I wish I could roll this out whenever I come across some creationist hater.

In Old and Middle English, our inflectional system worked a bit differently. Take the verb love, for example:

Infinitive: to love

*Depending on dialect, these forms may have had an s, n, or th on the end, but by the end of the Middle English period, these had been almost entirely lost.

Compare that with what we have today:

Infinitive: to love

The only variation that remains is the little “s” on the 3rd person singular form, in blue. We have lost the thou form entirely, and all of the various endings that could occur on the plural forms have been totally done away with.

Anyway, as I am sure you have noticed, when we read Middle English, it seems like everything has an “est” or an “eth” on the end, even though that’s not really true: they only occur on certain verbs and under certain circumstances. But this doesn’t stop us from throwing these endings all over the place when we want to sound Shakespearean. Usually, we indiscriminately tag endings on verbs, regardless of the subject they follow, but occasionally, someone will go hog wild, and throw ‘em on the end of everything. Like this gem of a sentence I saw in the comments section of a post at Unreasonable Faith:

And there’s NO WHERE in the Bible that says “be thouest the greatesteth personeth evereth by no spankingeth your brat child.”

They’re all over the place! This commenter put an “est” on the pronoun thou. They put the adjective great in the superlative by adding “est,” which is normal for today’s English, but they threw an “eth” on the end of that, just for the hell of it. They put “eth” on the noun person and the adverb ever, and even on the verb spank which already has the progressive ending ing.

Not to mention they are referring to the listener with the made-up pronoun “thouest” in the beginning, but switch back to using you to say your brat child.

I know that it was meant to be funny, so I am not making fun of this person. But as someone who has studied Old English, I am amused by what people think it meant to speak it. I think it’s cute.

[Update 5/18: apparently, Billy Graham didn't write this. Blast! Foiled again by the e-mail forward goblins.]

Yet another silly e-mail. This time, a friend of mine got one entitled ‘Prayer for our Nation.’ It started with a huge black and white picture of a seated Billy Graham, staring stoically off into space. Following that was this prayer:

Billy Graham’s Prayer For Our Nation

‘Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, ‘Woe to those who call evil good,’ but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor’s possessions and called it ambition. We have polluted the earth with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and Set us free. Amen!’

I don’t even know where to begin, it’s just so wrong. I guess the worst part is that it just forgoes the debate as to whether or not these things are indeed wrong, calls them a loss, and beseeches the sky fairy for forgiveness.

I think the ridiculousness of the self-flagellatory judgment is evident enough, but there is one sentence that was particularly ridic. When Graham said “We have polluted the earth…” I was on the verge of conceding that he had at least one point, but then he went on to totally ruin it by specifying “with profanity and pornography.” Damn him.

–

It’s amazing how religion mutates with time. The ’sins’ it obsesses about are totally a product of the political climate of the era. Religious people ally themselves with a certain political group, and all of a sudden, the positions of their political opponents are listed among the religious transgressions, and the behaviors of their own party that are explicitly condemned in their holy-book are just swept under the rug.

Abortion? The bible says nothing about it, but it’s arguably one of the most egregious sins, according to fundies.

Usury? The bible condemns it repeatedly, but it’s a non-issue among religious conservatives, because the business world runs on interest, and Republicans love business.

Destroying the environment? I’m sure there are plenty of verses in the bible that could be used to condemn those who knowingly destroy that which god has given us. But conservatives pussyfoot around this topic, because environmental protection is the Democrats’ bit.

Slavery, subjugating women? The bible condones it throughout, but it’s not in vogue today so religious people just jump on the bandwagon.

Homosexuality? There are a few passages about it sprinkled through the bible, but there are far more about how it’s immoral to be rich. Nonetheless Christians fixate on gay marriage, and virtually ignore the socialistic implications of their holy-book.

Religion can a tool of political movements: it allows the difference between you and me to be more than a matter of opinion, but a matter of supernatural law. It’s a powerful weapon to wield against your ideological adversary, to call him/her damned. It’s even more powerful when you try to take some kind of moral high-ground — like Mr. Graham does above — by asking for forgiveness for your rival’s political positions.

