32.1097, Review: Sociolinguistics: Wright (2020)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-1097. Fri Mar 26 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.1097, Review: Sociolinguistics: Wright (2020)

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Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2021 16:05:02
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Sunnyside

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36626677


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-1522.html

AUTHOR: Laura  Wright
TITLE: Sunnyside
SUBTITLE: A Sociolinguistic History of British House Names
SERIES TITLE: British Academy Monographs
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of Sussex

SUMMARY

House names are a significant aspect of British life, in a way that is not
true of other countries familiar to me.  In France, even a house on a rural
lane and surrounded by fields will be numbered, but in Britain its name will
be its only identifier.  In towns, most streets will have house-numbers
assigned by the local authority, but at least in leafier neighbourhoods the
houses will also have names, bestowed by the developer or by the first
residents.  It has often been said that Englishmen like to think of themselves
as country gentlemen even if they are not, so woe betide a correspondent who
fails to include house-name before house-number when addressing an envelope. 
Now that personal correspondence mainly uses e-mail, perhaps the phenomenon of
house naming will fade away, but to date there is no sign of that happening.

Laura Wright sees house naming as a valid topic for linguistic research,
though she points out in her Introduction that it is a topic which has been
almost entirely neglected up to now – essentially, she believes, for reasons
of intellectual snobbery:  academics see the proliferation of rural-sounding
names such as Oakdene or Fernlea attached to terrace houses in urban streets
as pretentious, and names based on wordplay like Herznmine, or Dunroamin
attached to a house bought for retirement, as vulgar.  In this book, sponsored
by the British Academy, she aims to illustrate what can be done when the topic
is taken seriously.  She argues that while individual house names are
endlessly diverse, they fall into a quite small range of general categories:

(1)  transferred place-names (the largest category), e.g. Grasmere
(2)  nostalgically rural, e.g. Oakdene
(3)  commemorative, e.g. Inkerman Lodge (the battle of Inkerman was a British
victory in the Crimean War)
(4)  “upwardly mobile”, e.g. Grosvenor Villa (Grosvenor is the family name of
the Dukes of Westminster)
(5)  popular culture, e.g. Elsinore

The categories overlap.  Grasmere is a place-name, but it is the name of a
lake and adjacent village in the outstandingly beautiful area of rural England
called the Lake District, hence the name belongs equally under (2).

In Chapter 1, the author analyses the several hundred London house names
recorded from before 1400; one notable development happened about 1320, when
the rising social class of merchants took to naming their houses (which were
also their workplaces) after heraldic devices – a symptom of social
aspiration, since merchants would not previously have been entitled to coats
of arms.  Chapter 2 leaps forward to the Victorian period, when the advent of
railways enabled people who worked in the centre of large cities to live in
outer suburbs, whose desirably semi-rural status could be expressed with house
names like Rosemont or Oak Lodge.
 
Then, the remaining four chapters all relate to one particular, frequent house
name which attracted the author’s curiosity:  the name of the book title,
Sunnyside.  Before reading this book, if I had been asked what kind of houses
I associated with this name, I would have said semis or bungalows built for
lower middle class buyers in the 1930s, a period when society was newly
enthusiastic about sunlight and the open-air life.  Laura Wright had similar
associations with the name, but her interest was piqued when she encountered a
Sunnyside that conflicted with this profile in several respects.  The bulk of
her book aims to show that, while many present-day Sunnysides may indeed fit
the profile, the name has a far longer and more specialized history.
 
Chapter 3 surveys early cases of Sunnyside within London.  The earliest case
found dates from 1860, and by 1870 there were 23 London Sunnysides.  Far from
being lower middle class houses, these were “large detached houses with room
to house numerous children and servants”.  They were owned by wealthy
businessmen, who tended to be actively involved in the life of Nonconformist
churches; many of them had Scottish connexions.  Chapter 4 looks further at
the link with religion.  It turns out that, before the 1860s, many
Nonconformist chapels in England were themselves named Sunnyside, the earliest
found being a Quaker meeting house in Rossendale, Lancs., which bore the name
by 1716.  In the USA and other recently-settled English-speaking countries,
this is still a frequent name for churches of equivalent denominations.  As a
house name, Sunnyside came to public attention in the USA when the writer
Washington Irving adopted it for his own house, described in 1859 as “next to
Mount Vernon, the best known and most cherished of all the dwellings in
America”.
 
