I first met Geoffrey Chaucer in my middle school English class. Perhaps it’s to be expected of friendships between 13-year-olds and 656-year-olds, but I felt a certain generation gap between us.

The way he wrote was strange. It was poetry, supposedly, but when I tried to read it out loud, it limped and dragged. He was clearly trying to rhyme, but the rhymes didn’t work. And, frankly, it looked like he could have used a spell checker.

My teacher — yes, Mrs. L — did her best to help me understand my new acquaintance. She told me about the differences in pronunciation between Chaucer’s day and our own, that what looked like mistakes in rhyme were actually just the result of language change. She assured us that, once you got to know him, Chaucer was actually great fun.

But, for me, Chaucer’s language was too much in the uncanny valley: too easy to understand to feel like a foreign language you need to master, too hard to understand to read without training. Old English, which we studied after Chaucer, was so much weirder looking, so utterly incomprehensible, that it was clearly a different language. So Chaucer was soon forgotten in favour of Beowulf.

Most people encounter Chaucer as the representative Middle English author, the way Beowulf represents Old English and Shakespeare Early Modern.

It’s ironic, because Chaucer is most interesting precisely because he’s atypical of the literature of his period. If you read him — when you read him — you’ll realize just how surprisingly modern he feels.

The problem is that there are two ways to read Chaucer, and they produce different experiences. The first is the way I read him in Mrs. L’s class, the way most people first encounter him: modern mouths applied to a 14th-century page.

Read him like that, and you’ll find no rhythm to pin down, no voice worth listening for. That’s the Chaucer who seems a dead curiosity. No wonder most people don’t make it past the first 18 lines of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

But there’s another way, which produces another Chaucer: that’s to read him out loud, in something approximating the sounds Chaucer himself would have made. This is how you bring Chaucer back to life, and he’s a lot more fun living than dead.

This kind of literary necromancy is also less work than you’d expect.

Middle English isn’t truly a foreign language — not entirely. It’s English, of a sort at least, with most of the same spelling conventions. In fact, the English spelling system makes a lot more sense for Middle English than it does for Modern English!

Learning to pronounce Middle English is mostly a matter of figuring out where English has changed since the 14th century, and running those changes in reverse.

Here’s the beginning of Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, as edited in the Riverside Chaucer, probably the most famous 18 lines of Middle English poetry:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.1

We’ll return to this passage at the end of the article, and your second reading should be close enough to Chaucer’s own that he might recognize it. I’ve recorded audio throughout, so you can listen and repeat as we go.

By the way, what works for Chaucer will work — with a few adjustments here and there — for other Middle English authors. We start with Chaucer because he’s the most famous and the best understood of the Middle English authors. Learn Chaucer’s 14th century London pronunciation first, and you can branch out to other dialects and centuries from there.

Middle English literature in general is criminally underrated, and most people have no idea what they’re missing out on. Once you’ve read some Chaucer, and accustomed yourself to the big differences between Middle and Modern English, it’s surprisingly easy to move on to other authors.

There’s lots of wild and weird stuff to read: an insult contest between birds, a speaking corpse discovered during a construction project, and a Celtic remix of Orpheus’ journey to the underworld all await you once you’ve got comfortable with Chaucer.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 50,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and the content I’m most proud of: practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, honest takes on how language really works, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (up next!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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The good news

The good news is that most Middle English pronunciation can be worked out by taking the Modern English form and reversing a few changes.

The conventions of Modern English spelling largely crystallized in the 15th century, around the end of the Middle English period, so Modern English is a reasonable starting point.

For words that didn’t survive, Middle English spelling has its own logic: spelling varied widely, but each spelling usually points to just one or two pronunciations. It’s not nearly as hard as it could be.

Most of the changes between Middle English and Modern English have taken place in the vowels. The consonants, by contrast, have remained largely the same. This means that you can — with some few exceptions — concentrate your attention on the vowels.

There are, however, a few principles to be aware of when pronouncing Middle English that will go a long way towards making your consonants fully Chaucer-approved.

First, there are (nearly) no silent letters. If you see it, say it. The k in knight and the w in write are both fully present in Middle English. There are some exceptions to this rule, but almost everything an author writes is there because it reflected how they pronounced the word. The discrepancy between sound and spelling arises because pronunciation changed after the spelling became fixed.

Say these not-so-silent letters in Middle English along with me: knight, writen ‘to write.’

The no-silent-letters principle also extends to words with ng at the end, such as sing. In most dialects of Modern English, there’s no actual g-sound in sing. The ng sequence writes instead a velar nasal (IPA [ŋ]), that is, a nasal sound made with the tongue touching the soft palate (or velum, hence the name).

Not so in Middle English, when there was a distinct g sound at the end of all these -ng words. Say them along with me:

The second principle is a subset of the first. It concerns a single letter and will only apply to a subset of English speakers, because a large percentage of English speakers already pronounce this letter in a Middle English-compatible way.

The letter is r, and the r-dropping, or non-rhotic, dialects of English (most famously, many dialects spoken in England) are all innovative. Middle English was rhotic. So if you see an r, pronounce it as a consonant r.

As for how exactly it was pronounced in the 14th century, that’s a more difficult question to answer. There is a wide variety of pronunciations of consonantal r in Modern English, but the most common is probably the approximant r — the “typical English r sound” found in most dialects.

Here’s how my rhotic (Canadian) dialect of English pronounces root, pierced, martyr, and flower:

What’s unclear is just when this approximant r developed. It’s not entirely a settled question, but the evidence suggests that English r was a tap or trill until the early modern period, around two centuries after Chaucer’s time. This tap/trill pronunciation still lives on in some English dialects, not to mention in English’s closest cousin, Scots.

Here are the ancestors of those same r-words with the Middle English pronunciation. Say them along with me: roote, perced, martir, flour ‘flower.’

I know many people have trouble making taps and trills, so don’t worry if you can’t do it (yet). As long as you’re pronouncing r as a consonant wherever it occurs, you’ll be capturing the most important difference between Middle and Modern English r.

So much for the easy part. What lies ahead is more interesting territory: the handful of consonants that really are different from their modern descendants, a couple of letters you may not have met before, the complete reorganization of the English vowel system, and, most important of all, the pronunciation rule that makes Chaucer’s poetry click into place.

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It was a good feast. Tournaments in the mornings, food and drink through the afternoons, and dancing at night for anyone who still had energy left to stand.

The great hall at Camelot was warm and bright and full of beautiful people who fully expected to live forever.

Arthur wouldn’t eat, of course. He had a rule. He wouldn’t touch his food until someone brought him “a marvel.” A wonder. Something worthy of a king’s attention. This is the kind of indulgence you could get away with when your knights were winning every war and none of them yet had the poor taste to die on you.

Then the door swung open. Smashed is actually the better word. It was hanging from one hinge.

A man rode into the hall on a horse.

The man was green.

Not green like someone who’d been sick. Not even like someone who’d taken a roll in the grass. Green like nothing you’d see in nature. Green skin, green hair, green beard, green clothes. Even his horse was green.

He filled the doorway the way a spring flood fills a river valley. In one fist he had a bough of holly. In the other he had the kind of axe that had no business being carried by just one man.

“Let’s play a game,” he said. “Any one of you may swing this axe. All I ask is that you come find me in a year’s time and let me return the favour.”

The hall went quiet, each of the revellers desperately working out exactly how far the exits were.

All but Arthur, who reached for the axe, of course. The sort of thing you’d expect from a man who pulls swords from stones. But Gawain — the youngest at the table, not to mention the most courteous — stood up first and walked over. Arthur sat down.

You can say this for Gawain: the blow was a clean one. The green man’s head came off in one swing. It hit the floor with a wet crack. Then the courtiers, being the flower of British chivalry, started kicking it around the hall like children with a pig’s bladder.

They were so busy with their game that they didn’t notice that the body hadn’t dropped when its head came off. Instead, it walked over to where its head had been kicked to, bent down, and picked it up, holding it by the hair. That stopped the game.

The eyes moved. The mouth opened.

“Remember your promise, Gawain,” the green head said. “One year.”

Then he tucked his head under his arm, climbed back on his green horse, and rode back out through the smashed up doorway.

The feast went on. Now, at last, Arthur could eat.

This is a retelling of the opening scene of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, possibly the strangest story from the vast collection of Arthurian legends. This spring, we’re going to read the original together.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 50,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and the content I’m most proud of: practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, honest takes on how language really works, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (up next!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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The rest of the story

A year passes. Gawain rides north to keep his promise to the Green Knight. The journey is one of the poem’s great set-pieces: wolves, wild country, and freezing rain.

He sleeps in his armour. He fights serpents, wild men, and giants who come down from the high fells to torment him. He nearly dies on more than one occasion.

On Christmas Eve, half-frozen, he prays to the Virgin Mary, and a castle appears through the trees.

The lord of the castle is a big, jovial, red-bearded man who offers Gawain hospitality and warmth. He tells Gawain that the Green Chapel (you’ll never guess who lives there) is nearby, but Gawain is early. He can stay at the castle until his appointment.

His host, however, proposes a second game: each day, the lord will go out hunting, and whatever he catches, he’ll give to Gawain. In return, Gawain must give the lord whatever he “wins” while staying at the castle.

What Gawain “wins” is the lord’s wife, who comes to his bedroom each morning and tries to seduce him.

Three days, three hunts for the king, three temptations for Gawain. Each evening they exchange their winnings. Gawain stays courteous — and nothing more — to the lady throughout. He gives the lord the kisses the lady gave him, without saying where they came from.

The poet tells the stories of each “hunt” in parallel, and each day the tension rises. Gawain resists, mostly. When he finally reaches the Green Chapel, there’s a big twist which I won’t spoil for you here. All I’ll say is that Gawain kept one small secret, and the Green Knight knows.

A tale from another England

Here’s what that journey through the frozen wilderness actually looks like on the page:

Mony klyf he ouerclambe in contrayez straunge.
Fer floten fro his frendez, fremedly he rydez.
At vche warþe oþer water þer þe wyʒe passed
He fonde a foo hym byfore, bot ferly hit were,
And þat so foule and so felle þat feʒt hym byhode.
So mony meruayl bi mount þer þe mon fyndez
Hit were to tore for to telle of þe tenþe dole.
Sumwhyle wyth wormez he werrez and with wolves als,
Sumwhile wyth wodwos þat woned in þe knarrez,
Boþe wyth bullez and berez, and borez oþerquyle,
At etaynez þat hym anelede of þe heʒe felle.
Nade he ben duʒty and dryʒe and Dryʒtyn had serued,
Douteles he hade ben ded and dreped ful ofte.
(713–725)

Since this is the English of the late 14th century, it needs a bit of translation.

Here’s Marie Borroff’s (1967) version:

Many a cliff must he climb in country wild;
Far off from all his friends, forlorn must he ride;
At each strand or stream where the stalwart passed
‘Twere a marvel if he met not some monstrous foe,
And that so fierce and forbidding that fight he must.
So many were the wonders he wandered among
That to tell but the tenth part would tax my wits.
Now with serpents he wars, now with savage wolves,
Now with wild men of the woods, that watched from the rocks,
Both with bulls and with bears, and with boars besides,
And giants that came gibbering from the jagged steeps.
Had he not borne himself bravely, and been on God’s side,
He had met with many mishaps and mortal harms.

Even if you’re used to reading Chaucer — who was a rough contemporary of the Gawain poet — this language can be hard going. Both are written in what scholars call Middle English, the period of the English language corresponding to the latter half of the Middle Ages.

But Chaucer was a Londoner, so his writing is relatively accessible to readers of Modern English, which descends from the speech of late medieval Londoners.

Gawain, on the other hand, is written in a Northwest Midlands dialect. The dialectologist Angus McIntosh was even able to localize the language of the manuscript itself to a small area of south-east Cheshire or north-east Staffordshire.1 It’s a kind of English so different from the one spoken in London that Chaucer and his circle would likely have found Gawain difficult to read.2

In the 14th century, there was no single “English.” Local dialects differed from each other, just as they had done throughout the earlier history of the English language.

But the Middle English period is where that diversity of dialect is most apparent on the page. In Old English, most writing sought to imitate West Saxon speech. In Modern English, standardization based on the London dialect quickly took hold.

But, in between the two, people wrote much more as they spoke, wherever they were from. This makes Middle English challenging to learn to read — it’s not just a single language — but it’s also part of the fun.

French indoors, Norse outdoors

That dialectal variety shows up most clearly in vocabulary. The Gawain poet’s word-hoard is roughly 60–70% Old English in origin, 22–30% Old French, and 8–10% Old Norse. That Norse number may seem small, but it’s much higher than the rate of Norse words in Chaucer (2.1%) or Middle English more generally (3.74%).3

A recent etymological survey identified no fewer than 496 different words in the poem whose form, meaning, or usage shows some degree of influence from Old Norse.4

Although many of these examples are ambiguous (Old English and Old Norse were so similar that a clean separation is often impossible), even a conservative count runs to over a hundred clearly Norse-derived words.

For a poem whose vocabulary runs to around 2,650 distinct words, that is a lot of Norse.5

There’s a lot of French too: about 28% of the words in the poem have French origin, although some, such as co(u)rt ‘court’ or laumpe ‘lamp’, had likely been in the English language long enough that they had ceased to feel foreign. But many others were more recent additions to the language.

Conspicuously French words tend to cluster in certain scenes within the poem. When Gawain is at the castle, being tested by the lady, their speech is dense with French. They talk of plesaunce ‘pleasure,’ prys ‘excellence,’ drury ‘love,’ and walour ‘valour.’

For example, in the following line, spoken by the lady, every content word is of French origin. English has supplied only the grammatical glue:

to þe plesaunce of your prys, hit were a pure ioye (1245–1247)

‘[I would gladly aspire] to the pleasure of your excellence; it would be a pure joy’.

When the Green Knight speaks, however, French is almost nowhere to be heard. And when, as we saw above, Gawain rides through the frozen landscape, the poet largely turns to native English vocabulary, albeit a Norse-inflected version: felle ‘mountain’ (from Old Norse fjall), dryʒe ‘strong; patient’ (from Old Norse drjúgr), dreped ‘killed’ (from Old Norse drepa ‘to kill’).

The poem sets court and culture against nature, and its representative, the Green Knight. The indoor world is adorned with French vocabulary; the outdoors is distinctly Germanic.

A poetic throwback

The verse form is part of the story too. Unlike most Middle English poetry — including The Canterbury Tales — Gawain doesn’t rhyme. Or, at least, most of it doesn’t rhyme.

Most lines of the poem alliterate in the old Germanic way: the stressed syllables in each line begin with the same sound, much as they did in Old English poetry centuries earlier. (If you want a fuller explanation of how alliterative verse works, I wrote about alliterative verse in a previous article.)

