The World’s Language

 

Practical High-Level English Expertise for Graduate Students, Researchers, Tech Geeks and Language Lovers from All Linguistic Backgrounds. 

 

Richard Summerbell 

 

All chapters can be downloaded as free pdf files from this website.  

 

Chapter 3 

 

Never I will understand how the English’s grammar works

 

We humans had no idea the trouble we were getting into when we first opened our mouths to speak rather than eat.   Grammar is tough.  Anyone studying the grammar of any language is sure to wish, at some point, that he or she was lying on the grass and eating a nice piece of fruit.  That is what our hooting ape ancestry prepared us to do with our mouths; we didn’t evolve to conjugate verbs.   

 

The person who invented Chinese grammar, though, wins the prize for leaving people the most available fruit munching time.  Chinese grammar is EASY.  Yes, you can get into fine nuances and spend your life studying exactly how to say things perfectly.  Basic speech, though, couldn’t be simpler.   No gender, no case, no pluralization of nouns, no simple past tense, no present tense, no words truly fixed as nouns, adjectives, adverbs or verbs.   Here are some examples, rendered in English:  I go concert.  (I am going to a concert.).  I yesterday go concert.  (I went to a concert yesterday.).  I tomorrow go concert.  (Tomorrow I will go to a concert).  I every Tuesday go concert.  (I go to a concert every Tuesday.)  I go concert, it good good.  (I went to the concert, it was very good.)   Yesterday s/he also go concert (Yesterday he or she [no difference] also went to the concert].  I car him/her to concert place because good far.  (I drove her in my car to the place where the concert was held, because it was very far away.)   Concert hall acoustic good good, and the-(plural) musician play good good.  (The concert hall was acoustically very good and the musicians played very well.).  

 

This is how grammar could be, and perhaps should be.  All else is embroidery or bad planning.   One does notice, though, that languages all tend to rise to the same level of complexity somehow.   Chinese scholars compensated for the simplicity of their language by developing a supremely complicated writing system.  Experts on the language thus had something to boast about when they faced the well-spoken common people.  Also, every Chinese noun has a corresponding classifier word for use in counting, so that instead of saying two pens, two books and two dogs, you need to say ‘two stick pen,’ ‘two volume book,’ and ‘two vessel dog.’ (Dogs, cats, and boats are all visually classified and counted as cooking pot vessels: this makes perverse sense in that some, but not all, ancient Shang dynasty pots had legs).   This feature must have been built into the language just to make it more fun for people who like puzzles and games.  It’s rather like our half-joking English terminology for groups of birds:  a ‘covey’ of partridge, a ‘gaggle’ of geese, a ‘nye’ of pheasants, a ‘murmuration’ of starlings, and so on.  Memorize the whole set and amaze your friends. 

 

On the other hand, many exceptionally complicated languages, such as Finnish, weren’t written at all until a few hundred years ago.  Perhaps there was already enough complexity there to allow experts to show their stuff.  In Finland and nearby Karelia (a Finnish province that has mostly been swallowed by Russia), for example, experts simply memorized vast amounts of text in the form of song.  The words to these songs now appear in print as the most interesting national epic ever, the Kalevala.  The prestige of all these singers would have been undercut if there had been written versions of the glorious tales.   To hear about the lusty young Lemminkäinen and his reckless attempts to carry off the Maid of the North and capture her magic grain and gold mill, the Sampo, you had to sit down and listen to the magic. 

 

In modern times, the status of infinitely complicated and irreproducibly beautiful language has gone down.  Many people are just trying to be practical and to communicate well.   Or, to be blunt, to sell things.  However, we have inherited lots of beautiful linguistic complexities from our ambitious ancestors, and we still have to deal with these traditions. 

 

As you have already seen, English is grammatically very simplified in comparison with most other European languages.  It still, however, makes its learners put down their food and pick up a book at times.  That’s unless they are lucky enough to be three or four years old, when the mind has a built-in genius for grammar.  You could even learn Latin at that age, though, sadly, no one does.  If you’re reading this, your early childhood days are long gone, and you may find grammar a real head-banger topic (as in, banging your head on a table in frustration).  Or, like me, you may think of it as a challenge in how to structure human thought, with each language having its own way of folding up reality into a conceptual paper airplane that will really fly.  Whee!  Hm, you look dubious. 

 

Anyway, since English grammar has enough complications to fill a large textbook, I am not going to try to deal with all of it, or even much of it.  What I will concentrate on is distinctive aspects, specific to English grammar, that are common sources of mistakes, but become easier to use if their history is understood.  Some of these mistakes are much more likely to be made by people learning English than by native speakers, but the back-stories about the problematical grammatical forms are so weird that I think everyone should find them interesting. 

 

I am going to start, then, with a built-in feature of English that simply makes trouble for everyone: irregular verbs.  ‘What I bring you, I have brought, but what I fling your way has not been flought.  And the bells that ring have rung; they haven’t rought.  The stringed instrument has been strung, not strought.  I tried to tell you, but you’d already been told.  Alas, I could smell you, but you hadn’t been smold.’  Our language has a lot of irregular verbs, more than you find in many languages.  Both of our major source languages, Saxon and Old French, also had many irregular verbs, but interestingly, we have mostly just maintained the Saxon ones.  The French verbs have mostly not been allowed to bring their irregularities across the English Channel.  Look at a complicated, but still semi-regular, modern French verb like ‘peindre,’ ‘to paint.’ It has many forms:  ‘je peins’ (I paint), ‘il peint’ (he paints), ‘nous peignons’ (we paint), ‘je peindrai’ (I will paint), ‘je peignais’ (I have painted), ‘vous peigniez’ (you have painted), ‘nous peindrions’ (we would paint), ‘il faut que tu peignes’ (you have to paint),  ‘il était nécessaire que nous peignissions’ (it was necessary that we should paint [as allegedly said in classic literary French, though the only hits on the internet for ‘que nous peignissions’ are from grammar texts]).  I count 38 forms of the verb, all told, based on three major stems, ‘pein-‘, ‘peindr-‘ and ‘peign-.’  English has reduced all of this diversity to one stem, ‘paint,’ yielding four easy words, ‘paint, ‘paints,’ ‘painting,’ and ‘painted.’ 

 

It seems that though the English could not overcome the Norman French, they did manage to overwhelm their verb conjugations.  Given the huge army of French conjugations involved, it must have been an epic battle. 

 

So who were the warriors, the champions, on the Anglo-Saxon side of this battle?  Well, it turns out that Germanic languages have two classes of verbs, so-called ‘weak verbs’ and – fanfare, please!! – ‘strong verbs.’   

 

The strong verbs are the linguistic equivalent of ancient Goths in armour, fairy tale hero warriors who have battled their way down through the ages.  They still show up in classrooms and spelling bees, waving their spiky spelling changes around and trying to knock the students down.  And who do you think first realized that this was going on?   It was none other than the English-speaking world’s most famous collector of fairy tales and heroic legends, Jakob Grimm.   He and his brother Wilhelm became famous in the English-speaking world by publishing Grimm’s Fairy Tales (first edition called Kinder- und Hausmärchen [Children's and Household Tales], 1812), a book that’s the source of many of our best known children’s stories.  Well known tales from this collection include Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Rumplestiltskin, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel.   Jakob and Wilhelm were German, not English, and so were most of the stories they collected.  It seems, though, that the tales they wrote down were deeply connected to all the Germanic tribes, including the Anglo-Saxons.  The Grimms’ tales are accepted everywhere as part of our English heritage, and all truly fluent English speakers must recognize many of the stories and characters.  You need to know, as an English speaker, that a frog is something that may be kissed and turned into a handsome prince.  Very important. 

 

Jakob Grimm was also an outstanding linguist who compiled a massive, multi-volume dictionary of the German language, complete with word origins.  While he was researching the dictionary, he came across some observations by Rasmus Christian Rask from Denmark about changes in vowel sounds in different Germanic and Nordic languages.  Rask, like Grimm himself, had noted himself that many of the irregular verbs in the German language followed distinctive patterns, quite different from the pattern shown by more regular verbs.  Grimm became inspired and decided it was time for linguists to separate the sheep from the goats.  The long-horned ‘goat’ verbs that seemed to have minds of their own, not obeying the rules of regular change, he called ‘strong verbs.’  The easily mastered ‘sheep’ verbs, the regular ones, he dismissed as ‘weak verbs.’  Clearly the strong ones were characters, much more like Rumplestiltskin and Rapunzel than the conformist weak verbs.  Their strong character was shown by their ongoing survival not just in German but also often in English and Scandinavian languages, with their strange patterns of change intact.   Let me illustrate with some examples.  In English, most verbs follow the ‘weak verb’ pattern exemplified by ‘to walk:’ I walk, I walked, I have walked.  There is a regular ‘-ed’ ending that indicates the past tense and the past participle.  Meanwhile, to look at a strong verb, ‘to sing’ persists with ‘I sing’ in the present, ‘I sang’ as the past tense, and ‘I have sung’ as the participle form.  In Dutch, the weak verb for ‘to hear’ follows the regular Dutch pattern, which resembles the English in adding a ‘d’ to indicate past tenses: ‘ik hoor’ (‘I hear,’ pronounced ‘ik hore’), ‘ik hoorde’ (‘I heard,’ pronounced ‘ik horda’), and ‘ik heb gehoord’ (‘I have heard,’ pronounced ‘ik heb khehoart).’  Meanwhile, the strong verb is as long-horned in Dutch as it is in English: ‘ik zing, ik zong, ik heb gezongen.’  I think you recognize which word it is.  The ‘a’ form seen in the English ‘sang’ is seen in Dutch in nouns like ‘zang’ for ‘song’ and ‘zanger’ and ‘zangeress’ for male and female singers. 

 

New verbs immigrating into English and Dutch follow the ‘weak’ pattern:  thus in Dutch you may see English computerese coming in as ‘ik email, ik emailde, ik heb geëmaild’ (the little dots are a diaeresis meaning ‘pronounce this letter separately’) or, more complicatedly, ‘ik log in, ik logde in, ik heb ingelogd.’ (Don’t forget to pronounce ‘log’ as in ‘Loch Ness’).  In English, avid readers know that science fiction author Ray Bradbury’s Martian-language verb ‘to grok,’ pronounced froggishly and meaning ‘to live and breathe the acute understanding of something,’ conjugates as ‘I grok, I grokked, I have grokked.’   There is no possibility of ‘I grek, I grok, I have gruk.’  The English strong verbs are unique characters out of history, and those sorts of characters aren’t being made any more.  Even Martians can’t produce words that strange. 

 

I strongly suspect, in fact, that if Ray Bradbury had conjugated ‘to grok’ as ‘I grek, I grok, I have gruk,’ this one change would have completely altered the character of his novel.  It would have switched the genre from sci-fi to high fantasy, like Lord of the Rings, by implying some sort of Martian connection to the forests of ancient Europe.  Intuitively, English speakers know that strong verbs are items of ancient folklore.  Futuristic sci-fi can only bring alien words into English as weak verbs. 

 

The warrior status of strong verbs is not mere fantasy.  Over the years, Jakob’s classification of the strong verbs as linguistic heroes has been completely vindicated.  It turns out that over 3000 years ago, somewhere in the steppes north and east of the Black Sea near the present-day Ukraine, there was a group of people who had become so successful at a relatively new invention, agriculture, that they managed to domesticate a new type of wild animal.  That animal was nature’s equivalent of a light armored tank combined with a powerful yet speedy tractor – the horse.  With the help of such an astonishing animal, these people were poised for success.  They soon expanded out over a very wide area. 

 

We don’t know what they called themselves, but let’s take a guess that, like many tribal nations, they called themselves ‘the people.’  In that case, we can reconstruct their own word and call them the Leudhis, or in more normal English phonics, the Leyudis (to rhyme, roughly, with Judy’s).   That hypothetical name can still be seen today in the German word ‘Leute,’ ‘the people,’ as well as Dutch ‘lieden’ (people) and ‘lui’ (‘a guy’).  Not to mention a string of other words meaning ‘the people’ or ‘folk,’ like Latvian ‘laudis’ Lithuanian ‘liaudis,’ Russian ‘люди’ (‘lyoodi’) and Czech ‘lid.’  Even the Latin word ‘liber,’ meaning ‘free,’ is thought to be a remote descendent of ‘Leyudis,’ the people.   We had the word in Old English as lēod and Middle English as lede, ‘people,’ and the latter still exists in Scots.  So we almost carried this name up to the present day in English. 

 

Yes, you may have recognized the Leyudis:  they are the speakers of the original language that gave rise to the whole Indo-European language family, including everything from Welsh to English to Spanish, Swedish to Greek to Russian, and Persian to Pashtun to Hindi.  The Leyudis didn’t write, and their language is completely unrecorded.  Its words can be roughly deduced, though, by linguists who compare words within the language family, especially among ancient forms like Gothic, Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Church Slavonic and Tocharian (a distinct set of Indo-European languages once spoken in the Xinjiang Uighur area of western China). 

 

It turns out that the patterns of sound changes Jakob Grimm saw in Germanic strong verbs is characteristic of the Leyudis’ semi-hypothetical language, Proto-Indo-European (known as PIE to its friends, who, in turn, can be called the Magnificently Educated Researchers Into Novel Geolinguistic Unity Enquiries, or MERINGUE).  Yes, just around the time when people were getting up on horseback for the first time, verbs were arising and putting on a distinctive array of sounds that would last in excellent condition for thousands of years. 

 

PIE words, it seems, often had an ‘e’ as their basic root vowel.  It isn’t always possible to follow in full detail how PIE words themselves changed, but the changes can still be seen in relatively ancient languages derived from PIE.  Benjamin Fortson, in his book Indo-European language and culture: an introduction, gives the example of the Latin verb ‘sedere,’ to sit.  This root word features the basic ‘e’ sound that also shows up in the related Greek ‘hedra,’ meaning a seat.  It is slightly transformed into a shorter sound in the English derivative, ‘sit’ and the equivalent Dutch ‘zitten.’ As an alternate sound form, used in various circumstances, PIE words often had a secondary form based on ‘o’ as a vowel.   This sound shows up, again slightly altered, in ‘sat,’ the English past tense of ‘sit,’ and in the corresponding Dutch ‘zat.’  The latter, pronounced more or less ‘zut’ or ‘zaht,’ is closer to the original ‘o’ sound than ‘sat’ is.   When linguists are discussing this ‘o’ sound, they call it the ‘o-grade’ of the PIE pattern of sound-shift.  Grimm gave this sound-shifting pattern the technical name ‘ablaut,’ meaning ‘down- (shifted) sound’.   You can think of the ‘o’ sound as second gear in the gearbox of PIE sounds. 

 

Another PIE sound shift substitutes a ‘lengthened-e’ for the original regular ‘e.’  Following our example above, this gives rise to words like the Latin ‘sēdēs’ (pron. saydace) and its direct translation into English, ‘seat.’  The Dutch ‘zetel’ (pron. ‘zaytel’), meaning ‘seat,’ follows suit.

 

Fourth gear in the PIE sound shifter is ‘lengthened-o.’  We see the traces of this phase among the English ‘sit’ words in the word ‘soot,’ meaning accumulated powdered char from the fire that sits on surfaces.  (The Dutch equivalent ‘roet,’ pronounced ‘root,’ is unrelated.)

 

Finally, and most challengingly, we have a neutral gear, the ‘zero-grade,’ where the ‘e’ sound disappears.  Amongst the ‘sitting’ words, we have this grade in English as the ‘st’ in the word ‘nest,’ based on PIE ‘ni-sd-os,’ ‘down (= ni)-sit (= sd)-os.’  

 

Coming back to our original strong verb example, the present tense ‘sing’ represents the basic e-grade, and ‘sang’ represents the o-grade.    Interestingly, ‘sung’ is considered to represent the ‘zero-grade:’ the presence of the nasal ‘n’ automatically fills in the empty space with a ‘u’ sound.  The noun ‘song’ is a variation on the theme of the o-grade. 

 

‘To sing’ is a prototype example of what’s referred to as a ‘Class 3 strong verb.’  These verbs tend, in English, to have a main vowel followed by ‘n,’ which usually produces the ‘u’ sound in the past participle.   The sequence of vowels is mostly either ‘i-a-u’ as in ‘sing sang sung,’ or a simplified version where one form has been copied over to another, as in ‘I run, I ran, I have run’ or ‘I spin, I spun, I have spun.’  More examples of Class 3 include ‘begin began begun,’ ‘drink drank drunk,’ ‘spring sprang sprung’ and ‘swim swam swum.’  I think I feel a children’s song coming on: ‘I drink drank drunk until I shrink shrank shrunk and then I sing sang sung as I wring wrung wrung myself out.’  Something like that.  There are some variants where the ‘o’ and ‘u’ came together as ‘ou:’ ‘find found found,’ ‘bind bound bound,’ and ‘wind wound wound’ make up this small group. 

 

Class 3 in Dutch, German and Old English also include several verbs with ‘l’ or ‘kh’ as the consonant following the vowel.  We have one remnant of each trend in English.  For the first trend, we have the slightly weakened ‘swell swelled swollen.’ Along with it, representing the second trend, we have the still fully armed ‘fight fought fought.’  In Dutch, ‘to swell’ is more or less regular as ‘ik zwel’ (I swell – presumably I am speaking here as a puffer fish), ik zwol (I swelled) and ‘ik heb gezwollen’ (I have swollen).  ‘Fight’ is as feisty as ever:  ‘ik vecht, ik vocht, ik heb gevochten.’  Just for fun, I can’t resist mentioning another  Dutch verb in the same class, the word for ‘to sound,’ ‘klinken:’ ‘ik klink, ik klonk, ik heb geklonken.’  Here’s a sample sentence from an interview with trumpeter Hugh Masekela in the Volkskrant newspaper on 15 May, 2008: “Ik klink weer als een jochie” (pron. ‘ik clink wayr awls ain yokhee’), meaning ‘I sound like a young kid again.’  We have a ghost of this word in English as the weak, impersonal verb ‘to clink’ (to make a sharp but slightly muffled sound like a muted bell), but it’s too bad we didn’t retain the original meaning so that we could say ‘I clink like a New Yorker’ or ‘you clonk really strange when you left that message for me’ or ‘she speaks with a strong Australian clank.’ Ah well, at least we still have ‘clunk:’ it’s supposed to be a relatively recently arisen word (1796) based on an echo of the sound it describes, but I think whoever coined it had some awareness of the Germanic Rumplestiltskin word that gave us the English ‘clank’ and the Dutch ‘klonk.’  For anyone who doesn’t know ‘clunk,’ it’s the sound of parts falling out of place in your car engine, or of the bottom falling out of a bad joke.  When Rumplestiltskin split himself in half, it’s probably the sound his left half made when it hit the ground.  As the Grimms told the story: “In his rage he drove his right foot so far into the ground that it sank in up to his waist; then in a passion he seized the left foot with both hands and tore himself in two.”  Rip…ouch … clunk! 

 

That’s your introduction to Class 3 strong verbs, the singers, drinkers and fighters.  They slink, they spin, they sting, they sling, they spring and they swing!  No wonder they stink, they stank, they have stunk.  These are wild characters here.  The Singers, we’ll call them.  The seven dwarves never partied like these guys.

 

There are seven major classes of strong verbs in English.  Class number 1 can be called The Riders.  They started off with an e-grade root in PIE that was pronounced ‘ei,’ combined with an o-grade that was an ‘oi’ sound and a zero-grade that developed a short ‘i’ sound.  With the sound changes that took place as PIE turned into Germanic and eventually into modern English, that gave us present tense words with long ‘i’ like ‘ride,’ past tenses with long ‘o’ like ‘rode,’ and participles with short ‘i’ like ‘ridden.’  This small category contains a lot of action words, like ‘drive drove driven’ and the slightly mutant ‘bite bit bitten.’  The reveillé words are both here, ‘rise’ and ‘shine.’  And those who have risen and shone can go out and smite or strike something, or perhaps, seeing someone they smote only yesterday, fall in love and become smitten.  Then they can write about it and let what they wrote become written.  Yes, dynamic, wild-eyed yet literate, the perfect fairy-tale verb class. 

 

Class 2, The Shooters, is an elite unit of verbs, consisting mostly of very fast moving archers on horseback who are also armed with small axes.  Their protective magic is that they had ‘eu’ in their PIE e-grade, ‘ou’ in their o-grade, and short ‘u’ in their zero-grade, giving rise to both ‘e-’ and ‘u-’like sounds in present tenses, and ‘o’s in past tenses.   As they and their horses ‘fly flew flown’ by, then, they ‘choose chose chosen’ what to aim at and ‘shoot shot shot.’  The target may ‘freeze froze frozen’ but if not, the axe comes out and will ‘cleave clove cloven or cleft’ the enemy’s helmet.  And that just about all they can do, unless they then ‘dive dove dived’ off their horses and run for cover.

 

Class 4, The Breakers, all ended up with their PIE e-grade turning into an ‘ea’ in English.  They also tend to have an ‘n’ ending the participle.  Break, broke, broken; steal stole stolen; tear tore torn.  

 

Interestingly, though, ‘speak spoke spoken’ is not in this group, but can be traced through its Old English vowel changes to the next group, Class 5, The Meeters.  (It is a marginal case, though, and is considered Class 4 by most Dutch linguists).  Yes, I am sure you are starting to wonder if the Leyudis did anything other than fight, plunder, drink and sing, and now here you see them making a little civilization in their spare time.  Verbs like ‘meet met met,’ ‘give gave given,’ ‘lie (down) lay lain,’ ‘see saw saw,’ ‘weave wove woven,’ ‘sit sat sat,’ and ‘eat ate eaten’ are all linked together in this diverse group of verbs that sit around the fire and share things. 

 

As you can see, their vowel changes are not very regular in modern English, though around half have an ‘a’ sound of some kind in the past tense.   Also, they tend to share an ‘e’ or ‘i’ in the present tense.  In Old English, in contrast to modern English, these Meeter verbs were quite regular.   Thus, they can be confidently linked to each other as a group even though today, they are all doing their own thing.   Back in the time of King Alfred the Great, they tended to have five regular parts: an e-grade present tense in ‘e’ or ‘i,’ the o-grade past tense mutated to æ (pronounced like ‘a’ in ‘fat’ as you recall) or ǣ (long ‘æ’ pronounced as in ‘Oh, I look really faaaat’) and zero-grade participles in ‘e.’ You can see where the past tense ‘a’s in the modern words came from. 

 

A prototype was the verb ‘sprecan,’ ‘to speak,’ which had ‘ic sprece’ (I speak), ‘þū spricst’ (thou speakest = you speak), ‘ic spræc’ (I spoke, or in King James Bible English, I spake), wē sprǣcon (we spoke) and, in the participle, ‘Ðā ðis ġesprecen was’ (‘when this was spoken’; this last phrase is a quote from the philosopher Boethius as translated for King Alfred: “Ðā ðis þā ġesprecen was, þā ġesūgode þæt Mōd,” or ‘When this [wisdom] then was spoken, then the Headstrong Mind silenced itself.’  Pronunciation is “tha this thaw ghesprayken was, thaw ghesooghodeh that mode.”) 

 

The Old English pattern is followed reasonably strongly in Dutch with ‘ik spreek,’ (pron. ik sprayk) in the present and ‘ik sprak’ in the past, though the participle has developed an ‘o’ as ‘ik heb gesproken.’  Indeed, this same ‘o’ carries on and takes over the past tense in the simplified modern English version, ‘I speak, I spoke, I have spoken.’   As mentioned above, ‘to speak’ has been kicked out of the Class 5 verbs in Dutch because it developed this ‘o’ sound; a true Class 5 verb is considered to have kept the ‘e’ in its participle, as ‘gesprecen’ did in Old English.  An orthodox Dutch example of Class 5 would therefore be – to cite a very civilized verb – ‘genezen,’ (pron. ‘ghenayzeh’) ‘to heal:’  ‘ik genees (pron. ‘ik ghenays’), ik genas, ik heb genezen.’   Yes, even the gentle care of the nurse gets to come into this Meeter group of strong verbs.   There is strength in gentleness as well as in force.   When wisdom has spoken, as Boethius noted, the headstrong warrior mind is silenced. 

 

Class 6 strong verbs, The Shakers, all have some variation on an ‘a’ sound in the present tense, while they may have kept or lost the original ‘o’ that used to distinguish their past tense.  ‘Shake, shook, shaken,’ ‘take took taken,’ ‘wake woke woken,’ ‘swear, swore, sworn,’ ‘stand stood stood’ (compare Dutch ik sta, wij staan, ik stond, ik heb gestaan – the ‘nd’ that occurs in English present tense ‘stand’ has been preserved in the past tense ‘stond’ in Dutch).  Other than dedication to the letter ‘a,’ there is not much to link the Shakers together.  

