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.

Grammar Mistakes That Aren’t

I’ve just nicely started reading a new language book and want to share some thoughts from it. Robert Lane Greene is a writer who lives in New York. Greene is a regular correspondent for The Economist and has published in The New York Times and many other well established periodicals so is well acquainted with modern English usage yet is no fan of prescriptionism. In his 2011 book You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity, Greene “pokes gentle fun” at linguistic sticklers.

As Greene learned new languages (he speaks nine last count) he began to question English grammar rules. If Danes can end sentences with a preposition, why can’t the English?

Here are some quotes from the Preface:

I think flexibility, humility, and multilingualism should take the place of sticklerism, arrogance, and nationalism when we think about language.

Language isn’t just rules and words, but communication.

Greene warns about journalists or other writers who, because they know how to use language well, think they can write about language without doing their research. He compares this to a top athlete thinking he is a physiologist. Greene devotes several pages to humorist author Bill Bryson’s “facts” about English and other languages that, in fact, just aren’t so.

Greene then takes umbrage with language sticklers, focusing on Lynne Truss in particular. The rally cry of her best-selling book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” (2003) is “Stickler’s unite!”. Greene argues that her “fury on the decline of English punctuation and those who hasten it” is greatly “out of proportion to the crime”. As an example he quotes her pronouncement that those who misplace apostrophes “deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.” Greene doesn’t seem to get her use of the British hyperbole. Later Truss demonstrates her appreciation of the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius (1450-1515) for standardizing Western punctuation by “absolutely kicking myself that I never volunteered to have his babies”. Perhaps Greene missed reading the Publisher’s Note to the American edition which ends “Please enjoy this narrative history of punctuation as it was meant to be enjoyed, bone-dry humour and cultural references intact…”

Getting back to my post title, there are two types of “grammar mistakes that aren’t”. One type occurs when the critic misunderstands or misapplies grammar rules himself. An example might be saying that the sentence “Send a copy to Joe and me” should be “Send a copy to Joe and I”. The first sentence is correct; the “and I” rule applies to the subject not the object of a sentence. Such incorrect corrections can be either ignored or dealt with satisfactorily by reference to the actual rule.

The second type, a few of which Greene tackles in his book, are grammar rules that shouldn’t be. Greene lists three bases for grammar rules:

·         clarity – does it make the meaning clearer?

·         literary tradition – is it used (or not) by great English writers, past and present?

·         purity – is it native to English or adopted from another language?

I would argue that only the first is essential. Just because Milton or Shakespeare broke a grammar rule doesn’t make it obsolete. And a rule borrowed from another language, if it makes English easier and clearer, should be welcomed. Some grammar rules, however, fail all three. Here are some examples:

Ending a sentence with a preposition

This is a natural sentence structure. We all do it. But according to a grammar rule, we shouldn’t. (We aren’t supposed to start a sentence with “but” either; I’ll get to that in a minute). So where did the rule prohibiting this particular sentence structure come from? (Now doesn’t that sound better than “from where did the rule… come?)  Blame a 17^th century poet, John Dryden, who liked to compose in Latin and then translate into English. Because one can’t end a Latin sentence with a preposition, Dryden stipulated that one shouldn’t in English either. His arbitrary rule was adopted by the writers of the first English grammar books in the 18^th century and continues to influence writers to this day.

Double Negatives

Robert Lowth, who I discussed in my post of April 2, proclaimed that two negatives cancel each other. Thus “He don’t know nothing” must mean that he does know something rather than emphasizing his ignorance. While this rule has some basis in mathematical logic (-2 x -3 = +6) there is no reason that it has to apply to English. The use of double negatives for emphasis is common in certain dialects and everyday speech both historically (Chaucer and Shakespeare used it) and currently. Some languages like Spanish and Russian require the negative pronoun with a negative verb.

