Roses are Rutilant?

Twelve highlanders and a bagpipe make a rebellion.
-Scottish Proverb

Yesterday, I encountered the same new word twice. A placemat at a diner asked, "The Scots are more rutilant than any other nation. What does that mean?" Later while reading a geology book it described the rocks of the Triassic period as particularly rutilant.

Rutilant means bright red.

According to Wikipedia, red hair is a recessive trait, you must inherit it from both parents. Red hair is the rarest natural hair color in humans at 1 to 2% of the world population. It's more common in Western or Northern Europe with 2-6% and most common in Scotland at 13% with another 40% of the Scots carrying the gene recessively. People with red hair usually have fair skin and freckles; the fair skin makes it easier to make vitamin D from weak northern sunlight but increases the risk of skin cancer under intense sun.

The Triassic period gave rise to the dinosaurs and first mammals. It's named after Triad for the three rock layers created during this period. The first layer of rocks formed during the Early Triassic are an intense red all the way through and can be seen throughout the world.

Bottom Line

You're never too old to learn new worlds. Not sure I'll ever use rutilant but it's nice to know what it means.

Here's a bonus word that sounds a bit similar but is very different:

red·o·lent/ˈredl-ənt/ Adjective
1.Strongly reminiscent of something: "names redolent of history and tradition".
2.Strongly smelling of something: "the church was old, dark, and redolent of incense".

Can't think of a good insult thou droning elf-skinned malt-worm?

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
- Shakespeare's Macbeth

Have you ever needed a really great insult and nothing came to mind. Well worry no more.

TastefullyOffensive.com offers the following Shakespeare Insult Kit  

If I look at the bottom of the chart I might come up with, Thou yeasty toad-spotted varlot!

Bottom Line

While the chart above is very clever and funny, personally I don't recommend insults. They can wound very deeply and permanently scar a relationship with a friend or relative. When used with strangers you're flirting with violence and inviting a fight. (Unless that is, you use a Shakespearean insult, in which case you'll most likely leave your target very confused).

When the ancient Greeks studied the art of debate and rhetoric they gave a name to verbal attacks against an individual - "Ad hominem". A person might argue, Don't believe what X says because he's an idiot. It's a reputation attack which ignores the topic under debate and proves nothing. Calling a person an idiot, or stupid, or one of the Shakespearean insults above does not win anything - it just hurts.

Who said it? God or Shakespeare?

Instead of one quote today I offer 17 quotes. Your task is to decide the source for each - the Bible or Shakespeare?

1.) Neither a borrower nor a lender be.
2.) Eat, drink and be merry.
3.) Nothing but skin and bones.
4.) To thine own self be true.
5.) Practice what you preach.
6.) The apple of my eye.
7.) You have to be cruel to be kind.
8.) Wear your heart on your sleeve.
9.) The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
10.) By the sweat of your brow
11.) How the mighty have fallen!
12.) Forgive and forget.
13.) You can’t have too much of a good thing.
14.) He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
15.) Forever and a day.
16.) I escaped by the skin of my teeth.
17.) Like mother, like daughter.
Answers below.

Yesterday I mentioned things learned in High School like Cooking and Typing. But what high school student has not had to suffer Shakespeare; usually a different play each year: Romeo & Juliette, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, etc. Why do we spend so much time on Shakespeare? A 20-year-old girl named Becky from London offers a clue. She posted a page from her notebook on Tumblr which got featured on the English Muse blog, and went viral....

Shakespeare not only wrote great stories that are performed 400 years later, but he had a flair for inventing phrases that remain popular and in common usage. Few English authors can make this claim. (See Erasmus of Rotterdam and John Heywood for two other profligate quote makes who are not as well known as they should be.)

Bottom Line

Answers:

1.) Shakespeare. "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." Hamlet. Act i. Sc. 3.

2.) Bible. "Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry" Luke 12:19

3.) Bible. "All my intimate friends detest me; those I love have turned against me. I am nothing but skin and bones." Job 19:19-20

4.) Shakespeare. "This above all: to thine own self be true" Hamlet. Act i. Sc. 3.

5.) Bible. "They do not practice what they preach" Matthew 23:3

6.) Bible. "Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings" Psalm 17:8

7.) Shakespeare. "I must be cruel, only to be kind" Hamlet. Act iii. Sc. 4.

