English is complicated?

Some folks on social media lately have been expressing concern about how "complicated" English is.  There are a couple of things a linguist might want to say about that.

First, we have to be clear that we are talking about the language, not the writing system.  The English writing system is indeed complicated, but not because the language itself is complicated.  The writing system is complicated because it was first developed for Old English or Anglo-Saxon back before the year 1000 CE.  It was developed by Christian missionaries who mostly used the Latin alphabet, and it was not bad.  The vowels a e i o u had their Latin qualities (pretty much modern Spanish).  A word like Moon (for the Moon) was pronounced like modern English moan.  Hus (house) rhymed with modern loose.  All the written consonants in cniht (knight) were pronounced.  These sounds changed, and some disappeared, over the years, but how we write them did not change so much.  We can safely that English spelling is a nightmare.  George Bernard Shaw captured this with his humorous observation that we could spell fish as ghoti (gh from enough, o from women, and ti from nation).

If anything, English grammar has simplified over the years.  In Old English, nouns had cases like modern Russian and German, so the word for 'person,' folc, varied depending on whether it was singular or plural as well as whether it was being used as a subject, object, possessor, or object of a preposition: subjects and objects singular and plural folc; possessors folces, folca; prepositionals folce, folcum.  This meant that word order was somewhat less important in Old English. In these example, the words for king and bishop do not change form, but the definite article does (ϸ is a rune letter that represented the 'th' sounds):

Se cyning meteϸ ϸone biscop.    'the king met the bishop'
ϸone cyning meteϸ se biscop.     'the bishop met the king'

Old English verbs, too, were more complicated than their modern reflexes.  They were conjugated for person, number, tense, and mode.  One brief example, the verb dēman (to judge) in the present indicative:  (I) dēmde; (you) dēmdest; (she/he) dēmde; (we/you-all/they) dēmaϸ.

.

While English has lost some of its complexity, the one thing that probably troubles adult learners most is the auxiliary verb (AUX) DO that makes an appearance in question-formation.  Note the following:

Statement:   Cats eat mice. 

Question:     Do cats eat mice?

Where did that do come from?  English is the only language I know about that forms questions in this way (though there may be others).  The answer lies in realizing that the basic rule for question-formation in English is "Move AUX" which means the Auxiliary verb is moved to the front of the sentence.  In sentences that already have an auxiliary verb, things are pretty simple.  Here the AUX will is moved to form the question:

Statement:   The cats will eat the mice. 

Question:     Will the cats eat the mice?

There appears to be no AUX in the statement.  Or isn't there?  It turns out that all English sentences have a place for an AUX, but the place can be unoccupied.  But to follow the "Move AUX" rule and form a question, if the AUX position is empty, we have to create a "dummy AUX" and then move it:

Statement:   Cats ___ eat mice.    →    Cats DO eat mice.
Question:     DO cats eat mice?

Just one more bit of complication.  Suppose the sentence is Our cat eats mice.  Look what happens:

Statement:             Our cat eats mice.

Prep for question:  Our cat DO eats mice.  →    Our cat DOES eat mice.

Question:               Does our cat eat mice?

Note that the -s on eat moves to AUX before AUX is moved to form the question.  There are explanations for why this happens, but they will take us too deep into the weeds of English syntax. For now, let's just say that while English is not as complicated as many people think, it does have its quirks.

English is weirder than most people realize

OK, so I just encountered this on Facebook, representative of the many "English is weird" memes floating around out there. And as I nearly always point out, the spellings shown here have nothing to do with the English language itself. If you want weird, consider this:

To make an English statement into a question, one of the rules is to "move the auxiliary to the front of the sentence."* E.g.
The mouse is eating the cheese > Is the mouse eating the cheese?

But what if there's no (apparent) auxiliary? Then you have to create one and move it:
Mice eat cheese > Mice do eat cheese > Do mice eat cheese?

Wait, there's more. If an overt inflection is present on the verb, the created auxiliary strips it off the verb and attaches it to itself:
Judy walks to school > Judy do walks to school > Judy does walk to school > Does Judy walk to school?

That's something truly weird about English!

* It's not that simple. The Aux really moves to a position under C in the CP that dominates the sentence. But this is enough for one day.

How's your "grammar?"

I took this "grammar quiz" yesterday, more curious about what sorts of questions they would ask than whatever my "score" might be. As it turned out, I got them all "right."

