The curious lives of French prepositions

When you study comparative Romance philology, it’s only a matter of time before you notice that French exhibits some prepositional anomalies. These have interested me for years. For heaven’s sake, you might wonder, how do we explain Spanish con, Italian con, Portuguese com, Romanian cu, all from Latin cum, but French avec? Where did parmi “among, between” come from? And how about dans “in”? What about chez “at the home of”, which is so useful it has made its way even into English? None of these are found in the other Romance languages — and there are plenty of other examples — but why?

I was asking myself questions like these twenty years ago, and though I have now long known the answers, it struck me that some of my readers might be interested as well. Since chez is my favorite example, I’m going to save it for last. Let’s start with the strange-looking avec.

This word is the modern reflex of Middle French avecques, in turn from Old French avoc, avuec, avoec. The latter is the spelling found in The Song of Roland, used prepositionally near the beginning of the poem (l. 186), but used adverbially near the end (l. 3626). The word is a contracted or elided form of Latin apud hŏc “with this (thing)”. The path would have been something like Latin apud hŏc > ap[ud] hŏc > Vulgar Latin *abhoc > Old French avoc. What is most interesting is that French kept a vestigial trace of the pronoun, hōc, the neuter form of hīc “this”. Quite separately, the Latin preposition apud eroded directly into an Old French preposition od, ot, o “with” — which occurs with greater frequency than avoc in Roland. There is also one occurrence of the construction o tot “with all” (l. 1357), with the same meaning as modern avec, and which looks something like the obsolete English withal.

Originally, Latin apud and cum had different connotations, the latter more often associated with coincidence of time than with people or things, but French took one path, all the other Romance languages the other. Why is a difficult question, one that would require a lot deeper investigation that we have time for here, but it was during the Carolingian/Merovingian dynasties that avoc began to outshine od, likely under the influence of Frankish (i.e., Germanic) constructions and preferences. (Let us remember too that Old English wið was originally “against”, preserved now only in withstand; whereas, it was mid that connoted the sense of our modern preposition “with”.)

Many of the other anomalous French prepositions evolved along similar lines from Latin collocations of either preposition + noun/pronoun, preposition + preposition, or preposition + adverb. By contrast, the other Romance languages (particularly Italian) usually derived their forms directly and solely from the original Latin prepositions. The “French model” explains parmi and dans, among many others.

Parmi, also attested in Roland, is formed from a preposition + noun, from L per mĕdium “in, through the midst of” > VL per mĕdiu > OF par mi, parmi. The preposition dans is similarly formed. The usual Romance preposition from Latin in “in(to)” became French en (cp. Sp en, It in, P em, Ro în), but dans came from OF denz, in turn from L de ǐntus “from within”. There is also an alternative (and redundant) form in dedans, from OF dedenz (< L de de ǐntus). Other “compound” prepositions of this sort include avant, dehors, dessous, dessus, delà, dépuis, avant, devant, envers, devers, etc. Some of these have direct cognates in the other Romance languages, but not all of them.

As promised, my favorite: chez. This wonderful preposition is unique among the Romance languages, and so valuable and concise that is has been borrowed from French. We all know what it means: “at the house of”, as in, “party this weekend chez Jason and Jennifer.” (That’s just an example; please do not knock on our door tonight unless you come bearing wassail! ;). This one is the real anomaly, because it is essentially just a noun repurposed into a preposition. This becomes pretty obvious when you consider that the only way to translate it requires the use of a noun, “house, home, etc.”.

So, as you may have guessed already, French chez goes back to Latin casa “house”. The c > ch sound change is among the most common in the language; cp. OF castel, chastel < VL castellu, OF cheval < VL caballu, OF chien < VL cane, OF chose < VL causa, and hundreds more.

The use of chez as a preposition comes along after Roland. In Old French, chez was not a preposition, but rather a noun meaning “house”. The prepositional use today has pushed this noun out of the language. Instead, the common French word for a house is maison, of which the English cognate form is mansion (< VL mansiōne < L manēre “to stay, remain”). The other Romance languages retain the derivatives of L casa in common use, cp. Sp casa, It casa, P casa, Ro acasă — but the Latin noun still survives in modern French as the specialized noun case “a small house or hut; or a square on a chess-board”. In the 11th century, the usual construction would have been je vais à chez Gautier (translating Latin vado ad casam Walterii), but à chez contracted rapidly to chez alone.

