Borrowed Words

All languages borrow words from languages with which they come in contact; English is unique in the extent to which it has done so. Henry Hitchings in his book The Secret Life of Words estimates that English has borrowed words from 350 different languages. This book deals extensively with this phenomenon [1] of the English language. Wikipedia estimates that only 26% of the current 700,000 to 1 million English words come from its Germanic roots, the rest are borrowed from other languages. Words of French origin actually exceeds German, making up 29% of English vocabulary and Latin (including technical words) ties with French at 29%, with the remaining 16% coming from all the other languages [wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_French_origin].

There are different levels to which borrowed words become assimilated into English. Some words like ensemble or bratwurst are obvious borrowings and partially retain their foreign spelling and/or pronunciation. At the other extreme are words like marmalade [2] or mayor that have become Anglicized to the extent that we can't tell from the words themselves (pronunciation or spelling) where they are borrowed from, or even that they have been borrowed. The level of assimilation depends on time and usage - the longer since it was borrowed and the more it is used, the greater its degree of "Englishness" and the more familiar it appears to us. For example, words from Greek like area and problem are  more familiar than euphoria and persona; and from French marriage has been Anglicized while montage retains its French pronunciation.

Many borrowed words result from the age of exploration in which new things were discovered from around the world and named from words taken from the local language. Chimpanzee is from the West African language Tshiluba, geyser from Icelandic, sauna from Finnish, and futon from Japanese. Closer to home, Saskatoon berries and pemmican are from Cree words, as is the name of my province Saskatchewan [3].

Similarly words may be borrowed because there is no English equivalent, even though the object or notion is well known. My favorite example of this is the German word Ohrwurm (literally "ear-worm") for that tune you just can't get out of your head. Other loanwords may already have an English word for it, but the new word is more descriptive (entrepreneur) or adds a particular shade of meaning (scarlet and vermillion from French).

The terms "borrowing" and "loanword" seem rather odd in reference to words, as the loaning languages don't have to give up their words and there is no expectations of having to pay them back (sort of like your teenager "borrowing" $20 to go to the movies). English however has returned the favor many times and loaned words to languages from which it has previously borrowed. French now has le weekend and cool, Japanese intanetto and wado purosessa [4], and German has die bluejeans and der blogger.

__________________
[1] from Greek
[2] from Portuguese
[3] A story goes that some American hunters pull into a gas station and ask the attendant where they are. The attendant replies "Saskatoon, Saskatchewan". One hunter then turns to the driver and says "I told you we went too far north - the natives don't even speak English".
[4] Try saying them out loud without the final "o".

The Forces of Language Change

Modern linguistics accepts that all languages are constantly changing and considers this a normal process. But if normal, then what are the forces behind language change?

Guy Deutscher in The Unfolding of Language devotes several chapters to answering this question. First he lists and dismisses three "obvious" reasons for languages to change. 

The first is to keep up with new technology and ideas. While this accounts for many new words, especially during the last few decades, it utterly fails to account for the vast majority of seemingly random changes which have occurred over many millennia. Language change has been recorded, over the space of one or two generations, among stone age tribes whose technology hasn't changed in over 30,000 years.

The second "obvious" theory is that languages change from contact with neighboring tribes by borrowing or imitating vocabulary and grammar. As I showed in the previous post, the French speaking Normans and later Latin speaking clerics and clergy had a significant influence on the English language. But change happens even in isolated peoples. The island of Papua New Guinea has 850 indigenous languages (about 14% of the world's 6,000) precisely because the tribes live in isolated mountain valleys.

The third theory is that people seek novelty and like to change things just for the sake of changing them. But most people actually fear change and try hard to prevent it from happening. This explains why, even though pronunciation of English has changed much in the last 400 years, spelling has changed little, resulting in the problems discussed in my last post.

