Rants on Language Usage

Those of you who know me know that I am a word nerd. I love looking up obscure etymologies and tracing the evolution of words and languages. I could go on and on about how this or that word is derived from French or German and trace it all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. Looking at language and languages from a historical (not "an", the h is aspirated, so it gets treated like a consonant!!!) perspective, there is only one true rule of language: They change over time. The syntax and grammar of yesterday are gone. But, to be fair, they never truly existed. They were "rules" arrived at by convention [con lat. "together"; venire lat. come]

To all you language mavens out there, admit it. You have words and/or phrases that feel like fingernails on a chalkboard. I do too. I'm trying climb down from my ivory tower, but it's so hard. It's so comfy and cushy up here. Plus, I get to look down my nose at whomever I choose. (I am sad to see the word, "whom", falling away...one of the last vestiges of the Old English case system like the word "him".) I do, however, draw the line of people using "irrgardless". This word violates both rules of syntax and morphology. In English, one wouldn't use both a negating prefix and suffix. (These rules are okay to keep; they are descriptive rather than prescriptive.

English, as beautiful and inclusive language that it is, has a few peculiar features that have never made sense to me. Take the construction, "Aren't I". It sounds right to me because it said to often. But is it correct to say, "I are"? Granted, the aforementioned construction is only really used for emphasis: "I'm supposed to go to the store, aren’t I?" Also, there never seemed to evolve a negative contraction for "I am". We have "don't", "aren't" and "isn't". (This follows a phonological rule of English, though. "I am't" doesn't work because, generally, English words don't like to end with an m t sound...at least words that are commonly used. The t would eventually elide away.)

I'm also sick of the i before e except after c rule and its exceptions. Time for it to go. The only reason this rule crept up was that English inherited most of its vocabulary from French and German. The letter c in French words usually needs an e after it, where the ei and ie spellings in German indicate a long-I and long-E pronunciations respectively. Pick one or the other. Etymology be damned! (a use of the subjunctive mood here...I still wish people would be conscious of it; especially in conditional clauses. It sounds so much cooler.)

Oh, how I love the subjunctive mood. Spanish speakers, you know what I mean. English used to have separate form for subjunctive verbs; it survives mainly in our modal (helping) verbs: can-could, will-would, shall-should. But, alas, it too is falling by the wayside. Granted, we don't really need it. Our contrary-to-fact statements are still intelligible. But to maintain them would be a lot of work. English verbs don't fall into neat little categories like French or Spanish. (Actually they do; there's just too many of them to keep track of.)

Which reminds me of another thing...

I never quite understood why one shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition? This rule harkens back to Latin grammar rules in which prepositions governed certain cases. The last time I checked, English was, structurally, a Germanic language. German sentences routinely end with prepositions. Many of their verbs are prefixed with prepositions, many of which are separable and fall to the end of a sentence or clause. Trying to put a preposition with a relative pronoun doesn't work well in English. We have no genitive or dative case.

I do like the Germanic family of languages: English, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, (but oddly not Finnish) Icelandic...and, oh yeah, German. I like the fact that almost one fourth of their words cannot be traced back beyond proto-Germanic. The word god, for instance, comes from the German Gott. That's about as far back as we can go. Romance variations on the word can obviously be traced back to deus, itself etymologically related to Zeus. Make a z and then a d sound. You should notice why these sounds are related. Deus itself can be traced back to proto-Indo-European and is related to words for the same concept that span most of Europe and northern Asia. Plus, Germanic languages have had an odd vowel shift that its sister families didn't undergo. It's nice being the odd one out.

My final rant for tonight will be about pronouns. First, I wish English had a neutral, neither masculine nor feminine, pronoun like Mann (Ger.) or on (Fre.). English uses "you" in this sense, but I've never liked it. Finally, but number one in my heart, I wish English made use of a formal form for "you". Consider: du/Sie, tu/vous tu/vosotros/Usted. "You" used to be the plural/formal "you". Thee and thou were the informal...even though it sounds formal (i.e. archaic) to modern ears. In many European cultures, there is a wall of formality between people who don't know each other very well. I don't like strangers addressing me by my first name. That's a privilege, not a right. I like keeping certain people at a polite distance until I've decided whether or not to invite them into my little world. I despise name tags that state: "Hello. My name is..." If I don't know you're name, I'll address you as "sir" or "ma'am" or "mister" or "Ms. (okay, I have no idea how to spell it, but it does seem more polite that "miss" or "misses". I'm all for gender equality and neutrality.)

Lesson learned here: There are some linguistic/grammatical rules I deplore, while others I love. There really is no rhyme or reason to why I like one rule and despise another. I'm not consistent. So just DEAL with it!

(By the way, my favorite bumper sticker: "Jesus loves you. Everyone else thinks you're an asshole.")