Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (13 page)

In comparison, English settles for making poor
you
do an awful lot of work:

Notice that while Swedish has its
“se habla”
pronoun
man
, in English we drag
you
in to do that job:
You
have to be careful with these big corporations.
In Old English, though, there was a
man
pronoun, too. But in Middle English documents, over three hundred years it blows away like autumn leaves. Today it is gone.

Learn a European language, including any Germanic language but Swedish, and note that quite often, while most verbs form their past perfect with the verb
have
—
Ich habe gesprochen
(“I have spoken”)—a good little bunch do it with the verb
be
, too—
Ich bin gekommen
(“I ‘am come’ ”). Just like in Old English:
Learning had fallen away
was “Learning
was
fallen away”:
Lār āfeallen wæs.

Marking some verbs with
be
instead of
have
is a matter of being explicit about a certain nuance: in the perfect, the verbs marked with
be
refer, technically, to a state rather than an action; i.e., something that
be
s. When you say you have arrived, you mean that you have now achieved the state of being there: “I’m here, so let’s get started.” On the other hand, when you talk about how you raked leaves this afternoon, you usually are getting across that you
performed
the action of raking leaves, not that you have achieved the
state
of having raked the leaves and are now ready to have your picture taken.

We English speakers think, “Well, yeah . . .” but hardly feel it necessary to split that hair. The other Germanic languages do split it—and Old English did.

But something strange started happening in Middle English, as usual; now it was the
be
-perfect that was falling away (like autumn leaves). By Shakespeare,
be
is used with only a few verbs (“And didst thou not, when she
was
gone downstairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with such poor people?”
Henry IV, Part II,
II, i, 96) and today, it lingers on only in a frozen form such as
The autumn leaves now are gone
. Even there, you may well have thought of
gone
as an adjective (
The leaves are red
,
The leaves are gone
), and in any case you can also say
The autumn leaves
have
gone
, which, in this case of the grand old Old English
be
-perfect, they have, as always in English.

In any self-respecting member of the Germanic family, one (
man
?) puts the verb in the second slot in the sentence, hell or high water. So for
I saw a film
, German has
Ich sah einen Film
—nothing odd there. But if you want to say
Yesterday I saw a movie
, “saw” has to stay in that second slot, and so “I” has to come after it:
Gestern sah ich einen Film
(“Yesterday saw I a film”). The verb sits tight in that second slot and everything else has to manage. In all the Germanic languages it has to be “Yesterday saw I . . .” to keep the verb in second place. Swedish for
Today she’s driving the car
has to be:
which gets
kører
(“drives”) into that number two slot after
I dag
(“today”).

This quirk of word order, which linguists call “verb-second” or “V2” for short, is by no means common in the world, and to my knowledge is only a family trait today in Germanic, in which it is as normal as Apfel pie. The details differ from language to language, but all Germanic languages have it—except one. Its absence in that one (guess which one!!) is odd. Although, given that the one it is absent from also shucked off so much else, maybe it’s not odd. Maybe there is a reason behind all of this.

English’s autumnal leaf-dropping quality involves even more cases,
⁶
but I need not list them all: you get the point. No Germanic language has shed as much of what Proto-Germanic passed down to it as English, by a long shot. Of course some drop a stitch here and there more than others. Afrikaans has no gender, because it is what happened when Dutch was learned by so many Africans that, unlike any Germanic language on the Continent, it went as far as English did and lost gender. However, in terms of the many other features that make a language a descendant of Proto-Germanic, Afrikaans is very much a card-carrying member: in Afrikaans, you “remember yourself,” you come
hither
, there is a nice
man
pronoun, a
be
-perfect, and the V2 tic. Swedish, as noted, has lost its
be
-perfect (although it holds on in Norwegian and Danish). However, Swedish is otherwise as Germanic as, well, German.

English’s grammar, then, is “easier” than the other Germanic languages’. The Grand Old History of English describes these “difficult” features as just mysteriously melting away. But none of these authors have had occasion to consider how very
many
such features just melted away, and that nothing similar was happening in other Germanic languages. The question beckons: why has English been so strangely prone to just letting it all go?

Back in the twenties, pioneering linguist Edward Sapir groped at the question in an elegantly put discussion of the
whither
/
hither
/
thither
case:

 

Sapir’s writing, as always, satisfies—but it does leave a question as to why, oh why, speakers of this and only this Germanic language found nuance so irritating. Scholarship on English has proceeded with about as little interest in that question as Sapir evidently had. Yet the question has an answer. It’s as much a part of the story of the English language as Chaucer and Caxton.

