{"id":38764,"date":"2019-07-11T01:00:57","date_gmt":"2019-07-11T05:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38764"},"modified":"2019-07-10T08:18:25","modified_gmt":"2019-07-10T12:18:25","slug":"qotd-english-is-weird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/07\/11\/qotd-english-is-weird\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: English is weird"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>English started out as, essentially, a kind of German. Old English is so unlike the modern version that it feels like a stretch to think of them as the same language at all. Hw\u00e6t, we gardena in geardagum \u00feeodcyninga \u00ferym gefrunon<\/em> \u2013 does that really mean “So, we Spear-Danes have heard of the tribe-kings’ glory in days of yore”? Icelanders can still read similar stories written in the Old Norse ancestor of their language 1,000 years ago, and yet, to the untrained eye, Beowulf<\/em> might as well be in Turkish.<\/p>\n

The first thing that got us from there to here was the fact that, when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes (and also Frisians) brought their language to England, the island was already inhabited by people who spoke very different tongues. Their languages were Celtic ones, today represented by Welsh, Irish and Breton across the Channel in France. The Celts were subjugated but survived, and since there were only about 250,000 Germanic invaders \u2013 roughly the population of a modest burg such as Jersey City \u2013 very quickly most of the people speaking Old English were Celts.<\/p>\n

Crucially, their languages were quite unlike English. For one thing, the verb came first (came first the verb<\/em>). But also, they had an odd construction with the verb do<\/em>: they used it to form a question, to make a sentence negative, and even just as a kind of seasoning before any verb. Do you walk? I do not walk. I do walk<\/em>. That looks familiar now because the Celts started doing it in their rendition of English. But before that, such sentences would have seemed bizarre to an English speaker \u2013 as they would today in just about any language other than our own and the surviving Celtic ones. Notice how even to dwell upon this queer usage of do is to realise something odd in oneself, like being made aware that there is always a tongue in your mouth.<\/p>\n

John McWhorter, “English is not normal”, Aion<\/em><\/a>, 2015-11-13.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

English started out as, essentially, a kind of German. Old English is so unlike the modern version that it feels like a stretch to think of them as the same language at all. Hw\u00e6t, we gardena in geardagum \u00feeodcyninga \u00ferym gefrunon \u2013 does that really mean “So, we Spear-Danes have heard of the tribe-kings’ glory […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,62,7,41],"tags":[570,33,400,737],"class_list":["post-38764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-europe","category-history","category-quotations","tag-england","tag-ireland","tag-language","tag-wales"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a5e","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38764"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49536,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38764\/revisions\/49536"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}