And the rest, as they say, is histoire. :)

Umlaut and Tolkien

I suppose the first question, for many of you, is what is umlaut? This is a term people like me throw around a lot, often without stopping to consider the confusion among non-philologists. “Non-philologists”, I suppose, is another way of saying, 99.999% of the human race. ;)

Put simply [1], umlaut is a phonological process whereby the pronunciation of a vowel is influenced by the vowel (or semivowel) in the subsequent syllable. This sound change comes in many different flavors, some more common than others. In the Germanic languages, umlaut frequently refers to a more specific sound change where vowels are raised or fronted [2] under the influence of i or j in the following syllable. For these reasons, when speaking of Germanic umlaut, the synonymous terms “i-mutation” and “fronting” may be encountered (you will sometimes also see “palatal umlaut”). This sound change occurred in all the Germanic languages except for Gothic. [3]

As for why one vowel changes under the influence of another, there are two basic views. Randolph Quirk and C.L. Wrenn may have summarized it best: “The generally accepted phonetic explanation […] is that the high front i or j palatalised the preceding consonant and that this in turn pulled the vowel of the stem towards its own position, raising or fronting it. […] This theory may be called ‘mechanistic’, because it is based entirely on the assumed workings of the speech-organs. An alternative explanation is that in pronouncing the back vowel in the root-syllable the speaker unconsciously allows his mind and his tongue to ‘anticipate’ the i or j that is to come in the immediately succeeding syllable, […]. This is a ‘mentalistic’ or psychological theory of i-mutation. The orthodox view of articulatory influence through the consonant is a theory of attraction and assimilation, while the mentalistic view is one of anticipation.” [4]

Since some eyes may be glazing over at that, let me make this a little more plain: i is basically the highest, frontmost vowel there is. It’s so high and so fronted, that it can’t help but pull other vowels toward its point of articulation; not to do so would put a much greater strain on the speech process, and if there’s one sure thing we can say about the speech process, it’s that it’s lazy. It will always take the path of less resistance and least strain on the speech-organs.

Perhaps a few examples would help to make i-mutation clearer. Let’s consider Old English gold “gold”, and observe how the process worked. OE gold was originally *guld (cp. Old Norse gull, and Gothic *gulþ, attested only in the dative singular, gulþa). The suffix used to form the adjective “golden” is still clear in Modern English. We should have expected very early OE *gulden, which mutated by umlaut into gylden “golden”, the u “fronting” into the corresponding short front vowel, y. Subsequently, under the operation of a different sound change, the vowel is the noun, *guld, was lowered, giving us gold. In Modern English, the signs of umlaut in “golden” are long gone, but they were quite clear in OE gylden.

How about another? Think about Modern English “old”, “older”, “oldest”. Do you see where I’m going with this one? In more archaic English, of the type Tolkien often used to represent the speech of Gondor and Rohan, we see the forms, “old”, “elder”, “eldest”. Here umlaut survived into Modern English — for a while. Let’s have a look at the antecedent forms.

In Old English, these were eald, ieldra, ieldest. So, hmm, where’s the i or j we need to account for the fronting of the diphthong ea to ie …? You have to go further back. The original comparative and superlative suffixes in Proto-Germanic were *–izo, *–isto — there’s our vowel! By the time of Primitive West Germanic, the comparative had rhotacized to *–iro [5], while the superlative remained unchanged. By the time of Primitive Old English, this would have given us first eald, *ealdira, *ealdist, which would in turn have mutated by umlaut into the recorded forms, eald, ieldra, ieldest. These are the early West Saxon forms. In the later “classical” West Saxon of around the year 1000, these had eroded into eald, yldra, yldest. In the Mercian dialect (Tolkien’s favorite and mine), the situation looks at once more familiar: Old Mercian ald, eldra, eldest.

If you speak any German, this should look equally familiar, as the Modern German forms are alt, älter, ältesten. As you can see, in German, the vowel experiencing umlaut is still written as the same original letter, but a diacritical mark is placed over it to indicate the umlaut, and the pronunciation is indeed raised or fronted (from a to e).

As the last example shows, umlaut is still very much with us today. It’s typically associated with German, from which the process takes its name (umlaut is um “after” + laut “sound”). A couple more examples from German: Frau, but Fräulein. And schön from Old High German scóni. But though usually thought of in connection with German, it’s still present in English too.

Here’s something I’ve been building up to. Ever wonder why it’s Anglo-Saxon but English? Or why it’s Anglia, but England? Had I begun with this question, you might have been scratching your heads, but now you know the answer: the change from a to e is umlaut! In Old English, the angle were the Angles (as in Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), but the adjectival form of their ethnonym was englisc (originally *anglisc, acted upon by umlaut). And this is where we come to Tolkien. You may have wondered whether I’d live up to that promise, so dense has been the discussion up to now! Hopefully, you’re all still with me.

Tolkien was far more expert than I in matters of Germanic sound laws. He owned books with impressive titles like Laut und Formenlehre Altgermanischen Dialekte [“Sound and Morphology in the Old German Dialects”], and he read them in their original languages and made annotations and corrections in their margins. He was better versed in umlaut than I will ever be and would surely have found plenty to niggle at in my explanations of it. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that he worked examples of umlaut into his fiction (as he did so many other philological elements). I can think of three instances in The Lord of the Rings. If I’ve successfully communicated the basic idea behind umlaut, can you think of any? Pause here to put on your thinking cäp.

