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?

The Simplification of English - Stage 2, The Viking Settlers

The first written texts of Middle English in the late 12th century show a remarkable simplification from Old English, just a century or two before. Verb and pronoun endings are reduced and simplified. Nouns lost their inflective endings (which indicate whether it was the subject or object of the verb) and relied more on prepositions and word order for meaning. Grammatical gender (nouns, adjectives and pronouns having different forms for male, female and neuter genders) was lost. And a few other simplifying changes that only a linguist could understand and appreciate. See this post by Linguistics Girl for a better explanation of these changes.

Linguists tell us that simplifications of this magnitude occur in a language only when it is learned as adults by a large enough group to influence the language spoken by the natives. It wasn't the Norman French, who were too few in number and mostly kept to themselves, who initiated this change. Rather it was the Norse from Denmark and Norway who had settled in eastern Britain in the late 8th and 9th centuries. This settlement (in contrast to previous Viking raids) was more or less peaceful. They ran businesses or farmed beside their English neighbors and often married English wives.

Because of their integration into English society, the Norse had to learn English. And adults, as you will know if you ever tried, find it difficult to learn another language fluently. Evidently they learned enough to get along and their simplified version of English gradually became the new standard across the country. Historical linguists tell us that these changes began in the northeast and gradually moved south over a period of several centuries.

A story related in Caxton's prologue to his translation of the Book of Eneydos in 1490 illustrates these changes in transition. A merchant ship was stranded in the Thames estuary by calm weather and a few of the men walked to a nearby house and asked the woman there for food. One asked for some "eggys", using the new (Norse) word. The woman didn't understand and said "Sorry I don't speak French", to which the merchant indignantly replied "Neither do I". Another merchant came to the rescue and explained that he was asking for "eyren", the old English word (singular "ey"), which the woman understood. You can read the story in Caxton's words here (page 2 starting line 25). He told the story to illustrate the predicament of English publishers in having to choose a dialect in which to print. It took over 200 years from the 14th to the 16th centuries for the word egg to become standard across England.

Norse also contributed many words to the English vocabulary. The most amazing are the pronouns they, them and their, replacing the Old English equivalents. Borrowing of pronouns is very rare and shows how significant the influence of Norse was on the core of the English language. Other core words include get, both, take, and want. Still other words are sky, skin, knife (and many other sk and kn words) and, as described above, egg. In many cases the Norse word was added, creating a synonym, rather than replacing the English word. Sometimes the adopted word took on a slightly different meaning, such as skirt (Norse) and shirt (English). Note that these words seem very English; they don't seem borrowed at all. Two reasons for this - Norse is another Germanic language so its words are more similar to English words than French or Latin words would be; and they were borrowed so long ago that they have become "Englishified" over time.

So English has two stages of people learning the language as adults and simplifying it in the process. First some people (possibly Semitic-speaking) in northern Europe learning Proto-Germanic (discussed in my previous post), then the Norse settlers in northeast England learning Old English. For them, all we native English speakers should be grateful, and those learning English as a second language even more so.

The Simplification of English – Stage 1, Proto-Germanic

While our children were in high school we hosted several European exchange students in our home for whom English was a second, third, or even fourth language. I was surprised when they told me that they considered English an easy language to learn, or at least less complicated than their own (French, Polish, German and Hungarian). What they meant by this was the lack of gender for most nouns and the simplified verb forms, not our beloved illogical English spelling.

John McWhorter, in “Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths of Language Usage” (The Great Courses), explains two quite different stages in the development of English where simplification occurred. The first occurred at the Proto-Germanic stage and therefore affected all the Germanic languages. The second occurred between Old and Middle English. In this post I’ll explore the first.

