Your English isn't your grandfather's English

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, words, linguistics, historical linguistics

I find John McWhorter fascinating: he digs out so many lovely examples of language usage, and writes about them so engagingly… In a prior book I reviewed in 2009 (Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue) he brought to our gaze the numerous chunks of other languages that were dragged together almost wholesale to produce what we today call "English". Now in Words on the Move; Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally), he provides an antidote to the amount of energy some of us "seasoned citizens" give to decrying the trends of change in language usage (Like, you know, gag me with a spoon if I have to keep hearing that!).

That last string of phrases caused much angst in my generation when "Valley Girl" (Val Gal) talk sprawled across the nation like a lanky teen on a love seat. In particular, "like" has gone from a word meaning (as a verb) "to desire or feel affinity to" or (adjective, adverb, etc.) "similarity", into a "piece of grammar", no longer really a word, but a functional sound that has morphed from the "similarity" end of things to at least three or four uses, most particularly a kind of bullet point, such as an example on page 215:

"So we're standing there and there were like grandparents and like grandkids and aunts and uncles…"

"Like" has become more a signal than a word, and this isn't new, it started almost a century ago, some 30 years before the Beatniks began to say, "Like, wow, man!". The new "like" has gathered new uses to the extent that McWhorter touches on it in three different chapters and spends a dozen pages on it in his last chapter, "This is your brain on writing." This word is an example of several he discusses, that are grammatical markers and have become very hard to explain as words. They are "grammaticalized." Consider what "well" or "so" might mean when used to begin a sentence. Could you explain them to an inquisitive five-year-old? Thought not!

Gliding back to the first chapter, "The FACEs of English", we find a long discussion of the acronym FACE, used to describe the uses of grammaticalized words such as "well" or "so", which a linguist would call "Modal Pragmatic Markers" or MPM's. Here "pragmatic" most closely means "personal". Our author states that a multitude of such words are needed so that we don't just speak English, we can talk.

This brings us to a major theme of the book, the difference between written and spoken (or "talked") English. Firstly, of course, we use fewer grammaticalizations when writing. I tend to write at full speed as though I were having a conversation with you, so I almost began this paragraph with, "Now, …". Were you and I really talking together, that's how I would have said it. But even writing full speed at 50wpm or so, I edit as I go and make the written form a little more compact, and, I hope, readable. (Those who find me long-winded are saying, "Oh, really!")

He dwells much more on spelling. For example, written English has a pronunciation rule of "silent, terminal e", that it makes the vowel before the prior consonant into a long vowel. Thus we have "mad", meaning crazy or angry, in which the "a" is pronounced as flatly as possible and is often called "short A"; and we have "made", meaning constructed or produced, in which the "a" is pronounced almost like "eh-ee" and is called "long A". The author tells us that nobody would design such a system from scratch, and that it had to arise from some process. Indeed it did. He discusses the "Great Vowel Shift" on pages 152-159, using a map of the placement of vowels in our mouth to show how the "short A" of 5 to 9 centuries ago morphed into a longer "E" sound then to the "long A", and that a final "eh" sound at the end of many words was gradually dropped. Thus, "made" was once pronounced "mah-deh", as the spelling suggests, shifted through "meh-də' ", which a much shorter final syllable, shown by the schwa (ə), which is more of a tiny grunt than a vowel, and then into the one-syllable word of today. The Great Vowel shift moved all the vowels about, leading certain words that once rhymed to have different sounds now than then, and they no longer rhyme. "Water" and "after", in "Jack and Jill", used to rhyme perfectly. No longer.

Dictionaries began to be written for English very early in the Great Vowel Shift. While this didn't exactly entomb all the spellings in stone, they did tend to hold things back, and today, dictionaries of "modern English" have to trot to keep up, having been rendered out of date by our movable language just in the time needed to research, typeset, and publish them. By the way, usage of the words "typeset" and "typesetting" is dropping, having peaked in the 1980's; they are being overtaken by "key in" and "keying in". As computers get better at speech recognition, those will drop off also.

