Xeno and the history of English

Kids these days.  They don't talk like we did when I was a kid.  I'd give some examples, but they're probably already out of date.  You know what I mean, though.  It's one of the constants of life, the next generation doing things a bit differently from the last.  O tempora o mores.

When trying to make sense of the world's languages, dialects, accents, jargons and such, it's natural to look at differences among speakers, or among groups of speakers.  French speakers speak a different language from Italians.  New Yorkers, for the most part, speak differently from people in Clinch County, Georgia, or County Derry, Ireland.  It's easy, though, to neglect differences in a particular language over time, even though they can be just as significant.

Changes over time are in some ways similar to differences among contemporaries.  If someone were to start speaking, say, the English of Beowulf to a group of modern English speakers, they would likely hear it as just another foreign language.  At that level of remove, there's little chance that a modern speaker would think "That person sounds like they're trying to sound like someone from pre-Norman times, but they're definitely speaking English."

There is, however, one salient property of changes over time: Unlike differences between languages at any given time, they have to be small.  Even if a parent and child speak differently, they still need to understand each other.  Granted, this is generally more important to the older generation.  Kids throughout history have always been quick to invent their own vocabularies and otherwise make themselves more easily understood by each other than by their elders.  Even so, from a linguistic point of view they are speaking essentially the same language.

It takes quite a while for that gradual change to amount to what we would call a new language.  For example, here's a bit of a poem (They flee from me) that I studied in college.  I've modernized the spelling, but otherwise the words are the same

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand

This was written by Thomas Wyatt in 1535, almost 30 years before Shakespeare was born, but that wouldn't necessarily be your first guess, would it?

As we go back further, change becomes more apparent, but again gradually.  Here's a bit of Chaucer (The Former Age), again with modern spelling, from the late 1300s

No man yet knew the furrows of his land,
No man the fire out of the flint yet found,
Unkorven and ungrobbed lay the vine;
No man yet in the mortar spices ground

OK, a couple of unfamiliar words (unkorven may be translated as "unpruned" and ungrobbed as uncultivated), but then what do bodkin and fardels mean in Hamlet's soliloquy, written about 200 years later?  The word order is a bit weird, but just how do you parse the first lines of The Star-Spangled Banner, written about 400 years later?  Maybe that's just poetry for you.

I'm cheating a bit here by focusing on the written word, because there's ample reason to believe that English was pronounced considerably differently in the 1300s.  But then, contemporary speakers, depending on their dialect, will pronounce the same written words differently as well.  In the case of Chaucer, I'm also cherry-picking a bit.  Some passages of Chaucer sound considerably less familiar, and some contemporaries of Chaucer in other parts of England would be less familiar still.

Continuing our journey back in time, here's a passage from The Peterborough Chronicle, written in 1140:

Tha was England suythe todeled: some helden mid the king.  Some helden mid the empress.  For tha the king was in prison, tha wenden the earls to rich men that he never more should come out, sahtleden mid the empress, brought her into Oxford, iauen her the burgh.

This still seems something like English, but it's getting harder to decide what to clean up as just a matter of spelling, and what's just different.  For example, with is now mid, in line with the other Germanic languages.  Verbs have the -en ending when the subject is plural (as they do in Chaucer as well, though not in the passage I chose).  I could just as well have papered that over and written held instead of helden and, stretching a bit more, went instead of wenden.

That funny word iauen is really just gave: the letters u and v were not distinguished until later, and quite likely the i at the beginning is like the y in yellow, corresponding to an initial g in other dialects, so we get gaven, or plain gave when you lop off the -en.  That tha seems a bit like then and a bit like when, not unlike modern dialects that use what where others would use that.

It's worth noting that this was written with the Norman conquest of 1066 still in living memory, though only just.  Given that, I'm actually a bit surprised there aren't more French borrowings.  The only ones that stick out are prison and empress.

