Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (7 page)

The only thing that led writers to start actually putting this “real” Old English on the page was the 150-year blackout period. When people started writing English once more, the written Old English standard could not exert the pull that it once had. These were now documents of another time. One hundred and fifty years was a vaster amount of time to a Dark Ages Englishman than it is to us—he had no photos or newspapers as we do of the Civil War, and no audio recordings as we do of the 1890s onward—and the continuity between generations of scribes preserving the old language had been broken. It was as the French had taken over Dante’s Italy for 150 years, imposing French as the language of writing. Imagine if after the French left, writers were no longer competent in Latin and felt more comfortable writing in the language people actually spoke, Italian.

In this light, our timing problem with the Celtic features is solved.

Traditional specialists understand that Old English was losing its case markers gradually even though writers wrote as if this wasn’t happening. As such, they should be able to accept that “Celty” English would also have been spoken out on the ground even though no one would have deigned to transcribe it amid the formality of the written word. This is not a studied argument designed to get around something about Old English, but a call to bring scholarship on The History of English in line with the realities of how different writing was from casual speech in the ancient, semiliterate world.

We can assume that Celts were speaking Celtified English starting with the first generation who grew up bilingual, as far back as the fifth century, and throughout the Old English period. However, this was not the English from across the North Sea—Celtified English was likely thought of as “mixed” or at least funny-sounding English for a long time. As such, it would never have been committed to print—and in a world without audio recording technology, this means that this kind of English as spoken during the entire reign of Old English is hopelessly lost to us.

However, starting in the Middle English period, when it became acceptable to write English more like it was actually spoken, this would have included not only virtually case-free nouns, but also our Celticisms. Therefore, it is not that Celticisms only entered English almost a thousand years after Germanic speakers met Celts in Britain. It is merely that Celticisms did not reach the page until then, which is quite a different thing.

People writing the way they actually talked was quite rare anywhere in the world until rather recently, and even today it is by no means universal.

The truth, then, is that if meaningless
do
and the verb-noun present did pop up in the first Old English documents, or even in Old English documents at all beyond the occasional peep, it would be very, very strange. We would expect that the constructions would show up only after a historical catastrophe such as the Norman occupation, after which, in many ways, England learned to write again. If the Battle of Hastings had not put a 150-year kibosh on written English, then “real” English might not have been committed to print until as late as after the Reformation, in the 1500s.

In the obituary of someone who started some famous chain of stores, often the date that the first establishment opened seems much earlier than you would have expected. The first McDonald’s, for example, opened in 1955. That doesn’t “feel” right: McDonald’s was an entrenched part of American life only ten years after that or more. For example, there is an
I Love Lucy
episode from 1956 where Lucy and Ethel are making a long road trip and running low on food, as fast-food restaurants alongside interstate highways were not yet ubiquitous. For a long time after 1955, McDonald’s restaurants were in business, but because they had yet to proliferate widely, to most people they were barely known. The first Wendy’s was opened in 1969—my intuition would have put it in about 1978.

Likewise, the Celtic imprint on English would have thrived below the radar long before it appeared regularly in print, even when meaningless
do
and the verb-noun present had long been well established as ordinary speech. They just weren’t being publicized in commercials yet, so to speak. Since there was no recording technology, we can’t hear Old English speakers using them. But they did. We know that because English was the only Germanic language spoken by people whose native languages had the selfsame traits.

There is one last thing that misleads linguists into thinking the Celts could not have had any significant impact on English: the fact that there are, essentially, no words in English that trace to Celtic.

One might expect there to be some, after all. The Vikings left a whole mess of their words, as did the Normans. One would presume that when large numbers of people start using a language imposed on them and start speaking it in their own way, that they will sprinkle their version of the language with a lot of their own words. The Vikings left behind their
get
and
skirt
and even their
their
; the Normans left behind seemingly every word we use to step beyond humility. So where are the long lists of Welsh and Cornish words?

Instead, there are only a dozen-odd words that have been traditionally traced to Celtic, and most of them are arcane, obsolete ones introduced by Christian missionaries from Ireland. Naturally, then, experts assume that the Celts must have just learned English the way they encountered it and added nothing to it. This assumption is reasonable. It is also mistaken.