(1) Of the 12, only 3 were really about "grammar." And one of those asked for a form (whom) that is essentially obsolete, what one writer calls "nostalgia as repression." Another asked for the past tense of "lie" (as in "lie down"); which is "lay" but that's also somewhat archaic at this point. The one legitimate grammar question had to do with subject/verb agreement (is v. are).

(2) Perhaps one (lose v. loose) was about lexicon, although this spills over into...

(3) ... spelling, which is what the rest were about, and which is not "grammar."  One of the more egregious examples of this is the distinction in spelling between the two forms pronounced [ɪts], written its and it's.  The first is possessive, 'belonging to it'; the second is the contraction of it and is.  This is not a confusion that anyone would or could make in speaking, because they're homophones!  It's only in spelling that they get separate treatment, and this is not where the grammar is.  Another frequently cited "confusion" is that of there - they're - their.  No English speaker would actually "confuse" these while using English, because they're different things: an adverb, a subject-verb contraction, and a possessive determiner.  They might confuse the spellings, but not the grammatical functions.

It would be nice if the people who make up these things would actually learn what "grammar" is.  A linguistics course might help...

The word is: "Jeopardy"

Last night (Monday July 21) on "Jeopardy" there was a clue that went something like "a single unit of language."  The response they wanted was "what is a word." That may be the most problematic answer they could have thought of, given that besides words all the following can be considered "single units of language":

• Distinctive features (units of articulation, e.g. Labial, Voiced, etc.)
• Segments (consonants & vowels, each of which is a unit composed of distinctive features: [b])
• Phonemes (psychologically salient units that signal contrast: /b/)
• Syllables (units of pronunciation, most commonly a consonant + a vowel but there are shapes, depending on the language: [ba], [bo], [bla], blab], and so on)
• Morphemes (units that refer in some way: {kæt})

When we get to morphemes we can begin to slide into "words," but it's tricky. The "word" (we use the <_> to enclose an orthographic representation) is composed of one morpheme, but what about ?  It's composed of two morphemes. Still, it's a "single unit" when considered within a larger structure, say a Noun Phrase (NP).  In the word is a single unit under what we call an N' ("N-bar"), a constituent paired with , which is a Determiner (Det).  If we expand to we get also living under a single N', still paired with that Det and still a "single unit" of language.

In other words, it's more complicated than most people realize. And, I humbly submit, *this* is what "language arts" teachers should be showing our children!

Aruskipasipxañanakasakipunirakispäwa!  A "single word" in Aymara meaning 'I know from personal knowledge that it's good if we all make the effort to communicate with one another.'

The tyranny of One

Author Stephen King, in his book On Writing: A Memoir on the Craft (Scribner 2010), calls for, among other things, the reduced use of adverbs. But that's not what I want to focus on. I want to call your attention to this sentence from the book:

(1)  With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.

This is almost painfully clumsy to read. Of course, it is a reaction to the years of prescriptive "grammarians" telling us, untruthfully, that he is a generic pronoun referring to anybody, which in those bad old days would have made King's sentence look like this:

(2)  With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he is afraid he isn’t expressing himself clearly, that he is not getting the point or the picture across.

The problem with this last sentence is that while the Noun Phrase the writer carries no gender, he does: it's masculine.  We know that he has never been a true generic, and we also know that the idea that it should be used as generic originated in England as Rule 21 in John Kirkby's 1746 treatise Eighty-eight Grammatical Rules.  Rule 21 states that male is "more comprehensive" than female and therefore he should be taken to include both feminine and masculine gender.

It was reaction to this rule that got us he/she-ing and himself/herself-ing all over the place.  The result is clumsy language; if you don't believe me read sentence (1) again.  Fortunately, there is a more elegant way: Make the sentence plural.  In English, the third-plural pronouns carry no gender at all, and King's unhappy screed against adverbs would look like (3):

(3)  With adverbs, writers usually tell us they are afraid they aren’t expressing themselves clearly, that they are not getting the point or the picture across.

Why don't we just do this all the time?  I think there's another aspect of our culture at work against us, and that is the tyrrany of the number one, or singularity.  One is one of our magical numbers: we like one Right Answer, one Most Valuable Player, one Winner, and so on.  We prefer singular when we can get it, and our default form for talking about generic entities is singular (the writer, the whatever).  

By the way, King also recommends that writers have at hand a copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style.  This is bad advice, unless accompanied by the caution not to take anything they say about grammar too seriously. But do start putting sentences in plural form, to avoid both Kirkby's wrongheaded gender prescriptivism as well as the awkwardness of those double pronouns.