Here is side point that I enjoyed. Do you ever hear the expression "willy-nilly"? I figured out long ago that it came from "will I, or nill I", but I wasn't sure just what "nill" meant. Dr. McWhorter has the answer. A millennium or so ago, negating words was done by adding the prefix "ne-", so to "not will", or not desire, something was to "ne-will" it. To say you don't have something, you would say, "I ne-have it", but by Chaucer's time it would have been "I nave it", with "nave" pronounced "nah-veh" or even "nah-və". And Chaucer spelled it næbbe. It seems the consonants have shifted as well, but the author has left that for a future book, I reckon.

I'll forbear further nerdifying. It is a delightful book, and an incredibly informative one. I am thinking of giving a copy to a friend who is a linguist, but primarily of Chinese, not English, to see what similar trends might have occurred in Mandarin, which the Chinese acknowledge is not a written language at all: the "written Chinese" language is one that nobody speaks, but they all know how to interpret it into whatever dialect they grew up speaking.

We now have one S

kw: history, historical linguistics, typography

In the original manuscript of the Bill of Rights, the word "Congress" is seemingly spelled "Congre⌠s" or even "Congrefs" to many eyes. That funny letter before the final "S" is the "Medial S" and was used everywhere except where S was the last letter, prior to about the year 1800. There are plenty of discussions of the medial S available, and that isn't my point here anyway. Rather, it is that with the help of the Google Labs Ngram tool, we can see the change take place.

As the Google Labs people explain in their "About Ngram" information, the medial S in older documents was OCR'd to an F, so that we need to be wise when searching older documents. Here is a search for both "wish" and "wifh":

You can actually see the change take place. You can also see that the medial S seems to have arisen about 1630 but become common only after 1660. Either Google is fixing older books' renderings, or only the common S was used in the oldest books.

By making a run with "wish,wifh,desire,defire" (not shown), I found that "desire" (+"defire") has a rather steady frequency going back to 1600, but, as we see here, "wish"+"wifh" grew from a low level early on prior to 1800. Since about 1800 the two words have very similar frequencies.

Does the downslope from 1850 to 2000 indicate a reduction in wishfulness? Further study may ferret that out.

Skimming along the edges of English

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, historical linguistics

Ever hear of a pruning hook? This is what one looks like; it is about three feet long. Though its inner edge is sharpened, its main utility is pulling down dead branches.

There was a law regarding the King's trees in royal forests in medieval England: nobody could cut them down. But people were allowed to pull down any dead wood that was within reach of a pruning hook or a shepherd's crook. The latter had the advantage, being twice as long. Through the process of time, this gave rise to that practical expression, "by hook or by crook."

Linguist David Crystal has written a few books on language. While traveling along the English/Welsh borderlands on behalf of a BBC project titled "Voices," he compiled private notes on the fascinating array of accents and dialects to be found there. He has gathered these into a nearly stream-of-consciousness memoir of the journey, By Hook or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English.

It is axiomatic that we learn most about the limits of a subject by examining its borders. This is true of language most of all. You'll have to click on this image to read the name of this train station, and its interpretation, in a larger image. It is considered the longest name of a town in the English language: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. It is the only "word" with four L's in a row, though in many renditions, there is a hyphen between "...drobwll" and "llanty...".

This "English" word was composed in the Anglo-Saxon—that is, Germanic—way of jamming a phrase together, in this case a long phrase in Welsh, to make one word. People who live in this lovely Anglesey village don't go around saying the whole name, but get by with calling their home "Llanfairpwll", approximately pronounced, "hlan-fire-pool". This long name, its origin and meaning, and plenty of musing about long words and long names in general, forms much of the first chapter, which begins and ends with the discussion of "by hook or by crook".