Go back not too much further, before the conquest, and we have something not too much different from the Peterborough Chronicle, but different enough from modern English that trying to smooth over the differences is a lost cause.  Here is Ælfric of Eynsham discussing the reflection in grammar of Christian theology.  First a straight transliteration (but with modern punctuation):

Oft ys seo halige þrinnys geswutelod on þisre bec, swa swa ys on þam worde þe God cwæð: 'Uton wyrcean mannan to ure anlicnisse'.  Mid þam þe he cwæð 'Uton wyrcean' is seo þrinnys gebicnod; mid þam þe he cwæð 'to ure anlicnisse' ys seo soðe annis geswutelod: he ne cwæð na menfealdlice, 'to urum anlicnissum', ac anfealdlice, 'to ure anlicnisse'.

Here's an attempt to smooth over the spelling differences and such, taking a few more liberties than in the last example:

Oft is the holy threeness geswutelod on this book, so so as the words that God quoth, 'Uton work man to our (an)likeness'.  With þam þe he quoth 'Uton work' is  the threeness gebicnod; with þam þe he quoth 'to our (an)likeness' is the sooth oneness geswutelod: he ne quoth na manifoldly (many-fold-ly) 'to our (an)likenesses', but one-fold-ly, 'to our (an)likeness'.

(That's sooth, as in soothsayer, meaning 'true', not the modern verb soothe).  And finally, glossing the words that don't seem directly related to modern ones, and updating a few that are,

Often is the holy trinity revealed in this book, just as the words that God said, "Let us make man to our likeness."  With that he said 'Let us make' is the trinity indicated.  With that he said 'to our likeness' is the true unity revealed: he neither said nor plural, 'to our likenesses', but singular, 'to our likeness'.

Even with the words glossed, the word order is a little funky, that "with that" is only approximate and doesn't parse easily, and the ne ... ne ... construct, still used by Chaucer and with traces here and there in Shakespeare, is gone now, the closest remnant being neither ... nor.  The forms of words have changed significantly (halige vs. holy, annis vs. oneness etc.).  There is more and different inflection in the original, both in nouns and pronouns (ure anlicnisse vs. urum anlicnissum, worde as the plural of word) and verbs (ge- ... -od for the past participle instead of just -ed today).

All in all, this is more a translation than a modernization.  Only after a third round of adjustments would Ælfric's English really look like modern English.

Even though the Peterborough Chronicle is in an East Midland dialect that is not a direct ancestor of Chaucer's, and Ælfric spoke a Wessex (West-Saxon) dialect which is, and the writers are writing in considerably different forms, it's not hard to see that these are examples of the same language, but a language which is, overall, changing gradually over time.

Thus even though we can point at plenty of texts and say "This is Middle English", or "This is Old English", there is no time in history we can point at and say "Middle English started here" or "Modern English started here".  As far as anyone at the time was concerned, they were speaking English.  No "Old" or "Middle" or "Modern" about it.

Even if you did pick some set of speakers and say, "the parents spoke Middle English, but the children spoke Modern English", you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between the two.   There would be much more difference between our Modern English and theirs than between the parents and the children.

Gradual does not mean imperceptible, however.  We can trace the origins of newer words like blog or semiconductor with a fair degree of certainty.  We can remember words and constructions that people don't say much any more (at least in most places), like To whom did she give the book? instead of Who did she give the book to?  Going further back to old written sources, we can get a reasonable idea of when people stopped using -en as a regular plural marker for nouns, though of course that didn't happen all at once.  We can see individual changes happening, it's just that there are so many parts to a language that it takes quite a few -- many more than typically happen in a lifetime -- before we decide to call the result a new language.

Drawing a precise line between an older form of a language and a later form is largely arbitrary, like trying to pick a boundary between green and blue.  You can do it, but wherever you pick, there will be a reasonable argument for picking some slightly different boundary.  Even so, the language has changed and continues to.  You can quite rightly say "no one saw Modern English arise from Middle English," and yet it did.

This is all reminiscent of Xeno's arrow paradox: If an object in a definite place is at rest, and at any given moment a flying arrow is in a definite place, then, it would seem, a flying arrow must always be at rest, so how can it move at all?  Untangling this sort of thing rigorously is the wellspring of the mathematical field of analysis, but for most purposes it's enough to know that the arrow moves anyway, somehow unaware that it's not supposed to be able to do that.