Split infinitives

The rule banning the insertion of words between the “to” and the rest of the verb in the infinitive tense is more modern, appearing in an anonymous article in 1834. The rule was adopted by grammarians and quickly became official. It likely originated from Latin and Greek where it is impossible because the infinitive form is one word. It completely fails the clarity test and has a long list of respected authors who ignore it – both historically (before the rule was invented) and afterwards (witness Star Trek’s “to boldly go...”). George Bernard Shaw verbally attacked an editor of a newspaper who had corrected his split infinitives calling him, among many other names, “a pedant, an ignoramus, an idiot…” and suggested he be replaced by an intelligent Newfoundland dog. Ironically, Shaw’s character Henry Higgins in Pygmalion shows a complete intolerance of nonstandard speech when he tells Eliza Doolittle “A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere—no right to live.”

The attitude towards these (and other) rules is changing. Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933) in his 1926 book A Dictionary of Modern English Usage encouraged readers to ignore rules that didn’t make sense or which caused ambiguity. He freely gave license to split infinitives, to end sentences with prepositions, to begin sentences with “and” or “but”, and to use “none” with a plural verb (e.g. “none of us are going”).

I agree that the first and third rule described above can be safely ignored. On the use of double negatives I’m not so sure. While the rule could have gone either way (that two negatives cancel or reinforce each other), one or the other should be standard. The use of double negatives was already in decline when Lowth’s rule was written, he just finished it off. For clarity sake, I would reserve a reinforcing double negative for dialogue in a dialect where it would not be unexpected (did you catch my double negative where the intent is to cancel?). One tip is the word “ain’t”; if someone says “she ain’t never comin' back” there’s no use waiting up for her.

Fowler’s rather liberal English usage book was published in England which one would expect to be the bastion of prescriptionism. Meanwhile in freedom-loving America William Strunck Jr. and E.B. White published, in 1959  The Elements of Style, commonly referred to as “Strunk and White”. This book is full of picky little rules, many of which are quite arbitrary like Strunk’s ban on beginning a sentence with “however”. White added “hopefully” to the sentence-beginning ban list as in “Hopefully, I’ll do better tomorrow”. Greene argues that in this usage “hopefully” is a “sentence adverb”, and gives another example “Honestly, he’s a liar”. In Greene’s example, “honestly” obviously does not describe the person being talked about but modifies the rest of the sentence. If “honestly” is acceptable in this structure, why shouldn’t “hopefully” be?

White’s inflexibility on the many rules in their book seems at odds with his beautiful quote on language change that I use in my blog heading. I suppose it illustrates the idea that language is very personal: “all changes to language are fine and acceptable – except for the ones I don’t like”.

The Proto-Indo-European Homeland Puzzle

The Indo-European Language Family

Indo-European was the first language family to be identified. This discovery, and the beginning of modern linguistics, can be dated to February 2, 1786 at a gathering of scientists and other interested men. Sir William Jones, speaking at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, made this astounding statement:

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure: more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.

Jones later added Persian and Celtic as likely members of this family of languages.

Jones was uniquely qualified to make this discovery. His parental language was Welsh; he was taught English at school; he learned classical Greek and Latin in university where he studied law; he wrote the first English grammar of the Persian language (which earned him a reputation as one of the most respected linguists in Europe); and when appointed a judge in India at age 37 set out to learn the Sanskrit language to better understand local laws. Thus by age 40 Jones was familiar with a language in 6 (out of a total of 12) different Indo-European language branches.

Indo-European languages are spoken today by over 3 billion people - about half of the world's population - as either a first or second language. These languages are divided into 10 or 12 language branches or subfamilies. See the attached graph (Figure 1.1 of The Horse, The Wheel and Language p.12) which is arranged more or less geographically. English is a member of the Germanic subfamily along with German, Dutch, Frisian, the Scandinavian languages (which includes Icelandic), Yiddish, and Afrikaans. Other languages to note include:

            Tocharian – two extinct languages found in western China, the farthest East branch

            Hittite – a member of the extinct Anatolian branch – the earliest branch to separate

            Romany – the language of the Gypsies of Europe, is a member of the Indic branch showing that they originated in northwest India (not to be confused with Rumanian which is a member of the Latin or Romance language branch)

Source: Figure 1.1 of The Horse, The Wheel and Language p.12

About 6,000 to 5,000 years ago the parent language, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken by a semi-nomadic tribe of people in the southern Ukraine and Russia. How their language spread and evolved into all of all these languages could be the subject for a future lecture. Today I want to show how historical linguistics and archaeology were combined to solve the puzzle of who the speakers of Proto-Indo-European were, and where and when they lived.

