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Linguistic Legitimacy
and Social Justice

Timothy Reagan
 Linguistic Legitimacy and Social Justice

“This book provides the first comprehensive study of language legitimacy and
social justice. It tackles the very real problem of language prejudice and offers
solutions to dealing with this problem. Dr. Reagan has spent his entire career
debunking misconceptions about the ‘value’ of one language or one dialect over
another and consolidates his findings here with reference to a substantial body
of previous research covering a wide variety of languages.”
—Frank Nuessel, University of Louisville, USA
 Timothy Reagan

Linguistic Legitimacy
and Social Justice
Timothy Reagan
College of Education & Human Development
University of Maine
Orono, ME, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-10966-0    ISBN 978-3-030-10967-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10967-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932174

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans-
mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or
dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Preface

It has become increasingly common for scholars, especially in the human-

ities and social sciences, to begin discussions about their research with a
description of their ‘positionality’ vis-à-vis the topic(s) of their research.
The underlying purpose of such descriptions is to recognize that no mat-
ter how hard we may try, ‘objectivity’ is not really possible. Each of us is
the result of the complex nexus of our background, social context and
setting, race, gender, and so on, and these factors will inevitably impact
how we construct reality. Descriptions of positionality are especially
important in studies addressing individuals and groups who are different
from those studying them in important, sometimes fundamental, ways.
In this book, I describe and discuss a number of very different speech
communities with which I have different kinds of connections. Further,
although I have had fairly extensive experiences dealing with each of the
speech communities that are discussed in this book, I am not a member
(or insider) of any of them. For the purposes of clarifying my own posi-
tionality in terms of the speech communities discussed here, I am a white,
heterosexual American Jewish male—but one with a somewhat unusual
linguistic background that no doubt colors some of my thinking about
language diversity.
I consider myself to have been extremely fortunate, in part because I
have spent my life surrounded by a variety of different languages. As a
child, on a fairly regular basis (indeed, most often on a daily basis), in
v
vi Preface

addition to English, I heard German, Hungarian, Polish and Yiddish

spoken around me. I remember being aware of this linguistic diversity,
but I have no memory of ever considering it odd, strange or unusual—it
was simply the way that the world was. For much of my schooling, the
vast majority of my classmates spoke African American English, though
none of us would have recognized it as a distinctive language at the time.
It was simply another way of talking and communicating, though obvi-
ously not the one used by our teachers. At school, many of my friends
and I studied French, but to be honest, I did not do so with any great
enthusiasm (or success)—but then, unlike the other languages that sur-
rounded me, French seemed unnatural, artificial and somehow alien to
my reality. Later on, I studied Afrikaans, American Sign Language, Latin,
Russian, Spanish, and Zulu, and gained varying degrees of fluency in
each of them. I was also lucky because my parents were speakers of
Standard American English. There are few possessions more valuable in
our society than the ability to speak standard English in what is consid-
ered to be the most prestigious way, and this is an ability that I inherited
from my parents. Although the central theme of this book is that there is
no such thing as a non-legitimate language, whatever that might mean,
and that all languages are fundamentally of equal value linguistically, this
does not mean that the lack of the ability to speak the socially, politically,
economically and educationally dominant language (in the case of US
society, Standard American English) is, for most people, essential for suc-
cess. In the 1979 country song ‘Good Ole Boys Like Me’, Don Williams
sang, “But I was smarter than most and I could choose … learned to talk
like the man on the six o’clock news.” Whether fair, just or right, it is
simply a fact that getting ahead in society almost always requires such
linguistic competence.
Over the course of my career, I have engaged in research on most of the
languages discussed in this book. My doctoral dissertation at the
University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, dealt with African American
English. My interest in language issues in South Africa began when I was
a post-doctoral fellow in the Program for the Study of Institutional
Racism at the University of Illinois, which provided the foundation for
more than twenty-five years of work and research in South Africa. My
first academic position was at Gallaudet University, where I was immersed
 Preface vii

in American Sign Language, which proved to be a life-altering experi-

ence. I was exposed to Spanglish during my years living in Hartford,
Connecticut, while on the faculties of Central Connecticut State
University and the University of Connecticut, when it quickly became
obvious to me that the vernacular Spanish that I heard on a daily basis
working in public schools in Hartford was radically different from the
Spanish I had studied at university. Finally, my long personal friendship
and professional relationship with Humphrey Tonkin, President Emeritus
of the University of Hartford, led to my interest in Esperanto, a language
(as well as a culture and movement) that I continue to find fascinating.
Although I have written a great deal on many of the languages dis-
cussed in this book, my views and ideas have evolved and changed—
sometimes in significant ways—over the years. As a consequence, almost
all of Linguistic Legitimacy and Social Justice is new, and, I hope, improved.

Bangor, ME Timothy Reagan

 Acknowledgements

This book is the result of many years of work, experience, and reflection.
Although I am solely responsible for any flaws that it may have, it could
have nevertheless not been written without the help and support of many
colleagues, students, and friends. In particular, I want to thank August
Cluver (University of South Africa, Pretoria), Neil Collins (University
College Cork and Nazarbayev University), Jane Edwards (Yale University),
Ceil Lucas (Gallaudet University), Paul Chamniss Miller (Akita
International University), Donald Moores (Gallaudet University), Rose
Morris (Human Sciences Research Council, Pretoria), Daniel Mulcahy
(Central Connecticut State University), Stephen Nover (Gallaudet
University), Frank Nuessel (University of Louisville), Terry A. Osborn
(University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee), Claire Penn (University
of the Witwatersrand), Sharon Rallis (University of Massachusetts,
Amherst), Eliana Rojas (University of Connecticut), Sandra Schreffler
(Roger Williams University), Jane Smith (University of Maine),
Humphrey Tonkin (University of Hartford), François Touchon
(University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Jan Vorster (Human Sciences
Research Council, Cape Town). I am also deeply grateful to my col-
leagues in the College of Education and Human Development at the
University of Maine.