But the Gawain poet adds a twist. The poem is divided into stanzas, and each stanza ends with a short rhymed section called the bob-and-wheel. Here’s how the wilderness ride stanza ends:

Þus in peryl and payne and plytes ful harde
Bi contray caryez þis knyʒt tyl Krystmasse Euen,
Alone.
Pe knyʒt wel pat tyde
To Mary made his mone
Pat ho hym red to ryde
And wysse hym to sum wone. (733–739)

‘Thus in peril and pain and predicaments dire
He rides across country till Christmas Eve,
our knight.
And at that holy tide
He prays with all his might
That Mary may be his guide
Till a dwelling comes in sight.’ (Borroff trans.)

Notice how the first two lines are alliterative: peril, payne, plytes; contray, caryez, knyʒt, Krystmasse.

These lines represent the last part of the stanza’s main body. Then we get a very short line, with just one stress: Alone. That’s the bob. Following the bob we get the wheel: four short lines of rhyming verse.

The combination of the alliterative stanzas with the bob-and-wheel technique at the end brings to the poem a kind of balance between the earlier alliterative style of English verse and the later rhyming style. It’s not clear where the bob-and-wheel technique comes from, but the Gawain poet uses it to great effect.

The alliterative verse of Gawain isn’t exactly the same as what you find in Old English poems like Beowulf, but the two are clearly part of the same tradition.

Why Gawain is special

Alliterative verse is not the only thing Beowulf and Gawain have in common.

The manuscript very nearly didn’t survive at all. Like Beowulf, it was in the Cotton Library, which caught fire in 1731. The Gawain manuscript was unharmed, but, if that day had gone a little differently, we would have lost one of the finest pieces of English poetry ever written.

Just as we don’t know who the Beowulf poet was, the identity of the Gawain poet remains lost to history. And, like Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight survives in a single manuscript, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, alongside three other poems: Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience. All are believed to have been written by the same author, who is sometimes also called the Pearl poet.

(We don’t know with certainty whether the Gawain poet was a man or a woman, but most scholars suspect that he was a man, so I’ll use “he” to describe him.)

Something new

The Gawain poet may not have lived in London, but he was as cosmopolitan and sophisticated as his counterparts in the capital. He knew Latin and French. Two of his other poems, Cleanness and Patience, are biblical paraphrases that show a familiarity with theology.

And the material of Gawain itself is steeped in French-language Arthurian romance. The beheading game traces back ultimately to an eighth-century Irish tale, but comes through French intermediaries.6 Similarly, the poet’s characterization of Gawain as the perfect courtier follows the French tradition, rather than the somewhat cruder English idea of Gawain.7

This is part of what makes reading Gawain so rewarding. You’re encountering the work of an author who had absorbed the high culture of his time — French romance, Latin theology — and reflected it out in a regional English and a native form of alliterative verse that London had long abandoned.

The kind of English poetry the Gawain poet wrote would soon be eclipsed by the style, and language, of Chaucer and his many imitators. Reading Gawain offers contemporary readers a glimpse of an English that might have been.

The invitation

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was effectively lost to the literary world for centuries. It was only rediscovered in the 19th century, but it has been gathering fans ever since.

J. R. R. Tolkien himself co-edited the scholarly edition in 1925 and later translated it into Modern English. It’s even been made into a (weird and artistically daring) film starring Dev Patel.

To paraphrase the scholar Larry Benson, Gawain has more fans today than it ever had during the Middle Ages.8 And this spring, we’re going to join their number.

We’re reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight together in four sessions on Substack Live. The poem naturally divides into four parts called fitts, so we’ll read one fitt per session.

Since we’re doing this on Substack Live, if you can’t make it at the time of the event, you’ll be able to watch the replay after.

When are we doing this?

• Session 1: Tuesday, May 5, 11:00am–12:00pm Eastern Time. Fitt 1.

• Session 2: Tuesday, May 19, 11:00am–12:00pm Eastern Time. Fitt 2.

• Session 3: Tuesday, June 2, 11:00am–12:00pm Eastern Time. Fitt 3.

• Session 4: Tuesday, June 16, 11:00am–12:00pm Eastern Time. Fitt 4.

Which edition to get?

We’ll read primarily in translation, using Simon Armitage’s translation (Norton, 2007). Like Heaney’s Beowulf, this is a poet translating a poet. It’s the most accessible translation to get started with. The alliterative feel of the original comes through without lapsing into obscurity.

But we will be dipping into the Middle English original often: this is the Dead Language Society, after all. At least some of the Armitage editions have the Middle English on the facing page. Get one of those if you can.

We’ll focus on the language, of course, but also on the storytelling, the structure, and the way the poem yields more every time you read it.

The book club is a benefit for paid subscribers. If you’d like to take part, you can upgrade your subscription here. You’ll also get access to the full archive of members’ only posts:

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We began today by reading about a king who refused to eat until someone brought him a marvel.

What the Gawain poet left us is exactly that: a poem written in an English that London would soon eclipse, preserved in a single manuscript that nearly burned, and still, after six hundred years, well worth the wait. Bon appétit.

Works Cited

• Benson, Larry (1965). Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

• Borroff, Marie (1967). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation.

• Brewer, Derek, ed. (1992). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Sources and Analogues. 2e.

• Brewer, Derek and Jonathan Gibson (1997). A Companion to the Gawain-Poet.

• Dance, Richard (2018). Words derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An etymological survey. Transactions of the Philological Society 116.

• Görlach, Manfred (2020). The Linguistic History of English.

• Tolkien, J. R. R. and E. V. Gordon, eds. (1925, rev. Norman Davis 1967). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

• Volkonskaya, M. A. (2013). Loanwords and stylistics: on the Gallicisms in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. ESUKA – JEFUL 2013(4–2): 145–156

Let’s try an experiment. Take four English words: knight, courage, fabricate, hypothesis.

Without looking anything up, can you tell where each one came from, and roughly when it came into English?

Here are my guesses: knight is pure English, never borrowed. Courage is from French, arriving around 1300. Fabricate is from Latin, around 1600. Hypothesis comes from Greek, also around 1600.

Now let’s check the results. The Oxford English Dictionary gives: knight, Old English; courage, c1300; fabricate, 1598; hypothesis, 1596.

Maybe it’s more of a party trick than an experiment. But how is it possible? Is it decades spent reading linguistics papers combined with years of careful study of Old English, French, Latin, and Ancient Greek?

No, it’s a far lazier method than that.

The words themselves carry the evidence of their histories in their sound, shape, and spelling. English has been borrowing words for well over a thousand years, and each wave of borrowing has left recognizable marks.

Reading those marks is a learnable skill, and that’s what this article teaches: a handful of rules for practical etymology. You don’t need to learn Latin, or French, or Ancient Greek. You don’t even need to learn any linguistics. All you need to do is look.

The rules won’t always be right — English has too many individual word histories for that. But for the vast majority of the vocabulary, they’ll get you there. And when they don’t, you’ve most likely stumbled on a weird word, perhaps even one whose origins remain a mystery.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 45,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

This is the first instalment of A Deep History of English, a series that traces the story of the English language through the mysteries that remain in Modern English.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and the content I’m most proud of: practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, honest takes on how language really works, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (up next!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Full details on the spring Gawain book club coming out next week!

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Impress your friends with this fact: roughly 80% of the words in a comprehensive English dictionary are borrowed from other languages.1 French, Latin, and Greek account for the vast majority of these loanwords. By raw headcount, English doesn’t even look like a particularly Germanic language.

But frequency tells a different story. Among the hundred most common words in English — words like the, is, and, to, have, it, and for — you’ll find very few borrowings. The non-Germanic words in the top hundred can be counted on one hand: people and very (from French), just and use (ambiguously from French or Latin).2

Add to that a smattering of Norse words — they, their, get, take, and give — which are borrowed but still Germanic, and you see how little borrowing has changed the inner core of the language.

The grammatical glue that holds everything together is stubbornly, almost entirely, Old English.

Rule 1. Function words are Germanic

Function words are the parts of a language’s vocabulary which have little meaning on their own. Instead, they express grammatical concepts or relationships. The parts of speech you learned in school (or, in many cases, from Schoolhouse Rock)3 can help you here. The function words consist of:

• articles (a, the)

• auxiliary verbs (be, have; will, shall, can, must, might)

• conjunctions (and, but, or; if, when, because, though)

• particles (not; up, down, out, as used in phrases like make up, live down, take out)

• prepositions (to, from, with, in, on)

• pronouns (I, he, they, who, which, herself)

• certain adjectives and adverbs having to do with quantity or questions (any, all, some; how, which, when)

Because function words are necessary to show grammatical relationships, they make up about half of the words in any given stretch of spoken or written English. I‘ve placed all the function words in this paragraph in boldface so that you can see just how common they are.4

The “function words are Germanic” rule works because of the durability of a language’s structural bones. Languages borrow words — English more than most — but they very rarely borrow function words.

Very rarely doesn’t mean never: the close contact between speakers of Old English and Old Norse in parts of England during the Middle Ages left its mark even on the function words: they (pronoun), until (preposition/conjunction), though (conjunction) all have Old Norse origins.

Part of the reason Old Norse words could jump so easily into Old English is that the two languages were still at that date very close. In fact, they were probably mutually intelligible in some situations.

This same similarity makes it very hard for any set of rules to distinguish between the two, which is why this rule says: “function words are Germanic,” not “function words are Old English.”

The vast majority of “Germanic” words in English are Old English in origin, but some will be from Old Norse, and it’s very hard to tell Old Norse from Old English without knowing the two languages. There is one trick, however, which we’ll get to later.

For now, we’ll satisfy ourselves with assigning the label “Germanic” to every function word we come across.5

That’s one rule down. There are four more, and they’re the ones that let you pull off the dating trick.

Read more

There’s something spiritually edifying about spending time in cemeteries. If you’ve ever walked through an older cemetery, you may have come across a headstone that addresses you directly:

As you are, I was. As I am, you will be.

…or some variation.

This is a memento mori, a philosophical reminder of the fleeting nature of life and the inevitability of death. Painters used to achieve the same edifying effect by slipping incongruous skulls onto their canvases.

The saying has been around for a surprisingly long time. Romans were carving versions of it on their tombs two thousand years ago: one of the earliest examples is the haunting viator, quod tu es, ego fui; quod nunc sum, et tu eris ‘traveller, what you are, I was; what I am now, you too will be.’

The English version I quoted above is a translation of the most memorable later compression: eram quod es, eris quod sum. You’ll often find it inscribed in earlier Protestant cemeteries.1 If you live in New England or in rural parts of Britain, you probably have a mossy, crumbling example close to home.

But the headstone version is edifying in another way: one that has nothing to do with mortality and everything to do with grammar.

The phrase has four forms of the single verb to be: are, was, am, and of course be itself. All four are forms of the same word, and yet they seem utterly unrelated, as if they had come from different words entirely. How did a single verb end up looking like this?

To answer this question, we need to take a stroll in a linguistic graveyard and pay our respects to the earliest ancestor of the English language. It has lain dead and mute for thousands of years, but you can still hear it echo every time you say to be.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 45,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

This is the first instalment of A Deep History of English, a series that traces the story of the English language through the mysteries that remain in Modern English.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and the content I’m most proud of: practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, honest takes on how language really works, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (up next!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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As you are, I was

Half of the world are cousins, linguistically speaking. Close to four billion people speak a language descended from this ancestor of English.2

These numbers are bolstered by languages such as English (with 1.5 billion speakers), Hindi-Urdu (800 million, usually counted together), and Spanish (600 million).

But the family contains hundreds of less widely-spoken languages as well: Latvian (1.5 million speakers), Welsh (840,000), Icelandic (350,000), alongside other, more obscure relatives. The living languages descended from this single ancestor number around 450, with nearly half of the total located in South Asia.

While some linguistic family resemblances are obvious — such as the close relationships between English and German, or French and Spanish — this larger family is harder to spot with the naked eye.

For example, it surprises many people to learn that German is more closely related to Bengali than it is to its neighbour Hungarian. On a superficial level, the languages of this family seem very different. But the similarities exist, just on a deeper, more structural level.

This family is called Indo-European, named for the fact that its hundreds of languages were traditionally spoken across an enormous swath of Eurasia: from India to Europe. But all of these languages had their origins in a single source.

Linguists call that source the Proto-Indo-European language, or PIE for short. This language was never written down, but we know it must have existed because its descendants — including English — still bear its distinctive features, even if they’ve sometimes been weathered by the passage of time.

That PIE existed, and roughly what it looked like, are not nearly as controversial as the entangled questions of when it was spoken, where, and by whom. Linguists, archaeologists, and, most recently, geneticists have spent decades trying to follow the trail back in time to the PIE homeland. After decades of debate the trail seems to lead — for the moment, at least — back to the grasslands north of the Black Sea around 4000 BC.3

They lived in what is called today the Pontic Steppe. It makes up the southern part of Ukraine and the neighbouring part of Russia. It is hot in summer, blisteringly cold in winter, and without shelter except among the courses of the rivers which cross it, running south to the sea.

The people who lived six thousand years ago grew no grain. Instead, they moved with the seasons, following the water in the summer, and in the winter, looking for ground where the snow was shallow enough for sheep to graze through it. They had cattle too: oxen to pull their wagons and, possibly, cows for milk. They drank mead, which they made out of honey they got through trade.

When one of them died, they carved no sayings on gravestones. Instead, they laid the body on its back with the knees raised, on a mat woven from the grasses of the steppe.

They rested the head on a pillow stuffed with aromatic herbs and sprinkled the body with red ochre. Beside the body were laid pots, some knucklebones, perhaps to be used as dice. Occasionally a bronze knife might be laid under the head. Then they raised a mound of earth over the chamber, just as Beowulf asked to be buried.

You can still see these mounds in the steppe today, and far beyond it. They’re called kurgans by archaeologists, although if you see one in the English countryside (or in Middle-Earth) you’ll probably call it a barrow.

They raided each other’s cattle, but a stranger at the threshold wasn’t necessarily an enemy: the peace between guest and host was for them a sacred bond. At a feast, the guests drank mead while a poet sang of glory and praised the generosity of their host.

Through the words of a poet, the glory of their great men spread, and they might hope to attain a measure of immortality. A bard could build a man’s name or break it. It’s fitting that it’s through words that we remember them too. They founded no cities, built no pyramids. The monument they left us was their language.

Sometime around the year 3300 BC, they carried it out of their home in the grasslands: west, east, south. Within a thousand years, their descendants, and their languages, had swept across a large part of Central and Eastern Europe and into Central Asia.

One of these migrations out of the steppe brought to Europe a branch of the Indo-European family — the Germanic languages — which would, much later, give rise to English.

But there were many more branches, which diverged into sub-branches, and, eventually, hundreds of individual languages stretching out across Eurasia: Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, Russian, Welsh, Armenian all descend from that single language spoken on the steppe 6000 years ago. All cousins.

