Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

5.4 Archaism
Unit 5 Language and time
Section 2 Language variation

A linguistic archaism is the use of a particular pronunciation, word or way of combining words that is no longer in current usage. The term comes from the New Latin word archaismus, meaning to model one’s style upon that of ancient writers (Collins’ English Dictionary). Thus, an archaism is an anachronistic use of a word or phrase. Certain registers are characterized in part by their use of archaism, particularly registers associated with institutions, such as the Church or the legal system.

The Bible exists in a number of different English translations. Until recently, the King James Authorized Version (1611) was the most widely used translation. Many Christian groups and churches have now adopted more recent translations such as The New English Bible(1961), partly because it seems more ’up to date’ and accessible. A measure of the difference between them can be seen by comparing the language of equivalent passages (I Corinthians 15, 53):

King James Version: For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortall must put on immortalitie.

New English Bible: This perishable being must be clothed with the imperishable, and what is mortal must be clothed with immortality.

Although the new version is easier to understand, the old version is still preferred by some Christians, in part because its archaic language seems more mysterious and appropriate to religious experience. Perhaps it is precisely because it is different from everyday language and more difficult to understand that this type of language is deemed more appropriate.

English legal texts are also characterized by archaism. If we take the English Copyright (Amendment) Act 1983 as an example, we find archaisms such as ’be it enacted’, ’shall have effect’ and ’cinematograph film’. The extensive use of archaism in legal texts arises partly from the fact that the law was the last institution to stop using the French and Latin of the Norman occupation (French was still used in the law into the eighteenth century). It is, however, also due to the fact that legal language has to be seen to be distinct from ordinary usage; lawyers would argue that it needs to be more precise and less open to ambiguity, but it might also be due to the fact that one of the jobs of the legal profession is to be the paid interpreters of this archaic language. (For a more extended discussion of the legal register, see Unit 7, Language and context: register.)

There is a long tradition of poetic texts using archaism. Edmund Spenser, writing in the late sixteenth century, developed a vocabulary for poems like The Faerie Queene by copying archaic words from Chaucer (writing 200 years earlier). Spenser’s language was itself imitated by later writers - especially by Romantic poets such as Keats in the early nineteenth century. Because of this, most attempts to define a poetic register would probably include some archaism as a component feature. Here, for example, is a line from Walter Scott’s ’The song of the Reim-kennar’ (1822): ’Enough of woe hast thou wrought on the ocean’. Archaisms here include the syntax (word order) - a modern English word order would probably be ’You have brought enough’ - and words such as ’thou’, ’hast’ and ’wrought’. A more recent poem that exploits archaism is W.H. Auden’s ’The Wanderer’ (1930), which is explicitly modelled on an Anglo-Saxon poem of the same name and uses Anglo-Saxon word-formation patterns, such as ’place-keepers’ or ’stone-haunting’, and alliterative patterns common in Anglo-Saxon poetry. The first line of the poem is: ’Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle’, which uses a repeated ’d’ sound on stressed syllables (see Unit 16, Rhyme and sound patterning). In using such archaisms, the poem may seem to explore meanings and values that give the impression of transcending time and place.

It should be added, however, that there is a problem with the identification of archaism, since ’archaisms’ are sometimes not archaic in the register in which they are used. For example, ’thee’ and ’thou’ are not archaic forms in a certain type of poetic register; they are archaic only in relation to our contemporary day-to-day speech. Thus the use of an archaism can be interpreted as either conforming to a register or looking back to the past (or both). One of the questions you should ask, therefore, in reading a text that seems to be using archaisms, is whether they are archaic relative to our current usage, or whether they would have been archaisms in literature at the time the text was written. Only by using a dictionary such as the OED, which is a historical dictionary, giving the meanings of words over time, will you be able to find out whether certain words were current or archaic at the time of writing.