ix
 Contents

1 Language and Other Myths: ‘Die Grenzen meiner Sprache

bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt’  1

2 Conceptualizing the Ideology of Linguistic Legitimacy:

‘Primitive people have primitive languages and other
nonsense’ 29

3 African American English, Race and Language: ‘You don’t

believe fat meat is greasy’ 77

4 Spanglish in the United States: ‘We speak Spanglish to the

dogs, to the grandchildren, to the kids’111

5 Sign Language and the DEAF-WORLD: ‘Listening

without hearing’135

6 Yiddish, the Mame-Loshn: ‘Mensch tracht, Gott lacht’175

xi
xii Contents

7 Created and Constructed Languages: ‘I can speak

Esperanto like a native’205

8 Afrikaans, Language of Oppression to Language of

Freedom: ‘Dit is ons erns’243

9 Why Language Endangerment and Language Death

Matter: ‘Took away our native tongue … And taught their
English to our young’285

10 Foreign Language Education in the US: ‘But French isn’t a

real class!’315

11 Linguistic Legitimacy, Language Rights and Social

Justice: ‘No one is free when others are oppressed’353

References367

Index433
 About the Author

Timothy Reagan, the Dean of the College of Education and Human

Development at the University of Maine, has held senior faculty and adminis-
trative positions at a number of universities, including the University of
Connecticut, the University of the Witwatersrand, Central Connecticut State
University, Roger Williams University, Gallaudet University, and Nazarbayev
University in Astana, Kazakhstan. His primary areas of research are applied and
educational linguistics, education policy and comparative education. Prof.
Reagan is the author of a dozen books, as well as the author of more than 150
journal articles and book chapters, and his work has appeared in such interna-
tional journals as Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Critical Inquiry in
Language Studies, Educational Foundations, Educational Policy, Educational
Theory, Foreign Language Annals, Harvard Educational Review, International
Journal of Intercultural Relations, Language Policy, Language Problems and
Language Planning, Multicultural Education, Sign Language Studies, and
Semiotica.

xiii
 Abbreviations

AAE African American English

ANC African National Congress
ASHA American Speech, Language and Hearing Association
ASL American Sign Language
BCE Before the Common Era (i.e., B.C.)
BICS Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills
CAL Center for Applied Linguistics
CALP Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency
CASE Conceptually Accurate Signed English
CE Common Era (i.e., A.D.)
CLS Critical Language Scholarship Program
CODA Children of Deaf Adults
COSAS Congress of South African Students
CY Central Yiddish
DA Democratic Alliance
ESG East Sutherland Gaelic
ETS Educational Testing Service
EU European Union
EY Eastern Yiddish
FLEX Foreign Language Exploration/Experience
IPA International Phonetic Alphabet
LCTL Less Commonly Taught Language
LOVE Linguistics of Visual English

xv
xvi Abbreviations

LSA Linguistic Society of America

NAD National Association of the Deaf
NAEP National Assessment of Educational Progress
NGO Non-Governmental Organization
NSEP National Security Education Program
OSV Object-Subject-Verb
OVS Object-Verb-Subject
PanSALB Pan South African Language Board
RP Received Pronunciation
SAE Standard American English
SASL South African Sign Language
SEE-I Seeing Essential English
SEE-II Signing Exact English
SEY Southeastern Yiddish
SIL Summer Institute of Linguistics
SLP Sign Language People
SOV Subject-Object-Verb
STEM Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
SVO Subject-Verb-Object
SY Southern Yiddish
TESOL Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages
UK United Kingdom
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation
US United States of America
VOC Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, Dutch East India Company
VOS Verb-Object-Subject
VSO Verb-Subject-Object
WY Western Yiddish
YIVO Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (‫)יי ִדישער װיסנשַאֿפטלעכער אינסטיטוט‬,
Institute for Jewish Research
 List of Figures

Fig. 5.1ASL phoneme inventory 154

Fig. 5.2The ASL timeline. Source: Baker-Shenk and Cokely (1980,
p. 176). Reprinted with permission of Gallaudet University
Press156
Map 8.1 Provinces of the Republic of South Africa 248

xvii
 List of Tables

Table 1.1 Contemporary translation of passage from Beowulf9

Table 1.2 Translations of Matthew 9:1–2 10
Table 2.1 Speakers of selected varieties of Spanish in the United States
(López Morales & Domínguez, 2009, p. 85) 43
Table 2.2 Spanish national language academies 44
Table 2.3 Comparative lexical size of selected world languages 47
Table 2.4 Loanwords in modern English 50
Table 2.5 English loanwords in contemporary Russian 52
Table 2.6 Lexical regional variation: American and British English 54
Table 2.7 Lexical regional variation: Metropolitan French and
Québécois French 55
Table 2.8 Lexical regional variation: Spanish 55
Table 3.1 Lexical items in AAE 87
Table 3.2 SAE tense system 89
Table 3.3 AAE tense system (Based on Fickett, 1972, p. 19) 89
Table 3.4 Aspect in Russian verbs 91
Table 4.1 Speakers of varieties of Spanish in the US (Lipski, 2008,
pp. 8–9)114
Table 5.1 Sign language families (Based on Wittmann, 1991) 140
Table 5.2 Documented sign languages 142
Table 6.1 List of Jewish languages 179
Table 6.2 Yiddish lexical items in American English 197
Table 6.3 Comparison of selected language populations 199

xix
xx List of Tables

Table 7.1 List of international auxiliary languages 209

Table 7.2 ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ in Volapük 211
Table 7.3 Esperanto affixes 224
Table 7.4 Pronominal-adjectival correlatives in Esperanto 226
Table 7.5 Adverbial correlatives in Esperanto 227
Table 8.1 African languages of South Africa 247
Table 8.2 Official languages of the Republic of South Africa (2011
census)248
Table 9.1 The geography of language endangerment 290
Table 9.2 The demography of language endangerment: The world’s
smallest languages 291
Table 10.1 Foreign language enrollments in the United States 323
Table 10.2 Critical languages supported by the NSEP 325
Table 10.3 Languages supported by the CLS program 325
Table 10.4 Interlingual distance to English of selected languages 328
Table 10.5 Expected levels of speaking proficiency in languages taught
at the Foreign Service Institute 329
Table 10.6 Number of programs and student enrollments in Level 2
languages in the US 332
Table 10.7 Growth of foreign language immersion programs in the US,
1971–2011339
Table 10.8 Languages of instruction in immersion foreign language
programs340
 1
Language and Other Myths: ‘Die
Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die
Grenzen meiner Welt’