8.) Shakespeare. "I will wear my heart upon my sleeve" Othello. Act i. Sc. 1.

9.) Bible. "But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret." Matthew 6:3

10.) Bible. "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return. Genesis 3:19

11.) Bible. "How the mighty have fallen!" 2 Samuel 1:19

12.) Shakespeare. "Pray you now, forget and forgive." King Lear, Act iv. Sc. 7

13.) Shakespeare. "Can one desire too much of a good thing?" As You Like It. Act iv. Sc. 1.

14.) Bible. Watch out for false prophets. "They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves." Matthew 7:15

15.) Shakespeare. "For ever and a day." As You Like It. Act iv. Sc. 1.

16.) Bible. "All my intimate friends detest me; those I love have turned against me. I am nothing but skin and bones; I have escaped with only the skin of my teeth." Job 19:19-20

17.) Bible. "'Everyone who quotes proverbs will quote this proverb about you: 'Like mother, like daughter.' " Ezekiel 16:4

Heather at "HeresWhatsLeft" provided the answers and offers this conclusion:

"So, how did you do? Not so good? If it makes you feel any better, the King James version of the Bible came out about 7 years after Shakespeare died. So they're basically written in the same vernacular, meaning that for phrases with words like "thine" it can be easy to get confused."

10 Misunderstood Words

Riddle: Do Canadians recognize July the 4th?
Answer: at bottom of blog

Here's a clever graphic from Grammar.net.

Bottom Line

How many of these words have you used incorrectly?

Answer to Riddle

Canada recognizes all the days in the month of July.
Americans often say July 4th when they should be saying Independence Day.

The Rise of "Logical Punctuation".

“In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the
score.”
-Ralph Richardson (English actor)

Early this year I posted about Punctuation with Quotations in which I discussed the American rules of punctuating quotations. I'd like to revisit the topic since Slate.com claims the "punctuation paradigm is shifting".

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you'll find in Slate, [...] —almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines.

But people are realizing that the American rules are unnatural. A sentence ends with a period, not period-quote mark. The British style puts punctuation outside of quotes and it is beginning to dominate on message boards, blogs, tweets, etc. And no wonder. Since at least the 1960s a common name for the British style has been "logical punctuation."

According to Slate,

If it seems hard or even impossible to defend the American way on the merits, that's probably because it emerged from aesthetic, not logical, considerations. According to Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA [Modern Language Association], it was instituted in the early days of the Republic in order "to improve the appearance of the text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space)."

Bottom Line

Personally as one who favors logic, I'll stop feeling guilty about following the British Style.

P.S.
Happy Birthday to my Sister!

Lateral Thinking

Vizzini: He didn't fall? INCONCEIVABLE.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
- from the book/movie The Princess Bride

Have you every noticed how different puzzles test different skills? I'm pretty good at jig-saw puzzles (pattern matching) and logical puzzles like Sudoku (math/logic). I don't like Rubiks's cube (memorization of sequences?).  Then there's a type of puzzle I love for it's cleverness, a way of thinking that is so different than my math/computer skills. These are out-of-the-box or "Lateral" thinking puzzles.

I often find that I over calculate and over complicate when the solution is actually quite simple. In college I got a C on a math assignment where I turned in 5 or 6 pages of work. A friend got an A. I asked to see his solutions which turned out to be a single page, front and back. I realized then that I was missing the big picture (and that more was not better).

Recently I volunteered to help move a collection of canned food that was piled up on a table at church. I grabbed serveal cans and recruited others to help carry. Someone more clever than I teamed up with a second person to carry the entire table with food to where it needed to go.

How are you at finding simple solutions? Here are some examples of Lateral Thinking puzzles from http://www.wilk4.com/humor/humore14.htm

1.  There is a man who lives on the top floor of a very tall building. Everyday he gets the elevator down to the ground floor to leave the building to go to work. Upon returning from work though, he can only travel half way up in the lift and has to walk the rest of the way unless it's raining!

2. A man and his son are in a car accident. The father dies on the scene, but the child is rushed to the hospital. When he arrives the surgeon says, "I can't operate on this boy, he is my son! " How can this be?

3. A man is wearing black. Black shoes, socks, trousers, coat, gloves and ski mask. He is walking down a back street with all the street lamps off. A black car is coming towards him with its light off but somehow manages to stop in time. How did the driver see the man?

6. A man went to a party and drank some of the punch. He then left early. Everyone else at the party who drank the punch subsequently died of poisoning. Why did the man not die?

7. A man died and went to Heaven. There were thousands of other people there. They were all naked and all looked as they did at the age of 21. He looked around to see if there was anyone he recognized. He saw a couple and he knew immediately that they were Adam and Eve. How did he know?

8. A woman had two sons who were born on the same hour of the same day of the same year. But they were not twins. How could this be so?

9. A man walks into a bar and asks the barman for a glass of water. The barman pulls out a gun and points it at the man. The man says 'Thank you' and walks out.

10. A murderer is condemned to death. He has to choose between three rooms. The first is full of raging fires, the second is full of assassins with loaded guns, and the third is full of lions that haven't eaten in 3 years. Which room is safest for him?

11. A woman shoots her husband. Then she holds him under water for over 5 minutes. Finally, she hangs him. But 5 minutes later they both go out together and enjoy a wonderful dinner together. How can this be?

12. There are two plastic jugs filled with water. How could you put all of this water into a barrel, without using the jugs or any dividers, and still tell which water came from which jug?

14. Can you name three consecutive days without using the words Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday? (or day names in any other language)

15. This is an unusual paragraph. I'm curious how quickly you can find out what is so unusual about it. It looks so plain you would think nothing was wrong with it. In fact, nothing is wrong with it! It is unusual though. Study it, and think about it, but you still may not find anything odd. But if you work at it a bit, you might find out.

Bottom Line

The answers can be found at http://www.wilk4.com/humor/humore14.htm
But don't peak until you've given it some thought!

P.S.
The Princess Bride is a delightful book/movie full of witty quotes that make you think.

Westley: I told you I would always come for you. Why didn't you wait for me?
Buttercup: Well... you were dead.

------------

[In the sail boat]
Inigo Montoya: He's right on top of us. I wonder if he is using the same wind we are using.

------------

Inigo Montoya: You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kill you.
Man in Black: You seem a decent fellow. I hate to die.

------------

[On entering the fire swamp of inescable death]
Buttercup: We'll never survive.
Westley: Nonsense. You're only saying that because no one ever has.

------------

Fezzik: Why do you wear a mask? Were you burned by acid, or something like that?
Man in Black: Oh no, it's just that they're terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.

Punctuation with Quotations

“Quotes are nothing but inspiration for the uninspired.”

-Richard Kemph

Recently I helped a friend's daughter proofread her English assignment. One mistake she made frequently was the placement (or lack thereof) of commas near quotation marks. Unfortunately the US follows horrible rules for punctuating quotations: all trailing marks go INSIDE the quote. Personally I think this corrupts the quote and the British agree. In England the final period goes outside the quote. But since I'm an American I should know and follow the American rules.

Aside: my wife enrolled in a British gemology course by correspondance. When she mailed in her assignments, they came back marked-up and graded down for not following the British rules of grammar and spelling (like colour). She quit the course.

Now back to the American rules. A great site is The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation. The author lists many rules with great examples. I'll summarize these and rules I've found elsewhere.

1. Periods and trailing commas always go inside quotation marks and single quotes
I added the word "trailing" to commas because we write:  He said, "Don't touch that!" instead of: He said ", Don't touch that!"  This rule puts the exclamation mark inside the quote above and the comma inside this quote: "I hate it when they grade me using British rules," she said.

There are some exceptions (see rule 2 for '?'.)
If the quoted item is a single letter or number, the period and commas go outside.

Look for the buried treasure where the map is marked with a large "X".

Her grade was an "F".

On this test, the highest score is a "1", not a "10".

2. Be logical with question marks and quotes.
This is the only time the US rules can be said to follow a "logic." If the quote is a question the '?' goes inside. He said, "Where am I?"
But if the quote is a statement and the sentence containing it is a question, then the '?' goes outside.
Did he actually say, "I am the walrus"?
If the quote AND the sentence are both questions, use only one '?' and put it inside the quote mark.
Are you sure he said, "Where am I?"

3. Capitalize the start of a direct quote, even in the middle of a sentence.
They said, "She said, 'He had to go.'" See how She and He are capitalized. Only the start of a quote is capitalized; for example "as" is lower cased in "I will in a minute," he replied, "as soon as I finish this chapter."