 

Class 7, the last group, has a very complex history of changes that is too detailed to go into here.  We can call these verbs The Throwers.   Linguistically, they have been thrown pretty far apart from one another over the centuries.  Most do retain an ‘e’ in the past tense, which is unusual in the other classes we’ve seen.  All the verbs with the pattern ‘throw threw thrown’ are here, including blow, know, and grow.  ‘Fall fell fallen’ also fits in here, as does ‘hold held held’ and ‘hang hung hung.’  Unexpectedly, so does ‘let let let,’ which still keeps its distinctive form in the Dutch version, ‘ik laat, ik liet, ik heb gelaten.’

 

So there they are, all gathered up for a battle and a big campfire chat afterwards, the champion strong verbs that the Leyudis sent down to us.   These poetic ruffians are a key feature of our language and a direct connection to the steppes of eastern Europe when the horse was the latest tech-toy.  If you have any love for history, you’ll welcome this crew of wild characters into your life and speak them with vigour and pride.  If you don’t, they will smite you. 

 

I should now move along to visit a few more of the flamboyant oddities of English grammar. 

 

One of our language’s weird grammatical features lies in the marital status of our verbs.  I suspect that as the English became ever more Frenchified and civilized during the middle ages, they began to raise an eyebrow at the sight of all those strong verbs out on the steppes, still waving their swords at the sheep-like regular verbs. Perhaps it was time to settle the hairy tribe down a little.  Well, as many wild men and women have discovered, there’s nothing like a mate to exert a calming influence.   And there’s nothing like a dance partner to bring beauty and discipline to your motions.  English became, at some point, a minuet of dancing partners.  I can’t think of any other language where so many of the active verb forms have to show up as members of a couple in order to be accepted in speech. 

 

For example, in Dutch, if you are on your way to a shop to buy something, you can tell your friends, ‘Ik ga naar de winkel,’ ‘I go to the store.’ The single word ‘ga’ is the appropriate present tense form of the verb gaan, ‘to go.’  In French, you can say, ‘je vais au magasin.’  ‘Vais,’ again, is the equivalent of ‘go’ in ‘I go.’  In no-frills Cantonese, you can say, ‘ngóh heui syùpóuh’ – ‘I go store.’  Even in Secwépemc, the very different language from my home part of Canada, you can say ‘nénsken te ctuméllcw’ (the last word is pronounced ‘khtuumełkhw,’ if that’s any help) – ‘go-I to the store.’ But in English, if you say ‘I go to the store,’ you sound like you don’t speak English.   You have to say ‘I am going to the store.’  The verb ‘going’ needs a partner, ‘am.’  You can generally only use the simple form if you’re talking about a habit, like ‘I go to the store on Tuesdays.’  So what’s wrong with ‘I go to the store?’  That’s a mystery. 

 

What if you decide not to go to the store?  Dutch is simple: ‘Ik ga niet naar de winkel’ – ‘I go not to the store.’  Just throw in a ‘not,’ and you’re off the hook for shopping.  Cantonese?  ‘Ngóh mheui syùpóuh’ in normal speech, with the extra ‘m’ serving as a ‘not.’ ‘I not go store.’  In formal speech, ‘Ngóh bāt heui syùpóuh,’ where the ‘bāt’ is a fancier ‘not.’  It’s simple even in the posh version.  French, admittedly, is a little odd: ‘je ne vais pas au magasin,’ ‘I no go not to the store.’  Now there’s a language that really knows how to refuse.  Still, the verb is simple. 

 

Secwépemc is something of a wild card: the non-shopper must say, ‘ta7 ken snens te ctuméllcw’ – ‘not I a one-going to the store.’ That could be made somewhat more English-looking as ‘I’m not a going-to-the-store-person (now).’ Tucked away inside this complicated negation is a simple verb form, unchanged from the one in the positive statement: ‘nens’ – ‘go.’ 

 

In English, this verbal simplicity is banned.  You simply can’t say, ‘I go not to the store,’ or ‘I not go to the store.’  As in the positive form, you have to partner up ‘go’ with another piece of action grammar, an ‘auxiliary verb.’ ‘I will not go to the store’ would work, since the abandoned trip would have happened in the future, but the most common version is, ‘I am not going to the store.’  (In popular speech, the last is contracted to ‘I’m not going to the store.’) Even in the related sentence about habitual acts, the ‘go’ needs a partner: ‘I do not go to the store on Tuesdays.’ 

 

Old English, as usual, was closer to Dutch than to modern English.  Here’s a historical sample sentence with the negation in boldface type and the relevant verb form in italics.  ‘Þeah ðe þin feoh ne ateorige, ðeah geendað þin līf þonne ðu læst wenst...’ This fairly unreadable text was the advice of the 10th century monk Aelfric in one of his famous religious essays.  In modern letters, it looks like this: ‘Theah the thin feoh ne ateorige, theah geendath thin lif thonne thu laest wenst....”  Hm, not much help.  Anyways, the translation is, ‘though your money does not fail, yet your life ends when you least wish it to.’  Here, in the original phrase, you see the word ‘ne,’acting just like the Dutch ‘niet’ and turning the solitary verb ‘ateorige’ – meaning ‘fail’ or ‘become exhausted’ – into ‘not fail.’  In my modern English translation, I was obliged to make the verb a couple, using ‘does not fail.’  No equivalent of ‘does’ was present in the original.

 

Even early Middle English used our original solitary verbs.  There’s a good example in an English translation from 1450 of the French ‘Book of the Knight Geoffroy de La Tour-Landry.’ The book recounts that when Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, born rich but committed to poverty as the head of a religious abbey, was visited by his wealthy sister, she appeared at first dressed in all her finery. He turned his back to her and would not bless her.  The text says, ‘the lady was ashamed, and asked whi he ne wolde with her speke.’ – ‘the lady was ashamed, and asked why he didn’t (did not) want to speak with her.’  The reason, Bernard said, was that he felt pity that she was so cloaked in pride, as seen in her fancy dress.  She excused herself and went off to change into street clothes, and soon everything was fine between her and Bernard again. 

 

‘The lady was ashamed, and asked why he ne willed with her speak.’  Ne think you that this simple, down-to-earth way of making negatives would function perfectly well in modern English?  Alas, it ne works that way.  English verbs, in contrast to Bernard’s sister, have to appear in their fancy state to get a blessing.  Posh.  Our language is posh. 

 

English verbal ballroom dancing is at its most formal when questions are being asked.  Look at a question like ‘do you have money?’  (I’ll keep putting the relevant verb forms into italics.)  Anyone who is going to be dancing all the time needs money, so this question comes up naturally in the English situation.  In Dutch, you can say, ‘heb je geld?’ – ‘have you money?’  That’s a little blunt – being polite, you might say, ‘heb je wat geld daarbij?’ – ‘have you some money along with you?’ (literally, ‘have you what money thereby’), just as in English, you might say, ‘do you have some money on you?’  Even in the fancy Dutch form, as you can see, one verb does all the work. 

 

Part of the English dance routine, in the case of questions, is to spin the important words around backwards.  Dutch does that too.  ‘You have money,’ the statement, has the verb coming after ‘you,’ while ‘do you have money?’ puts part of the verb, the auxiliary ‘do,’ before ‘you.’  Inversion, this is called.  As you can see, it also happens in Dutch – ‘je hebt geld,’ ‘you have money’ becomes ‘heb je geld?,’ ‘have you money?’ And the same thing happens in French: ‘vous avez de l’argent,’ literally, ‘you have of the money,’ – ‘you have money’ – inverts as a question and becomes ‘avez-vous de l’argent?’ 

 

Just in case other languages seem to be ganging up on English about this simple-negation tactic, I will bring back the two comparison languages I’ve been mentioning to show that, yes, they do support being different.  In Cantonese, ‘néih yáuh dī chín’ – ‘you have some money’ – doesn’t invert when it is turned into a question, but rather shows the available options:  ‘néih yáuh móuh dī chín a’ – ‘you have (or) not-have some money huh?’  And Secwépemc, bless its linguistic heart, sometimes has a prefix that acts as an auxiliary verb in its questions, putting it very superficially in a form similar to English:  ‘Kem ke7 péll-sqleẃ?’ – ‘Do you have money?’ 

 

The need in English for two-part verb constructions in questions, negative statements, and statements about current activities is very close to being a hard-and-fast rule.  As you wise readers now know, that means that there must be exceptions, places where the rule-breaking English spirit prevailed. 

 

There’s a well known exception among the different forms of English questions.  The ancestral Germanic pattern of simple questions with no attached auxiliary verbs is still common in some ‘w-word questions’ – questions that start with ‘who,’ ‘what,’ ‘when,’ ‘where,’ ‘why’ and ‘whow,’ um, ‘how’ – ok, the last one, ‘how’ doesn’t fit.  Another rule-breaker, haha.  Actually, in Old English, these question words all started with ‘h’ – for example, ‘what’ was ‘hwæt’ – so they are perhaps secretly h-word questions.  In any case, the two-part ‘Does someone have money?’ can more-or-less be rephrased as ‘Who has money?’  You can even make a sort of negative with ‘who has no money?’ – though it’s more common to double up the verb and ask ‘who doesn’t have money?’  The ‘who has money’ trick for making a question with a single verb only works when the w-word is the subject of the sentence.  “When does George come back from college” can’t be turned into “When comes George back from college?” because the word ‘when’ is not a reference to George himself. 

 

Let’s look at a major exception that actually has some logic behind it, rather than just a love of rule-breaking perversity.  As you’ve seen, many of the coupled-up forms of English verbs involve the auxiliary verb ‘to do.’  There’s an interesting story in how it got its role in these constructions, but I’ll save that for later.  Right now, I’ll just point out the obvious about ‘to do’ – that it usually suggests that something is being ‘done’ to something.  In other words, ‘to do’ implies that a cause is producing an effect.  For this reason, the ‘do’ coupling can’t be applied to the verb ‘to be,’ which, in its simplest forms, merely suggests that something is the same as something else.  You cannot say ‘he does not be an American’ – that seems illogical.  The simple ‘He is not an American’ is quite sufficient.  Likewise, we say ‘Is he an American?,’ not ‘Does he be an American?’  ‘To be,’ in many of its grammatical forms, is still used much as it was in Middle English.  “I am nat wont in no mirour to prie” – “I am not wont (accustomed) to look deeply into any mirror” – says the red-faced ‘yeoman’ character in Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Yeoman’s Tale,’ published sometime in the late 1300s.  (The Yeoman was the helper of an alchemist who tried to convert ordinary materials into gold by smelting them in a hot fire – as a servant, this yeoman was obliged to put his face up to the fire and blow on it constantly to make it burn hot.  Thus he had a permanently red face that was not something he wished to gaze at.)  Chaucer’s sentence has a double-negative – ‘I am not wont in no mirror to pry’ – something that was common in his day but is never allowed in modern English.  Modernized translations will change this, but will never go so far as to say, “I do not be wont to pry into any mirror.” The ‘to be’ part of the sentence is still found in the same form as it was in Chaucer. 

 

On the other hand, the Middle English ‘we ne singen’ (to pick the form used in the Midlands dialect of central England) became ‘we do not sing’ in modern English, and this construction seems natural.  Singing ‘does’ something – it changes the environment.  Even not singing produces a change of some kind.  Some people should be richly thanked if they decide not to sing – their decision may make the world a kinder place for music lovers. 

 

The English ‘couples-only’ policy towards verbs found in questions or negative sentences has a few other oddball exceptions.  For example, there are some high-and-mighty-sounding expressions that still carry over a fragment of simple Middle English grammar into modern times.  People seldom use these phrases seriously, and if they do, they sound like actors in a badly written drama.  My favourite is the phrase “Have you no shame?”  In strictly modern English, you would need to say, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” – a phrase I can only hear, in my mind, spoken in my mother’s voice.  It was much needed when I was young.    

 

Questions based on ‘to have’ normally include a ‘do,’ but in the case of ‘Have you no shame?,” the phrasing would sound extremely strange if you said ‘Do you not have shame?’ or ‘Don’t you have shame?’  The last version, in fact, would seem to come from someone who expected you to bring some shame along and is now worried that you forgot it.  

 

An excellent history of how ‘do’ came to be partnered with other English verbs has been published by an author with the good Anglo-Saxon name Terttu Nevalainen (I’m joking – it’s a Finnish name, actually – she’s at the University of Helsinki – but as you can see, anyone from anywhere can master English if he or she does a PhD in it and becomes an academic expert.  That’s a comforting thought, isn’t it?).  Nevalainen points out that “a group of verbs called the ‘know-group’ (including know, doubt, mistake, trow – meaning ‘to believe’) and wot (‘to know’) lagged behind” other early modern English verbs in developing intimacy with ‘do.’ Many English verbs, from around the year 1500 onwards, were regularly partnered with ‘do,’ a phenomenon referred to as ‘do-support.’ Members of the ‘know’ group, by contrast, often lacked do-support until the 17^th century.  Expressions like “I know not,” and “I doubt not that…” still prevailed over “I do not know” and “I do not doubt that...”  (Even now, ‘I do not doubt that…’ sounds surprisingly formal and would probably be replaced by ‘I don’t doubt that…’ or ‘I have no doubt that…’ just to calm it down).  Nevalainen gives an example from a letter in which King Henry VIII’s widow Queen Catherine Parr (died 1548) accuses Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour of distorting something she’d said in an earlier letter: “I knowe not wether ye be a paraphyryser or not, yf ye be lerned in that syence yt ys possyble ye may of one worde make a hole sentence” (“I know not whether you are a ‘paraphraser’ or not, if you are educated in that science [where] it is possible to turn a single word into a whole sentence” – in other words, “I don’t know if you are an expert at rewording things so that you can ‘scientifically’ turn my statements into things I never said”).  ‘Paraphryser’ or not, Seymour successfully courted Catherine and married her after Henry passed on.  Apparently, the good lady knew not why she shouldn’t accept his proposal.  He, for his part, doubted not that marrying her was a wise move, since she was the wealthiest woman in England and also much beloved by 9-year-old Edward, the heir to the throne. 

 

To this day, just as you can get into a state of high drama and say “have you no shame?,” you can also say “Truly, I know not whether I can believe you.”  As an actor or actress, you are more-or-less taking the part of a 16^th century queen – but such airs can be understandable in the right circumstances.  For example, if you are still working as a drag queen at the age of 80, this kind of phrasing might work well for you. 

 

In this type of dramatic comedy, another common deviation from do-support is to use the explosive refusal “I think not!” instead of the milder, normal “I don’t think so.” Some mild cursing often precedes the ‘think not.’ 

 

“I know not,” with its classical associations, is also a staple of 19^th and 20^th century religious English.  This usage is based in the English translation of the Christian bible by scholars working for King James in 1611.  Jesus, at the moment of his crucifixion by the Roman legal system, cried out a sentence that James’ 47 Church of England translators rendered as, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”  This transcendent statement of forgiveness is decidedly awkward if translated into modern English as, “Forgive them, Father, because they don’t know what they’re doing.”  That makes it sound as if the crucifying soldiers needed technical advice.  “Forgive them, because they don’t know what they’ve done” works a little better, but wrongly restricts the crucifiers’ confused motivations to the past.  “Forgive them, because they don’t know what they do” sounds like it has a grammatical problem.  Sometimes, archaic language is hard to substitute for. 

 

If you do a web search on “know not,” you will probably obtain entries like the ones I got as I wrote this paragraph.  Not only are there biblical quotations in King James English, like “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come,” but also quotations from other scriptures written up the same way.  A Baha'i prayer came up in my search: “I know not, O my God, what the Fire is which Thou didst kindle in Thy land.”  Christian hymns popped up that were written centuries after King James: ‘I Know Not Why God's Wondrous Grace (to Me He Hath Made Known),’(written by D.W. Whittle, 1883; all four of its verses begin with ‘I know not’) and  ‘I Know not What Awaits Me’ (Mary Gardiner Brainard, 1869).  Plus plenty more biblical quotations: “Ye worship ye know not what” and “Thomas saith unto him, ‘Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?’”  The important thing to know about these King James bible quotations is that most churches have moved on to modernized translations of the bible.  On the other hand, people in the English-speaking world who are not religious are permanently stuck on the King James versions as ‘the real’ biblical thought.  Students of English history and fans of the beauty of Renaissance English are also in love with the King James translation.  These “know not” phrases, then, are embedded in religious, non-religious and anti-religious culture, and are recognized by most people. 

 

Those who wish to be classical but earthy can quote Iranian poet Omar Khayyam: “Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why. Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.” Edward FitzGerald, in his 1868 English translation of Omar’s ode to alcohol and beauty, deliberately used scriptural language to give the writing its lofty, all-seeing tone. 

 

William Shakespeare also gave us several memorable quotes based on knowing-not.  The fictional Danish prince Hamlet, in his famous monologue on death, muses:

 

“…Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?”

 

(Who would carry heavy loads, grunting and sweating through a weary life, if not that the fear of what might happen after death causes doubt in the mind?  Death, the undiscovered country from which no traveller returns, makes us put up with the troubles we’re used to in this life, rather than hurrying to find new troubles whose nature we cannot guess.)

 

And Shakespeare himself muses, in a sonnet about looking at the person he loves,

 

“Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art,

They draw but what they see, know not the heart.”

 

(Eyes lack one important skill, despite all their art in showing us beauty: they let us see the image of the person we look upon, but they cannot read the human heart). 

 

In such perceptive writing, perhaps that idea that ‘to know’ something needed to be attached to a ‘doing’ process seemed clumsy.  Yet today, if we were writing William’s sonnet as a new piece of modern English verse, we would need to say that eyes ‘draw only what they see, but do not know the heart.’  The eyes now have to ‘do’ their knowing, rather than just knowing, at least in negative statements and in questions.  The quick nature of consciousness is grammatically broken up in way that, to speakers of early modern English, may have seemed wrong. 

 

Even today, ‘verbs of mental state’ (know, believe, realize, want, think, need, etc.) and verbs of mental perception (see, hear, feel, perceive, etc.) are used directly in the present tense.  They escape from using ‘to be’ as a partner in most kinds of expressions.  ‘I know that,’ ‘I realize that,’ ‘I need that’ are normal expressions for current, ongoing states of mind.  It is usually not valid to say ‘I am knowing that,’ ‘I am realizing that’ or ‘I am needing that’ – though the last two may have a place in sardonic and sarcastic sayings, such as ‘I am slowly realizing that you don’t like women’ and ‘I am needing that coffee break now, may I remind you?’.  In most cases, we experience our mental states directly, without help from helper verbs. 

 

Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that some of the verbs suggesting states of consciousness or mental activities, like ‘think,’ ‘ask,’ and ‘imagine,’ can block do-support when they are used in negatively worded, classical sounding commands.  Again, this happens mostly in lofty situations.  “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” said John Kennedy at his inauguration as U.S. president in 1961.  That sounds appropriate for an inspirational address, but if you asked your son “where did that homework sheet end up?” and he answered “ask me that not” instead of “don’t ask me,” you would assume he was having a flight of fancy about being someone medieval, perhaps a knight or a king who was too important to do homework.  That would be especially true if he continued with, “Think not that a boy such as I must do homework like a low-born varlet. I care not for homework or such trifles.” In good modern family speech, armed with do-support, you’d have to reply with ‘I don’t care if King Arthur has just knighted you head of the Round Table – don’t even think you can get away with not doing that homework tonight!” 

 

Or, you could change verbs and tell him, ‘don’t you dare try to get out of doing that homework!” You need to know, though, that the verb ‘to dare’dares to be different.  You will sometimes hear people saying things like “I dare not ask her how she plans to do that” or “How dare you tell me that I’m an unfit parent?”  Such expressions, which could be replaced by do-supported versions like ‘I don’t dare (to) ask her how she plans to do that,’ might seem to be typical do-free pomp, similar to ‘have you no shame?’ and ‘know you not that I am your queen?’  Within the ‘dare’ expressions, though, according to authorities on English, we cross over the border into another category of English verbs that don’t take support from ‘to do’ – the ‘modal verbs.’  Typical modal verbs like ‘can / could’ and ‘will / would’ make up a separate category of English verbs that serve as partners of other verbs.  Mostly, they express states of possibility, necessity or intention, as seen here in combination with ‘to go’: ‘I can go,’ I will go,’ ‘I must go,’ ‘I should go,’ ‘I may go.’ When ‘dare’ acts like a modal verb, it is considered to be one.  ‘I dare not go there’ is modal; while the equivalent and equally acceptable ‘I don’t dare to go there’ is not.  In some situations, only the modal ‘dare’ is used: ‘how dare you?’ can’t normally be replaced by ‘how do you dare?’  In others, the non-modal form seems to be the only possibility: ‘yes, I dare to go there’ seems slightly odd but realistic, while ‘yes, I dare go there’ seems to be a mistake, or at least very unusual.  The nonsensical, non-modal schoolyard taunt, ‘I double-dog dare you to take a swing at me’ can’t easily be replaced by ‘I double-dog dare you take a swing at me,’ omitting the non-modal ‘to.’ A bully who took such grammatical risks would probably not succeed, and would be forced to become a nice guy. 

 

The verb ‘to need’ can also cross the line into becoming modal, which explains do-less phrases like ‘You need not show me that’ or ‘Need I say more?’ These modal uses, however, always sound more pompous, more upper-crust, than non-modal equivalents like ‘You don’t need to show me that’ or ‘Do I need to say more?’ 

 

One thing ‘dare’ and ‘need’ have that full-time modals like ‘would’ do not have is an infinitive form: ‘to dare,’ ‘to need.’  There is no ‘to must,’ ‘to shall,’ or ‘to ought to’ – and no ‘to will’ or ‘to can,’ unless you include separate usages like ‘to can’ = ‘to seal into a round, metal container.’  The specialized modal verbs have had radical surgery that has stripped away several normal features of verbs.  Besides having lost their infinitives, they’ve also lost their distinctive form for ‘he, she, and it,’ the ‘third person singular.’  Regular English verbs change in the third person singular, usually adding an –s stem: ‘I go’ becomes ‘she goes;’ ‘I walk’ becomes ‘he walks.’  Modals don’t do this: ‘I can, you can, he can, they can; I must, you must, it must, they must.’  They’re highly simplified. Native English speakers may say ‘so what?’ about this – it seems so normal – but they may not realize that the equivalents of English modal verbs, in other languages, are often fully formed, with infinitives and normal grammatical endings.  ‘Pouvoir,’ for example, is the French verb standing in for ‘can’ and ‘could;’ its infinitive form clearly resembles our word ‘power,’ which is logical for a word linked to ability.  It opens up the usual peacock display of French endings and stem changes when you use it to say that different people ‘can’ do things: ‘je peux changer’ (‘I can change’), il peut changer (‘he can change’), ‘vous pouvez changer’ (‘you can change’), nous pouvons changer (‘we can change’) etc.  Notice, by contrast, that the English phrasing in the translations (in parentheses) is solid as a rock – only the first word, the pronoun, changes.  That seems curiously convenient for such a trouble-making language.  `

 

Not to make things too simple, I need to point out that ‘can / could’ has a sort of fake infinitive in ‘to be able to.’ For example, ‘It wasn’t known if he would be able to do that,’ would sometimes be used to replace the less formal and somewhat different-in-meaning, ‘It wasn’t known if he could do that.’ “I am able to” and “I can” are essentially the same in meaning; however, there is a slight difference between ‘I could’ and ‘I was able to,’ the past-tense forms.  I am going to take a moment and give an example of the distinction, since in this matter lies one of the most common mistakes that second-language English speakers make in writing technical and scientific English. 

 

Here’s an imaginary example of scientific text about insulin, the natural drug used to treat diabetes.  “In the past, the medical community could always rely on the beef industry as a source of insulin, but costs were high. In 1979, for the first time, members of my laboratory could clone the gene for insulin, and shortly after that, we could begin low-cost insulin production in the yeast.”  What is wrong with this paragraph? The error is very subtle.  To my eye, there is nothing wrong with the first sentence, where ‘we could always rely on’ refers to an ongoing process, a long-term possibility that could be exploited.  On the other hand, the second sentence, with its ‘could clone the gene’ and its ‘could begin low-cost production,’ is doing something that would be reasonable in German or Dutch, but not in English. It is using ‘could’ to refer to a single event where something was made possible.  The normal English way of writing the second sentence is “In 1985, for the first time, members of my laboratory were able to clone the gene for insulin, and only a few years later, we were able to begin low-cost commercial insulin production in the yeast.”  When it comes to pointing out one-time, activated possibilities in the past, ‘was able to’ is used rather than ‘could.’ 

 

Strangely, the difference between ‘was able to’ and ‘could’ only applies in positive statements.  Seonaid Beckwith, in her ‘Perfect-English-Grammar.com’ website, distinguishes these two types of past tense for ‘can.’  She points to the positive / negative pair ‘could / couldn't’ for general ability and gives the examples ‘I could read when I was four’ and ‘My grandfather couldn't swim.’  For specific ability, she gives us ‘was able to / couldn't,’ with the examples ‘When the computer crashed yesterday, I was able to fix it’ (positive) and ‘He called us because he couldn't find the house’ (negative). 

 

The future tense of ‘can’ is always ‘will be able to.’  ‘Today, I can play tennis with you, and, as for tomorrow, yes, I’ll be able to play tennis with you then, too.’  There’s definitely no ‘I will can.’ ‘Can,’ as a verb, has many missing parts.

 

The modal verbs, like ‘can,’ remind me of biological organisms that have evolved as parasites, pathogens or symbionts.  These kinds of organisms grow on, or within, other organisms, depending on those organisms for all or most of their nutrition.  Often, as they evolve, they lose random bits of their ancestral biology.  For example, they may randomly lose the ability to manufacture one or more of the vitamins they need.  These vitamins can just be extracted from the infected host, anyway, so the pathogen or symbiont has no problem if its own cellular machinery for making the vitamins shuts down.  Also, if you grow pathogens and symbionts in culture, you often find that they are simpler in structure than the species that still look like their free-living ancestors.  (We can guess what the extinct ancestors of modern species looked like not just by looking at fossils, but more importantly, by using a mathematical process that calculates which existing organisms have retained the most ancestral structure in their gene sequences.)  That’s because these dependent organisms have randomly lost the ability to produce items, like airborne spores, that are no longer needed in their simplified life cycle. 

 

Let’s look at the parallels with ‘can,’ as a verb.  This dependent modal is related to the free-living Dutch verb ‘kunnen,’ which can function either modally or independently.  ‘Kunnen’ is slightly deviant, but it still possesses most of the parts of a normal verb.  When used non-modally, it occurs in phrases like ‘Ik kan dat wel,’ literally, ‘I can that definitely,’ meaning, ‘I can certainly do that.’ As you perhaps can see, it is the only verb working in that sentence.  ‘Can,’ as a typical English modal, doesn’t occur as a sole verb: it is always dependent on the verb it is modulating, the verb it is helping out.  ‘It can’t alone' – oops, too much like Dutch – I mean ‘it can’t function alone.’  ‘To function’ is the necessary verb being helped in this statement.  Like all parasites or symbionts, then, ‘can’ has random bits of its original structure missing.  In some situations where it has completely lost a working function, the alternative form, ‘to be able to,’ has had to move in. 

 

Verbs that are missing abilities like this are called ‘defective verbs’ in grammar.  The modal ‘must’ is an extreme example: it has no past tense at all.  Its Dutch equivalent, ‘moeten,’ has a perfectly good one.  ‘Dat moesten wij,’ you can say – ‘that “musted” we,’ meaning, ‘we had to do that.’ 

 

As the last example shows, other modals besides ‘can’ can be replaced by parallel phrases based on normal verbs.  ‘He has to’ can replace ‘he must;’ ‘she intends to’ and ‘she is going to’ can stand in for ‘she will.’ ‘They are considering (doing something)’ is often equivalent to ‘they might (do something).’ And so on.  In regular speech, however, the simple modals tend to rule; they are very commonly used.  (The necessary English rulebreaker to that generality is ‘must,’ which is regarded as formal and polite.)

 

Modals never, ever, have ‘do-support,’ but they can combine with ‘do’ in cases where ‘do’ is acting like a normal verb.  That is, you can say ‘she can do that’ and ‘they really should do something else,’ but you can never say things like ‘He doesn’t must stop that’ (correct form: ‘He doesn’t have to stop that’).  In questions, the modals do the inverting – ‘you can shine my shoes’ becomes ‘can you shine my shoes?’ And, in negatives, they again take the role of supporting dance-partner to the normal verb.  ‘He might not arrive on time,’ ‘he ought not to drink that.’  You can see that in negative and questioning sentences, modals mostly serve as alternatives to ‘do.’ They replace it when the questions relate to ability, probability, permission, obligation, advice, or a subject’s probable habits.  Take the sentence, ‘He doesn’t believe that story.’  Replacing ‘doesn’t,’ the negative third-person form of ‘do,’ with various modals, you get ‘he might not believe that story,’ ‘he wouldn’t believe that story’ (it’s contrary to his habit to believe a story like that), ‘he shouldn’t believe that story,’ and so on. 

 

‘Can’ gets fancy with a special negative form, ‘cannot,’ which is used when you want to be relatively formal or to stress an important point.  Otherwise, you use the ordinary contraction, ‘can’t.’ I mentioned in Chapter 1 that English was almost like two languages in one – a French-like, latinized, high-status language holding hands with a Dutch-like, Germanic, low-status language.  Sometimes, the difference in formality spreads even into words that are derived from the same source.  “I cannot help you” is far more polite and formal than “I can’t help you.” 

 

Some modals in the negative form are almost always contracted – you see ‘I shouldn’t’ and ‘I couldn’t’ much more often than ‘I should not’ and ‘I could not.’  On the other hand, ‘I mustn’t’ is characteristically British or mock-British. ‘I must not’ (pronounced with emphasis on ‘not’) is more forceful than ‘I mustn’t,’ and also more widely used – but colloquial Americans would nonetheless abandon ‘must’ in most situations and simply say ‘I shouldn’t’ or, for emphasis, ‘I really shouldn’t.’  Compare ‘I mustn’t leave my sandwich on that low table because the dog may come by and snatch it’ (possible British phrasing) with ‘I really shouldn’t leave my sandwich on that low table; the dog might come along and grab it (good Canadian and probably American as well).”

 

The story of how these oddly used, defective modals came into being is one of the most interesting in the history of English.  Back in the days of early Middle English, the verbs that are now modals were all normal, or nearly so.  They were often much like their Dutch equivalents. 

 

Olga Fischer, in the Cambridge History of the English Language, gives us some examples.  For ‘can/could’ we have a line from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye,” which Fischer translates as “She knew a lot about travelling.”  Word for word, however, the line says “She could much of wandering by the way,” meaning ‘she was able to look after herself well when travelling.’ Here’s ‘could’ functioning all by itself without any verbal partner.  A few paragraphs ago, you saw a Dutch equivalent, ‘Ik kan dat wel,’ ‘I am certainly able to do that.’

 

‘Shall’can also stand alone in Middle English: “And by that feith I shal Priam of Troie” says a line from Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida.  ‘And by the faith I owe Priamus of Troy’ is Fischer’s modern translation of what, word for word, says “And by that faith I shall Priam of Troy.” As a final example of a modal walking on its own two feet, here’s a line from Chaucer’s poem House of Fame that says, “And seyde he mostt unto Itayle,” ‘And said he had [to go] to Italy,’ or, literally, “and he said he ‘musted’ unto Italy.”  In modern Dutch, a person who had had to go to Italy might indeed say, “Ik moest naar Italië,” literally, “I had to go to Italy.” 

 

Incidentally, if something from Chapter 2 is tugging in your memory around now, it might be a mysterious, weird Dutch expression I used there but couldn’t explain.  Now you know the explanation.  ‘Ik mag je graag,’ meaning, ‘I like you,’ is literally, ‘I may you willingly.’ It uses ‘may’ in its non-modal, self-standing form, meaning, roughly, ‘to permit,’ ‘to allow’ or ‘to favour.’  The ‘may’ verb, ‘mogen,’ possesses all tenses – for example, ‘Ik had hem graag gemogen,’ ‘I liked him,’ literally, ‘I had him willingly “mayed.”’ ‘I gladly welcomed him’ is the essence.  How very far we’ve come from these Dutch roots of ours. 

 

There is a connection between the modals and ‘to do’ in how they changed meanings and grew away from their Dutch-like roots over time.  To illustrate the similarity, I’m going to start off by showing you how ‘do’ works in Dutch, since modern Dutch carries over so many similarities to early phases of English.  In the Netherlands, you can go up to a fast-food stall and correctly say ‘Doe mij maar een frites met satésaus,’ ‘Do me just a French-fries with saté (Indonesian peanut) sauce.’  The verb ‘doen,’ to do, can stand alone with specific meanings similar to ‘prepare,’ ‘make’ or ‘put.’  There are many Dutch ‘do’ expressions that are impossible in standard English: “kaas op je boterham doen” (‘cheese on your sandwich-bread do,’ in other words, ‘put cheese in your sandwich’); “voor geld kan je de duivel doen dansen” (‘for money can you the devil do dancing,’ that is, ‘for money, you can make the devil dance to your tune,’), ‘kan je de deur dicht doen?’ (‘can you the door closed do?’, that is, ‘can you close the door?’), and so on. 

 

The Dutch ‘do’ can also take on the main functions of the modern, self-standing English ‘do:’ it can represent a completely non-specific action (‘I wonder what to do about this problem,’ ‘Ik vraag me af wat ik moet doen om deze zaak te regelen’), or it can stand in for a verb that has been recently used, thus avoiding repetition of the same verb (‘I’ll turn left if you want, but I don’t know why I should do that,’ ‘ik keer linksaf als je dat wilt, maar ik weet niet waarom ik dat moet doen’).  This is clearly more efficient than saying ‘I’ll turn left if you want, but I don’t know why I should turn left.’  In the last Dutch sentence, by the way, you can see yet another modal, ‘will,’ working in an independent function that the English version used to have, but has since has lost. “I turn left-off if you that will,” it says, word-for-word; i.e., ‘I’ll turn off to the left if you will that.’  Nowadays, in English, we’d have to say ‘if you want that.’ 

 

In Old English, ‘to do’ had many of the possibilities it has in Dutch today.  I’ll give you the example Fischer uses, with some explanation first.  In the biblical book of Genesis, chapter 37, we meet a character called Joseph, who is his father’s favourite son.  His jealous brothers beat him up and plan, at first, to kill him. As the King James translation tells the story,

 

“And when they saw him afar off, even before he came near unto them, they conspired against him to slay him. And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast hath devoured him…” 

 

The phrase ‘let us … cast him in some pit’ (modern English: ‘let’s throw him down into some well or cistern’) appears in an Old English translation of the same verse:  ‘Uton...don hyne on þone ealdan pytt’ (‘Let us do him in this old pit.’).  This sentence features ‘to do’ with the meaning of ‘to put something in place,’ and thus it is similar in structure to one of the Dutch phrases quoted above:  “kaas op je boterham doen,” ‘put cheese in your sandwich.’  Do Joseph in the well, do cheese in your sandwich. 

 

With “do” and the modals, then, we have a series of verbs that have lost many of their original uses and been re-applied, often in mutant form, to new functions.  This seems to have taken place as part of a shared historical process.  What happened?  When I look to the field experts in historical development of English grammar, like Fischer and Nevalainen, I don’t see a clear answer.  Fischer has carefully looked at every available Middle English book, poem and play, as well as every hypothesis about how Middle English developed, while Nevalainen has done statistics on how terms were used in private letters as well as books and manuscripts.  I got the impression they saw a little change here, a little change there, a local pattern in one place, and another pattern somewhere else – many minor and often mysterious changes culminating into trends that differed among people in different parts of England and even among men and women.  The changes were clearly related to the loss of the Latin-like (inflected) Old English grammar and the development of a Middle English grammar based on simple phrases pairing helper verbs with main verbs (‘periphrasis,’ they call that).  I don’t, however, see anyone giving an overall picture of the factors that drove these changes and how all the changes fit together. 

 

Amateurs – people like me who love fields of research that they are not professionals in – have some freedom to jump in and announce grand causal ideas where dedicated scholars might not dare to do so.  True scholars have to support nearly everything they say with references and hard data, whereas amateurs, like dogs, can see the looming shape of an idea coming out of the darkness and start barking immediately.  I’m going to tell you now about a looming idea of mine, perhaps slightly different from other published ideas in this heavily worked area of inquiry, that brings together the stories of ‘do,’ the modals, and the present continuous tense (‘I am going to school,’ ‘she is knitting a hat’).  I think that all these changes were part of a unified process that developed a simple English, a grammatically reduced language that served as a creole or a pidgin among people of different backgrounds.  There are many versions of the so-called ‘Middle English creole hypothesis,’ but if you are one of the people who keeps track of such things, I think you’ll find the one I’m about to advance has some distinctive features.

 

Whatever happened, exactly, in the mostly lost history of early Middle English, the changes that were made are important today.  They are what makes English relatively easy to learn as a widely used second language.  The unifying theme of some of the most important changes is – to use a word I’m now making up – that a small number of verbs got ‘mamooked.’ 

 

To explain that strange word, I have to tell you a story about my childhood encounter with a ghost language.  When I was a young language nut of 11 or 12 years old, I came across a treasure in a rotating metal rack of tourist handbooks in a British Columbia gas station.  It was a ‘Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon or Indian Trade Language of the Pacific Coast,’ a reprint of an 1899 book (based on an 1863 work by George Gibbs from Oregon) containing the tiny vocabulary of one of the simplest languages that had ever been spoken on planet Earth, the Chinook trader’s jargon of the Pacific Northwest.  This language, which never had more than about 500 words of vocabulary in it, was seldom used by anyone as a home language, but it was used whenever people of various language groups were trading or otherwise mixing together in what is now Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and southern Alaska. 

 

The Pacific Northwest area, including the coast and adjacent plateau, is home to a great diversity of completely unrelated native language families, including Salishan, Chinookan, Sahaptian, Kutenaian, Wakashan, Algonquian, Athapaskan / Dene, Chimakuan, Tsimshianic, Haida, and Inuit-Aleut.  When I say these families were ‘completely unrelated,’ I mean that they were all as different from one another as English is from Chinese.  All they had in common was a coincidental love of consonants that English speakers can’t pronounce.  Some of these language families, like Salishan, included dozens of distinct languages whose populations of speakers couldn’t understand one another.  The Pacific Northwest was a diplomat’s nightmare. 

 

Many of the Pacific Northwest peoples, however, had a distinct love of trade goods and art objects, such as fancy painted dugout canoes and strings of tusk-shaped sea-shells.  Some coastal societies had even developed a custom called ‘potlach’ (the Chinook jargon word for ‘to give’), in which people acquired large collections of beautiful possessions and then, during one or more days of feasting, gave them all away to guests until they owned next to nothing.  It was the most extreme version of the house party ever invented.  Clearly, there was no way for of all these native groups, while trading artworks and other items with members of other groups, to communicate using their national languages.  As a result, a trading jargon arose.  Little is known about this jargon until Europeans arrived, speaking still more languages.  The English- and French-speakers added their own words into the jargon.  The jargon itself actually times the entry of the English into the scene – the word for an English person is ‘kingchautsh’ or ‘kinggeorge’ – England was ruled by four successive kings named George from 1714-1830.  Americans were called ‘boston’ in Chinook, while the U.S. itself was called ‘boston illahie’ – ‘Boston Land.’ This was because most early American traders came on ships from Boston.  No one dreamed, at first, that parts of this very seacoast would someday be taken into ‘Boston Land,’ while other parts would end up in belonging to the British Empire while two more King Georges (V and VI, 1910 – 1952) reigned on the throne of Kingchautsh Land.

 

Most of the basic words of this simple jargon – pronouns, numbers, animal names – are from the Chinookan language of coastal Oregon and Washington, near the mouth of the Columbia river.  Don’t confuse that language name, Chinookan, with the simplified Chinook trader’s jargon.  Another important group of words comes from a language that’s an old friend of ours in this book – the Nuučaan̓uł (Nootka) language, the language of (if you remember my story about its spelling) the town of Ucluelet on Vancouver Island.  It’s in the Wakashan language family, unrelated to Chinookan.  The Chinookan and Nuučaan̓uł nations, however, were seafaring peoples who rowed large canoes out of good harbours.  They were well equipped to get around the coast and major rivers and do some trading. 

 

English and French terms came into the jargon in relatively large numbers in the 19^th century, when Chinook had an estimated 100,000 speakers.  Use of the jargon diminished in the 20^th century, and there were few fluent speakers after World War II.  The Grande Ronde Indian Reservation in Oregon is currently sponsoring a revival of the language within their own community.  Outside that reservation, most Pacific Northwest people only encounter Chinook in a small number of words that have been imported into the local English.  The most common of these are ‘skookum,’ meaning big and sturdy, ‘saltchuck,’ meaning salt water, ‘muck-a-muck,’ meaning food, and ‘cheechako,’ meaning a newcomer or inexperienced person.    

 

When I was 14, in the year 1970, I was lucky enough to be invited by a rancher named Frank Devick, the father of my Boy Scout friend Paul, to work on his ranch for the summer.  The work was mostly ‘haying,’ helping to bring in a harvest of hay to feed the cattle in the winter.  The ranch was about 50 km northeast of my home town of Kamloops, which had once had a Chinook-jargon church newsletter, the Kamloops Wawa (‘wawa’ was the Chinook word for ‘talk’). It was distributed from 1891 into the early 1900s. 

 

One day, my friend’s older brother Arthur, an impressively strapping near-adult, told me in conversation that he and some friends from nearby ranches were looking forward to going out in the autumn to hunt for ‘mowitch,’ – which, he confided, almost as if it was a secret, was “hunter’s talk for ‘deer.’” My ears perked right up like a mule-deer’s.  I remembered ‘mowitch,’ Chinook for ‘deer,’ from my little book.  This word was not part of local English.  And here was a fair-haired rancher, not much older than me, speaking this fragment of pure Chinook, knowing it only as ‘hunter’s talk.’ Clearly bits of the jargon were still lovingly preserved in the ranch country as a heritage of the pleasures of earlier days, when people were close to the wilderness.

 

The Devick family were originally of German heritage.  Since I was not at all talkative as a teen, I never dared inquire how much “hunter’s talk” they spoke among friends when they went out with rifle in hand. 

 

You didn’t need to know much Chinook to have a reasonable conversation.  The way this fondly remembered little language had managed to function with so few words lay partly in its having almost no verbs.  What it employed instead of most normal verbs was the word ‘mamook.’  Originally derived from the Nuučaan̓uł ‘mamuuk,’ which means ‘working’ (according to the First Peoples online dictionary of Nuučaan̓uł) it was usually translated as ‘work,’ ‘make’ or – this should come as no surprise – ‘do.’

 

Let’s see some examples of how ‘mamook’ was used.  English-speaking traders introduced an object called a ‘broom’ to the Pacific Northwest, used for sweeping European-style dwellings.  Chinook speakers weren’t fond of the letter ‘r,’ so this object was called ‘bloom.’ What, then, was ‘to sweep?’ Naturally, it was ‘mamook bloom,’ ‘do broom.’  The ground was called ‘illahie,’ so guess what ‘mamook illahie’ was.  Yes, you’re right – ‘to dig.’  A comb for combing your hair was ‘comb’ (pronounced as in English) and ‘to comb’ was ‘mamook comb,’ a phrase requiring slightly more energy than the English verb ‘comb.’ But put ‘comb’ together with ‘mamook illahie’ and you get ‘mamook comb illahie’ – to plough.  Dig the earth as with a comb.  So there, you save another unnecessary verb.  ‘Mamook piah’ – ‘do fire’ – ‘to cook.’  ‘Mamook nem,’ ‘do name,’ to call by name.  ‘Mamook lalahm,’ ‘do oar’ (from French ‘la rame,’ the oar), ‘to row.’ The English ‘spit’ or ‘saliva’ was given a sound-imitating word in Chinook, ‘toh.’ ‘To spit,’ then?  ‘Mamook toh.’ The word for ‘the heart’ imitated its sound as ‘tumtum,’ and because the heart is associated with emotions and the mind, ‘the mind’ was also ‘tumtum.’  Therefore, ‘to think’ was ‘mamook tumtum.’  Even some rather unusual English verbs could be rendered with ‘mamook.’  ‘To geld,’ for example, meaning to castrate a horse, was easily translated into Chinook as ‘mamook klak stone kiuatan,’ ‘do off testicles horse.’ 

 

Apart from turning nouns into verbs, ‘mamook’ also had the usual verbal functions of ‘do,’ as well as serving as the noun and verb for ‘work.’  You can see the first function in the sentence ‘Kahta mika mamook okook,’ ‘why you do that?’, i.e., ‘why do you do that’ or ‘why are you doing that?’  For the second function, see ‘Kansih dolla nika tolo spose mamook?’ – ‘how many dollars I win suppose work?’, i.e., ‘how many dollars will I make if I work?’

 

‘Mamook’ was never used as a general helper verb for questions or negative phrases, as ‘do’ is in English.  For example, there was no ‘mamook’ in ‘halo samun mika?’, ‘no salmon you?’ translating as ‘don’t you have salmon?’  It was just an all-purpose ‘do’ meaning ‘do anything’ or ‘make something happen.’  

 

‘Mamook,’ in Chinook, simplified the jargon by almost completely taking over the function of verbs, and, as we know, nothing happened to make English that simple.  What ‘to do,’ the modals and the present continuous tense did, however, was to strongly reduce the need to conjugate verbs.  Granted, conjugating most English verbs is not difficult.  In the present tense of ‘to sweep,’ for example, you have ‘I sweep, you sweep, he sweeps, she sweeps, it sweeps, we sweep, they sweep.’  The only change lies with the ‘s’ that is added in the third person singular.  Early Middle English, however, had three main groups of dialects, and they all differed in their conjugation.  For the verb ‘to sing,’ the Southern dialects had ‘ich singe (‘singe’ is pronounced ‘sing-uh’), thou singest, ye singeth (at that time English still had an ‘informal you’ – thou – and a ‘formal and plural you’ – ye), he singeth, we singeth, hy singeth’ (hy = they).  The Midland dialects had ‘–en’ endings on the plural forms, just as you see in modern Dutch: ‘ich singe (or ‘I singe’), thou singest, ye singen, he singeth, we singen, hy singen’ (or ‘thei singen’ – ‘they’ as a replacement for ‘hy’ was an import from Norse, and worked its way through English from northeast to southwest).  Finally, the Northern dialects had ‘Ic sing’ or ‘Ic singe’ (‘Ic’ was replaced by ‘I’ in some places and times), thu singes, ye sing (or ‘ye singe’), he singes (pronounced ‘he sing-ess’) we sing (or ‘we singe’), thay singe’ (or ‘thay sing’). 

 

Encyclopedia Britannica, in an entry on the history of English, said:

 

“The writers of each district wrote in the dialect familiar to them; and between extreme forms the difference was so great as to amount to unintelligibility; works written for southern Englishmen had to be translated for the benefit of the men of the north:—

 

“In sotherin Inglis was it drawin,

And turnid ic haue it till ur awin

Langage of þe northin lede

That can na noþir Inglis rede.”

 

Cursor Mundi, a 14^th century anonymous poem written in the Northumbrian form of the northern dialect.

 

(‘In southern English was it drawn (= written),

and turned I have it to your own [in other words, ‘I’ve translated it into your own’]

language of the northern lede [lede = ‘people’ – remember the Leyudis?]

That can no other English read’.)

 

 

English was in the process of assimilating Norman French speakers, especially in the south, and Danish and other Norse speakers, especially in the east.  It filtered its way through the speech of bilingual Cornish speakers to the southwest, bilingual Welsh speakers to the west, and bilingual Gaels in Ireland and Scotland.  Its regional dialects, as noted above, were so distinct that literature had to be translated from one dialect to the other.  Meanwhile, the disruptions caused by black plague caused much movement of people in the early part of the Middle English era.  London, in particular, swelled with people from other regions.  Later on, England prospered and approached one of its great golden ages, the Elizabethan age, 1558–1603.  Even though its inland roads were often in poor condition, it had ever more internal trade conducted by ship, both on river systems and around the coast.  When the roads were in good condition, the new invention of the day, the smooth-riding horse-drawn spring-suspension coach, was fashionable and popular.  Education and reading were surprisingly widespread, with children from most social groups going to school and studying academic subjects such as Latin.  Noble and common, rich and poor, children tended to go to school together.  Historian George Trevelyan says, “The typical unit of Elizabethan education was the grammar school, where the cleverest boys of all (social) classes were brought up together.”  English was being spoken in Parliament, while Anglo-Norman French was seldom heard, except on the most prestigious occasions.  This was no time in history to sacrifice the common understanding of the English people to the confusion of conflicting dialects. 

