Linguistic egotism, or, “The I’s have it”

I — in English, the first-person singular personal pronoun, nominative case. One of the most common words you will encounter in the language. The second-person you sometimes appears before I in frequency charts — I before you, except after who? Or is it, I after me, except before thee? — but you have to remember that you is nominative, accusative, and dative, all rolled into a single form. But I + me > you, every time.

I is also one of our shortest words (only the indefinite article, a, and the vocative interjection, O, are as short). English, moreover, is the only language that capitalizes its first-person singular pronoun. Other languages (e.g., German, Italian, Spanish) bestow this nicety on the polite forms of the second-person, but not English. No, in English, it is I who is most important; it is my perspective that matters more than any other. The I of the beholder, you might say. The first Roman numeral, I, coming before all others, putting the I in veni, vidi, vici. Try to demote the letter into lower-case and you get an imaginary quantity. We simply cannot conceive of diminished personal primacy, can we? Id pro quo? No, rather, ego vincit omnia. No need to dot this I. But underline it? Aye.

What was it that started me eyeing this pronoun, you might ask? Some of you who know me might say I’ve been I-obsessed for years, but there was something else — a recent piece in the Times Online, which claimed:

A “time traveller’s phrasebook” that could allow basic communication between modern English speakers and Stone Age cavemen is being compiled by scientists studying the evolution of language. Research has identified a handful of modern words that have changed so little in tens of thousands of years that ancient hunter-gatherers would probably have been able to understand them. Anybody who was catapulted back in time to Ice Age Europe would stand a good chance of being intelligible to the locals by using words such as “I”, “who” and “thou” and the numbers “two”, “three” and “five”, the work suggests.

Three pronouns and three numbers — not much of a phrasebook, is it? I guess it might work for the Neolithic dating scene. More to the point, what of the suggestion that the pronoun, I (as opposed to the Jason, I), “would stand a good chance of being intelligible”? I don’t think so. Aren’t these scientists forgetting something rather important, namely a little thing we like to call the Great Vowel Shift? As pronounced today, I bears little resemblance to its earlier forms. Compare the sound of English I to PIE *(h)eĝ. Hmm, in the words of Struther Martin, “what we’ve got here is ... failure to communicate.” Ironically, (h)eĝ sounds more like the stereo-typical grunts of early hominids than I ever could.

Now let me be clear: to a philologist’s eye, there is indeed a likeness between I and *(h)eĝ — just as there is between I and Sanskrit अहम्, Hittite ūk, Greek ἐγώ, Latin ego, Umbrian eho, Gothic, Old Saxon, and Old Frisian ik, Old Norse ek, Old High German ih, Old and Middle Danish iak, æk, Old Swedish iak, iæk, and so on and so forth — especially when one compares them to the Old English ic (and Middle English ich). Likewise, there’s a philological resemblance between Modern English I and the same pronoun in other modern languages, e.g., Italian io, Spanish yo, Swedish jag, Czech já, Russian я — just to give a more or less random assortment.

But to a speaker or a listener — that is to say, to the ear, not the eye — there is a great gulf between the sound of Modern English I, as it has been pronounced for the last several hundred years, and any of the earlier forms of the pronoun, let alone the earliest. It’s yet one more way in which English has differentiated — even canonized — its pronoun. Even Modern Frisian and Dutch, two languages arguably the closest to English, retain ik(ke) and ik, respectively. Dutch does have mijn “my”, pronounced just like English “mine” — that’s pretty close. If the nominative first-person pronoun had become *Ij in Modern Dutch, we might have had some company up here atop this I-ful tower, but alas, no.

It’s just English. And considering all the foregoing, I don’t think I should feel too bad about having rather a big ego. All English speakers are pretty full of themselves — aren’t they? — whether backed by the erstwhile imperialism of England, the rugged individualism of Australia, or the Manifest Destiny of America. Big egos — the Big I under a Big Sky — are built right into our language. Remember: you can spell solipsisme without je, but you can’t spell solipsism without I.

“Let them sa-si, if they can speak no better.”

Today’s post is about allophones, speech impediments, and onomatopoeia — with a little Tolkien thrown in for good measure. (What isn’t improved by the addition of a little Tolkien? ;)

Browsing Omniglot today, I came across a great WOTD: the Czech verb šišlat, which means something like “to lisp”. More specifically, it refers to the substitution of /∫/ for /s/ (whereas, lisping in English is the substitution of /θ/ for /s/). The word is marvelously onomatopoeic, isn’t it? It’s lovely how the word includes the very sound in question, isn’t it? Just as the English lisp contains the very sibilant a lisper can’t pronounce. Wait, did I say that’s lovely? I think I meant rather that it’s a bit of a cruel joke on lispers. ;)

While the Czech refers to a speech impediment, Spanish speakers are aware of a deliberate regional variation in the pronunciation of the sibilant sound. Speakers in parts of Spain and Argentina recognize a distinción between /s / and /θ/, meaning that casa and caza are not homophones. The so-called Castilian lisp. In Mexico and most of the rest of Latin America, by contrast, these are allophones. Where pronounced like /θ/, the term used is ceceo; where /s/, seseo. Those terms, once again, exhibit an apt onomatopoeia. Have I lost you? Perhaps it’s me; try Wikipedia for a more detailed explanation.

