How Our Native Tongue Has Slipped or The English Languish December 2005 By now you are doubtless aware of my interest in languages. I have toyed with tongues from Turkish to Italian, from Greek to Latin, from Spanish to Lakota, one of the three Sioux Indian dialects. But one of the most complex languages in the world, mispoken by millions of people, is English. I am fascinated by how we communicate ideas, with words, symbols, gestures. But this commonly accepted bunch of rules and terms we call English is as unstable as the New Madrid Fault. And unless we are careful this instability can produce equally catastrophic results. Would you join me for a brief look at our mother tongue. I thought we might as well start at the beginning, but English started changing from its inception, if indeed there is a certain time that marks the beginning of our language. About 500 AD or so three Germanic tongues that were probably closely enough related as to be mutually comprehensible fused in southern England into proto-English: the languages of the Jutes from Jutland, Angles from Schleswig, and Saxons from Holstein. Wayne O'Neal of M.I.T. says, "When languages that are closely related... come into contact, the points of distinction between them (the rough edges) disappear, thus leaving their common characteristics in place." The blending of this conglomerate language and Latin occured in the mists of history partly as a result of Roman occupation and partly from Christianity that was introduced into England in 597. By 1000 AD the people were called Angelcynn or Angle-kin and the language Englisc, the country Englaland. Old English, like other European languages, was highly inflected: one stan two stanas; the king (as nominative; I hate to say, "the king as subject") was "se cyning" but to the king "thaem cynige". These endings disappear in Middle English, and the prepositions appear like "from", "by", and "with". Old English fyr became Middle English fuir and finally Modern English fire. Our words like you, is, the, plough, earth, sheep, swine, and field all derive from Old English. House was hus, man mann, and drink drincan. There was no uniform language but rather a potporri of dialects. Ambiguity and puns were popular. Pronunciation was not standardized for centuries. The Irish were said to talk with a shoe on the tongue; and the Irish word for shoe was brog (compare our brogan). As late as 1772 the famopus Boswell recorded a conversation in which learned Englishmen dabated whether "g-r-e-a-t" should be pronounced to rhyme with "state" or to rhyme with "seat". We fail to realize how recently English was accepted as a "real", legitimate language. It was not until 1356 that court proceedings in London were heard in English, and it was 1362 when Parliament first opened to the tones of the tongue. In 1381 Richard II renounced the throne in English, no less! But scholars call that phase Middle English, the dialect spoken from about 1150 to 1500. Shakespearean vocabulary we assume to be taken en mass from Middle English, but the bard brought us new words such as emphasis, horrid, allurement, armada, initiate, modest, vast, meditate, and others. And the great playwright knitted these marvellous words into expressions that have themselves become the vocabulary of modern English: "brevity is the soul of wit", "frailty, thy name is woman", "something is rotten in the state of Denmark", "it's Greek to me", "vanished into thin air", "budge an inch", "a tower of strength", "knitting eyebrows", "have short shrift", "it's high time", and "the long and the short of it". But Shakespeare in a way lived on the corner of the language, and although not bound to his past still embraced old terms and regionalisms, such as "chill" for "I will". With exploration of the New World Indian words entered the English vocabulary. Examples included hickory, chipmunk, hominy, terrapin, pecan, kayak, and moccasin. The slave trade brought along expressions like voodoo, banana, nitty-gritty,and jazz. As Americans pushed west of the mici sibi (Chippewa for "big river" or what we corrupted into Mississippi), we acquired or assimilated Spanish terms like stampede, mustang, poncho, bonanza, lasso, and rodeo. Here and there other cultures dumped their treasures into our thesaurus. The French gave us a variant on their three-card game of poque as well as the ace and deuce to play it with. And passing the buck was shifting the position of the buckhorn knife that marked who was dealing. Scots Gaelic gave us skedaddle, Italian minestrone, pasta, and zucchini, Yiddish kosher, schmuck, and yenta. So just what is American English anyway? In half an hour or so it is impossible to summarize methodically all the ways our native language has changed, but leaving ancient history I thought it might be fun to romp through a few areas of modern linguistic alterations. I had originally intended to address only recent changes in our language. Let us glance at a few. The first category of change we have come to call "political correctness", though what it has to do with either politics or correctness I can't say. Take gender issues, for example. We now universally say, "Each person should do their own thing", and not "his own thing", lest we somehow offend someone with the centuries old custom of using the masculine singular for a gender- ambiguous substantive. Similarly we refer to the deity with studious avoidance of any reference to His (pardon me, God's) masculine nature, totally ignoring in the process our Judeo-Christian roots and the words used by centuries of prophets and even Jesus himself. And leaving religion and entering the realm of the socially less acceptable, "gay" no longer means lightheartedly happy, "make" has sexual connotations, and "chairman" is a no-no. And that which is P.C. in one context must not be mixed with another context. Even the literary liberal might find trouble uttering "Bye-bye, Your Holiness. See you!", as Randolph Quirk put it in The State Of The Language published 1980. He also suggests as inappropriate "Hi, John: I'm just phoning to say your sister has croaked." A second category of change is seen in verbal use. In case you're the "moody" type you probably realize that years ago the present subjunctive vanished leaving us with mere vestiges such as the Lord's Prayer and "Thy kingdom come" and Jack In The Beanstalk's giant saying, "Be he alive or be he dead!". More recently we have lost the past subjunctive, so long used to indicate conditions contrary to fact: "If he were only here!" or "Were it not so". Third in our categories is the yielding of subordinate clauses to the coordinate. Some languages are biased against the subordinate clause from the start. Lakota, for