The midlands of England and Wales typify a locale in which you can tell someone's birthplace within a mile or two, or sometimes which block of which street, by the accent. Parts of New York and New Jersey are like that, but for most of the United States, accents cover much broader regions. There are only about four Texas accents, for example, and so far as I can tell, one lovely one does for both North and South Carolina (Carolinians may differ with me here!).

I do recall, during the time I lived in Oklahoma, and frequently visited Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, that "y'all" has regional meanings. It is the only form of "you" you're likely to hear in much of Louisiana, while in Texas "y'all" and "you-all" mean you, singular, while "all-y'all" is plural. Arkansans and most Okies use "you" and "y'all" for singular and plural, with a fair measure of consistency.

These are mainly dialect differences, as they concern word usage. It is the different ways that "y'all" and "you-all" are pronounced that constitute accents. I am less capable of making a regional deduction based only on accent, but I suspect Dr. Crystal could do so. At least, he can certainly do so among the various accents that populate the British Isles.

On page 143 he writes, "English has always been a vacuum-cleaner of a language, sucking in new words form whatever languages it happens to make contact with," noting that English words derive from at least 350 languages, and only about 20% of current English usage is derived from Anglo-Saxon. In terms a professional linguist would use, much of English is thus composed of loan words. Of course, they are not on loan, as Crystal observes: we have appropriated them and often morphed them almost beyond recognition, but many we simply swallowed whole. He has a delightful riff on computer, a French word, but now so thoroughly identified with English that the French disdain it in favor of ordinateur!

A language has boundaries not only in space but in time. Do try to read this inscription (click for a larger image if needed): it is only 400 years old or so: it is the epitaph of William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Should you be so fortunate to be in the presence of one of his "first folios" or a good facsimile, or a first edition of the King James Bible (Authorized Version) of 1611, take a flying try at reading it. You'll be surprised how our language has changed in about fifteen generations.

The fact that you can read it at all is a tribute primarily to Shakespeare himself. His writings and plays are so beloved, and the English Bible produced by his contemporaries in Elizabeth's court being of equal influence, that these two oeuvres have anchored the language and kept it to roots that many other languages have lost.

I couldn't resist tracking down this image; the monochrome version in the book is not nearly so dramatic. It is in the Great Garden in Stratford, Shakespeare's town. One of several works inspired by his plays, it is titled A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Author Crystal calculates that Shakespeare's poetic output totals more than 80,000 lines. One would think it a record, but it is not. A more recent, rather obsessive poet, one John Bradburne, whose known (and growing) body of work totals more than 170,000 lines...most of it produced in but ten years. And it's good poetry, too. He died in 1979, as a Christian martyr, having stood up for residents of the Mutemwa leper colony in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Otherwise he could still be with us, and who knows how much poetry he'd have produced!

Back to spatial edges for a moment. The largest number of English speakers in the world are in India, 350 million of them. This number is growing fast. Because of the dozens of household languages in that polyglot nation, new loan words are being gathered at a great rate. I figure, between "teen text" and India, it's rather a tie who is having the greatest effect on English for the coming generation. I find it amazing that there are so many ways English is spoken, that manage to be comprehensible to the majority of us.

When did human evolution stop?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, paleoanthropology, archaeology, historical linguistics, primatology, social anthropology, evolutionary psychology, population genetics, human origins, natural selection

The simple answer to this post's title: It hasn't. Among those who accept evolution of the human animal, it is common to think that we've reached some kind of pinnacle, and no evolutionary change has taken place in the last ten or twenty thousand—or perhaps 100,000—years (For those who don't, of course no evolution has ever taken place). The book Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade presents a synthesis of what is known and strongly inferred in the disciplines related to human origins. The picture is full of surprises.

Item: When did people begin to wear clothing? Fabrics are so rarely retained in "fossil" deposits, we can't begin to guess. Body lice provide the answer (yuck!). Head lice, equivalent to head-and-body lice in apes, live in the hair. Body lice live only in clothing, and move to the skin to feed, but lay eggs in clothing, because there is too little hair on most human bodies to reliably protect the nits. So when did body lice evolve? Genetic dating from modern head and body louse populations provides the surprising answer: about 70,000 years ago. Such dates currently suffer from large uncertainties, so the actual development of the body louse, shortly (a few thousand years) after clothing became common, occurred before 40,000 years ago, and most likely 80,000 or later.

Item: When did proto-humans lose their body hair? Both chimps and bonobos (once called "pygmy chimps") both have fair skin under that black hair. Only the face, hands and feet are dark, because of a permanent tan. Dark skin over the body probably arose as hair was lost, to protect the skin from the sun. "Black" Africans can be sunburned, but it takes a lot more sun exposure compared to lighter-skinned people. When did darker skin over the whole body evolve? Genetic dating again provides an answer, this time from the genes that produce skin pigments: about 1,200,000 years ago.

Strangely, I looked for information on the "first use of fire", but Wade doesn't mention it. A BBC News article of 22 March 2004 states that early African humans, possibly Homo erectus, seem to have had hearths as early as 1.5 million years ago. Another article, dated 29 April 2004, about H. erectus in Israel, has them using fire in sophisticated ways 790,000 years ago. It seems to me that nakedness arose primarily as a result of fire use. Other explanations, such as sexual selection, seem less compelling.

What is interesting, though, is the million or more years that passed between the loss of hair and the development of clothing. Production of textiles must require a change in thinking that didn't occur earlier. The Acheulian "toolkit" was used by at least three species of Homo from 1.7 million years ago until it was supplanted 250,000 years ago by Mousterian (H. Neanderthalensis in Europe) and Middle Paleolithic (H. Ergaster in Africa) technologies. These related technologies show two things: that there was contact between African and European species of Homo; and that one had attained sufficient brain power to greatly improve their use of stone tools, which the other quickly adopted (it takes less wit to copy than to invent). So, apparently, clothing other than cured skins was an invention later yet.

I've known the term "anatomically modern human" (AMH) for decades. I confess that I didn't think about it much. But later, the term "behaviorally modern human" (BMH) gave me pause. Is there a difference? Sure is, by tens of thousands of years. It seems AMH's, which arose in Africa 100,000 years ago, could pass for human today, as long as they didn't do anything. But they didn't live like BMH's, who lived like the hunter-gatherer groups of today, such as certain "primitive" tribes in South America or New Guinea. Evidence of BMH living appears just after 50,000 years ago in Africa, and about 45,000 years ago in Europe.

AMH living was by foraging and minor hunting. Family groups stayed together, in bands of related families that scattered and coalesced on a daily basis, numbering 50 or fewer. Few activities other than food gathering and preparation, procreation, and sleeping, occurred.

BMH living included much more hunting, of larger game, and specialized plant gathering. A great increase in the use of ornaments and artful trinkets arose. The stone toolkit, called Upper Paleolithic, was much more complex, with specific tools for specific uses, and complex tools made of bone, antler, and ivory. Musical instruments, such as bone flutes, are found for the first time in BMH leavings. The people ritualized burial. And they traded among groups, much more than AMH's, to obtain materials and products found far from their home ranges.

Add one item: About 50,000 years ago, BMH's from the "ancestral human population" (AHP) in Africa migrated beyond Africa, apparently for the first time since 1.8 million years ago, and established themselves eastward and northwestward to the limits of the Eurasian continent in a few thousand years. They seem to have supplanted and replaced Neandertals in Europe and "archaic Homo" people in Asia, in less than ten thousand years. During this time, some reached Australia, something the archaics didn't do.

When I saw all these together, I was convinced for the first time that the "multiregional" hypothesis, which requires persistent gene flow among the African, European, and Asian species of Homo, must be wrong. What was it that kept Africans from continuing to migrate to Eurasia, at least successfully, between 1.8 million and 50 thousand years ago? The most likely answer is that the land was occupied by Neandertals and archaics, who either drove out or destroyed invaders. In the same way, the AHP in Africa filled at least the Northeast part of that continent and kept the other species from invading.

Once the AHP developed BMH living, they could make better use of resources, had better weapons, and could stay together in larger groups, compared to the other species, and could successfully invade Eurasia. However, even with these advantages, it wasn't a simple walkover. The number of BMH's who became the ancestors of all non-African people was less than 500, and possibly as few as 150.

OK, so what happened since 50,000 years ago? Are we BMH's who have somehow adapted to settled life? Are today's remaining hunter-gatherer (H/G) groups BMH's? Not really. Although BMH's were anatomically very nearly the same as AMH's, there are differences between today's people, both in Africa and Eurasia, and the people of the African AHP. If you were to take a range of modern people, of all races, of various sizes and ages, and pair them up with AHP folks of similar size and age, you'd find the earlier people had thicker skulls and heavier bones at all ages. They were not as heavily built as Neandertals, but were definitely more like American Football players than like Soccer (European Football) players. The AHP's also stayed in smaller groups than members of modern H/G groups do.

The main reason is inter-group combat. There has been a strong tendency among anthropologists to understate the level of aggressiveness and prevalence of warfare among "innocent savages." An unbiased look at the record reveals that the greatest single danger to humans through all ages was and is other humans. Xenophobia is the natural state of the H/G mind, the BMH mind, and the AMH mind, as it was for all earlier species of Homo.

It is now known that groups of chimps engage in wars of extermination against neighboring groups, and that the leading cause of death among males is "chimpicide". Bonobos, with a female-dominated society, do not engage in such warfare...a good reason for turning over all politics to women!

The greatest single cause of both male and female death in most H/G groups is warfare and killing raids between groups. So, while trade arose at least 50,000 years ago, it probably occurred primarily among groups that couldn't exterminate one another, just as it does today among all the mutually warring tribes in New Guinea and South America, for example. "You aren't my brother or cousin, but unless I judge I can destroy you, I'll call you friend...for a while."

My father's cousin, while a missionary in New Guinea in the 1950s, saw frequent warfare and some cannibalism. Two groups of men might trade one day, and slaughter one another the next. A smaller village might have all its men killed, whereupon all their children would be killed, plus most of the women, and the rest taken as concubines.

Let's look at a few numbers. About a third of adult male chimps die in combat. The number is the same among the Yanomamo, a Brazilian tribe of H/G's. One study showed that a typical tribal society lost, on average, 0.5% of its population yearly to warfare (that's ~1% if the men and a smaller proportion of women; and among men, that's a 26% loss per thirty years). However, averages tend to hide incidents. Most inter-tribe warfare is carried out by small battles and raids a few times per year, or perhaps monthly. Pitched battles are much less frequent, but cause huge carnage: A 30% loss on both sides is typical. Modern societies prior to 1900 AD could produce similar death tolls: At the battle of Gettysburg, the Union side lost 21%, and the Confederates lost 30%.

However, the two World Wars of the 20th Century resulted in losses of less than 10% among the soldiery, and a percent or less of the engaged nations' total citizenry. Stalin's purges of the 1940s and '50s were actually worse than either World War in terms of pure carnage...they were wars of another sort. But in 2002, though a number of wars were in progress around the globe, including America's war in Afghanistan, 0.3% of deaths were due to warfare.

But these latter figures are comparing recent wars among settled societies, with wars among H/G societies, BMH societies...and apes! They are probably not entirely fair. Wade doesn't go into this, but by my own study, I find the following: History is full of war stories, from Troy to Sparta to Carthage and so on. But it seems the total toll of warfare among settled societies is typically about half that among H/G societies.

I wonder what is cause and what is effect? Did settlement and agriculture result in a preference for negotiation? Or did the development of more negotiation-prone people—perhaps first among those who profited most from trading—allow settlement to occur?

I'd say it is a coevolutionary change. Our skeletons reflect the fact that we have less reason to fear being bonked on the head some random night, compared to the AHP, and less need for face-to-face combat. Although today's H/G members live very similarly to the AHP, a Yanomamo or Dani person can be socialized to live in a city. I suspect a person brought in a time machine from 40,000 years ago would be unsocializable, or only partly so.

The brain has changed since that time. So far, two genetic changes that determine brain size, and probably size in specific areas, have been found and genetically dated. One occurred 37,000 years ago, the other 6,000 years ago. The people of 50,000 years ago were, from archaeological evidence, able to live in larger groups than earlier peoples. They were able to extend the idea of "kin" to a larger group than before. But each change to the brain seems to have increased the number of "others" a person could tolerate.

By 15,000 years ago, when settlement began, it seems people could tolerate even greater numbers, and additionally, accept direction from leaders. Both are required for a few hundred people to live in continuous close proximity. It seems strange that these first settlements were not primarily agricultural. They seem instead to have been "places to be" between hunting and collecting expeditions, and trade centers. Specialized skills proliferated; the best hunters got their spear and arrow points from the best stoneworkers, as the best clothing makers got needles and other tools from bone workers...and in turn traded clothing to those less skilled.

The later development of agriculture led to much larger settlements, about the time of the 6,000-year-ago bump in brain size. A larger brain adapts one to the need to remember a larger number of people. It was not much later than this that lactose tolerance evolved among those who kept herds of large mammals. To this day, lactose tolerance or intolerance indicates whether your ancestors were farmers or ranchers.

Now think, today an office worker can step out of an apartment and essentially vanish into a city of millions of strangers, and return safely hours later! Rather extraordinary, wouldn't you say?

What other genetic changes have arisen recently? Malaria resistance among those living in subtropical areas has evolved at least twice since 10,000 years ago (one such change causes sickle-cell disease). Our sense of smell is much reduced compared to just 15,000 years ago, because most of the olfactory gene set has become inactive. Whether this is because of the stench of early cities, of because of less need to smell out game, I forbear to speculate!

The changes to brain and body that occurred prior to 50,000 years ago are found in all humans. Those that arose later are found in larger or smaller numbers depending on where a mutation arose and how strong a benefit it ensured.

This leads us to the most visible differences among human populations, those that correlate best with the continent one's ancestors inhabited: we call them races. While skin color is often considered to be the main indicator of race, it is not really the best. The Caucasians in southern India are darker than some Africans; some Japanese (and I don't mean Ainu, which are very pale) are paler than most Caucasians; many Australians (aboriginals not Austro-Brits) are darker than most Africans or Indians. If you take almost anyone, and paint their skin white (or any solid color of your choice), most people can tell at a glance what continental type they typify, and often the subtype (pygmies and Inuit are quite distinctive, for example).

Regardless how extensive "racial" differences are, it seems they arose no more than 12,000 years ago. They reflect, as do many other indicators, that most people in history seldom moved far from the place they were born. The subtypes within continental groups emphasize this. So, rather than the "not politically correct" attitude toward any mention of racial genetics, it would be better to look upon the diversity of human types as a library of the history of humanity.

One thing is sure: We continue to evolve. We are more gracile than the AHP. Gracility may continue, but it has probably already reached it logical limit among East Asians. Even though Chinese fed a "Western" diet grow taller than their parents, they remain on average much slenderer than Europeans. The continually increasing complexity of modern life will, unless civilization collapses, lead to people with larger brains and more multitasking skills, first behaviorally, and over a few generations, genetically. We won't become the bare brains of science fiction, but we may become smaller, thinner, quicker, and less aggressive in the future. Should Homo sapiens survive another 50,000 years, no doubt our descendants will look back at us as quizzically as we look back at the people in Africa, 50,000 years ago, some of whom managed to escape that continent to colonize the rest of the planet.