When I was about eight, I remember letting a neighborhood friend take a spin on my bike. He was a more highly spirited fellow than me and gave it a good zip up and down hills, bumping it down some curbs, doing “pop-a-wheelies” and so on. Finally he skidded to a stop in front of me and some of our pals. We heard some screw or washer from somewhere in the bike clink to the ground. Then, a pedal fell off, followed by the handlebars. The seat screws went loose and the seat tipped limply forward, and finally the back wheel fell out. My friend ended up squatting on a mangled heap of bars and gears, and we and our friends watching howled with laughter for the next fifteen minutes.

I swear I remember this, and yet upon reflection I can’t help suspecting that the memory has been distorted in my mind over time. After all, bicycles do not just fall to pieces like that—it would be like something out of a Looney Tune. Maybe something happened just to the seat, or just a wheel slipped—but with all due acknowledgment of entropy, the bike cannot have completely disintegrated right under him. Why, after all, would a bike do that?

Languages are no more likely to toss off massive amounts of grammatical features than bikes are to fall to dust. For example, in language groups other than Germanic, there is never one language that just miraculously becomes a stripper. Supposedly, what happened to English is so unremarkable. But the 250 languages of Australian Aborigines are known for having lots of suffixes, and even though the languages have been spoken there for several tens of thousands of years, not a single one has drifted into a state like English’s.

What this means is that something happened to English. Someone did something to it. If a bike does collapse under its rider, then we know that earlier that day, somebody loosened all of its screws so that it would fall apart after being ridden hard for a while. Somebody unscrewed English. Attention must be paid.

Let’s pay some, and line up the suspects. It has, actually, been bruited about that English was turned into a simpler language by the Norman French. The idea is tempting, but impossible. There were, for one, never all that many Normans on the ground in England—one estimate is about ten thousand amid a British population of one or two million. The Normans were an elite living amid masses of ordinary people speaking English as they always had. Thus, even if Normans tended to speak English in an inaccurate way, there is no reason that English-speaking folk would imitate them—if they ever even met them.

This even includes people as influential as the kings of England who, for a while, were men of Norman birth who likely did not even speak English. Think about it—let’s imagine that the king does speak English, but as a second language, like, say, Maurice Chevalier. You, on the other hand, talk like Eric Idle. If you ever actually heard the king speak—and that’s a big “if,” especially since there’s no radio or TV—no matter what esteem you hold the king in, why would you start walking around talking like him, so consistently that your children hear you talking only that way? If by chance you really were so odd a person, what would the chances be that whole villages would take to doing what you were doing, 24/7, for a century?

Besides, evidence suggests that the Normans didn’t speak funny English for long anyway. By a hundred years and change after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, there are reports of Normans needing to have French taught formally to their children, and of people of Norman ancestry speaking good English like anyone else. By the early 1300s, William of Nassyngton famously had it that:

 

Lewed,
by the way, meant “unlearned”—neat how the word has evolved into its modern
Hustler
connotation. And
gonge
, by the way, was
young
.

We can assume, then, that the Norman impact on English was in terms of words, and lots of them. That’s old news. Who beat up English’s
grammar
?

Here is where our Vikings come in. Grown men raised on Old Norse were suddenly faced with having to do their raggedy best speaking
Englisc
on a regular basis whenever they spoke with anyone besides the guys they came over with. The simple fact is that adults have a harder time learning languages than children and teenagers—and this was an era when there was no Berlitz, no language instruction beyond someone on the fly telling you, “Here’s the word for . . . ,” and for the most part, not even any writing.

They came in one wave after another over a century—for generations there were ever new hordes of men from across the sea not speaking the language right. Crucially, whereas French came to England as an elite language spoken by rulers living remotely from the common folk, the Vikings took root on the ground, often marrying English-speaking women, such that their children actually heard quite a bit of their “off” English. All of this had an effect on the English language.

The waves in question started in 787, Danes on the eastern side and Norwegians round the western one. For the next hundred years England coped with increasing numbers of these invaders, culminating in an agreement in 886 that the Vikings would confine their dominion to the northern and eastern half of England, thence termed the Danelaw.

The power that the Vikings wielded is clear in traditionally noted things such as the proliferation of Scandinavian-derived place names in the Danelaw area ending in -
by
and -
thorp
, and names ending in -
son
(like Orm Gamalson, he of the sundial), as well as transformations of bureaucratic procedure. These things alone, however, cannot, in the strict sense, tell us much about whether these people were passing their rendition of English down to new generations of people of both Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon (and Celtic) descent. Power can be wielded by almost counterintuitively small numbers of people, and thus have no effect on how everyday language is spoken.