Source: Figure 1.2 of The Horse, The Wheel and Language p.14

The Proto-Indo-European Homeland Puzzle

Since the discovery of the IE language family, the location of the homeland of the original speakers has been claimed by different people to be many different places: India, Pakistan, Syria/Lebanon, the Caucasus Mountains, Turkey, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, the Balkans and Germany. By the late 20^th century linguists only seriously considered two of these – Anatolia (modern Turkey) and the steppes of southern Ukraine and Russia. And as recently as 2000, Calvert Watkins in his essay “Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans” which introduces his book The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots stated “Archaeologists have not in fact succeeded in locating the Indo-Europeans.”

Colin Renfrew was a strong supporter of the other serious contender, Anatolia. Renfew's elegant proposal, published in the 1990's, had Proto-Indo-European migrant farmers carry their language along with agriculture from the Middle East to the westernmost part of Europe. But like many elegant theories, this one turned out to be not true. (I was greatly disappointed when linguistics and DNA analysis disproved Thor Heyerdahl's theories of Polynesian origins). There are, as we will see, serious problems with Renfrew's theory.

Before going further, I need to emphasize one point. Proto-Indo-European is a language. It is not a culture, nor is it a genetically-definable population. Language does not necessarily follow cultural boundaries, which can be determined by archaeology. Every first year archaeology student is taught “pots are not people”. But we know that someone must have spoken this language, and they must have lived in a particular place during a particular time. So while looking for the speakers of Proto-Indo-European we need to be careful of this constraint.

  

Clues from the Language

Since Proto-Indo-European is a language, let's look first at clues to the homeland from the language itself. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots published in 2000 contains 1350 reconstructed root words and several thousand more words based on these roots. These words have been painstakingly reconstructed by comparing similar words (called cognates) from the daughter languages over the more than 200 years since Jones' discovery. What can we learn about the people who spoke this language from their vocabulary?

- they knew four seasons with snow in winter

- they were not familiar with tropical plants or animals

- animals include: wolf, lynx, elk beaver, otter, mouse, fish

- birds include: crane, goose, duck, eagle, woodpecker

- insects: wasp, hornet, fly, louse, bee, honey (mead)

- domestic animals include: dog, cattle, sheep and horse

- horses play an important role in the culture

- they practiced spinning and weaving of wool

- they knew metallurgy - copper

- they knew of the wheel and used wagons or carts (weak link in Anatolian)

- they knew of boats and oars - words like nav (navigate, navy) and rowing.

- gift exchange is an important part of their culture

- the guest-host relation was important –  *ghosti is the root of both host and guest (ghost originally meant visitor or guest)

- they borrowed words from Proto-Uralic, another Eurasian language family, suggesting that the Proto-Indo-European speakers must have lived close to, and likely traded with, people who spoke Proto-Uralic who then, as now, live in northern Europe and Siberia (Hungarian is a member of this family found in Europe because of recent migration (~900CE).

The seasons and animals indicate a northern location either in or adjacent to a forest. The words for bee and honey place the homeland west of the Ural Mountains as honeybees do not occur east of there.

Clues to Dating Proto-Indo-European

Language can also help place the Proto-Indo-European speakers in time as well as location.

Agriculture was introduced to Europe between 6700 and 6500 BC while the wheel was not known until 3400 BC and woolen textiles sometime after 4000 BC. For the daughter language families to have similar words for the wheel and wool, they must have separated from Proto-Indo-European after their arrival. This effectively eliminates the Anatolian farmer immigrant theory. Besides, the two or three Anatolian languages were very similar to each other and spoken by only a small number of people in this area, which strongly suggests they are spoken by Indo-European speaking migrants to Anatolia, not by the ancestors of the language.

The domestication of the horse provides additional clues. Horses were hunted for meat by the people of the steppe for millennia before they were domesticated. They were first domesticated sometime after 4800 BC, a thousand years after cattle were introduced to the area. But they were raised for their meat only. During a cool dry period (4200-3800 BC) horses would have an advantage over cattle because they can forage for themselves during the winter. [Pioneer farmers in Saskatchewan like my grandfather often turned their horses loose for the winter to manage for themselves, rounding them up in the spring]. Riding of horses began on the steppes sometime before 3700 BC and had spread to Northern Kazakhstan, the Caucasus Mountains, and into Europe, by 3000 BC.