 

Somewhere in the mix of dialects and invading languages, ‘do’ became strongly mamooked – not in a way that made verbs out of nouns, but rather in a way that simplified verbs.  According to the relevant entry in the 1911 Oxford English Dictionary, the use of ‘do’ as an auxiliary to other verbs was found in Old English, but

 

“is more frequent in Middle English…(It) became especially frequent after 1500 … (around which time) it had, in the southwest dialects, practically taken the place of the simple form of the verb (e.g., ‘I dŭ zay’ for ‘I say,’ ‘he dŭ zim’ for ‘he seems’).” 

 

English was becoming a trader’s jargon, after centuries of regional isolation.  Obviously, a great way to simplify the problem of which conjugation to use (we singeth? we singen? we singe? we sing?) is just to put ‘do’ in front of all verbs and use the basic verb form, the infinitive.  ‘I do sing,’ ‘he do sing,’ ‘we do sing,’ and so on.  Mamook those pesky conjugations out of existence. 

 

Indeed, well before ‘do’ was extensively used to form questions and negatives, it became popular as a helper to verbs in ordinary, positive statements.  Terttu Nevalainen has documented how this positive ‘periphrastic do’ (added helper ‘do’) rose to popularity in documents well before the use of ‘do’ in negative phrases became regular.  A chart in Nevalainen’s article on Tudor English in the Oxford History of English shows that the use of do-support in positive (she says, ‘affirmative’) sentences peaks between 1570 and 1640.  She gives an example from a mathematics text written by Robert Record in 1551:

 

Nowe haue you heard as touchyng circles, meetely sufficient instruction, so that it should seme nedeles to speake any more of figures in that kynde, saue that there doeth yet remain ij. formes of an imperfecte circle, for it is lyke a circle that were brused, and thereby did runne out endelong one waie, whiche forme Geometricians dooe call an egge forme, because it doeth represent the figure and shape of an egge duely proportioned (as this figure sheweth) hauyng the one ende greater then the other.

 

(Now you have heard, in reference to circles, appropriately sufficient instruction, so that it should seem needless to speak any more about that kind of figure – except that there still remain [2.] forms of an imperfect circle, for it is like a circle that has been ‘bruised’ [squeezed], and therefore extended outward in one direction.  Geometricians call it an ‘egg form,’ because it represents the figure and shape of an egg, normally proportioned [as this illustration shows], having one end larger than the other.)

 

You can see in that passage that none of those ‘do’ forms would be likely to appear in modern English.  Or perhaps there’s one exception.  Modern speakers might translate and use the ‘doeth’ in the phrase ‘save that there doeth remain (Roman numeral 2) forms of an imperfect circle.’  That’s because one of the modern uses of ‘do,’ and also one of the historical uses, is as an ‘emphatic’ for statements that are being stressed.  “I do have to insist that you not cut my hair too short,” someone might say to their unpredictable hair stylist.  ‘Yes I did do my homework,’ a schoolchild might say, defensively, while avidly playing video games.  In the case of Record’s statement about ovoids (egg shapes), a modern speaker might place some stress on “except that there do still remain forms of an imperfect circle…” Other than that, however, the ‘do’s’ in the Record sentence are all the kind of general-purpose positive do-support that rose in popularity around 1500 and mostly died out before 1800.  Actually, sharp readers will have noticed that Record could have said, in his bracketed phrase about the illustration (not shown in this book or in the book I got the quote from), “as this figure doeth show.” Instead, he used the simple present tense, conjugated as ‘sheweth’ (‘showeth’ = shows).  This may suggest that he used do-support in the other statements partly to mark them as important, adding a little bit of emphasis.  Or he may just have been inconsistent.  Nevalainen, however, points out that positive do-support, in its 16^th- and 17^th-century heyday, is especially common in written-down speeches and writings where teaching or otherwise influencing groups of people appears to be a theme. Record’s book, as a kind of written-down school lecture, is a typical place to find (as Nevalainen puts it) “a cluster of affirmative do’s.”

 

Do-support doesn’t cross the line into being found in more than 50% of recorded negative statements (such as ‘I do not go’ vs. ‘I go not’) until after 1640. 

 

As you can see in the Record passage, as well as in the later King James Bible, ‘do’ eventually became standardized to appear in a conjugated form.  The fully mamooked form of the southwestern dialects probably seemed uneducated to scholars, and a more complicated form was preferred.  The arrival of James as a king from the north, the region where mamooked do-support was least common, may have been an influence.  ‘I do go, thou dost go, she doth go, we do go, they do go’ is the basic outline of how ‘to do’ was standardized, as seen in the King James Bible. 

 

It may seem to defeat the success of mamooking the conjugations away when you go back to using the helper verb in a conjugated form.  This strategy still has the advantage, however, that you only need to conjugate one verb, not all of them.  ‘I do go, he does say, we do sweep, she does labour, it does fall.’  English, in positive statements, becomes a series of unchanging infinitive forms with only ‘do’ changing its form. 

 

Even so, just as many English speakers never accepted the internal ‘c’ that scholars inserted into ‘arctic,’ many speakers of regional dialects doggedly hung on to, or reinvented, a fully mamooked ‘do.’ Here’s a quote from Oxford English Dictionary contributor Peter Trudgill about the characteristic modern English of people living in the flat farmlands of East Anglia, northeast of London. 

 

“And East Anglians also say: ‘He say’; ‘She go’; ‘That hurt’; ‘He like her very much—Oh, do he?’

 

… In his Essex Ballads, published in Colchester in 1895, the journalist and inventor, Charles Benham, wrote:

 

I loike to watch har in the Parson’s pew

A Sundays, me a-settin’ in the choir;

She look jest wholly be’tiful, she do.

That fairly seem to set my heart a-fire.

                (Miss Julia: the Parsons’ Daughter)

 

(I like to watch her in the Parson’s pew

On Sundays, me sitting in the choir;

She looks just wholly beautiful, she ‘do.’

That nearly seems to set my heart on fire.)

 

“This very sensible verb system omits the -s which Standard English has in these forms—it is redundant, after all, communicating no meaning of any kind. One explanation for this streamlined system is that it came about as a result of the ‘invasion’ of Norwich and Colchester in the sixteenth century by the ‘The Strangers’, thousands of Protestant refugees fleeing from religious persecution by the Spanish in the Low Countries. By 1600 these Dutch and French-speaking refugees formed an astonishingly high proportion—about 35%—of the population of Norwich. And of course third-person –s is well known to cause difficulties for foreign learners of English.

 

 

The simplicity of using the partly or completely mamooked ‘do’ depends on the speaker knowing the unvarying infinitive of each main verb he or she wishes to use.  Besides the infinitive, another highly standardized form that verbs appear in is the ‘present participle.’  Just add ‘–ing’ to an infinitive, following the easy rules for doing this, and you have the present participle.  ‘To go’ -->  ‘going;’ ‘to make’ --> ‘making;’ ‘to shout’ --> ‘shouting.’  To form the present continuous tense, the only verb you need learn to conjugate is ‘to be,’ which is essential for students of English to learn in any case.  Then you can represent nearly all ongoing actions with minimal verb conjugation:  ‘I am going, he is saying, we are sweeping, she is labouring, it is falling.’  

 

(Actually, as part of the rise of the modern present continuous tense, some diverse kinds of present participles needed to be mamooked into one uniform version.  Olga Fischer mentions that the uniform use of the ‘–ing’ form replaced several Old English alternatives, for which she gives examples from the verb for ‘to hunt:’ ‘he wæs huntende,’ ‘he wæs on huntunge,’ ‘he wæs on a huntunge,’ ‘he wæs an a huntunge,’ ‘he wæs in a huntunge.’  The form that says ‘an a huntunge’ resembles the modern Dutch present continuous, where ‘he was hunting’ [‘to hunt’ being ‘jagen,’ pronounced ‘yahkheh’] is ‘hij was aan het jagen,’ ‘he was on/in the hunting.’ Also, Old English had a verb form, similar in impact to the present continuous, that used the infinitive rather than the present participle.  Fischer gives the example of the standard Old English for ‘he comes riding,’ ‘he com ridan’ – literally, ‘he comes ride (infinitive)’ – being replaced by two alternative forms based on present participles, ‘he com ridyng’ and ‘he com ridand.’  The second form is similar to participles ending in the standard French ‘-ant’ for words imported into Middle English from Norman. You can see the exotic present participle of ‘to use,’ recently derived from the French verb ‘user,’ in Geoffrey Chaucer’s line  ‘He þat is usaunt to this sinne of glotonye,’ ‘He that is using to [used to] this sin of gluttony.’ 

 

All these many variants of the present participle got mamooked with a Middle English sledge hammer into the uniform ‘-ing’ we know and love today.)

 

In some situations, the present continuous may have been able to replace the positive do-support that fell from popularity in the 1600s.  Consider one of the complaints of the biblical character Job to God after God, in this tale about religious faith, has given him many painful problems to deal with.  “Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me,” says the King James Bible in the Book of Job, chapter 10, verse 8.  In modern phrasing, this could easily be, ‘your hands created me and shaped me as I am, but now you’re destroying me.’  In reality, the underlying Hebrew is difficult to translate exactly, and some modern bible versions make the last statement a question, using a modal helper verb instead of a ‘do’ or a present continuous form:  ‘And would You destroy me?’ (New American Standard Bible, updated1995) or ‘will You now turn and destroy me?’ (New International Version, updated 2011).  In many Bible versions, then, King James’ do-support has been replaced by something equally simplified – or more simplified.  

 

Modals, after all, are even more strongly mamooked than do-supported verbs or present-continuous forms.  In modern English, the modal helpers have no variation at all, other than, in some cases, a difference between present tense and past tense.  Just use the unvarying modal and the unvarying infinitive, and you’re home free.  ‘I can go, he can say, we can sweep, she can labour, it can fall.’  In Middle English and early modern English, some modals still had leftover conjugation changes: ‘I can go, thou canst go, he can go, we can go, they can go.’  As England became ever more democratic and began to ignore the difference between ‘thou’ and ‘you,’ this last bit of conjugation fell away.  

 

Today, thanks to the determined mamookers of the Middle English era, you can now express a large proportion of the thoughts that can be expressed in English without conjugating most verbs in the present tense.  For the majority of the things you want to say in the present tense, you need only deal with the present participle and the infinitive of 99.9% of the verbs you use.  ‘He is exercising; he can exercise, he should exercise, he will exercise, he does not exercise, does he exercise?  Only if you decide to make positive general statements or hypotheses do you need to conjugate – ‘he exercises on his lunch hour, I exercise on my lunch hour, I’ll exercise with her if she exercises on our lunch break....’ 

 

True, in the two-part past-tense form technically called the ‘present perfect,’ for completed actions, you need to learn to conjugate another helper verb, ‘to have.’ This is a regular feature of both the parent languages of English, French and North Sea Germanic.  Comfortingly, when you are using ‘to have,’ you need only learn the past participle of all the specific verbs you use.  Once placed in that form, the specific verbs never vary: ‘he has exercised, I have exercised, they have exercised.’  The same goes for the tense where the past is seen from a past perspective, the pluperfect tense: ‘he had exercised, I had exercised, they had exercised.’ For continuing events in the past that form the background for specific events, you come back to ‘to be’ as a helper verb, this time in its past-tense form, plus the present participle: ‘he was exercising, I was exercising, we were exercising.’ That’s the ‘past progressive’ tense.  The same simplicity holds, if you combine ‘to have’ and ‘to be’, for the ‘present perfect progressive’ tense (‘he has been exercising’) and the ‘past perfect progressive’ (‘he had been exercising’).  It’s all very efficient. 

 

Languages related to English, such as French and Dutch, are far more demanding in their requirements to use fully conjugated verbs in various parts of speech.  Both French and Dutch, especially the former, have many verbs that conjugate in irregular and complex ways.  They also divide their verbs up into those that partner with ‘to be’ in the past tenses (‘Ik ben aangekomen, je suis venu – both saying ‘I am come’ but meaning ‘I have come’) and those partnering with ‘to have’ (ik heb gezien, j’ai vu – both ‘I have seen’).  Old and Middle English used to do this, too, but the distinction was mamooked away, and ‘to have’ completely took over all the past tenses that ‘to be’ used to be associated with.  Gone are the days when a new husband would say to his bride, as in the King James Version of the biblical Song of Solomon, “I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey….”  These days, it’s all ‘have, have, have.’ 

 

Mamookers have had minimal influence on Dutch and French, particularly French.  The same is true of most other languages. 

 

My first bold statement of this chapter and the fifth for this book: 

 

Bold statement (BS) number 5: English, in many ways, modified itself to become its own simple trader’s jargon. 

 

Most languages have not developed that way.

 

A Wikipedia author says, “Many say that English is probably not a creole because it retains a high number (283) of irregular verbs.”  I’d propose that English is something slightly different from a creole, something you might call (using the correct Spanish-Latin root to match ‘creole’) a ‘subcreole.’ This would be a creole formed substantially among dialects of the same language, with secondary input from intermixing languages.  The basic stability gained from the similarities among the dialects would pit the actively mamooking traders against horrified scholars in a linguistic tug-of-war, with one side lustily putting ‘do’ in front of every verb in sight, and the other side grouching, ‘doth, doth, that should be doth.’  The Strong Verbs, always able to defend themselves, would simply fortify themselves in the overlap among dialects and wait the tug-of-war out, while drink drank drunking their cups of ale. 

 

The most heavily mamooked of the English helper verbs is, however, one that I mentioned above as a ‘strong verb.’  Unlike all the other irregular verbs of its tribe, it has exactly the same spelling in the present tense and the past.  That’s ‘to let.’  You only need to know it in its infinitive form, ‘let,’ and its present participle form, ‘letting,’ and you can use it for every type of sentence.  Well, almost every type of sentence – in English, there always has to be an exception, and in this case ‘to let’ has a typical conjugation pattern in the third person singular, ‘he lets, she lets, it lets.’  Other than that, it’s as unmoving as a mountain.  ‘Let me go,’ ‘I let her go,’ ‘I am letting her go,’ ‘they let it go,’ ‘they have let it get away,’ ‘earlier, she had let him leave.’  I mentioned above that the related Dutch verb, ‘laten,’ was used in various conjugated forms – ‘ik laat hem weggaan’ (I’m letting him leave), wij laten hem weggaan (we are letting him leave), ik liet hem weggaan (I let him leave), zij lieten hem weggaan (they let him leave), wij hebben hem laten weggaan (we have let him leave, literally, ‘we have him to let to leave’), je hebt mij in de steek gelaten (you left me in the lurch) and so on.  The French ‘laisser’ is even more extreme.  I won’t injure your brain by writing out the details – just trust me on that. 

 

Now, class, memorize this English lesson on ‘to let’:  present tense ‘let’ or ‘lets,’ past tense ‘let,’ past participle ‘let,’ present participle ‘letting.’  That’s it.  Put your feet up and live the easy life. Mamook cultus heehee (do useless laughs) – in other words, party! 

 

A whole lot of Middle English people, and Early Modern English people, put in a whole lot of work – mamook – into making English as easy as possible for you to learn. Enjoy it. 

 

Perhaps the most bizarre of all the English mamookings is our structure for things that happened regularly in the past, and then stopped.  Here, a whole new mamook tense has been made up that has no exact parallel in any related language.  I’m talking about the use of ‘used to’ to describe an ongoing past action that stopped.  ‘She used to work for the government,’ ‘I used to play tennis there,’ ‘we used to think those things.’  Again, it’s an unvarying form, with ‘used to’ as a fixed helper that partners with the infinitive form of the main verb. In most European languages, you’d need a mixture of adjectives and conjugated verbs to make expressions with similar meanings.  ‘Vroeger speelde ik vaak tennis’ – ‘earlier played I often tennis’ – would be one of the obvious ways to say ‘I used to play tennis’ in Dutch.  In plurals, the verb would change: ‘Vroeger speelden wij vaak tennis’ – ‘earlier, played we often tennis.’  In French, the verb would change with every grammatical ‘person’ (I, thou, you, he/she/it) and ‘number’ (singular, plural):  ‘auparavant, je jouais du tennis’ ‘quand elle était jeune, elle jouait du tennis,’ ‘dans ces années, elles jouaient du tennis’ (literal translations: ‘formerly, I played tennis; when she was young, she played tennis; in those years, they played tennis’).  If you switched to a different type of past tense (called the passé composé) in order to more firmly finish up the action, you’d still conjugate madly, but using the helper verb ‘avoir,’ ‘to have,’ as in ‘J’ai joué du tennis, tu as joué du tennis, il a joué du tennis,’ etc.).  There’s no escape into a simple ‘one-size-fits-all’ phrase.  

 

‘Used to’ had a colourful evolution.  It didn’t begin immediately as a mamooked form, frozen in the past tense (‘used’ being, of course, the past tense of ‘to use’).   It was influenced by one of the many meanings of the noun ‘use’ (pronounced ‘yooss,’ whereas the verb form in ‘to use’ is pronounced ‘yooz’).  This was meaning number 8 in the Oxford English Dictionary, “a custom, habit, or practice.” We English speakers no longer use the noun ‘use’ with this meaning, but it was popular in early modern English.  For example, see the complaint, published in 1542, of Andrew Boorde, a South English physician and dietary specialist who had traveled extensively in France:   

 

England hath an euyll vse in syttynge longe at dyner. 

 

(‘England has an evil use [habit] of sitting a long time at dinner.’  ‘Vse’ is ‘use’ written with ‘v’ used as ‘u’ in the Roman style, whereas ‘euyll’ reverse-substitutes ‘u’ for ‘v’ in an evyll attempt to confuse the modern reader still further.) 

 

As for sitting at the dinner table too long, pleasure was always controversial in England. 

 

Here’s another example from a later time, 1753.  Jonathan Swift, best known as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, is excusing himself for taking a woman on too long a walk outdoors.  He blames his lack of courtesy on the force of habit.

 

Madam, the mighty pow’r of use

Now strangely pleads in my excuse.

 

The origin of ‘use,’ in English, lay in the French verb ‘user.’  Many of the early expressions showing people being ‘used to’ something are found in forms that still showed signs of French grammar.  One form that existed for some time was based on the French present participle suffix ‘-ant,’ the equivalent of the English ‘-ing’ in words like ‘resting.’ I just mentioned it above as an example of old participle forms that had been mamooked out of English. Geoffrey Chaucer, in a religious essay included in the final part of Canterbury Tales, had his character, the parson (a type of priest), preach that: 

 

He þat is vsaunt to this sinne of glotonye, he ne may no sinne withstand… This sinne hath many spices.  The first is dronkenes….

 

(He who is used to this sin of gluttony [wanting to consume food, drink, and other sources of pleasure without limit], he is not able to keep away from any sin.  This sin comes in many flavours.  The first is drunkenness….)

 

Another colourful bit of Chaucer is a description of a nasty miller (professional grinder of grain): 

 

As piled as an ape was his skulle.

He was a market-betere atte fulle.

Ther dorste no wight hand upon hym legge,

That he ne swoor he sholde anon abegge.

A theef he was for sothe of corn and mele,

And that a sly, and usaunt for to stele.

His name was hoote deynous Symkyn.

 

(As sparsely hairy as an ape’s was his skull.

He was a full-blown lout in the public market.

There, no person dared lay a hand on him

For he swore whoever did it would quickly be begging for mercy

A thief, he was, truly, of grain and meal,

And a sly one at that, well used to stealing,

His name was called arrogant Simkin.)

 

Chaucer also gave us an expression that seems very close to ‘used to’ in modern form.  It appears in the story we’ve already encountered about the metal-working yeoman (alchemist’s assistant) with the red face.  The ‘used’ and the ‘to’ are separated by the phrase ‘in the fire,’ and although the yeoman seems to be saying that he’s accustomed to blowing in the fire, it’s hard to be sure he doesn’t mean ‘I am so used’ –  that is, so put to use – ‘by my master to blow in the fire, that…’ it has made his face turn red.  

 

"Now," quod oure Hoost, "yit lat me talke to the.

Why artow so discoloured of thy face?"

       "Peter! quod he, "God yeve it harde grace,

I am so used in the fyr to blowe

That it hath chaunged my colour, I trowe.

 

("Now," said our host, "yet let me talk to thee [you].

Why are you so discoloured in the face?"

       "Peter!" cried he. "God give it hard grace!

[‘Peter!’ is mild religious swearing, based on the name of St. Peter, the head of Jesus’s followers and the first pope.  ‘God give it hard grace’ might mean ‘may God take a hard line against my problems’]

I am so wont upon the fire to blow

[I am so accustomed to blowing on the fire]

That it has changed my colour, as I trow [testify].)

 

English still has the expression ‘to be used to something,’ meaning, ‘to be accustomed to, or comfortably familiar with, something.’ It can be used in present- and past-tense expressions, and can even cross into the future if it’s partnered with ‘get’ (informal) or ‘become’ (formal). “I was used to having my hair cut on Saturdays.  I found it strange to switch to Tuesdays, but my barber said ‘you’ll get used to it’ and I am used to it now!” Such expressions are clearly related to our past-and-finished ‘used to,’ and sometimes nearly as odd, but not the same.  The ‘accustomed to’ version of ‘used to’ is an adjectival form, describing someone’s state of mind, while the past-and-finished form is a verb.

 

Many early uses of ‘used to’ and related phrases show that this expression took some time to settle down into its rock-steady current form.  The Wycliffe Bible, translated by Yorkshireman and Oxford Professor John Wycliffe in 1382 – 1395, has been found in historic hand-copied manuscripts in various Middle English dialects. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a version with the following ‘used to’ expression in it:

 

John 4: 9 (Biblical New Testament book of John, Chapter 4, verse 9).  Jewis vsiden not to dele with Samaritans.

 

(‘Jews used not to deal with Samaritans,’ or, in more colloquial modern English, ‘Jews didn’t used to deal with Samaritans’). 

 

That quotation shows a long-vanished Middle English plural past tense form, ‘usiden.’

 

Other early quotations also catch ‘used to’ and closely related ‘use’ expressions in the act of conjugating and otherwise mutating. 

 

In the Acts and Deeds of the Illustrious and Valiant Champion Sir William Wallace, a long, pre-1488 poem by a Scots writer known only as ‘Blind Harry,’ we see a past tense lacking the usual –ed ending.  ‘Use’ is spelled ‘oyss’ in this passage: this spelling attempted to replicate the original French vowel at the beginning of ‘user,’ which was ü (IPA y, as discussed near the beginning of Chapter 2, above) rather than the English ‘yoo.’

 

Sen I off laitt now come owt off the west

In this cuntré, a barbour off the best,

To cutt and schaiff, and that a wondyr gude,

Now thow sall feyll how I oyss to lat blude." 

 

 

(Since I, of late [recently], now come out of the west

Into this country, a barber among the best of them,

To cut and shave, and doing so wonderfully well

[the narrator is humourously referring to his abilities as a sword-wielding warrior]

Now shall they feel how I used to let blood.

[Medieval barbers not only shaved people, but also ‘bled’ them, a medical cure involving allowing some blood to flow out of the body. It is the warrior’s joke that he does a particularly thorough job of this.])

 

It’s interesting to see the expression evolve through time. 

 

Year 1445.  A Middle English translation of Latin poet Claudian's De Consulatu Stilichonis (On General Stilicho) 

 

Al goddesses…Haue ioyned her dauncys within thi breste which vsid hem to receive

 

(All goddesses have joined her dances within your breast [heart] that used to receive them.)

 

Here ‘used to’ is split up by a direct object, ‘hem’ (them); the modern version would be ‘that used to receive them.’

 

Year 1547   Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches, III. Of the salvation of all mankind, by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. 

 

Therfore scripture vseth to saie, that faithe without woorkes dooth iustifie.

 

(Therefore scripture customarily says that faith without worldly actions justifies [that is to say, faith justifies the person who is faithful – note the positive do-support in ‘dooth iusitifie.’])

 

In the Cranmer example, we see a present-tense version of ‘used to,’ not past-tense like in the modern form.  And here’s another like that.  

 

Year 1596.  Edmund Spenser, in his long poem The Faerie Queene:

 

Her name Mercilla most men vse to call.

 

(Her name Mercilla, most men customarily call her.) 

 

This present tense was in the plural form.  Finally,

 

Year 1670.  John Milton, in History of Britain, Book 6. 

 

The English then useing to let grow on their upper-lip large Mustachio's.

 

(The English then being used to letting large, pointed moustaches grow from their upper lip)

 

That one is a present participle in the English style rather than the French –ant style. 

 

Somewhere between 1600 and 1700, as Oxford English Dictionary entries show, ‘used to’ settled down as the form we know and love today.  We can even see, in the 1664 entry in the list below, a free-form spelling mistake, ‘yoast to’ that shows that the term already had the soft-‘s’ pronunciation (‘yoost-too’) that it has now, rather than a pronunciation based on ‘use’ – ‘yooz.’ 

