Words on the Move
Page 11
Based on the same impulse, speakers of a language are always coaxing some words into switching sides to become grammar, because having grammar is part of what makes a language communicative. Naturally, then, as the old -an verb ending wore away, English started using to to mark the infinitive. It isn’t that now we have no way of marking something as a verb; it’s just that suffixes aren’t the only way to do such things. Now we have to shake, to rattle, and to roll.
Meanwhile, there are other grammaticalizations happening under our noses: a language seems to “want” to fill in a goodly number of slots of experience with a grammatical way of marking it. No language can fill all the slots, and part of the fun is watching which ones a language is filling at any given time. Yet this is a sport few get to watch, because so often the result is condemned as trivial or ridiculous.
An example is the counterexpectational ass discussed in chapter 1: big-ass pot, long-ass movie. Recall that it is no small feat to explain just how to use ass in that way. The reference is not anatomical, and yet it doesn’t work to simply say that it means “very” or “more.” As we have seen, when something is that hard to put your finger on, like Well … and the function of LOL, that is often a sign that it is no longer a normal word, but grammar. Counterexpectational ass is not the “word” word ass that it began as. A Martian hearing American English for a week might never happen to hear someone using ass to mean derrière, but most likely would hear a few counterexpectational ass examples. Likely, our Martian would document ass as a suffix! After all, it isn’t accented—why not longass movie, rottenass meat? The twentieth century witnessed many interesting things; one of them was the grammaticalization of ass.
In Greek, there are different forms of who for singular and plural. Pios? “Who?” you can ask, about one person, but if you’re asking about something two or three people did, then you ask not Pios? but Pii? And I don’t mean Ancient Greek, as if this were something grand but antique about people we’ll never know. I mean people walking around in Athens right now. Two whos. We just have our measly one: don’t you kind of wish we could have two like the Greeks? Wait, we do: the difference between Who’s coming? and Who all is coming? The all is a plural marker in that expression, unaccented—it’s a piece of grammar, allowing us to pluralize Who? as if we were Athenians. What all is similar—I want to know what all I need to do means, basically, “I want to know the ‘whats’ I need to do.” We are watching all become a grammatical marker, possibly even a suffix, and yet we are taught to dismiss it as slang or even as plain wrong.
Yet, if you think about it, any grammaticalization that happens within our experience will be treated that way, for the simple reason that we are taught that language isn’t supposed to change—or that it’s supposed to change only in that new things need new words. The problem with that analysis is that if people resisting change had their way, we would not have used to, ought, can, or -ly, which would seem to be strange things to resent at this point.
Grammaticalization as Spectator Sport
From the point of view of one language, such as our own, it will seem as if grammaticalization serves to lend a language the tools it “needs” to convey all shades of meaning. But in fact grammaticalization is driven to a large extent by the same factors of chance that determine how the meanings of words change.
Some words are more subject to grammaticalization than others: go and want, basic concepts constantly used, are easy to reinterpret as markers of future action, whereas more specific and lesser-used words such as prickle and bloat never get sought for grammaticalization. However, the concepts that grammaticalization leads to in any given language are not predictable. The phenomenon lends itself to spectating, and perhaps even to betting on the odds of one thing happening over another. So much of our own language’s grammar feels so fundamental that it can be surprising how much of it is just arbitrary tinsel that a language could easily do without. An English speaker’s sense of what a language is supposed to be is as arbitrary as a mole’s sense of what life is supposed to be—there is so very much more out there.
Surely, for example, a language has to have a way of indicating the past tense, so grammaticalization will fulfill that “need,” right? Actually, not: plenty of languages have no marker that means the past and get along just fine leaving it to context. It’s weird to encounter documentation of such languages—you keep looking in the index, sure that you’ve missed something, you scan the table of contents again, keep checking random sentences in the book thinking the author must have missed something, but no: there’s just no past marker. Some have no markers of past or future. Most languages do not have two little grammar words corresponding to our the and a.
Then, on the other hand, there are languages with grammar that marks things we would never consider as part of a language. Most East Asian and Southeast Asian languages mark the shape of the things you’re talking about. Languages on the island of New Guinea tend to have markers that tell whether you’re still talking about someone or are switching to discussing someone else. In Native American Algonquian languages, a suffix marks that something had a larger effect on another thing in the sentence than ordinary experience would suggest: if a mouse scared an elephant instead of an elephant scaring a mouse, you’d have to hang that suffix on scare. Marking the past or having a word a are just a couple of points on a huge roulette wheel.
Hence: just as we saw in chapter 2 that words ooze across a grid of meanings in an endlessly variant array of combinations, grammaticalization creates an endlessly variant array of grammar words marking assorted shades of existence, just “because.” Nor, it must be noted, does any of this correlate with the culture of the language’s speakers. An attempt to correlate a language’s grammatical features with its speakers’ cultural traits begins with hope and ends in a sputter.
