts themselves remain largely intelligible. As a point of comparison, it is worth noting that the English translation of the Bible known as the King James Version (hereafter referred to as the KJV), with which many English speakers have some familiarity, was published in 1611. Of course, in all of this, teachers and students alike should remember, as Vocca notes (2001: 560), that the published nursery rhymes sometimes go back to earlier oral traditions. (3)
Up to this point, this article has spoken of Mother Goose rhymes as if they were a clearly delineated and discrete collection. Instead, there are various collections, published over a period of centuries (4), often sharing many of the most popular texts but differing in some of the texts they contain, and with the shared texts sometimes even differing somewhat in their wording.
In what follows, attention will be given to examples showing how the Mother Goose rhymes can effectively illustrate various linguistic concepts and principles, specifically in relation to the history of the English language. This focus on the Mother Goose rhymes will generally not address some of the alleged stories about their origins. These would be difficult to establish, but the historical language forms that are evident are more easily and reliably established. Many of the linguistic concepts and principles that will be introduced here are very familiar to those who have studied linguistics, but some brief linguistic explanations will nonetheless be provided, not only for those who may be less familiar with these concepts and principles, but also to linguistically contextualize the Mother Goose examples that will be introduced. In doing so, this article aims to show just how useful the corpus of Mother Goose rhymes can be in illustrating various linguistic concepts and principles in an interesting, memorable, and meaningful way.
2 Illustrating Some Introductory Principles about Sound Changes
An appropriate starting point for the current study will be to look at how Mother Goose rhymes can illustrate some specific linguistic principles related to sound changes.
2.1 Voicing
In introductory linguistics courses and often in introductory material for courses dealing with the history of the English language, instructors show that many consonants that are otherwise similar in their place of articulation (where the airstream is obstructed in producing the sounds) and manner of articulation (how the airstream is obstructed) are distinguished through their voicing (whether or not the vocal cords vibrate in their production). Thus, the sounds /p/ and /b/ are both bilabial stops (involving both lips in a complete but temporary blockage of the airstream), but /p/ is voiceless, and /b/ is voiced. Similarly, /s/ and /z/ are both alveolar fricatives (produced with the tongue near the hard ridge just behind the top teeth and only partially obstructing the airstream). But /s/ is voiceless, whereas /z/ is voiced. Sometimes the difference in voicing is evident across dialects or across time. Some Southerners in the U.S. differ from Northerners in pronouncing greasy as if the internal consonant were a /z/. The 400-year-old KJV seems to display a historical voicing difference in Exodus 25: 31-36, which uses knop / knops where English speakers would now say knob / knobs (Elliott 1967: 99). Similarly, the respective distinction in voiceless and voiced labiodental fricatives /f/ and /v/ is evident in Joel 2: 24 and 3: 13, which contain the word fats (Elliott 1967: 65-66), where most would now say vats. Moreover, differences in voicing can sometimes serve to distinguish related words from different languages that share a common origin. Spanish and Italian have both developed from Latin. And their close historical relationship is well illustrated in their respective words for 'friend'. Spanish uses amigo, while Italian uses amico (the 'c' being the spelling representation for the /k/ sound). The pronunciation of the words differs from each other only in the fact that Spanish uses the voiced velar stop /g/ (the tongue making a complete but temporary blockage on the velum, or soft palate), whereas Italian uses the voiceless velar stop /k/. Spanish and Italian would originally have been just separate dialect forms of Latin. The two languages display great lexical similarity, which is apparent when comparing many word pairs whose differences are sometimes evident in the voicing of certain consonants.
At this point it will be useful to look at an English example from the Mother Goose rhyme, The Man in the Moon, and how it can contribute to an interesting discussion about voicing (5):
The man in the moon came tumbling down,
And asked his way to Norwich.
He went by the south
And burned his mouth
With eating hot pease porridge. (Lobel 1986: 96)
The juxtaposition of the words Norwich and porridge in the rhyming position of the two lines is likely to be a bit puzzling to most American English speakers, who would anticipate a rhyme and yet would expect the final consonant of Norwich to be pronounced with a voiceless /č/ (as in the common pronunciation of the digraph 'ch') rather than a voiced /ǰ/, like the final sound of the word porridge. In fact, the United States has a city in Connecticut named Norwich, and it is pronounced with /č/. But the juxtaposition of the two words in the Mother Goose text should at least make American students wonder whether Norwich in this text is intended to use a voiced /ǰ/. In fact, the Mother Goose rhyme seems to indicate that either historically or dialectally, there is a voicing difference that has emerged between the current pronunciation among American English speakers and the speakers whose pronunciation the Mother Goose rhyme is representing. (6) In fact, one textbook about the history of the English language makes special mention of this pronunciation issue and the Mother Goose rhyme that illustrates it:
Norwich [England] is traditionally pronounced to rhyme with porridge, as in a nursery jingle about a man from Norwich who ate some porridge; the name of the city in Connecticut is, however, pronounced as the spelling seems to indicate. (Algeo & Butcher 2014: 254)
An interesting, additional source confirms this customary difference between the two cities named Norwich, showing that this difference goes back at least about 80 years (and probably many more). The NBC Handbook of Pronunciation was first published in the United States for the National Broadcasting Corporation in 1943 to provide a uniform set of prescribed pronunciations for its radio announcers. Although American English speakers should not consider its prescriptions to be definitive, the handbook does seem to provide a useful guide to pronunciations that were probably regarded as normative and relatively prestigious (not merely descriptive) for the American English of about 80 years ago, thus providing some historical perspective. That handbook specifies that while the U.S. pronunciation of Norwich, Connecticut, is with /č/, the consonant /ǰ/ is to be used when referring to the city in England (Bender 1943: 207). (7)
2.2 The Use of the Schwa Vowel on Unstressed Syllables
Each language has some distinctive phonological patterns that its native speakers follow. One common pattern for English speakers is to pronounce the vowels in unstressed syllables as the schwa vowel /ǝ/, like the vowel that English speakers normally use in the first syllable of offend, for example. This use of the schwa is not a recent development in the language. It is a systematic phenomenon that has been a part of the language for centuries. In fact, many scholars believe that the reduction in the forms and varieties of inflectional suffixes (such as earlier noun plurals and verb tense suffixes), even as far back as the late Old English period (8), was strongly influenced, at least in part, by the practice of native speakers to produce the schwa vowel in the unstressed inflectional suffixes (Algeo & Butcher 2014: 137-139; Baugh & Cable 1993: 154-155). Of course, this vowel behavior is not limited to inflectional suffixes. And at least one Mother Goose text seems to confirm that this pattern has influenced English vowels for centuries. Note the following excerpt from Simple Simon, in which the words Simon and pie-man rhyme just because of the use of the schwa vowel on unstressed syllables:
Simple Simon met a pie-man,
Going to the fair.
