I love xkcd, especially this comic:

As a linguist, I can tell you, people are always decrying the decline of the English language; doomsayers lament that this may be the last generation marginally capable of stringing together words into a grammatical sentence!

But that’s simply not true.

Language has survived this far, and it will continue to survive indefinitely–if in slightly different forms. Common ‘pet peeves’ are actually symptoms of language change. For example, the inability to correctly execute the traditional distinction between ‘lay’ and ‘lie,’ pronouncing ‘pillow’ to rhyme with ‘fellow,’ and contractions like ‘gonna’ are signals of things to come: the next stage of English.

However, returning to the comic, I’d like to make a quick counterpoint. While there is no danger of humanity devolving into a quivering mass of stupid–à la Idiocracy–there is a very real danger of entering a dark age if we fail to educate ourselves. For this, there is precedence, and history has a demonstrated tendency to repeat itself.

I agree that the solution is not to institute selective breeding programs, but if we are at all concerned with the perpetuity of our species, we should make it our utmost priority to make education and information widely available, and to stamp out superstition and prejudice. That might mean socializing education a little more.

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.

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.

Some guys took the liberty of tracing place names back etymologically, and the result is fascinating:

While some names are unsurprising, like ‘Sibling Love’ for Philadelphia, some are intiriguing like ‘Home Ruler’ for America, or downright bizarre like ‘Moon Navel’ for Mexico.

h/t Strange Maps

McCain is getting a little confused these days. His campaign has become so focused on his clever “Joe the Plumber” and “X the Y” meme, that he is getting a little carried away.

Ha Ha Ha!

I know the more we attack Sarah Palin, the more her supporters love her, but I am so tired of hearing her half-assed attempts at producing grammatical sentences of English that I feel it is time someone say something.

Almost every time I see this poor woman speak, she makes some egregious grammatical error. Most recently here.

“We’re fighting two wars, with a force strength in need of rebuilding, not in being gutted,”

First off, “force strength.” You can almost see the rusty cogs feebly trying to turn in there, but I am sorry. I am not OK with “force strength.”

Second, she got caught somewhere beween

“not in need of being gutted,” and
“not of being gutted,”

But where she ended up is most certainly NOT English.

You know, she is exactly like a parrot. She is very good at mimicking human speech, but when it comes down to it, the internal machine that turns out human language is missing from her brain.

Is it too much to ask for our political leaders to be able to string words together into something we recognize as a part of our native language? America is in need of intelligent leaders, not in being led by this woman.

I was reading Dear Abby today, and I came across the following gem of a sentence given as a suggested response to someone to whom you do not wish to disclose your choice of presidential candidate:

“Isn’t it great we live in a country where we can’t be persecuted or nagged for whom we vote for?”

I can only imagine the kind of vindictive prick that would utter such a biting retort, instead of just saying “I don’t want to tell you,” and I would therefore like to take this opportunity to offer an equally supercilious response to what I plan to demonstrate is attempted grammatical snobbery.

Notice that the sentence ends in the stranded preposition for. Stranding prepositions is something most people most people get riled up about up about which people get riled.
If you don’t know what I am talking about, or why the last sentence is funny, take the following example:

A: What are you looking for?

B: For what are you looking?

There are people who would tell you that the A is incorrect, or at least that it sounds informal, because the word for - a preposition - occurs at the end of the sentence instead of preceding the interrogative pronoun what.

I personally think they are insane, but, for the sake of argument, let’s grant it to them that B is more formal or proper - whatever that means.

Now, these same tightwads are also generally proponents of using the object form of the personal interrogative pronoun. Sorry for the grammarese, but that means the word whom.
Most sensible English speakers have no idea where whom occurs, and where who occurs. I can explain it, but it is a little more difficult to wrap your head around.

First you need to understand what an “object” is, and in the interest of keeping it simple, you can just remember that if it’s a noun, and it’s not the subject of the verb, it’s the object.
So in the following sentences, the objects are in blue and red.

Frederick swallowed a peach seed.
I sent my congressman anthrax.
They will hum Daft Punk in the shower.

Second, you need to know that sometimes, for various reasons, stuff gets “replaced” by “question words” and those question words show up in strange places.

Normal: The transient accosted the mannequin.
What did the transient accost?
I saw what the transient accosted.

You see, in the second two sentences, the word mannequin is gone, because it has been replaced by what, and the word what is popping up somewhere other than after accosted. The word what is easy, because it doesn’t change based on whether it is a subject or object, but when the question word replaces a person, we run into the who/whom problem:

Normal: The transient accosted the day trader.
Who(m) did the transient accost?
I saw who(m) the transient accosted.

These sentences should technically have whom, because the question word replaced an object: day-trader. However, it’s hard to tell, because the question words have a pesky tendency of floating around, so you can’t tell where they came from. That is why people have trouble.

We can pretty much agree though that if you use whom, you are one of three things: a 19th century aristocrat, a grammarian, or a pompous windbag.

Our friend from the Dear Abby column, who(m) I submit is just such a pompous windbag, nailed the use of whom, but forgot about stranding the preposition. Why would he/she allow such a blatant inconsistency in niveau de langage? Well, in this instance, you are forced to strand the preposition, lest you produce the following superb specimen of English prose:

“Isn’t it great we live in a country where we can’t be persecuted or nagged for for whom we vote?”

WTF?! Lesson learned. You can’t always avoid stranding the preposition, although I am sure the author at least tried not to.

The problem that I saw in the original sentence is that whom sounds silly if you leave strand the prepositon, because you are mixing levels of formality. Don’t believe me?

Normal: Who were you speaking to?
Formal: To whom were you speaking?
Normal/Formal: Whom were you speaking to?
Formal/Normal: To who were you speaking?

The last two sound like crap, because they can’t make their up minds if they are elevated tone or not.

The point is that our author wrote him/herself into a syntactic corner, where they were forced to strand the preposition, but rather than saying “screw it, I will sound like a normal chump for one sentence,” they just HAD to get that whom in there, even if it made them sound silly.

If you are wondering what I, in my infinite grammatical wisdom, would have said…

“I voted for Barack Obama, and I am proud of it!”

Suck it, you jerk.