Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (3 page)

One

WE SPEAK A MISCEGENATED GRAMMAR

THE WELSHNESS OF ENGLISH

 

 

 

 

 

The first chapter in the new history of English is that bastardization I mentioned.

German, Dutch, Swedish, and the gang are, by and large, variations on what happened to Proto-Germanic as it morphed along over three thousand years. They are ordinary rolls of the dice. English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.

Did you ever notice that when you learn a foreign language, one of the first things you have to unlearn as an English speaker is the way we use
do
in questions and in negative statements? Take
Did you ever notice
. . . ? for example. Or
I did not notice
. We’re used to this
do
business, of course. But it’s kind of strange if you think about it. In this usage,
do
has no meaning whatsoever. It’s just there, but you have to use it. One cannot, speaking English, walk around saying things like
Noticed you ever
? or
I not notice
. English has something we will call
meaningless do
.

Most languages, unsurprisingly, have no interest in using the word
do
in a meaningless way. If you’ve studied Spanish, you quickly learned that to put a verb in the past, you do not stick in a past form of the verb for
do
.
Did she talk?
is not
Hago
ella hablar
? Nor do you jam in
do
to make a sentence negative—
She does not talk
is not
Ella no
hace
hablar
but
Ella no habla
. Nor is it
Elle ne
fait
parler
in French, or
Ona ne
delaet
govorit’
in Russian,
Hi lo
osa
ledaber
in Hebrew, or—you get the picture.

Did she walk?
feels utterly conventional to us, when if you step beyond English, you look for
do
used that way and come up short.
¹
None of the other Germanic languages use
do
the way English, ever the wayward one, does.

Then there is this -
ing
thing. We are given a tacit sense that tense marking in English works like this:

But if you think about it,
I write
is not really present tense. Imagine you’re at your laptop writing an e-mail and someone asks what you’re doing and you say “I write.” It’s impossible to imagine that said by anyone without a foreign accent, and one imagines that the e-mail such a person would write would be full of mistakes. “I write” would be, quite simply, incorrect. Your answer would be “I’m writing.”

“I write,” on the other hand, is what you would say to express something more specific: that it’s something you do on a regular basis.
I write, usually, from about ten A.M. to one P.M.
The present tense, in English, is expressed not with a bare verb, but with the progressive -
ing
. The bare verb has a different meaning, which linguists call
habitual
.
²

Yet once again, that’s not the way it is in any other language you learn. In Spanish, your answer if asked what you were doing would be
“Escribo.”
The French person would answer
“J’écris.”
Sure, both of these languages and many, many others have ways of calling attention to the fact that you are
in the process of writing the letter at this very instant
: in Spanish,
Estoy escribiendo,
in French,
Je suis en traîn d’écrire.
Germanic languages do, too, like German’s
Ich bin am schreiben
, which comes out as “I am on the writing.” But it’s the decidedly peculiar individual who is given to stressing for every one of their actions that they are indeed
in the process of accomplishing it at this very instant
. In a normal language, you use a progressive construction when there’s a reason to. Otherwise, to answer “I write” sounds perfectly fine in most languages. But in English, it sounds vaguely funereal, and
-ing
is the ordinary way to use the present tense.

English, then, is the only Germanic language out of the dozen in which there could be a sentence like
Did you see what he is doing
? rather than
Saw you what he does
? Since none of the other offshoots of Proto-Germanic seems to have sprouted oddities like these, one might ask whether there is a reason that English has.

And if one asks that, presumably it will strike one as germane that there happen to be languages with precisely the same oddities spoken right on the same island where English arose, long before English got there.

Yet most scholars of English’s history find this neither germane nor, really, even interesting. Why?

The languages in question belong to another Indo-European subfamily, Celtic. There are only a few of these languages today, although they once held sway across vast swatches of Western Europe. Irish Gaelic is one of them (and its variant Scottish Gaelic, an export to Britain, another). But the ones most of interest to us are those of Britain: Welsh in Wales and Cornish in Cornwall.
³
The last native speaker of Cornish died in 1891, but there is a hardy revival movement for it today.

If English is the odd one out as Germanic languages go, Celtic languages are odd ones out as Indo-European languages go. Verbs sometimes coming last in German strikes us as weird enough, although it is actually ordinary worldwide. But in Celtic, verbs come
first
in a sentence, which is less ordinary worldwide, and downright freaky within Indo-European languages. There are other features in which Celtic marches to the beat of its own drum, and two of them are the way it uses
do
and -
ing
.