Here’s a hint: just like Angle/English, the examples of The Lord of the Rings are topo/ethnonymic.

So. Just as we have Angle, but English, Tolkien gives us Dunland, but Dunlending and Dunlendish, where the i in the final syllable causes the a in the second to be raised to e. This is as straightforward a case of umlaut as you could wish for. Interestingly, the words dún-land “down, hilly land” and dún-lendisc “hilly, mountainous” are attested in Old English, as are uppe-land and up-lendisc, both pairs clearly demonstrating umlaut in the real world. Returning to Middle-earth, another example from Tolkien follows the same pattern: Sunlands, but Sunlending, each used only once in the novel, in reference to the far southern regions of Harad.

And finally, again in connection to Harad and the Sunlands, what about the curious Shire word, Swertings? “Swertings we call ’em in our tales; and they ride on oliphaunts, ’tis said, when they fight,” Sam tells Gollum [6]. This is a little less obvious, but it must be the umlauted form of *Swartings, derived from swarthy, a word Tolkien often uses of the Harad-folk. The word swart or swarthy comes from Old English sweart “black” (Mercian *swart), cp. Old Norse svartr “black” and Modern German schwarz. In Old Norse, there is a proper name Svertingr, which probably carries a swarthy meaning and shows umlaut from svartr; likewise, probably, for the Swerting in Beowulf, though we can’t really say much about him. Also in Old English, swertling was used to gloss the Latin ficedula, a small passerine bird, dun or drab (or swarthy) in color. Today, ficedulae are Old World flycatchers of the order Passeriformes, but Bosworth/Toller supposed that swertling might be the titlark, a bird of the same taxonomic order, but different in family, genus, and species.

There you have it. Both real-world and Middle-earth examples, side by side. Put there, in fact, by one of the most gifted Germanic philologists the world has ever seen. Should we be surprised? Of course not! Is it interesting? Well, I certainly think it is, and I hope you agree. :)


More, and lengthier, notes than usual …

[1] As complicated as this must sound to a lay reader, believe me, I have simplified it. The whole process is made more difficult by the fact that the i or j (especially the latter) frequently disappeared by the time the words in question were being set to parchment. Other processes of sound change might subsequently alter the vowels of the stem, inflexions, or both. Inflexions may have been lost entirely. Exceptions may have preserved root vowels where we would have seen umlaut. And so on. But at its simplest: i-mutation is the raising or fronting of a root vowel under the influence of i or j in the following syllable.

[2] Fronting and raising aren’t the same thing, though they’re closely related. Each vowel, like all speech sounds, is articulated at a certain location somewhere in the speech cavity, somewhere from the lips to the glottis (front to back), from the soft palate to the lower jaw (top to bottom). Fronting means that the articulation of a vowel moves from the back of the speech cavity toward the front (e.g., fool to foot to fur); while raising means a vowel moves from the bottom toward the top of the speech cavity (e.g., frond to friend to frill). Try pronouncing these groups of words and pay attention to how your tongue moves inside your mouth: forward with the first group of words, then upward with the second group.

[3] Actually, it might have occurred in Gothic, but two problems: the vast bulk of the Gothic we have is from the 4th century, which predates the umlaut process; and if umlaut did occur in Gothic, we don’t have any later texts that would show evidence of it. One would think it should have occurred in Gothic, and this has occasionally been alleged by scholars, but we have no clear evidence of it in the surviving corpus. By the way, i-mutation isn’t an exclusively Germanic process — there are examples in the Romance languages as well — but it was much, much more prevalent in the Germanic language family than in others.

[4] Quirk, Randolph and C.L. Wrenn. An Old English Grammar. 2nd ed. London: Methuen, 1957, pp. 153–4.

[5] Rhotacism is another sound change in the Germanic family, whereby Proto-Germanic z became a rhotic, or r-like sound. Like i-mutation, this occurred in all the Germanic languages except Gothic (er, maybe; see note 3). Example: PG *deuzom gave Gothic *dius (attested in dative plural diuzam), preserving the z; but this was rhotacized throughout the rest of the family: Old Norse dýr, Old Frisian diar, Old Saxon dior, Old High German tior, Old English déor “wild animal (> deer)”. Why should the z and r sounds be related? Ask Antonín Dvořák!

[6] In draft, it was Gollum, not Sam, who called the Haradrim Swertings.

Silent Letters in English

English is reputed to be among the most difficult second languages to acquire, and although my position is a biased one, I’m sure it’s true. It’s not so much because of the grammar, which is actually pretty simple — though it does have quite a profusion of irregular forms. I think the main obstacle is the spelling and pronunciation, which is far from regular. Just consider the inconsistencies in “the tough coughs as he ploughs the dough” (courtesy of Dr. Seuss), in which the same cluster of letters is pronounced in four different ways!

