Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue
Page 18
future tense
and Hittite
and Hopi
and meaningless do
past tense
present tense
and progressive -ing
and Proto-Germanic
and Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
and spontaneous changes
and vowels
Thackeray, William Makepeace
third person
thought and grammar
Time
time perception
tonal languages
travel
Tsakonian
Turkish
Twain, Mark
Twi
Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shakespeare)
U
Uralic languages
Urdu
V
Vanity Fair (Thackeray)
variety
Venerable Bede
Vennemann, Theo
verbs. See also tense, grammatical
and Celtic influence
and Germanic languages
and grammar inconsistencies
and Phoenician influence
and progressive -ing
and Proto-Germanic
and Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
in subordinate clauses
verb-nouns
verb second rule (V)
and Viking influence
and West African languages
and word order
Vietnamese
Vikings
contrasted with Celts
and English vocabulary
and evolution of English
impact on English
invasion of Britain
and literacy
and Old Norse
and Phoenician influence
and scripture vs. writing
and simplification of English
and suffixes
and verb usage
and vocabulary changes
vocabulary
and Celtic
and evolution of English
and French
and mixing of languages
and orphan words
and Proto-Germanic
and Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
vocative case
vowels
vulgarities
W
Welsh
and Celtic influence
and Celtic subfamily
and English grammar
and English vocabulary
and evolution of English
and linguistic equilibrium
and meaningless do
and noun gender
and orphan words
and progressive -ing
question sentences
and verb conjugation
West African languages
West Saxon dialect
Whorf, Benjamin Lee
Whorfianism. See Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
William of Nassyngton
William the Conqueror
Wilson, Edmund
word order
world views. See also Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
writing
and Old English
and Proto-Germanic
scribal errors
scripture vs. writing
and Viking influence
written vs. spoken language
X
Xhosa
Y
Yiddish
and Germanic language families
and immigrant language
and meaningless do
and Proto-Germanic
and verb usage
Z
Zulu
1 To those who are up on their colloquial German and feel that Germans are no stranger to meaningless do, we’ll get to that in a little while. Preview: Germans are, indeed, strangers to meaningless do.
2 Actually, you might notice that there are indeed verbs where you don’t use the progressive to speak of the present: I know the truth (you don’t say I am knowing the truth), I love dinosaurs, I have a scanner. The issue here is that these types of verbs fall into a class linguists call stative: knowing, loving, and having are ongoing conditions, not actions—one does not say “I shall hereby perform the action of right now having this pencil!”; rather, having is something that just “bes” in an ongoing fashion. As such, these verbs are inherently habitual, and habitual verbs in English are bare.
3 There was also an indigenous people in present-day Scotland called Picts. Most likely they spoke a Celtic language, too, but we have no evidence to be sure of this.
4 Indeed, English has what is called biological gender: actor/actress and that sort of thing. All languages do. What we lack is what is called grammatical gender—words assigned to “genders” for little or no predictable reason. On biological gender, I can’t resist sharing one of my favorite sentences ever, in an article written by a fine but non-native writer: “Like English, Chinese is a language without gender, i.e., apart from the natural sex of the nouns such as man, woman, boy, waitress, cock, bitch, etc.”
5 There are, however, genderless Indo-European languages beyond Europe. Armenian has no gender “just because”—but has seven cases (!), and so has hardly undergone an English-style sloughing-off experience. Persian has no gender—but then this is almost definitely because of a drive-by in its history similar to the one English underwent, upon which if you’re really interested, if I may be forgiven for plugging myself, see my Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Among Germanic languages, Afrikaans has no gender, but it is Dutch filtered through southern African peoples transforming it in like fashion to, but to a lesser extent than, what Vikings did to English (and thus retains almost everything otherwise that German and the gang do, as we’ll see as we go on).
6 For those who care, in “normal” Germanic languages: you say “She washed me the hair” rather than She washed my hair when talking about things done to your person; there remains alive a bouquet of prefixes that are long dead or fossilized in English, like be- (bedecked) and for- (forbear—did you ever think about what for- “means”?); the word become is used to mark the passive voice instead of just be; there is a pronoun especially for singular you like English’s thou now gone in the standard dialect; and then on top of that lots of endings are retained, such as to mark adjectives or the subjunctive.
7 There have been arguments that Chinese grammar was affected by the languages of its foreign rulers (most prominently some work by Mantaro Hashimoto). I find this hard to support, and highly suspect that most evaluators would agree with me in light of advances in the study of language contact since Hashimoto wrote. I present an alternate analysis of the history of Chinese grammar (indeed based on contact, but long before Genghis Khan and the Manchus) in Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)(sorry for plug number two).
8 This is a mock sentence.
9 A useful summary of the record of this hypotheses from its inception up to the eighties is John A. Lucy, Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). It should be noted that since then, there has been work faintly favorable to the hypothesis, albeit in no way bearing it out as proposed by Whorf and his followers. This has included work by Lucy, as well as work by scholars such as Paul Kay, Lera Boroditzky, and Daniel Colasanto.
10 In fact, there was one other ancient Indo-European branch that was about as slim around the waist as Proto-Germanic. Hittite, a long-extinct language spoken in what is now Turkey, had two genders rather than the classic three that Proto-Indo-European is thought to have had, and less verb-marking equipment than a card-carrying early Indo-European language typically hefted around. However, many heavy-hitting scholars of Indo-European have long argued that Hittite was what Proto-Indo-European itself was like, and that languages like Latin c
ame later. That is, at first Proto-Indo-European, a language about as elaborated as Hittite but nowhere near as elaborated as Latin, split into two languages. One was Hittite itself, or more properly, the small family of now extinct languages Hittite was a part of, called Anatolian. Hittite and company stayed like Proto-Indo-European, which would have had, for example, just two genders rather than three. Call that “Proto-Indo-European Number One” or PIE1. But then there was the other first branch of Proto-Indo-European, which we will call PIE2. PIE2 happened to sprout a bunch of new conjugations, and a new gender alongside the original two. This busy language then morphed into all of the modern Indo-European families, including Germanic. Among these families, if grammar were foliage, only Germanic proceeded to clip the hedges into bushes instead of letting them become trees. Thus Proto-Germanic remains the odd one out, having alone shed so much of what Hittite, albeit looking similar to it, cannot have shed since it never had it.
11 Vennemann also called my attention to the article in Der Spiegel reporting the discovery of the artifacts in Schleswig-Holstein.
I have not included Vennemann’s argument that the reason Germanic languages (except English) keep the verb up front in second place because early Semitic languages put their verbs first, such that Phoenicians would have preferred keeping verbs as close to the beginning of sentences as possible in rendering Proto-Germanic. Although the argument is interesting, my intent has been to maintain a focus on what made for Modern English, and Modern English lacks the V2 rule (although Old English had it).
Similarly, Vennemann is devoted not only to the Phoenician argument, but to one stipulating that Proto-Germanic vocabulary and accent patterns were affected by relatives of Basque once spoken across Europe before Proto-Indo-European spread across the continent and marginalized Basque. (Today, Basque is spoken in a small region straddling France and Spain and has no living relatives.) Vennemann’s work in this vein is also admirable, but I have not included it because it applies to other Indo-European language families as well, including Celtic and the Romance languages. For the sake of keeping the throughline as focused as possible, I have restricted this book to issues unique to English.
Vennemann puts forth both of these arguments in “Zur Entstehung des Germanischen,” Sprachwissenschaft 25 (2000): 233-69.