From my perspective as a linguist, Spanish is a rather unremarkable language. It has a relatively normal sound inventory (no ejectives, clicks, or voiced aspirates) it has a standard verbal conjugation system reflecting person and number, and its syntax is, for the most part, vanilla Subject-Verb-Object — like English.

However, there was always one thing about this language that bothered me: the past tense of its verb ‘to be’ is the same as the past tense of its verb ‘to go,’ ser and ir respectively. Take a look at the following tables for comparison:

Exactly the same! Freaky, I know.

I always wondered how a language could get by without the ability to distinguish ‘went’ from ‘was’ — it seems like such an indispensable distinction. Other related languages, like French, maintain two separate words for these concepts, as did Latin. So this got me thinking: what happened to Spanish along the way that allowed these verbal paradigms to collapse into one?

As always, the past is the key to the present. In Latin, the word ‘to go’ was the tiny little word īre. The macron over the i means that it was pronounced twice, so another way to write it could be iire. However, given that the morphological marker for the infinitive in Latin was [vowel]re, the stem of this verb was even smaller; it was really just i. Not a very substantial morpheme, and it tended to get bullied around a bit, sometimes showing up as e. Take a look at the present tense:

īre ‘to go’ (present)

The blue parts are conjugational endings that are added to every verb. For our purposes, they don’t even count as part of the word, so you can really get the feel that this word was a feeble little guy.

Most of the romance languages were of the same opinion, so one of the first things they did was dispense of īre, usually replacing it with a version of the word vadīre, which meant ‘wander.’* This is where the French get their present forms vais, vas, va and vont, and where Spanish gets voy, vas, va, vamos, vais, and van (although both languages retain some forms that use the base ir, and we will see why in a moment).

Having developed a propensity for suppletion, which is the technical term for replacing part of a verb’s paradigm with forms of another verb, īre was ready to lose its past tense. Fortunately, there was already a good candidate for replacement, and it came from an alternative past tense expression using the word ‘be’ followed by an accusative. We have the same construction in English: ‘We’ve been to France.’ Over time, this expression became the predominant means of expressing ‘go’ in the past tense, and so ser slowly replaced the original past tense of īre.

When no reasonable alternative to īre was available, the languages were stuck with it. This is why today Spanish still forms its futures, imperfects, and conditionals on a descendant of īre — iré, iras; iba, ibas; and iría, irías etc. French uses the stem ir- as a base for futures and conditionals — j’irai, j’irais — but has performed even further suppletion, replacing the imperfect, preterite, and some present forms with the base all-, borrowed from neighboring Germanic languages.

So, as you can see, what appears today to be totally nonsensical irregularity has a completely sensical, regular origin. Understanding the mechanisms that are responsible for creating the irregularity in the conjugation of ‘to go’ in Spanish sheds light on the irregularity of verbs like aller in French, whose forms vary unpredictably from je vais, to j’allais, to j’irai. Ultimately, these processes even illuminate the origins of highly irregular English paradigms like go/went and be/is/was.

Historical linguistics is cool!

*Interestingly enough, English did a similar thing. Our past tense went is taken from the word wend, which means something close to ‘wander’. It supplanted the original past tense of go.

I recently received the following e-mail:

AFTER THE GATHERING IN WASHINGTON, DC

So, what has “CHANGED” here?

The forwarder of this message was attempting to say something about the character of our new president by what his followers left behind at the inauguration. So, I thought it would be appropriate to provide a quiet reminder of the ‘garbage’ we are left with after the Bush years:

Faced with this, I would take a little litter any day.

Today, in my internet wanderings, I came across the following ad:

Because nothing says I love you like a fleshy tropical fruit with an enormous pit.

Lately, my housemate and I have been having a heated debate about religious inclusion. He takes the position that governments should have an inclusionary stance towards religious groups in the interest of getting them on your side, and eventually liberalizing them out of their fundamentalist beliefs. Furthermore, he maintains that the benefits of this bridge building outweigh the risks to our separation of church and state. While he very cogently points out that secular government is not a mutually shared ideal, and therefore cannot be used as a nucleation point for reconciliation, I still believe that we can’t give these people any leeway: an inch of theocratic encroachment eventually amounts to a mile. He says I’m stonewalling religious people.