example, in translating "since men are evil, they seek darkness" says in effect "men are evil & so they seek darkness". We do that every day now. We tend to retain "when" and "if" clauses but shift other concepts into coordination. Fourthly: gerunds are gone and participles fading fast. The learning is thwarted. Learned principles evaporate. Compare the simple Lakota, instead of "I saw a boy running" it says, "A boy was running and so I saw". (Hokshila wan ianka cha wamblake). And look at comparative participles: "most well known" for example has replaced "best known", "most well loved" has supplanted "best loved" or "most loved." And number five: pleurals are less structured, or if you prefer less regimented and constricted. "The data was collected", not "were collected". Computer geeks are not sticklers for traditional grammar! "The media is to blame", as though nobody recalled that "medium" is the singular form. Sixthly: Unusual words. We avoid those mellifluous, propitious words that a fourth grader might find foreign. We follow the maxim of "Keep It Simple, Stupid". I glanced at the "F" pages of a dictionary and found as examples of the studiously circumvented the following: felly or felloe meaning the under- rim of a wheel, fictile meaning made of molded clay or capable of being drawn out (like this paper!), fid used as a bar or pin for support, fizgig as a flirting woman, flagitious for grossly wicked or scandalous, and fleer meaning to laugh coarsely at or sneer. To get an idea of what we are missing in our rich verbal store try reading Umberto Ecco, who keeps his Italian-to-English translator hopping. Seventh: Avoid troublesome words even if short ones. Notice the trouble people have with "set" and "sit". Use "put" for your transitive choice. "I put the paper on the table". Worried about whether to use "affect" or "effect"? Use "impact" as a verb for the former and use a circumlocution for the idea of bringing about a change. "The disease impacts the whole community." And who dares to use "imply" or "infer"? We skirt the issue by using "hint at" or "pick up on" respectively. The eighth category is the explicit sexual expression. The explicitness varies from generation to generation. In one section of Canterbury Tales, The Summoner's Tale, written by Chaucer in the late 1300s, we find the guide in hell telling Satan: "Shew forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se Where is the nest of freres in this place" Then things changed. In the Victorian era mention of any anatomy north of the ankle was verbotten. But thimgs changed again. Soon came Lolita and Lady Chatterly's Lover. During the '80s one might get away with anything sexually explicit, but now conservatism and censorship are again creeping forth. And lastly, look at the evolution of slang. Each language has it, and English slang is truly volatile. A few expressions have endured through centuries. The ancient Romans said of a defeated gladiator "Habeat", he has it, from which we say "he's had it". Slang cannot be translated literally into another language, and therefore slang expressions have a uniquely homegrown regionalism about them. Take some quick examples: "Into": That's a simple enough word. But how do you translate "I'm into golf" or "he's into yoga"? Or use "into" in phrases such as "run into", "look into", "go into". (I ran into a patient and told him I'd look into his indigestion, but although I gastroscoped him, I'll not go into that!) Listen with unbiased ears to "where are you coming from?" I dare you to answer with a geographical location! And watch out for that little gem "get". Get it on, get one on, get down, get off on ... another subject, get with it, get it off. Or try "hang", as in hang on, hang one on, hang in there, hang loose, hang tough, hang ten, get the hang of it. "Upfront" has come to mean honest, forthright; but from the vantage of a cosmetic surgeon what's up front may be blatantly falsie. Yes, Alice, words mean what I say they mean. So much for categories of language change. Now I want to give two sorts of practical, concrete examples of linguistic evolution, first from our own Kentucky New Era and then from various translations of the Bible. I had assumed that newspapers would represent typical speech of the period and that I would find simplification of grammar and reduction of vocabulary to simpler words. But my theory proved wrong. Similarly I thought more modern translations of the Bible would show a similar trend. In that case I was more nearly on target, perhaps in part because centuries of evolution were involved and not mere decades. I took the front page of our local paper for 11 November 1918 and for 9 April 2005. The reason for choosing these was not profound; I just happened to have both on a shelf in my library. I assumed these two papers were representative of their respective times. The older paper had 7 articles plus "Daily Jots" and fillers on that page and 3 black & white photos. The newer edition had 5 articles with 2 large color photos and 2 smaller. Excluding headlines and captions the older paper had 2,040 words on that page and the newer 1,226. The older paper had 3 articles continued inside, the newer none. The older had 21 subordinate clauses and 2 gerunds and the newer 32 with one gerund. The older had the phrase "To H--L with Kaiser say Hendenburg", but the newer had no profanity. Both had very simple vocabulary, the older used "cantonments" twice and "enunciated" once. The newer had no word more complex than "hunkered". Now looking at Bible translations: 1. How is "whom" handled? The King James Version from the 17th century has John 20:15 saying "Whom seekest thou?" The 1952 RSV says, "Whom do you seek?" And the 1973 New International Version says, "Who is it you are looking for?" John 20: is rendered respectively: "the disciple whom Jesus loved", "the one whom Jesus loved", and "disciple, the one Jesus loved". John 6:29 is translated "that you believe on him whom he hath sent", "that you believe him whom he has sent", and "to believe in the one he has sent". Note the subtle differences. 2. How is the lay/lie pair treated? John 20:2 in these respective versions comes out: "We know not where they have laid him", "We do not know where they have laid him", and "We don't know where they have put him". 3. Inverted order vanishes with evolution: In John 12:8 "The poor always ye have with you", "the poor you always have with you", and "You will always have the poor among you". So the times they is a changing, and so is the language. We still haven't reached the dephths of George Orwell's Newspeak, but we're headed that direction. So get with it, hang loose, and make sure one of your legs is both the same.