Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

by John Mcwhorter

  Wherefore lighteth me the sonne?

  verb object subject (Oh, no no!)

  Why does the sun light me?

  subject verb object (That’s the ticket!)

  Yeah—but the question is where English even got a meaningless do to use in this way. In languages all over the world since the dawn of human speech, at first the verb can hang around at the ends or beginnings of sentences and then at some point the verb is restricted to sitting in the middle; it happens all the time. And nowhere—nowhere—else on earth have such languages taken the word do and turned it into a meaningless little helper in order to nudge this along.

  Biblical Hebrew put verbs first; Modern Hebrew puts them in the middle. Yet no one in Israel today is using the Hebrew verb for do in a meaningless way. The Arabic of the Koran puts the verb first; it has since morphed into the vast array of today’s actual spoken Arabics, stretching from Morocco across northern Africa into the Middle East, as well as down into Nigeria, Chad, and Sudan. Not one—not one—of these modern Arabic dialects has a meaningless do.

  So, where oh where might English have gotten that meaningless do in order to whip its verbs into line? According to the History of English folks, in trying to figure that out, we are to ignore that the languages already spoken in Britain . . . I don’t even need to finish the sentence. It may well be that corralling verbs into the middle of the sentence made a meaningless do useful. But only English had a meaningless do available in the first place—as used by Welsh and Cornish speakers. Welsh and Cornish, then, were together the reason English has a meaningless do today.

  English’s verb-noun present also looks, to traditional specialists, as if it is just one step past something in other Germanic languages. Again, there is a big picture they are missing.

  Now, the sheer presence in a language of a progressive construction using a verb-noun is not all that extraordinary. It happens here and there that people say that they are “in” an action to say that they are in the process of accomplishing it at this very instant. This includes the Germanic languages. In German you can say, as I mentioned before, Ich bin am schreiben for “I am writing.” Similarly, in Dutch it would be “I am on the writing,” Ik ben aan het schrijven, and Norwegian has something similar with Jeg er åt å skrive.

  English is peculiar, however, in taking the ball and running with it, to the point that the bare verb is nosed out completely. That is something much rarer in languages, popping up only in obscure corners here and there. Basque is one, a language related to no other one on earth. Or there is one little dialect of Greek (Tsakonian, for the record) that has booted bare verbs in the present and uses a progressive, for no reason anyone can see.

  But then, another of the obscure corners in question is good old Celtic. English is the only Germanic language that developed in a context where Celts were the original inhabitants—and English is also the only Germanic language that turned its verb-noun progressive into its only present tense.

  However, History of English specialists adhere to a just-so story in which the verb-noun present “just happened” by itself. Old English had two progressive constructions. One was the verb-noun one, I was on hunting, but another one used a participle form of the verb, marked with -ende. “I was following” was Ic wæs fylgende.

  Now, today we do not say “I was huntende.” To the experts, I was hunting rather than I was on hunting happened because for some reason speakers started having a hard time telling -ende and -ing apart and settled on using -ing in the -ende construction.

  But that -ende was an inheritance from Proto-Germanic. As such, other Germanic languages have their versions of -ende today, and no one confuses them with anything. German’s -ende, for instance, is doing just fine. Once in Germany I told a waitress not to put onions in my salad or I would become der kotzende Fremder (“the vomiting foreigner”). In earlier German, just as in earlier English, there was an -ende progressive; here is an Old High German sentence:

  Ist er ouh fon jugendi filu fastenti.

  is he indeed from youth much fasting

  “From his youth on he has been fasting much.”

  But then meanwhile, German drips with -en suffixes on both nouns and verbs, including their version of I was on hunting, Ich bin am schreiben (“I am writing”). Yet in a thousand years, this -en suffix has not been “confused” with -ende. Was it really just a shrug of the shoulders that supposedly led English speakers to confuse their -ende with -ing, which is much less similar to -ende than is German’s -en? Nowhere else in the Germanic family is the -ende ending so prone to “collapsing” into other ones. Why was -ende so uniquely subject to the vapors in only English? Historians of English are producing a description based on what they see in the documents over time rather than explaining it.

  And the traditional version is hopeless in explaining why the verb-noun progressive, once established when -ende was “confused” with -ing, metastasized and became the verb-noun present, i.e., the only way to express the present short of sounding like a Martian by answering “I write” when someone asks what you’re doing. Why couldn’t I am hunting have stayed as meaning “I am in the process of hunting at this very instant”? That is, as it has in all of the other Germanic languages? Scholars charting the triumph of the verb-noun progressive over the bare verb diligently note how the progressive becomes ever more common—14 percent progressive! 45 percent! 67 percent! 92 percent!!!!!—rather than wondering why nothing remotely similar ever happened to any of the other languages that Proto-Germanic morphed into. They are describing, but not explaining.