An important tool used in the dating of horse riding is bit wear on horse molars. The identification of tooth wear caused by bits of metal, bone, rope and rawhide, was pioneered by the author of The Horse, The Wheel and Language – David W. Anthony, and his wife, fellow archaeologist Dorcas Brown. There is an interesting Saskatchewan connection here. One of the experts they contacted was Hilary Clayton who began studying the mechanics of bits in horses’ mouths while working in Philadelphia, and then took a job at the Western Veterinarian College in Saskatoon. Anthony and Brown followed her to Saskatchewan in 1985 and viewed the X-ray videos she had made of horses chewing their bits.

Riding horses provided a significant benefit to herders in the steppes. A man on horseback could manage a herd of cattle or sheep much larger than a man on foot. With the much later advent of wheeled carts, about 3300 BC, the herders could carry with them tents, food and water allowing them to take advantage of the vast areas between the river valleys. This opened up the steppe much as the horse did to the plains of North America 5,000 years later.

Dating the Daughters

Language provides clues to timing in another way. Linguists can date, with more or less certainty, when each of the daughter language branches separated from the mother language. Here is a list of the branches, in the order of separation, with the approximate date (all BC) of separation (from Figure 3.2 The Horse, The Wheel and Language p. 57).

            Anatolian        4200

            Tocharian       3700 - 3300

            Germanic        3300

            Celtic / Italic   3000

            Greek / Armenian 2500

            Balto-Slavic    2500

            Indo-Iranian    2500-2200

Clues from Archaeology – The Kurgan Cultures

With the time line narrowed to the period 4000 to 2000 BC, it's time to look at the archaeological record and see who was living in the likely homelands and how well they fit with the linguistic clues. The archaeology of the Pontic-Caspian steppes was mostly carried out by Soviet scientists and published in Russian. These were not translated into English until the 1990s. Anthony was one of the first western archaeologists to study this work and relate it to the Proto-Indo-European homeland question.

Anthony found a close fit with the western steppe peoples who built huge burial mounds called kurgans. Their culture varied somewhat over the Proto-Indo-European time line and also geographically from place to place within this large area, but their overall cultures were similar, especially compared to the foragers to the north and east and to the sophisticated farming cultures to the west and south. They were semi-nomadic, raising cattle and sheep. Horses were important both for meat and for riding to manage their growing herds. They used wheeled carts. They mined their own ore and made their own tools and weapons of copper, tin and bronze.

Even more compelling is the evidence, from archaeology, of known migrations out of the steppes in the right directions and at the right times to account for the birth of the daughter language families.

1) to the west 4200-3900 (Anatolian)

2) to the east 3700-3300 (Tocharian)

3) to the west - several waves (Germanic, Celtic, Italic)

4) to north (Baltic, Slavic)

5) to the east and south (Iranian, Indic)

I should explain that by migration I do not mean large scale movement of people displacing existing populations along with their culture and language. This may have been the case with the Pre-Tocharians who made a remarkably long migration in one jump to the Altai Mountains 2000 km to the east (equivalent to the journey made by my grandparents from southern Ontario to Saskatchewan, but without the advantage of trains). Most if not all the other migrations were by small groups who, through some combination of trade or intimidation, became rulers of existing populations. They brought with them enough of their culture to be recognized archaeologically; and they brought their language which, for a variety of reasons, was adopted by the others and continued to spread long after they were gone.

  

Puzzle Solved

While there may be a few objections to his theory not yet satisfactorily answered, Anthony is convinced that the Proto-Indo-European Homeland puzzle has been solved.

Source: Figure 5.1 of The Horse, The Wheel and Language p.84

I want to finish with a quote from The Horse, The Wheel and Language  p. 464

Understanding the people who lived before us is difficult, particularly the people who lived in the prehistoric tribal past. Archaeology throws a bright light on some aspects of their lives but leaves much in the dark. Historical linguistics can illuminate a few of those dark corners.