And all bear traces of the linguistic signature of their ancient ancestor. One of them is the strangeness of the verb that English has inherited as to be.

Being, becoming, and staying the night

The irregularity of the English verb to be, with its various forms are, was, been, is so extreme that it seems like it has been cobbled together from entirely unrelated words.

It has. And we know exactly which ones.

Not because the speakers of PIE left us any record. They had no writing. But their language left traces in every one of its descendants. By comparing the many daughter languages, it’s possible to reconstruct what the ancestor language might have sounded like, and how its grammar worked.

When linguists show a reconstructed word, they are careful to precede it with an asterisk so that its hypothetical status is clear: this leads to forms like *h₁esmi, a reconstructed PIE word meaning ‘I am.’ This is a form of the first word that makes up our patchwork word to be.

About that *h₁. Reconstruction has its limits. It is not possible to reach back 6000 years and reconstruct every sound with perfect fidelity. Some sounds are simply beyond our ability to reconstruct with certainty. In the case of PIE, there is a small group of sounds which vanished too early to leave traces in most of PIE’s daughter languages. We know they were there, but we don’t know exactly what they sounded like.

Linguists call them the laryngeals, and write them with the symbols *h₁, *h₂, *h₃, which is a way of saying: I know there were three of them, I know they were made somewhere in the back of the throat, and that’s all I know.

We see the laryngeal *h₁ at the beginning of our first PIE word *h₁esmi ‘I am.’ If you remove that *h₁, not to mention the s and the i, you’re left with em, not far from the English word am. This is no accident. You’re hearing, in a word you say hundreds of times a day without a second thought, a word barely disguised from its ancestor spoken on the Pontic Steppe six thousand years ago.

The form *h₁esmi ‘I am’ can be broken down into two parts: *h₁es- and -mi. The PIE language worked like most of its descendants, in that words were composed of roots and endings. Just as the English verb work becomes works when it’s a he, she, or it doing the working, PIE verbs changed their endings depending on the subject of the sentence. The ending corresponding to I is -mi.

Since PIE grammar works mostly by adding endings to roots, scholars tend to talk about roots rather than words. So our first root is *h₁es-, which is the proper equivalent of to be in PIE. It’s the source of the Modern English forms am, is (from *h₁esti), and probably are.4 You might recognize a descendant of the form *h₁esti if you’ve ever come across the Latin word est ‘he/she/it is.’5 The *h₁es- root is also the source of the Latin word essentia ‘being,’ which gives us the English words essence and essential.

But *h₁es- is not the source of the word be itself, or of its derivatives been or being. For that, we need to look at another PIE root: *bhuh-, which meant ‘become; grow.’6

The initial consonant *bh, which probably sounded like a b with a breathy release, was prone to change in PIE’s daughter languages. It lost the breathiness in English be. In Greek, *bh changed into another sound which we spell ph.

We can see a descendant of *bhuh- in the Ancient Greek word phýsis, which gives us the English word physics. The Greek phýsis originally meant something like ‘nature’: the way things are. In Latin, the *bh came out as an f-sound. The root *bhuh- came out as the initial component of futurus ‘what is to be.’

The footprint of a single PIE root, in other words, is still visible in be, physics, and future, three words you would never think to connect.

But neither *h₁es- nor *bhuh- can give us was or were. For the past-tense forms of to be, we need to turn to one more root: *h₂wes-, which meant ‘dwell; spend the night.’

This root wasn’t as prolific as the other two, but it may be the source of two names for goddesses: the Greek Hestia, goddess of the hearth and household, and her Roman equivalent Vesta. In each case, the word seems to have originally meant ‘dwelling’ or ‘hearth,’ and was likely later applied to the goddess who presided over the hearth and home.7

One root for being, one for becoming, and one for dwelling. These were, in the days of the speakers of PIE, entirely separate words. Yet as one branch of PIE gradually developed into English, they fused together.

And the reason lies in a quirk of PIE grammar which I find genuinely strange, even after years of studying it.

Half a verb

We’re used to the idea that verbs have a present and a past tense. This is how it works in English: the present I am corresponds to the past I was.

It’s conceptually the same relationship as in the pairs sing/sang, teach/taught, and work/worked, even if the way it’s expressed in each of these pairs is different. In fact, it’s close to a law: every verb in the English language has both a present and a past tense.8

The very idea of a verb without a past tense seems strange. But there is at least one verb in English which truly has no past tense: beware. You can’t say that he bewared of the dog, and for no good reason. It’s not as if the concept of bewaring isn’t something you can do in the past.

There’s also a verb with a past tense and no present: quoth, meaning ‘said,’ as in Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” Again, this isn’t for any reason: the synonymous verb say is happy to be used in the present tense.

PIE was a whole language full of bewares and quoths. A given verb root could only be used in certain tenses. Sometimes there were workarounds — you could build a new verb from the root by adding a suffix — but for some roots there was nothing you could do. The verb simply had no way to express that tense.

The root *h₁es- ‘be’ was one of the restrictive types. It could be used in the present tense, such as *h₁esmi ‘I am’ and *h₁esti ‘he/she/it is.’ But it had no way to make the past tense.

The root *bhuh- ‘become; grow’ was the opposite: it could make the past tense but it had no present-tense forms. The root *h₂wes- ‘dwell; stay the night’, on the other hand, could do it all.9

So PIE’s daughter languages had a problem: how do you say ‘I was’ when your verb for ‘to be’ has no past tense? The branch that would become English solved it by pairing up two separate roots: present-tense forms from *h₁es-, past-tense forms from *h₂wes-.

A third verb, from *bhuh-, carried on alongside them for a while. In the earliest forms of English, it was used for future states and general, proverbial truths. It wasn’t until the later Middle Ages that all three finally merged into one.

Other branches made different choices. Latin fused *h₁es- with *bhuh- instead, which is why its present est and its perfect fuit ‘was’ look nothing alike.

But the result, in English, is the chaos of to be: am from one root, was from another, be from a third, all fused into a single verb that still carries the mark of its distant origins on the steppe.

As I am, you will be

To be is the most frequent verb in the English language. It’s also the most irregular. And it’s the most irregular because it’s the most frequent.

Every generation of English speakers exerts a pressure to smooth out the irregularities they inherit, which is why we say helped and climbed rather than holp and clomb. But the most common words resist. They are heard so often that even the most irregular verb ends up getting transmitted perfectly from one generation to the next.

It’s in words like to be, which we’re never more than a sentence or two away from saying, that we retain the closest connection with our most distant linguistic ancestors. The strange features of their grammar are reflected in the strange features of our own.

In the patchwork of am, was, and be, we’re hearing echoes of words spoken 6000 years ago in the grasslands of the Pontic Steppe, by people long gone, who once lived, feuded, got drunk off honey mead, and told epic poems.

We have nothing to remember them by but their words, which are now our words.

As you are, I was. As I am, you will be.

Four forms from three ancient roots, carried by the mouths of the living for six thousand years, and carved into stone to give voice to the dead.

Further reading

• Anthony, David (2007). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.

• Fortson, Benjamin (2009). Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction.

• Kroonen, Guus (2013). Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic.

• Lass, Roger (1999). The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 3: 1476–1776.

• Lazaridis, Iosif et al. (2025). “The Genetic History of the Southern Arc: A Bridge between West Asia and Europe.” Nature 639.

• Spinney, Laura (2025). Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global.

• Ringe, Don (2006). From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic.

By some stroke of geographic good fortune, I was raised within a short school bus ride of a place called Stratford.

Situated on the river Avon, this quiet town is most famous today as the hometown of one of the most celebrated artists its country has ever produced: Justin Bieber.

I’m speaking, of course, about Stratford, Ontario.

But, like its English namesake, Stratford-upon-Avon, our Canadian Stratford has an intimate connection with another, (dare I say?) greater artist: William Shakespeare.

The town had grown up around a railway junction, but, by the 1950s, employment in the locomotive repair industry was drying up. Stratford was (and is!) a beautiful little town, and perfectly named for putting on a Shakespeare play or two, so, in 1952, journalist Tom Patterson founded the Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada in the hopes of bringing some economic life back to the town.

The very next summer, the first words on the festival stage were spoken, by no less an actor than Sir Alec Guinness:

Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York. (Richard III, 1.1.1–2)

Since then, summer after glorious summer, the Stratford Festival has continued, although now under a slimmed down name, and with a broader repertoire (you can see Guys and Dolls this season).

But the busloads of students carted there every year by English teachers aren’t there to see musicals, as much as some of them might have wanted to. No, they’re there for Shakespeare.

I remember the first play I saw there during the Festival’s 2000 season: Hamlet starring Canadian legend Paul Gross. (You may know him as the star of TV’s Due South)

We’d been studying Hamlet in English class, so I was primed to enjoy it (thanks, Mrs. L!), and I did not leave disappointed. In fact, I enjoyed the experience so much that I’ve never stopped attending, even after — and now long after — I no longer had an English teacher shepherding me there: Colm Feore in Macbeth, Brian Dennehy in Twelfth Night, and Christopher Plummer in King Lear, all within a short commute. Geographic good fortune indeed!

But why on earth did a small town in southern Ontario make a bet on pivoting its economy away from repairing trains towards performing the works of a nearly 400-year-old playwright born on another continent? And why did the bet actually pay off?

In other words: What’s so special about Shakespeare?

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 45,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and the content I’m most proud of: practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, honest takes on how language really works, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (up next!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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I wish I could point to some single line, some single moment that knocked me flat, so that I could tell you exactly how I realized Shakespeare is great. But that’s not how he won me over. Instead, it was a cumulative feeling that I was encountering something special in his works, and that it had something to do with his language.

But the question is what. It’s not just inventiveness: as we saw in Part 1 of this mini-series, Shakespeare coined far fewer words than he’s usually given credit for. Nor is it the breadth of vocabulary: in a study of thirteen Elizabethan playwrights, he ranked seventh in lexical range per play, behind writers most people today have never heard of.1

And yet, pick up the works of John Webster or George Chapman, and you’ll feel the difference immediately. Shakespeare’s language is doing something theirs isn’t.

Take this line from Richard II:

Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle. (Richard II, 2.3.90)

York is furious with his nephew Bolingbroke, and so he takes two perfectly good nouns, grace and uncle, and in a fit of pique, turns them into verbs. We do this sort of thing too, of course. It’s the process that gave us the verb to Google.

But there’s something about the way Shakespeare does it that stops you cold.

What accounts for the feeling that Shakespeare was unique, both within his time and in the whole history of English literature? There are many great answers to this question, but I want to give you one that you’ll only hear from a linguist.

I think the answer lies in the application of Shakespeare’s undeniable genius to a language that was exactly ready for it.

By the late 16th century, centuries of change had made English unlike any of its European neighbours, and it was still changing fast.

For a brief period, the English language could be bent into shapes that would have been impossible only a few generations earlier. A few generations later, they would either stiffen into rules or become so commonplace they lost their spark.

Yes, Shakespeare was a genius. But he also had temporal good fortune: he was born into the century when English was most ready for him.

Read more

I had a wonderful Grade 8 English teacher. To protect her identity, I’ll call her Mrs. L. Without her, I think it’s safe to say that the Dead Language Society would not exist.

Mrs. L was the one who first introduced me to the history of the English language through the glorious trilogy of Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and Hamlet.

How many hours I spent in that classroom, reading for the first time the stories I’d come back to again and again. And yet it’s funny: I don’t remember much about the classroom itself.

Decades later, the only things I can still recall are the posters.

Every classroom, I think, has its posters. The science classroom might have a poster about the water cycle or the various parts of a cell. The French class might have a stern poster warning Ici on parle français! ‘Here one speaks French,’ as mine did.

Our English classroom, on the other hand, had a poster I remember well.

Its title was “Words invented by William Shakespeare,” and the rest of the poster was taken up by hundreds and hundreds of words in small type, giving the impression that Shakespeare was so prolific a wordsmith that to enumerate all his creations, you’d need far more than a single poster.

So, how many words did Shakespeare coin?

If you examine posters in English classrooms around the world, watch documentaries, or even ask Google, you’ll probably get an answer like “around 1,700.”

These same sources will usually mention that Shakespeare’s words have had staying power: he’s the reason we have the words assassination, eyeball, obscene, and uncomfortable, among many more.

Shakespeare didn’t merely master the English language, or so the story goes. He had a large hand in building it.

It’s a lovely story. But it’s mostly false.

Take the word assassination. Shakespeare first used assassination in Macbeth (c. 1606). But the diplomat Sir Thomas Smith had already used the word thirty-four years earlier, in a letter in 1572.

The first use of eyeball was once attributed to The Tempest (c. 1611). But the historian William Patten wrote it in his Calender (sic) of Scripture in 1575, more than thirty-five years before Shakespeare’s play.

The word obscene was thought to appear first in Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1595). But the humanist scholar Edward Grant used it in a translation in 1571, nearly a quarter century earlier.

And uncomfortable — which is a perennial favourite on lists of words Shakespeare invented — appears in a letter by George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, in 1534. Shakespeare wasn’t even born until thirty years later!1

Lest you think these are cherry-picked examples, I could name a few more from the list of famous Shakespearean words: generous, bedazzle, hurry, frugal, bold-faced all appeared on that poster back in my Grade 8 English class, and all were attested in print before Shakespeare put pen to immortal paper.2

All this raises the question: If Shakespeare didn’t invent these words, why do so many people think he did?

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 45,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and the content I’m most proud of: practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, honest takes on how language really works, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (up next!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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Three little words

The ultimate source of the claim that Shakespeare invented around 1,700 words is the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED for short.

According to one influential analysis of the OED, Shakespeare is the earliest known source for anywhere between 1,700–2,000 words, depending on how you count.3

The problem with that story starts with three words: first attested use.

What the OED records is not the first time a word was used by anyone ever. That would be first use. Given that words are often coined in speech before they are ever written down, it would be effectively impossible to pinpoint the true moment of birth of most words.

Instead, the OED records something that we can know a lot more clearly: the earliest written example of the word. That’s first attested use.

These can be very different things: first use is a claim about origins; first attested use is a claim about documentation.

To make matters worse, the editors of the OED don’t have access to every text ever written by anyone. They only have access to what happened to survive. (We’ll return to this point shortly.)

Even so, that’s a lot of text, especially after the introduction of the printing press. So the editors of the OED have to sample from the vast pool of English literature, hunting for first attested uses.

This means that dates of first attested use are entirely dependent on what the OED editors happened to read. And not every author got their equal attention.

A Victorian head start

To understand why the OED is so filled with Shakespearean citations, it helps to know a little about how the OED was put together.

Work began in the late 1850s on a project with enormous ambitions: to document every English word ever coined, with dated quotations tracing how every single one had been used across the centuries.

To gather these quotations, the editors recruited hundreds of volunteer readers who combed through texts and mailed in millions of handwritten slips, each recording a word, its context, and the source they had taken it from.