Compared to the other branches of Indo-European (e.g. Latin, Greek, Celtic, Persian, Sanskrit and Slavic), Proto-Germanic is different in several striking ways. One was the shift in consonants which is known as Grimm’s Law (discussed in an earlier post) where “p” becomes “f”, “k” becomes “h” etc. Another was a significant loss of complexity of verb forms. Where other IE language families have different verb forms for I, we (you & I), we (you, I & others), you (singular), you (plural) and they, PG had only one “we” and had the same verb form for “we”, “you all” and “they”. Verb tenses were also simplified to four (present, past, subjunctive and passive) from six in Indo-European. There were also some internal vowel changes in verb tenses introduced to Proto-Germanic (which I don’t understand so won’t attempt to explain here). Then there is vocabulary – many Germanic words were borrowed early on from the neighboring Indo-European languages of Roman and Celtic, but up to a third of Germanic roots are believed to be of non-Indo-European source.  What was going on here?

This type of language change (significant simplification) is not the normal pattern. In fact it is only seen when a language is learned by a group as adults. Who could these adults be?

First keep in mind that nearly all of the wide distribution of Indo-European languages is the result of imposition of the language on existing inhabitants by an introduced ruling class (either military or mercantile), rather than by mass migration of Indo-European speakers. See my post on the PIE Homeland. It had been proposed by Colin Renfrew (and others) that the Indo-European languages were introduced to Europe along with agriculture by farmers migrating west and north from Anatolia (modern Turkey). It made a nice neat theory but turned out not to be true – agriculture preceded IE languages by several thousand years in Europe. There were therefore, by the time the Indo-European language was advancing up the Danube into northwest Europe, farmers settled there with their own languages, whatever they may have been. It was these people who learned Indo-European as adults and adopted it as their own.

There is some linguistic evidence suggesting that these northwestern European people who learned Indo-European, and made it into Proto-Germanic, spoke a Semitic language (of which Arabic and Hebrew are members). Semitic languages are rich in the internal vowel changes of the kind seen in Proto-Germanic verbs; the fricative consonants “f”, “h”, and “th” introduced to Proto-Germanic as explained in Grimm’s Law are common in Semitic languages, and a few of the non-PIE Germanic roots seem to have a Semitic connection. This Semitic influence theory, promoted by Prof. Theo Vennemann, is quite controversial.

One theory to explain a Semitic influence on Germanic languages has the Phoenicians, a Semitic speaking sea-faring people who are known to have reached Portugal, to have sailed all the way around to north-western Europe – the Netherlands perhaps or even Denmark. This is highly speculative at best, as there is no archaeological evidence and so far to my knowledge no genetic evidence, to support their presence that far north. My theory (and you saw it here first) is that some influence of Semitic languages had accompanied agriculture as it made its way from the middle east to northwestern Europe. One of Bryan Sykes' maternal ancestors of modern Europeans described in his 2001 book " The Seven Daughters of Eve" is Jasmine who originated in the middle east and is associated with the spread of agriculture into Europe. Her genes spread into Europe and it seems quite likely that her language did as well, hundreds of years before the introduction ofGermanic Indo-European languages.

Whoever the first speakers of Proto-Germanic were, we owe them our gratitude for helping to simplify not only English but every other Germanic language spoken today.

The next stage of simplification for English, which occurred during the transition from Old English to Middle English, is credited to, of all people, the Norse Vikings who settled in northern England. But that’s a story for another week.

Prescriptivism and Descriptivism in the 18th Century

There are two opposing philosophies in the history of linguistics which can be summed up as prescriptivism and descriptivism. Should linguists write how the language ought to be spoken or written, or just record how, in fact, it is spoken or written?

The science of modern linguistics has come firmly down on the descriptive side. They realize that it is not only futile but fruitless to try to prevent a language from changing or to convert all dialects to a standard. But it was not always so.

During the Renaissance (16^th and 17^th centuries) the “correct” spelling and pronunciation of English words became an important class distinction differentiating between those of refined upper class from the “vulgar” masses. Significantly, it was during this time that the meaning of the word vulgar changed from simply “of the people” (eg Vulgar Latin) to its modern sense of crudeness and inferiority.