  The Celtic account, then, is more useful in the sheer scientific sense than the old one. It provides an answer to what specialists have been shrugging their shoulders about for eons: just why the verb-noun (-ing) ejected the participle (-ende) and just why the progressive became the only way to express the present tense. Welsh and Cornish express their progressive with a verb-noun and not with a participle. Welsh and Cornish use their progressive instead of bare verbs in the present tense. Period.

  Yet among the specialists, to propose that the English progressive construction is a copy of Celtic’s is considered a renegade point. Certain wobbly speculations continue to be reproduced in sources both scholarly and popular. Maybe, we learn, Anglo-French scribes were hazy on the difference between -ende and -ing—which leaves unexplained how scribal errors on codexes read in candlelight by a tiny literate elite would have affected the way millions of mostly illiterate people out on the land spoke.

  The likeness between English and Celtic is so close in this case that the only thing that would seem to save a traditionalist approach is the old assumption that there were barely any Celts around. And as we have seen, that assumption can’t stand.

  So:1. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes encountered Celtic speakers.

  2. Meaningless do in the affirmative, negative, and internegative is found nowhere on earth except in Celtic and English.

  3. English is the only Germanic language that uses its verb-noun progressive as the only way to express present tense; Welsh and Cornish do the same.

  Asked what those three facts signify as to why English has meaningless do and and verb-noun present, all human beings would draw the same conclusion—except those who know more about the history of the English language than anyone else in the world. What could the blockage possibly be?

  Assumption Number Three: Writing Is How People Talked

  It’s a timing issue. On its face, the specialists seem to have a point, especially with meaningless do. Old English speakers met Celts starting in A.D. 449. This would be when Celts started learning and transforming the English language. Yet there is not a hint of meaningless do in any English document until the 1300s, in Middle English. Century after century of Old English writings and no meaningless do at all. Why does it show up so late?

  The verb-noun progressive pops up in Old English now and then, in sentences like Ic wæs on huntunge for “I was hunting.” But today other Germanic l
anguages also have their “on hunting” constructions when they want to stress “progressiveness,” and so on its face this does not make Old English look at all strange as its family goes. And in any case, more often, the progressive is the -ende one as in Ic wæs fylgende for (“I was following.”) In fact it is the -ende progressive that becomes a little more common in later Old English.

  So Old English does not look terribly Celtic, and to traditional scholars this proves that the Celts cannot have been the source of meaningless do or the verb-noun present. What historians of English see is that English with meaningless do and a verb-noun present ruling the roost does not show up in documents until past the halfway point of English’s entire documented life span. If Celts mashed their mix-ins into English, then why did they take almost a thousand years to do it?

  But that question proceeds upon a fundamental misconception about what ancient written evidence tells us—or doesn’t—about how the language was spoken every day.

  Writing and talking are very different things. This is clear to us when it plays out in our own times with our own languages: in the entire eighty-five-year run of Time one could miss that in casual speech people say “whole nother.” But when we are dealing with languages of antiquity, whose casual renditions we cannot experience, the gulf between writing and speaking cannot help but be less apparent. We will never know how Old English was spoken by illiterate farmers; the written version that survives for us to peruse is the only rendition of the language we will ever know. However, people way back when were no more given to gliding around talking like books than we are, and in fact, writing and talking were much more different for them than for us.

  In ancient times, few societies had achieved widespread literacy. Writing was primarily for high literary, liturgical, and commercial purposes. Spoken language changed always, but the written form rested unchanging on the page. There was not felt to be a need to keep the written form in step with the way people were changing the language with each generation.

  For one, each language was actually spoken as a group of dialects very different from one another, such that there was no single spoken variety to keep up with. As long as the written form was relatively accessible to the general population, however they actually spoke, then the job was done. Old English, for example, came in four flavors: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and West Saxon. Most Old English documents are in the West Saxon dialect, because Wessex happened to become politically dominant early on. But this means that what we know as Old English is mostly in what is properly one dialect of Old English, and the speakers of the other dialects just had to suck it up. They did, and there is no evidence that anyone much minded.

  In addition, there was always a natural tendency, which lives on today, to view the written language as the “legitimate” or “true” version, with the spoken forms of the language as degraded or, at best, quaint—certainly not something you would take the trouble of etching onto the page for posterity with quill and ink. As such, the sense we moderns have that language on the page is supposed to more or less reflect the way the language is spoken would have seemed peculiar to a person living a thousand years ago, or even five hundred.

  In Europe, for example, it was the technology of the printing press and the democratic impulses in the wake of the Reformation that led to calls for written material in local languages. Until then, people in France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal readily accepted Latin—a different language entirely from what was spoken “in the street”—on the page. Similarly, for many centuries, Slavic language speakers were used to ancient Old Church Slavonic as a written lingua franca, although no one spoke it. Sanskrit was long the written language par excellence in an India where its offshoots, such as Hindi, had long since emerged and thrived as spoken languages.