More than fifty years ago, in an article published in the journal the
Western Political Quarterly, the historian Carl Becker commented that,
“Now, when I meet a word with which I am entirely unfamiliar, I find it
a good plan to look it up in the dictionary and find out what someone
thinks it means. But when I have frequently to use words with which
everyone is perfectly familiar—words like ‘cause’ and ‘liberty’ and ‘prog-
ress’ and ‘government’—when I have to use words of this sort which
everyone knows perfectly well, the wise thing to do is to take a week off
and think about them” (1955, p. 328). I am extremely fond of this pas-
sage, because it makes abundantly clear the point that words, the mean-
ings of words, and how we choose to use words, really do matter, and
indeed, they often matter a great deal. As Robert Fitzgibbons has observed,
“The varying degrees of precision in ordinary language cause remarkably
few difficulties in conducting our everyday, nonprofessional affairs. In
private matters, people tend to overlook imprecision, and adjust. Indeed,

‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’, from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus (1922), §5.6.

© The Author(s) 2019 1

T. Reagan, Linguistic Legitimacy and Social Justice,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10967-7_1
2 T. Reagan

in many cases the lack of precision is beneficial. However, the opposite

tends to be the case when it comes to public matters … the problems
created by imprecision become especially acute in attempting to make …
decisions rationally” (1981, p. 106). The word ‘language’ is an excellent
example of such imprecision. ‘Language’ is a word we use frequently, and
is one we certainly believe we understand and of which we know the
meaning. And yet, the more we reflect on the concept of ‘language’, the
fuzzier and more problematic it becomes. Given the importance of lan-
guage, and indeed, of its centrality to being human, this lack of clarity is
especially intriguing. Noam Chomsky, in Language and Mind, asserted
that, “When we study human language, we are approaching what some
might call the ‘human essence’, the distinctive qualities of mind that are,
so far as we know, unique to man” (1972, quoted in Fromkin, Rodman,
& Hyams, 2014, p. 1). In fact, some linguists have gone even further,
arguing that not only is language unique to human beings, but that it is,
to at least some extent, a necessary condition for ‘human being-ness’. As
Neil Smith has written,

Language makes us human … Whatever we do, language is central to our

lives, and the use of language underpins the study of every other discipline.
Understanding language gives us insight into ourselves and a tool for the
investigation of the rest of the universe. Proposing marriage, opposing glo-
balization, composing a speech, all require the use of language; to buy a
meal or sell a car involves communication, which is made possible by lan-
guage; to be without language—as an infant, a foreigner or a stroke vic-
tim—is to be at a devastating disadvantage. Martians and dolphins,
bonobos and bees, may be just as intelligent, cute, adept at social organiza-
tion and morally worthwhile, but they don’t share our language, they don’t
speak ‘human’. (2002, p. 3)

The uniqueness of human language is an idea dating back thousands of

years, certainly to parts of the Book of Genesis composed somewhere
between the tenth and fifth centuries BCE at the very latest. It is also an
idea that has become, in many ways, an act of faith (or, perhaps more
accurately, a collection of claims that together constitute a series of related
acts of faith) in modern linguistics. Among contemporary linguists, there
 Language and Other Myths: ‘Die Grenzen meiner Sprache… 3

are broadly speaking two different sets of views about the origins of
human language: the majority advocate a continuity position, while a
minority believe human language to be the result of an evolutionary dis-
continuity. Basically, the continuity position means that the emergence
of language was the result of the evolution of pre- and proto-linguistic
forms which over time became increasingly complex and that ultimately
took the form of human language as it now exists. The alternative per-
spective, advocated by Chomsky and some others, is that language is so
unique that it cannot really be explained by any kind of gradual evolution
from earlier types of communicative behavior, and so must be the result
of a fairly sudden—genetic and cognitive—change, which probably took
place around 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. Regardless of how human
language emerged, though, there is agreement about its general charac-
teristics, and about what makes modern human language unique.
There is an important distinction that needs to be made here: there is
a key difference between ‘language’, referring to all human languages and
their common, universal characteristics, and any specific language (e.g.,
English, French, Russian, Sesotho, Thai, Spanish, Zulu, etc.) and its own
special and unique features. Thus, we can assert that “all languages have
nouns and verbs” (Hudson, 2000, p. 74), which is a general claim about
human language as a singular, unitary construct. On the other hand, we
can make observations about the features and characteristics of particular
languages, as in:

Among the formal characteristics of English nouns are that they typically:
(a) may be made definite in meaning by use of preceding the (the definite
article), as in the book, the guy, the answer; (b) may be made possessive by
suffixing—’s, as in people’s. Jane’s, a politician’s; (c) may be made negative by
prefixing—non, as in nonbeliever, nonsense, nonunion … (Hudson, 2000,
pp. 74–75)

Both of these types of claims are perfectly reasonable, and both are
useful in certain contexts, but the kinds of evidence required to support
or reject them is different. Claims that purport to be universal are par-
ticularly difficult to defend, since to reject such a claim requires evidence
from only a single language—that is, if the claim is true universally, then
4 T. Reagan

it must be true of each and every human language, without exception. The
claim that “all languages have nouns and verbs,” for instance, might be
true as far as we know at the present time, but there are quite literally thou-
sands of human languages that have not been studied, any one of which
could provide disconfirming evidence for the claim—and thus leading to
its rejection as a universal characteristic of human language. It is entirely
possible for there to be a language that somehow gets along without any-
thing remotely noun-like or verb-like. Further, the ways in which noun-­
like and verb-like lexical elements exist and are used in languages varies
considerably. For instance, in Nunavut Inuktitut there is the word
‘Tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga’, which is a single lexical item that
would be expressed in English as, ‘I cannot hear very well’. In some lan-
guages and groups of languages, such as some Bantu languages in south-
ern Africa, this becomes especially problematic:

There has been debate as to the proper arrangement of the Bantu lexicon,
and the question is far from settled. The inflection of nominals and verbals
by means of prefixes, and the complex and productive derivational system,
both characteristic of Bantu languages, pose difficulties … If items are
alphabetized by prefix … a verb will be listed far from its nominal deriva-
tions, however transparent these may be … A competing school arranges
the lexicon by stem or root; this usefully groups related items, and saves on
cross-referencing. Unfortunately, in such a system the user must be able to
identify the stem, which given the sometimes complex morphophonemics
of Bantu languages may not be easy. (Bennett, 1986, pp. 3–4)