During the centuries to follow, linguists would fall into either of the two extremes. Robert Lowth (1710-1787) was a strong prescriptivist; Joseph Priestly (1733-1804) more of a descriptivist. Lowth wrote several books on English grammar in order to “teach what is right”. What he decided was “right” was based largely on his study of Latin. For example, it was Lowth who gave us the rule that sentences should not end with a preposition (now what did he have to do that for?).

Priestly on the other hand was an empirical scientist and understood the importance of observation (as well as a grammarian, he helped discover oxygen and founded Unitarianism in England and later in the United States). His book on grammar, published about the same time as Lowth’s, was based not on Latin principles but on “…a collection of observations on the structure of it…” Priestly had his personal grammatical biases too, however. Like most scientists of his day he had a strong attraction to the idea of simplicity and applied this to English grammar. While keeping English grammar rules simple is a noble objective, he also applied it to the vocabulary and strove to pare English down to its English roots. He particularly disliked what he called “Gallicisms”, that is words recently adopted from French. Priestly’s philosophy on language is summed up in this quote: “I think it not only unsuitable to the genius of a free nation but in itself ill-calculated to reform and fix a language”.

Another linguist of the 18^th century, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) started as a prescriptivist and then converted to a descriptivist. Johnson is most famous for his 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language, the significance of which I shall devote a later post to (sorry Lowth!). In his proposal for the dictionary to his patron Lord Chesterfield, written in 1747, Johnson describes his goal to bring rule and order to the English language. He compares himself to Caesar about to invade Britain, and expresses the hope that “…though I should not complete the conquest, I shall at least discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed farther, to reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws.” He continues to explain “This, my Lord, is my idea of an English dictionary, a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened.” Johnson was proposing to single handedly reform the entire English language with his dictionary which he estimated would take him three years to complete.

Johnson’s dictionary was published in 1755, 8 years after the proposal. During this time his goals had shifted. In the preface to the dictionary, Johnson uses much different analogies to describe his work. He had come to recognize that language was continuously subject to change and that the goal of the lexicographer was “to register the language” rather than to fix it. Reforming a language would be like “trying to rope in a river”. He compared the immensity of this task to a story from Greek mythology: “...to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chase the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.”

But of course Johnson’s 1755 dictionary did in fact serve to “fix” the English language by the very act of recording it. For 150 years until the publishing of the first Oxford English Dictionary, it was the standard reference in both the schools and the home for spelling, pronunciation and definition. In it he codified the spelling reforms made by grammarians during the previous two centuries. In Lecture 21 of The History of the English Language, 2^nd Edition [The Great Courses, 2008], Professor Seth Lerer describes the dictionary as “an arbiter of language and a guide to life”.

I maintain there is a place for both prescriptivism and descriptivism in English. In the short term, elementary and high schools must teach students the standard rules of the language – spelling, grammar and punctuation. This is essential for clear, unambiguous communication, not only with one’s neighbor but with speakers of the language around the world. However I also believe that grammarian authorities (whoever they be) need to be more willing to accept natural changes to the language. A case in point is who and whom, discussed in my post of 11 Sept 2011.

Let me finish with a quote from page 20 of Lynne Truss’ delightful book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”. She is writing about punctuation but I submit that her argument applies equally to spelling and grammar.

The reason it’s worth standing up for punctuation is not that it’s an arbitrary system of notation known only to an oversensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

Eastern American Dialects – an example of migration and ethno-linguistic frontier formation

In Chapter 6 “The Archaeology of Language” of his book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David W. Anthony uses the colonization of North America by English speaking people as an example of ethno-linguistic frontiers [1] formed by migration. In many cases the first people to settle a region put their language and cultural stamp on the area which is copied by later migrants. In the Eastern USA example, the language and cultural boundaries coincide almost exactly.

Between about 1620 and 1750 what is now the eastern United States was colonized by four different migration streams from different areas of Britain. These formed distinct ethno-linguistic patterns which are still very much visible today. They are:

• New England (Yankee) – East Anglia
• Mid-Atlantic ( Pennsylvania Quaker) – English Midlands
• Virginia Coast (Royalist Anglican) – Somerset and Wessex
• Appalachians (“Hillbillies”) – Scotch Irish

New England, centered on Boston, was first settled by the Pilgrims from East Anglia. The Yankee dialect is a variant of the East Anglia dialect and the New England folk culture (church, house, barn and fence types; town organization type; food and dress preference; and religion) is a simplified version of East Anglian folk culture.

