English Celticisms – the “Dummy Do” and “Obsessive Progressive”

Last time I discussed the influence of the Norse settlers on English during the period between Old English and Middle English and how it filtered down from the north to become standard English. About the same time, perhaps beginning a few centuries earlier, there was a Celtic influence that began in the south and filtered northward.

This Celtic influence is much more significant than the handful of words that I wrote about in the August 2011 post “Celtic Vestigia”, but is only now beginning to be generally recognized. 

Professor John McWhorter in Lecture 4 of Myths. Lies, and Half-Truths of Language Usage (Great Courses 2012) describes three Celtic influences that appear in modern English. Two relate to sentence structure, the third is a vestigial counting system.

Let’s deal with the numbers first. In northern England there is a special counting system called sheep-scoring numbers, presumably used originally to count sheep. This system today is found only in children’s games and nursery rhymes. It goes like this for 1-10: aina, peina, para, pedera, pump, ithy, mithy, owera, lavera, dig. The closest known number words to these are Welsh: un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump, chwech, saith, with, naw, deg. The system of teen numbering is also similar. Note these are not an exact match, but the 4, 5 & 10 are strikingly similar. So the origin of the sheep-scoring system was not, of course, Welsh but an older British Celtic language that somehow survived down the centuries only in this children’s number game.

As an aside, nursery rhymes are excellent “museums” of old words and phrases which are passed down intact while the language around them changes. “Pease Porridge Hot” is a good example of this. Pease was once the singular of the little green vegetable with peasen the plural. At some point the “n” dropped from the plural making both singular and plural words the same. Then, as the “s” ending of plurals became more common, someone assumed that pease was peas, the plural of pea, and this usage spread.

What McWhorter calls the “meaningless do”, Professor Anne Curzan in Lecture 9 of The Secret Life of Words (Great Courses, 2012) dubs the “dummy do”. Both refer to the English grammatical structure of using do in question and negative sentences. Instead of asking “Smoke you?” as would be normal in most other languages (including Old English), we ask “Do you smoke?” And we reply “I do not smoke” rather than “I smoke not”.

In Celtic languages, do is also used in positive statement sentences, but this is optional in English, used occasionally for emphasis. “Yes, I smoke” or “Yes, I DO smoke. Do you MIND?” More likely you would simply reply, “No, I don’t” or “Yes, I do” in answering a question like that, where the action verb in your reply is understood rather than repeated.

Back in Shakespeare’s day the do form of statements was more common. Hamlet, near the end of his famous soliloquy: “…thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”. And Duncan to Macbeth: “Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be What thou art promis’d. Yet I do fear thy nature; It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness…”

Although this structure of using do sounds completely normal to us now, in fact it is very peculiar. The only other languages in the world that use do in this way are the Celtic languages. This use in English was first observed in Cornish English and gradually worked its way north. Cornish, spoken in Cornwall at the south-western tip of England, is one of the three Brittonic Celtic languages. Similarly to the core changes made by Norse speakers discussed last time, such changes to basic sentence structure were likely first made by Celtic (in this case Cornish) speakers who learned English as a second language. Bilingual speakers are more likely to use their native language sentence structure and overlay it with vocabulary from their new language. (I just made that up so would welcome comments from a linguist).

Similarly, the use of the progressive tense (the “ing” form of a verb indicating the action is ongoing) to show the present is another Celticism. This is what McWhorter calls the “obsessive progressive”. We ask “What are you doing?” instead of “What do you?” (in this case the verb do is the main verb, not a “dummy do”). And we answer “I am making dinner” not “I make dinner”. Again this is peculiar to English and the Celtic languages. It could be used in, for example, Spanish or German to emphasize that you are doing something right now, but that would be a rare usage (perhaps if your mother yelled at you “Get doing your homework!” you would reply “I AM doing my homework!”).

In Welsh to say “Mary is singing” it would be “Is Mary in singing”. Celtic languages have the word order VSO where the verb always comes first, so what looks to us like a question is in fact a statement. Notice the extra word “in” before the action word. English used to have this structure too but it was gradually lost with only a trace remaining in a few dialects. “I was on hunting” became “I was a-hunting” and finally “I was hunting”. See my post from October 2011 “A Hunting We Will Go” for more on this ancient grammatical structure. So this could be another Celticism.

Both the “dummy do” and the “obsessive progressive” show up suddenly in Middle English documents, with nary a trace in Old English. Why the sudden change? Two reasons – first there was 150-200 years starting after 1066 when French was the official language and hardly anything was written in English. Changes to the language during this time were not recorded anywhere. Celtic influence could have started as early as the 5^th century with the first Saxon-Celtic interaction. If so, why is there no record in Old English documents? Simply because writing at that time did not record how the common people spoke. Writing was used exclusively for church documents and high literature – it would have been unthinkable to record common speech.

