Pat’s Polemics

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- about half-way through Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. It's clear McWhorter is applying the same techniques to English that he has to the Spanish Creoles and a number of languages incl. English in Language Interrupted, i.e. he's looking at the socio-historical situation and asking, "Is there evidence in the language that reflects the social situation? If so, let's take it into account even if it flies in the face of conventional interpretations."

The result is a fascinating look at early English, in the period when the Germanic peoples invaded with the language that would become English. The Celts were there already, of course, and, according to the usual account, were pushed back and counted for nothing in the development of English. Think The Story of English, The Mother Tongue episode.

Just as he did with the Spanish creoles, he looks at what happened, most probably, in those first centuries

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The following is a series of posts and the last one should be read first. Following that last one are some additional comments to the post which begins right here:

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Here's an idiom or saying that is on the verge of incomprehensibility:
dumb as a post
For people who do not know that dumb means not speaking, the phrase is peculiar. For them, dumb means only stupid and has nothing to do with speaking.
So after a time, when dumb (also seen in dumbbell, dumbwaiter) no longer "means" non-speaking, it will have to be explained that no one is talking about the IQ of posts in the ground but that dumb once meant not talking.
Then, of course, we'll have to explain post no doubt, b/c everyone will think we are talking about an e-mail message to a blog or listserv.

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Having not yet introduced the apostrophe of the genitive (that didn't happen until the 17th century or so - I have the exact century I can look up if anyone wants to know), we do not use it in adverbial expressions like "nights", as in, "He works nights". That was how the genitive was used in Old English and such expressions (nowadays, once, twice, thrice, since) survive as expressions of frequency. "Nights" is reanalyzed as a plural but, due to cryptic grammar, those who do so are barking up the wrong tree.

The wh- of many English words, esp question words, is often shown phonetically as hw-, equivalent to the Latin qu- and other I-E forms. However, in one book it pointed out that this often is a digraph for a voiceless w, something I had not thought of as occurring in English.

While "afire" may seem archaic, it is still used e.g. "Careful, you'll set your dress afire."
More commonly, people say "on fire". However, afire comes from "on fyre". There are many doublets like these, where two words or expressions appear different but have the same source except one evolved phonetically to obscure the commonality.

One of the slaient features of Black speech in this country is the pronunciation of 'ask' as 'aks'. One woman at my school, known for her unfavorable attitude toward African-Americans, once asked me why a Black teacher said 'aks' instead of 'ask'.

I explained that the word's consonant cluster has switched back and forth several times in its history, with Old English being 'acsian'. This wowed her; she even mentioned it later, saying how it had opened her eyes.

But I have never seen another English word with that cluster that switched like that until now. The word is 'dusk', which in OE was 'dox'.

The use of the word "board" to mean 'table' survives in the expressions 'bed and board' and 'boarding house' where people 'board' or are 'boarded'. I suppose a 'board of directors' has the same source.

The expression "the more the merrier" uses the instrumental case of "the". Of course, the instrumental ending wore away centuries ago, but the expression goes back to a time when the instrumental case expressed much the same meaning as the Latin ablative of degree of difference; it is used adverbially. Because this is a frozen or fossilized expression, it sounds natural to us, but when we analyze it grammatically, we realize that the construction "the..... the....." on its own isn't English. Tracing the form back to the instrumental ('thy' instrumental neuter singular) reveals the underlying, thus 'cryptic', grammar of the set phrase.