So if these theories don't explain language change, then what does? It's only in the last few decades that linguists have developed satisfactory answers. Before providing three motives for change, Deutscher  addresses the question of who does the changing. The answer of course is that we all do, albeit unintentionally. I refer you to the quote on my blog header. One cow wanders off the path a little - perhaps to crop a fresh bunch of grass, or to follow a butterfly - and the one behind follows. As an example, I've noticed people lately using the word "perfect" at the end of a transaction as a new way of saying "thank you". I overheard a really absurd situation in the bank last week when the teller apologized to a customer for not having enough American dollars to complete the requested cash withdrawal for her planned holiday to the States, and asked her to come back in a few days. The customer answered "perfect" as she turned away empty-handed. My point here is that as silly as this expression seemed to me the first few times I heard it, I now catch myself using it sometimes. I admit it - I am a human cow. In summary, we all are the modifiers of our language, unintentionally and often unknowingly. Now - what motivates us to make changes?

Deutscher lists three motives for language change: economy, expressiveness and analogy. Economy refers to the human propensity for energy conservation - especially our own. In other words, we are just plain lazy. We pronounce words and phrases with the least effort possible to still be understood. "I don't know" comes out as "dunno"; "what's up?" something like "tsup?". These examples, from my youngest son's telephone conversation earlier this evening, involve omitting one or more syllables from a phrase. The words "don't" for "do not" and "what's" for "what is" are examples of the very same thing which have become formalized as proper English.

A countering motive to economy is expressiveness where we add more words for emphasis. Instead of replying with a simple "yes" we might say "by all means" or "I'd be delighted". I explained in the August 25 post on Grammaticalization how this led to the development of the French word "pas" to mean "not". As words become overused (an "awesome" salad), the intensity of their meaning is reduced (similar to the value of money with inflation) and new words must be found to replace them.

The third motive, analogy, is a force that returns order to language. Irregularities in grammar over time become more regular. Children learning to talk do this unintentionally, and are usually quickly corrected. Classic examples are "I goed" or "two foots". Sometimes these "mistakes" catch on. Deutscher gives the following examples: the plural of "book" used to be "beek" but changed to "books" in the 13th century; "eyes" replaced "eyen" as the plural of "eye" in the 14th century; and "kine" was replaced by "cows" for the plural of "cow" in the 16th.

These changes do not occur everywhere at once. They start at a particular place and time - perhaps with a 4 year old! Others copy and it starts to spread. Both versions would co-exist, for several generations, with one gradually growing in popularity until it becomes the standard. Sometimes we can find in literature examples of two versions co-existing. Chaucer in "The Merchant's Tale" uses the word "maked" referring to God's creation of Adam (chosen to rhyme with "naked") and four lines later uses "made" for God's creation of Eve (chosen to fit the line's meter). Note - this is an example of economy, not analogy. A word which uses the regular past tense form ("maked") is in the process of being changed into an irregular one ("made") just because it's easier to pronounce. A similar current situation is "dove", the past tense of "dive", which, at least in North America is replacing the regular "dived", perhaps following "drive" and "drove". Both forms are in current use.

Different languages change in different ways, which has resulted in the 6,000 extant languages today plus the tens of thousands of extinct and intermediate languages of which we can only surmise.

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.

The Original Word Order

The October 23 AWAD email had a link to a news article on the word order of the first language. Talk like Yoda? We May have originally by Natalie Wolchover in the Science website of msmbc.com. She was reporting on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann, co-directors of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages.

Of the six possible word orders of Subject, Object, Verb, slightly over half of the 2,000 languages they looked at are SOV (I you like). English is SVO (I like you) while Latin and German are SOV. The SOV order, the authors claim, is the most likely order for the proto human language from which all the rest have evolved. Incidentally, it is also the word order spoken by Yoda in Star Wars, hence the title of the article.

Ruhlen and Gell-Mann came to this conclusion after creating a family tree of the world's languages and discovering a clear pattern. While SOV languages changed into other orders, the other orders never changed into SOV. Therefore SOV had to be the original order.

A previous article had also predicted SOV as the original but based on an entirely different information. Tom Givon, a linguist from the University of Oregon, argued that the SOV order is the most natural to humans as evidenced by how children learn language.

So, perhaps Yoda's speech would not seem so strange to a German?

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?