The Virginia coast was settled by Anglican royalists escaping anti-royalist sentiments of the English Civil War. These settlers gave Virginia a distinct linguistic and folk culture based on the tobacco plantation.

Similarly Quakers from the North-Midlands, Lancashire and Yorkshire emigrated to avoid persecution following the Restoration. Most settled in Pennsylvania. Their distinct dialect and folk culture was later added to by German-speaking settlers from Switzerland and southern Germany (Pennsylvania “Dutch”) [2].

The Appalachian dialect was touched on in an earlier post http://www.englishcowpath.blogspot.com/2011/10/hunting-we-will-go.html

Migration of other people from Britain, Europe and other countries, and movements of people within the country, all added to or modified the regional dialects of America.  Despite the complexity from these other sources, these original four ethno-linguistic cultures can still be observed. Besides the regional accents and architectural styles of old buildings, Anthony claims that even modern presidential voting patterns can be discerned and traced back to these original folk cultures.

 _______________________

[1] Frontier in this discussion refers to a boundary between two discernable cultures or languages.

[2] There were Dutch settlers in America, centered around New York from which some place names like Harlem, Bronx and Brooklyn originate as well as a few other words like waffle and poppycock (from Dutch pappekak meaning “soft dung”). The Pennsylvania Dutch however were German-speaking people from Switzerland and southern Germany – the Amish, and Mennonites. Here Dutch is an Anglicized form of Deutsch (the German word for German).

Grimm’s Law

In linguistic circles Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) is better known for his discovery of phonetic changes in the development of Proto-Germanic than for his German folk tales.

Jacob was trained as a lawyer but was more interested in history and language – early German literature in particular. He authored many scholarly books including Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache (History of the German Language), Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar), and the monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary). In 1812 and 1814 he and his younger brother Wilhelm published their collection of old German folk tales as Grimms Märchen (Grimms’ Fairy Tales) Volumes 1 and 2.

Grimm’s Law was first published in the second edition of his German Grammar in 1822. It is considered significant in linguistic science for introducing “…a rigorous methodology to historic linguistic research.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Grimm].

Sometime during the progression from Proto-Indo-European (about 2000 BC) to Proto-Germanic (about 500 BC), certain sound shifts in consonants occurred which were nearly universal (occurring to all words). These changes did not occur in any other PIE daughter languages such as the Proto-Romance language, so are observable with comparisons between English words taken directly from Latin, French or other Romance languages and those from its Germanic roots.

Greatly simplified, the changes are (with examples):

Labials (sounds made with the lips)

p changes to f: ped / foot; pater / father

f changes to b: fund / bottom

b changes to p: labial / lip

Velars (sounds made mid-palate)

k changes to h: canine / hound

h changes to g: host / guest

g changes to k: genuflect / knee

Dentals (sounds made with the tongue and teeth)

t changes to th: triple / three

th changes to d: thyroid / door

d changes to t: duo / two

Note that in all three groups, the changes go full circle, sort of like musical chairs.

Verner’s Law, developed by Danish linguist Karl Verner, explains further changes that occurred later to certain consonants in certain conditions (depending on the accent of the preceding syllable).

These sound changes are evident in all of the modern Germanic languages: German, Frisian, Dutch (and Africaans), Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Luxembourgish, and of course English.

Sound changes like this are common in language history and take several generations, often a few centuries, to complete. A more recent example in English is known as the Great Vowel Shift which occurred between 1400 and 1600 (between Chaucer and Shakespeare). That’s a subject for a future post.

English Spelling & Pronunciation - Why the Discrepancy?

The discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation of words is perhaps the most difficult part of learning English as a second language. Or for that matter as a first language. How did this discrepancy develop?