German, for example, divides its nouns into three genders, usually arbitrarily. Bridges and mortgages are feminine; muffins and purses are masculine; ribbons and udders are neuter. One might ask why German grammaticalized this three-way split in thes, such that you have to master the masculine der, the feminine die, and the neuter das. At some point several millennia ago, these gender classes presumably corresponded to some cosmological system among herders or farmers somewhere. No self-regarding humans come up with a system like this just for kicks: even ossified bureaucracies emerge via a series of accidents, not deliberate sabotage, and languages are no different. Presumably, German began as a language like the Australian Dyirbal, in which there were four classes: one for men and most living things; a second for women, water, and fire; a third for fruit and vegetables; and a fourth for everything else.
But the point is that today, German’s groups correspond to nothing like this. Whether a noun takes der, die, or das simply has to be learned, dragged along with the logical part of the language like those wedding-day tin cans—and it’s a lot of cans: der, die, and das each has different forms for the possessive, the dative, and the object case, and then there are the plural forms, too. Obviously no language “needs” that. Things just drifted into this situation as the old cosmology fell away but the language kept on ticking, carried along because toddlers are capable of picking it up and by the time they are old enough to realize how unnecessary such things are, they are too set in the habit to give it up.
Grammaticalization, then, is accident, and the lesson is crucial. So very much of language is random confluence, despite dictionaries and grammar books giving the illusion of a language as an almost deliberate creation, whose contours are somehow a set, dictated canon. The idea that language is more like cloud formations than the Periodic Table of Elements can be almost unsettling, to be sure. When something is as magnificent as what a whole language is, in all its prolificacy, we want it to be “for” something. We hearken to the idea that speakers “built” it via ingenuity and persistence. We reify it, or almost anthropomorphize it, and we’re hardly alone, with Russians calling their language “great and mighty” and
the French cherishing the phrase “If it isn’t clear, it isn’t French.”
But down on the ground, Russian is a language that hasn’t bothered to grammaticalize a future marker. French has grammaticalized its the word into usage that no foreigner has ever found “clear”—to ask “I’d like water, please,” you have to come up with “I’d like of the water”(?!?!??!). English has grammaticalized have into a present perfect construction (Elvis has left the building) that conveys a shade of difference from the simple past (Elvis left the building) that a great many foreign learners find “perfectly” unnecessary to communication! There are simply no grounds for judging one’s own language to have grammaticalized the “right” way, or for which language has grammaticalized things “better.” The lesson is simply that in any language, a word does not just stay the way it is, and one way it changes is to become a piece of grammar—sometimes a grammar word, sometimes a prefix or suffix or other kind of hiccup that is no longer a word at all.
And then, there’s more change, because sounds are always changing along with meanings. “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food”—one can’t help noticing that good and food don’t rhyme, and it seems unlikely that the composers of such a solemn verse would have resorted to mere eye rhyming on the page. Or, “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water / Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling … after.” Is that the best they could do?
Of course not—and we’ll learn in the next chapter why these things are the way they are.
4
A Vowel Is a Process
Words Start Sounding Different
I lived in upstate New York for a spell. One of the things that most strikes outsiders there is what is often called the region’s “flat” a. Cat sounds more like what one might most readily transcribe as “kay-it,” but that overshoots the reality. “Kay-it” sounds like a bad imitation of a southern drawl, and a common alternate attempt, “kyet,” looks like something in Russian. It’s more like “keh-it”—truthfully, somewhere in between “kay-it” and “keh-it.” In any case, as an American you may well have heard this kind of pronunciation of what is often termed the “short” a. Indeed, it’s not just with the word cat or any other mere set of words; it’s that sound in general: flat is “fleh-it,” rabbit is “reh-ihbit.”
Alone, what’s that all about? But it actually makes perfect sense.
* * *
An in-group epithet that young women of a certain demographic have been using in the 2010s is betch, a transformation of the word bitch. The Betches Like This website is an articulate demonstration of a tongue-in-cheek archetype, tartly defined in one source as “a well-groomed party girl who is smart enough to mock her vapid, privileged lifestyle but spoiled enough to endorse it at the same time.” One suspects that the epithet will ultimately go down as a passing sign of an era in the way that yuppie and preppie did, but it still yields a question: why betch?
Alone, what’s that all about? But it actually makes perfect sense.
* * *
I once spent a fair amount of time with a couple whose names were Dawn and Sean, and a friend of theirs named Ron. To me, Dawn and Sean’s names rhymed, and then mine and Ron’s did. But to most people in California, where we were, all four of our names rhymed. They pronounced Dawn as “Dahn” and Sean as “Shahn,” such that we were “Dahn, Shahn, Jahn, and Rahn.” This wasn’t unusual: across the country, increasing numbers of people are pronouncing aw as ah.