Said Simple Simon to the pie-man:
“Let me taste your ware.”
Said the pie-man to Simple Simon:
“Show me first your penny.”
Said Simple Simon to the pie-man:
“Indeed, I haven’t any.” (Miller 1971: 50)
In the first stanza, the words Simon and pieman (pie-man) are rhymes that are internal to their own lines. But by the second stanza, the rhyming relationship between the two words is even more overt, with the two words being placed at the ends of lines that are tied together by the rhyme.
2.3 Types of Phonological Processes
Languages display a variety of phonological processes by which sounds or sequences of sounds in various words are changed. Two of these will be discussed here: metathesis and segment addition (intrusion). The Mother Goose rhymes provide helpful illustrations of these processes that have occurred in English and that an instructor can discuss with the class.
2.3.1 Metathesis
The first type of phonological process or change to be considered here is metathesis, which occurs when sounds are inverted with each other. Metathesis frequently involves an adjacent r-consonant and vowel (Arlotto 1972: 89). A notable example of this is the word bird, which was once brid or bridd (Arlotto 1972: 89, Ayto 1990: 64, Yule 2017: 258). Similarly, the ordinal number third used to be thrid (þridda) (Arlotto 1972: 89), with its historical sequence of the r-consonant and vowel more closely matching the current sequence of the r-consonant and vowel in the related words three and thrice. Historically, moreover, the word horse was once hros (Yule 2017: 258, Arlotto 1972: 89). Burridge (2005: 122) has noted that this earlier pronunciation explains the rhyme scheme in the famous Mother Goose rhyme about Banbury Cross:
Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers, and bells on her toes,
She shall make music wherever she goes. (Miller 1971: 28)
As the text currently appears, the words for horse and cross don’t present a rhyme. But if people read horse as hros, as the word was earlier written and pronounced in the language, the rhyme scheme falls into place. Another example of a Mother Goose text whose rhyme scheme depends on this earlier form of horse as hros appears below:
I went to the river—
No ship to get across,
I paid ten shillings
For an old blind horse. (Excerpt from a longer text in Opie & Opie 1955: 127)
2.3.2 Segment Addition
Another phonological process is segment addition. This manifests itself in English in various ways. One very common manifestation of this occurs as speakers insert a stop consonant (/p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, or /g/) that has the same place of articulation as an immediately preceding nasal consonant. This commonly occurs before consonant sounds like /t/, /k/, /s/, /l/, or /θ/ (the latter being a voiceless sound corresponding to the digraph th). This type of segment addition is evident, as Burridge notes, with a word like mince, in which many speakers insert a /t/ before the /s/ because of the preceding /n/. Both /n/ and /t/ share the same place of articulation, and, for a reason related to a timing issue in the articulation of the /n/ and /s/ combination, avoiding the insertion of a /t/ in a word like mince can actually make it more difficult to pronounce (Burridge 2004: 31-32). This common phonological tendency, to insert a stop consonant in such an environment, occasionally results in homophonous pairs like mince / mints, dense / dents, and sense / scents (or cents). In another example of this type of segment addition, in one of Abraham Lincoln’s letters, he mentions Fort Sumter, the site of the outbreak of the American Civil War, but he mistakenly spells it as Fort “Sumpter” (Goodwin 2005: 343). Lincoln’s spelling is almost certainly an indication of how he actually pronounced the word. In this case the bilabial stop /p/ is inserted because of the preceding bilabial nasal /m/.
As might be expected from this discussion, Mother Goose texts contain words that have undergone segment addition, though the words that will be identified here had already altered their pronunciation and spelling by the time their respective nursery rhyme texts were published. But the words’ appearance in these prominent nursery rhyme texts still presents opportunities for discussion. Consider, for example, one famous text:
Jack, be nimble,
Jack, be quick;
Jack, jump over
The candlestick. (Miller 1971: 39)
In this text, the word nimble features prominently, though not as part of its rhyme. And as can be documented in earlier, unrelated texts, the adjective nimble didn’t always have a /b/ in English (Entry for the adjective “nimble,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2021, available at https://oed.com). The consonant seems to have been added because of the preceding bilabial /m/. (9)
This type of segment addition is also evident with the verb tumble in the famous nursery rhyme about Jack and Jill. This verb apparently entered the language “from Middle Low German tummelen, which has other relatives in modern German tummeln ‘bustle, hurry’ and taumeln ‘reel, stagger’” (Ayto 1990: 544). Although this word may have entered the language without a /b/, it acquired one soon enough that The Oxford English Dictionary, which endeavors to show the earliest documentable forms and subsequent developments for a given word, has almost no early examples of tumble that lack a /b/ (Entry for the verb “tumble,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2021, https://oed.com). Now note the rhythmic contribution that the word tumbling makes in the nursery rhyme below, rendered even more dramatic by the additional sound symbolism of /b/, with its association of impactful contact:
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after. (Miller 1971: 40)
2.4 Motivating Factors Behind Some Phonological Changes
Up to this point, examples from Mother Goose rhymes have been provided to illustrate some types of sound change. But nursery rhymes also illustrate some of the factors motivating different sound changes. In the previous discussions of voicing, segment addition, and perhaps metathesis, it might be noted that some sound changes were motivated by the tendency of speakers to adopt easier articulations. But there are additional factors that seem to have prompted some sound changes.
2.4.1 Spelling Pronunciation
Some pronunciations develop as people try to make their pronunciation conform more closely to the spelling they see for a particular word (Fromkin et al. 2014: 546-547; Algeo & Butcher 2014: 49-50). It makes sense that many speakers would take their cue about pronunciation from the spelling of words. But applying this standard unconditionally can sometimes result in pronunciations that were never a part of the language or which have not been customary in the language for a long time (Algeo & Butcher 2014: 49-50). As Crystal explains, Shakespeare presents a comic character in his play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, who insists that people should match their pronunciation of particular words to their spelling, such as to pronounce the /b/ sound in doubt and debt (Crystal 2004: 270). This character in his play gives insight into some common pronunciations of that day, indicating, for example, that the normative pronunciation for doubt and debt in Shakespeare’s time, as in the language of today, would not actually have used a /b/. In fact, the words doubt and debt were borrowings that entered English without a /b/ in the spelling or pronunciation. Later scribes and others added a b in their spelling to reflect the words’ ultimate Latin origins (Wolman 2008: 55). This spelling change did not alter the customary pronunciation, but if speakers of the language had subsequently altered their pronunciation to adopt the /b/ sound in doubt and debt because of their spelling, the resulting forms would have been spelling pronunciations.