In fact, the situation is even more complex that this might suggest,
since we actually distinguish between two logically different kinds of lin-
guistic universals. There are absolute universals, of the types we have been
discussing thus far, which must be true for every single human language,
but there are also statistical universals (or tendencies) which may not be
true of all languages, but which are true of far too many languages to be
simply the result of chance or random accident. Linguistic universals are
also sometimes divided into implicational and non-implicational univer-
sals; implicational universals are characterized by claims that assert that if
one feature is present, then a second feature will also be present. Thus, an
 Language and Other Myths: ‘Die Grenzen meiner Sprache… 5

example of a statistical, implicational universal would be that “languages

with subject-object-verb … word order are most likely to be postposi-
tional.” While there is clearly a relationship between language universals
and features of specific languages, it is nevertheless essential as we proceed
with this discussion that we keep the distinction between the two in
mind.
A key conviction of many, probably most, linguists about human lan-
guage, as articulated in one of the more widely used introductory college
and university linguistics textbooks, that:

No language or variety of language … is superior or inferior to any other

in a linguistic sense. Every [language] is equally complex, logical, and
capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to express any thought.
If something can be expressed in one language … it can be expressed in
any other language … It might involve different means and different
words, but it can be expressed … All human languages … are fully expres-
sive, complete and logical … (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2014,
pp. 10–11)

The claims made in this passage are well-intentioned, and given the folk
wisdom about and misunderstandings of language held by most students,
there are compelling pedagogical arguments for making them. As Ronald
Wardhaugh has observed,

Language plays an important role in the lives of all of us and is our most
distinctive human possession. We might expect, therefore, to be well-­
informed about it. The truth is we are not. Many statements we believe to
be true about language are likely as not false. Many of the questions we
concern ourselves with are either unanswerable and therefore not really
worth asking or betray a serious misunderstanding of the nature of lan-
guage. Most of us have learned many things about language from others,
but generally the wrong things. (1999, p. viii)

Although claims about the fundamental equality of languages may be

useful in introducing students to linguistics as an academic discipline,
and while such claims may be valuable as a foundational working prin-
ciple for linguists in a variety of ways, neither of these advantages makes
6 T. Reagan

them necessarily true. Given our limited knowledge of many of the

roughly 6000 to 7000 languages used by human beings around the world,
such a claim must, for the time being, remain largely unproven—at best,
it is really just a working hypothesis.
There is an underlying question in such discussions, and it is con-
cerned with the fundamental nature of both language and specific lan-
guages: does language exist as a singular entity? In an abstract sense, when
speaking of ‘human language’, it does make sense to conceptualize lan-
guage as singular construct, characterized by specific norms. It is clear
that in much of our discourse about language, we assume that it is an
abstract entity, in a Chomskian sense,1 and that language does exist as a
singular and knowable entity. However, as Neil Smith noted, “There is an
intuitive appeal to the notion that there is an external language that dif-
ferent people speak. Indeed, it is so self-evidently true that it would be
pointless to deny it. However, when taken to its logical conclusion, the
idea turns out to be problematic, as the notion of ‘language’ involved is
different from the notion that linguists theorize about” (2002,
pp. 102–103). This is even more problematic when we assume that par-
ticular languages exist as knowable entities which can be described and
analyzed, taught and learned, and so on. We say that a particular lan-
guage is our mother tongue, students engage in the study of a particular
language in the hope of being able to communicate with other speakers
of that language, books are written in particular languages, and so on.
Such claims and the assumptions which undergird them are embedded in
our discourse about language, and in turn have important implications
for education. What this entails, in short, is that we are engaging in the
reification of the construct of ‘language’, which in turn can lead us to
misunderstand the nature of language and to accept what are essentially
technicist views about language, language teaching and learning, lan-
guage rights, and language policy.

1
Actually, Chomsky himself would deny that language exists in this manner—as Smith notes,
Chomsky has argued that “there is no external reality” (Chomsky, 1993, p. 43), that “the question,
‘to what does the word X refer?’, has no clear sense,” (Chomsky, 2000, p. 181) and finally, that
relating linguistic mental representations to things in the world is not only not simple, but may be
“perhaps even a misconceived project” (Chomsky, 1994, p. 159). See Smith (2002, pp. 100–104)
for a detailed discussion of this point and of its implications.
 Language and Other Myths: ‘Die Grenzen meiner Sprache… 7

In its most commonplace and everyday uses, the term ‘language’ is in

fact both ahistorical and atheoretical. It is ahistorical in that it ­presupposes
that a language is in some sense fixed and static. As David Pharies has
commented,

Human culture is constantly changing in every way: in the way people

dress or wear their hair; in the technologies they use; in their political,
religious, and educational institutions; in the way they treat children and
animals; in what and how much they eat; in the way the sexes relate to each
other … Language can be characterized as the ultimate manifestation of
human culture. It represents the foundation, in practical terms, of all other
cultural elements, since it is the instrument through which is conveyed the
entire body of knowledge that constitutes our customs, laws, and concept
of human life. Perhaps because language is so omnipresent in our lives, the
subtle yet infinite series of changes that it undergoes are sometimes difficult
to perceive. (2007, pp. 1–2)

