There's extinct, and then there's extinct

As a little follow-up to the previous post:

Both Manx and Old English have been extinct (I'll explain the careful phrasing in a bit).  We know exactly when Manx went extinct: with the death of Ned Maddrell on December 27th, 1974.   We can't say when Old English went extinct, and not only because it would have happened hundreds of years ago.

"When did Old English go extinct?" is the same sort of question as "When did Middle English arise?", though it's not the exact same question.  If we were to define some set of speakers as "the first speakers of Middle English" and some other as "the last speakers of Old English", then there was, pretty much necessarily, a period of time where both were alive.  Middle English was alive, by such a reckoning, but Old English wasn't dead yet.

In fact, it's plausible that some number of people could have been said to speak both, depending perhaps on the company and occasion.  As I argued before, what's really going on here is that there is really no clear line to be drawn in cases of continuous change.

On the other hand, when the number of speakers of a language dwindles, it's reasonable to speak of the language going extinct: when the last speaker speaks no more.

The situation may become somewhat better-defined if we consider features of languages.  It's plausible that there was a last time that someone used urum for "our" with a plural noun (in the appropriate grammatical case, etc.), or a first time (probably some time earlier and/or in some other place) that someone said oure in the like situation.

This at least clarifies some of the difficulties of the exercise.  First, features do not arise or disappear everywhere at once.  At some point, there would have been some people who said urum or oure, as the case may be and some who didn't.  At some later point there were fewer who said urum and more who said oure, and eventually, no one was saying urum anymore.  And even that may be an oversimplification.

Second, what set of features we call "Old English" and what set we call "Middle English" is largely arbitrary.  More realistically, as time went on, there were more people speaking English with what we would now regard as Middle English features and fewer speaking with what we would regard as Old English features.

Except that we still retain some features of Old English, for example, the words is, on, to and he from Ælfric of Eynsham in the previous post.  When we try to draw a line between Old and Middle English, we're really looking for features unique to each.  We could plausibly say that when there are, say, no longer any people who speak with more of Old English's unique features than Middle English's, Middle English has taken over.  When no one is using that particular set of features at all, we could say that Old English is extinct ... but then we should be careful not to choose any features for that set that do survive.

If this has a sort of unsatisfying feel to it, it's because the whole exercise is of limited use.  At the bottom of all this careful definition is a distinction without a difference.  The real story is that features come and go, with enough differences eventually accumulating that we start to feel that two different sets of features denote different languages.


Now, why did I say "have been extinct" above?  Manx is, it turns out, no longer dead.  There aren't many speakers, and perhaps none who speak exclusively Manx, or few that could be said to speak Manx as their first language, but people are speaking Manx again, with pride.  This is thanks not only to modern Manx speakers, but in part to recordings of Ned Maddrell and others, and to the efforts of the linguists who made those recordings and otherwise worked to preserve a record of the language.

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.

Real imitation Old Modern English

Just in time for the NFL playoffs, GEICO ran an ad based on the gag that there is, in fact, an "oldest trick in the book".  The trick?  Two sort of Medieval/Renaissance-looking guys are sitting in some sort of library/scriptorium-looking place.  Quoth the elder, pointing: "Looketh over there!", and when the younger does, "Haha!  Madeth thou look!"

OK, it's a GEICO commercial, not King Lear.  We don't expect linguistic accuracy.   We expect them to get the gag over, which they do just fine, by pasting -eth onto every verb in sight.  Old-looking costumes, old-sounding language ... got it.  Now back to the game in progress.  As the voice-over says "So endeth the trick."

Ironically, that last line is actually proper Elizabethan English.

Before I get back to the whatever larger point I may have, and largely because I just can't help myself, here's a brief rundown of the history of English.  If you're ever having too much fun at a party and would like to recast yourself as a fun-puncturing pedant and so be left in peace, take careful note.

English is generally divided into three forms

• Old English, spoken from somewhere around the 400s to somewhere around the 1100s.  It's basically a Germanic dialect, and if you weren't familiar with it you likely wouldn't think of it as English at all.  It sounds more like German or Icelandic and has a grammar more similar to classical Latin, with gender and case distinctions and other inflections all over the place, than English as we know it.  The best-known Old English work, Beowulf, doesn't even take place in England, but in what is now Scandinavia.  It looks like this, and starts off "Hwæt! Wē Gār‐Dena in geār‐dagum þēod‐cyninga þrym gefrūnon, hū þā æðelingas ellen fremedon" (except without the modern niceties like punctuation). This, of course, means, in Seamus Heaney's fairly loose translation, "So.  The Spear-Danes in days gone by, and the kings who ruled them, had courage and greatness."  (to be fair, English of that period can also look a bit more familiar, like this)
• Middle English, spoken from somewhere around the 1100s to the 1400s.  It looks a lot more like English as we know it (to be fair, it can also look like this), but still has some grammatical differences.  For example, I sleep, They sleep and I have slept become I slepe, They slepen and I have yslept.  More noticeably, Middle English was pronounced much differently from Modern English, not having been through the Great Vowel Shift.  Before then, English vowels had approximately the same values as in many other European languages, so the phrases above would be pronounced more like Ee slaypeh, Thay slaypen and Ee hahv eeslept.  Note that the silent e at the end of words isn't silent (or at least not always).  Middle English uses -eth as a verb ending where we would use -s, so she singeth instead of she sings, and it uses thou with -est as a verb ending, so thou comest instead of you come (see this post for a lot more on thou and you).   The best-known work of Middle English, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, looks like this and starts off "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / the droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote ...".  If you heard it recited, you might not catch much, but in print you might well believe it meant "When April, with its sweet showers, has pierced March's drought to the root ..."
• Modern English, which includes the Early Modern English of Shakespeare's Elizabethan times, spoken from the 1400s or so to the present.  Naturally the language has changed a bit over the past few centuries, but older forms such as Elizabethan English seem like our English with a few odd changes, not like a different language.  Apart from vocabulary, the most noticeable changes to our ears are probably that Early Modern English still uses thou and endings like -eth and -est.

There's a lot more to it, of course, but that seems more than enough for now.

Well, actually ... while I'm still in full-on killjoy mode: The actual rules of thou, -eth and -est are really not that hard:

• Use thou for the subject and thee for the object (but again, see the other post for details):  Thou art tall;  I bid thee good night.
• Put -est on the end of the verb if thou is the subject, with a couple of special cases like art for are and hast for have:  Thou knowest not what thou sayest.
• Change -s on the end of verbs (and only verbs) to -eth: The ice man cometh; So endeth the trick.

That covereth not all the bases, of course, but it will give thee reasonably accurate "old-sounding" English without too much trouble.  For the GEICO ad, we get "Look over there!" and "Made thee look", though perhaps "Look thou yonder!" and "I made thee to look" might be more likely.  I would suspect that the first version, at least, just doesn't sound "old enough" to pass muster for the ad.

Now that I've got that out of my system, what was my actual topic?  Ah yes.  It's not surprising or particularly interesting that modern speakers would get Elizabethan English wrong.  Why wouldn't we?  We don't speak it, and we only hear or read it on special occasions.  The more interesting question is how we get it wrong.  How is it that we come up with the particular pastiche of Elizabethan English that we do?

At a guess, since -eth and -est sound more or less alike and seem to be attached to a lot of verbs, it's not hard to boil real Elizabethan usage down to "use thou a lot and put -eth at the end of verbs" and even to "use thou a lot and put -eth on the end of a lot of random words."

That's so straightforward and obvious that it's easy to forget that there are plenty of other minor differences between our English and Elizabethan English that we don't tend to imitate.  Here and elsewhere, I'll take "our English" to mean "English as spoken by newscasters in major US outlets" or such.  Even in this day and age there is significant variation among dialects.  Please don't take it amiss if I say "We don't say ___" when you've heard people around you say just that -- but do feel free to leave a comment.

I've taken the examples below from Much Ado About Nothing partly because it's reasonably representative, but mostly because it's so much fun to read.

• The vocabulary has changed noticeably.  For example, we no longer distinguish whither (to where) and whence (from where) from plain where.  We may still recognize words like yonder and betwixt, but we don't tend to use them.  Some words, like meet (suitable, fit) or an (if) have meanings we no longer use, and some, like baldrick or fardel are entirely unfamiliar.
• Elizabethan English uses word orders and constructions that sound odd to our ears.  Here's a nice illustration:
  Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none; and the fine is, for the which I may go the finer, I will live a bachelor.
  Every word there is a perfectly familiar contemporary English word, but the way they're strung together makes me feel a bit like I just got off a ship and haven't got my land legs yet. Your mileage may vary.
• Cultural references have shifted, understandably.  Shakespeare's works, and other literary works of the time, are full of classical allusions that his audience would have had no trouble with, but are as opaque to us as a modern pop-culture reference would have been to Shakespeare (though I suspect he would have been a quick study). Things like or do you play the flouting Jack, to tell us Cupid is a good hare-finder and Vulcan a rare carpenter?
• Re-reading the opening of Much Ado, I found that large chunks of it flow almost like today's English, without major twistiness like the speech above, but with lots of little idioms that are just a bit different: he wears his faith but as [like] the fashion of his hat ...Don Pedro is approached [here] ...I wonder [am surprised] that you will still be [are still] talking, Signior Benedick: nobody marks [notices] you ...I would [wish] I could find in my heart that I had not [didn't have] a hard heart.

What we have here, as one might expect, is several layers of changes, none of them very big by themselves, but taken together enough to produce something that's clearly still English, but a significantly different kind of English.

When we try to imitate this language, there are a couple of major constraints:  It can't be too hard to come up with, and it can't be too hard to understand, but it does have to sound more or less like the examples we've heard.  We need a superficial imitation, while a realistic one would just get in the way.  I think that explains why we don't see obsolete words, strange word orders or classical references in the usual "Olde Englissh", but we do see features like thou and -eth.  Since we're going for impression, not accuracy, it's not so important exactly how we apply those features, just that they're there.

On this theory, the little idiomatic changes like I had not or is approached might find their way into a more careful imitation, at least more easily than the other items on the list above.  I can't be bothered to find evidence for or against that idea, but hey, it seems plausible enough.