 

1606   J. Carpenter, Schelomonocham,   ‘He vsed to be gladsome and merily conceited.’

 

1664   in B. D. Hicks, Rec. N. & S. Hempstead, Long Island (1896) ‘Thomas Hickes is…to have the weages that the Clarcke yoast to have.’

 

1712   J. Arbuthnot, Law is Bottomless.  ‘He had acquir'd immense Riches, which he used to squander away at Back-Sword, Quarter-Staff, and Cudgell-Play.’

 

 

About the only variation that might still be seen in modern times is the mostly British and Irish informal negative expression, ‘usen’t to,’ a contraction of the relatively formal negative, ‘used not to.’ 

 

1907   George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara.   “That is a new accomplishment of Andrew's, by the way. He usen’t to drink.”

 

1939   James Joyce, Finnegans Wake.  “Usedn't she make her a simp or sign to slip inside by the sullyport?”  (‘Didn’t she used to give a little smile or gesture to let her man know that the hidden gate of her personal castle wall was now open for the grime of his entry?’ [Now, now, James, calm yourself!].  Note the pun between the type of castle gateway called a ‘sallyport’ and the verb ‘sully,’ to make dirty.)

 

2000   Irish Times (Nexis). “She stops and smells the roses now. She usen't to know what colour roses were.”

 

You can see that James Joyce, famous for his word-play, chose the more complicated ‘usedn’t … to’ rather than ‘usen’t to,’

 

The truly odd thing about ‘used to’ as a mamook is that it has become so stiffly frozen that it is allowed to break one of the main rules of modern English logic, the ‘no redundancy’ (‘no repetition of the same logical bit’) rule.  As you’ve seen in various examples like Chaucer’s ‘he ne may no sinne withstand,’ English used to allow double-negatives – ‘he no may no sin withstand’ – just as you’d see in French or Afrikaans.  At some point in the formation of modern English, such redundancies were ruthlessly removed.  I’ll say more about this in the next chapter.  Virtually the only all-out redundancy allowed in standard modern English lies in the negation of ‘used to.’  My favourite example of this has always been a series of articles in the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail, where reporters (the one example I can verify online is Liam Lacey) interviewed people who had been famous in the past, but hadn’t been heard from in public for a long time.  The titles of the articles were ‘Didn’t you used to be…(interviewee’s name)?’  The title was a joking echo of one of the most annoying questions that could be asked by a fan.  Think of someone who would come up to, for example, 1970s teenaged television and singing icon David Cassidy, thirty years after the height of his fame, and ask ‘Didn’t you used to be David Cassidy?’ 

 

In fact, Cassidy heard this question so often that he eventually responded by putting out an album titled “Didn’t You Used to Be?”  One wonders if he puzzled over the grammar as this odd question came out under his name.  

 

What a strange expression it is, ‘didn’t you used to be?’  Helper ‘do’, in the past tense, generally partners with the infinitive of the verb, often in expressions where an action is being emphasized.  “Yes, I did go to the police station on Thursday.’  English, clearly, would never allow, ‘I did went there’ or ‘didn’t you watered the plants?’ or ‘I didn’t walked my dog yesterday.’  The second occurrence of the simple past tense (first ‘did,’ then ‘walked’) feels unacceptably redundant.  Yes, to be fair, in making the pluperfect tense, which puts an earlier past event into the framework of a later past event (‘Yesterday, I had just walked my dog to the store when I saw the fire trucks racing toward my apartment building’), we’re all used to seeing something fairly similar.  In such cases, the past tense auxiliary – in the pluperfect, always ‘had’ – partners with the past participle – in this case ‘walked.’  The past participle looks the same as the simple past tense for most verbs, except in the case of many strong verbs (I walked there, I had walked there; I flew there, I had flown there).  But it isn’t the same at all, as you can see with ‘flew’ and ‘flown.’  ‘Didn’t you used to,’ is the one place in English where two true simple past tense forms (called ‘preterites’ by grammar specialists) are allowed to partner together. 

 

There are a few people who insist on dropping the final ‘d’ and saying, ‘didn’t you use to?’  This tendency is especially strong in the positively worded equivalent ‘did you use(d) to?’, as in ‘Did you used to be a law student?’ ‘Did you use to own a pet python?’  The Oxford English Dictionary has many examples, historical and contemporary, of both forms.  The great majority of people today – if they choose not to escape into more formal structures such as ‘were you not once a law student’ or ‘weren’t you David Cassidy at one time?’ – tend to use ‘used’ in these expressions.  This makes perverse sense to me, since to use ‘used’ without the ‘d’ suggests that you are still working with the verb ‘to use,’ which is pronounced ‘yooz.’  In fact, though, what you are saying has the other pronunciation, ‘didn’t you yooss to,’ and that, to me, is another animal altogether. 

 

Grammar expert Mark Liberman, in his ‘Linguistics in the Comics’ blog online, says,

 

The key insight here, I think, is that "used to" has been sort of part-way re-analyzed as an aspectual auxiliary, usually pronounced (IPA) jus.tə and sometimes written "useta".  The "to" part has been incorporated into this new verb, so that "used to be" is no longer "used [to be]" but rather "[used to] be", where "used to" is just the way to render the word ‘jus.tə’ in standard spelling, just as "want to" and "going to" are the ways to write ‘wanna’ and ‘gonna.’

 

Mark’s ‘aspectual auxiliary’ is a professional way of saying ‘mamooked helper verb,’ so he and I appear to be playing the same grammatical concerto – he on violin, and me on banjo. 

 

In overview, you can see how much English is like Chinese.  English spelling, like Chinese writing, is ridiculously over-complex, but at the same time, perhaps in compensation, great efforts have been made to use a simple grammar.  These efforts have not been made by scholars – no, no, as I mentioned above, scholars have resisted all the way, carefully writing ‘doth’ and ‘dost’ when the farmers were saying ‘do.’  The common people are the ones who have striven to simplify English.  True, they’ve adopted the strong verbs and the oddball spellings as colourful customs, but they have minimal time for unnecessary endings attached to verbs.  Also, they don’t class words into genders like the French and Dutch, or into countable classes (as in the Chinese ‘three vessel of dogs,’ ‘four stick of pens’).  Moreover, ‘you’ are always ‘you’ whether you’re the youngest child or the King or Queen.  No one has to be a ‘thou’ who is spoken down to, as if he or she were less important than the members of the royal family.  Similarly, ‘we’ is ‘a bunch of us’ whether or not the person being spoken to is included or excluded.  (Secwepemc has a whole suite of different grammatical conjugations distinguishing a ‘we’ that includes the person spoken to, as in ‘pick up your suitcase, we are going into the hotel room’ and a ‘we’ that excludes the person spoken to, as in ‘pick up your suitcase and get out, we are kicking you out of the hotel room.’) 

 

The fundamental point is that English has been made fairly friendly to newcomers.  It’s like a parking lot where half the area has been paved and a quarter has been marked off with painted parking space lines.  Most languages, extending the same metaphor, are fields of rocks.  (Chinook was like valet parking at the Ritz.) The friendliness in English lies mostly in the grammar. 

 

Bear with me, then, and I will help you out with a few remaining rocky patches that are still found near the edges of this well-mamooked parking lot. 

 

One matter that puzzles people who are new to English – or new to thinking about English – is closely related to the topics we’ve just been discussing.  This is the business of verbal inversion.  The headphone cords of grammar may seem be badly tangled when you see places, other than questions, where a verb form and the grammatical subject of the sentence are forced to flip around each other and go into reverse order.  ‘Never in my life have I seen such an unpredictable bit of grammar,’ you might think, in your new English – and then you might have to ask yourself, “Hey, why couldn’t I say ‘Never in my life I have seen such an unpredictable bit of grammar??’ What’s going on?  I thought that in this language, the grammatical subject, like ‘I,’ came before the verbal bits, like ‘have seen,’ except in questions!  ‘SVO language,’ remember?” 

 

The English language, at that point, will just have to shrug its shoulders and say, “Sorry, you can say ‘I (Subject – S) never in my life have (Verb part 1 – V1) seen (Verb part 2 – V2) such a thing’ and ‘I (S) have (V1) never seen (V2) such a thing in all my life,’ and ‘Such a thing I (S) have (V1) never seen (V2) in my life’, all of them SVO, but if you start the sentence with ‘Never,’ you have to reverse the subject and V1!  ‘Never have (V1) I (S) seen (V2) such a thing.’  VSO! Never in my life have (V1) I (S) seen (V2) such a strange piece of grammar!”   

 

Exploring further, you find you can say, about an action you performed one time in the past, ‘Once, I (S) cut (V) my hair in a Mohawk’  (A Mohawk hairstyle is an extreme fashion that has a strip of hair running down the middle of the scalp, while the sides of the scalp are shaved to the skin.)  That’s equivalent to saying ‘I cut my hair in a Mohawk once,’ but it gives extra stress to the idea that you performed the action on just one occasion, or did it during just one time period in your life but not after that   If, however, you want to state clearly that you only did it once, and you put the ‘only’ at the beginning of the sentence for added emphasis, you have to say ‘Only once did (V1) I (S) cut (V2) my hair in a Mohawk’  Not only do you have a reversal, but also, in the simple past tense, you need to add in do-support to achieve that reversal, almost as if you were asking a question.  Distinctly weird.  Despite the demand for reversal, you can’t say, ‘Only once cut (V) I (S) my hair in a Mohawk.’ 

 

In general, you can say ‘I did X only once,’ but to say ‘Only once I did X’ is not good English.  You are forced to say, instead, ‘Only once did I do X.’ 

 

In this VSO form, even the positive present tense must have support from an auxiliary, which is often ‘do.’  The SVO ‘I (S) seldom see (V) so many wild daffodils as I see when I’m in Mykonos’ reverses as ‘Seldom do (V1) I (S) see (V2) so many wild daffodils as I see when I’m in Mykonos.’ This is a regular pattern.  ‘Rarely do (V1) I (S) get (V2) so drunk as I do when I’m out with him.’  There are alternatives to ‘to do:’ see, for example, ‘Never am (V) I (S) so eager to get started as I am when I’m sure I’m going to win.’

 

Our familiar helper verbs, ‘have’, ‘do,’ the modals, and ‘to be,’ all get involved in this conspiracy of strange inversion.  ‘Only now, after weeks of wearing a cast, can (V1) I (S) tie (V2) my own shoes again.’   But, ‘After weeks of wearing a cast, I (S) can (V1) only now tie (V2) my own shoes again.’ ‘Never, ever am (V1) I (S) going (V2) to an outdoor concert again.’ ‘I (S) am (V1) never, ever going (V2) to an outdoor concert again.’

 

Now what is that crazy language up to?  Let’s change perspective for a moment to find out. 

 

In 1994, a National Parks project officer named David Noble climbed down into a 600-metre deep, narrow canyon in Australia and saw a strange tree with fern-like leaves.  He brought up a sample for identification and found that his tree was only known from the fossil record.  The most recent known example was two million years old.  The ‘living fossil’ or ‘woody dinosaur with leaves’ that he had discovered was later called Wollemia nobilis – Wollemia from Wollemi National Park, home of the tree, and nobilis (of Noble) for the discoverer.  Actually, I suspect there was a pun there with the beautiful, ‘noble’ aspect of the tree, so kudos to W.G. Jones, K.D. Hill and J.M. Allen, the authors of the name.

 

The verbal turn-around in ‘Seldom have I seen such a dirty shirt’ is itself a living fossil.  It is a rare living descendant in modern English of a kind of turn-around that was completely regular in Old English.  The same phenomenon is also found in modern Dutch, German and Icelandic.  This linguistic back-flip is called ‘V-2 structure.’  I had to learn it very early on when I was first learning Dutch: it’s a rule that says “If you break a sentence (a ‘declarative,’ non-questioning sentence) into functional components, the verb has to be the second component.” ‘V-2’ = ‘verb second.’  That idea doesn’t seem too strange at first, because we see that in simple sentences like ‘Ik (S) reisde (V) naar Amsterdam,’ ‘I (S) travelled (V) to Amsterdam’ the verb is indeed in second place, after ‘I,’ the subject.  Where Dutch and Old English differ from modern English, most of the time, is in what happens when you put a word or descriptive phrase modifying the verb (an adverb or adverbial phrase) at the beginning of the sentence.  In English, you can say ‘Yesterday I (S) travelled (V) to Amsterdam,’ but in Dutch, you have to say ‘Gisteren reisde (V) ik (S) naar Amsterdam,’ that is, ‘Yesterday travelled I to Amsterdam.’  The adverbial ‘yesterday’ can bump the subject ‘I’ into position 2 in English, but in Dutch, the verb owns position 2, and it can’t be budged.  The subject has to bump around it to position 3. 

 

You’ve seen more examples of Dutch V-2 reversals in sentences I’ve just used above.  ‘Vroeger speelden (V) wij (S) vaak tennis,’ I said – ‘earlier, played we often tennis.’  In this repetition of the sentence, I’ve added the symbols showing you that the verb comes before the subject.  In English, we’d say ‘Earlier, we (S) often played (V) tennis,’ placing the subject first.  Another example you will remember: “Voor geld kan (V1) je (S) de duivel doen (V2) dansen (V3)” (‘for money can you the devil do dancing.’).  The simplest English for that is, ‘For money, you (S) can (V1) make (V2) the devil dance (V3).’ 

 

If your memory is amazing, you may recall that the very first sentence of Old English I quoted to you in Chapter 1 began with a V-2 reversal.  “Tha cydde (V) man (S) me, thæt us mara hearm to fundode, thonne us wel licode,” wrote the embarrassed King Canute the Great to the English people, ‘Then told (V) people (S) me, that us more harm to found, than us well liked.’  The time-word ‘then,’ coming in first place as an adverb, bumps the subject ‘man’ (a pronoun for unspecified people, lost in English, but still found in Dutch) to third place.  Even a Viking king had to obey the V-2 law if he wrote in Old English.  

 

If you lower yourself down, then, swaying on a rope, at great risk to your sanity, into the depths of modern English, you can still find a few living specimens of V-2 structure.  It’s the English language’s Jurassic Park, where you can still see dinosaurs made of letters roaming around, terrorizing everyone.  One of these dinosaurs is the reversal I’ve been showing you:  ‘Only once (adverbial phrase) have (V1) I (S) ever seen (V2) my cat climb a tree.’  This V-2 dinosaur is known to linguists as ‘negative inversion.’  We can think of it as ‘Negativosaurus Rex.’ 

 

It is a deep, dark mystery to everyone why this particular kind of English sentence still contains V-2 dinosaurs.  One common factor we see is that a negative descriptive word or phrase has to make up the first part of the sentence.  More technically, linguists have pointed out that this negative starter has to describe the whole action or condition found in the main part of the sentence (the verb, object and related parts: in grammatical terms, the ‘predicate’).  If the negative starter only describes the subject him- or herself, the V-2 reversal is not needed.  Wikipedia gives an interesting example.  You can say, ‘In no clothes does Mary look good.’  This means that there are no clothes available that can make Mary look good; technically, there is ‘no’ way that the condition ‘to look good’ can be achieved by Mary with the help of clothes.  In contrast, you can say, with no V-2 structure, ‘In no clothes, Mary looks good.” This has a radically different meaning: Mary looks good naked.  Here, the phrase ‘in no clothes’ strictly describes Mary herself.  It doesn’t place a limit on her entire situation. 

 

What I find interesting about Negativosaurus Rex is that the situations it describes often have scary overtones.  Something is being limited, or has become limited, in the existence of the sentence’s subject.  ‘At no time did we see him play the piano successfully.’  ‘Little did he know that there was a scorpion inside the shoe.’  And so on.  Of course, you can force this type of sentence into a cheery form, such as, ‘Never have I seen a prettier butterfly,’ but there is still a scary element there – where are the butterflies that are even prettier than the pretty butterfly you’re talking about?  Are there truly none?  Have the unfolding wonders of butterfly biology come to their gorgeous conclusion at this one?  Quick, fly me to an alternate world where butterflies five times as beautiful can still be discovered!

 

The negative inversion sentences all, to me, have a sense of confinement, restriction, being hemmed in, being limited.  Most of the words that make this inversion happen are clearly negative, but there are also several that only seem restrictive: barely, hardly, little, rarely, scarcely.  There is also ‘seldom,’ which, as Randolph Quirk and friends point out in A Grammar of Contemporary English, can be restated as a negative, ‘not often.’  The confining and restricting words are all abstract, placing a grey border of fuzzy negativity around the existence of any person they interact with.  Physical confinement is not included:  ‘In prison, I (S) could (V1) never get (V2) a Mohawk’ is SVO.   ‘Rarely could I get a Mohawk while in prison’ is VSO. 

 

We’ll come back to this idea of a person haunted by negative forces in his or her life. 

 

In the meantime, let’s hide behind a bush and see what other sorts of dinosaurs can be found in this language canyon.  (Don’t worry, I’m not going crazy on you – this playful approach is just to make what I’m saying easier to remember.)

 

Wow.  I can’t believe that there are flying dinosaurs down here!  Just like the pterodactyls of the fossil beds!  One thing about flying creatures is that they must be well balanced, with wings on either side that are similar in length and strength.  Cut off one wing, or most of it, and the creature can no longer fly.  And here’s an inverted sentence based on that the same principle: “Over the bridge drove (V) an expensive car (S).”  (‘Over the bridge,’ a descriptive phrase, is considered to occupy position 1 in the sentence syntax, and the verb ‘drove’ occupies position 2).  This Dutch-style V-2 sentence is just a slightly poetic reversal of the more regular English, ‘An expensive car (S) drove (V) over the bridge’ – but now, notice something strange.  You can talk to someone later about the car and say ‘It (S, represented by a pronoun) drove (V) over the bridge,’ but you can’t say, ‘Over the bridge drove (V) it (S).’  With the pronoun ‘it’ substituting for ‘an expensive car,’ you’ll notice that even when you’re being poetic, you have to use an un-reversed grammatical form: ‘Over the bridge it (S) drove (V).’  The reversed form cannot ‘fly’ – cannot succeed, cannot exist – when the half containing the grammatical subject is shortened down to a pronoun.  It needs to contain two phrases of approximately equal strength before it can flap its way into the air.  Or at least, it needs to have a subject that is a full noun or someone’s name. 

 

This type of inversion that needs to have two strong wings includes sentences about where someone or something is located, as well as about directions things are moving in, in space or in time.  ‘After the rainstorm came a day of muddy ground,’ you can say – a sentence dealing with placement in time – or ‘Inside the cupboard lay a package of spaghetti,’ a sentence dealing with something’s location.  ‘Into Babylon marched the great army,’ you may read – a sentence about the direction in which something was happening.  In no case can pronouns be substituted for the subject unless you turn the grammar around.  There’s no ‘After the rainstorm came it’ or ‘Inside the cupboard lay it’ or ‘Into Babylon marched it.’  But there can be – and I hope I’m not making this painfully simple – the SVO equivalents ‘After the rainstorm it came,’ ‘Inside the cupboard it lay’ and ‘Into Babylon it marched.’  Only the true subject of the sentence, and not its pronoun substitute, is strong enough to support the VSO word order of ‘Into Babylon marched the army,’ and so on.  Let’s call this two-winged V-2 dinosaur the ‘Navigator pterodactyl,’ since it flaps its way around in sentences about locations and destinations. 

 

I can see two other, closely related pterodactyls flying around down here in V-2rrassic Park.  Before I tell you about the first one, I’m going to introduce a piece of grammatical terminology: ‘copula.’  This word may seem technical, but it’s related to common English words.  If you look at a railway train, for example, you’ll see the cars are held together by a jointed, metal linker device.  This device is called a ‘coupling.’ And, of course, a pair of people who are very friendly with each other may be a ‘couple.’  They may even, ahem, link to each other and copulate – but if they did so, they’d probably make sure that this action was discreet, not seen by other people.  A ‘copula,’ then, is a verb that couples two parts of a sentence together without making any suggestion at all that that one part is performing any action that affects the other.  Usually, in English, the verb ‘to be’ serves as a copula.  ‘Shuwen is a good golfer,’ you may say – the ‘predicate’ part of the sentence, ‘is a good golfer,’ simply tells you about a feature of Shuwen.  By contrast, if you have an action verb in place, as in ‘Shuwen is driving to the golf course’ (where ‘is’ is serving as a helper auxiliary, not as a copula), the predicate introduces several temporary facts that are not qualities of Shuwen.  It says she is driving, and it says where she is driving to. 

 

The copula can also classify the subject – let’s stick with our friend Shuwen.  We can say ‘Shuwen is a young woman’ or ‘Shuwen is an international trade consultant,’ pigeonholing her into various categories.  And, the copula can link Shuwen to a description that is unique to her and thus shares an identity with her, such as ‘Shuwen is the current president of the Brampton, Ontario United Way charitable foundation’ or ‘Shuwen is the owner of the dog called Sheldon.’  With this last type of copula, a copula based on identity, a V-2 turn-around is common.  ‘The owner of the dog called Sheldon is (V) Shuwen (S).’ ‘The current president of the Brampton United Way is Shuwen.’  The other types of copulas don’t work this way: there is no ‘A good golfer is Shuwen’ or ‘A young woman is Shuwen’ – either phrase would make you sound like the pointy-eared character Yoda from the Star Wars movies, who is so alien that he speaks VSO English. 

 

The copula of identity produces a very normal V-2 pterodactyl, in that, again, the ‘wing’ of the sentence where the subject is found can’t be reduced to a stubby little pronoun.  It isn’t good English to say ‘The owner of the dog Sheldon is she’ or ‘Our current United Way president is she.’  True, in very casual, colloquial English, people may turn sentences of this type into fake SVO sentences by changing the pronoun into a form that suits an object rather than a subject:  ‘The owner of the dog Sheldon is her,’ people may say.  In such cases, ‘her’ tends to be emphasized, either to point Shuwen out in a crowd, or to accuse her of something naughty the dog did.  ‘Our current president is her’ sounds uneducated and somewhat rude, though if you want to make it very rude, you can say ‘Our current president is that one,’ while pointing to her.  But whatever you do, don’t let her hear that. 

 

This kind of V-2 ordering may seem trivial and natural – just an expression of identity freely pivoting around backwards or forwards.  Such changes in word order often go unnoticed: who cares if you say ‘The two tall boys there are (V) Rhys (S1) and Derek (S2)’ or ‘Rhys (S1) and Derek (S2) are (V) the two tall boys there’?  Therefore, I’m going to call this ancient fossil the Rotating Pterodactyl, since it can freely fly either forwards or backwards. 

 

The Rotating Pterodactyl is a strong dinosaur.  Even when the copula is missing, it can stay airborne.  In ‘African American Vernacular English (AAVE),’ the distinctive home dialect of many Americans descended from the slave trade, ‘to be’ is often replaced by what linguists call a ‘zero copula,’ similar to what is seen in Russian.   (I should add that, at the moment, AAVE is also the prestige schoolyard dialect of hip-hop-loving teens of all descriptions.)  This means that expressions like ‘Ms. Samuels our new president now’ and ‘That dog my seeing-eye dog’ are conventional.  These expressions can go V-2, even without the V being present – ‘Our new president now Ms. Samuels’ or ‘My seeing-eye dog that dog.’ But the pronoun problem remains – there is no ‘My seeing-eye dog he’ to rotate with ‘He my seeing-eye dog.’ 

 

Finally, among the two-winged creatures in our language canyon, you have the noisiest of the V-2 dinosaurs, the Talking Pterodactyl.  This is the V-2 structure that can be used when you are quoting people.  ‘“I respect your opinion,” Florence (S) said (V)’ can easily be switched around to ‘“I respect your opinion,” said (V) Florence (S).’  Again, this may seem completely trivial and ordinary to the native English speaker, but nonetheless, it has the restriction on pronoun use that shows it really is a dinosaur, not a just a linguistic downtown pigeon.  ‘“I respect your opinion,” she (S) said (V)’ works just fine, but ‘“I respect your opinion,” said (V) she (S)’ would seem outlandish.  The Talking Pterodactyl, however, can still flap its wings comfortably, even when the subject wing is a pronoun, when it is used in song lyrics.  Old-style rhyming poetry can also provide a prosthetic second wing for Talking Pterodactyls.

 

Appropriately, the National Song of Australia, land of the Wollemi Pine, features a Talking Pterodactyl.  It’s in italics, below. 

 

Up rode the squatter, mounted on his thoroughbred,

Down came the troopers, one, two, three,

"Whose is that jumbuck you've got in your tucker bag?"

"You'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me."

