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A Few 'Language Miniatures'

Understand You Not These Words?

What 400 years can do in a language

The first thing that came to mind might well be change in sound, like sounds we stopped pronouncing centuries ago but that still survive in spellings such as the 'k' in know or the 'gh' in through. Or that have been replaced by another sound: we still spell laugh with that odd 'gh' even though we pronounce it 'f', because centuries ago the word - as most of our common words that end in 'gh' - ended with a sound like German 'ch' in Bach (German still has durCH 'through' and laCHen 'laugh').

The second thought might be change in the meaning of a word, for instance computer, which used to mean 'a person whose job it is to compute figures'. Today we're watching a change in progress and nearly complete: the change in presently from meaning 'pretty soon' to 'at present'. Another that seems to be under way though still widely regarded as a 'mistake' is the use of literally 'the opposite of figuratively' to mean 'really and truly' (someone was recently heard to exclaim "That literally killed me!").

Even though it may not be the first thing you would think of, it turns out that changes in the ways sentences are put together (in other words, their syntax) can be much more far-reaching, with the result that texts written centuries ago appear more and more alien to modern readers as the time gap widens. It is mainly the slow changes in syntax that cause earlier stages of any language to slowly slip into unintelligibility.

When you listen to a Shakespeare play on the stage, it's comprehensible but you have to listen pretty carefully to catch it, right? It's usually pronounced as we pronounce modern English (if the actors used the pronunciation of Shakespeare's time, we would hardly understand anything!), but what isn't turned into modern English is the wording: the ways sentences are put together, which is changing over the years too. Let's pick one example of why English of 400 years ago can sound so odd to our ears. Look at the way the verb behaves in questions and when we use a negative with it.

In English as it was spoken around 1600, the way verbs were used in a sentence was pretty much the way the other Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Scandinavian) still do it today. Look at four different things that can happen:

1. Declarative statement: subject + verb He knows
2. Negation: subject + verb + adverb He knows not
3. Question: verb comes first Knows he?
4. Negated question: verb + subject + adverb Knows he not?

1. He MAKES for England
   You HOLD a fair assembly
2. I CARE not for her
   My master SEEKS not me
   She LOVED not the savour of tar
3. SAW you my master?
   SPEAKEST thou in sober meanings?
   CAME you from the church?
4. KNOW you not the cause?
   SPAKE you not these words plain?
   AWAKED you not with this sore agony?

1. -
2. He DOES not know
   I DO not care
3. DOES he know?
   DID you see?
4. DOES he (really) not know? / DOESn't he know?
   DO you (really) not see it? / DOn't you see it?

So, to wrap it all up, we can say that DO has taken its place as another auxiliary verb like be, have, will, must, and others:

He IS WORKING
You HAVE SEEN it
She WILL GO with us
I MIGHT AGREE to that
We really DO INSIST on it
DID you SEE that?

All essays Copyright © 1998-2004 by William Z. Shetter
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Got a question? Send it to me -- kmdavis@erols.com and I'll answer it.