The words themselves give it away: in their spelling, their suffixes, and even where the stress falls.
English words wear their history on their sleeve, if you know what to look for.
I’ll show you the system tomorrow.
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A bluffer's guide to etymology.
Here are four words: knight, courage, fabricate, hypothesis.
Without looking anything up, you can tell:
- What language each word came from
- Roughly when it entered the English language
How?
"Should" comes from the Old English verb "sċulan," whose earliest known meaning was — you guessed it — 'to owe.'
So the Old English word "sċyld" meant both ‘debt’ and 'guilt.' German still uses the related word "Schuld" for both.
How much of our moral language is debt collection?
Something similar happened in Latin.
"Dēbēre" 'to owe' became an 'ought' word too: it gave birth to Spanish "deber," French "devoir," Italian "dovere," all meaning both 'owe' and 'should.'
Even 'should' comes from debt.
"Ought" is the past tense of "owe."
At least, it was originally.
Both words come from he Old English verb "āgan," which meant 'to have.' The ‘owe’ meaning comes from a phrase "āgan tō ġieldenne" 'to have (something) to pay.'
Eventually, we dropped the "tō ġieldenne" 'to pay' portion.
Its descendants include English, as well as Hindi, Greek, Russian, Welsh, and many hundreds more.
Our reconstruction of their common ancestor is detailed enough to tell us what its speakers ate and drank, how they buried their dead, and even the names of some of their gods.
The method: compare what the descendant languages still share and work backwards from there.
The biggest success story of this comparative method is the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, likely spoken around six thousand years ago on the grasslands north of the Black Sea.
Linguists can reconstruct long-dead languages that no one ever wrote down.
These reconstructions can be surprisingly precise: individual words, grammar, sound changes, even something of the world the speakers inhabited.
But how?
Thank you very much!
So it’s fitting that it’s through words we remember them too.
This is the first instalment of A Deep History of English: the story of how English became what it is, one mystery at a time.
The first mystery: why "is," "was," and "be" look nothing alike."
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/why-the-ve...
The explanation reaches back six thousand years, to a dead language spoken on the grasslands north of the Black Sea by people who left no writing.
They founded no cities, built no pyramids. The immortality they hoped for came from the words of poets, who would spread the glory of their great deeds.
English is full of mysteries hiding in ordinary words. The verb "to be" is one of the strangest.
Its forms "is," "was," "be," look nothing alike, as if the word had been assembled from spare parts.
It was.
How they ended up as a single verb is a story that begins in the deep prehistory of English.
Get it in your inbox tomorrow:
www.deadlanguagesociety.com
Why the verb "to be" is so irregular.
The verb "to be" is three completely unrelated words stitched together.
"Was" comes from an ancient root meaning ‘to spend the night.’
"Is" comes from a different root entirely.
"Be" comes from yet a third (the same one that gives us "physics" and "future").
On this theory, these words started as nicknames: thousand-year-old versions of "doggy" and "piggy."
These words tend not to show up in Old English texts because they're informal: not the kind of thing monks write about.
That's one theory, anyway: we'll probably never know for sure.
Some scholars think it might be a nickname.
One clue: dog belongs to a cluster of English animal words that all share an unusual shape.
We have "dog," "pig," "stag," "frog," "hog," even "earwig."
They're all terms for animals, the kinds of things we might give cute nicknames to.
The word "docga" is the ancestor of "dog."
But it has almost no written history before that, and no clear relatives in any other language.
By 1500, dog had replaced hound. The upstart won.
So where did dog come from?
In Old English, the word for ‘dog’ was "hund" too, a word which survives in "hound."
It's traceable back thousands of years to link up with its cousins in Latin "canis" and Ancient Greek "kýōn."
Then, around the year 1050, a different word appears: "docga."
The word "dog" is something of a mystery.
All of English’s relatives have something like "hound": German has "Hund," Dutch has "hond," Swedish has "hund."
Yet only English has a word like "dog." Why?
If you want to know how iambic pentameter actually works (and why it's simpler and more intuitive than most English classes make it seem), I've got you covered:
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-iambic...
Think of the rhythm: "I dó not knów" fits differently into a line than "I knów not" or "Í know nót."
The same kind of variation made it useful to have the two alternatives: "knows" and "knoweth."
The extra syllable of "knoweth" sometimes made all the difference in a line of iambic pentameter.
This week I wrote about three things Shakespeare’s English gave him that our English no longer provides.
One of them was the coexistence of "I know not" and "I do not know."
This was a choice between competing grammatical constructions, but it had consequence for the poetic metre.
My take: it’s the application of Shakespeare’s undeniable genius to a language that was exactly ready for him.
But it wouldn’t stay that way for long.
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/shakespear...
In a study of the vocabulary range of thirteen Elizabethan playwrights, Shakespeare ranked… seventh, behind writers most of us have never heard of.
Yet read these other writers (say, John Webster or George Chapman) and you’ll see instantly that Shakespeare is special.
But why?
Writers alive during that window could do things with English that we simply can’t today.
Then the sugar high ended.
Tomorrow’s piece is about what that window looked like from the inside.
www.deadlanguagesociety.com
Old grammatical forms were dying, and new ones were struggling to be born. And nobody had sorted through the mess: there were no comprehensive dictionaries or grammars yet.
The result was an explosion of linguistic possibility.
The age when English could do anything.
The English Renaissance must have been an interesting time to be alive.
I mean, linguistically. (Not a fan of plagues.)
Between 1500 and 1650, English was on a kind of sugar high, as thousands of new Latin words flooded into the language.
This internal grammar is an unconscious knowledge of English that you never learned in school.
Try it yourself, whether you’re a native speaker or not:
Does “What did you make ham and?” sound wrong to you?
And if so, can you come up with a reason why?
“What did you make ham and?”
Most native speakers of English will tell you that question is just… wrong somehow.
The meaning is perfectly clear but it just... doesn’t work for some reason. This instinctive wrongness is the voice of your internal grammar of English.