David Crystal in By Hook or by Crook devotes a few pages to the history of English spelling that I will summarize here.

Irish monks living in England developed the first writing system for English during the Anglo-Saxon period. They did a fairly good job of recording the language as it was spoken. One problem they encountered was the difference in dialects between areas of England. Spelling phonetically resulted in hundreds of words with different spellings in different parts of the country. "Old" for example was spelled "eald" in the south but as "ald" in the north.

After the Norman Conquest (1066) the writing of English was taken over by the French who introduced their own peculiar way of spelling. Some of the Norman French contributions to English spelling are: "qu" for "cw" (thus cwen became queen), the "ou" in words like mouse and house, and the "gh" in might and rough. The Old English alphabet, with lots of up and down strokes made it hard to read words with adjacent letters "n", "m", "v" and "u", so they frequently substituted "o" for "u" making words like come, love, and son. As Crystal explains "[this] certainly helped legibility, but it added a new set of complications to spelling".

Later spelling "reformers" near the end of the Middle Ages decided that spelling should reflect a word's history, so words with a Latin origin were changed to remind readers of the original Latin word. This resulted in the "b" in debt (to remind us of Latin debitum) and the "o" in people (for Latin populum), among many others. Most modern English speakers do not view these changes as an improvement (my understatement of the day).

So why have these spellings persisted? It's not for lack of reformers. Many scholars over the years have made spelling reform proposals. All but one (more on the exception in a minute) were met with fierce resistance. No one wanted to have a new system imposed on them, even if it would make life easier (witness the resistance to metric in North America). It didn't help that the reformers couldn't agree among themselves on a single system. I have an entire book on the subject of English spelling in my language library - Righting the Mother Tongue by David Wolman - which I will delve into for more detail another time.

Now for the exception among spelling reformers: Noah Webster. His proposals came at the right time and place to gain national acceptance - the formation of the new nation of "The United States of America". Strong anti-British sentiment lent support to his proposal in 1789 for America "as an independent nation... to have a system of our own, in language as well as government." His 1828 "American Dictionary of the English Language" became the standard for American English. Webster of course only did the job of reform half way - if that. He dropped the "u" from words like colour and the "o" from diarrhoea but left the vast majority of irregularly spelled words (nearly 1/4 of the words in a modern College dictionary) the way they were. And of the words that he did change, Canada adopted both British and American versions, only adding to our spelling complexity (see my June 23 post "Canadian English, Eh?"). His opportunity may never knock again.

There is some hope, however. Modern linguists are watching the way English is being used in social media like email, chatrooms, and blogs. Here grammar, punctuation and spelling are greatly simplified, more or less without loss of meaning. Blogging is of particular interest where more complex ideas are being published but, as Crystal puts it, "without the intervention of an editor or proof-reader, so it is more like 'speaking in print' than anything before". Perhaps this is the beginning of grass-roots language reform.

Are you a traditionalist or reformer? I'd like to hear your thoughts on English spelling.

A-Hunting We Will Go

Ever wonder about the a- tacked in front of some verbs? Where did it originate? Does it (or did it) have any special meaning?

We're familiar with this construction now only from a few old folk songs like "A-hunting we will go", a few old English Christmas carols "Here we go a-wassailing" and "six geese a-laying", and the 1969 film "Daddy's Gone A-Hunting" which borrowed the name (and little else) from a silent 1925 MGM film of the same name. It is also found in a line of the Knight's song to Alice in Through the Looking Glass: "an aged aged man, A-sitting on a gate" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haddocks%27_Eyes).

Wikipedia describes it as an "archaic intensifying prefix". David Crystal in By Hook or By Crook explains that the a- originally meant the action is on-going, something you do over and over. "A-sitting" indicates the old man had been sitting on the gate for a long time, or was accustomed to doing so. Its use in this regard died out centuries ago but has been kept alive by poets and song-writers who found it useful to fit the meter of their compositions. All of the examples given above are relatively recent and likely used for this reason. "A-wassailing" was composed about 1850 and "A-hunting we will go" was written in 1877 for "The Beggar's Opera". "The Twelve Days of Christmas" is older, first published in 1780 and likely somewhat older than that. Through the Looking Glass was published in 1871.

