Editor’s note: Welcome to InDepthNH.org’s new 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! – Nancy West
By Michael Ferber, Speaking of Words
For reasons that have nothing to do with its virtues, English has become “the world language.” Although more people speak Mandarin Chinese as a first language than English, hundreds of millions of people speak English fluently as a second language or, as in India, a second first language. English is everywhere. But if the world were to sit down and decide on a world language on the basis of its similarity to other languages, or of its simplicity, the world probably wouldn’t choose English; it certainly wouldn’t choose English for its spelling rules, if we can call them rules.
English belongs to the great family of Indo-European languages, from Irish to Nepali, and particularly to the Germanic branch, at least originally. But nearly all of these hundreds of languages have features that English never had, or once had but has now lost. Gender, for instance. In Proto-Indo-European (PIE), spoken about 5000 years ago in the steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas, all nouns were gendered: they were masculine, feminine, or neuter. That remained true of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit; it is still true of Russian and German, among others. Old English retained the three-gender system, but in Modern English the only vestige of it is the set of third-person singular pronouns: he/him, she/her, and it. The third-person plural pronoun, however, even in Old English, was not gendered, which is why it has been recruited as the singular pronoun for a person of unspecified or non-binary gender.
Getting rid of gender may have been a step toward simplicity, but our verb system is another matter. English verbs have three tenses and four aspects, making twelve possibilities. Aspects have to do with the way an action is viewed, as completed, as ongoing, or as completed but with ongoing effects. So, in the past tense, we can say she spoke English and she was speaking English, with quite different meanings: we might label them as the simple past and the progressive past, though there are other terms for them. Both of these can be made into what we call past perfects: she had spoken English and she had been speaking English. I don’t think there are many other languages that distinguish two kinds of perfects. We do all this with helping verbs, with as many as three in a row in the future perfect progressive: she will have been speaking English. These aspectual differences across three tenses are very difficult for foreigners to get straight. And then we enlist another helping verb, do/does, for questions (Does she speak Mandarin?), negative statements (She doesn’t speak Mandarin), and emphatic statements (She does speak Mandarin), among other functions.
How did English verbs get this way? (Note the did.) The do-forms are fairly recent and distinctly English, but be, have, and the future helping verbs (will, shall, or others) go way back. They are common to all the Germanic languages—including German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages—and represent a drastic change from the earlier verb system of Proto-Indo European, in which aspect was essential to a verb but tense was not. PIE, like Latin and Greek after it, indicated aspect and (later) tense mainly by adding little suffixes or prefixes to the verb root, and sometimes by altering the vowel in the root itself. In English and the Germanic family we use suffixes for the regular past (they talk, they talked) and vowel changes for some of the irregular verbs (they speak, they spoke). Our verbs have only two obligatory tenses. The other tense and three of the four aspects we construct with helping verbs.
So the Germanic branch is odd to begin with. On top of that, English had to deal with two invasions. First came the “Danes,” the Vikings who settled in northern England, and spoke a kindred Germanic language, with many similar roots but quite different endings. That may have led to the erosion of Old English endings. (We also borrowed a lot of words, such as egg, and even they and them.) More powerful was the invasion and complete conquest by the Normans beginning in 1066. The Normans, though they were originally Vikings (“Norse-men”), spoke a kind of French, with the result that English today, in both grammar and vocabulary, is a hybrid of Germanic Old English and Latin-derived Old French. Our original cousins Dutch and German suffered no such flood of French or anything else, so to us they seem quaintly reminiscent of Old English. But we English-speakers are the weird ones.
Had the Normans not conquered England, the opening of the Declaration of Independence might have gone something like this: “When in the roundgang of mannish happenings, it behooves one folk to melt off the burgish bands which have knotted them with another…” And the Declaration itself might have been known as “The Boding of Unoffhanginghood.” If that sounds silly, remember that the German word for “independence” is Unabhängigkeit.
On top of these massive alterations, there was something called “The Great English Vowel Shift” that got under way around 1500. Certain long vowels that once sounded the way they sound today in Italian, Spanish, and German changed quite a bit. Long A, as in grace, before 1500 sounded like the A in grazie or gracias; long E, as in greet, resembled the long A sound in great or grate today; long I, which is now a diphthong or double vowel (ai as in aisle), sounded like the I in pizza; and so on. Linguists have not agreed on a reason for the Shift; maybe the perverse people of England just wanted to speak differently from their cousins on the continent.
Despite all these differences, everyone in the world, it seems, wants to learn English if they don’t already speak it. That’s handy for us, but it allows us to be lazy about learning foreign tongues. Most Americans, a European told me, speak two languages: (1) English, and (2) Loud Slow English for talking to foreigners. Legend has it that a school board in Kentucky was debating whether or not to allow the teaching of a foreign language in the high school when the superintendent clinched the argument by saying, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ it should be good enough for us.” Well, let’s hope we can be less lazy, weird though we are.