It was one of the great intellectual achievements of the Victorian age, or of any age. But it was inevitably uneven. Readers didn’t cover everything equally, and Shakespeare had an advantage that no other writer could match: a Complete Concordance, such as the one published in 1845 by Mary Cowden Clarke.

A concordance is an index of the words in a text (or a collection of texts). Unlike the index in the back of a book, a concordance displays every occurrence of a word alongside its immediate context.

Here’s what Cowden Clarke’s looked like:

This tool made searching through Shakespeare’s works much easier than searching the works of any other author. No such tool existed for Shakespeare’s contemporaries, such as Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, or other writers of the period.

Their works had to be read the old-fashioned way, that is, the hard way. As a result, they weren’t combed through quite as carefully as Shakespeare was.

Shakespeare received roughly 33,000 quotations in the first edition of the OED, many more than any other individual author,4 primarily because his works had been the most convenient to search thoroughly.

Have you heard the one about the drunk searching for his keys under a streetlight? It’s not because that’s where he dropped them, but because that’s where the light is.

This joke gives the name to the bias we’re seeing here: the streetlight effect. It’s the tendency to search for evidence where it’s easiest to look, rather than where it’s most representative.

What would happen if Shakespeare’s contemporaries had been searched with the same rigour? Would the Bard still reign supreme as the word coiner par excellence?

One writer, fifty words

In 1980, a German scholar named Jürgen Schäfer decided to find out.

He picked a single Elizabethan prose writer, Thomas Nashe (1567–1601). Nashe was a pamphleteer and satirist who also tried his hand at poetry and works for the stage. Crucially, Nashe’s works had been read for the OED, though far less thoroughly than Shakespeare’s.5

Schäfer went through Nashe’s works meticulously, looking to see how many of Shakespeare’s credited “first attested uses” Nashe could beat.

The answer was over fifty. One writer, working at the same time as Shakespeare (1564–1616), was able to knock dozens of first attested uses off Shakespeare’s list.

If a single under-read author could displace fifty or so first attributions, what would happen if we examined the works of every poet, preacher, and pamphleteer? The total number of false credits to Shakespeare’s account must be far larger than fifty.

And so it is. The OED’s ongoing third edition has been revising entries as it goes. In one sample of 117 words once credited to Shakespeare, nearly half (57/117) have now been superseded by an earlier attestation.6

But the OED editors’ reading list is only part of the problem. The deeper issue has to do with what happened to Elizabethan works before the dictionary’s editors ever had a chance to read them.

What the fire took

Even if those involved in producing the OED had tried to read every bit of Elizabethan English they could get their hands on, they’d still have missed most of it.

Scholars estimate that about 3,000 plays were written for London’s public theatres between 1567 and 1642. Of these, only 543 survive: that’s about 18%. Around 1,800 (60%) are so thoroughly lost to history that we don’t even know their titles.7

Plays, at least, were sometimes printed. But for other forms of text, the picture is even worse.

Nearly half of all printed editions from before 1642 have vanished entirely, with not even a single copy reaching a modern library.

Broadside ballads (the pop songs of the era) survive at a rate of well under 1%. Pamphlets, primers, chapbooks — cheap print — were published in great quantities. And almost all of it is gone.8

When we turn to the everyday written language of ordinary people, as we’d see recorded in personal letters, almost nothing survives at all. And, of course, in an era before audio recording, spoken language, where most words actually begin their lives, left no trace whatsoever.

This is survivorship bias. Our conclusions are drawn from what survived, and we’re blind to everything that didn’t.

Shakespeare’s 1,700 words owe more to uneven documentation and catastrophic textual loss than to individual genius — though genius he certainly had.

Scholars have known this for decades. But the correction hasn’t reached the places where most people learn about language.

A better story than the truth

In The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson states without qualification: Shakespeare “coined some 2,000 words — an astonishing number.”9 Mrs. L’s classroom posters say the same. Google goes with 1,700.

The “Shakespeare invented 1,700 (or 2,000) words” myth tells a story we seem to want to hear: that language is shaped by individual genius. It’s the Great Man Theory of history applied to language.10

The reality is messier. Most Elizabethan vocabulary innovation wasn’t the work of one solitary genius, as romantic as that story may be.

Across London, writers and translators were coining and borrowing at furious rates, drawing on Latin, French, and the native resources of English to furnish the language with new compounds and derivations.11

What made Shakespeare’s use of the English language special had nothing to do with coining words. But that’s a story for next time.

Shakespeare was part of the collective churn going on in Elizabethan England. He worked with the same raw materials as his contemporaries, and often came up with similar results, at least as far as word coinages are concerned. The difference is that we can’t — or can’t be bothered to — check the work of his fellow writers.

This pattern of over-attribution isn’t unique to Shakespeare, by the way. Any writer whose works survived intact and got read carefully will be over-cited. Shakespeare is just the most extreme case.

What’s left?

So what’s left of Shakespeare’s linguistic creativity? Was the Bard just a hack, using other people’s words?

Far from it.

Even after all the false attributions are stripped away, Shakespeare still emerges as a prolific coiner of words. Just not a superhuman one.

The real number is likely well below 1,700. Just how far below is unclear, but it’s likely to keep falling, as the OED’s third edition continues to find earlier sources for words once credited to Shakespeare. But many words remain, for now at least: Laughable is one. Lonely may be another.

Shakespeare produced over 800,000 words of published text.12 It would be weird if he hadn’t coined anything. But any number published today will almost certainly shrink tomorrow, as more early modern texts are digitized and searched with more ease than ever before.

What we’re left with is a writer who used a large vocabulary — David Crystal puts it at about 20,000 words — with extraordinary skill.13 Shakespeare’s genius is not diminished by the loss of the “greatest inventor” myth.

Plenty of people coin words. But almost none of them did what Shakespeare did, wherever his words came from.

Let’s return to the word we began with: assassination. Here’s the passage from Macbeth where it appears:

If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success… (Macbeth 1.7.1–4)

We know now that Shakespeare didn’t invent the word assassination. Sir Thomas Smith used it 34 years before Macbeth was written.

But the word assassination isn’t what makes that passage special.

Instead, it’s the language coiling around itself, the way the word done is emphasized differently with each repetition, how the repeating s-sounds make the sentence seem to struggle against its own frantic momentum.

Whatever greatness is incarnated in this passage, it’s not the greatness of having coined a new word by sticking the suffix -ion onto the pre-existing verb assassinate.

Any English speaker could have done that. It should take more than this to get a poster in your honour in Mrs. L’s classroom.

If we want to understand Shakespeare’s true linguistic greatness, we need to do more than count words. We need to see what Shakespeare did with his words.

And that’s what we’ll do next week, in Part 2 of this short series exploring how Shakespeare used the English language.

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Works Cited

• Bailey, Richard W. (1985). “Charles C. Fries and the Early Modern English Dictionary.” In Fries, P. H., and Nancy M. Fries, eds. Towards an Understanding of Language: Charles C. Fries in Perspective.

• Barber, Charles (1997). Early Modern English.

• Brewer, Charlotte (2012). “Shakespeare, Word-Coining, and the OED.” Shakespeare Survey.

• Bryson, Bill (1990). The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way.

• Crystal, David (2004). The Stories of English.

• Crystal, David (2008). Think on My Words: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language.

• Goodland, Giles (2011). “Strange Deliveries: Contextualizing Shakespeare’s First Citations in the OED.” In Ravassat, Mireille, and Jonathan Culpeper, eds. Stylistics and Shakespeare’s Language.

• McKenzie, D. F. (2002). Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays.

• McInnis, David, and Matthew Steggle, eds. (2014). Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England.

• Raymond, Joad (2003). Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain.

• Schäfer, Jürgen (1980). Documentation in the O.E.D.: Shakespeare and Nashe as Test Cases.

• Spevack, Marvin (1968–1980). A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare.

• Watt, Tessa (1991). Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640.

• Wiggins, Martin (2012–2019). British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue.

English spelling has a bad reputation. When you type in “english spelling is” into Google, the autocomplete brings up a record of frustration.

According to the world’s searches, English spelling is “hard”, “broken”, “a mess”, “so weird”, and “ridiculous.”

As anyone who has had to learn it can attest, English spelling seems to be a system without much logic. And whenever people gather to bemoan its evils, it won’t be long before someone brings up a famous five-letter word, the ultimate demonstration of the insanity of English spelling: ghoti, pronounced fish.

Gh as in enough, o as in women, and ti as in nation.

The joke is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw,1 and it’s not hard to see why. It’s got that classic Shaw wit, but like Professor Henry Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion, it’s a little too sure of itself.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 45,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and the content I’m most proud of: practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, honest takes on how language really works, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (up next!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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You, dear reader, are a competent reader of English. Imagine you’d never heard of ghoti and you saw it in a book. How would you pronounce it? Almost certainly like goaty.2

The reason the natural pronunciation of ghoti is goaty, rather than fish, is precisely because English spelling is, in fact, logical.

The letter combination gh does make an f-sound in enough, cough, and rough. But it only makes this sound after certain vowels, and never at the beginning of a word.

At the start of a word, gh is always a g-sound: ghost, ghee, ghastly. That is a rule, and it’s followed without exception.

It’s true that letter o sounds like a short i in the word women. But it only makes that sound in one word in the entire English language.3

And the sequence ti makes the sh-sound in nation. But only as part of the larger sequence -tion, and a few others. It never makes this sound at the end of a word.

I know, it’s poor form to fact-check a joke, but there is absolutely no way that ghoti can be pronounced fish.

The very word that was supposed to prove that English spelling is lawless and chaotic has only ended up proving that English is anything but. What makes English spelling difficult to master is not that it has no rules, but that it has too many.

I’ve criticized English spelling a fair bit in the history of this newsletter, see: how the printing press ruined English spelling and why every attempt to reform English spelling has failed. These articles have silently assumed what most people imagine: the English spelling system is a disaster.

But what if it’s not a disaster? According to a tradition in linguistic research going back to the 1960s, the English spelling system might just be… good, actually.

No one will ever call it perfect.4 But it’s more systematic — and far more useful — than its reputation suggests. It’s just that the whole system is rigged. It’s set up to benefit one group of English users over another. But don’t worry, that favoured group includes you… at least some of the time.

Read more

Last week, I was writing the first draft of an article about Shakespeare’s linguistic creativity. You might imagine a writer at peace in such a state, furiously typing out his thoughts about particular turns of phrase in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and periodically consulting the Oxford English Dictionary for dates of words’ first attestation. Sounds like a dream, right?

But, as I wrote, I was troubled by a thought so troubling that it distracted me entirely from the Shakespeare article, which was meant to come out today — don’t worry, it’s still on its way — and set me to penning this piece instead.

Here’s what happened: I was revising a paragraph and I found myself looking twice at the em-dashes. These are the big long dashes (—) that Gen-Z apparently calls “the ChatGPT hyphen.” The name derives from the fact that the extensive use of this little bit of punctuation has become the most infamous of all the “AI tells.”

Mine, on the other hand, were good little em-dashes, doing the job they’re supposed to do: cracking open a window in the middle of a thought, letting you peer through it, and then closing it again.

Nevertheless, dear reader, I deleted them.

Not because there was anything wrong with my lovely little em-dashes, but because I was afraid that someone would spot them on the page and dismiss my article as nothing but “AI slop.”

The thing is, I’ve been using em-dashes since I was in graduate school back in 2008. I used them in my dissertation. I use them in birthday cards to friends and family. I’ve used them in many of the articles I’ve written for this newsletter.

But now, every time I write one, a small voice in my head whispers “Better get rid of it. People are going to think this is AI.” So it gets replaced with a semicolon, a colon, or a period.

I’ve lost my innocence with respect to em-dashes. I’ve eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of AI slop, and I’ll never again be able to deploy em-dashes with the youthful abandon I once enjoyed.

That is what bothered me when I was writing my Shakespeare piece. I felt my em-dash was the appropriate choice, but I was tempted to change my writing to something I thought was weaker just to satisfy the future critics I’d conjured up in my mind.

And I’m not the only one self-censoring like this. In an 18-month ethnographic study of professional writers, one participant described “deliberately choosing a less elegant sentence structure because I was worried the better version would make people suspicious.”1 Another participant described going through a piece of writing, and removing words associated with AI in the public consciousness, such as delve and tapestry.

If you write online, I’d wager these thoughts have run through your mind as well.

I’ve even heard of people deliberately leaving typos in their work, because mistakes are now apparently proof of hand-crafted artisanal prose. (I hope you’ll treat mine that way too.)

Something has gone badly wrong here. Anxiety about AI writing is, paradoxically, making us worse writers. We’re voluntarily surrendering the writerly tools we want to use — the ones that would be the best thing for the piece we’re writing — simply because machines have learned to imitate them.

It’s the literary equivalent of deciding that salt is poison because blanketing your food with salt is bad for your long-term health, and then policing anyone else who reaches for the shaker.

The impulse to blame the em-dash because you hate AI writing is curiously reminiscent of an older controversy. This isn’t the first time writers have panicked about the corruption of prose in the wake of a technological revolution. But I’ll come back to that.

What’s important is that people who quote a sentence with an em-dash and call it “AI slop” are aiming their criticism at the wrong thing.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 40,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and the content I’m most proud of: practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, honest takes on how language really works, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (up next!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Subscribe now

Why AI prose is indigestible

Em-dashes aren’t the thing that makes AI writing bad. Nor is it any other now-infamous technique: not sentence-initial but, nor the corrective antithesis (it’s not X — it’s Y), nor even the ascending tricolon (lists of threes, where the longest item comes last).

The problem is something more diffuse: it’s what John Gallagher called “designer syntax without any content.” A colleague of his had an even better phrase: “haunting uniform polish.”

AI prose has no sense of proportion. It deploys the same level of special effects to every sentence regardless of importance. It’s just always on. And this makes reading it exhausting: it’s just one zinger declarative sentence after another, without a pause to let you digest.

Everything is designed for maximum effect. As a result, nothing ends up having any effect.

For example, if you asked me to opine about the importance of patience in language learning, I might say something like: “There’s no way around it: language learning takes a long time.”

There’s really not that much to say about it, since everyone knows it’s true.

But an AI would give you something like this: “Language learning isn’t a sprint — it’s a marathon. It demands not just memorization, but transformation. Not just patience, but persistence. And ultimately, not just knowledge, but the kind of wisdom only bilinguals have.”

It’s a bizarre mixture of Churchillian rhetoric and the verbal tics of a billboard advertisement. It’s a trite observation. Why belabour the point?

As many people have remarked, what AI writing lacks is taste: it has the ability to deploy techniques, but not the wisdom to know when to do so. But lack of taste is diffuse. It’s not the kind of thing you can find a single “gotcha” sentence for. So people reach for the tells they can spot — an em-dash here, a parallelism there — and a reasonable distaste for the style of AI-generated prose has hardened into an unreasonable suspicion of anything that even bears a family resemblance to that style.