Just as Shakespeare’s play provides an opportunity to discuss the phenomenon of spelling pronunciation, Mother Goose does as well. One noteworthy spelling pronunciation relates to how the double “e” in the spelling is sometimes rendered in speech. For example, although some speakers pronounce the noun creek with /ɪ/, as if the pronunciation corresponded to what could be spelled as crick (/krɪk/), others scrupulously avoid that pronunciation, preferring instead to pronounce the word with the /i/ sound as in the word see. This preference for the /krik/ pronunciation is likely motivated in many cases by the spelling of the word and in such cases would be a spelling pronunciation. Some students find it hard to believe that the crick pronunciation with /ɪ/ could have any legitimacy. It would probably surprise them, however, to see that sources such as both The Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary show /krɪk/ as a possible American pronunciation (Entry for the noun “creek,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2021, https://oed.com; the noun “creek” in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 2020). Of course, those dictionaries are following a common practice of dictionaries in describing rather than prescribing, but the presence of this form near the front of the entry for the noun creek is a good reminder of its common use. Students can be invited to consider the widespread American English pronunciation of been, with its /ɪ/ vowel. (10) Despite this, it can nonetheless seem counter-intuitive that some words with the “ee” spelling would be pronounced with /ɪ/. But Mother Goose rhymes reveal that this pronunciation can be the case and has been so for a long time. Some people who are familiar with the written form britches may not realize that it is a spelling variant of breeches, the latter word having traditionally been pronounced with the same vowel /ɪ/ in the middle of the word. More recently, however, it seems that some speakers in America and England have been influenced by the spelling of breeches and have begun to pronounce the middle part of that word as if it had the same /i/ vowel that is commonly used in the word see. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2020), in fact, gives a variant pronunciation of breeches with this vowel, as does the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (Jones 2003). It is worth noting, however, what Mother Goose provides as a rhyme for breeches in the text, Little Jack Nory:
Little Jack Nory
Told me a story.
How he tried
Cock-horse to ride,
Sword and scabbard by his side,
Saddle, leaden spurs, and switches,
His pocket tight
With pence all bright,
Marbles, tops, puzzles, props,
Now he’s put in a jacket and breeches. (Favorite 1923: n.p.)
Another interesting case of spelling pronunciation involves the days of the week. It is common, at least in American English, to pronounce each of the names of the days of the week with its end part pronounced as speakers would normally pronounce the word day (/dei/). But the widespread use and acceptance of this pronunciation appears to be more recent, influenced by the spelling of the words. Indeed, judging from earlier pronunciation guides, many speakers, likely even the most highly regarded speakers, pronounced a word like Sunday as if the ending were /di/, pronounced as many would pronounce dee (or possibly with the closely related but lax vowel variant /dɪ/). The NBC Handbook of Pronunciation, again from about 80 years ago, shows the pronunciation of Sunday (and the other three days of the week that are listed) as ending in /dɪ/ (Bender 1943: 247, 260, 272, 284). Similarly, in his 1935 edition of American Pronunciation, Kenyon explains that in both America and England the word Monday is pronounced with the ending form /dɪ/, “and so with the other days of the week” (1935: 168). Across the ocean, the 1926 British English guide, An English Pronouncing Dictionary, which aims generally at describing a variety “used by a considerable number of cultivated Southern English people in ordinary conversation” (“Received Pronunciation”) (Jones 1926: vii-viii) shows all the days of the week ending in the similar /di/, except for Saturday, which allows for an ending in either /di/ or /dei/ (ibid.). Kenyon indicates that the word-final pronunciation with /dɪ/ in Monday [and presumably the other days of the week] is “as it has been for at least three hundred years” (1935: 168). In a separate 1948 publication, Kenyon does acknowledge some speakers’ pronunciation of the days of the week with the word-final /dei/ but refers to this pronunciation as “substandard” (1948: 26). The pronunciation with /di/ (or /dɪ/) rather than /dei/ is consistent with the Mother Goose rhyme, Solomon Grundy, in which the name Grundy is evidently shown to rhyme with the various days of the week:
Solomon Grundy,
Born on Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
This is the end
Of Solomon Grundy. (Delamar 1987: 95)
The previous, traditional pronunciation of Saturday with /di/, before the more recent spelling pronunciation gained wider acceptance, is also evident in the nursery rhyme, Oh, Dear! What Can the Matter Be?:
Oh, dear! What can the matter be?
Two old women got up an apple-tree;
One came down,
And the other stayed till Saturday. (Favorite 1923: n.p.) (11)
Another example of how a nursery rhyme illustrates an older, more traditional pronunciation prior to the subsequent spelling pronunciation, can be seen, as Algeo & Butcher note, with the word forehead (2014: 50). The compound word forehead is now frequently pronounced with two stressed syllables, with the second syllable being pronounced as /hɛd/, in other words, as many speakers would pronounce the independent word head. Algeo & Butcher explain, however, that the older pronunciation for the compound was /ˈfɔrǝd/, a pronunciation that they note is evident in the rhyme scheme of the text about “the little girl” (2014: 50), a version of which is included below:
There was a little girl who wore a little hood,
And a curl down the middle of her forehead;
When she was good, she was very, very good,
But when she was bad, she was horrid. (Favorite 1923: n.p.) (12)
The last example of a spelling pronunciation that will be noted here involves an inflectional suffix. Many assume that the 'correct' pronunciation of the suffix -ing, as on the participial forms of verbs like dancing, must avoid what some people refer to as “g-dropping.” Thus, there are people who are inclined towards avoiding a pronunciation like dancin’. The reference to “g-dropping,” however, is a mistaken characterization of what is happening in that pronunciation, for it does not actually involve dropping a consonant, but rather using an alveolar nasal instead of a velar one. The -ng spelling is employed as a written convention for representing the velar nasal, since the English spelling system has no single alphabetic symbol to represent that sound. But even as the -ng spelling is an understandable convention for the pronunciation of words like sing and rang, it should be recognized that its use in the spelling of the suffix -ing to represent a velar nasal in participles such as dancing or playing does not always match the actual pronunciation that some speakers have traditionally used with such participles. In this regard, then, some speakers who consider the spelling and adhere closely to maintaining a velar nasal (in their view by saying playing rather than playin’) are promoting a spelling pronunciation that even some respected literary authorities of the past would not always have maintained. Algeo & Butcher, in fact, show that in at least a couple of his works, Jonathan Swift used rhymes that depended upon the participial pronunciation with the alveolar nasal /n/, despite the spelling. This is evident in one of the examples they provide from his work:
See then what mortals place their bliss in!
