Seth Lerer reads Chaucer’s 14th-century Treatise on the Astrolabe, addressed to the author’s 10-year-old (“Litell Lowys, my sone”), and hears sweet poetry.
“It’s beautiful because, first of all, we don’t know what happened to the son,” says Lerer, a philologist who specializes in Old and Middle English literature and is a professor of English and of comparative literature. “Second, of all things to present to your son, why write a manual for an astrolabe, a machine that enables you to locate your latitude on the earth and find stars?”
Lerer pauses for effect, then pounces on the answer. “Why? The purpose of this instrument is to get you to find yourself. And Chaucer is finding himself as a parent, as a user of language.”
Language has fascinated Lerer since his growing-up days in 1960s Brooklyn, where he was attuned to the Yiddish spoken at home and surrounded by Cuban Spanish, Russian and Italian on neighborhood streets. In his new book, Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia University Press), Lerer looks at seminal literary texts—from the earliest surviving English poem, written by a Yorkshire cowherd in the 7th century, to the lyrics of Eminem and the influences of the Internet—and proclaims his abiding infatuation. “It’s unfashionable to say that you love literature, but I do. I found myself in it, I figured out how my mind works and what pleases me. And what I love, too, is the musicality of different sounds and language.”
Lerer traces some of his affinity for nuance and accent to the influence of his parents, who met at Brooklyn College in 1948, cast in a student production of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. “Here were children of immigrants, who were advancing socially and economically and artistically by aping the language of ’30s British swells. We grew up not so much with the classics, but with the sense that high culture was going to redeem us.”
Other voices also stood out for the young Dodgers fan: Russ Hodges, Red Barber, Curt Gowdy. “The rhetoricians I grew up with—my Odysseus, my Stentor, my Daniel Webster—were sportscasters,” Lerer writes. “The voices on the radio were voices of the picture makers.”
Lerer’s musings on the ways in which medieval scribes, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson altered and advanced the English language make this a compelling textbook. “What this approach asks is, ‘Are our great authors our great linguistic innovators?’ I think the authors I talk about did something new, and were very self-conscious about how they worked with language in new ways.”
Lay readers may well be engaged with Lerer’s asides on runes, kennings, calques, parataxis, rhyming antiphons, diachronic change and diphthongization. He suggests in his book that, “Language now changes in a lifetime, and the shifts that I have charted toward the close of this book—war, ethnic diversity, popular culture, and literature—make the speed of verbal passage seem as fast as technology.”
As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, Lerer studied music, old languages and Latin, and at Oxford he did “an antiquated degree” in philology, the love of words. “I got there in ’76, and there were people who were part of a living tradition of Tolkien.” When today’s moviegoers and readers absorb the adventures of Harry Potter, Lerer says, “It’s really tapping into this 19th- and early 20th-century Oxford/Cambridge idiom.”
In tracing the history of philology, Lerer says the 18th-century model inquired into big metaphysical questions: “How did language originate? Was there a language of Adam?” Today’s practitioners look at how the study of language used to be central to American universities and try to understand the current relationship between aesthetics, culture and language.
“For somebody like me, at a place like Stanford,” Lerer says, “the big question today is, ‘What’s the place of people with books in a place full of labs?’”