  Until well into the twentieth century, for Indonesians, the written language of books and newspapers and the one taught in school was Classical Malay, about as different from how people actually spoke as Shakespeare’s English is from how we do. Even today, although standard Indonesian is more in step with everyday speech than Classical Malay, it is still not the way anyone would actually converse casually who wanted to date or have friends. Indonesians giggle to see the spoken rendition of their language put on a blackboard, just as English speakers would find it inappropriate to see Time written in the dialect of rappers.

  Among people worldwide before five hundred years ago, this kind of gulf between written and spoken language was, in a word, a norm. In the late 1200s, Dante considered himself to be venturing a special gesture in writing La Vita Nuova in Italian instead of Latin, only doing so because he wanted the work to be accessible to a woman who did not know much Latin. In Dante’s world, Italian as we know it had long existed as an everyday language—Dante himself spoke it 24/7—but the ordinary thing was to write in Latin. Latin was what Italian (and French, Spanish, and the other Romance languages) had been a thousand years before. But since Latin hit the page first—Latin “called it!” as kids say in grabbing a seat—a millennium later, there still reigned a sense that Latin was fit for the page, while Italian was just “the vulgar tongue,” as even Dante put it, “in which even housewives can converse.”

  There is a similar situation today in Arabic-speaking countries. In, say, Morocco, the Arabic used in writing is one thing, preserved on the page and kept as close to the language of the Koran as possible. The Arabic actually spoken is another thing, morphed fifteen hundred years away from the written variety and now a different language entirely. A Moroccan will recall learning “Arabic” in school, so different is the standard variety from the “Arabic” they learned at home.

  Moreover, in each Arab nation, the standard has drifted into a spoken dialect in different ways such that the spoken Arabic in each place is a different language from the others. So, good in the standard is jayyad, but look at what it is in different countries in the Arab world:

  To Arabic speakers, the preservation of Standard Arabic on the page, and only occasionally or even never seeing the language they actually speak in print, feels normal. It is even seen as an advantage in forging ties between different Arab nations.

  It is in this light that we return to the fact that the Celtic impact shows up in English documents only long after the Celts and the Old English speakers had first come into contact. The personnel in question did not live in anything like our world. They lived lives in which there were no potatoes, tomatoes, coffee, tea, chocolate, spinach, broccoli, or sugar. They didn’t need last names because most of them spent their lives in small villages where everybody knew one another. Dismemberment and murder were so common that adjudicating their outcomes was the main focus of suites of laws penned by kings like His Highness Mr. Ine.

  And, by and large, speakers of Old English did not read. Writing was better described as scripture—a formal, ritualized, elite pursuit, preserved via scribes copying old texts century after century, sequestered in thick-walled edifices from the hurly-burly of actual everyday speech. In this rigidly classist world, casual English—especially the kind associated with wealhs, who were usually slaves—was no more likely to wind up engraved in ink than the charming babblings of toddlers.

  As such, the only reason that Celtified English started coming through in writing even in the 1300s was a historical accident.

  The year 1100 is when, largely, Old English stopped and Middle English, an almost curiously different thing, began. Middle English was, indeed, a profound transformation of Old English. Partly, yes, in terms of words—a bunch of French ones started pouring in—but also in terms of grammar. When the Norman French conquered England in 1066 and established French as the written language of the land, for the next century-and-a-half there is almost no written English that has survived. Then after relations with France began to sour in the early 1200s and English started to be used as a written language again, we see a brand-new, slimmed-down English, as if it were in an “after” picture in a diet ad.

  Old En
glish had been jangling with case markers, and nouns had three genders as in Latin, Greek, and Russian. In Middle English, waking up like Rip Van Winkle around 1200, case and gender were largely as they are now: vestigial and absent, respectively.

  In Old English, words like this one for stone, stān, took different suffixes according to case and number. Suddenly in Middle English, the only case suffix left is genitive (possessive), and the plural one is the same in all cases. Suddenly, in Middle English we are, in other words, home.

  The question, though, is whether this all really happened in 150 years, and certainly it did not. Languages do not suddenly chuck away their case markers, almost as if people speaking languages with lots of them find them, deep down, as burdensome as we Modern English speakers do when exposed to them in classrooms in Latin and Russian. Greek, like Russian, has been chugging along for millennia with enough case markers to sink a ship.

  Sure, languages will slough off a suffix here and a suffix there, just like we do our eyelashes. Just as sure, some languages will slough off more suffixes than others, just as many men go bald on their heads but retain hair, well, elsewhere. But even that takes time. No language “goes bald” in just a century-and-a-half.

  Rather, in languages’ documentation we watch these things happen gradually—century by century, as with those few more hairs you keep spotting on the shower drain as the years pass. Old High German had a Latin-style fecundity of case and gender inflection. Modern German has much less (although still a lot by English standards). We can watch that happening in a majestic procession of documentation over almost a thousand years—not just 150, roughly the time since the end of the Civil War! And even then, the end result was not a language as denuded of case and gender as English, but the German that so frustrated Mark Twain.