There is ample scholarly work on how going to went from referring to locomotion to becoming a future tense marker, complete with statistical analysis, tables, and so on. It’s great stuff, and it’s what a scholar of language change is trained in.
However, charting how Celtic languages impacted English involves different strategies. It requires being a different brand of linguist. Often, that brand is language contact specialist. That person has an eye on what sorts of features are common around the world and what sorts are not, is obsessed with not just one language family but with several, and has a native taste for history as well as linguistics. Such linguists are less tickled by things that sprung up in a language by themselves than by things that languages did to one another.
As such, it’s as if scholars of The History of English are engaged in a lusty game of Monopoly when adherents of the Celtic idea bust into the room asking who wants to play a game of Clue. Or, some people are building things with an Erector set and someone pops in with a little car made of Legos. To the traditional specialist on how English got from Beowulf to The Economist, drawing parallels between English and some other language is just Not What They Do, especially not at any length. That feeling is understandable, but the problem is that the language contact specialist’s analysis, in this case, squares with logic in a way that the same-old same-old analysis simply does not.
Frankly, another likely factor is that Irish, Welsh, and Cornish are not languages anyone is apt to become familiar with who is not of Celtic ancestry. Andrew Dalby, working outside of the academy, has a way of getting such things tartly right. On the Celtic question, he gets in that “few English linguists know Welsh, so the similarities tend to be overlooked or played down.” Yep—I highly suspect that if Welsh were, say, for some reason regularly taught in schools across Western Europe and in America, as French and Spanish are, then to linguists, raised with “schoolboy” Welsh, the parallels between Celtic and English would seem glaringly obvious and would long ago have been accepted as having a causal rather than correlative relationship.
However, here in real life, even to seasoned linguists, Celtic languages are, as often as not, remote oddities, bristling queerly on the page à la the likes of Sut rydych chi? meaning “How are you?” in Welsh. Rydych??? How do you even pronounce that?? To someone whose foreign language competence is in French and German, there is nowhere to grab on to here. One moves on.
All that understood, the facts tell a story even if we will never have the “documentary evidence” of the kind the scholar quoted above was accustomed to working with. Swords and grimaces could not have exterminated a race of millions of Celts and left a few huddling in Wales and Cornwall. Rather, Celts, albeit subjugated, lived on throughout Britain in vast numbers. The Germanic invaders, like dominant classes worldwide at the time, enshrined a version of their language on the page that reflected what it was like before it came to be spoken and reshaped by the people who, albeit subjugated, continued to vastly outnumber them, and who passed their rendition of the language on to future generations both Germanic and Celtic. After the Norman French conquered the country, English was rarely written for a century-and-a-half, and when English was reawakened on the page thereafter, it suddenly had a grammatical flavoring that paralleled no languages on earth but Celtic ones, while English’s relatives over on the Continent developed nothing similar.
Those facts lend themselves to an analogy about people we will call the Robinsons and the Joneses.
In 1870, Mr. Robinson and his family move to a small town in Illinois called Summerfield. Thirty years later, in 1900, the town’s newspaper does a story about how Mr. and Mrs. Robinson and their three offspring have developed an unusual deftness in playing the piano with their feet. They play only with their feet, never with their hands, and can manage pleasant renditions of classical sonatas. The story also notes that the Robinsons’ elderly next-door neighbors, the Joneses, have the same skill, as do their kids.
The news story does not tell us whether the Robinsons learned to play the piano with their feet from the Joneses. However, it does note that the Robinsons were close friends with the Joneses and that the Joneses’ son Thaddeus even married the Robinsons’ daughter Minerva.
Researching the issue in 2008, we find two other things. First, in 1880, researchers in the new field of sociology did an extensive study of the town the Robinsons moved to Summerfield from, Wistful Vista. And even in their chapter on the arts in Wistful Vista, which includes a detailed description of the town’s musical scene, there is nary a mention of anyone playing the piano with their feet. Nor in the annals of descriptions of, or reports from, any other mid-nineteenth-century Illinois towns is there any record of people playing piano with their feet, just as today the practice is unheard-of in Ohio or anywhere else.
Second, Mr. Jones, having made his way into serving as Summerfield’s water commissioner, left his papers to the local museum, and among them is a daguerreotype of him playing the piano with his feet way back in 1850, long before the Robinsons moved into the house next door.
Obviously, this evidence makes it rather plain that the Robinsons picked up their quirky approach to piano playing from the Joneses. However, imagine modern historians instead insisting that the Robinsons learned to play the piano with their feet on their own, despite that the Joneses right next door, their close friends, had been doing just that long before the Robinsons moved to Summerfield.
Our historians craft elaborate webs of motivation that would lead the Robinsons to take off their shoes and socks, hoist up their legs, and attempt “Chopsticks” with their toes. Mr. Robinson was a banker—maybe he developed repeat stress syndrome in his hands from using the telegraph machine while communicating with banks out of town and found that the only way he could play the piano was with his pedal digits. Maybe Thaddeus, whom the article described as a spirited fellow “full of the dickens,” was as a tyke given to athletic stunts like putting his bare feet on the keyboard.