In fact, many of AI’s compulsive quirks are ancient rhetorical techniques, the very things that make good writing good. But they’re all under suspicion now because a machine learned to write. And it writes well, from a certain point of view, but it writes without any sense of restraint.

AI’s favourite techniques aren’t the first good tools to be prosecuted with bad evidence. In fact, this phenomenon — where a change in writing style is denounced as an impurity — is about as old as the flushing toilet.

In defence of the em-dash

I’d like to focus on the em-dash in particular because it’s such a good example of how a perfectly good stylistic technique got picked up by AI, and, as a result of overuse, has become something that writers avoid when they want to prove their humanity.

But the em-dash is part of your heritage as a writer of the English language. Don’t let it be taken away from you!

The em-dash has its ultimate origin in the variety of horizontal strokes used for various purposes by medieval scribes. With the advent of printing, printers began to standardize the lengths of these lines, resulting in the difference between the hyphen (-), the en-dash (–), and the em-dash (—).2

The first great champion of the em-dash was Laurence Sterne (1713–1768). In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (published serially, 1759–1767), Sterne turned the dash into something new: a typographic reflection of consciousness.

The narrator of Tristram Shandy, it seems, can’t get through a thought without interrupting himself. His sentences break apart in the middle of a clause, veering off into digressions, then circle back, only to be driven apart. The dashes are the straining seams of the mind of a man who has more to expound than English grammar will readily allow.

Witness, for example, this paragraph, which is also a single sentence:

I would sooner undertake to explain the hardest problem in geometry, than pretend to account for it, that a gentleman of my father’s great good sense,⁠⸺⁠knowing, as the reader must have observed him, and curious too in philosophy,⁠—wise also in political reasoning,⁠—and in polemical (as he will find) no way ignorant,⁠—could be capable of entertaining a notion in his head, so out of the common track,⁠—that I fear the reader, when I come to mention it to him, if he is the least of a cholerick temper, will immediately throw the book by; if mercurial, he will laugh most heartily at it;⁠—and if he is of a grave and saturnine cast, he will, at first sight, absolutely condemn as fanciful and extravagant; and that was in respect to the choice and imposition of christian names, on which he thought a great deal more depended than what superficial minds were capable of conceiving. (Tristram Shandy, Vol. I, Ch. XIX)

Alongside the many commas, semicolons, and parentheses, Sterne uses the em-dash to make the page feel like thought, which is halting and self-interrupting.

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was another famous dash enthusiast. Her dashes do something different from Sterne’s. His dashes fragment a line of thought that is struggling to hold itself together, while Dickinson’s dashes seem to crack open a space for meaning. Take this, from poem 372, as an example:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The dash is doing something here that no other punctuation could do. A comma would keep you moving; a period would stop you in your tracks. The dash does something in between. Dickinson used so many of these dashes, and used them so distinctively, that scholars now call it the Dickinson dash.

It was good enough for James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and David Foster Wallace as well. That’s two and a half centuries of English literature improved by a sometimes liberal application of the em-dash. So why has it become synonymous with AI slop?

The most likely explanation is prosaic: recent models were trained on large quantities of 19th-century prose, a period when writers were most enamoured of the em-dash.

As Brian Phillips wrote, “the prevalence of em dashes in AI-generated text is a sign of how reliant the AI companies are on the human writers they want to replace.”

Can writers overuse em-dashes? Of course. Any technique can be overused. But the cure for overuse is taste, not prohibition.

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A strange sense of déja vu

Here’s what I find most striking about the AI writing panic: it’s following a script that English has already rehearsed all too well.

In the sixteenth century, a very similar panic emerged in English literary circles. It too was set off by a technological advance: the printing press, which had arrived in England in 1476.

When coupled with the revival of classical learning that had already been going on in continental Europe for quite some time — the Renaissance was one party England was late to — the printing press made it easy for humanists to spread their ideas far and wide. And with their new ideas came a new vocabulary.

The humanists introduced a large number of loanwords from Latin, words such as educate, celebrate, and illustrate. They weren’t popular with everyone. In fact, many writers denounced them as inkhorn terms,3 vocabulary only a scholar could love, and which had no place in proper English prose.

The details were different. Back then, writers weren’t worried about machines imitating their style. They were worried about foreign words flooding into the language, abetted by the ease of publishing books that the printing press brought. But the pattern was the same: a reasonable concern about excess hardened into an unreasonable prohibition.

In some cases, the imported words weren’t strictly necessary, but in many cases these words filled a genuine gap. English had only recently recovered its status as a language of prestige and power in the late Middle Ages, and the language simply lacked words for many of the new developments in technology and thought.

Some writers went so far as to coin elaborate made-in-England equivalents so that they wouldn’t have to employ a Latin word: gainrising instead of resurrection, foresayer instead of prophet, witcraft for logic and naysay instead of negation.4 These coinages tell us something important about what happens when the impulse to purify runs ahead of common sense.

Take as an example the word gainrising, meaning resurrection. Although this sounds more like something you’d do at the gym than coming back from the dead, this word is a straightforward calque — a translation of the parts of the word — of the Latin word resurrectio. Re- means ‘again’ (hence the gain) and surrectio means ‘rising.’ But gainrising never had a chance, because the word resurrection had already been a part of the English language since around the year 1300.

That’s over two hundred years of history. When the purists were removing foreign words from the language, the words were often so deeply embedded that the process was more like invasive surgery than a cosmetic procedure.

That’s not to say that the borrowers — or inkhornizers, as they were called — were models of restraint. Many Latin words were proposed when there were perfectly good English words for the job. We likely didn’t need latration to describe the barking of a dog, or condisciples for schoolmates. Often these words were put into early English dictionaries by mechanically anglicizing the words found in Latin dictionaries, and they stood very little chance of surviving outside the scholar’s study.

A reasonable concern about the value of these gratuitous borrowings is what first raised the ire of the purists in the first place. Both sides had a point, and both sides had their share of cranks.

Now, the AI panic and the inkhorn controversy aren’t perfect parallels. The inkhornizers were changing the language by grafting Latin onto it; AI is imitating techniques that have been around for a long time. But the panic takes the same course. In both cases, a reasonable distaste at overuse — of gratuitous Latinisms then, of relentless em-dashes now — mutated into a blanket suspicion of perfectly good tools.

The irony of it all is that the purists couldn’t even follow their own advice. As Manfred Görlach, a scholar of the period, has noted, none of the so-called purists was truly consistent. All borrowed more Latin words than their stated principles allowed. Sir John Cheke himself — the man who gave us gainrising — used dozens of Latin loanwords in his writings.

In the end, however, the purists lost. The Latin-loving scholars and their friends won, and English today is full of — or, I should say, replete with — Latin words.

If the purists had their way, the peculiar genius of English literature — the vast tonal range that springs from the mixing of Latin and Germanic layers — would never have flourished.

Consider Milton. The opening of Paradise Lost asks the Heav’nly Muse to sing of man’s first disobedience. But disobedience is Latin in origin, from dis- + oboedientia. So, in a purified English, Milton’s Muse (except she wouldn’t be a Muse, because that’s Greek — maybe some kind of valkyrie instead?) would have sung of man’s first unhearsomeness,5 or perhaps his gainstanding

She couldn’t have sung of the fruit of that forbidden tree, because fruit is a French word. It would have had to be the wastum of that forbidden tree, from the Old English wæstm ‘fruit.’

If you start pulling at the Latin threads, the whole tapestry — sorry, the whole weaving — comes apart.

Hamlet would have wondered, To be or not to be, that is the asking, since question comes from Latin quaestio. He’d have known nothing of questions. And he wouldn’t have been able to complain about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, because outrageous and fortune are both French words. Instead, he’d have had to rage against something like unmeetly weird, from Old English unġemetlīċ ‘immoderate’ and wyrd ‘fate.’6

And Jane Austen could never have written her most famous sentence. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. We’d need to lose universally, single, possession, and (once again) fortune. So: It is a truth acknowledged everywhere, that a onefold man in ownership of good wealth must be in want of a wife.

What a loss that would have been!

And this is what we risk now if we allow the comment section to have a heckler’s veto on perfectly legitimate techniques like parallelism, the corrective antithesis, and the almighty ascending tricolon.

Style policing is not inherently wrong. Everyone has opinions about how language should be used and this is never going to change.

But this particular kind of style policing is based on bad evidence and it punishes the wrong people.

The ones it punishes are the writers who are using the tools of classical rhetoric and those who want full freedom to use the punctuation that is the heritage of the English literary tradition.

So I went back to my Shakespeare article and I put those em-dashes back in. Every last one of them. They were, after all, good little em-dashes, doing the job they’re supposed to do: cracking open a window in the middle of a thought, letting you peer through it, and then closing it again.

In 1998, Ted Chiang published “Story of Your Life,” a novella about a linguist named Louise Banks, who learns an alien language with a non-linear structure. In learning it, she begins to experience time the same way the aliens do: past, present, and future collapse into a single act of perception.

Eighteen years later, Denis Villeneuve turned this story into a film called Arrival, and the idea that language can affect how you see reality found its way firmly into the mainstream. Suddenly linguists were being asked at cocktail parties whether the premise of the film was true: could learning a new language really change the way you see the world?

Speaking mainly for myself, I think we linguists were just happy to be noticed, and none of us wanted to give people the blunt truth. So most of us said something like, “It’s complicated.”

But it actually isn’t that complicated. The premise explored by Arrival is that learning a new language can utterly reshape your perception.

It’s a beautiful idea, and it made a great story and a great film. It is also mostly false.

The idea explored in Arrival has a name: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, although the name is itself misleading. The linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored a paper, never jointly proposed a hypothesis, and would probably be surprised to find their names joined to describe an idea that neither of them ever proposed in the form we understand it today. The term was coined in 1954, after the death of both Sapir and Whorf, by another linguist, Harry Hoijer.

What Whorf actually did, working from his day job as a fire insurance inspector in Hartford, Connecticut, was study Hopi and other indigenous languages of the Americas.

From his study, he concluded that the grammars of these languages revealed fundamentally different ways of experiencing reality. The idea caught fire — ironically, given his profession — and has been burning through popular culture ever since.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 40,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of English being weird.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and the content I’m most proud of: practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, honest takes on how language really works, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (up next!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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Mostly false. Mostly.

I said that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was “mostly false.” The problem is that there are actually two versions of the idea, and it’s easy to conflate them.

The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, linguistic determinism, says that your language constrains what you can think.

It argues that if your language lacks a word or a grammatical structure for a concept, that concept is literally unavailable to you. This is the version behind Arrival, behind Orwell’s Newspeak, and behind every claim that such-and-such language has a word for something we can’t even conceive of.1

It’s also the version of the hypothesis that has been dead in linguistic circles for half a century.

The weak version, linguistic relativity, makes a much more modest claim: that the language you speak can nudge certain cognitive processes, especially under time pressure, and especially in tasks involving memory and categorization.

This version has real evidence behind it. The evidence is interesting but it’s far less dramatic than any science fiction writer would want it to be.

Here’s a quick example of what the weak version actually looks like in practice:

Russian has two colour terms where English has one: siniy for dark blue and goluboy for light blue. Russian speakers don’t consider these versions of a single basic colour, like English speakers consider navy blue and sky blue to be versions of a more basic colour term blue. For a Russian speaker, siniy and goluboy are as distinct as blue and green are to an English speaker.

In 2007, a team of researchers led by Jonathan Winawer tested whether this linguistic difference had any measurable cognitive effect. It did. Russian speakers were faster at discriminating between two shades of blue when those shades fell on opposite sides of the siniy/goluboy boundary than when both shades fell within the same category. English speakers, who lump all of these shades under blue, showed no such advantage.

But, and this is the critical part, when researchers gave participants a simultaneous verbal task, occupying the language centres of the brain, that advantage vanished.

The effect was real, but it was fragile and entirely dependent on active linguistic processing. No one’s perception was permanently altered. No one was trapped in a world created by language.

So the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has real evidence behind it. But how much evidence? And how far does it actually go?

The Russian blue study studied a single perceptual domain. If language genuinely shapes thought, even modestly, at the margins, the effect should show up beyond colour and beyond the confines of the laboratory.

Turns out, it does.

Read more

A man takes a train from London to the coast. He’s visiting a town called Wulfleet. It’s small and old, the kind of place with a pub that’s been pouring pints since the Battle of Bosworth Field. He’s going to write about it for his blog. He’s excited.

He arrives, he checks in. He walks to the cute B&B he’d picked out online. And he writes it all up like any good travel blogger would: in that breezy LiveJournal style from 25 years ago, perhaps, in his case, trying a little too hard.

But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.

By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.

But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.

None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the language is real, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working from what we know about how English was written in each period.1

It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post.

Read it and notice where you start to struggle. Notice where you give up entirely. Then meet me on the other side and I’ll tell you what happened to the language (and the blogger).

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 35,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of English being weird.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and the content I’m most proud of: practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, honest takes on how language really works, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (up next!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Subscribe now

2000

Well, I finally got to the town everyone has been talking about lately. Wulfleet. And let me tell you, it was not easy to get here. It’s ridiculous how close this place is to London, and yet how hard it is to get here. I took a train to some place whose name I can’t pronounce, and then from there I had to hop on a bus. The whole day was shot just getting here.

Not going to lie though: so far, it’s totally worth it.

Yes, it’s the typical English coastal town: the seagulls, the cobblestone streets, the works. But there’s something about it that just makes me want to dress up in a cape and walk around like I’m in a Gothic novel. Although, let’s be honest, do I really need an excuse to do that? :)

Everyone seems really nice here, although I did have one really weird encounter on the way to the B&B. A guy was following me for a while. It kind of freaked me out. Anyway, if you go to Wulfleet, just watch out for this one weird guy who hangs out near the bus stop. I know, real specific. But anyway, that was just a bit odd.

Speaking of which, the B&B is also… interesting. LOL. It has separate hot and cold taps and everything. I’m about to see how the “bed” portion works. I’ll update you on the “breakfast” tomorrow morning. If I can find an internet cafe around here, that is.

1900

My plans for an untroubled sleep were upset, however, when I woke with a start before dawn. The window had, it seemed, come open in the night, though I was perfectly certain I had fastened it. I sprang up from the bed to see what was the cause, but I could see nothing in the darkness — nothing, that is, that I could satisfactorily account for. I closed the window again but was entirely unable to fall asleep due to the shock. I am not, I hope, an easily frightened man, but I confess the incident left me not a little unsettled.

When dawn finally came, I went downstairs to find a well-appointed dining room in which there was laid out a modest but perfectly adequate meal. After I ate, and thanked the landlady — a respectable woman of the kind one expects to find in charge of such an establishment — I decided to take a stroll around the town. The sea air did something to revive me after the events of the previous day, not to mention the night, although a question still weighed on me. Do windows simply burst open in the night? Or was there something else afoot? I resolved to make enquiries, though of whom I was not yet certain.