Next morn betimes the bride was missing. (Algeo & Butcher 2014: 163-164)
Moreover, as Crystal (2007: 178) notes, some speakers in the past actually regarded the pronunciation like playing (with a velar nasal) as less prestigious. Now consider the example below from Old Mother Hubbard that shows what was apparently a widespread pronunciation with the alveolar nasal /n/ in the participle:
She went to the seamstress
To buy him some linen;
But when she came back
The dog was a-spinning. (Opie & Opie 1955: 30)
2.4.2 Reinterpretation
Some pronunciation (and even spelling) can change when people reinterpret the forms or meanings of particular words. This seems to have happened with the famous Christmas folk song, The Twelve Days of Christmas. The song now commonly includes references to four calling birds. But it is useful to compare what is found in the excerpt from the corresponding nursery rhyme below:
The twelfth day of Christmas
My true love sent to me
Twelve lords a-leaping,
Eleven ladies dancing,
Ten pipers piping,
Nine drummers drumming,
Eight maids a-milking,
Seven swans a-swimming,
Six geese a-laying,
Five gold rings,
Four colly birds,
Three French hens,
Two turtle doves, and
A partridge in a pear tree. (Opie & Opie 1955: 198-199)
As might be concluded from the development of the lyrics to this song, speakers of English probably became less familiar with the term colly (or collie), which had meant 'black', and did not realize that the lyrics referred to blackbirds. This led English speakers to reinterpret what it was that they had heard or sung (e.g., Armenti 2016), and they apparently assumed that since some birds "‘call out’ in song", the type of birds mentioned here must be calling birds (Armenti 2016). Armenti says that in The Twelve Days of Christmas, the phrase “‘colly birds’ predates ‘calling birds’ by more than a century,” though other variations have existed as well (Armenti 2016 (blogs.loc.gov/catbird/2016/12/is-it-four-calling-birds-or-four-colly-birds-a-twelve-days-of-christmas-debate; 14-06-2021)).
One distinctive type of reinterpretation that can occur involves a back-formation, by which speakers make “a new word from an older word that is mistakenly assumed to be a derivative of it” (Algeo & Butcher 2014: 264). Mother Goose shows us a memorable example of this. The modern word form of the vegetable known as pea is actually the result of a back-formation from the singular word pease. People eventually and mistakenly reinterpreted pease as a plural form and, through analogy with other singular and plural forms, created the new singular word form pea (Algeo & Butcher 2014: 264). The nursery rhyme about pease porridge, as Algeo & Butcher note (2014: 264), shows the earlier use of pease as a singular:
Pease porridge hot,
Pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot
Nine days old.
Some like it hot,
Some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot
Nine days old. (Opie & Opie 1955: 9)
Another type of reinterpretation that is worth mentioning is related to word boundary confusion. Speakers of English have sometimes misunderstood where word boundaries occur and have adjusted them accordingly. One environment for word boundary reinterpretation involves the indefinite articles a / an and the initial sound of the following noun. Historically, the word nadder changed to adder, a development that likely resulted, at least in part, from the fact that the pronunciation of a phrase like “a nadder” could have sounded like “an adder.” A similar process occurred with napron, becoming apron, where a noun lost its initial nasal consonant (Algeo & Butcher 2014: 133, Burridge 2004: 20-21, also Stageberg & Oaks 2000: 72). The opposite happened with nickname, which acquired a word-initial nasal consonant as it developed from a phrase like an ekename, literally 'an also-name' (Algeo & Butcher 2014: 133, also Burridge 2004: 20), or an additional name that was applied to someone. The old use of eke to mean 'also' can be seen in the following nursery rhyme:
Ye Parents who have children dear,
And eke ye that have none,
If you would keep them safe abroad
Pray keep them all at home. (Delamar 1987: 65)
3 Illustrating Morphological Change
By the time the Mother Goose texts were formed, many of the most important morphological developments that characterize the modern English language had already occurred. In the transition from late Old English into early Middle English, the language experienced an extensive loss of inflectional suffixes, the suffixes that show such grammatical notions as plural, verb tense, etc. Although some inflectional suffixes have remained in the language, the variety of forms has been greatly reduced. At the time that the various nursery rhymes were fashioned, however, some distinctive forms and behavior that are now archaic or obsolete still remained, not only with the inflectional suffixes, but with some other prefixes and suffixes as well.
3.1 Inflectional Suffixes
Historically, one plural noun inflectional suffix that competed with the inflectional -s (or -es) for a lasting place in the English language was -n (or -en). A surviving but isolated example of that suffix is still visible in the language today with the word oxen (Algeo & Butcher 2014: 102, also Baugh & Cable 1993: 156). But that inflectional suffix was much more common in earlier times. In fact, Old English had many nouns that used that plural suffix (manifested earlier as -an) (Algeo & Butcher 2014: 101-102). Its limited use was still visible quite a while later such as with Shakespeare’s Early Modern English writing, where eyes might occasionally appear as eyen, and shoes might occasionally appear in a slightly different form as shoon (Baugh & Cable 1993: 235). This plural is also evident in an excerpt from the nursery rhyme There was a Monkey:
There was a cobbler clouting shoon,
When they were mended, they were done. (Opie & Opie 1955: 144)
Another change among the inflectional suffixes of the language is also worth noting. This involves the traditional Old English inflection -th or -eth (written in Old English as -þ, -eþ, -ð, or -eð) for the third person singular present tense of the verb as in the word maketh. This suffix has passed from the language, having been replaced by the inflection -s (sometimes appearing as -es) as in the word makes. Of course, despite its similar appearance, the newer inflection is different from the plural -s on nouns. The old third person singular verb inflection -th (or -eth) regularly appears in such prominent Early Modern English texts as the KJV, and Shakespeare’s writings. But it is also visible in the well-known Mother Goose rhyme for remembering the number of days in each month:
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone,
And that has twenty-eight days clear
And twenty-nine in each leap year. (Lobel 1986: 60)
3.2 Other Prefixes and Suffixes
Changes to the morphological system of English have also occurred with derivational prefixes and suffixes, those forms like un- or -ness, which, while often associated with particular parts of speech, are not used for conveying grammatical notions like plural or verb tense. One morphological characteristic that has changed since earlier times is the use of the particle a- that preceded participial verbs in such forms as a-going. This feature is no longer in common use in the standard variety of the language, though it can still be found in some non-standard dialects like Appalachian English. Most modern speakers’ encounter with the form is through older texts like the KJV, as in the apostle Peter’s statement that he would go “a fishing” (John 21: 3). It is also evident in nursery rhymes as in the earlier quoted lines from The Twelve Days of Christmas that mention lords a-leaping, maids a-milking, swans a-swimming, and geese a-laying. Interestingly enough, the actual participle a-fishing, whose biblical use has previously been noted, also occurs in the famous nursery rhyme about Simple Simon and the pieman, as is shown in the example below:
Simple Simon went a-fishing,
For to catch a whale;
But all the water he could find
Was in his mother’s pail! (Miller 1971: 50)
The last morphological issue to consider here relates to the derivational suffix -ly that often occurs on adverbs. It is a common expectation among modern English speakers that most adverbs should use -ly. But earlier forms of the language often used “flat adverbs” (adverbs sharing the same form as their corresponding adjectives – without -ly), whether they functioned as “ordinary adverbs” or as “intensifiers” (Webster’s 1989: 451, also Algeo & Butcher 2014: 106-107). (13) Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage provides examples of flat adverbs from earlier writers, noting forms such as “monstrous fine” from Jonathan Swift, “violent hot” from Daniel Defoe, and “exceeding good” from Jane Austen (1989: 451). In relation to this, the expression “wonderful hot” in the following nursery rhyme is also illustrative:
Baby and I were baked in a pie,
The gravy was wonderful hot.
