The weirdness of English by Barry Evans

I read an interesting article this week in The North Coast Journal that I thought my readers would enjoy. It was written by linguist Barry Evans in two installments. Enjoy: English is a mutt of a language, the bastard tongue of a bastard tongue, to use popular linguist John McWhorter’s phrase. He was addressing the […]

I read an interesting article this week in The North Coast Journal that I thought my readers would enjoy. It was written by linguist Barry Evans in two installments. Enjoy:

English is a mutt of a language, the bastard tongue of a bastard tongue, to use popular linguist John McWhorter’s phrase. He was addressing the fact that the language you’re now reading isn’t just the odd man out of its northern European siblings, but that their parent language ‘Proto-Germanic’ is itself an oddball in the Indo-European family. 

No one paid much attention to language families until polyglot judge Sir William Jones gave a legendary address to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta in 1786. He noted that the similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin couldn’t be coincidental and that they must, therefore, have a common root. (More tentatively, he suggested that the Persian, Celtic and Gothic languages were also derived from the same root.) His observation – not totally original but the first to tabulate the connection – kick-started the science of linguistics.

In a nutshell: Around 6,000 years ago, nomadic Yamnaya people living on the steppes north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea in present-day Ukraine spoke a now-extinct language we call Proto-Indo-European, or PIE. They domesticated horses, used wheeled chariots, grew crops and spun wool. Starting around 2500 BC, they spread out east to India and west to Europe. Today, 2.5 billion people communicate using PIE-descended languages, including: Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi (in the Sanskrit family); Kurdish, Pashto and Farsi (Iranian); French, Spanish and Italian (Italic); Welsh, Breton and Gaelic (Celtic); Polish, Czech and Russian (Slavic); German, Swedish and English (Germanic); and some 30 more distinct tongues.

Proto-Germanic, the parent of English and about a dozen other languages mostly spoken in northern Europe, has several features shared by neither its parent (PIE) nor any of its siblings. In addition to being much simpler, especially in its abbreviated verb endings and lack of genders, Proto-Germanic uses fricatives. This is easier to show than explain, by comparing Latin (a “regular” PIE language) to English:

Latin P becomes English F (e.g. pater to father)

Latin T becomes English TH (e.g. tres to three)

Latin K becomes English H (e.g. canis to hound)

The P, T and K of Latin and all other PIE languages are voiceless stops. Try saying “p,” “t” and “k,” noting that your lips, tongue and glottis momentarily stop the airflow. Now do the same with the fricatives (as in friction) “f,” “th” and “h.” Notice that they’re also created by your lips, tongue and glottis, but in this case, you only partially stop the airflow.

What caused the voiceless stop to fricative switch in Proto-Germanic? The generally accepted hypothesis is that it was due to speakers of Semitic languages (which are awash with those sibilant F, TH and H sounds) learning PIE before passing it on, imperfectly, to their children. This can also explain the simplified verbs and nouns of Proto-Germanic, typical of adult second language speakers. There’s good reason to believe that these parents were Phoenician seafarers, as I discussed in my Field Notes column on Grimm’s Law (Nov. 15, 2012). Meanwhile, speakers of other PIE-derived tongues passed on their language in the usual way, native-speaking parent to child, thus retaining PIE’s original voiceless stops and complex verb and noun forms.

Proto-Germanic, then, is uniquely odd. But so is one of its descendants: English. Next time, we’ll look at what is so weird about English compared to other Germanic tongues. Learn more at my one-evening OLLI class, The Lore and Lure of Language, at the Humboldt Bay Aquatic Center on March 8, 6:00-8:30 pm. Register at 826-5880.

Last time, we saw how the precursor of English, Proto-Germanic, was an oddball among other languages derived from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) spoken by nomads in present-day Ukraine around 6,000 years ago. Proto-Germanic is odd because its verb and noun forms are much simpler than those found in its sibling PIE tongues. In addition, it uses hissy “fricative” consonants in lieu of PIE’s regular “voiceless stops.”

English, in turn, is the black sheep of the Germanic language family. For one thing, its grammar is far simpler than any of its siblings. For instance, it’s the only language spoken in Europe that lacks gender (other than one dialect of Swedish); whereas German, for instance, has der, die and das to signify masculine, feminine and neuter, English has plain old the. English probably lost its gendered nouns in the transition between Old and Middle English, as Danish and Norwegian newcomers struggled to learn “Englisc,” streamlining it in the process.

Some linguists have even questioned whether English should properly be classified as Germanic in the first place, given its vocabulary is mostly composed of “Romance” languages (29 percent French and 29 percent Latin) compared to 26 percent Germanic (Old and Middle English, Old Norse and Dutch). English, they say, is more of a Creole, originally created in the guise of Old English by Celtic-speaking Britons who learned it as a second language from successive waves of European invaders and settlers between about 450 and 1100 AD. (Celtic is another Indo-European language family, represented today by Welsh, Breton, and Irish and Scottish Gaelic.)

Although Old English has traditionally been linked with Angles, Saxons (hence “Anglo-Saxon”) and Jutes, more recent studies indicate that it was essentially a hybrid of Frisian (the closest relative of English, which is spoken in the Netherlands where it’s an official language) and Saxon, created by British Celtic-speaking natives. And it’s in that Celtic connection that the weirdness of English really shows. Not in vocabulary (other than archaisms, no Celtic words are heard in English) but in a few quirks of grammar, including “do” and “-ing.”

English speakers use the meaningless word “do” in questions (Do you know the way to San Jose?) and negations (I don’t understand French). All other languages get by fine without the equivalent of “do.” (¿Conoces el camino a San José? No entiendoFrancés.) All, that is, except Celtic. Welsh, for instance: Did I open…? isNes I agor…? wherenes = do. Other than Celtic and a single obscure Italian dialect (Monnese), none of the world’s other 6,000 languages use “do” in this way.

Then there’s “-ing.” Present tense in English is, for instance, “I write, you write, he writes,” just like other PIE-derived languages. Except it isn’t. “S’up?” you ask me as you walk into the coffee shop. “I write my column for the Journal.” I reply. Huh? “I’m writing my column” – present progressive, right? Again, other languages get by just fine with the “regular” present: J’écris in French, (Yo) escribo in Spanish. You can say, “(Estoy) escribiendo,” in Spanish but you’d be doing it for effect: “Now I’m writing, but in an hour I’ll be partying.” So where does our English “-ing” oddball come from? Yep, Celtic.

Britons living in present-day England were speaking Celtic for thousands of years before invaders and settlers from continental Europe arrived, starting around 450 AD. The newcomers partially displaced the people (30 percent of white British DNA matches that of modern-day white Germans) and wholly erased their language, except for those little “do” and “-ing” Celtic constructions. Which is why you can legitimately ask of the above, “Does he know what he’s talking about?” But not, “Knows he what he talks about?”