E a língua de Shakespeare foi para a cozinha

One outcome of the Norman Conquest was the making of the English language. As a result of Hastings, the Anglo-Saxon tongue, the speech of Alfred and Bede, was exiled from hall and bower, from court and cloister, and was despised as a peasant’s jargon, the talk of ignorant serfs. It ceased almost, though not quite, to be a written language. The learned and the pedantic lost all interest in its forms, for the clergy talked Latin and the gentry talked French. Now when a language is seldom written and is not an object of interest to scholars, it quickly adapts itself in the mouths of plain people to the needs and uses of life. This may be either good or evil, according to circumstances. If the grammar is clumsy and ungraceful, it can be altered much more easily when there are no grammarians to protest. And so it fell out in England. During the three centuries when our native language was a peasants’ dialect, it lost its clumsy inflexions and elaborate genders, and acquired the grace, suppleness, and adaptability which are among its chief merits. At the same time it was enriched by many French words and ideas. The English vocabulary is mainly French in words relating to war, politics, justice, religion, hunting, cooking, and art. Thus improved, our native tongue re-entered polite and learned society as the English of Chaucer’s Tales and Wycliffe’s Bible, to be still further enriched into the English of Shakespeare and of Milton. There is no more romantic episode in the history of man than this underground growth and unconscious self-preparation of the despised island patois, destined ere long to ‘burst forth into sudden blaze’, to be spoken in every quarter of the globe, and to produce a literature with which only that of ancient Hellas is comparable. It is symbolic of the fate of the English race itself after Hastings, fallen to rise nobler, trodden under foot only to be trodden into shape.

Eu adoro este parágrafo de A Shortened History of England, do G. M. Trevelyan. Gosto de como ele descreve o salto do inglês de sua fase plebéia e quase clandestina para a hegemonia global (e olha que isto foi publicado antes da Segunda Guerra, anterior portanto ao auge do império americano e à Internet, que levaram aquele domínio ainda mais longe), e gosto principalmente da teoriazinha sacada para explicar a plasticidade e a simplicidade da língua.
Também aprecio este tipo de narrativa histórica despreocupada com os pseudo-rigores acadêmicos e científicos, sem jargões abstratos como ‘estrutura’, ‘arcabouço institucional’ e outras chatices do gênero, e nas quais o autor perambula gostosamente entre fatos e tiradas interpretativas, com a non-chalance de quem passeia num jardim com brisa fresca e sol de outono. O dia em que escreverem livros de História do Brasil desse jeito, deixarei de ser o ignorantão consumado nas ‘cosas nostras’ no qual me fiz.