The main reason for these inconsistencies is that English is an amalgam of so many other linguistic influences, ranging across the whole Indo-European spectrum, with a staggering number of foreign borrowings from virtually every language family on Earth. If America is the so-called melting pot, then the English language is its fondue fork, dipping into the pot and drawing out whatever words it finds useful, sometimes modifying their spelling, sometimes their pronunciation, sometimes neither, and sometimes both! No wonder ESL students have difficulty.

English is particularly famous for its silent letters. Many languages have some of these. French is also notorious for them, but in French, they tend to be much more regular; in English, they are anything but! As a fun exercise, I’ve tried to think up words in which each of the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet is silent. There are only one or two letters for which I couldn’t find an example (or possibly as many as five, depending on how strict you are). That’s pretty good, eh? (Or pretty bad, if you are learning the language.) In any case, more than twenty of the letters in the English alphabet can be silent, which is pretty incredible whther you deem it good or bad.

Wherever I could, I’ve also tried to show the same letter silent in more than one position in a word (i.e., initially, medially, and/or terminally). Some of these are words of foreign borrowing, though I’ve tried to limit them. Such borrowings are inevitable with English, but feel free to disqualify them if you prefer a stricter game. Also, comments on the silent letters in other languages are welcome!

A: Cocoa, Bread, Practically [and innumerable adverbs of the same sort]

B: Debt, subtle, doubt, climb, plumb, thumb, lamb, subpoena

C: Indict, muscle, chthonic, victual, czar, science, yacht, scissors

D: Handkerchief, bundt, Wednesday, djinn

E: Every, evening, vegetable, walked, talked [I don’t count the terminal e in words like fate, because it governs the pronunciation of the earlier vowel.]

F: Halfpenny

G: Phlegm, gnu, gnome, eight, align, foreign, diaphragm

H: Honest, hour, eight, exhibit

I: Business, parliament

J: Marijuana

K: Knee, knife, knot

L: Half, salmon, calf, yolk, talk, would

M: Mnemonic

N: Autumn, damn, hymn, column

O: Subpoena, Leopard, Country

P: Corps, coup, cupboard, pneumonia, ptomaine, pterodactyl, pseudo, psychic, psalm, receipt

Q: Lacquer, racquet [not the best examples; anyone have anything better?]

R: February [by some], forecastle [I don’t count non-rhotic accents, in which r is routinely silent, since this is not my own accent. Can anyone think of any others?]

S: Island, corps, aisle, debris, hors d’oeuvre, viscount, demesne

T: Ballet, tsunami [by some], thistle, rapport, ricochet, listen, castle, soften, whistle

U: buoy [by some], biscuit, victual [I disqualify u when following g and q; in those cases, it governs the pronunciation of the consonant.]

V: — [anyone?]

W: Write, wrist, answer, sword, two, whole, who

X: Faux, Sioux

Y: Key [maybe; what do you think?]

Z: Rendezvous, laissez-faire, chez [exclusively French; can anyone think of something else?]

And for even more fun, there are some words which, through the continued erosion of their pronunciation, now boast multiple silent letters in English. Examples: corps, boatswain, blancmange, forecastle — or is it actually forecastle?! Can anyone think of a word with three or more silent letters in it?

German — warum störrisch?!

I’ve been wondering about this for some time. I haven’t researched the question, in part because I’m not quite sure where to begin, and I’m hoping some of you can help me. In a nutshell, why has declension survived into Modern German, almost unchanged after more than a thousand years? Three genders and four (sometimes five) cases make learning the language more difficult for those unaccustomed to case systems. It’s a complaint I hear a lot about such languages (not only German, but Russian, Polish, Irish, Finnish, Greek, to name a few). It’s a little easier to learn the paradigms for “dead” languages (e.g., Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit), because one generally tends only to read fixed texts, not to attempt to converse in these languages. One must only recognize inflected forms; one is not normally called on to summon them up during ad hoc conversations. It’s a question of passive versus active mastery.

I know there have been a few changes to German declensional paradigms over the centuries, sure, but the rest of the Germanic family has pretty much given up on them entirely, or nearly so. In Modern English, the only really conspicuous survival of the system is in the personal pronouns. Everywhere else — articles, numbers, adjectives, and of course, nouns — they’ve been swept almost completely into the dustbin of history. This is pretty universally true of the Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Frisian, Dutch (though Dutch held on perhaps longest of all of them). Of the Germanic family*, it’s really only Modern (High) German that has stubbornly retained its original declensional system, and the system in use today is almost the same system in Middle High German, and it’s easily recognized even in Old High German texts more than a thousand years old. Why?

Just to give you an idea of the similarities, take a look at the following table representing the definite article in Old High German, Modern German, Old English, and Modern English. As you’ll see, the ancient forms are readily recognized, and it’s very clear that the Old English forms are close cognates to those in Old High German and even Modern German. This gives German speakers some advantage over English speakers when each attempts to learn Old English. Why have these distinctions survived in German, when they have been mostly abandoned by the rest of the family? (Note: I omitted the plural forms from the OHG paradigm because these have, in fact, changed a good deal, with distinct forms for each gender collapsing into a single plural form for each case in the modern language.)