1800

After spending the day wandering around the environs of the town, and, finding myself hungry, I sought out an inn, where I might buy some supper. It was not difficult to find one, and, sitting alone, I called for supper from what the publican had to offer. I confess I gave no great thought to the quality of the fare. Hunger, that great leveller, makes philosophers of us all, and renders even the meanest dish agreeable.

The place was adequately charming. The tables were covered with guttering candles, and the local rustics seemed to be amusing themselves with great jollity. Reader, I am not one of those travellers who holds himself above the common people of the places he visits. I saw fit rather to join in with their sport and we whiled away the hours together in good cheer. I found them to be as honest and amiable a company as one could wish for.

The only thing that disturbed my good humour was when I thought, for a brief moment, that I saw the man who accosted me yesterday among the crowd. But it must have been a mere fancy, for whatever I thought I saw vanished as quickly as it had appeared. I chided myself for the weakness of my nerves, and took another draught to steady them.

When, at long last, the entertainment was spent, I undertook to return to my lodgings; however, finding myself quite unable to find my way, a fact which owed something to having imbibed rather immoderately in the hours prior — and here let me caution the reader against the particular hospitality of country innkeepers, which is liberal beyond what prudence would advise — I soon found myself at the harbour’s edge.

1700

When I was firſt come to Wulfleet, I did not see the harbour, for I was weary and would ſooner go to the inn, that I might ſleep. It is a truth well known to travellers, that wearineſs of body breeds a kind of blindneſs to all things, however remarkable, and ſo it was with me. But now that I beheld the ſight of it, I marvelled. In the inky blackneſs I could see not a ſtar, nor even a ſliver of the moon. It was indeed a wonder that I did not ſtumble on my way, and periſh in a gutter, for many a man has come to his end by leſs.

Finally, with my mind much filled with reflection, I found my way through dark ſtreets to a familiar alley. This was a welcome sight, as an ill foreboding was lately come into my mind. I entertained for a moment such unmanly thoughts as are far from my cuſtom, and which I ſhould be aſhamed to ſet down here, were it not that an honeſt account requires it. I felt eſpecially that I was purſued by ſome thing unknown to me. I glanced backwards, to ſee if I might eſpy that man. But there was no one, or at least no one that I could diſcern.

At laſt, I found the doorway of the inn, as much by chance as by deſign, and retired to ſleep with a mind addled half by drink and the other half by a fear for which I could not well account. I commended myſelf to Providence, and reſolved to think no more on it.

1600

That night I was vntroubled by such euents as I had vndergone the night before, for I had barred the door ere I ſlept, and so fortified, that so no force might open it. This town of Wulfleet was paſſing ſtrange, as ſtrange I dare ſay as any place whereof Plinie wrote, or any iland discovered in the voyages of Sir Walter Raleigh. But I was bound to my taſk, and would not flinch from it. I would record the occurrents in Wulfleet, howeuer ſtrange they might ſeem, yea, though they were ſuch things as would make a leſſer man forſake his purpoſe.

But I ſoon forgot my earlier dread, for the morning brought with it ſo fair a ſight as to diſpel all feare. The people of the town had erected ouernight a market of ſuch variety and abundance as I haue not ſeen the like. Animals walked among men, and men among animals, a true maruel!

As I looked on this aſſembled throng, greatly pleaſed and not a little amazed, a man approached me. He ſtartled me, but I quickly saw he was nothing but a farmer come to hawke his wares. “Would you haue a fowl, sir?” ſaid he, “My hens are fat and luſty, and you may haue them cheap.”

I said in reply, “No, I thanke thee,” He was a churliſh fellow, rude of ſpeech and meane of aſpect, and I felt no ſhame at thouing ſuch a man as that.

1500

I went forthe among the people, and as I paſſed throughe the market and the ſtretes of the towne, euer lokyng aboute me with grete care, leſt I ſholde agayn encountre ſome peryl, thee appeared, from oute of the prees that ſame man whom I ſo dredde. And he was passyng foule was of vyſage, as it ſemed to me, more foule than ony man I had ſene in al my lyf.

He turned hym towarde me and ſayd, “Straunger, wherefore art thou come hydder?”

And I anſwerd hym nott, for I knewe nott what I ſholde ſaye, ne what answere myght ſerue me beſt in ſuche a caas.

Than hee asked me, “Was it for that thou wouldeſt ſee the Maiſter?”

And verely this name dyd me ſore affright, for who was this Maiſter wherof he ſpake? And what maner of man was he, that his very name ſholde be ſpoken wyth ſuche reuerence and drede. I wolde haue fledde but he purſued me and by myn avys he was the ſwifter, for he caught me full ſoone.

I sayd to him, “What meaneſt thou? Who is the Maiſter?”

And he sayd, “I ſhall brynge the vnto hym, and thou ſhalt ſee for thy ſelf what maner of lorde he is.”

But I wolde not, and cryed out ayenſt hym with grete noyſe, leſt he ſholde take me thyder by violence and ayenſt my wille.

1400

Bot þe man wolde me nat abandone þer, ne suffre me to passen forþ. I miȝt nat flee, for hys companiouns, of whom þer were a gret nombre, beſet me aboute, and heelden me faſt þat I ne scholde nat ascapen. And þei weren stronge menn and wel douȝti, of grymme contenaunce and fiers, and armed wiþ swerdes and wiþ knyues, so þat it were gret foly for eny man to wiþstonden hem.

So þei bounden me hond and foot and ledden me to þe one þei callede Maiſter, of whom I hadde herd so muchel and knewe so litel.

Þe sayde Maiſter, what that hee apperid bifore me, was verely a Deuill, or so me þouȝte, for neuer in al my lyf hadde I beholden so foule a creature. Hee bore a blak clok þat heng to þe grounde, and ſpake neuer a worde. Bot his countenaunce was hidous and so dredful þat my blood wexed colde to loken on hym. For he hadde nat þe visage of a man bot of a beest, wiþ þe teeþ and ſnoute of a wulf, scharpe and crueel. And his eres weren longe eres, as of a wulf, and bihynde him þer heng a gret tayl, as wulf haþ. And hys eyen schon in þe derknesse lyke brennyng coles.

“What wolden ȝe wiþ mee, ȝe heþene?” aſked I, þouȝ myn voys quaked and I hadde litel hope of eny merci.

Bot þei maden no answer, neyþer good ne yuel. Þei weren stille as stoon, and stoden about me as men þat wayte on þeir lordes commandement.

1300

Þanne after muchel tyme spak þe Maiſter, and his wordes weren colde as wintres is. His vois was as þe crying of rauenes, scharpe and schille, and al þat herde hym weren adrade and durst nat speken.

“I deme þe to þe deeþ, straunger. Here ſchaltou dyen, fer fram þi kynne and fer fram þine owen londe, and non ſchal knowen þi name, ne non schal þe biwepe.”

And I sayde to hym, wiþ what boldenesse I miȝte gaderen, “Whi fareſt þou wiþ me þus? What treſpaas haue I wrouȝt ayeins þe, þat þou demeſt me so harde a dome?”

“Swie!” quoþ he, and smot me wiþ his honde, so þat I fel to þe erþe. And þe blod ran doun from mi mouþe.

And I swied, for þe grete drede þat was icumen vpon mee was more þan I miȝte beren. Mi herte bicam as stoon, and mi lymes weren heuy as leed, and I ne miȝte namore stonden ne spoken.

Þe euele man louȝ, whan that he sawe my peine, and it was a crueel louȝter, wiþouten merci or pitee as of a man þat haþ no rewþe in his herte.

Allas! I scholde neuer hauen icumen to þis toune of Wuluesfleete! Cursed be þe dai and cursed be þe houre þat I first sette foot þerinne!

1200

Hit is muchel to seggen all þat pinunge hie on me uuroȝten, al þar sor and al þat sorȝe. Ne scal ic nefre hit forȝeten, naht uuhiles ic libbe!

Ac þer com me gret sped, and þat was a uuif, strong and stiþ! Heo com in among þe yuele men and me nerede fram heore honden.

Heo sloȝ þe heþene men þat me pyneden, sloȝ hem and fælde hem to þe grunde. Þer was blod and bale inouȝ And hie feollen leien stille, for hie ne miȝten namore stonden. Ac þe Maister, þe uuraþþe Maister, he flaȝ awei in þe deorcnesse and was iseon namore.

Ic seide hire, “Ic þanke þe, leoue uuif, for þu hauest me ineredd from dæðe and from alle mine ifoan!”

1100

Þæt ƿif me andsƿarode and cƿæð, “Ic eom Ælfgifu gehaten. Þu scalt me to ƿife nimen, þeah þe þu hit ne ƿite gyt, for hit is sƿa gedon þæt nan man ne nan ƿif ne mote heonon faren buten þurh þone dæð þæs Hlafordes.”

“Ac þær is gyt mare to donne her, forþi ƿe nabbaþ þone Hlaford ofslagenne. He is strong and sƿiðe yfel, and manige gode men he hæfð fordone on þisse stoƿe.”

“Is þæt soð?” cƿæþ ic, forþon þe ic naht ne ƿiste. “Ic ƿende þæt ic mihte heonon faren sƿa ic com.”

“Gea la,” cƿæð heo. “Hit is eall soð, and ƿyrse þonne þu ƿenst.”

1000

And þæt heo sægde wæs eall soþ. Ic ƿifode on hire, and heo ƿæs ful scyne ƿif, ƿis ond ƿærfæst. Ne gemette ic næfre ær sƿylce ƿifman. Heo ƿæs on gefeohte sƿa beald swa ænig mann, and þeah hƿæþere hire andƿlite wæs ƿynsum and fæger.

Ac ƿe naƿiht freo ne sindon, for þy þe ƿe næfre ne mihton fram Ƿulfesfleote geƿitan, nefne ƿe þone Hlaford finden and hine ofslean. Se Hlaford hæfþ þisne stede mid searocræftum gebunden, þæt nan man ne mæg hine forlætan. Ƿe sindon her sƿa fuglas on nette, swa fixas on ƿere.

And ƿe hine secaþ git, begen ætsomne, ƿer ond ƿif, þurh þa deorcan stræta þisses grimman stedes. Hƿæþere God us gefultumige!

The blog ends there. No sign-off, no “thanks for reading.” Just a few sentences in a language that most of us lost the ability to follow somewhere around the thirteenth century.

So, how far did you get?

Let me take you back through it.

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The calm after the storm (1700–2000)

Written English has been remarkably stable over the last 300 years. Spelling was standardized in the mid-1700s, and grammar has barely changed at all. This means that, if you can read Harry Potter (1997–2003), you can read Robinson Crusoe (1719), which is good news to fans of the English novel.

What has changed is the voice.

Blog post became diary entry became travel letter. The format changed much faster than the language. Compare the very first line, “Well, I finally got to the town everyone has been talking about lately” with the line from the 1800 section, “Hunger, that great leveller, makes philosophers of us all, and renders even the meanest dish agreeable.”

They’re both performances of a sort: the 2000s protagonist is performing for his blog’s audience, so the tone is chatty and personal. The 1800s protagonist, with the mind of a Georgian diarist, is performing for posterity, so he philosophizes.

The one visible change in the language itself is the appearance, in the 1700 passage, of the long s (ſ). This wasn’t a different letter, just a variant form of s used in certain positions within a word. It disappeared fully from English printing in the early 19th century, although its use was dwindling even before that, which is why it does not appear in the 1800 passage. It’s a typographic change rather than a linguistic one, but it’s the first unmistakable sign that the text is getting older.2

Slowly, then all at once (1400–1600)

This is where the ground starts to move under our feet.3

Before the mid 1700s, there was no such thing as standardized spelling. Writers spelled words as they heard them, or as they felt like spelling them, which is why the 1500s and 1600s sections look so alien, even when the words, underneath the surface, are ones you know.

For another difficulty, take the word vntroubled from the 1600 section. This is our familiar untroubled, but the u is replaced by a v, because u and v were not yet considered separate letters. They were variants of the same latter, used to represent both sounds. The convention was to write v at the beginning of words and u in the middle, which give us spelling like vnto (unto), euents (events), ouernight (overnight), and howeuer (however). It looks weird at first, but once you know the rule, the words become much more readable.

Another new arrival — or, more accurately, late departure — from the language is the letter thorn (þ), which first appears in the 1400 section. Thorn is simply th. That’s it. Wherever you see þ, read th, and the word will usually reveal itself: þe is the, þei is they, þat is that. If you’ve ever seen a pub called “Ye Olde” anything, that ye is actually þe, an attempt by early printers to write a thorn without having to make an expensive new letter.

Thorn’s companion, yogh (ȝ), is more complicated. It represents sounds that modern English spells as gh or y — so miȝt is might, ȝe is ye. The reasons for this are a story unto themselves.

But the most interesting change in this period isn’t a letter. Rather, it’s a pronoun. Notice the moment in the 1600 section where our blogger meets a farmer and says, “No, I thanke thee.” Then he adds, “I felt no ſhame at thouing ſuch a man as that.”

Thouing. To thou someone, or to use thou when talking to them, was, by the 1600s, a deliberate social statement. Thou was the old singular form of you; you was originally the plural. Over the centuries, you came to be used as a polite singular, much as French uses vous. Gradually, you took over entirely. By Shakespeare’s time (1564–1616), thou survived in two main contexts: intimacy (as in prayer) and insult. Our blogger is being a little rude here. He’s looking down on a man he considers beneath him, and his language gives him a way of making his feelings perfectly clear.

Over the wall (1000–1300)

Somewhere in this section — and if you’re like most readers, it happened around 1300 or 1200 — the language crossed a boundary. Up to this point, comprehension felt like it was dropping gradually, but now it’s fallen off a cliff. In one section, you could get by by squinting and guessing; in the next you were utterly lost. You have hit the wall.4

There are two reasons for this. The first is vocabulary. As you move backwards in time, the French and Latin loanwords that make up an enormous proportion of the Modern English vocabulary grow fewer and fewer. When you pass 1250, they drop off almost altogether. Where a modern writer would say he underwent torture, a 1200-era writer must say that he suffered pinunge instead.5

The farther back you go, the more the familiar Latinate layer of English is stripped away, revealing the Germanic core underneath: a language that looks to modern eyes more like German or Icelandic than anything we’d call English.

The second reason for the difficulty is grammar. Old English (450–1100) was an inflected language: it used endings on nouns, adjectives, and verbs to mark their grammatical roles in a sentence, much as Latin or modern German do. Alongside these endings came a greater freedom in word order, which makes sense given that the endings told you who was doing what to whom.