4. [Wikipedia Style Manual] If an entire sentence is quoted in such a way that it becomes a grammatical part of the larger sentence, the first letter loses its capitalization
It turned out to be true that "a penny saved is a penny earned."

5. Use single quotes when quoting a quote.
See the example in #3 above.

6. Offset direct quotes with commas
No one mentions this rule explicitly. Notice the commas in Gary says, "Pay attention." and "Grrr," said the monster.

There are special cases:

First, when the quote is not a direct quote we drop the quote marks and the comma. She said that she hates men.

Second, when a quote is introduced with 'that' the comma is omitted,  She said that "All men are pigs."

Third, consider this example from http://grammartips.homestead.com/inside.html

"Diane, put the book down and go outside" was what her mother said, but what Diane heard was "Blah blah blah" or something even less meaningful.

I'd put a comma after "outside." The "blah blah" is not a direct quote, instead it's quoted for emphasis and not set off by commas.

Bottom Line

I tried to keep the rules few and simple but the English language is anything but simple. If you just remember that trailing punctuation goes INSIDE the quotes you'll be miles ahead of most people.  (And please don't pick on me when I don't follow this awful rule.)

According to grammartip.homestead.com cited above,

When type was handset, a period or comma outside of quotation marks at the end of a sentence tended to get knocked out of position, so the printers tucked the little devils inside the quotation marks to keep them safe and out of trouble.  But apparently only American printers were more attached to convenience than logic, since British printers continued to risk the misalignment of their periods and commas.

Early Modern English

Hamlet: Madam, how like you this play?
Queen: The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
- Hamlet Act 3

The language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible are now called Early Modern English. It begins in 1470 with the Chancery Standard and extends to 1650 when Oliver Cromwell overthrew the monarchy in the English Civil War.

You may recall from yesterday’s post that during the French occupation, English was “unregulated” and dialects flourished. But slowly English became respectable again and by the late 1300s leading writers like Chaucer published in the native tongue (with many French & Latin imported words). During the reign of King Henry V (1413 to 1422) the chancery (government officials) were commanded to use English rather than Anglo-Norman or Latin. An official printer of government documents, William Caxton, selected the London dialect as the standard and he also standardized spellings for the first time. Prior to this (and even as late as the 1600-1700s) most people spelled phonetically; House was “Hus” in Old English and “Hows” in Middle English.

Sadly some official word spellings were based upon presumed etymological origins instead of actual usage. “Doutt” became “doubt” based upon the Latin ‘dubitare’. “dett” became “debt” from the Latin ‘debitum’. The french “voir dit” and “parfait” were changed to ‘verdict’ and ‘perfect’ to look more Latin. Early Modern also included some spelling confusion as the alphabet was still in flux: u and v were considered the same (‘v’ to start words, ‘u’ used inside words), ‘i’ and ‘j’ were interchangeable, silent ‘e’ could be added anywhere (“manne” for “man”), “Th” and “Y” were interchangeable at the start of words (giving us “Ye Olde Shoppe”).

The 1400’s also saw the start of a linguistic mystery – The Great Vowel Shift. If an English speaker tries to spell words for a Spanish speaker (or any other Latin based language) confusion abounds. What we call “A” (as in hay) is spelled “e” in Spanish. What we call “E” (as in bee) is spelled “i” in Spanish. There were changes also in the O and U sounds. Theories abound but no one knows exactly why this happened or why some words were immune. The “ea” family of break, steak, great, and yea did not shift. Nor did the word “father”.

Foreign words aside, the oddity of English spelling is a combination of the Chancery Standard and the Great Vowel Shift. The Chancery Standard locked down official spelling regardless of how the words were actually spoken. As local pronunciation shifted and spelling remained the same, English was forced to assign new pronunciation to old vowels. Hence “be” is now “bee” not “bay”, “feet” was once pronounced as “fate”, and “wipe” was once spoken as “weep”.

The pronouns in Early Modern were much the same as today with three exceptions.

• “Thee” and “thou” was used as the informal, personal “you.” (‘You’ was the formal version.) Over centuries the informal “thee” declined in usage and now survives only in religious discourse. (Ironically “thee” is now considered formal usage!)
• ‘My’ and ‘thy’ became ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ before vowels just as ‘a’ becomes ‘an’; so “mine eyes” and “thine uncle”.
• The “arbitrary” gender of words began to be replaced with a practical gender. In Old English (and modern German) a wife “wif” was the neuter (it) gender, a young maiden was feminine. With Early Modern ‘he’ and ‘her’ more accurately reflected the gender of people and objects became “it”. The term “its” was being used for the first time (it appears once in the KJV Bible). But the old system faded slowly; in “The Merchant of Venice” Shakespeare wrote “How far that little candle throws his light”. Even today we still refer to ships as “she” and sometimes personify objects.

The word order of Early Modern settled into the patterns we use today. In Old English you could put words in any order since noun endings indicated the subject from the object from the dative (possessive). When the case endings started disappearing, Middle English adopted the subject/verb/object order like “I hit the ball” for declarative sentences. But Middle English question sentences were different, “Hit I the ball?” This changed during Early Modern when the Old English verb ‘do’ (I did this) was given extra work:

• Changing the way we phrase questions, “Do I hit the ball?”
• As an answer shortcut for verbs used in a question, “Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?”, “I do” (or “I will”) instead of “I do take”.

Early Modern also saw the transition of modal verbs, “shall”, “may”, “will”, etc. In Middle English (and modern German) the modals are transitive: “I can music” meant I have skill/learning/knowledge in music, “I will it” meant I want it or I shall use my force of will to make it so. Today the modals are intransitive (I can play music) and provide yet more ways to form question sentences, “Will you sit?”, “Shall I pay?.” The modals were co-opted to represent the subjunctive (counterfactural) case from Latin: “I only she would love me.”
Another verb change is a new way to indicate perfect tenses, “I have been waiting”, “I had been waiting” and “I am going to be waiting”. The “-ing” of verbs was firmly established in Early Modern. It started in the south in Middle English and spread north to replace “ende” and “ande” endings: lovande vs loving.

The most recognized verb difference in Early Modern is the usage of –(e)st for second person informal singular verbs and –(e)th for third person singular. So “I take” but “thou takest” and “he taketh”. You may also see some strong verbs that have not yet completed the Great Vowel Shift as in “Jesus spake unto the people.”

In the last posting I touched upon the growth of the English vocabulary via French and Latin. In Early Modern the language was on steroids. Some writers invented new words from Greek and Latin roots for poetic or scholarly effect. These are called “inkhorn terms” having sprung from the ink well of the writer. Examples include allurement, anachronism, dexterous, and mediate. Another source of new words was thru global trade, war, and New World exploration as England became a world class sea power. New words include:

• French: (New World) tomato, (war) alloy, duel, equip, volunteer, bombast, explore
• Spain: (New World) anchovy, banana, cannibal, cocoa, maize, potato, tobacco, (war) embargo, armada
• Italy: (Trade & Travel) balcony, granite, stanza, violin, volcano
• Dutch: (Sea Trade) smuggler, jib, schooner, reef, walrus, blunderbuss, tattoo, knapsack
• Arabic: sash, hashish, sherbet, sofa
• Turkish: coffee, kiosk, caftan
• Chinese: ketchup
• African: zebra
• North American Indians: raccoon, moose, skunk, hickory, totem, canoe

Early Modern was a Scientific Golden Age and new words were needed for discoveries in Natural Science, Match, and Philosophy: vertebra, torpor, specimen, lens, cylinder, prism, calculus, dogma, critic, propaganda. It was also a Golden Age of English poetry and plays – the meaning of many words were tweaked. “Ardent” and “flagrant” meant “on fire” (literally) but poets could imagine the heart on fire with ardent passion. Shakespeare described harts (i.e. deer) spanieling the hunter (i.e. following like a Spaniel dog).

Bottom Line

It is to English’s credit that we allow the flexibility of turning verbs into nouns, nouns into adjectives, etc; that we are rich in tenses and verb cases; that we can invent words on the fly.

Middle English

“Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote
the droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote”
– opening lines of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

This is part 2 of 3 from my current commuting CD, History of the English Language by Professor Seth Lerer for the Teaching Company.