So whenever you use the “dummy do” or “obsessive possessive” sentence structure, you are speaking a remnant of the language of the ancient British Celts. I think this is rather fascinating, don’t you?

Celtic Vestigia

The English language developed in England so to understand the history of English we must explore the history of England.

The earliest inhabitants to leave any trace on the English language were the Celts. Their legacy is surprisingly small considering the centuries they inhabited Britain prior to and during the Roman occupation.

The Celtish languages are part of the Indo-European language family. There are six Celtic languages surviving into historical times, divided into two branches – the Brythonic (Welsh, Cornish and Breton) and Goidelic (Irish, Scottish and Manx).

The Brythonic (Brittonic) language was spoken across Britain south of the Firth of Forth by the people known as Britons during the Iron Age (800BC – 100AD). North of the Firth of Forth the distantly related Pictish language was spoken. By the 6^th Century AD regional Brythonic dialects had developed into the Welsh and Cornish languages. In the 4^th and 5^th centuries AD Britons immigrated to the mainland (escaping the invading Saxons), settling in what is now known as Brittany, France. Here the third Brythonic language, Breton, developed, replacing the Gallish (or Gallic) Celtic language which was previously common across most of western mainland Europe.

Irish and Scottish Gaelic and Manx (from the Isle of Man) make up the Goidelic branch. These languages bear similarities to Iberian Celtic while the Brythonic languages are more similar to Gallish Celtic, suggesting that the Irish Celts came from Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal) while the Britons came across the English Channel from what is now France and Belgium. Thus the roots of differences between the Irish and English are very deep.

The Gaelic language was introduced to Scotland from Ireland in the 4^th century AD by Irish raiders who settled in western Scotland. The Romans called Irish raiders Scoti and the area in northeast Britain settled by the Irish became known as Scotia (the Roman name for Scotland was Caledonia and Ireland itself was at one time known as Scotia). [I tried to explain this one time to a Scottish born friend but he wouldn’t hear of it.] Over time Scottish Gaelic diverged from the Irish Gaelic and spread throughout most of Scotland, displacing Pictish and Old English. Gaelic was later replaced by Scottish English, surviving in the Highlands and northern islands into modern times.

This brief history of the British Celtic languages lays a foundation for understanding the history of the English language. For a foundation, however, Celtic had surprisingly little lasting influence on English. A short chapter in my new book The Story of English deals with “The Celts and the Romans”. While the Romans ruled southern Britain, the Celts were more or less allowed to carry on with their life and language. After the Romans left, the Anglo-Saxon invaders pushed them into the far western corners of the island. There was very little assimilation either of the Celtic people or their language. We have to look carefully to find traces of them in modern English.

Most modern English words of Celtic origin are of place names and landforms. The place name suffix combe is Celtic for valley (spelled cwm in Welsh, a useful Scrabble word!). Tor means hill or high rock (a bit of trivia I learned in a university geography class which has also proven useful in Scrabble). It has been suggested that the landform names for hills and valleys were borrowed from Celtic because the Anglo-Saxons, coming from countries with low flat land, lacked names for them. London (Latinized to Londinium by the Romans), Dover, Kent and the rivers Thames, Wye and Avon, among many others, are of Celtic origin. These place names increase in frequency from east to west across England.

Some words have been obviously borrowed from modern Celtic languages: bard, plaid, loch and glen from Scottish Gaelic and brogue, coracle and colleen from Irish Gaelic. Not so obvious is whiskey from the Gaelic compound word for water + life (similar to Latin aqua vitae for distilled alcoholic drinks). Bannock is another word believed to have a Celtic origin: OE bannuc (piece of a loaf or cake). It has survived in Scotland where it refers to a round, flat unsweetened and usually unleavened bread, and in Canada where its adaption to being baked over a campfire has made it a staple of northern trappers and traders. It was likely Hudson Bay Co. traders from Scotland that introduced both the bread and the name to northern Canada.

Two surprisingly modern looking words can be traced back to Celtic: slogan and car. Slogan comes from the Gaelic words sluagh (army) and gairm (cry) which together make war-cry. This proves that advertisers mean business! The word car has a more complicated derivation from words meaning “cart”. Old Celtic karros became Latin carra and Old French carre which was introduced into Middle English by the Normans. But this and likely many other words were previously borrowed by the Romans from the Celts living on the continent, not necessarily from the British Celts. Other Celtic words – like gravel, lawn, truant and valet were borrowed by the French from Gallic and later introduced into English following the Norman Conquest.

In summary, there remains very little evidence in modern English of the Celtic languages, once spoken across what is now England for centuries.