The a- construction also survived at least into the 20th century in the Appalachian English dialect. One can imagine a stereotypical hillbilly leaning on the door of his mountain shack, rifle in the crook of his arm, saying "I ain't afeerd o' nobody". It was taken there by the early settlers and because of their cultural isolation survived long after it was dropped by English-speakers everywhere else. For more on this fascinating dialect see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_English.

Lately I've been a-reading By Hook or By Crook by the English linguist David Crystal. It's subtitled "A Journey in Search of English" but I would describe it as a "delightful romp". As Crystal describes his journey through Wales and England recording local dialects, his narrative gets sidetracked into many different directions, all of them (to me anyway) quite interesting. I will share more of these in shorter posts like this one rather than wait for time to compose longer essays.

Riding, Farthing, Reeve & Sheriff

Here in Saskatchewan, we are coming up to a provincial election. Each district in which a Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA for short) is elected is called a riding. This word has an interesting etymology – it started when the County of Yorkshire was divided into three administrative divisions by the ruling Danes probably in the 10^th century.

Yorkshire was ruled by the Danes between 866 and 1066 which resulted in a higher proportion of Old Norse words adopted into Yorkshire English than in any other part of Britain. One of these words was thrithi for thirds. This became thriding in Old English when applied to one of the three Yorkshire divisions – West Thriding, East Thriding and North Thriding. Because of the “t” or “th” endings of the first words in the names, the “th” of thriding was dropped to form simply riding. My Bielby ancestors on my maternal grandmother’s side came from a small village in East Riding.

A similar word is farthing, created from a “fourth-ing”. A farthing is an English coin worth ¼ of a penny – the smallest coin in British currency, hence symbolically of very little value. In Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, a farthing is one of four regions of the Shire.

While on Saskatchewan politics, another word that comes to mind is reeve. In the western provinces and parts of Ontario, the reeve is the elected chair of a rural municipal council (equivalent to the mayor of a town). Reeve comes from Old English “gerefa” and was used in Anglo-Saxon times in Britain for a number of minor local officials. It is no longer used in Britain (to my knowledge) but has survived in “the colonies”. Similarly sheriff originated as “shire reeve” – the reeve of a Shire. I don’t know to what extent a sheriff is still used in Britain, but the position was made famous by American western novels and movies, and is still used today, in varying roles, in many American States and in Canada.

So at election time, remember that the word riding originally meant a third of Yorkshire, and reeve was rescued from extinction by Canadian municipal government. And when reading a Zane Gray or Louis L’Amour novel or watching an old “cowboys and Indians” movie, remember that the hero’s title of sheriff originated as a “shire reeve” in England. Of course not all sheriffs are heroes – like any government official, a sheriff’s position is susceptible to corruption, as attested to by the reputation of the Sheriff of Nottingham in the Robin Hood stories.

Who, Whom and Wham

In the last post I quoted a newspaper columnist’s dismay at the degradation of English, particularly the incorrect use of who and whom. Linguistics professor John McWhorter mentions this particular pair of words in Lecture 19 of The Story of Human Language. In this lecture, titled “The Fallacy of Blackboard Grammar”, McWhorter argues that the idea of speaking “incorrectly” is a property only of the minority of languages which have a written standard. For most of the world’s languages – which are oral only (think Amazonian natives) – this notion would be absurd.

The rules of English grammar were first encoded by two authors writing in the 1700s. Their books A Short Introduction to English Grammar by Robert Lowth (1762) and English Grammar by Lindley Murray (1794) set out for the first time rules for English speakers. Many editions and similar texts followed – their influence lives on more than 200 years later.

There are two different approaches to linguistics. Lowth and Murray were following the Prescriptive approach – telling people how they ought to speak. Modern linguists prefer the Descriptive approach – describing how people actually do speak. To be fair to Lowth and Murray, English was, during their time, becoming an international language and standardization of the spoken and written language would be useful. They were also writing long before the modern science of linguistics had developed.