We had nothing to pay
To the baker that day
And so we crept out of the pot. (Lobel 1986: 32)
4 Illustrating Syntactic Developments
The syntactic developments in English since Old English times are quite significant. The language previously relied on inflectional suffixes to convey case relationships such as subject, direct object, indirect object, etc., which also allowed a greater freedom in its word order than what now prevails. With the loss of many of its inflections, however, the language began to rely more heavily on certain word orders and prepositions to signal such relationships (Baugh & Cable 1993: 54). The current importance of word order can be illustrated by considering the difference in meaning between the following sentences:
The farmer surprised the cow. vs The cow surprised the farmer.
It is also worth considering the importance of word order and prepositions in conveying the synonymy of the next two sentences:
The man brought the dog a bone. vs The man brought a bone to the dog.
The heaviest loss of inflectional complexity in the language and some of the resulting changes in word order pre-date the first publications of the Mother Goose rhymes. But other syntactic changes continued to occur later, and the Mother Goose rhymes thus still reveal some older syntactic patterns and practices that vary from the language of today. Anyone assessing this matter, however, should be careful because poetry often inverts syntax, especially to achieve certain meters and rhyme. Still, some examples in the Mother Goose texts do seem to display genuine differences between the syntactic possibilities of their time and those of more recent English. Such a difference is evident in the following nursery rhyme:
“Little maid, pretty maid, whither goest thou?”
“Down in the forest to milk my cow.”
“Shall I go with thee?” “No, not now;
When I send for thee, then come thou.” (Real 1916: 108)
This passage displays a prominent syntactic change in the historical development of English that is worth noting. The end of the opening line shows an earlier possible linguistic pattern of a wh-question that is formed with a wh-word (whither) followed by a main verb, goest (in this case, with its now archaic second person singular inflection), and then the subject, rather than being followed by an auxiliary verb, subject, and main verb, as would now generally occur in English (Where do you go? or Where are you going?). (14) Although Modern English has generally settled into the custom of requiring an auxiliary verb in its wh-questions (unless someone is inquiring about the grammatical subject of the sentence), it can instead use a form of the main verb be, even when it is not serving as an auxiliary verb (Where are you?). Additionally, in Modern English, unless inquiring about the subject, when no other auxiliary nor be form would otherwise be present in a wh-question, the question uses do-support, providing a form of the auxiliary verb do (such as Where do you go? or When does he study?). Early Modern English (about 1500 to 1700 A.D.) sometimes applied do-support. They could say both Whence doth he come? or Whence cometh he? In fact, its options for question formation were more flexible than the language of today. The Mother Goose text above shows a syntactic possibility that is generally no longer in productive use in the language.
Elsewhere among the Mother Goose texts, another interesting syntactic development may also be noted, this time regarding a relative pronoun. Standard Modern English has settled into a limited set of relative pronouns that may be used to introduce relative clauses, such as the word that in a sentence like The book that she studied was interesting. Among the relative pronouns are some wh-words like who, whom, which, and whose. But, significantly enough, the list of relative pronouns does not include the word what. Like most of the relative pronouns, the word what can be an interrogative that begins a wh-question. But it does not serve as a relative pronoun. An example of such a use, if it were possible in the standard variety, would be evident in a sentence like “He is the man what came“. The word what, however, actually did occur as a relative pronoun in earlier varieties of English. In fact, Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989) indicates that “in the 13th century it appeared in natural English idiom” (ibid.: 952). It can still be found in some non-standard varieties (sometimes represented in print as wot). The popular 1964 movie Mary Poppins represents the Cockney dialect of London in its song, Chim Chim Cher-ee, when it has Burt, the chimney sweep, sing, “Nowhere is there a more ’appier crew than them wot sings, ‘Chim chim cher-ee, chim cher-oo!’” (15) One particular Mother Goose rhyme excerpt contains the following example of the earlier use of what as a relative pronoun:
If I had a donkey wot wouldn’t go
I never would wollop him—no, no, no;
I’d give him some hay and cry gee O!
And come up Neddy. (Opie & Opie 1997: 180) (16)
This discussion has certainly not exhausted the possible syntactic observations that could be made with regards to nursery rhymes and language change. For example, an additional discussion might consider the older placement of a negative form after a main verb rather than after an auxiliary verb, as in “knows not what to do” (e.g., Real 1916: 81); the omission of a relative pronoun when it represents the subject of its own relative clause (Barber 1997: 215-216), as in “There was a little boy and a little girl [Ø] lived in an alley” (e.g., Real 1916: 118) (17); and the use of a form of the auxiliary be rather than of the auxiliary have in the perfect verb constructions when verbs such as come and go are involved, as evidenced in “They say the balloon is gone up to the moon!“ (e.g., ibid.: 121).
5 Illustrating Lexical Borrowing and Historical Cognates
A historical consideration of the lexicon or vocabulary of a language will distinguish between those words that have come into the language from outside influences (borrowings) versus those that are inherited from the language’s distant origins. English is a Germanic language, which, if traced back even more distantly, goes back to an Indo-European proto-language. Nursery rhymes can provide useful examples related to these lexical sources.
5.1 Borrowings
As English has evolved, it has borrowed significantly from other Indo-European descendant languages, including Latin, French, Old Norse, Greek, and the Celtic languages, among others. In the case of the Celtic languages, however, the early borrowings into English are primarily limited to place names and names of the physical landscape, such as the names of rivers or hills (Baugh & Cable 1993: 73-74). But some old Celtic numbers from local varieties of that language group do seem to have found their way into a couple of the Mother Goose texts. Opie & Opie (1997) explain that the local Celtic varieties have had some alternative “sets of counting words” used for tallying knitting stitches or sheep in the field (ibid.: 12). A few of these alternative Celtic counting numbers from the Westmorland variety are listed below:
hevera eight
devera nine
dick ten (Opie & Opie 1997: 13)
As Opie & Opie note, one nursery rhyme displays similarities between these Celtic numbers and its opening and closing words:
Hickory, dickory, dock,
The mouse ran up the clock.