What initially ignited the debate was the the Israel-Palestine situation. He says that if Israel has any chance of ousting Hamas, it needs to beat Hamas at its own game; that is, move into Palestine, provide social services, and build mosques. His plan is essentially for Israel to appoint more liberal imams to run the mosques, and shepherd the masses to a more moderate interpretation of Islam.

I think this is a terrible idea, because it doesn’t address the core dispute between the people: the holy-land. Muslims want Jerusalem back, and while it’s true that the mutual antagonism over the years has obscured the root of the problem, it’s really a religiously motivated land dispute. Period.

Take for example the Sinai war. Soon after the creation of Israel, the entire Muslim world lined up at the side of Palestine, and basically attempted to choke Israel to death. They refused to let Israeli planes into their airspace, and wouldn’t let any ship coming from or bound for Israel dock at their ports. This ultimately culminated in Israel lashing out and invading the Sinai Peninsula, but it’s a good indicator of the importance of Jerusalem to the Muslim faith: it transcends borders. Any solution that does not take this into account will ultimately fail.

This is why if you went in and supplanted Hamas with Israeli funded religious and social programs, you could only get rid of suicide bombers and extremists temporarily. If there is anything we have learned from the existence Israel, it’s that you can deny a people their religious holy-land for a very long time, but they will continue to stew about it.

It’s clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at its core a religious problem, and as long as people are allowed to confound religious political issues, it will remain a political problem too. This is why regardless of the side you support, the values you should espouse should be separation of faith from government. I don’t see how demanding reasoned, secular diplomacy is stonewalling when your opponents are religious nutjobs refusing to even sit down and discuss diplomatic solutions with an ‘illegitimate state.’ Having qualifications for what should be considered rational discourse is not stonewalling.

Anyway, our debate moved on to Obama’s new ‘faith-based office,’ which I believe is an absolute waste of time. I know it’s in the interest of everyone to move forward together, but I don’t understand why we have to kowtow to people who unabashedly admit that the US would be better off as a theocracy. We have standards for rational discourse, and just like we would have a hot fire under our asses to shut down Nazi talk in Congress (sorry…Godwin’s law…), we can’t tolerate people telling us that their invisible sky fairy opposes stem cell research. Or that some holy book written by some bronze age desert people offers genuine insight on gay marriage and abortion. I’m sorry, that just isn’t the kind of reasoning I expect from the governing body of the most powerful nation in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t seek to confront their beliefs — telling them that they’re idiots would be unproductive. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask them to base their political convictions on empirical evidence, and therefore keep god out of government. The problem is that if you place any limitation on these people they take it as an affront.

Take senator Jim DeMint, who is claiming that this stimulus package is actually an attack on people of faith because it specifies that any school facilities that receive federal funds for renovation may not subsequently be used for religious activities. He claims this is an infringement on existing liberties, because the activities are currently permitted, and may not be in the future.

Well no, not exactly. If you were getting free fruit from your neighbor’s tree, it wouldn’t be an infringement on your rights if that neighbor decided to cut you off. He would just be exercising his prerogative to keep his own fruit. In the case of the federal government, they aren’t supposed to be giving funds to religious institutions anyway, so this is really just enforcement of a previously ignored stipulations.

If you give Christianists an inch of political ground, they are bound to take a mile. They say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. That’s why I think faith needs to keep its place.

This Dvorak experiment^1,2 has been going really well. I am actually approaching the speed at which I used to type using QWERTY, which was give or take 50 wpm. Not that impressive, I know.

I suspect my actual typing rate may be over 60 WPM, but there are a bunch of weird handicaps they impose on you at typingtest.com, which, in the interest of consistency, is the testing site
I always use. For example, once you hit space after a word, its spelling is recorded and cannot be modified. So, if you make a mistake, you aren’t allowed to go back and fix it. Also, the text they want you to type is above the entry field, which is kind of a pain. In practice, if you are transcribing something, it’s always next to your screen, so that’s not really accurate.

Anyway, below I have included a graph of my progress over the past couple months. As you can see, it’s pretty steady. I am hoping I will keep increasing at this rate until I reach about 70 WPM, and then I can boast that my typing is actually a skill. Not that I would ever want a job as a typist or transcriptionist, but it would be good for a writer or copyeditor.