English lost most of these endings over the course of the period linguists call Middle English (1100–1450), and it tightened its word order as if to compensate. When you look at these final sections, if you can make out the words, you will see the effects of this freer word order. For example, in 1200 we read monige gode men he hæfð fordone ‘many good men he has destroyed’, where we’d expect a Modern English order more like and he has destroyed many good men.

To make matters worse, a few unfamiliar letters also appear: wynn (ƿ) is simply w, eth (ð) means the same as thorn (þ) — both represent th, and ash (æ) represents the vowel in cat and hat.6:

All of these factors combined likely made it difficult, if not impossible, to follow the plot. So let me tell you what happened. In the 1400 section, the blogger was seized. He was dragged before a creature they called the Master, and the Master was no man. He had the teeth and snout of a wolf, as well as a wolf’s long ears and great tail. His eyes glowed like burning coals. Wulfleet was once Wulfesfleot ‘the Bay of the Wolf.’

In the 1300 section, the Master condemned our hero to death. In the 1200 section, a woman appeared and killed his captor. The Master, however, fled into the darkness. In the 1100 section, the woman revealed her name: Ælfgifu ‘gift of the elves.’ She told the blogger — can we still call him that in 1100? — they would marry, and she shares the terrible truth about Wulfleet: no one leaves until the Master is dead.

In the 1000 section, they are married. She is, he writes, as bold as any man in battle, and yet fair of face. But they are not free. Together, through the dark streets of Wulfleet, they hunt the Master still.

The English in which I write this paragraph is not the English of fifty years ago, and it will not be the English of fifty years in the future.

Go back far enough, and English writing becomes unrecognisable. Go forward far enough and the same thing will happen, though none of us will be around to notice.

Our poor blogger didn’t notice either, even as he and his language travelled back in time through the centuries. He just kept writing even as he was carried off to somewhere he couldn’t come back from. Some say that, far away in Wulfleet, he’s writing still.

We covered:

• The spectrum of contact, from isolated loanwords all the way to pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages.

• Whether the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings could understand each other, and what the place names of the Danelaw tell us about how they did it.

• Why European languages are weird from a global perspective, and how the fall of Rome created a continent-wide linguistic area.

• Why languages spoken by small communities might differ from widely spoken lingua francas.

Danny also posted this conversation on Linguistic Discovery. Go over and subscribe if you’re not already following his work!

Articles we discuss:

• 1066 didn’t change English (but 1250 did)

• How are new languages created? The linguistics of “The Iron Dreamers”, Part 4

• Were Old Norse and Old English a single language?

• European languages are exotic

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October 15, 1066. It’s a chilly autumn morning. Somewhere in the fields outside Winchester, a peasant goes about his day. He has no idea that, only yesterday, a hundred miles away, the king has fallen just outside the town of Hastings.

Our peasant — let’s call him Leofric — is equally unaware that the victor of that battle, William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, will soon be crowned King of England under the name of William I, with the much-upgraded sobriquet of “the Conqueror.”

Leofric doesn’t know it yet, but his world has irrevocably changed. He has, you see, come under the Norman Yoke. And, worse than that, as any linguist would be able to tell him, his language is also about to change forever.

Soon, Leofric will live through a new period in the history of the English language: Middle English (1066–1450), in which English falls under the domination of French, birthing the bizarre situation where seemingly every word in the English language has a fancier, French counterpart.

Will Leofric need to go for French lessons? If Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1819) is to be believed, our peasant hero will have to get to work on his bonjours and his s’il vous plaîts, and tout de suite!

Scott’s novel, which is set in England in the year 1194, levels the blame on the Normans for an infamous linguistic quirk of English: animals have Anglo-Saxon names when they’re alive and French names when they’re served at the table.

For example, a farmer raises a cow (Old English cū), but a nobleman asks for beef (French bœuf). Shepherds guard their flocks of sheep (Old English sċēap), but those same sheep become mutton (French mouton) when they find themselves in the lord’s stew.

You’ve probably heard this story before in a YouTube video or on a placemat at a medieval-themed restaurant. Is it true? We’ll return to that question later.

But first, I’d like to zoom out to discuss the larger question: how did the Norman Conquest actually affect the English language?

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language echoes most people’s understanding: “after the Norman Conquest” came an “influx of words from … French”.1

That’s not technically wrong: the influx did come after the Conquest. But it allows the reader to assume what almost everyone who hasn’t looked at the data assumes: that “after” means “shortly after,” and more specifically “as a direct result of.” In other words, we’re led to assume that the military conquest and the linguistic one were roughly simultaneous.

But this familiar story — English dethroned and forced to absorb massive quantities of the language of the oppressor — has a gaping hole.

There was no flood of French words into the English language, not until around 1250, a full 200 years after the Norman Conquest. Before then, the influx was more like an in-trickle. And, by 1250, the families that had first brought French to England were increasingly speaking English as their first language.

The French words in English were far from an imposition of a Norman aristocracy. Instead, they came just as French was beginning to lose its grip on the Normans themselves, or rather, their descendants.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society. I’m Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language.

I publish every Wednesday. Free subscribers get every other issue; paid subscribers get them all. Upgrade for the full archive, deep-dives on skills and takes you won't find anywhere else, plus our live book clubs.

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As French as the word very

If we had no historical records of the Norman Conquest, we’d have a hard time deducing it happened in 1066 just by looking at the language.

That’s a bit weird, right? A country gets taken over by a foreign élite and the language just… stays the same?

But it’s true: for the first 100 years after the Conquest, the English language showed very few signs of French influence of any kind. Leofric would never need French lessons. Neither would his kids. Neither would theirs.

If you were one of Leofric’s great-great-great-(etc.) grandchildren living in 1150, the only French words you might know would be things like war (first appeared in 1116), duke (1129), charity (1154), and nativity (1105). In other words, things that lords and priests talk about.2

Even accounting for the scarcity of written English in this period, loanwords from French barely show up at all. They form a tiny proportion of all new words first appearing in the language, dwarfed by words formed in other ways, for example, by compounding from pre-existing English words, as in birthday, composed of two ancient words, but first attested as a compound in 1384.3

A hundred years into Norman rule in England, the number of French loanwords began to increase in both relative and absolute terms, but it was a slow process.

Even by 1200, only about 10% of new words coming into the English language did so from French. Looking at texts from this period, such as Ormulum (a late 12th-century attempt at spelling reform), the overwhelming majority of the words would be recognizable to an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon.

In the century after the Conquest, French words trickled into English at a rate of about one every eight years. Then came 1250. And the rate increased roughly twentyfold, to nearly three per year.4

And many of the words that came in during this period aren’t the sophisticated language of noblemen or priests. They’re utterly common. For example, the intensifier very — a word so ingrained into English that almost no one realizes it’s an adaptation of French vrai ‘true’ — is first attested in 1384.5

Not what we would expect from the top-down imposition of a language on a conquered population. We need a better explanation for what happened in Middle English than simply appealing to the Norman Yoke.

It also means that Sir Walter Scott’s story, charming and memorable as it is, doesn’t hold up either. If the cow/beef and sheep/mutton split had come from Norman lords demanding meat from English peasants, why did the names for meat not show up in English until around 1300?6 It’s a neat story but it doesn’t survive contact with the chronology.

So here’s the real puzzle. The flood of French words into English didn’t come when French was at the height of its power in England. It came when French had started to lose its grip.

By 1250, the descendants of William the Conqueror’s companions had started speaking English at home, and their ancestral ties to Normandy had been severed for decades.

Why did French have its biggest impact on English just as its own dominance was waning?

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If you’d told me a year ago that 34,000 people would sign up of their own free will to receive emails about Middle English vowel shifts and the etymology of the word “dog,” I would have asked what you were selling, or what you were smoking.

This newsletter began as a signup form on my website, where I shared the occasional post whenever I had something on my mind (shoutout to anyone here from the Winged Schwa days!). But, at the start of last year, fresh off the launch of the first modern graded reader for Old English, I realized that I wanted to get serious in my writing about the history of the English language.

So, the Dead Language Society was born: date of birth, January 29, 2025.

Now that we’ve reached a year into the project, I wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude.

Thank you for the space you’ve granted me in your inboxes. It’s been a true privilege to be able to share my love for the history of the English language with you over the past year.

I’d also like to thank my paid subscribers for supporting my mission to bring linguistics out of the ivory tower. Your support allows me to devote the time needed to research, write, and edit these articles. From the bottom of my philological heart, I thank you!

By the way, if you’ve been pondering whether to become a paid subscriber, I’m offering a one-time anniversary discount: 20% off an annual subscription for one year. The offer is running until February 11. More details about what’s coming up at the Dead Language Society below.

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Now that the mushy stuff is out of the way, I want to share what I’ve learned over the past year: about writing, about audiences, and about what happens when you try to explain scholarly topics without the safety net of footnotes… well, with fewer footnotes!

After that, I’ll share a guide to what I think were the best posts from year one, and a look at what’s coming up in year two.

But first, some lessons from the field.

The ivory tower has poor wifi

You can’t write for everyone at once

Coming from an academic background, I’ve found that the hardest habit I’ve had to break is the compulsion to cover all my bases: to anticipate every objection, to caveat every claim, and to add a footnote to every assertion. As you can see from literally any article I’ve written over the past year, I haven’t entirely kicked that last habit.

But I’ve come to realize that there is always more complexity than you can fit into a single piece. When you’re writing for a general audience — even when that audience is composed, as mine is, of brilliant, attractive people, not to mention funny! — you need to show the essential outline of the topic first, to let them see the shape of the thing.

If readers want to get closer and appreciate all the nuance and complexity of the topic, they can. That’s what books and academic articles are for, and that’s precisely why you’ll find a reading list at the end of all my deep dive posts. But I’ve learned that I can’t add all of that nuance in the body of the text without losing the thread of what is most important about the topic.

And even when you feel like you’ve added enough complexity, you’ll still get people showing up in the comments to tell you that you’ve oversimplified things. There is absolutely no way you can stop this from happening, so don’t even try. It’s simply the price of admission for writing publicly about complex topics.

Besides, if you bog readers down with disclaimers and exceptions, not only will you still get those comments, but you’ll make it harder for the majority of your readers to follow what you’re saying.

Believe me, I get the temptation to hedge — I can’t even resist it 100% of the time — but focusing on the core message you’re trying to convey will always win the hearts of all but the most pedantic of your readers. (I love you too, pedantic readers!)

Readers will surprise you

I never would have predicted that my most popular posts would be about spelling: lost letters, the history of the alphabet, why English spelling is such a… well, the word disaster comes to mind, but, of course, I’m far too professional to use such inflammatory language.

My articles on these topics have travelled far beyond the usual linguistics crowd, getting shared on the likes of Hacker News, and reaching audiences I’d never have expected.

It turns out that people are fascinated by the history of spelling itself. Who knew? I’ll certainly be returning to this topic in the second year of the Dead Language Society.

Meanwhile, some of the things I expected to find a wider readership… didn’t. In some cases it’s because I didn’t get the headline quite right, but in others, I’ve been wrong about just how broad the appeal of the topic is.

For example, and in retrospect, I probably should have seen this coming, an article about the vagaries of early Germanic kinship systems probably isn’t going to be a breakout hit.

Either way, I’ve learned to pay attention when something resonates.

So I’ll ask you: what topics from the past year have you been most interested in? I’m always looking for ideas for what to write about next. Leave a comment to let me know what you think.

Finding your voice is a slow thaw

Looking back at my earliest articles from 2025, I can see how constrained my writing was. I’m not sure whether it was a holdover from academic training, but I had trouble putting much of myself into the prose.

Even then, I knew I needed to put some personality into my writing, especially in the age of AI, when writers with a voice are becoming an increasingly scarce resource. But I found it difficult nevertheless. Drafts would come back from my brilliant editor with notes like “It needs to be more you,” or the one I dread to this day, “Needs more pizzaz,” a note which serves to remind me to bring more Colin to my writing.

Eventually, however, I got over it. There was no moment of revelation where I discovered that the real writer was inside me all along. It was more like a gradual thaw, where I slowly became comfortable enough with the format to write in a way that expresses how I really feel about all these topics, which is to say, a kind of giddy enthusiasm.

Teaching is learning

There’s even a Latin proverb for this one: Docendo discimus ‘we learn by teaching.’

When I first set out a year ago to write these articles, I imagined that I would be writing about things I already knew well. My challenge would merely be to present them to a new audience.

This seems, in retrospect, naïve. Even when you have a good working understanding of a subject, the act of explaining it in writing to someone fresh to the topic is a perfect way to reveal all the gaps in your own knowledge.

I’d sit down to confirm a date or double-check a quotation, and before I knew it, I’d be three books deep into something I thought I understood, only to discover that I had far from the whole story.

For example, the research I did for the piece I wrote on Chaucer completely transformed my understanding of how iambic pentameter developed. I’d always heard that Chaucer invented iambic pentameter. And that’s true in a sense, but the reality is far stranger: Chaucer adapted continental models, but then the language changed, we lost lots of final vowels, and the metre’s logic was lost until later poets rediscovered it (possibly by accident).

If you want the full story, it’s in How the letter E almost ruined English poetry, one of my favourite articles from this past year.

This kind of discovery has happened again and again. I hope that my excitement, which comes from my experience of genuinely learning something along with you, is contagious. That’s always been my goal: to show you how much fun learning about linguistics can be, and it’s easier to show you that when I’m also having fun myself.

The moment I knew

Although I’m celebrating a year of the Dead Language Society specifically, my overall project of doing what people call public linguistics or linguistics communication, or, as I like to put it, “bringing linguistics out of the ivory tower,” has been going on for much longer.

I first started writing and teaching online back in 2021. I’ve been through different platforms, including Youtube, Twitter, and my own blog, and I had some modest success here and there.

I never imagined that Substack would be any different. But it has been. Substack is the first platform where I’ve felt that the niche I’ve carved out, writing about the history of words, has found real traction.

I first realized this in late March, when I published a piece on how the Black Death reshaped English. It was featured by the Substack Post, picked up some traction on Hacker News, and overnight the subscriber count jumped in a way it never had before. Now, it’s not good for your writing or your mental health to obsess over these kinds of numbers, but I’ll confess that this was an exciting moment. I thought, “Maybe there’s something to this Substack thing, after all…”

Honestly, I never expected historical linguistics to find an audience of this size. Etymology! Of all things! But that growth came from you: sharing posts with friends, recommending the newsletter, leaving comments that sparked new ideas.

The Dead Language Society exists because of its members. I’m just happy you’re here.

Season two

Now that I’ve gone through a year (and 200,000 words) of writing, I have a much better sense of what works for me, for you, and on Substack as a platform. To that end, I have a few minor changes to let you know about:

First, both free and paid articles will be coming out on Wednesdays, rather than having paid articles come out on Saturdays. This will help give you time to get through the paid article before the next comes out, and avoid the long 10-day gap we have now between the free article on Wednesday and the paid article on the following Saturday.