Alone, what’s that all about? But it actually makes perfect sense.
* * *
The sense in all these things becomes clear when we know two things: one, that English spelling is a tragic accident that steers us away from what’s happening in our own mouths, and two, that vowels, like the meanings of words, are ever on the move. Not only a word but a sound is something going on rather than something that is.
But spelling sits at the gates of understanding like Cerberus, barring us from the fruits of enlightenment. We must first get past him.
Spelling: A Block on Perception
It is gruesome how much of an impediment English spelling is to internalizing the realities here. To learn how sounds work, we are cursed with having to divorce ourselves from how letters work. That’s tough (think about how goofy the spelling of tough is!). We can’t help thinking that letters are sounds, after all, just as we can’t help thinking that Social Security is a matter of getting back money that we paid in. But ladies and gentlemen, letters are not sounds in any way that can help us, beyond the rickety purchase they gave us on learning how to spell—and most of us barely remember how that even worked.
We all know that English spelling is tricky and often irregular, but things are even worse than that. It’s bad enough that we write the first sound in thin as th, when the actual sound is hardly a t with an h after it—do you say “tuh-HIN” for thin? However, it’s even worse that the th in thin is a different sound from the th in this. Try the two out in your mouth to see what I mean. And yet we have no way of indicating that difference with letters. English letters are not English sounds.
As such, the way we have to write vowels is just a mess. The vowel is the same sound in all these words:
free
these
leaf
field
seize
key
machine
but not in these:
tough
cough
through
thorough
bough
Then, there are only five letters to indicate about a dozen different vowel sounds. The u stands for three different sounds in cute, cut, and put.
It is clear, then, that we must shift gears and think about sounds rather than letters to make sense of things, despite how vivid the letters are in our minds. Sadly, even the traditional notion of “long” and “short” vowels can take us only so far. Long u: cute. Short u: cut. Okay, but what’s the sound in foot? Or paw? The aw is two letters but one sound. Long, short … what? We need help.
Bees in Your Mouth
A handy way to see what sounds, rather than letters, are like is with words that are the same in everything but the vowel (and not the letter but the actual sound) and then situate those words in our mouths. Why? Not just to make a chart like a third-grader doing a science report to show that he is diligent, tidy, and submissive. Only when we feel the vowels in our mouths do things like “keh-it,” betch, and “Dahn, Shahn, Jahn, and Rahn” transform from weirdnesses to, as it were, ABC.
Let’s start with beet, bait, and bat. They seem to have not a thing to do with one another—certainly not the concepts, but not even the sounds. They look out of order because we’re used to the alphabet song. But in the grand scheme of things, the relationship of the alphabet song to English sounds is equivalent to the one between the castle in Frozen and the hundreds of small pieces of the Lego set of the castle in Frozen spread out on the floor.
Say beet, bait, and bat to yourself and you’ll notice that you make all the vowel sounds in the front of your mouth. If that doesn’t quite strike you yet, then say bat and then say baht (Thailand’s currency) and notice that you have to pull backward for baht. That’s the way that beet and bait and bat are up front.
Now, you can also feel that the vowel sound for bait is made lower than beet, and bat is made even lower than bait. Thus the sounds in beet, bait, and bat are a stack in the front of your mouth. Notice that the letters don’t matter at all here. The vowels in bait and bat are written with the same letter a. Beet could be spelled beat. This is about sounds only. Here’s what the sounds look like in terms of where they sit in your mouth:
beet
bait
bat
Let’s do three more words: start with that baht. And then, think of boat and boot. Boot, boat, and baht stack up in the back of your mouth, right across from beet, bait, and bat up front. Just as baht is bat pulled back, you pull back from bait to say b
oat, and you pull back from beet to say boot. So the front stack is “ee,” “ay,” and?—note that there is no way to even reliably spell the a sound in bat—and the back stack is “oo,” “oh,” and “ah.”
beet
boot
bait
boat
bat
baht
But these vowels alone, if you think about it, don’t get us what English sounds like. Apart from the bat sound, these are the vowels (ah, ay, ee, oh, oo) we associate with languages like Italian, of the kind that lend themselves well to opera singing. But if you give somebody a tip, which of these sounds are you using? The closest thing would seem to be “teep,” but that sounds like English with an accent. We’re missing the proper sound, and others.
Namely, most of the vowels we have already situated have a “friend” who is like them but different, different enough to be another sound entirely. Take beet and bait, for example. One need not go from beet immediately to bait in the way that you go from A to B—there’s room in between. Think, say, of bit. Roll bit around and you can feel that in terms of how high it is in your mouth, it’s like beet except a little lower down, and also pulled a touch farther back. Here, then, is the sound in tip, and we need to get that in: