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interesting article. This assertion does go against the last 200 years or so (since the Grimm Brothers) of thought about the origins of the English language. I

interesting article. This assertion does go against the last 200 years or so (since the Grimm Brothers) of thought about the origins of the English language. I'm not an expert but I did major in linguistics and have studied the history of the english language in some depth. For me, the strongest points this new proposal has are the syntactical features that scandinavian and modern english share. Syntactical features i.e. sentence structure being adopted from one language to another is very very rare and when it does occur it happens at a much slower rate. There are a couple week points in the theory though. #1 and the article admits this, Old English is West Germanic. #2 Chaucer's english is vastly different from Old English but I don't think anyone would say its a completely new Language, there are too many similarities, shared vocabularies, etc, this has until now led everyone to believe modern english discends from old english and was mingled up with scandinavian and then norman french. Also, almost all the syntactical similarities the article shows have to do with the split verb that modern english doesn't have. In german "ich habe gestern lange gearbeitet" is in English literally : "I have yesterday long worked" but translated should be "I worked a long time yesterday" . I think they'd need to give support that the split verb didn't die out, (which is kind of suggested in the texts of chaucer and his predecessors), but rather was something that never existed b/c the "original" language, in this case scandinavian, never had them in the first place.

bitwize 14y ago
Split verbs do actually exist in modern English. Schoolmarms may enphatically teach that they're flat-out wrong, but linguists have long maintained that English rules of grammar are descriptive, not proscriptive. Actual common use is what is considered to fundamentally dictate the rules, not vice-versa.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  I'm not sure, but I think you're confusing split infinitives with split verbs. Split infinitives are definitely a schoolmarm invention (borrowed from Latin, where the infinitive is an inflection and thus inseparable). I think split verbs are here referring to the possibility of separating verbal auxiliaries from their verb.
  - dunham 14y ago
    I think by "split verb" he's referring to "separable verbs", where a particle, resembling a preposition, moves to the end of the sentence. This sometimes occurs in English, apparently violating the "schoolmarm" rule to not end sentences with a preposition. c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  The concept to which you're referring is that linguists describe language without shaping it. Its like saying scientists don't make physics, they observe it. With sociological phenomena the distinction between dictating something and measuring it is finer, but it doesnt mean linguists hate prescriptive grammars.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    I think he means to contrast English with, say, Spanish which has an actual governing, prescriptive body. I googled to find the name of it for you and Wikipedia gave me a much better link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators As a primary English speaker, I find it both silly and abhorrent that they even bother but... eh. Whatever.
fusiongyro 14y ago
Just a question, since my knowledge on this subject is very, very limited, but is it possible that the syntactic changes could be accounted for by a single parameter? From what I recall, _The Atoms of Language_ makes the case that English went from SOV to SVO because a style in which very short sentences could be uttered in SVO arose and became popular, and within a fairly short period of time the L1 learners of English were mostly hearing SVO during their early years, so as they matured the head directionality parameter was set contrary to their parents. As I recall the book had some evidence to support this, but I can't speak to the quality of it. I'm also not sure how that would work with the antisymmetry proposal (which nicely explains other phenomena).
- jfaucett 14y ago
  I haven't read the Atoms of Language but this sounds plausible and is if I remember correctly, more or less, what is believed to have happened. The diachronic study of english from say 900 to 1300, shows a language undergoing drastic changes such as the loss of inflections, grammatical gender, and adoption of north germanic (danish) words and later norman french ones. The idea is that original SOV speakers of saxon were put under the heavy influence of the SVO languages of the danes and later (post 1066 - battle of hastings) that of the SVO normans. It would make sense, especially since even OE was not a truly pure SOV language and allowed a much freer word order due to the inflection system, which upon dying out forced word order to take on a much stricter form. As an interesting side note to show just how big of a hack mixed up jumble of everything modern english is, the usage of the verb do, in elliptical sentences and questions such as "do you want some coffee?", is very rare in indo-european languages (only found in celtic langs such as irish) and thought to have been picked up during the time in which saxon speakers and celts were sharing the same island.
  - fusiongyro 14y ago
    I find this proposal an interesting thought experiment, for sure, but replacing all the vocabulary except the grammatical words seems more likely to me than replacing just the grammatical words and the grammar and retaining all the other vocabulary. Are there any other cases of the grammatical words being replaced while the rest of the vocab was left intact? The fact that there was so much and such dramatic change happening that either of those possibilities are reasonable suggests to me that we're not going to get a definitive conclusion anytime soon.
sirmarksalot 14y ago
The joke I always heard about split verbs was, "I suppose then to uphold a bank is the same as to hold it up?" Not to say that really contradicts the theory, though, as the single word "uphold" is essentially vocabulary, and could easily have been borrowed from a West Germanic language, irrespective of its grammatical implications.
oellegaard 14y ago
I find the article very interesting being a Dane. Your sentence "I worked a long time yesterday" would be "Jeg arbejde lang tid igår" in modern Danish - exactly the same structure as the English sentence. This applies to most sentences in at least Danish/Norwegian(Bokmål) and English.

bitwize 14y ago

Split verbs do actually exist in modern English. Schoolmarms may enphatically teach that they're flat-out wrong, but linguists have long maintained that English rules of grammar are descriptive, not proscriptive. Actual common use is what is considered to fundamentally dictate the rules, not vice-versa.

fusiongyro 14y ago
I'm not sure, but I think you're confusing split infinitives with split verbs. Split infinitives are definitely a schoolmarm invention (borrowed from Latin, where the infinitive is an inflection and thus inseparable). I think split verbs are here referring to the possibility of separating verbal auxiliaries from their verb.
- dunham 14y ago
  I think by "split verb" he's referring to "separable verbs", where a particle, resembling a preposition, moves to the end of the sentence. This sometimes occurs in English, apparently violating the "schoolmarm" rule to not end sentences with a preposition. c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb
alanctgardner2 14y ago
The concept to which you're referring is that linguists describe language without shaping it. Its like saying scientists don't make physics, they observe it. With sociological phenomena the distinction between dictating something and measuring it is finer, but it doesnt mean linguists hate prescriptive grammars.
- saraid216 14y ago
  I think he means to contrast English with, say, Spanish which has an actual governing, prescriptive body. I googled to find the name of it for you and Wikipedia gave me a much better link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators As a primary English speaker, I find it both silly and abhorrent that they even bother but... eh. Whatever.

fusiongyro 14y ago

Just a question, since my knowledge on this subject is very, very limited, but is it possible that the syntactic changes could be accounted for by a single parameter? From what I recall, _The Atoms of Language_ makes the case that English went from SOV to SVO because a style in which very short sentences could be uttered in SVO arose and became popular, and within a fairly short period of time the L1 learners of English were mostly hearing SVO during their early years, so as they matured the head directionality parameter was set contrary to their parents. As I recall the book had some evidence to support this, but I can't speak to the quality of it. I'm also not sure how that would work with the antisymmetry proposal (which nicely explains other phenomena).

jfaucett 14y ago
I haven't read the Atoms of Language but this sounds plausible and is if I remember correctly, more or less, what is believed to have happened. The diachronic study of english from say 900 to 1300, shows a language undergoing drastic changes such as the loss of inflections, grammatical gender, and adoption of north germanic (danish) words and later norman french ones. The idea is that original SOV speakers of saxon were put under the heavy influence of the SVO languages of the danes and later (post 1066 - battle of hastings) that of the SVO normans. It would make sense, especially since even OE was not a truly pure SOV language and allowed a much freer word order due to the inflection system, which upon dying out forced word order to take on a much stricter form. As an interesting side note to show just how big of a hack mixed up jumble of everything modern english is, the usage of the verb do, in elliptical sentences and questions such as "do you want some coffee?", is very rare in indo-european languages (only found in celtic langs such as irish) and thought to have been picked up during the time in which saxon speakers and celts were sharing the same island.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  I find this proposal an interesting thought experiment, for sure, but replacing all the vocabulary except the grammatical words seems more likely to me than replacing just the grammatical words and the grammar and retaining all the other vocabulary. Are there any other cases of the grammatical words being replaced while the rest of the vocab was left intact? The fact that there was so much and such dramatic change happening that either of those possibilities are reasonable suggests to me that we're not going to get a definitive conclusion anytime soon.

sirmarksalot 14y ago

The joke I always heard about split verbs was, "I suppose then to uphold a bank is the same as to hold it up?" Not to say that really contradicts the theory, though, as the single word "uphold" is essentially vocabulary, and could easily have been borrowed from a West Germanic language, irrespective of its grammatical implications.

oellegaard 14y ago

I find the article very interesting being a Dane. Your sentence "I worked a long time yesterday" would be "Jeg arbejde lang tid igår" in modern Danish - exactly the same structure as the English sentence. This applies to most sentences in at least Danish/Norwegian(Bokmål) and English.