Lowth and Murray believed that Latin and Greek were superior to Modern English because of their many case endings in both verbs and nouns. They rescued the few remaining case endings of nouns that had not already been lost from Old English and standardized them. Many of these are pronouns with different words for subject and object: I/me, he/him, she/her, and who/whom. Imagine if there were sets of 4 or more (not just pairs) of these for every noun! My older brothers studied Latin in high school and found these case endings a chore to memorize. I’m grateful that English has been greatly simplified, at least in this respect.

Let’s look at who/whom for example. In Old English there was a different word for each of the following noun cases:

                  Case                              OE    Modern           Example

            Nominative (subject)   hwā     who     Who gave you my book?

            Genitive (possessive)  hwæs   whose  Whose book do you have?

            Accusative (object)      hwone whom  Whom did you see with my book?

            Dative (recipient)         hwām  wham  Wham did you give my book?

The modern form of the dative case wham is italicized because it does not exist in any dictionary. Its role is adequately covered by “to whom” and, I think it’s safe to say, it has never been missed. According to Wikipedia, the Dative case is completely absent in modern English, having merged with the Accusative case during the Middle English period to form one Objective case. McWhorter’s argument is that like wham, whom is also unnecessary.

The demise of whom is predicted by many, not just because it is a relic of an archaic system, but because of the observation of its declining use in everyday speech. This demise is not imminent, however, as the loss of whom is a grammatical change, not a lexical one, which typically takes much longer - often centuries – to complete. Language purists strive to slow this process even more but their cause will eventually fail.

The more I think of it, the more I like wham. Let’s start a movement to bring wham back into the English language. Wham shall we direct this movement first?

The Story of Human Language DVDs

After several years of receiving catalogues in the mail from The Great Courses [www.getgreatcourses.com] I finally ordered one (my wife actually encouraged me to order one for my birthday). There are easily half a dozen that I would love to get, but one at a time... My first was The Story of Human Languages with professor John McWhorter.

There are 36 half-hour lectures on 6 dvds - 18 hours worth total. Donna and I have watched 7 lectures so far. It even comes with a Course Guidebook so you don't have to take notes, and can see how words referred to are spelled. McWhorter is one of my favorite linguistic authors anyway for his The Power of Babel book published in 2001.

In Lecture 3 McWhorter talks about sound changes, and explained the Great Vowel Shift which started in the late 1300's in English. The word name for example used to be pronounced NAH-meh which is why it is spelled the way it is. Two changes turned name into the way it sounds today - the first vowel changed into a long A, and the E became silent. This explains much of our weird spelling in English - the spelling is a fossilized remnant of the way words used to be pronounced - the sounds changed but the spellings did not. Boat, coat, etc used to be two syllable words BO-at, CO-at, etc. which is how they are still pronounced in modern Frisian. Inherent laziness caused our ancestors to turn them into one syllable words. Other examples were given of how words shorten over time.

Lecture 4 deals with how words are added to, a process that continuously occurs along with the shortening trend. Prefixes and suffixes started out as separate words that got shortened and attached. McWhorter explained how grammatical words (prepositions, articles, conjunctions etc like in, under, the, but, not...) develop out of concrete words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs), a process called Grammaticalization. He gave the fascinating example of how, in the French language, the concrete word pas meaning "step" became a grammatical word meaning "not" (if someone asks, I'll explain it in a future post).

Another process called Rebracketing creates new words out of other words. For example all one became alone from which came the word lone (not the other way around as we might suppose). Similarly a noranj became an orange, and an ekename became a nickname.  Another example of rebracketing is hamburger which started as Hamburger steak, named for the German city where burg means "fort" and ham has nothing to do with meat. It has been further shortened to burger, referring to the meat patty, from which variations like cheeseburger  and fishburger were invented. He also showed how new words in tonal languages can develop using an example from the Lahu language of SE Asia.

I'll share more from these dvds in future posts.

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.