The changes that are continuously taking place in our language may be
difficult to perceive, as Pharies suggests, but they are nonetheless very
real. Consider the case of English. The English speech community has
evolved over the past thousand years in a variety of ways (see Galloway &
Rose, 2015; Graddol, 1997, 2006). From a relatively small and insignifi-
cant speech community at the fringe of Europe, speakers of English have
become the most powerful linguistic community in the modern world.
The domination and near-hegemony of English in international com-
munication is unmatched in the history of our species. One of the inter-
esting aspects of the growth of English as a global language is that we are
now at a point in time when the majority of speakers of English are no
longer native speakers of the language—in fact, native speakers of English
are outnumbered by non-native speakers approximately three to one (the
number of native speakers of English is estimated to be approximately
330 million, of a total of more than 1 billion total speakers). As David
Crystal (2003) and others have suggested, the bifurcation of speakers of
English into native and non-native is simply no longer as useful as it once
was. Rather, as Braj Kachru (1982, 1985, 1990, 1992, 1996, 2003, 2006)
has suggested, we need to conceptualize the English-speaking world as
8 T. Reagan

consisting of three ‘circles’: the inner circle, the outer circle, and the
expanding circle (see also Melchers & Shaw, 2013; Schmitz, 2014). The
inner circle consists of those countries in which English is the first, and
dominant, language of the population: included in the inner circle are
the UK, the US, Canada (excluding Québec), Australia, Ireland, and
New Zealand. The outer circle consists of those post-colonial countries in
which English plays a significant role in most formal domains: India,
Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, and South Africa (except for the relatively
small—though important—community of native speakers). Finally, the
expanding circle consists of those countries that have no colonial or par-
ticular historical link to the inner circle, and in which English generally
has no special legal or constitutional status, but where it is nevertheless
widely used and studied as a second or additional language, and in which
it may be used as a lingua franca, especially in contacts with external indi-
viduals and organizations. Examples of countries in this expanding circle
include China, Denmark, Iran, Japan, Sweden, and so on.
The phenomenon of contemporary English raises a number of very
important questions, including those of the threat of English linguistic
imperialism (see Canagarajah, 1999a, 1999b; González Fernández, 2005;
Phillipson, 1992, 1997, 2007, 2008, 2009), the role of English in the
promotion and maintenance of structural inequality around the world,
and questions about language ownership. Especially interesting is that
the relative power of native speakers of English remains incredibly strong
even as the percentage of native speakers among all speakers of the lan-
guage continues to decline—a strength and status that is clearly seen in
the case of TESOL, in which native English speakers are often not only
preferred as instructors but are also frequently renumerated at rates higher
than those of non-native speakers (see Braine, 1999; Llurda, 2001, 2006;
Mahboob, 2010; Norton & Tang, 1997).
Not only has English spread both as a native and as an additional lan-
guage, it has also evolved and changed in dramatic ways over the course
of its history. We normally distinguish among Old English (or Anglo-­
Saxon), Middle English and Modern English, and consider each of these
a distinct language (or, more accurately, a set of language varieties) in its
own right (see Baugh & Cable, 2002; Freeborn, 1998). There were, for
instance, several varieties of Old English—the major variations being
 Language and Other Myths: ‘Die Grenzen meiner Sprache… 9

Table 1.1 Contemporary translation of passage from Beowulf

Passage from Beowulf
Old English Gewat ða neosian, syþðan niht becom, hean huses, hu hit
Hring-Dene æfter beorþege gebun hæfdon. Fand þa ðær
inne æþelinga gedrihtswefan æfter symble; sorge ne cuðon,
wonsceaft wera. Wiht unhælo, grim ond grædig, gearo sona
wæs, reoc ond reþe, ond on ræste genam þritig þegna;
þanon eft gewat huðe hremig to ham faran, mid þære
wælfylle wica neosan.
Heaney So, after nightfall, Grendel set out for the lofty house, to see
Translation how the Ring-Danes were settling into it after their drink,
(Heaney, and there he came upon them, a company of the best asleep
2000, from their feasting, insensible to pain and human sorrow.
pp. 9–11) Suddenly then the God-cursed brute was creating havoc:
greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men from their resting
places and rushed to his lair, flushed up and inflamed from
the raid, blundering back with the butchered corpses.

Kentish, Mercian, Northumbian, and West Saxon.2 A speaker of Modern

English certainly finds Old English unintelligible, regardless of the his-
torical connections between the two.3 Table 1.1 provides a short passage
from the Old English classic Beowulf, offering both the original text and
a modern translation. Although scholars disagree about when Beowulf
was first composed, estimates range from the eighth to the early eleventh
centuries CE. Regardless of when it was created, though, what is fairly
clear is that speakers of modern English—even well-educated speakers—
typically find the original text of Beowulf incomprehensible without some
amount of formal study of Old English. The same phenomenon can be
seen in Table 1.2, in which a short Biblical passage (Matthew 9: 1–2) is
given in the original Greek and then in different translations into English
ranging from a tenth century Old English version through a translation
completed in the second half of the twentieth century. The differences are

2
This is an important historical and linguistic point, because most of the Old English texts that
have been preserved are written in Late West Saxon, but the standard varieties of both Middle
English and Modern English are largely descended from Mercian.
3
The differences between Old English and Modern English are dramatic. For examples, see
Diamond (1970), Hogg (2012), Lass (1994), Mitchell (1985, 1995), Mitchell and Robinson
(1992), and Smith (1999).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
strange piece, Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut, is a further
experiment in the kind of music of which La soirée is an example.
Here as there the music is fragmentary. Here as there there is but an
occasional touch of vividness against a background of misty night. In
both pieces pictures, words, almost sounds are only suggested to
the ear, not completely represented.

On the other hand, the Cloches à travers les feuilles, and the
Poissons d’or, respectively the first and last pieces in this second set
of Images, are what we might call consistently motivated throughout,
in the manner of the Reflets dans l’eau. There is always the rustling
of leaves and the faint jangle of bells in the former, always a quiver
of water and a darting, irregular movement in the latter; whereas in
neither La soirée nor in Et la lune is there the persistence of an idea
that is thus predominant and more or less clearly presented.

The last two series of Préludes show us his art yet more finely
polished and concentrated. In general these twenty-four pieces are
shorter and more concise than the Estampes and the Images,
certainly than the representative pieces in them—Pagodes, Les
jardins, and Reflets dans l’eau. Most of them, moreover, are in his
suggestive rather than his explicit manner. He accomplishes his end
with a few strokes, and usually in a short space. The placing of the
titles at the end rather than at the beginning of the pieces is an
interesting point, too; for one cannot believe that such a finished
artist as Debussy shows himself in these pieces to be would have
sent his work before the public without a consciousness of the
significance of such an arrangement. He does not, as it were,
announce to his auditors his purpose, saying, imagine now this
sound which you are about to hear as representing in music a
picture of gardens through a steadily falling rain. He rather draws a
line here upon his canvas and adds a point of color there, all in a
moment, and then, having shown you first this strange beauty of
combinations, says at the end you may now imagine a meaning in
the west wind, a church sunk beneath the surface of the sea, a
tribute to Mr. Pickwick, dead leaves, or what not in the way of
exquisite and incomplete ideas.
Many of these postscripts are significantly vague: Voiles, Les sons et
les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir, Des pas sur la neige (Alkan
called a piece of his Neige et lave), La terrasse des audiences du
clair de lune, etc.