In 1066 AD England was defeated by the Norman (French) William the Conqueror. For the next 300-400 years French was the official language of British politics and the court. During this same period the language of scholarship was Latin. So an educated Englishman needed to be trilingual in English, French and Latin. Today we call this time period “Middle English” with an end date of 1470 when the Chancery established an English standard for political documents.

The trilingual Middle Ages has made English rich in synonyms:

• kingly (Old English)
• royal (French)
• regal (Latin)

The impact of French and Latin upon modern English is immense. As one example consider the grammatical rule against split infinitives. Some English teachers would require Star Trek to rephrase “To boldly go” as “To go boldly.” The rule was an attempt by Renaissance scholars to impose Latin grammar on English. Latin infinitive verbs, like “to go”, are one word and so impossible to split with an adverb.

According to Wikipedia, Joseph M. Williams in Origins of the English Language surveyed 10,000 words taken from several thousand business-letters and produced these statistics for the origins of our words:

• French: 41%
• "Native" English: 33%
• Latin: 15%
• Old Norse: 2%
• Dutch: 1%
• Other: 10%

Some studies show the influence of Latin as high as 29%. For centuries, when scientists added new words to English, they often used Latin and Greek roots like “telescope”. Modern examples include telephone and television.

The Middle English period established some interesting word patterns dividing the rich and poor. When we eat meat, the name of the animal (raised by peasants) is Old English while the name of the meat (eaten by the noble) is of Norman origin: pig/pork, cow/beef, deer/venison and sheep/mutton. The peasants lived in a English “hus” (house) while the nobles lived in a French “mansion”. Our words for government and law are mostly from the French: attorney, bailiff, baron, city, conservative, countess, county, damage, duchess, duke, empire, executive, felony, govern, judicial, jury, justice, legislative, liberal, marriage, nobility, parliament, perjury, petty, prince, prison, regal, representative, republic, royal, senator, sovereign, state, traitor, viscount.

Originally all vowels and consonants were pronounced ('knight' was pronounced /kniçt/) but by Chaucer's time (late 1300s) the final 'e' had become silent in normal speech but could optionally be pronounced in verse as the meter required. The rise of “silent” letters and elimination of the complex system of inflected endings from Old English has led some to call Middle English a "creole" language. When speakers of two different languages (English/French) need to communicate with one another, fancy inflections are ignored and rules simplified.

Another interesting aspect of Middle English is the diversity and extremity of dialects. During late Old English, the West Saxony dialect was made the “standard” by royalty. In 1470 the government printing office, the Chancery, established London English as the standard. But in between during the Middle English period, royalty ignored English and no standards were set. Dialects separated the people. The Northumbrians (with a Norse dialect) were viewed by the south as ill-educated peasants while the Northumbrians considered the Londoners as pompous French imitators.

Bottom Line

Scholars in the 1500s and 1600s would rant about the loss of purity in the English native tongue but by that time the battle was lost. Three plus centuries of French and Latin had made Middle English a polyglot that continues to the present. Unlike France, neither the UK nor the US have language officials to control and restrict new additions to the language. Shakespeare alone may have added 6000 words to our language.

Linguists argue over the “size” of the English language. How do you count the words? Do we count “fiancé” which is clearly French? Do we count cat and cats as one word family or two words? Eat/ate, walk/walked, etc? One study counted 54,000 word families in the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1963). Claims of individual word-counts range from 400,000 to two million.

Regardless of its size, English is richer for its diversity of word origins.

Old English

"Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonumSi þin nama gehalgod" - Old English for "Our
Father who art in Heaven, Hallowed by Thy Name"

My latest commuting CD has been the History of the English Language by Professor Seth Lerer for the Teaching Company. I’ve always been interested in words – my MS in Mathematics included a minor in Linguistics. So I’ll take a pause from end of the world doomsday scenarios, moden warfare, disturbing political trends, a depressed economy, and emergency preparedness to discuss the English language we know and love.

As early as 1583 scholars noticed that India and Europe shared some common sounding words: devah/dio "God", sarpah/serpe "serpent", sapta/sette "seven", asta/otto "eight", nava/nove "nine"). Since that time linguists have traced 449 languages and dialects from Europe, the Iranian plateau, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent to a theoretical ancestor language called Indo-European used by people who lived around the Black Sea before 2500 BC.
Perhaps you’ve wondered who invented the irregular (strong) verbs we use like run/ran, bring/brought, sing/sang, etc? Credit goes to the ancient Indo-Europeans who indicated the tense of verbs (future/past/other) by changing the root vowel of the verb. All new verbs added to English have been “weak” verbs that take and “ed” for past tense like talk/talked.