The clock struck one,
The mouse ran down,
Hickory, dickory, dock. (Opie & Opie 1997: 244, also 13-14)
Although the words are not exactly the same, some similarities are evident, not only in the sounds, but in the number of syllables, and presumably in the stress patterns. One of this author’s students, upon learning the likely connection between the Celtic numbers and this nursery rhyme involving a clock, made the interesting observation that on the face of a clock, the numbers eight, nine, and ten, corresponding to hickory, dickory, dock, are going up the clock, just as the nursery rhyme suggests about the direction the mouse is going.
Opie & Opie provide another illustration of the alternative Celtic counting numbers that seem to have made their way into nursery rhymes, in this case as part of a common type of “counting-out rhymes” (Opie & Opie 1997: 11-14 provides a discussion of counting-out rhymes). Counting-out rhymes are used “when children wish to play a game in which one of their number must take a part different from, and therefore usually disliked by, the rest” (Opie & Opie 1997: 11). The counting-out rhymes are thus “used to choose who is ‘It’” (Kroupová 2014: 23).
Many English speakers are familiar with a counting-out rhyme that appears in various forms, such as the following version, in which italics have been added:
Eena, meena, mina, mo,
Catch a tigger by his toe;
If he squeals, let him go,
Eena, meena, mina, mo. (Opie & Opie 1955: 111)
The italicized words in this counting-out rhyme may be compared with a version of the alternative Celtic numbers, this time not from Westmorland but from Yarmouth:
ina one
mina two
tethera three
methera four (Opie & Opie 1997: 13)
Opie and Opie, in speaking of the familiar counting out rhymes [such as those with “eenie, meenie . . . .”], explain that “great antiquity was attached to these pieces well before 1820. The tradition in England was that counting-out rhymes were remnants of formulas used by the Druids for choosing human sacrifices” (Opie & Opie 1997: 12). The proposed antiquity and purpose behind these little counting-out rhymes are sobering to consider.
5.2 Cognates
When studying the lexical development in a language, it is sometimes important to consider the cognates it shares with other languages. Cognates of course are “words in related languages that developed from the same ancestral root” (Fromkin et al. 2014: 364). English and German, both from the Germanic branch of Indo-European languages, share various cognates. For example, the English words hound and bread closely resemble their German cognate equivalents (Hund and Brot, respectively). One interesting cognate to compare with its counterpart in German is the word sore, one of the older English modifying adverbs (the focus here not being on the adjective sense that means 'painful' ), which was more widely used in the language before it was replaced by other modifiers such as the French word very. The English word sore is a cognate of the German sehr, which it resembles (though the initial consonant in sehr is voiced), and it is documented in the KJV. It appears, for example, in Luke 2: 9, where the nativity story describes the shepherds as “sore afraid,” in other words 'very afraid' or 'greatly afraid‘. Algeo & Butcher (2014: 240) and Ayto (1990: 490) provide a discussion of sore along these lines). Its use also appears in the following Mother Goose text:
There dwelt an old woman at Exeter;
When visitors came it sore vexed her,
So for fear they should eat,
She locked up all her meat,
This stingy old woman of Exeter. (Real 1916: 128)
Cognate comparisons can also be made between English words of Germanic origin and those from more distantly related languages on the Romance branch of Indo-European, such as Latin, French, Spanish, or Italian. Given the extensive borrowing that English has done from Latin and French, such cognate comparisons can even occur between the Romance and Germanic vocabulary within the English language. The cognate sets of inherited Germanic vocabulary and the Romance borrowings will sometimes look quite different from each other. But even though their cognate relationship is not as visibly apparent on the surface, many of their differences can be accounted for through systematic sound correspondences that were identified by Jacob Grimm. (18) Grimm posited a series of sound changes that developed between Indo-European and its descendant branch of Germanic, thus often serving to account for some of the differences between Germanic languages (such as English, German, or Dutch) versus other non-Germanic Indo-European descendant languages, which did not undergo those same sound changes described by Grimm’s Law. For example, he showed that while Indo-European /p/ came down as /p/ in many of the descendant languages of Indo-European, it was altered to /f/ in the Germanic branch of languages (thus subsequently affecting English and German). This explains how Latin pater, Spanish padre, and Italian padre with their initial /p/ are related to English father and to German Vater (pronounced with an initial /f/). Within the English language, the Germanic-based word fatherly can be compared with its Romance-based cognate paternal (Claiborne 1983: 46), which was a later borrowing into English. The correspondence of /p/ and /f/ is just one of the systematic sound correspondences identified by Grimm (Claiborne 1983: 46; Algeo & Butcher 2014: 76-78; and Fromkin et al. 2014: 363-365). And there are many cognate comparisons in relation to Grimm’s Law that can be made within the English language itself because of the Germanic words it has inherited from its Germanic heritage and because of the extensive number of Romance borrowings it has acquired along the way.
Such cognate pairs, of course, are not likely to be found together in Mother Goose texts. How likely, for example, would both father and paternal occur together in these folk texts? But this does not mean that there are no words within the text that could lead to an interesting discussion about cognates and the kinds of systematic sound correspondences outlined in Grimm’s Law. Consider the opening lines of Little Boy Blue:
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn;
The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn. (Miller 1971: 33)
The two lines above both end in words that can be effectively used to illustrate two separate sound developments from Indo-European to the Germanic branch (and subsequently English) that were identified by Grimm:
Indo-European /k/ became /h/. (19)
Indo-European /g/ became /k/.
Thus, the Germanic-based English word horn in the rhyme may be compared with the Romance cognate corn that we have in English (or corne, as in licorne; not to be confused with the coincidentally similar form concluding the next line of the text). The Indo-European /k/ had changed to the /h/ of English but remained /k/ in the Romance languages from which the language would subsequently borrow some words. This is evident in the Romance root cognate, corn, in borrowed words like unicorn (literally a creature with “one horn”) and cornet (literally, a small horn). Now moving to the second line of the Mother Goose text, the Germanic-based English word corn may be compared with its Romance-based cognate grain, which was later borrowed (Indo-European /g/ became the /k/ of English but remained /g/ in the Romance languages from which the English language borrowed words). By the way, the English word corn is also distinct in appearance from the borrowed cognate grain because the English word has apparently also undergone metathesis (switching the order of the r-consonant and vowel) in its development from the Indo-European root (Watkins 2000: 33 for the reconstructed Indo-European root gr̥ǝ-no-).
One other cognate example involving the sound correspondence of /g/ becoming /k/ may be discussed in relation to a now distinctive word in a nursery rhyme about Robin Hood, an excerpt of which is provided below:
Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
Is in the mickle wood;
Little John, Little John,
He to the town is gone. (Delamar 1987: 109)
In this text the word mickle (meaning 'great' [or 'large']), with its /k/ sound, is a cognate with Romance words like the Latin magnus, with its /g/ sound, and the Romance borrowings of magnificent and magnify. It may also be compared with the Greek form mega- (Watkins 2000: 52 for the Indo-European root meg- ). The adjective word mickle has been preserved in regional varieties in Scotland and northern England (The Oxford English Dictionary, 2021 (https://oed.com), entry “mickle“). But it has largely disappeared from many other varieties of English (Entry for “mickle,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2021, https://oed.com), though a related form, as Watkins (2000: 52) notes, is found in the English word much, now subsequently pronounced very differently in its final consonant sound.