 

Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda; Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me? "Whose is that jumbuck you've got in your tucker bag?" "You'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me."

 

Up jumped the swagman, leapt into the billabong,

"You'll never catch me alive," said he,

And his ghost may be heard as you pass by the billabong,

"Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me?"

Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda, Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me? And his ghost may be heard as you pass by the billabong, "Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me?"

 

(Here’s a translation of these lyrics with all the old rural Australian slang words explained:  Up rode the owner of the sheep, mounted on his big thoroughbred horse.  Down came the British soldiers who enforce the law, one, two, three of them.  “Whose is that sheep you’ve killed and hidden inside your food bag?  You and your wandering lifestyle can now pack up and wander off to prison with us.”  

 

Up jumped the migrant worker, and leapt into the oxbow lake [a narrow lake created when an arm of a meandering river becomes cut off].  “You’ll never catch me alive, said [V] he [S – pronoun].  And his ghost may be heard as you pass by the oxbow lake.  Who’ll come – wandering the country [waltzing] with only a supply bag [nicknamed by the woman’s name, ‘Matilda’] for companionship – with me?)

 

We’ll come back to the hidden meanings of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ later in the book. 

 

Interestingly, the line “‘You’ll never catch me alive,’ said he” sounds natural in the song, even though it sounds unacceptable in speech.  This is partly because it imitates a poetic VSO form that was once fairly common in old-fashioned speech, persisting in some dialects.  You can see many examples in the King James bible of these ancient V-2 forms in pronoun phrases that can’t be used in modern English: “Then saith he unto his disciples, ‘The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few;’” “These things said he in the synagogue, as he taught in Capernaum;” “Then said he unto them, ‘But now, he that has a purse, let him take it…’”  

 

Now say I to you, this type of English has disappeared in modern times, except in song. 

 

Current English speakers can see that pop songwriter Neil Diamond was making a grand statement when he sang, in the chorus of one of his hits, “I am, I cried.  I am, said I.  And I am lost and I can’t even say why.”  The VSO turnaround in ‘I am, said I’ seemed to state, ‘here’s my classical poetic statement about existence.’ 

 

By now, you are probably waiting for me to point out that the need for a good rhyme is also painfully clear when one thinks about the songs we’ve been discussing.  The word ‘said’ rhymes mostly with difficult words like ‘dead,’ ‘head,’ ‘bled,’ ‘red’ and ‘sled,’ whereas ‘he’ and ‘I’ rhyme with many good poetic words, including pronouns, as well as pop music staples like ‘cry’ and ‘sky.’ Let’s try an SVO ‘Waltzing Matilda.’  “‘You’ll never catch me alive,’ he said.  And his ghost may be heard as you pass by the billabong, Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with, um, old Ned?"  I don’t think so. ‘Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda – with the dead?’  Definitely not.  That’s not national song material unless it’s included, after the year 2000, in the soundtrack of an overwhelmingly popular Aussie zombie video game.  ‘Waltzing Matilda to bed?’ Too modern, and complete change of tone. 

 

Meanwhile, what about Neil and SVO?  ‘I am, I cried.  I am, I said.  And I am lost and I can’t … clear my own head.’  Awkward.  Poets and lyricists very much need the Talking Pterodactyl to have the ability to soar on pronoun wings into the updrafts of enjoyable music.  And lo – it does. 

 

The Talking Pterodactyl, however, has competition as the most dramatic of the V-2 dinosaurs in this canyon.  There is also a dinosaur that is highly dramatic, towering over the treetops, with footsteps like thunder.  Let’s call it Dramatosaurus.  I’ll give you an example from a current article on a highly emotional topic, the rights of people accused of sexual crimes to be considered innocent until proven guilty. 

 

“So drilled are (V) we (S) in the language of crime and punishment that any skepticism about the central role of victims seems scandalous.”  This is author JoAnn Wypijewski in the online magazine The Nation, telling us that we are (in my paraphrase into simpler language) ‘so often told that crime must reliably be matched by punishment that we are likely to think badly of anyone who suggests that we should be concerned about the rights of the accused person, not just about those of the person who claims to be the victim.’  This type of sentence, starting with ‘so,’ is a giant V-2 beast that can be used for making heavy, intense statements.   ‘So shocked was I by your comments that all my hair fell out.’  ‘So beautiful was the young woman that all the young knights on horseback wished she’d be attacked by dragons so that they could rescue her.’  The Dramatosaurus cannot be replaced by an exactly reversed SVO form – you can’t say, ‘So shocked I was by your comments that all my hair fell out.’  If you want SVO phrasing, you need to say ‘I was so shocked by your comments that all my hair fell out.’  Any good author will tell you that when you take the time to put a subject in front of ‘shocked’ in this way, it cuts down the shock value considerably.  The SVO version might just be a factual statement rather than a looming mass of verbal drama. 

 

There is a smaller form of the Dramatosaurus that begins with the word ‘such.’  ‘Such was (V) my poverty (S) that I had to rent out my bedroom to students.’  Let’s pick another example at random from the web.  Here’s a sentence of unknown source that has been reprinted in much ‘English as a second language’ material for Chinese students:  “Such was (V) the road building fever (S) that by 1810, New York alone had some 1,500 miles of turnpikes (toll roads) extending from the Atlantic to Lake Erie.”  This ‘such’ Dramatosaurus isn’t nearly as heavy-footed as the ‘so’ form.  Unlike the ‘such’ form, the ‘so’ form often partners up with a dramatic adjective (shown in italics). ‘So severe was my poverty that I had to rent out my bedroom to students;’ ‘So intense was the road building fever that by 1810, New York alone had some 1,500 miles of turnpikes extending from the Atlantic to Lake Erie.’  Or there may be a dramatic adverb:  ‘So firmly did she grip my arm that she left a bruise that lasted a week.’

 

Notice the do-support in that last VSO form.  The big sauruses, Negativosaurus and Dramatosaurus, differ from the pterodactyls in that they only work with ‘to be’ or with the usual auxiliary words, namely forms of ‘have,’ ‘do’ and the modals.  The pterodactyls don’t work with any auxiliaries; for example, you can’t flip around “‘I am going crazy,’ he has been known to say” and make it “‘I am going crazy,’ has he been known to say.” The big sauruses, however, eat auxiliaries for breakfast.  “So strongly has her love affected me that I’ve become kind to everyone;” “So frequently could he take days off to go fishing that no one ever knew whether he was coming in to the office.”  “Not only would I encourage you to eat a durian, but I would also actually pay you to try it.”

 

Some modals are seldom seen in this format, but all of them can technically be made to work. “So urgently must I see him that I shall have to karate-chop you out of the way.”  Ordinarily, that would be “so urgently do I need to see him …”  Finally, here’s a piece of literature that shows that the mighty Dramatosaurus can even survive in the middle of a sentence:

 

No doubt we are becalmed pretty often, and yet our old skipper almost reconciles us with our dreary isolation, so well can he beguile the time, when he chooses, with anecdote and quotation.

 

(Yes, our sailboat often can’t move forward because there’s no wind, but our ship’s captain almost makes us enjoy being stuck in the middle of nowhere, since he is so good at amusing us, when he chooses, by telling us stories and reciting famous sayings and bits of writing he has memorized)

 

That’s from "The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays", by American romantic poet James Russell Lowell, who lived from 1819 to 1891. 

 

Maybe I’m imagining things, but the two big sauruses, Negativo and Dramato, both give me a feeling of restriction, of being pushed around by powerful forces.  They share a sense of drama that is heightened when they appear, as they almost always do, at the beginning of the sentence.  We’ll soon be coming across another verb form that shares this sense of dread. 

 

There are three or four important types of inversion left in English, but, to my eye, they are not V-2 dinosaurs.  Two of them are practical, and one is yet another connection linking English to the Germanic languages. 

 

Whether by design or historic accident, the two practical ones simply allow you to shove nouns into a convenient place.  One of them lets you to move nouns to the end of the sentence when an extra participant in an activity is being added in.  ‘The town council of Chudleigh voted for the new bridge, as did (V) the council (S) of Taddingsbroke.’  (The subject marked with an ‘S’ there is the subject of the second part of the sentence, technically the second ‘clause’).  You could stick to SVO and say ‘The town council of Chudleigh voted for the new bridge, and the council (S) of Taddingsbroke also did (V),’ but that would appear to be awkward, grade-school-assignment English. 

 

This add-on inversion comes in two common forms, the ‘and so’ form and the ‘as’ form.  The inversion works with most verb tenses and a nearly full range of modals.  ‘He would like to go to the concert, as would his brother, sister and cousin.’  ‘He is inclined to go to the concert, as is his sister.’  ‘He had gone to the concert, and so had his sister.’ ‘He will go to the concert, and so will his sister.’  ‘He wants to go the concert, and so does his friend.’  An auxiliary helper verb (do, have, modals) or ‘to be’ is generally required.  Neither the ‘as’ form nor the ‘and so’ form has a strongly parallel Dutch equivalent in common use, so we can give this inversion a nickname that isn’t a dinosaur name, let’s say, the Add-on Rotator. 

 

Now we come to an inversion that scientists and other technical writers all over the English world need to know about.  When I worked as an editor, I dealt with many people who had either used this device wrongly, or – more commonly – had used mistaken and non-English structures instead.  It’s an inversion that allows you to deal with comparisons, and especially, with very wordy comparisons.  Much of experimental science is all about comparing things, so there is nothing more critical to the researcher than knowing the English of comparisons. 

 

The next couple of paragraphs may look technical, but you are allowed to ignore the details of any long words or phrases.  I’ve tried to write the text so that you can still take in the general ideas I’m talking about even if you find long words scarier than dinosaurs. 

 

Imagine you have two categories of medical treatment, treatment A and treatment B. You need to write a precise, professional sentence stating that the patients given ‘A’ treatment recovered five times more often than the patients given ‘B’ treatment.  The precise statement you need to write must include awkwardly large amounts of technical information. 

 

Let’s say the disease is a tropical fungal infection, chromoblastomycosis (chromo – [dark] coloured; blasto – showing yeast-like cells in the tissue; mycosis – fungal disease).  In that disease, black fungus becomes planted into the patient’s skin, often by a cactus thorn prick.  Many of the patients are farmers who work in bare feet and thus get foot infections.  The disease needs treatment so that it cannot, over the course of a decade or so, turn the foot into a messy, soft mass that looks like a dirty cauliflower. 

 

The treatment A group includes patients who have had the affected part of the foot scraped by the surgeon’s scalpel to take infected tissue away, and have then been asked to take the antifungal drug itraconazole (azole – a molecule containing a five-atom ring consisting of at least three carbon atoms and at least one nitrogen; itracon – a made-up prefix reflecting the need of drug companies to trademark distinctive names. Azole antibiotics with ‘conazole’ in the name generally target fungi rather than bacteria).  The surgical scraping is called ‘debridement’ (meaning ‘taking off a bridle, that is, taking away a restraint that prevents cure),’ usually pronounced ‘debreedmunt’ in English because it’s a recent import from French.  Debridement is done only when necessary, since it may leave a big hole behind in the patient’s flesh.  That hole may then need extra procedures to fill it and to keep it from acquiring additional infections.  Treatment B, then, is the same as A, but without the problematic surgical action.  Since treatment B starts off treating a disease where none of the causal fungus has been removed by surgery, the drug therapy is planned to last longer than in treatment A. 

 

How can we turn all this into a precise sentence that will be accepted by a tough scientific editor like me?  You can see I’ve deliberately picked out a problem that will require a complicated sentence – that’s because the more complicated it is, the better it illustrates the usefulness of the language inversion.  

 

The first part of the sentence would be found fairly easy to write by most scientists who speak English as a second language:  “The patients randomized to 25 weeks of itraconazole therapy following wound debridement were five times more likely to recover completely …” 

 

At this point, however, many scientists reach a point where they are unsure of what to do next.  How, now, to connect the other group of patients “who received 35 weeks itraconazole only, without debridement of their lesions?”  Perhaps they write:

 

[The patients randomized to 25 weeks of itraconazole therapy following wound debridement were five times more likely to recover completely] than [the patients who received 35 weeks itraconazole only, without debridement of their lesions.] 

 

(I’ve put the complicated items being compared into square brackets in order to make the basic structure of the comparison easier to see.)

 

The comparison above is actually acceptable English, but it has an odd feeling to it.  The first part of the sentence has a verb in it, ‘were,’ whereas the second, long part of the sentence has no verb.  Very often, complicated English sentences have ‘parallel’ structures that repeat such elements in order to make the logic of the sentence vividly clear (more about this in the next chapter!):  ‘My friends were served by the experienced waiter, whereas Roderick’s friends were served by the new staff member.’  You can eliminate some overlap between the clauses and say ‘My friends were served by the experienced waiter, whereas Roderick’s were served by the new staff member,’ but you can’t just eliminate a verb and say ‘My friends were served by the experienced waiter, whereas Roderick’s friends by the new staff member.’ 

 

Therefore, making the sentence sound just right seems to favor insertion of a second, parallel verb – but where should it go?  SVO structure would tend to put it after the end of the second, long subject phrase: 

 

[The patients (S) randomized to 25 weeks of itraconazole therapy following wound debridement were (V) five times more likely to recover completely] than [the patients (S) who received 35 weeks itraconazole only, without debridement of their lesions,] were (V).

 

As you can see, that verb trailing way back at the end looks silly.  On the other hand, a VSO inversion neatly fixes the problem: 

 

[The patients (S) randomized to 25 weeks of itraconazole therapy following wound debridement were (V) five times more likely to recover completely] than were (V) [the patients (S) who received 35 weeks itraconazole only, without debridement of their lesions].

 

Basically, the shorter the second comparison item is, the better SVO structure looks: 

 

He was much more likely to play tennis than she was.  (hmm, nice wording)

He was much more likely to play tennis than was she.  (hmm, are you trying to sound like an English lord from 1895?)

 

The longer the second comparison item, the better VSO seems.

 

He was much more likely to play tennis than was the large, strangely shaped, intelligent blob from planet Erakador. 

 

In science and technology, there may be no way of getting around giant blob comparison items, and a VSO reversal is a major advantage.  Let’s call it the Comparison Rotator. 

 

There’s more to say about comparison sentences, but I’ll come back to them in the next chapter. 

 

The last inversion I’m going to talk about is another ancient creature from the Germanic languages, but since it doesn’t introduce V-2 structure into our modern sentences, it doesn’t have a place in V-2rrassic Park.  This form has the verb and the subject reversed – that is to say, the auxiliary, helper part of the verbal combination is reversed with the subject – but the verb usually comes in first position in the sentence, not in second position. 

 

‘Had (V1) I (S) known (V2) that she would be at the party, I wouldn’t have asked her ex to be my date.’ 

 

‘Should (V1) I (S) ever go (V2) to another party at Nadine’s, I won’t ask him to come with me.’

 

‘Were (V1 – strange) she (S) to come (V2 – strange) along next time, I’m sure things would go better.’

 

I’ll get back to the odd combination of verbs in the third sentence in a few paragraphs.  Meanwhile, I’ll just point out that the last two examples show structures that are more formal sounding and less commonly heard than their regular equivalents that start with ‘if.’  Each of the sentences above can be expressed as an ‘if’ sentence.  There’s no verb reversal in the ‘if’ version.

 

 

‘If I (S) had (V1) known (V2) that she would be at the party, I wouldn’t have asked her ex to be my date.’ 

 

‘If I (S) ever go (V) to another party at Nadine’s, I won’t ask him to come with me.’

 

‘If she (S) were (V1 – strange) to come (V2 – strange) along next time, I’m sure things would go better.’  (Or more informally, but slightly awkwardly, ‘If she (S) would (V1) come (V2) along next time, I’m sure things would go better.’ Another alternative is to go back to be being formal again, this time with alternative modal help: ‘If she should come along next time, I’m sure things would go better.’)

 

All these sentences that can be expressed with ‘if’ are of the type called ‘conditional’ sentences in linguistics.  They usually match a possible condition to its logical outcome, as in, “If I departed at 3:00 p.m., I’d miss the rush hour.”  Sometimes they express a condition that’s known to be purely imaginary, but can still be used logically, as in “If I won the lottery 30,000 times, I could buy Austria” or “If you had really loved me, you would never have tried to feed me those white woodland mushrooms.” 

 

The ancient inversions seen above have the same effect as the ‘if’ clauses.  ‘Were I to win the lottery enough times, I’d go all-out and buy Russia.’  ‘Had you really loved me, you wouldn’t have fed me that death-angel mushroom risotto.’  Let’s call these inversions “backwards fossil maybes.”

 

Some of the backwards-fossil-maybe phrases are such powerful pieces of English-language history that they embed other fossils.  You may hear relatively formal English speakers say things like ‘Had I but known he was famous, I’d have asked him for his signature.’  The ‘but’ in ‘had I but known’ is a real piece of historic English.  There was a long-standing use of ‘but’ in earlier versions of our language to take on meanings that, in modern English, would usually be expressed by ‘only’ or ‘just.’   In such cases, ‘but’ is acting as an adverb, modifying a verb.  Perhaps you can see that in an example such as ‘I was but smiling at you, not laughing’ which is valid archaic English – not useable today except as a joke – for ‘I was only smiling at you, not laughing.’  In modern English, ‘but’ is almost always classified as a conjunction, a linker word like ‘and.’  It usually means ‘in contrast,’ as in ‘I will eat the broccoli but not the spinach’ (‘I will eat the broccoli; in contrast, I will not eat the spinach’).  Less commonly, it means ‘except,’ as in ‘Looking at what’s on the table, I would gladly eat anything but the spinach’. 

 

The regular use of ‘but’ to mean ‘only’ is found along with many inverted conditional phrases in Middle English works like Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  These structures are holdovers from Old English, where they were also common.

 

Here in The Knight’s Tale, one of the Canterbury Tales, you can hear the sad words of young Arcite, a captured warrior from the ancient Greek city-state of Thebes.  He is miserable in his prison in Athens because he has seen and fallen in love with a local young woman named Emily. 

 

We seeke fast after felicity,

But we go wrong full often truely.

Thus we may sayen all, and namely I,                       

That ween'd, and had a great opinion,                         

That if I might escape from prison

Then had I been in joy and perfect heal, 

Where now I am exiled from my weal.

 

Since that I may not see you, Emily,

I am but dead; there is no remedy."

 

(We always seek after good fortune and joy

But we often truly go wrong.

That is something we can all say, and especially I,

Who felt strongly and had a driving opinion

That if I could escape from prison

Then I would have been in joy and perfect health,

Whereas now, I’m exiled away from my wellbeing and wealth

 

Since I cannot see you, Emily,

I am simply dead; there’s no remedy.) 

 

In this quote, you can see a combination of the items we’ve been discussing.  First, you have an inverted phrase that serves as a conditional: ‘then had (V1) I (S) been (V2) in joy…’, rendered in modern language as ‘then I (S) would (V1) have (V2) been (V3) in joy.’ True, in this case, the inverted phrase makes up the second half of the conditional sentence (called ‘the consequence’) rather than the half implying the ‘if’ (‘the condition’), but that was possible in Middle English. If you tried using this type of wording in a conversation today, listeners probably wouldn’t understand you. 

 

Just below the ‘joy’ phrase, there’s a good example of ‘but’ serving as ‘only’ or ‘just’ – although I have translated it as ‘simply.’ ‘Simply’ is similar in meaning to ‘just’ but is more conventional in the exact phrasing used in the quote.  In a telephone text-message chat, mind you, one teenager could say to the other, “since I cant come n see u, Im just dead, miss u so much x.”  (The ‘x’ is a kiss).  If, on the other hand, the teen said ‘I am but dead,’ the recipient would think he or she had tried to reference the butt (posterior, arse end of the body) but had been censored by a phone’s spell-correction program. 

 

If you want to see Chaucer use a backwards-fossil-maybe in a normal ‘if’ situation, here’s a quote from his story Troilus and Cressida, featuring the young Trojan warrior Troilus and the girl he’s fallen in love with, Cressida.  Cressida loves Troilus equally, but many problems related to wartime loyalties and social relations prevent the couple from marrying right away.  In the quote, Cressida’s crafty uncle Pandarus is advising Troilus to run away with Cressida even if it causes a scandal. 

 

Pandare answered, "Friend, thou may'st for me

Do as thee list; but had I it so hot,

And thine estate, she shoulde go with me!”  

 

(Pandarus answered, “Friend, as far as I’m concerned you can

do as you wish; but if I had it so hot for someone

[If I ‘had the hots’ for someone like you do],

and if I had your rank and social position, she would be going with me!”)

 

The inverted phrasing that we use today in ‘had I but known’ is a direct plug-in not just to this Chaucerian Middle English heritage, but also to our whole Germanic heritage.  Such phrasing is very common in modern Dutch:  ‘Had ik maar geweten dat je zou komen, dan zou ik meer geld meegebracht hebben.’ (‘Had I but known that you would come, then would I more money with-brought have’ i.e., ‘Had I but known you were coming, I would have brought more money along with me.’).  Common similar phrases include things like ‘Had ik het maar niet gedaan!’ (‘Had I it but not done!’ i.e., ‘If only I hadn’t done that!’), ‘Had ik maar eerder iets gezegd!’ (‘Had I but earlier something said’, i.e, ‘If only I’d said something sooner!’ or, still in good English, ‘Had I only said something sooner!’) and ‘Wist ik het maar!’ (‘Knew I it but!’, i.e., the common English lament, ‘If only I had known!’). 

 

Modern English doesn’t allow us to slap our heads and mutter ‘Knew I it but!’ – but at least we get to say ‘Had I but known’ along with our fellow-North Sea Germanics in the Netherlands.  Links between communities are always valuable in a world where we’re all trying to understand each other, don’t you think?  To celebrate our ancient fossil connection to the flat lands on the east side of the North Sea, we can take a moment to sing a verse of the well known English folk song ‘If I Had a Hammer,’ by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, as freely translated by Dutch songwriter Richard Verschuren into the regional Brabantse dialect of the southern Netherlands

 

Had ik moar een hamer

En een handje vol met spijkers

Dan zou ik fijn goan timmere

Heel dun dag dur

 

(‘Had I but a hammer

and a little hand full with nails [I love it that nails are called ‘spikers’ in Dutch]

then would I gladly go carpentering [‘timmere’ related to English ‘timber’]

all the day long’)

 

Our last type of inversion, the backwards-fossil-maybes, gives us all this connection. It’s like a grammatical free-trade treaty.  Or, to extend the theme of carpentry, like a grammatical wooden bridge stretching across the North Sea. 

 

Incidentally, you may be glad to know that the Dutch have also kindly kept alive the Chaucer-style ‘but’ meaning ‘only.’  You can see it flourishing in a quote from the Dutch wiktionary entry for ‘maar’ (a word that translates the English ‘but,’ other than when it means ‘except’).  ‘Ik heb maar drie euro op zak’ literally says ‘I have but three euro up sack,’ but can best be given as ‘I only have three euros in my pocket.’  Also, let’s not forget the great Dutch-language ska-reggae band of the late 20^th century, ‘Doe Maar,’ named after a popular expression that literally says ‘Do but!’ It would be translated by Chaucer as ‘But Do!’ and by Anglo-moderns as ‘Just Do It!’  

 

I hope that by now, when you come to inversions in English, you feel comfortable with them and can gleefully say, ‘Yeah!  Just do it!’ 

 

Whatever you do, though, don’t translate that last part as ‘Do but!’  For reasons mentioned above, that might sound inappropriate. 

 

We have to have some cultural differences from the Dutch, after all, or we’d all need to consume entire raw herrings in one gulp. 

 

I promised I’d say more about ‘Were you to come along next time, I’m sure things would go better,’ and related sentences.  With the backwards-fossil-maybe inversion, we begin to connect with the last major topic I’m going to discuss in this chapter on grammar.  It’s time to play some spooky music, because there is a ghostly verb form here, not definite enough to be classed as a tense but instead considered to be a ‘mood.’ It’s called the ‘subjunctive.’ 

 

This very technical sounding name has nothing to do with the ghost story that lurks behind this verb form.  The name subjunctive, which means ‘joining up from underneath,’ was first coined because this form, in ancient Greek, happens to be found mainly in parts of the sentence that are ‘subordinate’ to the main clause.  A sample subordinate clause, if we look at the sentence “I would suggest that something be done about this problem,” is the part that says “that something be done about this problem.”  This particular subordinate clause actually includes a subjunctive verb form, ‘be,’ in it, but most subordinate clauses in English don’t include subjunctive verbs.   Just for background information, so that you’ll understand what I’m talking about with subordinate clauses, these clauses are parts of sentences that are started off by words called ‘subordinating conjunctions.’ This expression literally means, ‘conjunctions that let the boss part of the sentence rule the employee part of the sentence.’  In our example, the forceful ‘I would suggest’ is the alpha-dog clause dominating the low-ranking, upside-down, tail-wagging suggestion ‘that something be done about this problem.’ 