Consider another oddity of English – the overlap of the letters k, c, and s. Sometimes c is pronounced like k and sometimes like the soft s. Around 2500 BC migrations split the future Europeans (West) from the Slavs/Indians/Asians (East). This resulted in a language split called the Satem-Centum Isogloss after the East-West words for 100. Eastern speakers used “soft” sounds for c (Satem=100). Western speakers used the “hard” c (Centum=100, pronounced Kentum). Today we say, “Hail Cesear” with a soft c but the Romans actually pronounced it more like Kaser. The German word for emperor, Kaiser, is close to the original Latin.

Around 1000 BC the Celts arrived in England. Their language is sometimes called Brythonic->Brittonic->British. In 449 AD, the Anglo-Saxons-Jutes invaded England and gave the island their name (Angles -> Aenglaland -> England). The Angles were a Germanic tribe from the "angle" or corner of land in present-day Schleswig-Holstein. These German/Danes replaced the Celtic people quite ruthlessly and established what we call “Old English” as read in Beowulf. Few Celtic words survived into English; e.g. Avon (river), hubbub, peat, bucket, and crock. Scholars think Celtic had a bigger lexigraphical impact giving English two verb formations not found in Europe.

1. Use of auxiliary verbs like “do” and “be”: in German the only way to say “I love” is “Ich liebe” while English allows variants like “I am loving” and “I do love”.
2. Europeans have fixed expressions for asking if one can contradict the truth of a statement, namely “nicht wahr?” (German) and “n'est-ce pas?” (French). English is more flexible with “won’t he?”, “isn’t she?”, “cann’t they”, “aren’t I?” and so on.

Before we say goodbye to the Germanic tribes and Danes, there are a few more contributions to note. Old English quickly broke up into regional dialects with the Jutes in Kent, the Angles in Northumbria and the Saxons in the south. During the 9th century AD, Northumbria was devestated by frequent Viking invasions. Some raiders decided to stay and contributed words with hard g’s to the northern dialect: muggy, ugly, anger, get, give, leg, soggy, and egg. A tale is told in the late 1400’s of two Northumbrian merchants stopping in Kent to buy “eggs” and the famer’s wife had no idea what they meant.

Other Old Norse words include sky, cake, skin, window, husband, fellow, skill, flat, odd, take, raise, call, and die. We can thank the Danes for our personal pronouns of they, their, and them. We can also credit the Norse Gods for naming many days of week: Odin’s Day = Wodin = Wednesday, Thor’s Day = Thursday, Freya’s Day = Friday, Tyr’s Day = Tuesday. (Of the remaining days, one is Latin, Saturn’s Day = Saturday, and the other two are named for the Sun=Sunday and Moon=Monday.)

Many Old English words and their Old Norse counterparts competed vigorously with each other for supremacy in the language. In some cases both words survived: anger/wrath, nay/no, fro/from, raise/rear, bask/bathe, skill/craft, skin/hide, dike/ditch, skirt/shirt, scatter/shatter, and skip/shift. The Danes favored a hard “sk” while the English preferred a soft “sh” or “ch”. Ironically a later language shift would reverse the drift and push soft “ch” words in English to hard ‘k” like Church > Kirk.

Another influence on Old English was Latin. Latin reached Britannia in two ways – via the Roman occupation AD 43 to 410 and via the Catholic Church. Romans brought new foods and new engineering skills and the words to describe them: street, fort, kitchen, kettle, cup, cheese, pea, peach and wine. Christian missionaries introduced religious words like angel, bishop, abbot, martyr, and candle.

Bottom Line
While fewer than 5,000 Old English words remain unchanged and in common use today, these constitute the basic building blocks of our language. They include the everyday household words, most parts of the body, as well as the numerous pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs that hold the language together. Most of our “dirty” & profane words date back to Old English. After France conquered England in 1066, the nobility spoke primarily French and Latin for several centuries. King Henry IV, who ascended the throne in 1399, was the first King since the Norman Conquest whose mother tongue was English. So from 1066 thru the 1300s English was looked down upon as the language of the coarse and “vulgar” peasant.