Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (25 page)

To those who are up on their colloquial German and feel that Germans are no stranger to
meaningless do
, we’ll get to that in a little while. Preview: Germans are, indeed, strangers to
meaningless do
.

Actually, you might notice that there are indeed verbs where you don’t use the progressive to speak of the present:
I know the truth
(you don’t say
I am knowing the truth
),
I love dinosaurs, I have a scanner.
The issue here is that these types of verbs fall into a class linguists call
stative
: knowing, loving, and having are ongoing conditions, not actions—one does not say “I shall hereby perform the action of right now
having
this pencil!”; rather, having is something that just “
be
s” in an ongoing fashion. As such, these verbs are inherently
habitual
, and habitual verbs in English are bare.

There was also an indigenous people in present-day Scotland called Picts. Most likely they spoke a Celtic language, too, but we have no evidence to be sure of this.

Indeed, English has what is called biological gender:
actor
/
actress
and that sort of thing. All languages do. What we lack is what is called grammatical gender—words assigned to “genders” for little or no predictable reason. On biological gender, I can’t resist sharing one of my favorite sentences ever, in an article written by a fine but non-native writer: “Like English, Chinese is a language without gender, i.e., apart from the natural sex of the nouns such as
man
,
woman, boy, waitress, cock, bitch,
etc.”