Yet, however vague the subject or the suggestion, there is a sort of

epigrammatic clearness in the music. The rhythms are especially
lithe and endlessly varied, the phrase-building concise yet never
commonplace. There is a glitter of wit in nearly all, an unfailing sense
of light and proportion. This, not the strange harmonies nor the
imagery, seems to us the quality of his music that is typically French.
There is infinite grace and subtlety; sensuousness in color, too,
though it is spiritualized; but there is little that is sentimental.

The delicacy and yet the sharpness with which he has reproduced
qualities in outlandish music must be noticed. In earlier music he
gave proof of his insight into the essentials of other systems of music
than the French, or the German which has been considered the
international. The Suite Bergamasque has a local color. There is
Oriental stuff in Pagodes, Spanish and Moorish in La soirée dans
Grenade, Egyptian in Et la lune. Traces of Greek or of ecclesiastical
modes are abundant. Here, in the Préludes all this and more too has
he caught. Greece in Danseuses de Delphes, Italy in Les collines
d’Anacapri, the old church in La cathédrale, Spain in La puerta del
Vino, cake-walks in General Lavine, England in Pickwick, and Egypt
in Canope. There seems a touch of the North, too, in the exquisite
little pieces, La fille aux cheveux de lin. In this way alone Debussy
has rejuvenated music, doing more than others had done.

Finally, it would be hard to find more essence of comedy and wit in

music than one finds in Debussy’s Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum in
the ‘Children’s Corner,’ with its ludicrous play on the erstwhile sacred
formulas of technical study. This alone should place him among the
wits of a century. The Sérénade interrompue and ‘Puck’s Dance’ are
both full of mockery. Then there is the eccentric General Lavine, and,
perhaps most laughable of all, the merry homage to Pickwick, made
up of ‘God Save the King’ and a jig in the English style.
No one can say what the future of his music will be, nor how it will be
related to the general development in music by students a hundred
years hence. Yet it is certain that it recommends itself to pianists at
present because it has expanded the technique of the instrument. It
is made up in part of effects which, as we have said, if they are not
new in principle, are newly applied and expanded. He has developed
resources in the instrument which had not before been more than
suggested. His pieces bring into striking prominence the qualities of
after-sound and sympathetic vibrations or overtones in the piano,
which are as much its possession and as uniquely so as the bell-like
qualities it had before been chiefly called upon to produce. Therefore
though his accomplishments in harmony and form, in the possibilities
of music in general, may be regarded with a changed eye in the
years to come, and though he may even some day appear in many
ways reactionary, because he has once more associated music with
ideas and weakened the independence of its life; yet as far as the
pianoforte is concerned he is the greatest innovator since Chopin
and Liszt.

VI
The pianoforte music of Maurice Ravel is in many ways similar to
that of his great contemporary. His conception of harmony is, like
Debussy’s, expanded. Sevenths and ninths are used as
consonances in his music as well; and consequently one finds there
the free use of the sustaining pedal, the playing with after-sounds
and overtones.

His works are not so numerous. The most representative are the
Miroirs, containing five pieces: Noctuelles, Oiseaux tristes, Une
barque sur l’océan, Alborado del gracioso and La vallée des cloches;
and a recent set, Gaspard de la nuit, containing Ondine, Scarbo, and
Le Gibet, three poems for the piano after Aloysius Bertrand. A set of
Valses nobles et sentimentales are only moderately interesting on
account of the harmonies. The rhythms are not unusually varied, and
the treatment of the pianoforte is relatively simple. There is a well-
known Pavane pour une infante défunte of great charm, and a
concert piece of great brilliance called Jeux d’eau.

Though Ravel, like Debussy, makes use of a misty background, his

music is on the whole more brilliant and more clear-cut. One is
likelier to find in it passages that are sensational as well as effective.
His effects, too, are more broadly planned, more salient and less
suggestive. The Jeux d’eau is a very good example, with its regular
progressions and unvaried style, its sustained use of high registers
rather than an occasional flash into them, its repetitions of rather
conventional figures.
Famous Pianists. From top left to bottom right:
Ferruccio Busoni, Ignace Paderewski, Ossip
Gabrilowitch, Eugen d’Albert.
Yet it is not in technical treatment of the piano that Ravel is most
clearly to be differentiated from Debussy, but rather in the matter of
structure. Most of his pieces are relatively long, and few of them are
written in the fragmentary, suggestive way characteristic of Debussy,
but are consistently sustained and developed. This in general. In
particular one will notice not only a regularity in the structure of
phrases but a frequent repetition of phrases in the well-balanced
manner we associate with his predecessors, sequences that except
in harmony are quite classical. The Jeux d’eau will offer numerous
examples; and the same regularity is noticeable in the Ondine and
Le Gibet. The phrases are long and smooth. They have not the
epigrammatic terseness of Debussy, who, even in passages of
melodious character, always avoids an obvious symmetry. Nor is
Ravel’s music so parti-colored as Debussy’s. It does not touch upon
such exotic or such foreign scales and harmonies. Ravel shows
himself a lover of the Oriental in his string quartet, especially of the
Oriental mannerism of repetition; but one does not find in his
pianoforte music, as in Debussy’s, hints of ancient Greece, of Italy, of
North America, of England. Even the Alborada del gracioso, for all its
length and brilliance, is not Spanish as Debussy’s Soirée dans
Grenade or Puerta del Vino. The impressions one receives from
hearing works of the two men performed one after the other are
really not similar. Debussy’s music is subtle and instantaneous, so to
speak; Ravel’s is rather deliberate and prolonged.