OHG	masc.	neut.	fem.
nom.	dër	daz	diu
acc.	dën	daz	die
dat.	dëmu	dëmu	dëru
gen.	dës	dës	dëra
...
German	masc.	neut.	fem.	pl.
nom.	der	das	die	die
acc.	den	das	die	die
dat.	dem	dem	der	den
gen.	des	des	der	der
...
OE	masc.	neut.	fem.	pl.
nom.	se	þæt	seo	þa
acc.	þone	þæt	þa	þa
dat.	þæm	þæm	þære	þæm
gen.	þæs	þæs	þære	þæra
...
English		sing.		pl.
all cases		the		the

* Modern Icelandic is the other notable exception. It’s still a highly inflected language, but in this case (no pun intended ;), an insular history explains how the grammar has been preserved, virtually unchanged, since the days of Snorri Sturluson. But German is its antithesis: spoken in the middle of a busy continent, by more than one hundred million (compared to less than half a million for Icelandic). German has also been widely used as a language of science, philology, literature, and even music. One should have expected substantial erosion. Why hasn’t this occurred? Any theories?

The secret lives of irregular verbs

Ah, irregular verbs. They are the bane of first-year language students everywhere. The grammars of most languages are fairly regular — sure, nouns and adjectives offer occasional surprises (e.g., the gender-switching plurals of Italian, on which I am preparing a separate post), but is there any feature of grammar that bedevils students more than the irregular verb? I don’t care if we’re talking about English, Italian, German, Sanskrit, or Ancient Greek — just about all natural languages have them. (It’s been claimed that a few, like Turkish and Chinese, have very few irregular verbs or even none at all; and of course, artificial languages, like Esperanto, are designed quite deliberately to have none.)

Students find them intimidating, nothing more than columns of more or less random variants to be stumbled through and memorized. But all words have etymologies, even the irregular forms of verbs. Etymology is really nothing more than asking how a word became the way it is. The inquiry is normally confined to root words (nouns, adjectives, infinitive verbs, and so on), but the question may be asked of particular forms too. In fact, it should be asked of particular forms, especially those for which no intuitive explanation comes readily to mind. When we do so, we find that a lot of the so-called irregular forms aren’t really so irregular after all. Let’s look at some examples.

In the Germanic languages

English has a large number of so-called irregular verbs, close to 200 of them. Moreover, these are among the most commonly used of all English verbs. It’s been estimated that when you use a verb in everyday English conversation, something like 70% of the time it’s one of the “irregular” ones. But most of these are not really (or were not originally) irregular. Rather, most of them followed very specific, if fairly complex, rules for changing their internal vowel. This process is called ablaut, and it runs the whole gamut of the Germanic language family, from the earliest recorded languages to the present day. Students of Old English often encounter the terminology of “strong” and “weak” verbs — which is another way of saying the same thing.

Even today, when we have lost touch with the rules that made these verbs more regular, we can still detect patterns. Consider just a couple of the representative classes: (1) ring, rang, rung; sing, sang, sung; spring, sprang, sprung; (2) blow, blew, blown; grow, grew, grown; know, knew, known; show, shew, shown; throw, threw, thrown. Notice shew, the original past tense of show, unfamiliar to most of us today but still in use as recently as 1915. This form has now been supplanted by a seemingly more “regular” form, showed. In reality, though, the attempt to regularize the verb has really made it less consistent with other verbs of its class. And this process of “regularization” is gaining momentum. Consider: hang, hung, but also hanged; plead, pled, but also pleaded.

Some verbs are irregular in English for a different reason. Ever wonder why the past tense of go is went? Or why we have to be, I am, I was? Phonologically, these forms have nothing whatsoever in common. As it happens, went is the past tense of wend, a verb synonymous with to go but almost extinct in Modern English. It clings to life in a few phrases such as “to wend one’s way”, and in computer programming constructions such as WHILE … WEND. But while wend has all but wended away, its past tense, went, has stuck around, stuck to a different verb! Lingusts call this process suppletion. In the case of to be, we again have forms from two different Old English verbs: beón and wesan. As a side note, in Old English, gán “to go” had yet a different irregular past tense: ic gá “I go”, but ic éode “I went”. But I digress.

In the Romance languages

A major class of Romance verbs represents the case of simple erosion, a process occurring in all languages all the time. Erosion occurs for many reasons, from easing pronunciation to nothing more than laziness. There are innumerable examples in English — e.g., every, pronounced “evry”, probably pronounced “probly” (even “prolly”), walked pronounced “wakd”. And how about one from French — est-ce que pronounced “esque”. Eventually, the spelling of these works is likely to change. But to return to verbs, where this kind of erosion or contraction has occurred, traces of the older, “uneroded” verb form survive in different forms or tenses of the modern verb, right alongside newer forms.