Chapter 5 shows that Sunnyside is a common name for farms in certain parts of
Scotland and northern England.  Standard dictionaries claim that this usage
refers to the sunny side of a hill, that is the side which faces broadly south
rather than north; but although that is an obvious guess, the author argues
that it cannot be right.  For one thing, the limited areas where Sunnysides
occur are notably flat rather than hilly.  By studying the frequent use of
“sunny side” and Scots equivalents in legal documents such as property deeds,
Laura Wright shows that the term was routinely used in contexts where more
recently the reference would be to compass directions such as south or east. 
Under the open-field system which preceded agricultural enclosure, the land of
a manor was not divided up by hedges or fences.  It was split into numerous
strips or “selions”, scattered sets of which were allocated annually to
families in a fashion that gave everyone a fair share of good and poor land to
work.  (Typical selion dimensions were 220 by 22 yards, an acre in all.) 
Before compasses were available, selions had to be defined by reference to
some other way of fixing directions, and Laura Wright tells us that in
Scotland this was done in terms of the position of the sun at a standard time
of day and of year, e.g. sunrise at the summer solstice; people would walk
clockwise round a stretch of land at this time to “vesy” or survey it by
reference to the direction of shadows.  She relates this to a Scandinavian
land-division sytem called ‘solskifte’, “sun-shift”.
 
Finally, Chapter 6 is a brief summary in timeline form of the evolving use of
“sunnyside” from a North British legal concept to do with land tenure into a
name bestowed on suburban and urban houses all over Britain.
 
Much of the book comprises data rather than exposition, for instance one
53-page appendix lists every case the author has found of a Sunnyside in
northern Britain pre-dating the period when it came into general use as a
house name, with National Grid references and extracts from maps showing the
name.  (She also includes a number of Scottish places called “Green”,
“Greens”, or “Greens of X”, where “Green” may represent not the English colour
term but Gaelic ‘grian’, “sun, sunlight”.)  The body of the book, excluding
appendices and other data-lists, is well under 150 pages long.

EVALUATION

Laura Wright certainly establishes that house names are a valid topic for
sociolinguistics.  She demonstrates considerable detective skill in locating
early Sunnysides and discovering what kind of people first lived in them.  (We
are given mini-biographies, averaging a third of a page, for the householders
at all but five of the 23 London Sunnysides listed in the 1870 Post Office
Directory; three of the missing five were women, who are commonly elusive in
old records.)  I wonder how many other ordinary-sounding house names would
prove to hide such long and unexpected histories, but it is natural and right
that someone aiming to demonstrate the possibilities of a novel research area
through detailed attention to one example will pick the best example she can
find.
 
With respect to some parts of her analysis I feel Laura Wright falls short of
making her case.  She shows that early Sunnyside houses tended to belong to
chapel- rather than churchgoers, and that this may relate to the fact that
Nonconformist chapels were sometimes called Sunnyside; but it is not clear why
that should be.  If the first London Sunnysiders tended to be both wealthy
businessmen and Nonconformists, that might be because Nonconformist religion
was particularly strong in northern Britain, where the name Sunnyside
originated, and it was successful businessmen who had a reason to migrate from
the north to London; but did the first of them bring the name Sunnyside with
him because it had pleasant associations in his homeland, and others copy it
because they belonged to the same social circles in London, or was Sunnyside
somehow a natural name for Nonconformist chapels?  I am not sure what Laura
Wright is saying here.
 
And when it comes to “sunny side” as a land-tenure concept, together with
Nordic ‘solskifte’, I am lost:  I have read this part of Laura Wright’s
exposition several times, but I do not understand it.  It is obvious enough
that if you have no compass, another way to fix a cardinal direction precisely
would be by the position of the sun at a specified time and date, but what has
that to do with walking round a landholding clockwise (or in any direction)? 
Adjacent selions were necessarily parallel, but maps I have seen of open-field
divisions suggest that a manor would contain separate groups of selions, with
those of different groups laid out in very different orientations.  (In the
author’s defence, nothing I have found about ‘solskifte’ online has made the
system any clearer to me.)
 
