The Secret Lair

“Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.”

~ Walt Whitman

The English language is weird. In some ways, the English language is really, really weird. But if there’s one thing we know here at The Secret Lair, it’s that weird things are generally awesome. Especially when those weird things are mutant cross-species hybrids, patched and infused with alien DNA, which are then forced to stand on their heads and jump through flaming hoops while ten people shout out suggestions for what tune it should be whistling. And yes, I’m still talking about English.

Let me back up a bit. A week or two ago, Overlord Miller pointed me to a humorous video purporting to convey the entire history of the English language in ten minutes.¹ The video’s wonderfully British narrator was accompanied by cartoons,² and it was overall very funny, with a couple genuine laugh-out-loud moments. The interwebs junkie in me was sated, but my scholarly side felt it left a lot to be desired. For one thing, it focused only on individual words, while ignoring vast shifts in grammar and pronunciation. For another, it seemed to pass on (or at least gloss over) some common myths about dialect, spelling, and language contact.

Clearly, as Governor of Purposeful Obfuscation and Lateral Linguistics, I could not let this lack of information stand! While I may not be the most expert on the subject, I do know a pretty good bit about it. Back in my college days, I took a course on the history of English and found it to not only be fascinating, but also surprisingly useful. In fact, in studying the history of the English language (both in that class and in later exploration), I learned that much of what I had previously thought about English (and languages in general) was, in a word, wrong.

So in this series of articles, I hope to not only give you a little more information about where this crazy, Frankenstein-esque language of ours came from, but also to correct a few of the more common myths about English, such as:

• You can’t split an infinitive (no matter how badly you want to boldly go somewhere).³
• You can’t use a preposition to end a sentence with.⁴
• English isn’t spelled at all like it sounds.⁵
• English is being ruined and dumbed down by too many people learning it (incompletely) as a second language.⁶
• There is one pure, perfect, Standard English language, and all other dialects are corrupted versions of it.⁷
• The way I learned to speak/write/read English is and always has been the correct way!⁸
• Languages are logical.⁹

But before we can really dive in and look at these things, we need to define a few things to make sure we’re all starting in the same spot. This can be a trickier point than you might expect; you probably know most of these words, but the way they’re used in linguistics might be slightly different than you expect.

Here’s one to get you started: what is a language? We use the word in all sorts of ways–the language of love, body language, the language of flowers–but for this series, I’m going to define “language” like this:

Language: A rule-based system of communication capable of conveying a wide range of information and ideas.

The most important thing to note here is that languages are rule-based; that is, even if you know all the words in a language, you can’t just string them together randomly and be speaking that language. For example, the sentence “Store at me yesterday toward go,” is most definitely not a correct English sentence, even though every word in it is valid on its own. Instead, you’d of course say “I went to the store yesterday,” because you know the rules for putting together an English sentence.

In linguistic terms, we call these rules grammar. ((Yes, I know I’m blurring the line a bit between grammar and syntax, but for our purposes we’re going to keep it simple.)) Now, this is another tricky word, because you probably think grammar is something you’re taught in school, what with diagrams and objects and parts of speech and oh look I’ve fallen asleep. In linguistics, grammar is the rules you know without knowing you know them.

Huh?

Well, let me give you an example. In English, words can be either singular or plural, as you know. Setting aside words borrowed from other languages, we make words plural by adding one of three sounds to the end of the word. This can be a little confusing, since we represent these three sounds all with the same letter: “S.” But when you think about it, there’s three actual sounds: there’s the “hard”¹⁰ S at the end of “hats,” which we’ll write as /s/; there’s the “soft”¹¹ Z-like sound at the end of “mugs,” which we’ll designate /z/; and there’s the extra syllable version at the end of the word “peaches,” which we’ll call /ez/.

So, three sounds for making things plural: /s/, /z/, and /ez/. And you as a native (or fluent) speaker of English always know which one to use. I can give you a word you’ve never heard before, and I bet you can correctly tell me which sound to use to make it plural. So for example, which one would you put on the end of these words:

• Chrob¹²
• Frink¹³
• Mudge¹⁴

You might not be able to explain how you know which one is correct (beyond just “it sounds right”), but you’ll get it right every time. And more importantly, every other English speaker will do the same. What that means is that there’s a rule there for choosing which sound is correct. You might not be able to articulate that rule,¹⁵ but you know it and you use it. And that’s what a linguist means by grammar, those rules that you as a native speaker of a language know that just “sound right.”

One other term that we need to define is this one:

Dialect: A specific variety of a language that may have its own variations on vocabulary, grammar, and/or pronunciation.

Or, in other words, a dialect is a flavor of a language. It’s a specific way of speaking a language that may be unique to an area or group of people. It’s not just accent, though pronunciation is a part of it. For example, we know that Standard British English and Standard American English sound very different, but someone who asks for a biscuit is going to get something very different in New Orleans than in London, no matter how they pronounce it.

It’s also very important to note that the word “dialect” isn’t a pejorative term. That is, to a linguist, a dialect isn’t worse than a language; it’s not a “bad” version of a language, or one that’s “fallen away” from the standard. (In some ways, this may be especially true of English, as we’ll see next time.) Linguistically, no dialect is inferior to any other dialect, and any dialect is just as capable of conveying ideas and communication as any other. In fact, it has been famously opined that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

Now, this leads to another question: how do you draw the line between a dialect of a language and a separate language altogether? The general criterion is inter-intelligibility; that is, speakers of one dialect can understand speakers of another dialect. On paper, this seems pretty clear, but in reality the lines can get fuzzy. Scots, for example, is right on the line between a separate language and a dialect of English. Speakers of other varieties of English can understand some of it… sometimes… but maybe only just.

In the next article we’ll start looking at the very early origins on English, including where some of these dialects got there start. Come back next time for History of English: When Angles Met Saxons.

1. I’d embed it here, but it’s since been taken down. [↩]
2. It’s a well-known scientific principle that everything is better with cartoons. [↩]
3. Hint: I just did. [↩]
4. Hint: See what I did there? [↩]
5. Hint: Pronunciations change, but spellings don’t. Additional hint: silly English kuh-nigghts. [↩]
6. Hint: This has already happened–at least twice, and possibly three or four times. [↩]
7. Hint: This is akin to saying “Chocolate chip is the original cookie and all other cookies are corrupted versions of it.” [↩]
8. Hint: The person who wrote _Beowulf_ probably said the same thing. [↩]
9. Hint: You ain’t seen nothing yet. [↩]
10. Technically, unvoiced. [↩]
11. Voiced [↩]
12. /z/ [↩]
13. /s/ [↩]
14. /ez// [↩]
15. If you’re curious, it’s roughly: /s/ after an unvoiced consonant, /z/ after a voiced consonant or a vowel, and /ez/ after a sibilant. [↩]

Tags: english, history of english, language, linguistics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Memoranda, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.