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English Language Peculiarities · Acedra
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0:00
The English language is downright weird. I don’t think that’s an especially controversial statement, but it’s one that warrants some explanation. Sure, much fuss gets made over the nonsensical pronunciation schemes we follow – Today I present you with this video, but if I present you, you’d worry about getting stuffed in a box with a bow on it. I may be a joker, but I am not The Joker – and you can tell the difference by my use of The. Weird indeed, huh,
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but ultimately pretty surface level. No, the English wackiness goes far deeper. Despite the language’s ancestry in Germanic cultures from Northern Europe, half of the words in English instead come from French and Latin. Weird. We can partly explain this by pointing to that time William the Conqueror and his Norman French buddies took over England in 1066, but that’s just one plot-point in a much longer story. So come with me today on a tour of English – not the
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English, but English itself – as we piece together how our beautiful mess of a language came about. Now let’s do some Linguistics! First, a bit of scene-setting. Languages don’t appear in a vacuum, they come in families. Romance, Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic are families of languages that share similarities and origins. Sometimes they can be mutually intelligible – say, within the Romance group, a
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Spanish speaker can ask a question, get an answer back in Italian, and both participants understand it – but in most cases, there’s distance and friction between a family’s languages, with some farther apart than others. English is a Germanic Language, meaning it’s related to languages from Northern Europe and Scandinavia, but the average English speaker won’t comprehend German, Frisian,
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Yiddish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Dutch, or Afrikaans if it’s spoken to them. And as a student, an English speaker will have the hardest time trying to learn any of the others. Among that group, English is the odd one out. Why? Well, the simplest account is that “English was a Germanic language, but then the French showed up.” The notion being that English changed after getting sat on by a Norman French monarchy for 150 years. This is true, and it fits
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cleanly into popular understandings of English history overall, but it’s not our main culprit. As I’ve discovered while researching this video, Linguistics is very complicated, so we won’t be swimming through all the technical details of how languages work, and we’re gonna keep this story as clear as possible by building it in layers. Germanic plus Normans was the simplest version, now here’s one layer deeper: Old English was a Germanic language brought
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to Britain by migrating tribes called Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and their language picked up new vocabulary in 3 major rounds. First was Old Norse words from Scandinavian Viking raiders and settlers in the 8 & 900s. Second was French words from Monsieur Guillaume le Conquérant and the Normans in 1066. As the language of the royalty and aristocracy, French vocab was for upper-class topics, so the animal Cow comes from the Old English Cu, but the delicacy Beef comes
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from the French Boef. But England and France wouldn’t stay buds forever, so from the 13 and 1400s when the Hundred Years War was going on, English sought to distinguish itself from French by turning to Latin as a source of vocabulary. This continued into the Renaissance era, as Latin words infused English like, for instance, infuse, from the Latin Īnfundēre. This also gave us a few quirky rules like not ending a sentence with a preposition or not splitting infinitives because
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that’s how it works in Latin. Thus to barbarously split an infinitive is, uh, barbaric. Those were the three main sources of vocabulary over the centuries, but other words sprinkled in from trade with the Dutch, Spanish, and Germans, plenty of science vocab comes from Arabic, and some extra Greek words gave English that touch of class… He said, in the most non-biased way possible. That’s more or less how English
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got its words, but borrowing words from visitors and neighbors is essentially how every language acquires vocabulary. English speaks its imports proudly, but it’s not an outlier for having them. This story suitably traces the history of English Etymology, but it doesn’t explain how English uses its words, how it spells and says them, how it puts them together with Grammar. Grammar gets less attention
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than etymology because rules are more complicated than disparate little words, but we can put this in context all the same. Consider the evolution of Modern, Middle, and Old English through the sequence of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Beowulf – a juxtaposition so handy it’s come up on OSP before! Shakespeare’s poems and plays are just an early version of our Modern English. It has some word order that feels wacky to us, plus your
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classic Thees and Thous and some spiffier words we may need to look up, but the rules for how words fit together and sentences get built are the same core rules we have today – the same core grammar. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are Middle English. The macro-level grammar is similar enough that we can understand the original text, but the words themselves appear very odd. He comes after the Norman French influence, but well before we
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got our modern spellings. “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote” is close enough to “When that April with his showers sweet”, but it’s undeniably different. You kinda have to unfocus your eyes and feel the words rather than read them, because the rules for how we spell words today are different. Then there’s Beowulf, which is functionally unintelligible to modern readers. This is post-Viking and pre-French, but there’s a lot more
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different about this than just a piece of French vocabulaire here and there. We’ve got letters out of Old Norse like thorn (þ) and eth (ð) and æsc (æ), and words that are entirely unrecognizable. The poem opens with lines I’m not even gonna try – It means “Lo, we have heard of Spear-Danes in days of yore, of folk-kings' prowess, how the princes wrought deeds of valor.” But just trying to
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compare them… What? Sorry, what I actually meant to say was HWÆT? It’s only a jump of a few hundred years from Chaucer, and yet this is an English so distant from us that it may as well be a different language entirely. Is it even the same language? Now that’s the interesting question – by lineage, yes, but practically, no it is not! So, let’s dig deeper to explore the third layer of English through the lens of grammar. Comparing
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English to its Germanic relatives, it has some weird linguistic omissions. For one, the Germanic languages all have Grammatical Gender and Case. If those terms sound odd, it’s because we don’t have them in English. By Gender we don’t mean distinguishing between He or She, Mister or Miss, but what’s the gender of a cup? A table? A tank? Gender typically sets the ending of a word and the article that goes in front of it. In French, the cup is la tasse, feminine. English
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fully does not do that. Nor does it have Case, which sets the function of a noun in a sentence, and the word ending changes to reflect that. In English, we do it with word order: I throw an alligator to my friend. You know the thrower, the object being thrown, and where it’s going just by its position in the sentence – If I say To my friend an alligator throw I, the word order isn’t helping us make sense of it, so it takes a second to sort out what’s being thrown to whom. And if
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you’ve ever tripped up on the difference between Who and Whom, that’s because it’s a vanishingly rare example case in the wild. We do mark the possessive case by putting an apostrophe-s on a word’s ending or throwing Of in front of it – but by and large, cases elude our understanding. English is the outlier among the Germanic gang for the two big features it doesn’t have, but what it does have might be
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even weirder. Namely, do. Do you know why we put the word do in our sentences? Before my research, I did not. It doesn’t do any essential lifting, but it is nonetheless essential to not sounding like a madman. And what’s with that -ing ending? On paper, the present form of To Listen is I listen, but if someone asks what you’re doing and you say I listen to the silly history man, they’ll look at you funny because the natural response is I’m listening. This continuous present
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tense and do-verbs make English quite the oddball among the Germanics, so now let’s learn why. Walk with me, viewers, as we reminisce about the cool autumn days of 450 AD: the Roman armies have left Britannia, and Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes have come across the North Sea to reside in their new home – I remember it blissfully. The newcomers spoke a descendant of Pro-Germanic we can call Old English,
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while the pre-existing locals held onto their Celtic languages: Common Brittonic, which was a Latin-influenced form of Celtic, plus Old Welsh and Cornish in Wales and Cornwall respectively. And wouldn’t you know, those Celtic languages have early equivalents of an -ing present tense and those goofy little do-verbs. Ah, a match! Frustratingly, we don’t have good written evidence for this in English until several centuries later,
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but we can be confident it was there from early in the linguistic contact, on the basis that writing is a fundamentally conservative medium. We know with confidence that spoken Latin was diverging from the written standard since the 400s AD, yet it’s not until the 10-1300s that those romance vernaculars get widely circulated in writing. Similar deal here: after the Celts were subjugated, little linguistic influences seeped into colloquial Old English over the centuries,
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but even by the 8 or 900s, works like Beowulf would stick firmly to a traditional literary register, no Celticisms allowed. In every language in every era, there’s a disconnect and a lag-time between formal writing and common speech. So that’s what Old English gained after its trip to Britain, but what about the features it lost? For that, we look to the Vikings, who didn’t just import a bunch of words,
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but handily slimmed down Old English by, well, not being the best at speaking it. See, when the Danes & Norwegians came to England, they spoke Old Norse, the ancestor of modern Scandinavian languages. Both it and Old English had case and gender at the time of the Viking Age, and overall the languages were similar enough for Vikings and their new English wives to roughly understand each other, but not quite pick up those finnicky word endings. In a few generations of speaking and
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raising children in a mix of both languages, Old English and Old Norse hybridized – so plenty of words crossed over, that’s the easy stuff, but grammar is harder – so gender, case, and verb conjugations got dropped. Now we do actually see a bit of document evidence for this, as Northumbria shows these changes first, and just so happened to be the heaviest area of Norse settlement. So at the end of the millennium, we have a
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conservative register of Old English demonstrated in Beowulf, yet the implication of a significantly different spoken English. How then did we jump to Chaucer’s English 3 centuries later? I invite you to join me as we blame France. See, when the Normans came to England, there were not very many of the guys, yet French became the spoken language of the aristocracy and written language of state,
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replacing written English and sending it into a century-long blackout. French left its mark on English vocabulary, but was otherwise so insular that it didn’t affect English grammar. Then in the early 1200s, geopolitics happened, and England politically decoupled from France, so English asserted itself as the language of state. But here, the literary chain to Beowulfy Old English was broken, so their new starting point for Written English was simply Spoken
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English, and suddenly hundreds of years of Celtic and Scandinavian influence crashed onto the page at once. From there, the linguistic path through Chaucer, Shakespeare and onto the modern day is quite straightforward in comparison. That is, with one planet-sized caveat. For everything we may tell ourselves, standard English is not standard. The processes that brought English new words and reorganized its
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grammar are happening all over the world in over a hundred dialects and languages related to English. Not just American or Australian or regional accents, but African American Vernacular English, Hawaiian pidgin, Singlish, Jamaican Patwah, Naijá, Hinglish, and countless others – a startlingly vast wealth of culture spread around the world that is an essential piece of the English lineage. English is a mess of a language, of course – but the sooner we realize it, the sooner
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we get to have fun with it. If we have to speak the damn thing we may as well enjoy ourselves! Thank you for watching. If you have the constitution for more in-depth discussions of Grammar, I highly recommend the book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter. It’s an insightful and illustrative book that expertly guided me through the deeper layers of the English story, but it’s also written in a remarkably human
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way. You can really hear the voice of the author talking to you. I cannot recommend it enough.
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