Yes, maybe. But all of this leaves the outside observer wondering what the use is of concocting scenarios like this. The scenarios would seem, ultimately, to be for some reason turning a blind eye to an obvious explanation. What purpose does it serve, we ask, to deny that the Joneses taught the Robinsons how to tickle the ivories with their feet? And what is the use of pointing out that the Robinsons don’t dress much like the Joneses? (That’s the part about Celtic words, in case the analogy is slipping!)
Or even: why conclude that the Joneses may have been “just one influence” on the Robinsons? “Acknowledging” both sides is of no use in this case. The Robinsons learned how to play the piano with their feet from the Joneses. Period. If the Joneses had not already been playing the piano with their feet, the Robinsons would not be, either.
The judgment must be the same on Celtic’s impact on English. The facts in this particular case do not lend themselves to mere parenthetical civil surmises that Welsh and Cornish “may have influenced ” English grammar, with the treatment otherwise proceeding as usual, describing meaningless do and the verb-noun present drifting into existence by themselves for no reason. The facts do not indicate that the Welsh and Cornish features merely pitched in on a process that would have happened by itself anyway. If Old English had been brought to an uninhabited island—or, say, Cyprus, Greenland, or Fiji—rather than an island where Celtic languages were spoken, then there would be no such thing as a Modern English sentence like Did you see what he’s doing? That sentence would be rendered as See you what he does?, as it is in any normal Germanic—or European—language.
English is not normal. It is a mixed language not only in its words, but in its grammar. Every time we say something like Did you see what he’s doing?, we are structuring our utterance the way a Welsh or Cornish person would in their own native tongue. When well-intentioned chroniclers take in from scholarship on The History of English that “the English language has been indifferent to the Celts and their influence” (Robert McCrum, Will
iam Cran, and Robert MacNeil’s The Story of English) or that “the Celtic language of Roman Britain influenced Old English hardly at all” (David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language), they have been misled, despite the brilliance of their books overall (both of these are among my favorite books of all time).
English is not, then, solely an offshoot of Proto-Germanic that inhaled a whole bunch of foreign words. It is an offshoot of Proto-Germanic that traded grammar with offshoots of Proto-Celtic. The result was a structurally hybrid tongue, whose speakers today use Celtic-derived constructions almost every time they open their mouths for longer than a couple of seconds. Do you want to leave now? What’s he doing? Did he even know? What are you thinking? I don’t care. She’s talking to the manager.
Celtic grammar is underneath all of those utterly ordinary utterances in Modern English. Our language is a magnificent bastard.
Two
A LESSON FROM THE CELTIC IMPACT
THE “GRAMMATICAL ERRORS”
EPIDEMIC IS A HOAX
Oh, those lapses, darling. So many of us walk around letting fly with “errors.” We could do better, but we’re so slovenly, so rushed amid the hurly-burly of modern life, so imprinted by the “let it all hang out” ethos of the sixties, that we don’t bother to observe the “rules” of “correct” grammar.
To a linguist, if I may share, these “rules” occupy the exact same place as the notion of astrology, alchemy, and medicine being based on the four humors. The “rules” make no logical sense in terms of the history of our language, or what languages around the world are like.
Nota bene: linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not—I repeat, not—that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage. No argument there.
The argument is about what constitutes artful and effective usage. Quite a few notions that get around out there have nothing to do with grace or clarity, and are just based on misconceptions about how languages work.
Yet, in my experience, to try to get these things across to laymen often results in the person’s verging on anger. There is a sense that these “rules” just must be right, and that linguists’ purported expertise on language must be somehow flawed on this score. We are, it is said, permissive—perhaps along the lines of the notorious leftist tilt among academics, or maybe as an outgrowth of the roots of linguistics in anthropology, which teaches that all cultures are equal. In any case, we are wrong. Maybe we have a point here and there, but only that.
Linguists’ Frustration
Over the years, some of the old notions have, in truth, slipped away, although this is due less to the suasive powers of linguists than to the fact that the particular rules in question were always so silly anyway.
No one taken seriously thinks it’s wrong to end a sentence with a preposition anymore, such that That’s a store I wouldn’t go to is “awkward.” Similarly, the grand old rule that one does not split infinitives is on the ropes. In our guts, few of us truly feel that there is anything wrong with where slowly is placed in Imagine—to slowly realize that your language lost all of its suffixes as of this morning!
The preposition rule was cooked up in the seventeenth century under the impression that because Latin doesn’t end sentences in prepositions, English shouldn’t. That makes one wonder when we are going to start cutting our English to conform to Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, and other languages with grand histories and literatures. The split-infinitive business was a nineteenth-century fetish, and may also have been based on the fact that Latin doesn’t split infinitives—because its infinitives are just one word! We say to end; Latin had terminare, period, as unsplittable as the atom was once thought to be.