The Czech word šišlat also reminds me of the story of the shibboleth. In the Bible, there is a passage in the Book of Judges where the pronunciation of the Hebrew word שיבולת (”shibboleth”) proved quite significant. There, the same distinction between /s/ and /∫/ identified members of rival tribal groups. For anyone who couldn’t pronounce the shin (ש) properly, the price was death. Once again — are you hearing an echo? — the word shibboleth contains the sound in question, though in this case, it’s not inventive onomatopoeia, but rather an existing word with an identifying pronunciation which gave the speech pattern its name.

J.R.R. Tolkien — I promised I’d be coming round to him eventually! — adopted this terminology to describe a similar phonological distinction in his Elvish language, Quenya. In the late essay, “The Shibboleth of Fëanor” (circa 1968, published in The Peoples of Middle-earth), Tolkien discusses the change from Quenya /θ/ to /s/ — though Tolkien uses the letter Þ in place of θ in the essay. As in the Biblical story, the Quenya pronunciation became a matter of political struggle. Tolkien writes that:

Into the strife and confusion of loyalties in that time this seemingly trivial matter, the change of Þ to s, was caught up to its embitterment, and to lasting detriment to the Quenya tongue. Had peace been maintained there can be no doubt that the advice of Fëanor, with which all the other loremasters privately or openly agreed, would have prevailed. But an opinion in which he was certainly right was rejected because of the follies and evil deeds into which he was later led. He made it a personal matter: he and his sons adhered to Þ, and they demanded that all those who were sincere in their support should do the same. Therefore those who resented his arrogance, and still more those whose support later turned to hatred, rejected his shibboleth.

A fascinating and diverse collection of words for describing the pronunciation, or mispronunciation, of sibilant sounds, eh?

Two new beers to recommend

Those who know me know that I like to try potables and comestibles from all over the world — the more exotic, the better. And those who know me also know I’ll sieze any excuse to use a word like “comestibles”, hahae. I mean, this post isn’t even about food! ;) This week, two new countries join my list of beers from around the world. My normal preferences lean toward dark beers, bocks, stouts, porters, and the like, but today I have a couple of lagers to recommend.

Toña — Nicaragua
Toña is a wonderfully mild lager out of Managua. I was going to call it “light”, but I worry that could be confused with so-called light beer, which I never drink — mainly because it isn’t beer :) Toña only made it to American beer aficionados in January of this year, and it’s very welcome as far as I’m concerned. One thing I found interesting is that the malt and hops are American and European; only the well-water (and the brewing process itself, I suppose) is Nicaraguan. It carries a 4.6% alcohol content, and it’s not overcarbonated, so it’s very smooth. It has a little bit of a floral note, too, I think. I’m not sure whether they’ve added any flowers or herbs (e.g., coriander) to the mix, as some brewers will do, but it’s a very nice beer. It compares favorably with other lagers of the region. One thing I found amusing was that, according to the bottle, Toña comes to Texas supermarkets by way of Washington state. That’s a little out of the way, isn’t it?

Czechvar — Czech Republic
Considering that I’m one quarter Czech myself, it may be surprising that I haven’t tried any Czech beer until now. Well, actually, in a way, I have, since Shiner and other Texas beers still use techniques brought to Texas by Czech immigrants (of which there are still many small communities — e.g., Shiner, TX, itself). There’s even a Czech Heritage Society of Texas. In any case, Czechvar is a very nice, very drinkable lager, with a 5% alcohol content. I could almost believe it’s the pivo červený (“red beer”) of which my grandmother used to sing as a girl — to judge by their folksongs, the Czechs have their priorities right! — except that it’s pale gold in color. They brew it in České Budějovice in the Southern Bohemian region of the country, and I believe this may be my first beer from Eastern Europe.

Other countries whose beer(s) I’ve tried include:

• Australia
• Austria
• Argentina
• Belgium
• Belize
• Brazil
• Canada
• Chile
• China
• Czech Republic
• Costa Rica
• Denmark
• El Salvador
• England
• France
• Germany
• Guatemala
• Honduras
• India
• Ireland
• Italy
• Jamaica
• Japan
• Lithuania
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Nicaragua
• Peru
• Poland
• Phillipines
• Russia
• Scotland
• Singapore
• Spain
• Sri Lanka
• Tasmania
• Thailand
• Tibet
• Trinidad and Tobago
• Turkey
• Vietnam
• Zimbabwe

Counting the United States, that puts me up to 44 countries.

Am I forgetting some? Probably. I feel like I’ve had one or two others from Central and South America, but I’m blanking. And if you count things that are beer-like, but not actually beer, then I could add Nigeria and Ethiopia to the list. I should keep a real list, I suppose (I mean, a list that’s on the outside of my brain :). Are there any international beers that any of you can recommend? I also look for microbrews inside the U.S., but that’s a post for another day.