{"id":39171,"date":"2017-07-04T03:00:33","date_gmt":"2017-07-04T07:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=39171"},"modified":"2017-07-03T21:30:30","modified_gmt":"2017-07-04T01:30:30","slug":"the-linguistic-weirdness-of-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/07\/04\/the-linguistic-weirdness-of-english\/","title":{"rendered":"The linguistic weirdness of English"},"content":{"rendered":"

Native English speakers tend to have difficulties acquiring their first foreign language because their mother tongue has failed to equip them with what other languages consider quite basic tools, like gendered nouns, relatively sensible quasi-phonetic spelling, and relatively stable patterns for conjugating verbs. In a post from a few years back, John McWhorter<\/a> points out a few of the weird spots of English and where they came from in the first place:<\/p>\n

English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn\u2019t spoken, there is no such thing as a \u2018spelling bee\u2019 competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.<\/p>\n

Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. Speaking came long before writing, we speak much more, and all but a couple of hundred of the world\u2019s thousands of languages are rarely or never written. Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird. It\u2019s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels \u2018normal\u2019 only until you get a sense of what normal really is.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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 \u2018So, we Spear-Danes have heard of the tribe-kings\u2019 glory in days of yore\u2019? 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 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<\/em> is to realise something odd in oneself, like being made aware that there is always a tongue in your mouth.<\/p>\n

At this date there is no documented language on earth beyond Celtic and English that uses do<\/em> in just this way. Thus English\u2019s weirdness began with its transformation in the mouths of people more at home with vastly different tongues. We\u2019re still talking like them, and in ways we\u2019d never think of. When saying \u2018eeny, meeny, miny, moe\u2019, have you ever felt like you were kind of counting? Well, you are \u2013 in Celtic numbers, chewed up over time but recognisably descended from the ones rural Britishers used when counting animals and playing games. \u2018Hickory, dickory, dock\u2019 \u2013 what in the world do those words mean? Well, here\u2019s a clue: hovera, dovera, dick<\/em> were eight, nine and ten in that same Celtic counting list.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Native English speakers tend to have difficulties acquiring their first foreign language because their mother tongue has failed to equip them with what other languages consider quite basic tools, like gendered nouns, relatively sensible quasi-phonetic spelling, and relatively stable patterns for conjugating verbs. In a post from a few years back, John McWhorter points out […]<\/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":[4,7],"tags":[570,400],"class_list":["post-39171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-history","tag-england","tag-language"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-abN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39171","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=39171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39172,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39171\/revisions\/39172"}],"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=39171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}