Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (5 page)

I make no claim to have checked all six thousand languages in the world for a meaningless
do
, but I am aware of precisely two approximations of it anywhere but in Great Britain, and then, only approximations.

One is in a small language called Nanai spoken in Siberia, where it is
be
rather than
do
that is used meaning-lessly. To say
They died
, you can say “They died was.”

 

This does not mean “They were dead” or “They were dying”: the
was
is the third-person singular form, not the third-person plural form that would agree with
they
. The
was
word is just tacked on, with no meaning: “They died—uh, was.” A more graceful translation would be something like “What it was is that they died.” But even this is optional, like the Germanic
do
s.

Then there is the Monnese dialect of Italian and a few other close relations, out of dozens of Italian dialects, where the word for
do
is used in questions:

 

But in these Italian varieties,
do
is not used in negative sentences, whereas in English,
do
is used in both negative and question sentences—just as in Welsh and Cornish. And then, in Welsh and Cornish,
do
is also used in “default” affirmative sentences and was as well in earlier English—Gertrude in
Hamlet
’s “That you
do
bend your eye on vacancy.” So, in some Italophone
hamlets
, so to speak,
do
has been yoked into service in a meaningless fashion—but not in the particular way that it was in English, which mirrored precisely how
do
was used in the Celtic languages spoken by the people whom Anglo-Saxon speakers joined in invading Britain.

The only languages in the world that are known at present to have meaningless
do
as English does are (drumroll, please) none other than the Celtic languages. Can we really believe that the Celts had nothing to do with English’s meaningless
do
, which parallels it so closely
and once did so even more
? In fact, do we have any reason to consider that the Celts were anything less than the crucial factor, without whom English would have no meaningless
do
?

This question looms ominously over all of the specialists’ “shitte happens” versions of how English got meaningless
do
. All of them are brilliant in themselves, but also seem to ignore that meaningless
do
as it exists in English is about as weird as finding an AMC Gremlin on the moon.

One specialist tries that it all started with
do
being used to indicate that something is done on a regular basis—
Cats do eat fish
would mean “Cats are in the habit of eating fish”—and that something odd happened in negative versions of sentences like that. At first,
Cats do not eat fish
meant “Cats are in the habit of not eating fish,” as a kind of description of something specific about cat’s gustatory disinclinations. It was a description of a habit of cats, with
do
as the habitual marker. But obviously that sounds like a rather labored way of saying “Cats don’t eat fish,” and that’s exactly how people started processing it. Instead of “What cats do is not eat fish,” people heard “Cats eating fish is a ‘no’ ” That is, they heard the negation as the most prominent feature in the sentence and thought of the “habit” part as background. Thus a sentence that was first about
do
-ness became one about
not
-ness.
Do
started to seem like just some bit of stuff hanging around. It lost its “juice” and stopped meaning “regularly,” and eventually meant nothing at all, functionless like a hallowed old politician given a sinecure in acknowledgment of services rendered back in the day. Voilà, meaningless
do
.

Now, if you didn’t quite get that or had to read it again in order to do so, it’s not surprising. To be sure, it follows more gracefully when expressed in terminology that academic linguists are trained in, and the article in question is one of the most elegantly written pieces of scholarship I have ever read; it has always been, to me, almost pleasure reading—I’d take it to the beach. Yet the explanation is still a distinctly queer, Rube Goldberg turn of events. Nothing like that is documented to have happened to the word
do
in any other language on earth, and besides, the author even admits that in almost half of the sentences in the Early Middle English documents he refers to,
do
does not, in fact, indicate that something happens regularly.

“Future research” will figure out why, he has it—but how about if future research shows that what created meaningless
do
was not that English speakers for some reason drifted into the peculiar hairsplitting reinterpretation of
Cats are not in the habit of eating fish
as meaning “It is not that cats eat fish,” but the fact that the people who lived in Britain long before English got there had meaningless
do
already?

Then there are those who claim that meaningless
do
was a natural development in response to various ways that English’s grammar changed from Old to Middle English. For example, in Old English, verbs could sit in various places in a sentence—at the end, at the beginning, and so on, depending on what was next to it. In Middle English and beyond, verbs started sitting in the middle, after the subject and before the object, the way they do now (
The boy kicked the ball
). But there was an intermediate point when the general pull was toward the verb’s being in the middle, but there were still sentences like
Wherefore lighteth me the sonne
? (“Why does the sun light me?”) where the verb
lighteth
is before the subject
sun
. One way of thinking has it that meaningless
do
came in because when you use it, the verb ends up in the middle the way sentences by Middle English were supposed to go:

Yeah—but the question is where English even got a meaningless
do
to use in this way. In languages all over the world since the dawn of human speech, at first the verb can hang around at the ends or beginnings of sentences and then at some point the verb is restricted to sitting in the middle; it happens all the time. And nowhere—nowhere—else on earth have such languages taken the word
do
and turned it into a meaningless little helper in order to nudge this along.