Think about the following Italian verbs: bere “to drink”, versus bevo “I drink”; dire “to say”, versus dico “I say”; fare “to do”, versus faccio “I do”. Where did these consonant changes come from? In turns out that bere is contracted from an older form, bevere, dire from dicere, fare from facere. These earlier forms may be found in the works of Dante and Boccaccio. And seen in this new light, the forms bevo, dico, and faccio look much more regular. We find the same phenomenon in French, where the verb boire “to drink” has “irregular” plural forms buvons, buvez, boivent. Why? Again, because of older form(s) of the infinitive, beivre, boivre > boire. We find boivre and beivre, in illo ordine, attested in the twelfth-century Roman de Renart and the thirteenth-century Fables of Marie de France.

Another class of Romance verbs appear to be irregular only because two verbs coalesced into one — suppletion again. This explains the case of Italian andare “to go”, versus vado “I go”, French aller / vais, Spanish ir / voy, Portuguese ir / vou, Catalán anar / vaig, and so on. What we have here is a pair of Latin verbs, īre and vādere, both meaning “to go”. Rather than one verb winning out over the other entirely, we ended up with surviving forms from both. Why? So far as I know, that’s a mystery. But it’s a mystery taken up with remarkable consistency into Latin’s many daughter-languages! Not quite so irregular as things might first have appeared, eh?

Summing up

Learning how irregular verb forms originated makes remembering them much easier. Typically, there are three major explanations for irregular forms. (1) Ablaut, or the changing of internal vowels to convey grammatical information; these are the “strong” verbs of the Germanic languages. (2) The erosion or contraction of forms over time, as in the examples of Italian bere and dire. And (3) suppletion, where forms from independent (synonymous) verbs coalesce into a single verb in the modern language.

These are hardly the only reasons verbs become irregular — I haven’t touched on changes due to orthography, or brought about by historic vowel and consonant shifts — but if you take the time to learn how these three broad classes operate, you will be surprised how often those troublesome irregular verbs begin to fall in line.

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.

Oxen and Foxes — the curious life and death of plurals

The plural of ox is oxen, but the plural of fox is foxes. Has that ever bothered you? Ever wondered why it is? I have known people to guess that it’s because the words were drawn from two different linguistic wells, but that’s not it; both are straight from the swift-flowing waters of Old English, surviving into Modern English almost without change. So ... why is it? And have oxes and foxen ever been spotted in the wild?

Let me answer the last question first. Yes — oxes is liberally attested in the Middle English period, with its veritable explosion of different word forms and spellings, and oxes has cropped up occasionally ever since. The form foxen has occasionally been seen as a plural of fox, as in David Booth’s Analytical Dictionary of the English Language [1]. But as a plural, it would have had stiff competition from foxen = vixen “a female fox”. When it has appeared as a plural, I would guess it was under the pressure to match oxen. Or it may show a Dutch influence. The examples Booth gives — housen, foxen, eyen — have the Dutch forms, huizen, vossen, ogen.

Let’s take a closer look at the provenance of the two words. First, the obligatory litany of cognate forms. Now come on, no complaining; you knew this was coming. :)

The word ox comes from Middle English ox, from Old English oxa. Cognate are Old Norse uxi, Old Saxon ohso, Middle High German ohse, Old High German ohso, Welsh ych (pl. ychen), and Gothic aúhsa — all (well, not the Welsh) from Primitive Germanic *uhsōn.

The word fox comes from ME fox (and southern dialectal vox), from OE fox. Cognate forms include ON fóa “fox” (“vixen”, actually; the noun is feminine) — ON borrowed the OE fox, unchanged, but it was only used (and only rarely) in the metaphorical sense of a kind of fraud; Norn fūa; OS fuhs, vuhs; MHG voha, and vuhs; OHG foha, and fuhs; and Gothic faúhó — all from Primitive Germanic *fuhsaz.

Great, you’re saying, but how does this help us understand why the plural forms differ? Well, take a closer look at the OE forms, and you will notice that one of them ends in a vowel. Our ox originally ended with a vowel in all the Germanic languages, as it still does in Modern Swedish oxe, German Ochse, and Frisian okse. But in Modern English (as in Modern Dutch os) the terminal vowel has been lost. But fox had its terminal consonant from the beginning. OE fox is a strong noun, hence its plural form is foxas; but OE oxa is a weak noun, hence its plural would be … anyone? … oxan. And there you have it: that’s the reason for Modern English oxen, but foxes.

Are there other words like these? Not pox (actually = pocks, already plural). Nor tax (from Latin via Old French).

How about box? Like ox and fox, this is a direct survivor from OE box, but this word is a feminine strong noun, so its original plural, buxa, was of a third kind! Subsequently, buxa was standardized by force into boxes, just as oxen will probably someday become oxes.

And what about lox? This comes to Modern English via Yiddish, which is not Hebrew, but basically German. There is actually an all but forgotten OE antecedent in lex, leax, læx “salmon”. This was a strong noun (like fox), so its the plural would have been leaxas. But strangely enough, modern lox has no plural!

Any others? How about two more, just for fun. You are having fun, aren’t you? Modern English ax(e) is from OE æx, æcs(e); its correct plural is like box, æxa, but similarly, it has been “standardized” into the form, axes. And wax is from OE weax, wæx; a strong noun like fox, so its plural is weaxas. We’re all right there with Modern English waxes.

What does any of this have to do with Tolkien (as everything must :)? I’ll leave you with two quotations (emphasis added):

A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed. ‘Hobbits!’ he thought. ‘Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer behind this.’ He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it. — The Fellowship of the Ring (Chapter 3, “Three is Company”)

And:

In Dasent’s words I would say: ‘We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.’ [...] By ‘the soup’ I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by ‘the bones’ its sources or material—even when (by rare luck) those can be with certainty discovered. — “On Fairy-Stories”

[1] Booth, David. An Analytical Dictionary of the English Language. Volume 1. London: J. and C. Adlard, 1830, p. xxxiv.

English ascendant — long foreseen?

I suppose we all have a certain chauvinism for the language we learned to speak first — our “cradle-tongue”, as Tolkien has called it [1]. We may learn other languages, explore the aesthetics of speech, and perhaps (if we are fortunate) even find our native language — “our own personal linguistic potential”, embodying our “inherent linguistic predilections”. But for all that, we still fall often enough into the prejudices of our “language of custom” [2]. So please take the following with that caveat in mind and not as a personal endorsement of English as the best language in the world. (Far from it, I sometimes think.)

It has become pervasive, though, hasn’t it? One recent book on Tolkien, in which a number of international contributors were given a voice, bemoaned “the fact that English has, without a doubt, become the koiné in Tolkien studies – some sort of Middle-earth Common Speech” [3]. And of course, English has spread far beyond Middle-earth. It is spoken in almost every corner of the world, and learning it is frequently required in the educational systems of many countries. I am told that Indians begin learning English in school at the age of two years! (In the U.S., children don’t even begin school until age five or six!)

Why has English become so popular? I won’t rehearse the many arguments about the whilom successes of the British Empire, the emergence of the United States as a world-dominating political and economic force, etc., etc. You have heard these arguments many times. But other answers might be closer to the mark — or at least equally valid. Why, after all, didn’t Chinese or Hindi become the ascendant lingua franca? Both can boast more native speakers than English, almost as widely distributed around the globe.

Part of the answer might be the particular structural, phono-logical, morphological, and assimilative qualities of English. All the foregoing has been a perhaps too lengthy introduction to the following quotation. Here, Richard Carew (quoted in William Camden’s Remains Concerning Britain) extoled the virtues of English some 400 years ago. His description of the “excellency” of the English language seems to come near the mark (bracketed insertions are mine):

The Italian is pleasant, but without sinews, as a still fleeting water. The French, delicate, but even nice as a woman, scarce daring to open her lips for fear or marring her countenance. The Spanish, majestical, but fulsome, running too much on the O, and terrible like the devil in a play. The Dutch [i.e., modern German, not modern Dutch], manlike, but withal very harsh, as one ready at every word to pick a quarrel. Now we, in borrowing from them, give the strength of consonants to the Italian, the full sound of words to the French, the variety of terminations to the Spanish, and the mollifying of more vowels to the Dutch, and so (like Bees) gather the honey of their good properties and leave the dregs to themselves. And thus when substantialness combineth with delightful-ness, fulness with fineness, seemliness with portliness, and currantness [i.e., fluency] with stayedness, how can the language which consisteth of all these sound other than most full of sweetness?

Again, the long words that we borrow [e.g., from the Latin and Greek], being intermingled with the short of our own store, make up a perfect harmony; by culling from out which mixture (with judgment) you may frame your speech according to the matter you must work on, majestical, pleasant, delicate, or manly, more or less, in what sort you please. Adde hereunto, that whatsoever grace any other language carrieth in verse or prose, in Tropes or Metaphors, in Ecchoes [i.e., onomatopoeia] and Agnominations [i.e., alliteration], they may all be lively and exactly represented in ours. [4]

Carew goes on from here to provide a litany of Classical writers and the English writers who capture their styles in that language. I won’t repeat them all here. He’s clearly very partial to English (“if mine own eyes be not blinded by affection,” he admits), and he may go too far in some of his verdicts — but even so, I think he has hit on some important points. Most importantly: that even then, and moreso now, English owes much of her success (and, to Carew, aesthetic virtue) to her unique ability to assimilate the most successful or euphonic words and elements from other languages and to make them her own.