Take a look at this in Welsh.
Nes
means “did.” Welsh puts words in a different order than English, and so
nes
is always first. What’s interesting is that it is there, just as in English:

Welsh uses
do
in the same meaningless way that English does.
Do
just sits there taking up space, not contributing any meaning to the sentence.

Note that Welsh is different from English in one way: it uses
do
in “normal” sentences, affirmative ones as well, as we see in that third sentence. When a Welshman states
Nes i agor
, they are using the words that come out in English as “I did open,” but not with an emphatic meaning as in our
I
did
open
. They mean it as if we were speaking English in the Elizabethan period and said, “Since it was so hot out, I did open a window for you.”

But in that people still said things like that then, English was more like Welsh than it is today. Even further back in Middle English, one might say for “You wept”
Thou
dudest
wepe
. Our sense that to speak fake “Olde English” means sticking “dosts” and “doths” all over the place corresponds to a Middle English reality, which persisted for centuries afterward. Here is Gertrude in
Hamlet
, addressing same:

 

Upon which he answers (147-48):

 

English has gone its own way since and dropped this
do
usage in affirmative (“neutral”) sentences, keeping it in the negative and question contexts. But there was a time when English was even more like Welsh on this score than it is now.

 

 

Or how about English’s progressive construction, as in
Mary is singing
. In English, -
ing
leads a double life. In one guise, it makes a verb into a gerund, which means that it makes the verb into a noun. One sings, and one may enjoy that which is known as
singing
, a noun:
Singing is fun.
As a matter of fact, gerunds are sometimes called “verb-nouns.”

Then, -
ing
has a second identity, when it is used in the progressive construction:
Mary is singing.
Here,
singing
is not a verb-noun—
Mary is singing
does not mean “Mary embodies the act of rendering song.”
Singing
in
Mary is
singing
is just a verb, specifically what is called the present participle form of a verb. Our -
ing
is two things.

The important point is the fact that in English, as we have seen, this progressive
Mary is singing
construction is our present tense. If someone asks you what you’re doing as you warble “Just the Way You Are,” your answer must be “I’m singing,” not “I sing.” Interestingly, in Welsh as well, to answer that question you must use a progressive construction: Welsh and other Celtic languages have the same -
ing
fetish as English. Remembering that Celtic word order is odd to our eyes and ears, in Welsh, if someone asks, “What’s our Mary doing?”, the answer is not “Mary sings” but “Mary is in singing”:

 

Canu
is the verb-noun for
sing
in Welsh: “Mary is in the act of singing.”

Now, to be sure, in Welsh the present is expressed with a verb-noun progressive, while in English’s
Mary is singing
progressive,
singing
is not a verb-noun but a participle. However, the participle is just a latter-day morphing of what
started
as a verb-noun. Just as with meaningless
do
, what English does now is a drifting from what first was even more like Celtic.

It went like this. In Old English one could say “I am on hunting” to mean that you were hunting. This was, obviously, just like the Welsh “Mary is in singing.” Then in Middle English, the
on
started wearing down and one might say “I am a-hunting,” just as we now say “Let’s go” instead of “Let us go.”

Then before long, the
a
- was gone completely—as in the way we casually say “ ‘Tsgo” for “Let’s go”—and hence, just “I am hunting.” Ladies and gentlemen, the birth of a present participle. Celtic was English’s deistic God—it set things spinning and then left them to develop on their own. But that first spin—
I am on hunting
—was key. It was just like Welsh.

And it’s not just Welsh. Cornish down south has the same kinks about
do
and -
ing
. The way to say
I love
is:

 

Sort of an Elvisesque “I’m a-doing loving,” except it is a perfectly normal sentence in Cornish, and its
do
is used the same way with negative sentences and in questions:

Then it has the same mysterious drive to use verb-nouns for the present tense. Here is
She is buying vegetables
, in which the word for
buy
is a verb-noun:

 

So: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes brought a language to Britain in which a sentence like
Did you see what he is doing
? would have sounded absurd. The people already living in Britain spoke some of the very, very few languages in the world—and possibly the only ones—where that sentence would sound perfectly normal. After a while, that kind of sentence was being used in English as well.

And yet specialists in the history of English sincerely believe that English started using
do
and -
ing
by itself, and that it is irrelevant, or virtually so, that Welsh and Cornish have the same features. You can page through countless books and articles on The History of English, and even on specifically the history of meaningless
do
or the -
ing
present, and find Celtic either not mentioned at all, actively dismissed, or, at best, mentioned in passing as “a possible influence” (read: of no significant bearing upon the issue).