6 Illustrating Semantic Change
Another development to consider within the Mother Goose rhymes involves semantic changes that have affected various words. Words can go a variety of directions in their meanings through time. Historical linguistics courses commonly consider such changes as generalization, by which a word takes on a broader or more general meaning; as specialization, by which a word takes on a narrower or more specialized meaning; as amelioration, by which a word takes on a more positive meaning; and pejoration, by which a word takes on a more negative meaning. It would take too much time here to explore each of these, but some examples from Mother Goose rhymes will be examined with regards to specialization. Specialization is well illustrated in the same excerpt that was previously shown from Little Boy Blue. This time the excerpt will be used to illustrate a historical change in semantics rather than sounds:
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn;
The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn. (Miller 1971: 33)
This excerpt shows that the word corn had a more generalized meaning from what it now denotes, at least in current American English, where it has narrowed to refer to the particular type of grain that some call “maize“. But with regards to the earlier time period and setting of this nursery rhyme, Barry (2017: 187) explains that “British English used ‘corn’ to mean any cereal grain, such as wheat, barley, rye, or maize, until fairly recent times”.
A similar specialization of the word corn can be evident to readers of the KJV (Elliott 1967: 42), which was published in England in 1611. The biblical passage in Matthew 12:1 explains that “Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn.” This verse has perhaps perplexed some modern readers, since the plant that is so commonly referred to as corn today was discovered in America and did not come to the Old World until after Columbus’s voyage. But the Scripture is not anachronistic, since the term is part of a translation, and to the extent that the semantic narrowing being considered here occurred in British English, it appears not to have become widespread in that variety until well after the KJV was prepared (First noun entry for “corn” [subentry about “maize”], The Oxford English Dictionary, 2021, https://oed.com). One Bible Dictionary, in fact, is careful to clarify that “Indian corn (maize) ... is not the corn of the Bible” (“Bible Dictionary” 1979: 650).
Specialization does not just operate to narrow one specific meaning but can instead narrow a range of meanings, reducing the number of potential senses (Barber 1997: 247). This type of specialization occurred in the meanings of the word meat, which in the Early Modern English period conveyed the general meaning of 'food', as well as its more particular meaning of animal flesh, but which has since narrowed that range of meanings to indicate primarily the latter, specialized sense (Barber 1997: 247-248). Without an understanding of the earlier possible meaning, however, the following Mother Goose lullaby, which speaks of grinding wheat in order to provide meat, does not make sense:
Hush thee, my babby,
Lie still with thy daddy,
Thy mammy has gone to the mill,
To grind thee some wheat
To make thee some meat,
So hush-a-bye, babby, lie still. (Opie & Opie 1955: 18)
The same kind of older meaning for meat is evident in the KJV in Matthew 25:35, where the general use of meat is juxtaposed with drink. It is also apparent in Leviticus 2:1, where the meat offering for the Lord is identified as consisting of oil, flour, and frankincense. (20)
A narrowing in the range of possible meanings has also affected the verb tell. Among its senses that were possible in an earlier time was the meaning 'to count' (Elliott 1967: 194), which explains why banks have the occupational title of teller, a carryover from the earlier meaning. The occupational title is not referring to someone who shares information, but instead to someone who counts money. Similarly, in the KJV, when the Lord promises the prophet Abram (Abraham) a large posterity and wants him to understand the scope of that promise, the Lord directs him to “tell the stars” (Genesis 15: 5, Elliott 1967: 194). Here, the Lord is not commanding Abraham to talk to the stars but instead to count them. This older meaning, which has since largely disappeared from the language, is also available in the following excerpt from the previously mentioned Mother Goose rhyme about Robin Hood:
Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
Is telling his beads,
All in the green wood,
Among the green weeds. (Delamar 1987: 109)
In this excerpt, Robin Hood is counting his beads, certainly not talking to them. The same use of tell to mean 'count' also seems to be used in the following nursery rhyme:
If I’d as much money
As I could tell,
I never would cry,
Old clothes to sell!
Old clothes to sell!
Old clothes to sell!
I never would cry,
Old clothes to sell! (Opie & Opie 1955: 73)
In the above text, although the verb tell could possibly be used to mean 'report on an amount of money', it is more likely being used with the meaning of 'counting'. In other words, if the person in the poem had as much money as he or she could count, then it would not be necessary to sell old clothes.
7 Conclusion
Mother Goose and other nursery rhymes are valuable authentic texts that can be usefully applied pedagogically in a variety of ways. Some previous research has indicated that they help small children develop phonological awareness, which benefits them later when they begin to learn to read (e.g., Harper 2011 and Bryant et al. 1989). Moreover, taken as a group, they are linguistically rich examples of word play and cover an impressive array of topics, genres, and language artistry. In the conclusion to her article about Mother Goose rhymes, Vocca (2001) notes Walter de La Mare’s observation that many of the nursery rhymes are “tiny masterpieces of verbal craftsmanship.” But as it turns out, they are also memorable texts that can effectively illustrate particular historical aspects of language structure, behavior, and change.
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The Real Mother Goose (1916). Illus., Blanche Fisher Wright. Chicago: Rand McNally & Co.
Rubin, David C. (1995). Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes. New York & Oxford: Oxford UP.
Rubin, David C., Violeta Ciobanu, & William Langston (1997). “Children’s Memory for Counting-out Rhymes: A Cross-language Comparison.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 4: 3, 421-424.
Stageberg, Norman C., & Dallin D. Oaks (2000). An Introductory English Grammar, 5th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt College Publishers.
Vocca, Donarita (2001). “Mother Goose.” In Cullinan, Bernice E., & Diane G. Person (eds.). The Continuum Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. New York & London: Continuum, 560-562.
Walker, John (1791). A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language. London: G. G. J. & J. Robinson; and T. Cadell. [Accessed through a Scolar Press Facsimile edition (1968). Menston, England: The Scolar Press Ltd.].
Watkins, Calvert, ed. (2000). The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd ed. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin.
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Author:
Dallin D. Oaks
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Brigham Young University
College of Humanities
Provo (Utah)
USA
Email: dallin_oaks@byu.edu
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(1) Some might argue that Mother Goose rhymes are in fact a subset within the more general category of ‘nursery rhymes‘ (e.g., Delamar 1987: 2-3).