But the “rules” that have hung around make no more sense than those two, and yet laymen cling to them like Linus to his blanket.
Take the idea that it is wrong to say If a student comes before I get there, they can slip their test under my office door, because student is singular and they “is plural.” Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree (“Each man in their degree”).
Maybe when the sentence is as far back as Middle English, there is a sense that it is a different language on some level than what we speak—the archaic spelling alone cannot help but look vaguely maladroit, as if Middle English speakers were always a little tipsy on their mead.
But Shakespeare is not assumed to have been in his cups when he wrote in The Comedy of Errors, “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me / As I were their well-acquainted friend” (Act IV, Scene III). Later, Thackeray in Vanity Fair tosses off “A person can’t help their birth.”
Yet the notion that this usage is “wrong” holds on so hard that even linguists have to submit to their publishers’ copy editors’ insistence on expunging it, which answers the question we often get as to why we do not use constructions like this in our own writing if we are so okay with them. My own books are full of resorts to he, which I find sexist, occasional dutiful shes, which strike me as injecting a stray note of PC irrelevance into what I am discussing, or he or she, which I find clumsy and clinical—for the simple reason that I was required to knuckle under. At best I can wangle an exception and get in a singular they or their once or twice a book. (I must note that the copy editor for this book, upon reading this section, actually allowed me to use singular they throughout the book. Here’s to them in awed gratitude!)
Or there’s the objection to nouns being used as verbs. These days, impact comes in for especial condemnation: The new rules are impacting the efficiency of the procedure. People lustily express that they do not “like” this, endlessly writing in to language usage columnists about it. Or one does not “like” the use of structure as in I structured the test to be as brief as possible.
Well, okay—but that means you also don’t “like” the use of view, silence, worship, copy, outlaw, and countless other words that started as nouns and are now also verbs. Nor do many people shudder at the use of fax as a verb.
The linguist notes that in a language with a goodly number of endings showing what part of speech a word is, making a noun into a verb means tacking the appropriate ending onto it. In French, the noun copy is copie; the verb “to copy” is copier. But in a language like English with relatively few endings, making a noun into a verb requires no extra equipment, and so copy becomes just copy. This is not a quirk of English—i.e., a loosey-goosey stipulation linguists make out of “permissiveness”—but typical of countless other languages in the world that don’t make much use of suffixes to mark parts of speech. In Cantonese Chinese, lengjái can mean “good-looking guy,” “to become good-looking,” and “good-looking”: noun, verb, and adjective. No one in China is writing in to newspapers complaining about it.
But somehow, a sense persists that nouns becoming verbs in English is icky, a messy transgression. Told that English speakers have been, as it were, turning fax into fax forever, people remain convinced that there’s still something “wrong” with it. And we won’t even get into how people feel about Billy and me went to the store and the idea that me is wrong because it’s an object pronoun referring to a subject. (Actually, we will get into it, but not just yet.)
Trying to get into the head of how people feel about these things even when presented with linguists’ protestations, I sense that the resistance is based on an understandable pride in having mastered these “rules.” You’ve got your ducks in a row, and except when exhausted or on glass number three of wine, you have no trouble producing Billy and I. You learned what subjects and objects are, you learned your Parts of Speech. As such, you don’t like someone coming along and deeming your effort a
nd vigilance worthless. It must feel like someone telling you that it would be perfectly appropriate, natural even, to give in to the untutored impulse to chew with your mouth open.
The problem is that with all due understanding of that feeling, the “rules” we are taught to observe do not make sense, period. All attention paid to such things is like medievals hanging garlic in their doorways to ward off evil spirits. In an ideal world, the time English speakers devote to steeling themselves against, and complaining about, things like Billy and me, singular they, and impact as a verb would be better spent attending to genuine matters of graceful oral and written expression.
Over the years, I have gotten the feeling that there isn’t much linguists can do to cut through this commitment to garlic-hanging among English speakers. There are always books out that try to put linguists’ point across. Back in 1950, Robert Hall’s Leave Your Language Alone! was all over the place, including a late edition kicking around in the house I grew up in. Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct , which includes a dazzling chapter on the grammar myths, has been one of the most popular books on language ever written. As I write, the flabbergastingly fecund David Crystal has just published another book in the tradition, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left. But the air of frustration in Crystal’s title points up how persistent the myths are. Maybe we just can’t get through.
However, in this chapter I want to venture one more stab. If you understand that the phrasing of Did you see what he’s doing? was injected into English by non-native speakers, and that there was once an English where no one would have put it that way, and that then, for a while there was an English where lots of people were putting it that way but it sounded quaint and awkward to others, you are in a position to truly “get” the message. The message: the notion that people are always “slipping up” in using their native English is fiction.
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue Page 6