Biblical Hebrew put verbs first; Modern Hebrew puts them in the middle. Yet no one in Israel today is using the Hebrew verb for
do
in a meaningless way. The Arabic of the Koran puts the verb first; it has since morphed into the vast array of today’s actual spoken Arabics, stretching from Morocco across northern Africa into the Middle East, as well as down into Nigeria, Chad, and Sudan. Not one—
not one
—of these modern Arabic dialects has a meaningless
do
.

So, where oh where might English have gotten that meaningless
do
in order to whip its verbs into line? According to the History of English folks, in trying to figure that out, we are to ignore that the languages already spoken in Britain . . . I don’t even need to finish the sentence. It may well be that corralling verbs into the middle of the sentence made a meaningless
do
useful. But only English had a meaningless
do
available in the first place—as used by Welsh and Cornish speakers. Welsh and Cornish, then, were together the reason English has a meaningless
do
today.

 

 

English’s verb-noun present also looks, to traditional specialists, as if it is just one step past something in other Germanic languages. Again, there is a big picture they are missing.

Now, the sheer presence in a language of a progressive construction using a verb-noun is not all that extraordinary. It happens here and there that people say that they are “in” an action to say that they are
in the process of accomplishing it at this very instant
. This includes the Germanic languages. In German you can say, as I mentioned before,
Ich bin am schreiben
for “I am writing.” Similarly, in Dutch it would be “I am on the writing,”
Ik ben aan het schrijven,
and Norwegian has something similar with
Jeg er åt å skrive
.

English is peculiar, however, in taking the ball and running with it, to the point that the bare verb is nosed out completely. That is something much rarer in languages, popping up only in obscure corners here and there. Basque is one, a language related to no other one on earth. Or there is one little dialect of Greek (Tsakonian, for the record) that has booted bare verbs in the present and uses a progressive, for no reason anyone can see.

But then, another of the obscure corners in question is good old Celtic. English is the only Germanic language that developed in a context where Celts were the original inhabitants—and English is also the only Germanic language that turned its verb-noun progressive into its only present tense.

However, History of English specialists adhere to a just-so story in which the verb-noun present “just happened” by itself. Old English had two progressive constructions. One was the verb-noun one,
I was on hunting,
but another one used a participle form of the verb, marked with -
ende
. “I was following” was
Ic wæs fylgende
.

Now, today we do not say “I was huntende.” To the experts,
I was hunting
rather than
I was on hunting
happened because for some reason speakers started having a hard time telling -
ende
and -
ing
apart and settled on using -
ing
in the
-ende
construction.

But that -
ende
was an inheritance from Proto-Germanic. As such, other Germanic languages have their versions of -
ende
today, and no one confuses them with anything. German’s -
ende
, for instance, is doing just fine. Once in Germany I told a waitress not to put onions in my salad or I would become
der kotzende Fremder
(“the vomiting foreigner”). In earlier German, just as in earlier English, there was an -
ende
progressive; here is an Old High German sentence:

 

But then meanwhile, German drips with -
en
suffixes on both nouns and verbs, including their version of
I was on hunting
,
Ich bin am schreib
en (“I am writing”). Yet in a thousand years, this -
en
suffix has not been “confused” with -
ende
. Was it really just a shrug of the shoulders that supposedly led English speakers to confuse their -
ende
with -
ing
, which is much less similar to -
ende
than is German’s -
en
? Nowhere else in the Germanic family is the -
ende
ending so prone to “collapsing” into other ones. Why was -
ende
so uniquely subject to the vapors in only English? Historians of English are producing a description based on what they see in the documents over time rather than explaining it.

And the traditional version is hopeless in explaining why the verb-noun progressive, once established when -
ende
was “confused” with -
ing
, metastasized and became the verb-noun
present
, i.e., the only way to express the present short of sounding like a Martian by answering “I write” when someone asks what you’re doing. Why couldn’t
I am hunting
have stayed as meaning “I am
in the process of hunting at this very instant
”? That is, as it has in all of the other Germanic languages? Scholars charting the triumph of the verb-noun progressive over the bare verb diligently note how the progressive becomes ever more common—14 percent progressive! 45 percent! 67 percent! 92 percent!!!!!—rather than wondering why nothing remotely similar ever happened to any of the other languages that Proto-Germanic morphed into. They are describing, but not explaining.

The Celtic account, then, is more useful in the sheer scientific sense than the old one. It provides an answer to what specialists have been shrugging their shoulders about for eons: just why the verb-noun (-
ing
) ejected the participle (-
ende
) and just why the progressive became the only way to express the present tense. Welsh and Cornish express their progressive with a verb-noun and not with a participle. Welsh and Cornish use their progressive instead of bare verbs in the present tense. Period.

Yet among the specialists, to propose that the English progressive construction is a copy of Celtic’s is considered a renegade point. Certain wobbly speculations continue to be reproduced in sources both scholarly and popular. Maybe, we learn, Anglo-French scribes were hazy on the difference between -
ende
and -
ing
—which leaves unexplained how scribal errors on codexes read in candlelight by a tiny literate elite would have affected the way millions of mostly illiterate people out on the land spoke.

The likeness between English and Celtic is so close in this case that the only thing that would seem to save a traditionalist approach is the old assumption that there were barely any Celts around. And as we have seen, that assumption can’t stand.

So: