Editor’s note: Welcome to InDepthNH.org’s column Speaking of Words. Michael Ferber retired from the English Department at UNH, but has plenty more to say and write about words. We are thrilled he wants to do that for our readers. Welcome Michael!
By MICHAEL FERBER, Speaking of Words
This rather alarming word does not refer to what might happen to pupils who go to grammar school but to a simple concept in linguistics that goes a long way toward explaining how languages change over time. It is the process by which words with a full meaning, like the definition found in dictionaries, gradually lose that meaning and become mainly grammatical adjuncts such as auxiliary verbs or suffixes. They are subject to “semantic bleaching” and then become routinely attached to other words. This process is best understood by looking at examples, and there are lots of them, discoverable in probably every language on the planet.
The verb “will” in Old English meant “desire, wish for, be willing to.” We still say “God wills it” and “do what you will.” We can “will something to happen.” But as early as the tenth century we find cases where “will” was used as the future auxiliary, and today that is its primary function, as in “He will study grammar,” whether he wills it or not. Several other languages use a verb of volition for the future auxiliary, but it is not inevitable. In our cousin German, ich will gehen does not mean “I will go” but “I want to go.” German uses a different verb, werden, for the future: ich werde gehen = “I will go.” Werden used to mean “turn, turn out, become”; the Old English cognate weorthan was sometimes used for the future but was then dropped.
The earliest sense of “do” in Old English was “put” or “place,” and because these meanings are very general “do” was easily extended in many directions: “do honor to the King,” “do you no harm,” “do me a favor,” etc. Note also “Don we now our gay apparel,” where “don” = “do + on.” But in Middle English it acquired looser usages, one of which bleached almost to meaninglessness: “I do love thee” was simply a variant (useful in poetry) of “I love thee.” Today it is the emphatic use. “Do” is now also the normal auxiliary for questions (“Do you love me?”) and negations (“I don’t love you”), as well as short rejoinders (“Do you love me?” “I do.”).
There is a persuasive theory that, long before these developments, an ancestor of “did” was the origin of the past-tense suffix (-ed) of regular verbs, so that “he loved her” was once something like “he love-did her.” “Do” has so permeated English that it is hard to imagine what we would do without it.
Here is a nice example from French. The word pas meant, and still means, “step,” as in faux pas in etiquette and pas de deux in ballet, phrases that have entered English; it is also the source of “pace.” But pas is also the negative particle: je ne parle pas anglais (“I don’t speak English”). How did “step” get to mean “don’t”? Well, the original negative particle in French is ne, a direct descendent of Latin ne but pronounced with a less substantial vowel, and it must have seemed inadequate to French speakers long ago. To make it more emphatic they added other words, just as we say “no way” or “not a bit.” For verbs of motion pas was a natural choice, as in ils ne marchent pas (“They aren’t moving a step”) or Ne bouge pas! (“Don’t budge an inch!”). For other verbs there were other intensifiers, such as goutte (“drop”), miette (“crumb”), and so on. Je n’ai mangé miette (“I didn’t eat a crumb”). Eventually pas replaced most of these, and now it so common that it often stands alone without ne, as in je parle pas anglais.
When I first studied French I was puzzled to learn that to make an adverb out of an adjective you take the feminine form of the adjective and add –ment. Between masculine heureux (“happy”) and feminine heureuse you choose the latter and make heureusement (“happily”). The same rule applies to Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Why feminine? The answer lies with –ment (or –mente in the other Romance languages): it derives from Latin mente, the ablative case of the noun mens, which means “mind.” “Happily” originally meant something like “in a happy mind.” And mens is feminine! As a suffix in the modern Romance languages, anything having to do with mind has evaporated; it has been grammaticalized.
Rather the opposite happened in English and other Germanic languages. Our standard adverbial ending is “-ly.” Where does it come from? The Old English forms were –l?che and
–l?ke, corresponding to modern German –lich, found in both adjectives and adverbs. But these words meant “body (living or dead).” Modern German Leiche means “dead body,” and in English “lich-house” meant “mortuary.” From l?che or its root came “like,” which means “similar in shape or body.” So “happily” derives more or less from “happy-like,” and that means “(in) happy shape” or “(in) happy body.” So the Germanic family recruited bodies for their adverbs, while the Romance family recruited minds. Make of that what you will.
As for “body,” that word too has been bleached. A transitional use as “person” may be seen in Robert Burns’s line, “Gin [If] a body meet a body, comin thro’ the rye.” In Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables we read “You will find me a cheerful little body.” And now we have “somebody, anybody, everybody, nobody,” where the word is a suffix. Also “busy-body.”
There is no end of examples. Linguists have been busy-bodies on this subject for over thirty years, and they have found close parallels across languages. In French, for instance, chez means “at the home of.” Chez moi means “at my house,” a prepositional phrase functioning as an adverb. It is akin to casa, which in Spanish and Italian means just “house.” In Swedish hos means “at the home of”; it comes from hus, “house.”
One last example, one of my favorites. The adverb “down,” the opposite of “up,” is anomalous among Germanic languages, where German has unter or unten, Dutch has beneden, etc. But rather than use the cognates “under” or “beneath,” English for many centuries has used a word that means “hill.” There are “The Downs” in England, and there are sand “dunes” in America. Old English speakers said of-dune (“off the hill”), which then shortened to “a-down,” and then just “down.” It seems unlikely that a word could grammaticalize into nearly its opposite, but there it is.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.