Other French composers have hardly made themselves felt with

such distinctness as these two men. The most prominent of them is
Florent Schmitt whose Pièces romantiques, Humoresques, and Nuits
romaines are worthy of study. Within the last year or two several sets
of pieces by Eric Satie have appeared which must give one pause.
These are almost as simple as Mozart; indeed many of them are
written in but two parts. They are not lacking in charm, whether or
not one may take them seriously. Satie shows himself in many of
them a parodist. He plays strains from the Funeral March in Chopin’s
sonata, twisting them out of shape, and writes slyly over the music
that they are from a well-known mazurka of Schubert’s. He parodies
Chabrier’s España and Puccini’s operas.

Finally he writes directions and indications over measures in the

score which cannot but be a malicious though delightful mockery of
modern music in general. Remembering Scriabin’s Avec une céleste
volupté, or une volupté radieuse, extatique or douloureuse, one is
not surprised to find Satie telling one to play sur du velours jaunie,
sec comme un coucou, léger comme un œuf, though at this last one
may well suspect a tongue in the cheek. But Satie goes much further
than this. There is among the Descriptions automatiques one on a
lantern, in which we are here told to withhold from lighting it, there to
light, there to blow it out, next to put our hands in our pockets. And
throughout the absurd, unless they be wholly ironical, pieces inspired
by Embryons désechés, there is almost a running text which cannot
but stir to hearty laughter. Think of being directed to play a certain
passage like a nightingale with the toothache—comme un rossignol
qui aurait mal aux dents; or of being reminded as you play that the
sun has gone out in the rain and may not come back again, or that
you have no tobacco but happily you do not smoke. Such are the
remarks which Satie intends shall illumine your comprehension of his
music; and his humor is the more delightful because as a matter of
fact Mozart’s first minuet is hardly more simple than this music to
dried-up sea-urchins. Such naughty playfulness may well offend the
conservatories; but even if it is only nonsense, surely it is a felicitous
sign in these days, when high foreheads and bald pates ponderously
try to further the gestation of a new art of music.

If we leave our study of pianoforte music with a laugh it is only

because we may be supremely happy in the possession of so much
music that need not be hidden before the raillery of any wit, no
matter how sacrilegious. Into the hands of Claude Debussy we give
the art of writing for the pianoforte. His is the wisest and most
sensitive touch to mold it since the day of Chopin. Whatever the
music he writes may be, it has conferred upon the instrument once
more the infinite blessing of a proper speech. He has once more
saved it from a confusion of thumps and roars.

Bach, Chopin, Debussy: it is a strange trio, set apart from other

composers because to them the pianoforte made audible its secret
voice, a voice of fading after-sounds. Let us not take Bach from
among them. It was after all the same voice that spoke to him from
his clavichord, more faint perhaps yet even more sensitive. Music
whispered to Mozart that she would sing sweetly for him through his
light pianoforte. The powers of destiny made themselves music at
the call of Beethoven, and they swept up the piano in their force.
Through Schubert the hand of a spirit touched the keys. For Weber
the keys danced together and made strange pantomimes of sound.
Schumann, as it were, spoke to his pianoforte apart, and it opened a
door for him into a fanciful world. To Brahms the keys were
colleagues, not friends, and Liszt drove them in a chariot race,
worthy of Rome and the emperors, or converted them like a
magician into a thousand shapes with a thousand spells. But to
Bach, Chopin and Debussy this instrument revealed itself and
showed a secret beauty that is all its own.
 CHAPTER XI
EARLY VIOLIN MUSIC AND THE
DEVELOPMENT OF VIOLIN
TECHNIQUE
The origin of stringed instruments; ancestors of the violin—
Perfection of the violin and advance in violin technique; use of the
violin in the sixteenth century; early violin compositions in the
vocal style; Florentino Maschera and Monteverdi—Beginnings of
violin music: Biagio Marini; Quagliati; Farina; Fontana and Mont’
Albano; Merula; Ucellino and Neri; Legrenzi; Walther and his
advance in technique, experiments in tone painting—Giov.
Battista Vitali; Tommaso Vitali and Torelli; Bassani; Veracini and
others—Biber and other Germans; English and French
composers for the violin; early publications of text-books and
collections.

I
The origin of string instruments of the violin family is involved in
much obscurity and it would be impossible to discuss here the
various theories concerning it which have been stated with more or
less plausibility by musical historians.[42] A preponderance of
authoritative opinion seems to favor the theory that the direct
ancestor of the violin was the Welsh crwth, a sort of harp, which
seems to have been played with a bow. Venantius Fortunatus (570
A.D.) mentions this instrument in the much quoted lines:
Romanusque lyra plaudit tibi, barbara harpa, Græcus Achillaica,
chrotta Britana canat. (‘The Roman praises thee with the lyre, the
barbarian sings to thee with the harp, the Greek with the cither, the
Briton with the crwth.’) The fact that the old English name for the
fiddle was crowd furnishes an etymological argument in favor of the
crwth. It is, of course, possible that the idea of using a bow with the
small harp was first suggested by some instrument already in
existence. The Arabs and other peoples had instruments roughly
approximating the violin type. One is inclined, however, to the
assumption that the violin was not developed directly from any
particular instrument, but came into being rather through the
evolution of an idea with which various races experimented
independently and simultaneously.
 Ignace Paderewski.

After a photo from life (1915).

The immediate forerunner of the violin seems to have been the
rebec, of which there is a drawing in an extant manuscript of the
ninth century. The Benedictine monk Ofried, in his Liber
Evangeliorum of about the same period, mentions the fidula as one
of the two bowed instruments then in use, though to what extent the
fidula differed from the rebec we are unable to ascertain. In the
psalm-book of Notker (d. 1022) there is also a figure of a rebec and
a bow. Drawings, written references and bas-reliefs enable us to
follow the development of the violin clearly enough from this time on.
In the abbey of St. Georges de Boscherville, Normandy, there is
preserved a bas-relief which shows a girl dancing on her head to the
accompaniment of a band which includes two instruments of the
violin type, played with the bow. The Nibelungen Lied speaks of a
fiddler who ‘wielded a fiddle-bow, broad and long like a sword,’ and
although this epic was completed in the twelfth century it is probably
safe to antedate the reference considerably. There is in the cathedral
of Notre Dame in Paris a crowned figure with a four-stringed violin,
and in the Abbey of St. Germain des Près there is a similar relic
showing a man with a five-stringed violin and a bow. Both date from
the eleventh century. From these and similar evidences it is plain
that a violin of a rudimentary type was used extensively in the
eleventh century. Its musical possibilities must have been very slight,
and probably it was used chiefly to accompany the song or the
dance.