(2) In the introduction to their article about mnemonics and alliteration, Lindstromberg & Boers (2008: 200) explain that “it is widely believed that patterns of sound repetition such as rhyme and alliteration are particularly noticeable and memorable”. For some research that empirically examines the role of rhyming and alliteration in facilitating memory, cf. Rubin et al. 1997, Copeland & Radvansky 2001 and Lindstromberg & Boers 2008. For an additional discussion, cf. also Rubin 1995 (especially 72-89).
(3) In fact, “based on internal evidence in the rhymes, and other relevant factors,” Opie & Opie (1997: 7) believe that 27.1 % of the nursery rhymes precede 1600.
One important clarification worth making here is that published dates given next to nursery rhymes later in this article are the dates in which a particular published collection of the nursery rhymes appeared, not an ascribed date for a nursery rhyme itself or even its first published appearance.
(4) For a brief history of the collections of Mother Goose rhymes as well as discussions on the development of some of the specific nursery rhymes, cf. Delamar 1987 and Opie & Opie 1997.
(5) In this next example and throughout this paper, italics have been added to highlight the specific parts of the texts that are under discussion.
(6) Of course, occasionally the Mother Goose passages use near-rhymes. But that possibility has been taken into account when collecting and assessing examples for this paper.
(7) More recently, it appears that some British English speakers have begun to pronounce a voiceless /č/ at the end of Norwich. Unlike the 1926 edition of An English Pronouncing Dictionary, the later 2003 edition provides a variant British English pronunciation that uses a word-final /č/ for the English city (Jones 1926 and 2003).
(8) The end of the Old English period is commonly placed around 1100 A.D.
(9) Barry has pointed out the sound change of nimble in relation to this nursery rhyme text (2017: 166). Burridge (2004: 32) has provided analogous examples of words in which a /b/ has historically been inserted after the nasal /m/ and before /l/. These include thimble, tremble, and humble. In the case of the latter two words, a contrast in forms can be seen when those words are compared with related words she provides, such as tremulous and humility, which have not added the /b/ (ibid.).
(10) This also corresponds with a common historical pronunciation in British English. Barber (1997: 34) indicates that at least in an “unstressed position,” the word been would commonly have been pronounced as bin [/bɪn/] in the English of Shakespeare’s time. Similarly, this pronunciation was apparently common for many years in British English. By 1791, it was still the pronunciation identified in a contemporary pronunciation dictionary (Entry for “been,“ Walker 1791: n.p.). And it is still a possible variant in current British English (Jones 2003).
(11) As is evident from Kenyon’s (1948: 26) criticism of the “substandard” pronunciation of the days of the week, even during the first half of the twentieth century, American English speakers did not display a uniform pronunciation for these words. There would have been some variation between word-final /di/ (or /dɪ/) and /dei/. Elster notes a pronunciation guide from 1929 that prescribes the /dei/ pronunciation (1999: 98). Moreover, this kind of variation has existed for a while. The nursery rhyme, How Many Days has my Baby to Play? contains lines ending in words such as play, away, and day, as well as a couple of days of the week (Opie & Opie 1997: 68-69). This rhyme scheme would seem to favor the word-final /dei/ pronunciation. A version of this nursery rhyme was published at least as early as 1805 (ibid.: 69). Elster (1999: 98) reports Frank H. Vizetelly’s claim that the pronunciation with /dei/ could be found in Scotland, northern England, and Ireland in the 1700s. Thus, the present article’s claim that the current widespread pronunciation with /dei/ in the names of the days of the week is a spelling pronunciation should not be understood to say that the word-final /dei/ pronunciation did not previously exist. Rather, the claim is that the /dei/ pronunciation in this lexical set has acquired a more widespread acceptance over what it had earlier had for many years.
(12) The NBC Handbook of Pronunciation gives the pronunciation of forehead slightly differently, as /ˈfɑr ɪd/ (Bender 1943: 143). This would still rhyme with a common pronunciation of horrid as /ˈhɑr ɪd/, which the handbook actually provides. In either event, the current, common spelling pronunciation of forehead with /hɛd/ is in contrast with what can be seen in the Mother Goose rhyme. It should be noted, however, as Algeo & Butcher (2014: 50) indicate, that the spelling pronunciation’s use of /hɛd/ within that word is a return to an even earlier pronunciation than what is used in the /ˈfɔrǝd/ pronunciation. Indeed, Walker’s 1791 pronunciation dictionary provides just one pronunciation of forehead, and that uses /hɛd/ as the last part of the compound (Entry for “forehead”, Walker 1791: n.p.).
(13) Modern English uses a few flat adverbs like fast (such as “We spoke fast.”) and hard (“They work hard.”), but the frequency and variety of the forms now in use are reduced in comparison to the past (Webster’s 1989: 451).
(14) It should be noted, however, that this linguistic description of what “generally” occurs in Modern English wh-questions needs to be adjusted somewhat for wh-questions that inquire about the grammatical subject of the sentence. In those wh-questions, the initial wh-word serves as the subject, and no auxiliary verb is needed (for example, Who goes to the forest?).
(15) The lyrics to this song can be found at https://www.musicalsandlyrics.com/mary-poppins/chim-chim-cheree.html.
(16) This text version is attributed by Opie & Opie (1997: 180) to a ditty created by Jacob Beuler and “occasioned by The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act (1822).” But the first line above is reportedly within a passage that was “already traditional” (ibid. 1997: 180), and it is that first line which is relevant to the above linguistic discussion about relative pronouns.
(17) Modern English now allows the omission of a relative pronoun when it would represent the object (not the subject) of its own relative clause, as in “The birds used the nest [that] they built.”
(18) Grimm was building on the work of others, notably Rasmus Rask (Fromkin et al. 2014: 362-363). It may interest some students to learn that Jacob Grimm is one of the famous Grimm brothers, who are known for their collection of fairy tales. Grimm, however, is famous among linguists for his work in Germanic linguistics. It is humorous here to note that at this point in the paper, a linguistic intersection of sorts occurs between Mother Goose rhymes and fairy tales.
(19) The Indo-European /k/ actually became the Germanic /x/, a sound like the middle consonant sound in the modern German word Nacht. In English this /x/ sound often developed into /h/ (Fromkin et al. 2014: 363). Since the focus here is on English, a type of shorthand description will be used to speak of the Indo-European /k/ becoming /h/.
For a listing of the sound correspondences of Grimm’s Law, as well as a discussion of a few of the upcoming examples in this paragraph and their contextualization within Grimm’s Law: Claiborne 1983, 46; Algeo & Butcher 2014, 76-78; and Fromkin et al. 2014: 363-365.
(20) The older meaning of meat and some illustrative references are briefly noted in the “Bible Dictionary” (1979: 729-730) of The Holy Bible, published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Unlike many English-speaking members of some other Christian churches, who now regularly use newer English translations of the Bible, the English-speaking Latter-day Saints continue to use the King James Version of the Bible.