I welcome your thoughts on this — especially those of you whose “cradle-tongue” is not English. (And let me congratulate you for reading this blog in English and perhaps helping to prove the point. ;)



[1] Tolkien, J.R.R. “English and Welsh.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983, p. 190.

[2] All quotations, loc.cit.

[3] Segura, Eduardo and Thomas Honegger, eds. Myth and Magic: Art according to the Inklings. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007, p. ii.

[4] Camden, William. “The Excellency of the English Tongue, by R.C. [Richard Carew] of Anthony Esquire to W.C. [William Camden].” Remains Concerning Britain. London: John Russell Smith, 1870, pp. 50–1. The text quoted is the 1870 reprint of the 7th edition (1674). The last edition Camden himself revised was the 5th (1607); the first edition appeared in 1586.

“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?

Perfect pitch — but at the cost of expressiveness?

NB: I’ve been meaning to post about this for ages, so I have to apologize for the staleness of some of the underlying stories I’ll be referring to.

Some time last year, I heard an intriguing piece on NPR (which I can’t find now — maddening!) in which the phenomenon of perfect pitch was correlated with native fluency in tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese. Diana Deutsch of the UCSD Pyschology Department is probably the leading researcher in this field, and she’s discovered some very intriguing things. (Here’s a link to one of her most recent, and highly readable, publications on the subject, from the 2006 issue of Acoustics Today.)

Just what sorts of discoveries has she made? How about this? While only about 14% of American English speakers exhibited perfect pitch, fully 60% of Mandarin Chinese speakers did so. That’s pretty staggering, don’t you think? And what’s more, Deutsch recorded Chinese speakers pronouncing the same word on different days, and a different times of day, weeks apart, and the recordings sounded identical (pitch-accurate within a semi-tone — basically, the difference between Middle C and C#). The NPR piece played a number of these samples, and others are available on Deutsch’s website.

No wonder so many Chinese speakers — like my favorite cellist, Yo-Yo Ma (who reportedly does have perfect pitch) — are gifted musicians, right? But after ruminating on this research for a little while, I began to wonder whether this perfect pitch might come at a cost in expressive flexibility.

Think about it. Tonal languages like Chinese convey lexical meaning through precise tones. Why tones? One theory holds that they were necessary for expanding the range of meanings possible in languages that are largely monosyllabic, and often phonemically limited. So, pronounce the same collection of phonemes in each of Mandarin’s four tones, and you get four distinct meanings — most often, completely unrelated to one another. The pitch becomes crucial for understanding. And the more tones you have, the greater the need for pitch-perfect speech. Mandarin Chinese only has four tones, but Vietnamese has six, and Cantonese has nine!

In most Indo-European languages, lexical meaning is unrelated to tone or pitch. Rather, these factors can be used to convey a wide range of secondary connotations instead — irony, humor, emphasis, irritation, accusation, you name it. This is very common in expressive languages such as English and Italian. Consider an example. I just found a more or less random sentence in a recent email (from my wife to one of our friends): “I just wish Jason didn’t have to go to work tomorrow.” Here are a few (by no means all) of the variations possible:

1. I just wish Jason didn’t have to go to work tomorrow.
[Maybe he doesn’t mind, though.]
2. I just wish Jason didn’t have to go to work tomorrow.
[Emphatic.]
3. I just wish Jason didn’t have to go to work tomorrow.
[However I don’t care if you have to.]
4. I just wish Jason didn’t have to go to work tomorrow.
[Alas, he does.]
5. I just wish Jason didn’t have to go to work tomorrow.
[However he is, in fact, obligated.]
6. I just wish Jason didn’t have to go to work tomorrow.
[Rather than work from home, maybe.]
7. I just wish Jason didn’t have to go to work tomorrow.
[Rather than have to go somewhere else.]
8. I just wish Jason didn’t have to go to work tomorrow.
[Today or the day after tomorrow, say, would be better.]

Would all of these shades of meaning be possible in Chinese? I don’t think so! Because of the lexical significance of its tonality, spoken Chinese approaches melody (I tried to capture this in the picture I made, above) — and you can’t alter a melody without producing a completely different sense. Mozart isn’t Debussy. Tonal languages perforce become a sort of monotone. Well, not a literal monotone (perhaps we could call it a “fixed polytone”?), but anyone speaking the same sentences would sound much more “identical” than in English, Italian, or Dutch, for example.

So far, studies have been limited to just a couple of Asian languages. I’d like to see the investigation expanded to consider other tonal languages, such as Yoruba, Cherokee, Hausa, and Punjabi. I’d also like to see the study applied to Indo-European pitch-accent languages, such as Norwegian, Swedish, and Serbo-Croatian. Cherokee might make an especially revealing study, because it’s spoken with tone in Oklahoma but without tone in North Carolina. Unfortunately, the population of speakers is very small (fewer than 25,000, 99% of whom speak it only as a second language).