As we may deduce from many contemporary references, the

troubadours, jongleurs, and minnesingers[43] of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries played a very important part in the development
of the violin type of instrument. There is extant, for instance, a
manuscript of the period, containing an illustration of a jongleur
playing upon a three-stringed instrument very nearly resembling the
modern violin. Jerome of Moravia, a Dominican monk of Paris in the
thirteenth century, informs us in his Speculum Musices that the two
strings of the violin then in use were tuned as follows: . His
Speculum, which is probably the earliest approach to an instruction
book for the violin, also contains this very definite indication of the
fingering:

Under the influence of the troubadours and minnesingers the

popularity of the violin spread rapidly both among professionals and
amateur musicians. It was especially popular as an accompaniment
to dances. In the Brunswick Chronicle (1203) we read of a
clergyman who had his arm struck by lightning while playing for
dancers. We may infer from this that it was considered quite a
respectable recreation. The Chronicle has the words veddelte
(fiddled) and Veddelbogen (fiddle-bow) without any comment, so that
they must have been quite familiar terms. A stained glass window, a
Parisian manuscript and a miniature painting from a manuscript
called Mater Verborum (1202-12) show that the instrument then in
use resembled in shape the modern violin. In Ulrich von
Lichtenstein’s Frauendienst we read of an orchestra which included
two fiddles and which played a lively walking-tune or march for the
purpose of charming away the fatigues of the journey. We may
gather some idea of the vogue of violin playing during this period
from the character of a decree, issued in the year 1261 and now in
the archives of Bologna, which forbade the playing of the viol at night
in the streets of that city. Despite its great popularity it held a place
beside the harp as an instrument worthy of the dignity of a minstrel,
as we may gather from an allusion of a French poet about the year
1230:

‘When the cloth was ta’en away

Minstrels strait began to play,
And while harps and viols join
Raptured bards in strains divine,
 Loud the trembling arches rung
With the noble deed we sung.’

By this time professional instrumentalists had become a strong class

and in various cities had begun the formation of fraternities which did
not differ much in essence from our modern musical unions. The first
of these, as far as we can discover, was the St. Nicholas
Brüderschaft which existed in Vienna as early as 1288.

The many and varied forms and sizes of viols illustrated in

manuscripts and elsewhere suggest that the instrument was used in
the music of the church. Certainly instruments of some kind (apart
from the organ) must have been taken into the church service, else
Thomas Aquinas would not have argued against their employment.
The church was not very sympathetic toward musicians and its
attitude was reflected to a great extent by the world at large. Synods
and councils frequently issued decrees against wandering minstrels
and in the city of Worms they were even refused the privilege of
lodging in or frequenting public houses.

The fourteenth century brought much greater recognition for

instrumental art, which grew in popularity and in the favor and
patronage of those in high places. When the French jongleurs united
in 1321 into the Confrérie de St. Julien des Ménestriers they
obtained a charter which called their leaders Rois des ménestriers
(later Rois des violins). The same charter alludes to ‘high and low’
instruments, apparently treble and bass rebecs or viols which were
played in octaves to each other or perhaps in a primitive sort of
counterpoint. Technique must have been very inferior, for musicians
in Alsace were required to study only one or two years before taking
up music as a profession. Their incomes, on the other hand, were
probably substantial, as it is recorded that they were obliged to pay
taxes. It is interesting to note at this early period that the city of Basle
employed a violinist to play in a public place for the entertainment of
the citizens.
So far we have endeavored to trace the progress of violin music
through paintings, monuments and fugitive references in
manuscripts, decrees and other documents. These references are
not on the whole very clear and the nomenclature of early
instruments of the violin family is very loose and confused. We know
practically nothing about the music composed for these instruments.
Their imperfect shape does not suggest music of an advanced kind,
nor does it mean that the technique of the time was equal to very
exacting demands. The famous blind organist, Conrad Paumann
(1410-73), who could play on every instrument, including the violin,
has left us in his Orgelbuch several transcriptions of songs which he
may have played on the violin as well as on other instruments, and
the dances and other pieces of free invention composed for other
instruments may also have served as musical material for violinists.
But all this is mere surmise.
Relatives of the Violin. Top: Viola de braccia, Pochette, Viola
bastarda.
Bottom: Viola da gamba, Violone, Viola d’amore.
Regarding the combination of the violin with other instruments we
know that at the end of the fifteenth century there existed in Louvain
an ‘orchestra’ composed of a harp, a flute, a viol, and a trumpet.
There is recorded an account of another ‘orchestra’ belonging to
Duke Hercules in Ferrara, who employed a great number of
musicians. It included flutes, trumpets, lutes, trombones, harps, viols
and rebecs. We should not assume, however, that all of these
instruments were played simultaneously. Each class of instrument
had its own part and if all of them played together they must have
made noise rather than music. We are also informed that previous to
the year 1450 popes and princes employed ‘orchestras’ which
combined ‘the voices, organ, and other instruments into the loveliest
harmony.’ In spite of the almost entire lack of music for the violin we
know that it was a favorite instrument and consequently that the
players must have produced on it pleasing music of some kind.
Indication of its popularity is found in the works of Fra Angelico
(1387-1455), whose famous angel holds a viol in her hands, and in
Boccaccio’s novels, where we learn that violin music formed a
considerable part of the entertainment of all classes.

II
The sixteenth century brought the violin to a perfection that was still
far in advance of the technique of the players. At the same time there
was a distinct advancement in the recognition of instrumental music,
although vocal music continued to maintain its preeminence. This
was due partly to the limited technique of the instrumentalists and
partly to the greater appeal of music wedded to words. Violin players
then knew nothing about changing of positions and therefore could
play only in the first position.[44] Thus the tone register of the violin
was small. Some players, however, attempted to reach higher tones
on the first string through the stretching of the fourth finger. Simple
melodic phrases or figures were lacking in even quality of tone, in
smoothness and in fluency. The art of legato playing was unknown