The fact is that people scattering their own words into their new language is not a universal. It might happen—the Vikings did it; the Slavonic-speaking people who picked up Latin in what is now Romania did it to Romanian. But it might not.

Russian, for example, has some quirky features that show that at some point way back, it was learned by so many speakers of another language that it was never the same again in terms of
grammar
. The culprit was a language of the family called Uralic. Its most famous members are Finnish and Hungarian, but other ones have long been spoken across a vast expanse of what is now northern Russia. In Russian, it seems odd that in negative sentences an object has to be rendered as “of” itself: “I see a girl” is
Ja vižu devočku
, but “I do not see a girl” is
Ja ne vižu devočk
i
where the -
i
ending connotes “of-ness” (“I do not see of a girl”). Odd, that is, until you notice that Finnish and its relatives do that same thing. In Russian, unlike in a “card-carrying” Indo-European language, you do not “have” something: rather, something “is to” you: “I have a book” is
U menja kniga
(“to me is a book”). Again, something similar is par for the course in Finnish.

No one interested in the Russian-Uralic encounter denies that Russian picked up these and other things from speakers of Finnish-related languages. It’s as if your child comes back from summer camp with some downloaded music they never listened to before, from some friends they met who were into that kind of music.

Yet there are at very best about a couple of dozen Uralic words in Russian, most of them obscure. The Vikings left about a thousand in English, and the Normans left ten thousand. Yet the Uralic speakers left just a handful in Russian. We will never know just why; certainly it was due to specific cultural factors lost to us because the people had no writing.

It is the same in India: in the southern part, there is a smallish family of languages, Dravidian, completely unrelated to the other ones, which are of the Indo-Aryan subfamily of Indo-European. When you hear that a person from India speaks Tamil, for instance, that is a Dravidian language, as unlike Indo-Aryan Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, and the others as Finnish is unlike English. In any case, along the barrier between the Dravidian area and the Indo-Aryan area, people have often been bilingual in Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages—but over the past thousand years, almost no Dravidian words have seeped into Indo-Aryan languages. Yet Indo-Aryan words are fairly dripping with features in their grammars which, again, no linguist denies are the result of Dravidian speakers learning Indo-Aryan ones.

It also bears mentioning that, really, etymology is not the most rigorously policed of fields. Much of the basic work was done long ago under different standards of evidence than linguists would admit today; there are a great many holes (“etymology unknown”), and legions of etymologies that, if linguists were moved to seriously examine them today, would fall apart. In that light, there is some work suggesting that there are at least a few more Celtic words in Modern English than once thought. Candidates include
brag
,
brat, curse,
and
baby
.

In any case, the paucity of Celtic words in English is no argument at all against meaningless
do
and present-tense -
ing
being due to Celtic influence. It’s interesting—the work that argued that Dravidian languages decisively shaped Indo-Aryan grammar is today cherished as sage, classic, and incontrovertible. Yet a very similar argument about Celtic and English is received as quirky, marginal, and eternally tentative.

To show how ordinary it would have been for a “Celtified” expression to almost never make it onto the page over centuries’ time, here is a living example. There is a queer little wrinkle in regional dialects in the north of England. Standard English verb conjugation in the present tense involves one thing: tacking on -
s
in the third person singular:

In the northern dialects in question, instead the rule is that you tack on the -
s
in all persons and numbers:

Except for one thing: in the third person plural, when you use the pronoun
they
instead of nouns like
Betty and Shirley
, or
children
, or
McDonald’s outlets
, you drop the -
s
:

So Betty and Shirley
walks
, but they
walk
.

Weird, isn’t it? There is nothing like it in any Germanic language but English. But there is something just like it in—need I even finish the sentence?

With the Welsh verb, in the third person plural, when nouns like
Betty and Shirley
are involved, the conjugational ending is the same as for the third person singular one. Again, verbs are first, and so Welsh has
learned she
for
she learned
,
learned Betty and Shirley
for
Betty and Shirley learned
:

 

But if you use the pronoun
they
, the verb takes a third person plural ending: