[T]ry naming another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do you find that difficult? ...Not the only really cool insight that was new to me, who has occasionally read into these matters for decades now.
[T]o the untrained eye, Beowulf might as well be in Turkish.
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 – roughly the population of a modest burg such as Jersey City – very quickly most of the people speaking Old English were Celts.
Crucially, their languages were quite unlike English. For one thing, the verb came first (came first the verb). But also, they had an odd construction with the verb do: 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. 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 – 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.
The Celtic Underbelly of the English Tongue
A missing piece from your philology, perhaps. Everybody knows about the Normans and their importation of a kind of French to impose itself upon the Old English. But how much do you appreciate about the Celts?
Ha, I thought that might be McWhorter. This is one of his favorite themes. I really enjoy his books.
ReplyDeletePS, and it wasn't even that long ago that we started using "do" this way. In Shakespeare, we wouldn't be surprised to see "Walk you often along this path?" instead of "Do you often walk here?" Or think of folk songs: "Cam ye o'er frae France . . . saw ye Geordie Wilkes. . . ."
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting observation too. It would sound as if we recovered something that was latent in the language. Maybe it was a usage that continued in common verbal, but not in formal written English?
ReplyDeleteOr maybe it has nothing to do with the Celts and it simply reflects an evolution of our language.
ReplyDeleteWell, he gives the other modern languages that use it as Irish Gaelic, Breton, and Welsh. Two of those are descended from Old Brythonic, and Irish Gaelic is also a Celtic language.
ReplyDeleteAlternatively the source uniting those regions should be the Normans, since they came from the north of France and conquered both Wales and Ireland in addition to England. But it isn't a French usage (which makes its survival in a majority francophone region like French Brittany surprising).
It could be that the English adoption has nothing to do with the older Celtic use, but it seems more likely that it's a folk usage that dropped out of educated use for a long time because educated Anglophones looked to French and Latin for their cues of respectability. Once that finally stopped after the English Reformation (and contemporary loss of the last of their French possessions), there'd be no more reason to look to French or Latin usages as the standard of what was respectable. Just as there was sudden acceptance of translating the Bible into English at that time, and for those reasons, English may have been elevated in other ways too.
A quick glance through the KJV finds lots of uses of the "do..." forms he's talking about.
ReplyDeleteAnything is possible I guess. I didn't find the evidence presented in the article sufficient to support the argument. Additionally, I think he grossly underestimates the numbers involved in the Anglo-Saxon invasion/settlement of England.
ReplyDeleteNow you two have me interested in the question. I dug out my Chaucer and other Middle English poets. The form does exist, but it's a lot less common. Questions are usually formed with the regular verb, as in the French: "Fares it so?"
ReplyDeleteHowever, I do see the form in places. It's sometimes given in anachronistic variations: doth, dooth, dost, doeth. But, from the anonymous Richard Couer de Lion:
"Earls and barons came, I ween,
To her lord she hastes, the queen,
Asked of him what did him ail?"
We probably wouldn't phrase it "What does you ail?" but rather "What do you think made you sick?" But it's recognizably the "Do you walk?" form, well before Shakespeare.
Yes, it's as if there was a long-term struggle between the two forms, and "did/do" won out in the end. But as recently as the end of the 16th century, the old Germanic form was still holding its own. Over the next few centuries, it was relegated more and more to stilted or poetic usage. Today, the old form seems distinctly quaint.
ReplyDeleteMcWhorter's books go into the evidence in more detail. He's convinced that it's an unusual form, impossible to account for in English's dominant roots of French and the Germanic branch of Old English. I don't know that the Celtic origin is a well-accepted theory, though it does seem odd that the strange construction is pretty much limited to English and the old Celtic languages. It's certainly McWhorter's pet theory. Of course it could also be just an odd structure we dreamed up for English, like French's habit of saying "Is it that he goes to the store?"--which is not found in other European languages to my knowledge.
ReplyDeleteNo wonder people find English to be difficult to learn.
ReplyDeleteIt's not even a single language. Then again, the Celts somehow made it to Anatolia, the "Galatia". The vikings of their era, before the vikings got boats.