 

To quote wikipedia, “The most common subordinating conjunctions in the English language include ‘after,’ ‘although,’ ‘as,’ ‘as far as,’ ‘as if,’ ‘as long as,’ ‘as soon as,’ ‘as though,’ ‘because,’ ‘before,’ ‘even if,’ ‘even though,’ ‘every time,’ ‘if,’ ‘in order that,’ ‘since,’ ‘so,’ ‘so that,’ ‘than,’ ‘though,’ ‘unless,’ ‘until,’ ‘when,’ ‘whenever,’ ‘where,’ ‘whereas,’ ‘wherever,’ and ‘while.’”  Memorize that list before your next meal.  (That’s as good a weight-loss diet plan as you’ll see anywhere).

 

A sentence like ‘Were you to come along next time, I’d be ever so happy’ doesn’t contain a subordinating conjunction, but it does contain a subjunctive.  Let’s have a look at what a subjunctive really is, starting with how to recognize it and ending up with what it’s all about. 

 

If I reverse ‘were you to come’ and draft a sentence that reads ‘you were to come,’ as in, ‘You were to come by 5:00 p.m., but now you’re over an hour late’ (a shortened way of saying ‘You were expected to come by 5:00 p.m., but now you’re over an hour late’), the new sentence does not contain a subjunctive verb.  Subjunctives often look identical to other verb forms.  Where they can be seen to differ, in the case of most verbs, is in the third person singular – that is, in the verbs that go along with ‘he,’ ‘she’ and ‘it.’ Look at the sentence, “I recommend that he buy a good pair of work boots.”  ‘Buy’ looks like the present tense of ‘to buy’ –  the past tense is the very different ‘bought’ – but the correct present tense form of ‘to buy,’ when linked to ‘he,’ should be ‘he buys.’  I buy, you buy, he buys.  So where did the ‘s’ go in ‘he buy’?  Investigation shows that the subjunctive ‘that he buy’ is related to an ancient verb form that, in Old English, possessed a complex series of distinctive word endings.  It looked different from the present and the past tenses for nearly all persons and numbers.  During Middle English times, the subjunctive began to lose its special endings and to blend in with the regular present and past tenses.  For most verbs, a missing ‘s’ in the third person singular is the only visible clue that shows you immediately that you’re looking at a subjunctive. 

 

The one English verb that still holds on to distinct forms for most subjunctive situations is ‘to be.’  Look at the following examples.  They all show the present subjunctive, and you will notice the similarity in the ‘to be’ verb forms: ‘It is desirable that I not be tattooed right now.’ ‘I recommend that you be tattooed by that superior artist.’ ‘All I ask is that my daughter not be tattooed there.’ ‘That we not be tattooed was a requirement if we wanted to go to a Korean bath.’ ‘It was necessary that new gang members be tattooed with the gold skull design.’  As you can see, these sentences all contain ‘be,’ all by itself.  There is no ‘I am’ ‘you are’ or ‘she is.’  ‘I be,’ ‘you be’ and ‘she be’ are the subjunctive equivalents.

 

In commonly heard informal speech, sometimes less correct than the formal equivalent or differing slightly in meaning, you might find sentences similar to those above where the subjunctive is replaced by a normal verb form in the past, present or future tenses, or by a verb combined with a modal.  ‘It’s better that I shouldn’t be tattooed right now.’(modal+verb ‘should be’)  ‘I recommend that you’re tattooed by that superior artist.’ (present tense) ‘All I ask is that my daughter won’t be tattooed there.’ (future tense with modal). ‘That we weren’t tattooed was a requirement if we wanted to go to a Korean bath.’ (past tense) ‘It was a rule that new gang members had all been tattooed with the gold skull design.’ (pluperfect). 

 

Comparing the two sets of examples above, you can see an interesting distinction between subjunctives and the other verb forms I’ve used.  When present subjunctives are used in negative phrases, ‘not’ is simply placed before the verb in the ancient English style.  When the modern alternatives are used, auxiliary verbs such as modals come before the ‘not,’ as usual in modern negations.  You can easily see that difference if I recycle some of the examples above with contracted verb forms expanded to full length.  ‘It is desirable that I not be tattooed right now’ contrasts with ‘It is desirable that I should not be tattooed right now’ while ‘All I ask is that my daughter not be tattooed there’ contrasts with ‘All I ask is that my daughter will not be tattooed there.’

 

The examples I gave for ‘to be’ illustrate some of the situations where the present subjunctive is used in formal or semi-formal modern English.  As you can see, subordinate clauses actually are the norm, as illustrated in the italicized part of ‘It is desirable that I not be tattooed right now.’  This dominance of subordinate clauses is not found with the past subjunctive, as we’ll see in a moment.  The kind of sentence that most commonly includes a present subjunctive begins with a recommendation or other form of urging, moves on to a ‘that’ and then specifies something that should be done or not done.  The ‘that’ can sometimes be left out, as in ‘I suggest you be wary of writing long sentences.’

 

There are also some fascinating oddball cases of present subjunctives, such as phrases based on ‘in order that’ and ‘lest’:

 

‘I am writing him in order that he understand my viewpoint better.’ (Use of a modal such as ‘might’ is more common than the subjunctive in this situation, e.g., ‘I am writing him in order that he might understand my viewpoint better’)

 

“(Spanish judge Juan Balthasar Garzón) asked for Pinochet's extradition in order that he be judged in Spain” (from Masters of War by Clara Nieto)

 

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, half of Aphorism 146). 

 

Some of the examples above showed verbs other than ‘to be,’ but now let’s return to that verb, which is responsible for most of the subjunctive phrases seen in modern text.  ‘To be,’ unlike other verbs, has a distinctive subjunctive past tense.  It is almost always seen in clauses starting with ‘if.’  ‘If I were you, I’d leave now’ ‘If you were the hall monitor, you’d let me go.’ ‘If she were on duty today, she’d have issued a hundred parking tickets by now.’ You can see the trend developing here: ‘were’ is used in all cases, including those where ‘was’ would be expected in a normal past tense.  Illustrations: ‘I was there’ vs. ‘if I were there.’  ‘He was near-sighted’ vs. ‘if he were near-sighted.’  Let’s add some more examples from the small number of cases where something other than ‘if’ is used to cue the past subjunctive.  ‘I wish that she were here now.’  ‘I’d be happier if he were kept on as president.’ ‘I feel as though I were about to explode.’ In informal speech, people often use the regular past tense in all these situations, e.g., ‘If I was you, I’d leave now.’ ‘If she was on duty today, she’d have issued a lot of parking tickets.’  ‘I wish that she was here now.’ The first of these informal examples sounds uneducated, perhaps even deliberately crude, but the others simply sound natural and informal.  British English tends to use subjunctives in these optional situations more regularly than does American English (Note that Comparison Rotator there in the sentence you just read). 

 

Other verbs in the past tense might be imagined to have a subjunctive mood in modern text, but they have no recognizable subjunctive forms.  Look at a sentence like, ‘If you paid more attention in school you’d get better grades.’ The verb form ‘paid’ of the verb ‘to pay’ could be classed either as subjunctive or as past-tense.  Since the two forms can’t be distinguished, such verbs are simply taken to be past-tense.  If a writer wanted to clearly introduce subjunctive feeling into such a sentence, he or she could combine the ambiguous verb with the past subjunctive of ‘to be,’ yielding ‘If you were to pay more attention in school, you’d get better grades.’  Such two-verb constructions combining the past subjunctive and the infinitive (the ‘to’- form, as in ‘to eat,’ ‘to run’) are common.  If I were to give you one more example now, this sentence would be it.

 

Despite the best efforts of some grammarians, the subjunctive in English is widely felt to be optional; in most situations, we use it when we feel like using it.  In French, by contrast, speakers must memorize a long and complex list of expressions that always take the subjunctive.  Here’s a sample quote from the relevant Wikipédia page: “Il est probable qu'il reviendra. (mais on dit toujours : Il est possible qu’il revienne)”.  That is, “‘It is probable that he’ll return’ (future tense); but one always says: ‘It is possible that he return’ (subjunctive).” 

 

The basic theme of the subjunctive is unreality, dealing with possibilities that have not (yet) come to be.  Many of the present tense forms deal with an action that is being advocated in some way.  A sense of pressure, combined with uncertainty, seems to be necessary.  The sentences often seem to be possible commands where the speaker is holding back on final commitment – all the more so because verbs in the present subjunctive have exactly the same form as those in the imperative, the verb form used in commands.  Merely to say that you hope someone will do something seems not to cook up enough pressure to justify a subjunctive:  “I recommend that she do that as soon as possible’ has a counterpart in hope as ‘I hope that she will do that as soon as possible.’  Or, if the hope seems faint, ‘I would hope that she would do that as soon as possible.’ Very strong phrases can retain the subjunctive if they are impersonal: “It’s imperative that he do that.”  “It’s commanded that he do that.”  On the other hand, if a person steps up to take responsibility for those sentiments, the subjunctive tends to bow out: “I command that he must do that” or “I command him to do that.”

 

It’s usually acceptable to substitute a modal phrase based on ‘should’ for a present subjunctive: ‘I recommend that she should do that as soon as possible.’  To an educated English speaker, however, this sounds almost redundant, as if the ‘should’ suggestion is being made twice.  Unlike a definite redundancy, such near-redundancies are tolerated. 

 

Expressions using ‘should’ often sound formal.  People who don’t want to sound formal and who are unfamiliar with the subjunctive tend to insert the modal ‘would’: ‘I recommend that she would do that as soon as possible.’ This kind of substitution is also used with past subjunctives, as in replacing ‘If I were elected president this year, I would make a lot of changes’ with ‘If I would be elected president this year, I would make a lot of changes.’ This type of expression is problematical.  It sounds very non-English, even though it may be heard from the mouths of schoolchildren raised with English as a first language.  On the other hand, the ‘should’ equivalent is so very formal that it gives the speaker an upper-class British air: “If I should be elected president, I’d make a lot of changes.”  Some people have a policy of appearing down-to-earth by avoiding subjunctives, and they would have to say “If I was elected president, I’d make a lot of changes.”  Personally, I’d vote for the subjunctive. 

 

The aspect of the subjunctive that makes it fun for me is that I think it relates to interesting developments in cultural history.  I call it the ‘jinx avoidance mood.’  I need to explain this concept in a roundabout way.  Bear with me as I spend a few paragraphs putting forth some ideas about the history of languages and human psychology. 

 

Many European languages, in my opinion, started off with two grammatical features that were basically religious in nature, or what skeptics might call superstitious.  One of these items I haven’t yet mentioned: it’s something called the ‘vocative case’ of nouns.  We scarcely have any remnant of the ancient vocative case in English today, other than in religious songs and verses containing the word ‘O,’ as in ‘O God our Hope in Ages Past’ and ‘O Holy Night.’  In some languages, however, like modern Greek, the vocative is still well developed in everyday speech and is used when you speak to people directly.  For example, ‘my friend’ (male) is φίλος μου, (filos mou) but if you want to hail your friend with “What do you say, my friend?” you say ‘Τι λες, φίλε μου’ (Ti les, fileh mou – the ‘h’ is just there to keep English speakers from saying ‘file’ to rhyme with ‘pile’).  A very literal translation would have to be, ‘What say, o my friend?’ 

 

Scholars believe that the original Indo-European languages all contained a vocative.  In the languages where the vocative lasted long enough to be written down, such as Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, some Slavic languages, and the Baltic languages, it retains similarities in form that suggest origin in a common proto-Indo-European vocative.  We meet again, O Leyudoi! (I’ve stuck the Greek masculine vocative plural on the end).  

 

Using the vocative, in languages that have one, isn’t just a matter of obeying grammatical rules.  Survival of body and soul are involved.  The basic idea of the vocative is to honour and raise up the person or deity you are addressing (True, some Polish speakers turn the vocative around and use it in irony as an insult, but, hey, let’s give them credit for risk-taking).  Many ancient and traditional religions strongly promoted the idea that to name or classify people and things, or even to treat them as ordinary, was a step that led one to the edge of a great spiritual mistake.  The Chinese mystical book called the Tao te Ching famously begins with the line, ‘The Way that can be named is not the Way,’ or ‘The Path that can be named is not the Path.’  The message is that defining things by their names, or otherwise making them too definite, is bad, harmful.  Our fellow humans are all creative and, in a sense, are too large to be contained in a mental box.  When you name a person, even with his or her own name, you are, to some extent, putting him or her into that box.  In many aboriginal North American cultures, to ask someone you’d recently met to give you his or her name was rude, almost insulting or threatening.  A person’s magic was diminished if his or her name was known to people who might not fully respect it.  And to ask directly was, and is, prying.  Here’s the sample sentence given by the Secwépemc online dictionary entry for the word ‘swéti7’ (pron. ‘sweddy/full throat stop’), meaning ‘what.’ 

 

Swéti7 ke7 skwest?

What is your name?

The words "What is your name?" are impolite in the language; you can say this in English.  To use the word ‘what’ is an insult.

 

To ask someone’s family name in Cantonese, you must say “néih gwai-sing a?” – “your honored-surname (I ask)?”  To ask for the ‘sing,’ the family name, without elevating it as honorable or precious is unthinkable. 

 

In grammar, there was a role in traditional societies for verb forms that appeared to exalt and not diminish the person who was being spoken to or about.  Even today, Japanese features distinct grammars for language usages showing different degrees of politeness, formality, honorific respect and respectful humility. Everyday Japanese is divided into a ‘plain’ form that is used among family members and friends, and a ‘polite’ form that is used among associates, colleagues of similar rank, and people met casually or in business. Going beyond those two forms, people speak directly to their business superiors and teachers with a special ‘respect’ vocabulary partly conveyed by special verb forms. If they speak about themselves in statements made to those higher-ups, they use special ‘humble’ terms and structures. Both the respectful and the humble languages could be seen as conveying the basic vocative message: ‘I raise you up and never diminish you.’

 

Vocatives, where they exist(ed), developed out of caution about offending the wholeness or greatness of someone being addressed in language.  As civilizations modernized, people arguably became more confident about considering themselves and others to be ordinary, equivalent, and not realistically worthy of a worshipful approach.  The vocative therefore often became a relic, usually just a religious relic. 

 

During the times in history, however, when people are cautious about not offending the greatness of other people’s spirits, or offending God or the gods, what about offending Fate or Destiny?  What about offending godly power by predicting future events, as if human wishes were in control of destiny rather than the Almighty?  An Islamic story by Muhammad ben Ishaq, who wrote in the mid-700s CE, depicts the prophet Muhammad as promising some religious questioners that he would have answers for them the next day.  He expected that God would provide these answers.  At the time he made that promise, however, he forgot, to say ‘if God wills,’ إنشاء الله‎, ‘insha'Allah.  As a result, he was punished with a drought of new revelations from God for 15 days, at the end of which he received a new chapter of the Quran that contained the following message from God:

 

"And never say of anything, ‘I shall do such and such thing tomorrow.  Except (with the saying): 'If God wills!' And remember your Lord when you forget.” (Surat Al Kahf [18]:23-24)

 

I’ve travelled in Egypt, among other places in the Islamic world, and can confirm that if you say ‘See you at noon tomorrow’ to most Egyptians, their agreement, even in English conversation, will come in the form of ‘insha’Allah.’ 

 

Geoffrey Chaucer, just before he wrote one of the quotes I used above, addressed this very issue of the arrogance of humans trying to order the future. 

 

Alas, why plainen men so in commune      

Of purveyance of God, or of Fortune,

That giveth them full oft in many a guise

Well better than they can themselves devise?

 

Some man desireth for to have richess,

That cause is of his murder or great sickness.

And some man would out of his prison fain,

That in his house is of his meinie slain.

Infinite harmes be in this mattere.

We wot never what thing we pray for here.

 

We fare as he that drunk is as a mouse.

A drunken man wot well he hath an house,

But he wot not which is the right way thither,

And to a drunken man the way is slither.

 

And certes in this world so fare we.

We seeke fast after felicity,

But we go wrong full often truely.

 

(Alas, why do people complain so much about fate or God’s generosity, which often, in a hidden way, provides for them better than they can do themselves? 

 

Some people want to have riches that only cause them to be murdered or to become sick, while others want to escape prison when, if they were at home, they would be killed by their servants. There is infinite harm in this matter: we never know [the import of] what we pray for.

 

We get along like someone who is completely drunk.  A drunken man knows he has a house but he doesn’t know how to get there, and to a drunken man the way is slippery. 

 

And certainly, in this world, so it goes with us.  We constantly look for good fortune, but we often truly go wrong.) 

 

The profound doubt Chaucer voices about human plans and wishes is contrary to the modern viewpoint.  We are told, in our dominant secular world, that we are supposed to come up with a dream, plan out our steps, work and network to build up our dream, and finally succeed.  Logic and science are our foundations, we reassure ourselves, and natural disasters may all be controllable some day. 

 

Who has more need of a subjunctive mood to express his thoughts, Chaucer or the modern citizen? 

 

Grammar experts tend not to explore such topics, but for anchorage, let’s look at what Olga Fischer had to say about where the subjunctive was used and not used in Middle English conditional expressions. 

 

The (appearance of the) subjunctive (form) is the rule when conditionality is expressed by inverted word order. In other cases, it seems to be more frequent when the condition is entirely 'open,' i.e. when potentiality is stressed. Compare sentence 396 to sentence 397:

 

(396) But & sche haue (subjunctive) children with him þei leten hire lyue with hem to brynge hem vp...

 

(‘But if she have children with him [her late husband] they let her live with them to bring them up.’ This passage appears in a section of a partly imaginary book of world travels attributed to Sir John Mandeville – a book first circulated in around the 1360s.  A distant country is described where widows tend to be buried with their husband if the husband dies, unless the couple has had children.  In that case, the woman may remain alive to raise the children.) 

 

(397) If that a prynce useth (indicative, i.e., present tense) hasardrye,

in alle governance and policy

He is, as by commune opinioun,

yholde the lasse in reputacioun.

 

(If a prince uses dice-gambling methods in all governance and policy,

he is, by common opinion, held to be lesser in reputation. Chaucer, Pardoner’s Tale)

 

Fischer comments: 

 

In (396) the subject may either have children or not and this is important for the effectiveness of the action expressed in the main clause. In (397) the speaker is not interested in whether a prince uses ' hasardrye' (dice-play for high stakes – RCS) or not, but rather he wishes to state that every prince who is a 'hasardour' loses his reputation as a result of it. In the latter case the if-clause is almost equivalent to a temporal clause (in other words, a ‘when’ clause, as in ‘when a prince gambles heavily, his reputation goes down’ – RCS)

 

Fischer tells us two very interesting things about the subjunctive here.  One item is structural – that we can recognize all the inverted ‘conditional’ phrases in Chaucer and similar writings as being subjunctive.  Inverted conditionals starting with ‘had,’ such as ‘had I only known,’ are directly descended from subjunctives: in fact, many authors today class them as ‘pluperfect subjunctives.’  Fischer’s other item is psychological – she points out that the subjunctive depends on a real sense of causally important uncertainty. Logical uncertainty alone is not enough to justify a subjunctive; there should be a sense that a causal or fateful unknown is waiting to be resolved.  This needn’t be something of great importance; it just needs to be something where the free will of people, the deity or fate may be directly involved. 

 

Here’s a passage from Chaucer’s The Summoner’s Tale, part of the Canterbury Tales.  In it, a friar (a traveling religious person, living by preaching and begging) very delicately and politely begs for his supper by assuring his hostess that he can live on very small amounts of donated food.  His approach requires the subjunctive wherever he directly states his request. 

 

"Now, master," quoth the wife, "ere that I go,

What will ye dine? I will go thereabout."

"Now, Dame," quoth he, "je vous dis sans doute,

Had I not of a capon but the liver,

And of your white bread not but a shiver,

And after that a roasted pigge's head,

(But I would that for me no beast were dead,)

Then had I with you homely suffisance.

I am a man of little sustenance.”

 

(Now, master, the woman said, before I go

What would you like to eat?  I’ll go get it.

Now, ma’am, said he, I tell you without doubt (while using my educated man’s French)

If I could have only just the liver out of a young chicken,

And a tiny slice of your white bread,

And after that, a roasted pig’s head (which has little meat on it)

(Even though I would never wish an animal to die for my sake)

Then I would have had enough to eat from you.

I am a man who requires little food.)

 

Such humility can only inspire generosity, so we may suspect the friar was trying to beg a good-sized meal.  The begging sentence with subjunctives in both the condition (‘Had I not [but a few tiny morsels]’) and the consequence ‘then had I [enough to eat]’ is a masterpiece of persuasive uncertainty.  The free willed generosity of the hostess is not trampled it on as it would be with ‘If you’ll just give me a chicken liver, a bit of bread, and a leftover pig’s head from your last slaughter, I’ll be fine.’ And that’s important, because the freedom of the hostess is being worked upon, in the hope that it will come up with a more abundant feast.  The subjunctive is a mood with a gentle hand – it reaches out, it gently grasps the item it is referring to – but it does not squeeze.  To squeeze might make the hostess, or destiny, or God, squeeze back. 

 

The modern subjunctive often very well conveys this feeling of someone lightly begging destiny.  Someone saying, “if I had a million pounds sterling, I’d buy a racecar” might only be making an accurate description of a fantasy that might someday turn into a plan.  Someone who instead says “if I were to have a million pounds sterling, I’d buy a racecar” isn’t just being grammatically formal.  He or she is deliberately being polite with fate, expressing a dream without making a psychological demand on destiny – in effect, saying ‘insha’Allah.’  English culture has various superstitions like ‘touching wood’ to allow people who feel they’ve gone too far in teasing fate to return to safety.  “My little boy hasn’t had any serious colds this year – touch wood.”  The ancient European belief about wood is that it absorbed negative spirit energy. Therefore, the angry spirit power that might appear if you teased the future with self-serving predictions could be taken away from you if you quickly touched your offending body to a piece of wood.  The subjunctive, by nature, touches wood.  It is, as I said at the beginning, the ‘jinx avoidance mood,’ the verb form that holds back from offending the future and inviting bad luck, the jinx.  And here also is the ghost story I promised you:  when you’re dealing with the subjunctive, you’re firmly in the realm of the spirits.  Or at least, you’re dealing with people’s beliefs about the spirits, fate, jinxes and possibly an angry God.  This all goes far beyond passing the English-as-a-second-language test. 

 

The humble fear of going too far may be easy to see in a hopeful past subjunctive like ‘if I were really rich, I’d …’ but what about other uses of the mood?  Look at the amazing politeness of a present subjunctive like ‘I recommend that he buy a good pair of work boots.’  It’s obviously not a command – the listener has not been commanded to tell the person who’s the subject of the recommendation (the ‘he’ in the sentence) to buy good boots.  Moreover, the freedom of the ‘he’ is not imposed upon.  As an alternative, the speaker could say, informally, ‘I recommend him to buy a good pair of work boots’ – but that, in a subtle way, takes ‘his’ decision out of the focus of the thought and replaces it with a mechanical solution to a problem.  Another alternative, ‘I recommend that he should buy a good pair of work boots,’ seems both paternalistic (because of the pushiness of ‘should’) and impersonal (because the ‘should’ suggests that a general policy of what ought to be done is being applied to ‘him’).  Nothing sounds quite as caring, non-pushy, and yet strongly felt as ‘I recommend that he buy a good pair of work boots.’  The politeness of the subjunctive is like a Japanese honorific verb, bowing and saying, ‘the free decision, respected boot-needer, is purely up to you.’ 

 

Now take an expression like ‘Long live the queen!’ where people might feel they are coming close to telling God what to do in the realm of life and death.  They may tell themselves that they’d never dare do that, but instead they are enthusiastically but politely begging God for a favour.  But, oh no, they don’t want to offend God with that begging. It mustn’t seem pushy even though it should clearly convey the desire.  What verb form will you find in a sentence like that? 

 

Subjunctive.  Obviously, subjunctive. 