The author allows herself to take many detours which evidently fascinate her
but which could be thought self-indulgent.  For instance, four pages in
Chapter 1 together with the six pages of Appendix 3 deal with stagecoach
names, which are certainly an interesting topic in their own right but seem
wholly unrelated to house names.  Or again, she spends three pages of Chapter
4 discussing whether the Oxford English Dictionary is correct to describe the
word “bartizan”, for a kind of turret, as an invention of Sir Walter Scott
based on an etymological misunderstanding.  She succeeds in establishing that
the word was used before Scott and has a respectable etymology, but this has
no apparent relevance to the topic of house names.  
 
For that matter, it is not clear how Scott comes into the Sunnyside story at
all.  Laura Wright says that “The impact of Sir Walter Scott’s novels on
house-naming practices … cannot be overstated”, which may well be true, but
there is no suggestion that the novels contain a Sunnyside – Scott’s own
splendid house was (and is) named Abbotsford.  The link drawn by Laura Wright
is that Washington Irving was a house guest at Abbotsford in August 1816 and
went on rambles with Scott, and a mile away there is a farm which has been
named Sunnyside at least since 1590 – we are shown a photograph.  When
Sunnysides are as numerous in that part of Scotland as Laura Wright shows them
to be, it is a fairly safe bet that there would be one within rambling
distance of Scott’s home, but it seems a large assumption that walking past
this farm was what prompted Irving to choose the name for his own house, or
that the popularity of Scott’s novels had anything to do with the widespread
adoption of the name in England.
 
And at one point I questioned Laura Wright’s factual accuracy.  On p. 135 she
asserts “A statute of 1290 known as ‘Quia Emptores’ ended the open field
system in England”.  That is not what Quia Emptores did.  It was about
simplifying the feudal pyramid of overlord/vassal relationships:  if B held
land from overlord A, Quia Emptores forbade him to grant it or part of it to a
sub-vassal C, making A C’s liege at two removes.  This says nothing about how
the land of a manor was divided between the tenants.  Enclosure only began to
any extent in the sixteenth century, and the bulk of the Inclosure Acts came
in during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Laura Wright is repeatedly careless about spellings, surprising in a scholar
of onomastics.  Okehampton in Devon is not spelled “Oakhampton”, and Queen
Victoria’s Isle of Wight residence is Osborne, not “Osbourne”.  The word “axe”
is spelled with an E, except by Americans.  On the first page, “No Bother” is
surely a poor translation for the name of Frederick the Great’s palace of Sans
Souci, a more obvious rendering being “Carefree”.  (“No bother” is normally a
phrase used in order to deflect someone’s apology for putting the speaker to
trouble.)  I wondered whether a reference on p. 41 to a “Stocks Market” should
have read Stock Market (but here I do not know the facts).  And the author’s
quotations of Old English seem to confuse the letters thorn and wynn.

That last problem may be more the publisher’s than the author’s
responsibility.  And this applies too to the many quotations from mediaeval
Latin documents, which are full of abbreviation signs, e.g ‘aliquã’ for
‘aliquam’.  I am no expert in this area, but it looks to me as though O.U.P.
has fudged up approximations to the various abbreviation symbols actually used
as best it can in a font which does not provide for them.  It would have been
very much clearer to spell the Latin words out in full.
 
Nevertheless, this is an informative and enjoyable book.  Any linguist who
lives in a Sunnyside (there is at least one) will undoubtedly be keen to read
it, and so will many others.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University in
1965, and studied Linguistics and Computer Science as a graduate student at
Yale University before teaching at the universities of Oxford, LSE, Lancaster,
Leeds, and Sussex. After retiring from his Computing chair at Sussex he spent
some years as a research fellow in Linguistics at the University of South
Africa. Sampson has published in most areas of Linguistics and on a number of
other subjects. His most recent linguistics book is ''The Linguistics
Delusion'' (Equinox, 2017); in 2020 he published ''Voices from Early China''
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing), a translation of an anthology of Chinese
poems dating from about 1000–600 B.C.





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