 

Many people have stated that the subjunctive is on the way to disappearing, and indeed, it may be.  Many English-speaking people seldom if ever use it, especially in parts of the United States.  In Dutch, it has almost completely disappeared, other than in the local equivalents of ‘Long live the king!’ and ‘May they rest in peace.’  (The Dutch verbs like ‘mogen,’ – ‘may’ – that serve as modals can be placed in subjunctive form, unlike the English modal auxiliaries).  We live in a world where scientific culture has often assured us that jinxes can’t exist; the angry universe is not waiting to punish our hopes.  Business books advise us to accept challenges, go out bravely, state our case clearly, and ensure we’re never caught hovering where fateful decisions need to be made.  Religions also have made an effort to modernize, and to distinguish themselves from superstition by avoiding silly dreads and unfounded fears.  Gods and spirits who like to play tricks are nearly passé, except in aboriginal and African cultures that guard their traditional tricksters as sources of stories and creative change.  Where is there a need for kowtowing with a vocative, or prayerfully tugging at the robes of free will and fate with a subjunctive?   Since when have free men and women been thrust into life’s very own subordinate clause, under the foot of a pushy main clause who directs us all with an enormous conjunction, a giant ‘that?’  Do we need grammar to cower with? 

 

Perhaps this is where I should make my second official Bold statement of this chapter.

 

Bold Statement (BS) number 6.   The need for the subjunctive may arise out of our brain structure. 

 

Surprised you, didn’t I?  I’m going to surprise you again, or make you think, temporarily, that I’m truly mad.  Let’s look at the ancient idea that there is a jinx waiting for us, somewhere, if we try too hard:  unexpectedly, this notion is accurate, and it is also a consequence of our brain structure. 

 

Here’s my case for the subjunctive taking on a new relevance. 

 

Recent science has repeatedly supported the ancient idea that people can often perform better, and solve certain kinds of problems better, if they mute their logical thought systems and use the skills that we sometimes call ‘intuition.’  The brilliant popular science writer Malcolm Gladwell has published a book called ‘Blink’ (2005) that looks over some of the research involved.  He refers to intuition as ‘thin-slicing’ because it processes huge amounts of information in very brief slices of time. True experts, he shows, often know within seconds what semi-experts can only determine after months of work. 

 

Interestingly, people who know things at the true expert level can seldom find words to express the details of how they know what they know, or how they do what they do.  Gladwell talks about a psychologist named Jonathan Schooler who developed a series of tests measuring how well people could come up with rapid flashes of insight needed to solve tricky problems.  Schooler gave some people a sheet of problems and simply asked them to solve the problems.  Another group was asked to solve the problems but also to keep track of how they solved them, and to write their methods down.  Plenty of time was allowed.  Schooler found, according to Gladwell, that “people who were asked to explain themselves ended up solving 30% fewer problems than those who weren’t.  In short,” Gladwell carries on, “when you write down your thoughts, your chances of having the flash of insight you need in order to come up with a solution are significantly impaired.” 

 

"It’s the same kind of paralysis-through-analysis you find in sports contexts," Schooler says.  "When you start becoming reflective about the process, it undermines your ability.  You lose the flow.” Continues Gladwell (note the Talking Pterodactyl there), “As human beings, we are capable of extraordinary leaps of insight and instinct.  We can hold a face in memory and we can solve a puzzle in a flash.  But what Schooler is saying is that all these abilities are incredibly fragile.  Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads.  It is a flickering candle that can be easily snuffed out. 

 

This conclusion echoes the core values of traditional Japanese martial arts and artistry.  In his very influential 1948 book Zen in the Art of Archery, Eugen Herrigel, a German who had taught philosophy in Japan, wrote about his experience of trying to learn Japanese traditional archery from a master teacher, Awa Kenzo.  He discovered that he not only had to learn how to use a bow and arrows, but also needed to re-learn his thinking processes.  At one point, he asks a fencing master, Takuan, why a certain pupil who seems very talented often loses his swordfighting matches with opponents. 

 

The reason, according to Takuan, is that the pupil cannot stop watching his opponent and his swordplay; that he is always thinking about how he can best come at him, waiting for the moment when he is off his guard.  In short, he relies all the time on his art and knowledge.  By doing so, Takuan says, he loses his ‘presence of heart’ … the more he tries to make the brilliance of his swordplay dependent on his own reflection, on the conscious utilization of skill… the more he inhibits the free ‘working of the heart.’  What is to be done?  How does skill become ‘spiritual,’ and how does sovereign control of technique turn into master swordplay? Only, so we are informed, by the pupil’s becoming purposeless and egoless.  He must be taught to be detached not only from his opponent but himself. 

 

The jinx that waits for us if we grasp too hard at the universe is that we will slide out of brilliance and into awkwardness.  We need to have the balance of a ballet dancer in putting our ambitions forward; otherwise, we may find out that even our best efforts are unexpectedly defeated.  Anyone who cultivates a high level of skill, a true expertise, must reach the point where he or she approaches his or her goals with a gentle hand – one that reaches out, as I said above about the subjunctive, and gently grasps the item it is aiming at – but does not squeeze.  To squeeze too hard might make the awkward parts of the mind squeeze back. 

 

Our other brash tenses and moods simply rush in and say what they want to say, full of their logic.  The subjunctive holds back, egoless, detached from the request it puts forward.

 

The way that can be named is not the Way.

 

So yes, the subjunctive may reflect superstition and hesitation arising from primitive fears.  Also, though, it may reflect a type of mental functioning that modern societies have wrongly lost respect for.  Now, science itself is bringing this respect back.  The zen sophistication of the subjunctive mood suddenly seems to be in tune with the times again. 

 

At least to me. 

 

(As you have guessed, I’m very interested in this topic, and if you want to see some detailed but friendly discussions of how the block arising from logic may work against intuition, you are invited to read my pseudonymous science-fiction novel, This Moonless Sky.  There, my alter-ego author Marrik Rajjarsen lays out, in the context of an epic story, how ‘decision regress’ and related processes may work against ‘adherent’ [intuitive] thought and favour reductive [logical] thought.  Understanding this process relates to something that I consider myself to be a true expert on – unlike English – namely, the philosophy of self-fulfilling prophecy.  Marrik can explain the connection.)

 

My conclusion is this:  were we English speakers to allow our subjunctive to be lost, we would be much the worse for it.  Long live the subjunctive! 

 

I don’t know if it means anything, but I find it interesting that the subjunctive and the two big V-2 rotators, Negativosaurus Rex and Dramatosaurus, share a common feeling that scary, looming forces may be limiting one’s movements and choices.  Perhaps people worry about changing ancient language structures that deal with the frightening forces of fate and circumstance.  The dinosaur rotators rotate us, as subjects of the sentences, away from negative and dramatic words, placing rocks like ‘did’ between us and them.  The subjunctive allows us to poke the scary dragon of destiny, or the dragon of another person’s pride, ever so non-committally, so that we don’t wake up the potential rage that lurks there.  These structures all side-step drama and make us as calm and polite as possible. 

 

Speaking of politeness, if you read a comprehensive book on English grammar, like A Grammar of Contemporary English by Randolph Quirk and colleagues, you’ll find out that English actually does contain the politest of all noun structures, a vocative.  In this case, though, it’s a hidden vocative.  It couldn’t be less related to the general Indo-European vocative case.  It’s like Chinese – expressed only in tones.  The authors give three examples, which can only be understood if we use the Chinese tone marks I explained in Chapter 1.  Quirk and colleagues actually use these exact marks.

 

Jǒhn, I want you

It’s a lovely dày, Mrs. Jóhnson

And yòu, my fríends, will have to work hàrder

 

In the English vocative, we inform people that we are politely and respectfully addressing them by using rising vocal tones.  If the person we’re addressing is named at the beginning of the sentence, like ‘John’ in the first example, we use a low rising tone with some degree of falling before the rise.  The result tends to be similar to the tone used in the Mandarin Chinese word ‘xiǎo,’ meaning ‘small.’  If we were being rude or giving John orders, we would use a high-falling tone, ‘Jòhn!’ similar to that used in the Mandarin ‘shàng’ of ‘Shànghǎi’ (上海, ‘Oversea,’ China’s biggest city).  That’s not considered vocative. 

 

When the person being respectfully addressed is named at the end of the sentence, a high rising tone is used, as seen with ‘Mrs. Jóhnson’ in the example “It’s a lovely dày, Mrs. Jóhnson.” This tone is similar to the one we encountered in Chapter 1 in the Mandarin ‘hái’ meaning ‘child.’  Similarly, a vocative appearing in the middle of the sentence, as seen with the ‘friends’ addressed in “And yòu, my fríends, will have to work hàrder” is indicated by a high rising tone. 

 

So don’t say you don’t speak a tonal language, you first-language English speakers.  Very little in any language is truly foreign. 

 

There are still books and books of English grammar tips and legends that we haven’t covered here, but we are approaching the point where I planned to stop and move on to ‘style.’  Style sounds as if it would be a matter of free choice, but in fact, it mostly relates to matters of word order that are as important in written English as grammar.  Before going on to that topic, though, I want to mention one more trick of English grammar.  I found as a scientific editor that my writers from Japan, Russia, China, Brazil and other nations with related languages had persistent problems with English ‘articles.’  The task of putting ‘the’ and ‘a’ in the right places can be very difficult if you grew up speaking a language where articles are used differently, or don’t occur at all. 

 

It wouldn’t be sensible for me to try to contrast the English system of articles to the handling of such matters in all the languages I just mentioned.  I’ll just pick on the Romance languages as an example, specifically, French.  French speakers have plenty of trouble with our articles, and I understand the system they use in their own language relatively well.   

 

In Romance languages, like French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Romanian, an article is used almost every time a noun is used, unless the noun is being counted, possessed, indicated with demonstratives like ‘that’ or ‘this,’ or otherwise grammatically tied up.  At first, the system may seem like the English system:  you say ‘j’achète un poisson,’ literally, ‘I buy one fish,’ to mean ‘I am buying a fish.’ That’s if you’re buying any one of several fish being sold at the fish stand.  The English ‘a’ and ‘an,’ our ‘indefinite articles,’are both descended from Old English ‘ān,’ meaning ‘one.’ 

 

If, by contrast, you are going back to the pet store to buy a particular, beautiful cichlid fighting-fish you saw last week, you may tell your friend, who already knows you’re intererested in a particular fish, ‘j’achète le poisson,’ ‘I’m buying the fish.’  Again, this is much like English; we have the ‘definite article’ ‘the.’  Things get a little strange in French if you’re buying two beautiful cichlids rather than one, because then you need to say j’achète les poissons,’ ‘I’m buying the(-plural) fish’ (I hope everyone knows that English plural of ‘fish’is ‘fish’ no matter how many there are.)  The English ‘the’ is the same for single and plural items.  French also has different forms of articles for male and female genders.  Old English used to have such things, you may remember, but they were mamooked out of existence.

 

Where the French vs. English comparison goes crazy is after you fry up your market fish and eat it.  You then comment to your friend, ‘J’aime beaucoup le poisson.’ In English, that can’t be translated word-for-word as ‘I really like the fish.’  Instead, it must be ‘I really like fish.’  English, unlike French, has a concept of a ‘mass noun’ that requires no articles. A mass noun is a word for a substance that, in theory, can be found in indefinite quantities.  When you say ‘I like cake’ you are saying that you like the substance ‘cake.’ ‘I like the cake’ says you like a particular, exact cake that someone has made.  That cake, unlike the general substance ‘cake,’ is a defined object, and can thus be given an article, ‘the.’  (‘I like a cake,’ which may seem to come up logically, is an unusual expression that would probably only be used if you were gently telling a friend that you were planning to marry a cake. You can, however, normally say things like ‘I like a cake that has birthday coins baked inside it.’)

 

English mass nouns can be abstract items.  ‘I like happiness,’ you can say, whereas in French, you’d be obliged to say, ‘j’aime le bonheur,’ ‘I like the happiness.’ In French, ‘bonheur’ is a noun and so it must have an article attached.  It is possible to say ‘the happiness’ in English, but only in a sentence that somehow points out a particular instance of happiness, like ‘I like the happiness I am feeling now.’

 

Abstractions that are countable, like ‘priority,’ never get the mass noun treatment.  ‘This is an important priority;’ ‘This is the priority we need to focus on.’  English dictionaries may classify nouns as countable, uncountable or both.  ‘Priority,’ like ‘bicycle,’ is purely countable; ‘happiness’ and ‘bread’ are uncountable, and ‘cake’ and ‘fish’ are both countable (as individual items) and uncountable (as substances that may be eaten).  Categories may also be considered uncountable, and so we see, again, a difference between English and French in descriptions of the same biology student: ‘he studies fish’ vs. ‘il étudie les poissons.’  The category ‘fish’ takes no article in the English version. 

 

This last point is probably the one that causes the most trouble for technical writers who grew up speaking Romance languages.  Let’s take a typical technical sentence from French and look at all the articles.  This is from Wikipédia:  ‘La sérologie est l'étude des sérums et des variations ou modifications de leurs propriétés au cours des maladies.’ Literal translation: ‘The serology is the study of the serums and of the variations or modifications of their properties in the course of the diseases.’  This translation isn’t easy to follow, because French sneakily fuses some articles into standard contractions when they follow prepositions equivalent to ‘of,’ ‘in’, ‘to’ or ‘at.’  In the sample sentence, ‘des’ is the contraction of ‘de + les,’ meaning ‘of the,’ while ‘au’ is the contraction of ‘à + le’ meaning, in this situation, ‘in the.’ As it happens, the whole phrase ‘au cours de’ is usually translated by a fixed English expression, ‘over the course of,’ so the literal translation ‘in the course of’ is not used.  In the sample sentence, even that standard translation runs into problems (too complicated to go into), and the best English translation overall would therefore be something like, ‘Serology is the study of serum and of the variations and modifications in its properties during the development of diseases.’  There are three instances of ‘the’ there, as opposed to six in the French sentence.  The articles that are missing in the English translation are those that were attached to general categories in the French. 

 

Serum, in case you’re curious, is the colourless liquid, full of white blood cells and proteins, in which red blood cells float to make up red blood.  Our blood is actually white: it just has enormous numbers of tiny red oxygen submarines diving around in it.

 

So, going back to the word-for-word translation of our sample sentence, ‘serology’ is uncountable, and therefore, English speakers just call it ‘serology,’ not ‘the serology.’  Next, you’ll notice that I’ve translated the original ‘the serums’ as ‘serum.’  Serum is considered a mass substance in English and is normally uncountable, so it is just ‘serum.’  Only if a particular serum sample is specified in some way, as in ‘the serum from that patient,’ does it acquire an article.  I’ve noticed that Europeans who want to generalize about very different types of serum will sometimes reach back to medical Latin and use the plural ‘sera.’ This is acceptable in English, though not common in the English-speaking world.  If we re-translated the sample sentence to bring it closer to the original as ‘Serology is the study of sera and of the variations and modifications in their properties during the development of diseases,’ ‘sera’ still wouldn’t have a ‘the’ in front of it.  It is a category that is being referred to in its entirety, and is treated as uncountable even though it is plural, just like the fish in ‘I study fish’ or the cats in ‘She loved cats.’ In the sample sentence, ‘diseases’ is also a whole category and thus gets no article in English.  On the other hand, the ‘variations’ mentioned in the sentence are the particular variations that serum samples may show as diseases progress over time.  That abstract noun therefore keeps the article ‘the’ in English.  So does ‘development,’ where the sentence implies that the particular courses of development of various diseases will be studied. 

 

Now you can see what our poor Romance language speakers are up against with ‘le maudit Anglais,’ ‘the cursèd English’ – oh, wait a moment, did I make a mistake there?  Yes!  The word ‘English,’ indicating the English language, is a ‘proper noun,’ a name for something.  It was originally an adjective, but became redeployed as a name. We can’t say ‘the English,’ referring to the language, any more than we can say ‘the George,’ referring to George. I’d need to translate ‘le maudit Anglais,’ as ‘the cursèd English language,’ turning ‘English’ back into an adjective; or I must translate it as the medieval-looking phrase ‘Accursèd English.’

 

To reduce all this information to take-home items, and to solve other problems for international authors, I’ve made up a recipe for dealing with English articles.  It contains some technical looking words, but people who do technical writing aren’t afraid of technical words.  It’s the grammar they fear.  Or at least, given the number of mistakes they make, it’s the grammar they ought to fear. 

 

1. If you get an expression that makes sense when you insert the words ‘singular representative’ in front of a noun, use ‘a’ or ‘an.’

 

‘I want to buy a fish.’  ‘I want to buy a (singular representative) fish’

 

Suzanne is a girl.  Suzanne is a (singular representative) girl. 

 

This doesn’t work for all cases of ‘a/an,’ because sometimes, the speaker has one exact item in mind, not just a fungible (functionally interchangeable) ‘representative.’  He or she, however, is not telling you enough details about the item to allow it to be identified.  In such cases, the phrase ‘singular deliberately unspecified’ can be used to confirm valid uses of ‘a’ or ‘an.’ 

 

I’m going to see a very special man. I’m going to see a (singular deliberately unspecified) very special man. 

 

2. If you get an expression that makes sense when you insert the words ‘specific, pointed-to’ in front of a noun – meaning that the noun refers to a defined, known item could be physically pointed to or explicitly abstractly indicated – then use ‘the.’

 

I am going to the dance.   I am going to the (specific, pointed-to) dance.  (I know what dance I am going to and, unless I still need to get directions, I could point out its location on a map if you don’t know where it is already). 

 

He is off to the dance those kids are having somewhere.  He is off to the (specific, pointed-to) dance those kids are having somewhere.  (There is a particular, exact dance he is going to; I don’t know where it is but those kids do.)

 

I am going through the changes older people go through.  I am going through the (specific, pointed-to) changes older people go through.  (I generally know what the changes are and I think you do, too, even if we may not remember all the details.)

 

Later documents suggest it was a mission to arrange a marriage between the future King Richard II and a French princess.  Later documents suggest it was a (singular representative) mission to arrange a (singular representative) marriage between the (specific, pointed-to) future King Richard II and a (singular representative or, more likely, deliberately unspecified) French princess.

 

‘Serology is the (specific, pointed-to) study of serum and of the (specific, pointed-to) variations and modifications in its properties during the (specific, pointed-to) development of diseases.’

 

An uncommon, special use of ‘the’ indicates specified whole categories that are treated in the old-fashioned style as what philosophers might call ‘typological types.’  A ‘type,’ in the typological sense, is something grander and more fundamental than anything suggested by the everyday word ‘type,’ as seen in ‘I really like this type of pencil-eraser.’ That usage merely means a ‘kind.’  A typological type is more like an ideal philosopher’s model that can be used as the symbol for all the objects in a category.  An example of this usage is ‘The horse is the finest animal of them all.’  Another is, ‘The family is the basic unit of society.’ ‘No animal is more protective of its young than the elephant.’ In cases where ‘the’ is used in connection with a typological type, the phrase ‘specific, pointed-to’ doesn’t work as an indicator of appropriate usage.  You can use, instead, ‘pointed-to whole category.’ That’s slightly inaccurate, but it’s perhaps easier to understand than the true heart of the matter, which is ‘specific typological type.’  Feel free to use the second one if you’re comfortable with it. 

 

3. If a noun is a bulk substance or an abstract state, no article is used. If, however, the bulk substance or abstract state is somehow divided up into portions or shares, it can be assigned articles as specified in parts 1 and 2.  If you get an expression that makes sense when you insert (an unspecified measure of the general category) in front of a noun, use no article.

 

I was eating cake (bulk substance).  I was eating (an unspecified measure of the general category) cake.  Contrast ‘I was eating a (singular representative) cake (a single object composed of the substance ‘cake’).  I was eating the (specific, pointed-to) cake (I was either eating a particular, single cake, or, or I was eating the bulk substance ‘cake’ as singled out in contrast to an alternative type of food. ‘Hey, I saw you eating up all the pie.’ ‘Go away, I wasn’t even eating the pie, I was eating the cake.’)

 

I was experiencing happiness (abstract state).  I was experiencing (an unspecified measure of the general category) happiness. I was feeling a (singular representative) happiness I’d never felt before.  We were feeling the (specific, pointed-to) happiness that newly married couples are famous for experiencing.

 

4. If a noun is a whole category, phenomenon or concept, it is generally uncountable and is treated very similarly to a bulk substance. If you get an expression that makes sense when you insert (the general category, phenomenon or concept) in front of a noun, or can contract this phrase to suit the noun that is being described (i.e., ‘the general category,’ ‘the general phenomenon,’ ‘the general concept’) then use no article.

 

I like (the general category) horses. 

 

‘(The general category) Politicians are susceptible to (the general concept) corruption.’

 

Some illustrative examples for all my guidelines are given below.  Many of them emphasize the range of acceptable personal choices that can be made in the orthodox use of English articles.  Intact sentences are shown first, and then the analysis is given below. 

 

Serendipity is defined as the tendency to experience unusually high levels of good luck. 

 

(The general concept) Serendipity is defined as the (specific pointed-to) tendency to experience (the general phenomenon) unusually high levels of (the general concept) good luck. 

 

Serendipity is defined as a tendency to experience unusually high levels of good luck. 

 

(The general concept) Serendipity is defined as a (singular representative) tendency to experience (the general phenomenon) unusually high levels of (the general concept) good luck. 

 

Serology is the study of serum and of the variations and modifications in its properties during the development of diseases.

 

‘(The general concept) Serology is the (specific, pointed-to) study of (the general phenomenon) serum and of the (specific, pointed-to) variations and modifications in its properties during the (specific, pointed-to) development of (the general category) diseases.’

 

A typical Mongolian is likely to be expert at the care and feeding of the horse.

 

A (singular representative) typical Mongolian is likely to be expert at the (specific pointed-to [abstract]) care and feeding of the (specific typological type) horse.

 

A typical Mongolian is likely to be expert at horse care.

 

A (singular representative) typical Mongolian is likely to be expert at (the general phenomenon) horse care.

 

The Mongolian is likely to be an expert in the care and feeding of horses.

 

The (specific typological type) Mongolian is likely to be a(n) (singular representative) expert in the (specific, pointed-to) care and feeding of (the general category) horses.

 

The typical Mongolian family group we met in Kharkhorin was dependent for transportation on the horses they owned. 

 

The (specific, pointed-to) typical Mongolian family group we met in (proper name) Kharkhorin was dependent for (the general concept) transportation on the (specific, pointed-to) horses they owned. 

 

I felt anger rising in my heart when I realized the diamond was a fake.

 

I felt (an unspecified measure of the general category) anger rising in my heart when I realized the (specific, pointed-to) diamond was a (singular representative) fake.

 

I felt the anger rising in my heart again as I looked at the fake diamond.

 

I felt the (specific, pointed-to) anger rising in my heart again as I looked at the (specific, pointed-to) fake diamond.

 

The journal printed papers about a very technical topic, diseases caused by microscopic fungi in humans and animals.

 

The (specific, pointed-to) journal printed (the general category) papers about a (singular representative) very technical topic, (the general category) diseases caused by (the general category) microscopic fungi in (the general category) humans and (the general category) animals.

 

Physics is a discipline that requires years of training. 

 

(The general category) Physics is a (singular representative) discipline that requires (an unspecified measure of the general category) years of (the general phenomenon) training. 

 

One final note about articles is that ‘a/an,’ can have a sort of plural in ‘some.’  ‘I’m going to buy a fish’ transforms, when the person plans to buy multiple fish, to ‘I’m going to buy some fish.’  Meanwhile, ‘some’ can also be used to indicate the theoretical dividing-up of bulk substances and abstract states into fractional pieces.  Someone who used to say ‘I like to eat cake’ may begin to say, once they go on a diet, ‘I like to eat some cake from time to time.’ A teen who is getting out of school for the entire summer may think ‘Now I’m going to experience happiness!’  Later, during the school year, as he goes out on a Sunday to ride roller coasters at the amusement park, he may think, keeping in mind that he has to go back to school tomorrow, ‘Now I’m going to experience some happiness!’ 

 

I would say that you may have outgrown horror movies when, instead of experiencing fear, or experiencing moments of fear, you only experience some moments of fear. 

 

I don’t think I need to spend much time talking about ‘some,’ though, since I’ve never known an author to have trouble with it.  It’s only when ‘a,’ ‘an’ and ‘the’ need to be correctly placed that the errors start popping up in articles written in second-language English.  I hope I’ve helped cut their number down. 

 

The (specific typological type) job of (the general concept) journal editor would become much easier if the (specific, pointed-to) constant rain of (the general concept) misplaced article words in the (specific, pointed-to) text could give (an unspecified measure of the general concept) way to the (specific pointed-to [abstract, metaphorical]) brilliant sunshine of (the general concept) understanding. 

 

The job of journal editor would become much easier if the constant rain of misplaced article words in the text could give way to the brilliant sunshine of understanding. 

 

Ah, English, English.  You’ve tried so hard to clarify your grammar, but I think it’s going to be a while yet before we’ll need sunblock. 

 

Chapter 4 --> https://justpaste.it/68yh8