Second, I’m going to be experimenting with recording voiceovers for these articles, as I’ve done for this one. Think of it like a podcast version of the post that you can listen to whenever you like.

Beyond the general benefits of audio, I think this feature will be particularly useful for us because these articles often contain words from multiple languages or other things that the automated text reader does a poor job at. Also, we’re talking so often about how things sound that an audio track is worth a thousand words.

I need to see how much time this adds to the article preparation process, but I’m optimistic that we can fit it in. That said, I’d like to make sure it’s a feature that you’d actually use. So if you like the idea of audio voiceovers, or you’re currently enjoying this one, please let me know in the comments. That will greatly increase the likelihood that the experiment becomes a permanent feature.

It’s also time to tease an upcoming series. The working title is “Why is English like this?!” It will be a multi-part series (maybe 10–12 issues) telling the entire history of the English language in narrative form, focusing on all the accidents of history that have made English the strange beast it is today.

I’ve been dancing around this for a long time, telling smaller stories which relate to one aspect of the language or another, or that focus on a single period. Now it’s time to put it all together and show you the grand sweep of history as it has shaped this language of ours.

What questions about English have you always been curious about? Let me know in the comments: there’s still time to shape the direction of the series.

The obligatory sales pitch

If you’ve been on the fence about becoming a paid subscriber, now is the time. To celebrate one year of the Dead Language Society, I’m offering 20% off an annual subscription for the next week only.

Paid subscribers get access to the full archive, including all the deep dives and the upcoming “Why is English like this?!” series as it comes out. You’ll also be directly supporting my mission to bring linguistics out of the ivory tower, and helping me keep writing these articles for years to come.

This offer expires on February 11, 2026. After that, it’s back to the regular price.

Get 20% off for 1 year

Some light reading

Whether you’re a new subscriber, or you’ve been here from the beginning, here are a few of the posts from the first year that I’m proudest of:

The Viral Surprises. These are the posts that went out into the wider world, and brought many of you here in the first place. As it turns out, people are really interested in the history of writing:

• The strangest letter of the alphabet. The lost letter yogh (ȝ) and its strange afterlife.

• Why English doesn’t use accents. Weirdly, the French are to blame.

• The invention that ruined English writing. How the printing press broke English spelling because it came just a few decades too early.

Weird Words. I started a series called “weird words,” which has a simple premise: I pick an everyday word and show how absolutely no one understands where it comes from. Some of my favourites:

• “Dog” is a weird word. For some reason, European languages like ditching their word for dog, and replacing it with something completely different. English is no exception. This post even unlocked a dream of mine: to speak about the history of language on NPR!

• “She” is a weird word. English used to have a perfectly good word for she, and we abandoned it in favour of a Frankenstein pronoun.

Deep Cuts. For those who want the more scholarly stuff, even if it involves the tiniest little bit of controversy:

• How the Black Death reshaped English. Pandemic + social climbing = the most dramatic change in the history of the English language.

• Don’t read Heaney’s Beowulf. A hot take on the internet’s favourite translation.

• The ancient poetic law that explains basically everything. (paid) The 6000-year-old reason we say “ladies and gentlemen,” not “gentlemen and ladies.” (Homer would probably approve.)

  ---

That was year one. Thank you for reading, subscribing, commenting, and for sharing these articles with your friends!

Here’s to year two. See you next Wednesday.

I have committed an act of literary madness, and I’m not even ashamed of it.

It started with a note from , who asked: What if Shakespeare had known about Beowulf? What might he have done with it?

I read this and thought: what if, indeed. What if Shakespeare had written Beowulf?

And then, because I’m entirely lacking in anything resembling restraint, I wrote the thing. What follows is the first 52 lines of Beowulf re-conceived as a scene in Hamlet — complete with Polonius’ moralizing, Hamlet’s snide commentary, and enough double entendres to raise the eyebrows of the entire Kingdom of Denmark.

If you’ve read Hamlet and at least the first 52 lines of Beowulf in translation,1 you’ll catch more of the joke. But even if you haven’t, this piece should stand on its own as a silly tribute to two of the greatest English poets.

Here’s everything you need to know (spoilers for Hamlet):

Claudius has recently become King of Denmark after the death of his brother, and has also married the late king’s wife, Gertrude. Hamlet, the protagonist and son of the late king, is naturally unhappy about this state of affairs.

Matters are made worse by the discovery that Claudius had murdered his brother. Hamlet learned this from his father’s ghost. But, because Hamlet was not certain that he could trust his father’s ghost, he arranged the staging of a play whose plot mirrors the way Claudius killed his brother, so that he could gauge Claudius’ reaction to see whether he was indeed guilty.

Oh, and Polonius is Claudius’ advisor, and a pompous fool.

This scene occurs immediately before Hamlet’s play begins.

First comes the text; then, below the paywall, the commentary where I explain the decisions I made in composing this piece, including exactly which lines I stole from Shakespeare and why.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society. I’m Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language and its relatives.

Subscribe for a free issue every other Wednesday, or upgrade to support my mission of bringing historical linguistics out of the ivory tower and receive two extra Saturday deep-dives per month.

You’ll also get access to our book clubs (you can watch the recordings of the first series, a close reading of Beowulf), as well as the full back catalogue of paid articles.

Subscribe now

Enter Claudius, King of Denmark, Gertrude the Queen, Polonius, Hamlet, with others.

CLAUDIUS
My lords, ere further sport beguile the night,
We’ll have a taste of elder Denmark shown,
A poem held in honour, Beowulf named.
I prize it much, for first it revelleth
In a rehearsal of our fathers’ deeds,
Set forth in measured speech. Such things, we hope,
May school our blood to patience and to peace.

HAMLET (aside)
Peace is a tune oft played before a dirge.

CLAUDIUS
What say you, nephew? You look angerly,
As if the past did trouble you.

HAMLET
Not so, my lord.
I love old stories well, especially
When kings go down to sea.

POLONIUS
A grave proceeding,
Weighty and full of good instruction.

HAMLET
Aye,
And full of bones, if one should dig but deep.

Enter the Player King.

PLAYER KING
Open your ears to hark to Danish deeds,
Which, half remembered, half by Rumour kept,
Did prove the puissance of our ancient kings.
Among these warlike monarchs there was one
Surpassèd all. ‘Twas Scyld, the castaway,
Whom men name Scefing, father of the race
Of Spear-Danes, callèd by the cow’ring throngs
“O Conqueror, O Sovereign,” who paid
Him tribute. Thus did Fortune recompense
Th’ original outrage she worked against him,
His former poverty. By turning of her wheel
She lifted him (as she has tumbled many),
To high estate, and granted men’s obedience.

HAMLET
We shall not look upon his like again!

PLAYER KING
To him was born a son, a royal infant
Given by God’s fair ordinance to those
Who wept, who bled, who sank beneath the yoke.
As houses are defiled for want of use,
And tender blossoms starved for want of rain,
The land itself then groaned for want of rule
And noble government. The name of Beow,
For so the prince was named, ran through the mouths
Of young and old among the Danish nation.

POLONIUS
Let every gentleman this noble precept
Character in his memory: that he should do
Such benefits, by liberality
In glitt’ring gold, while in his father’s care,
That when he see old age, and bloody war,
His friends might bleed for him.

HAMLET (aside)
Thus is love
Minted in youth, and spent in needful dotage.

POLONIUS
By care and valour shall a man attain,
In every nation, to the highest point
of greatness, and of fame for all his deeds.

PLAYER KING
When at last the hour of death was come,
Into the keeping of the Everlasting,
The lordly monarch, bravest at the last,
Went hence, upon a ship, as he came hither.

POLONIUS
Observe, my lords, that life is but a passage,
And death the harbour that concludes the voyage.

PLAYER KING
They bore his body down, his thanes and kinsmen
Towards the ocean’s roaring tide, as he
Himself in word commanded, while he yet
commanded words. So excellent a king
that was, a friend of Danes, and their protector.
In harbour was the royal ship, whose stem,
With rings adornèd, gleamed, as fangs of ice
Beneath the winter moon reflect its whiteness.
Eager it seemed, the barge that stood at anchor,
No baubling vessel, to undertake its fare.

HAMLET (aside)
The ship is keen; methinks the passenger
Is not.

PLAYER KING
Then in the bosom of the ship,
Beside the mast they set the king whose fame
Was won as much by martial deeds as jovial.
Inestimable stones were laden there,
Where he lay balmed, entreasured. How the bark
Showed like a mine, with gold from every coast!
I never saw a boat so decked with ornaments,
With sword and harness, bright instruments of war.
Within its bosom lay the tuns of treasure,
Which should accompany their master hence
Into the tumbling billows of the main.
They furnished him with no less store of gifts,
The riches of the world, than those who first
Did send him forth, a child o’er ruthless waves.
Then high above his head they set a standard,
A golden ensign. They gave him to the deep,
Sad-hearted men, much overgone with care.
And so he died, and went I know not where.
No learnèd doctor that yet draweth breath
Can say where lies the secret house of death.

GERTRUDE
Methought this poem treated on the theme
of Beowulf, the Gothic prince, but this
Is merely Danish kings succeeding kings.
When comes the hero to the stage, my lord?

HAMLET

Anon, anon. The poem creeps apace,
And tarries in the telling.

CLAUDIUS.
My nephew tires,
It seems, of this night’s sport. Let us retire.
Give thanks unto the players who so well
Do mind us of our ancient stock of kings.

The audience applauds, excepting Hamlet.

POLONIUS
A worthy piece, my lord, and full of pith.
It shows how rule well planted long survives,
And how renown doth crown the just in death.

CLAUDIUS (to Hamlet)
Come, nephew, you are silent. Speak your bosom.
Does not this tale give comfort to the mind?

HAMLET
Comfort, my lord? Such comfort need I not.
The worm that eats the slave devours the high.
I need no verse to know: Kings die, kings die.

The rest is commentary

Now for some notes on how this came together: why Polonius was the perfect vessel for the moralizing tendencies of the Beowulf poet, where I realize I was being too clever by half (I left it in anyway), and a complete accounting of my thefts from Shakespeare, including the three lines I lifted without changing a letter. (Did you spot them?)

Read more

On January 25, people the world over will celebrate Burns Night. They will gather for Burns Suppers and honour the memory of Robert Burns — Rabbie Burns to his friends — the national poet of Scotland. The celebration will likely include a multi-course meal, the recitation of poems, and the elaborate presentation of the haggis.

If you’re not familiar with haggis, it’s a polarizing Scottish dish made of sheep’s offal (heart, liver, and lungs) cooked in the sheep’s stomach. At least, that’s the traditional version. You can get vegetarian versions these days; I had one myself while on the Isle of Skye which used mushroom and walnut in place of the offal. It was delicious.

On Burns Night, however, haggis is the centrepiece of the evening. The guests stand while the haggis is brought in. In fact, the haggis is not simply brought in, but piped in, that is, accompanied by a tune on the bagpipes. Then, a poem of Burns is recited: appropriately, Address to a Haggis.

Toasts are made, songs are sung, speeches are given. It’s good fun. If you can get yourself to a Burns Night, I highly recommend it, not least because you’ll get to hear a lot of Scots.

The Scots language is a close cousin of English. Both languages are descended from Old English, and, living side by side, the two languages have had a close and often complicated relationship over the years.

Scots is one of the three official languages of Scotland (as of last year), the other two being English and Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig).

Here’s an example of what Scots looks like:

Some hae meat an canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.

‘Some have food and cannot eat,
And some would like to eat, but don’t have it (food);
But we have food, and we can eat,
And so the Lord be thanked.’

This is the Selkirk Grace, traditionally said at Burns Suppers.

If you’ve never encountered Scots before, it can appear like English distorted in a funhouse mirror: hae instead of have, wad instead of would, sae instead of so.

It hovers just on the edge of comprehensibility. Of course, a monolingual Scots speaker encountering English would have a similar experience, although I’m not sure there are any monolingual Scots speakers left.

This close relationship between the two languages has meant that Scots has, over the years, contributed many words to the English language. These loanwords were especially common during the 18th and 19th centuries, as a wave of interest in Scotland brought the works of Scottish writers to an English audience ready to gobble up tales of this exotic and Romantic world on their doorstep.

But because the languages are so closely related, these loanwords can be hard to spot. To the untrained eye, they seem like they may well have been part of the English language since time immemorial.

Let's look at a few of these stealth Scots words in English. As we'll see, the words that made the crossing tend to cluster around certain themes: the wild, the dangerous, and the supernatural. Their stories reveal something of the history of Scotland, but they reveal far more about what Scotland represented to the 18th- and 19th-century English mind: a seductive mix of violence, superstition, and authenticity.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society. I’m Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language and its relatives.

Subscribe for a free issue every other Wednesday, or upgrade to support my mission of bringing historical linguistics out of the ivory tower and receive two extra Saturday deep-dives per month.

You’ll also get access to our book clubs (you can watch the recordings of the first series, a close reading of Beowulf), as well as the full back catalogue of paid articles.

Subscribe now

Great Scott

Let’s begin with violence.

Our first word describes a phenomenon familiar to anyone who lived on either side of the border between England and Scotland for much of its history: the raid. The Scottish Borders were a violent part of the world for many years, and the institution of raiding was a tradition of long standing. So it’s appropriate that the word raid comes into English from Scots.

As is true of most words in Scots, raid descends from an Old English word. The Old English word in question is rād, which could mean a variety of things, all to do with riding: rād is the noun form of the verb rīdan ‘to ride.’

Rād could be the activity of riding, an expedition out on horseback (especially with hostile intent!), or the place where you could ride on a horse. Beowulf aficionados will recognize rād from the famous kenning at the start of the poem: hronrād, which refers to the sea, and which Tolkien, in the notes to his translation, insists we must translate as “where the whale (hron) rides.”1 We could also, just as easily, translate it as “where the whale raids.”

But that’s not the usual translation of hronrād. More usually, hronrād is rendered as “whale-road,” as it is in Heaney. Tolkien condemns whale-road as suggesting “a sort of semi-submarine steam-engine running along submerged metal rails over the Atlantic.”

But Heaney, and others who translate hronrād as whale-road are on to something. The word road is in fact the direct descendant of Old English rād, at least as it has come down into Standard English.2

The meaning has, of course, narrowed to mean a path that was wide enough for a horse or vehicle to travel on. But the older meanings hung around for a surprisingly long time: you could still use road to mean a hostile expedition until the early 19th century.3 The use of rād/road to mean an attack is the source of the word inroad, as in the phrase to make inroads into something: an inroad was originally a military incursion.

But in Scotland and Northern England, that ā vowel had a different fate: it turned into the sound we have in day, which is often spelt ai. So raid is the direct descendant of rād in Scots. But, in Scots, the meaning of the word rād narrowed in a different way than it did down south. In England, a road was a path on which you could ride. But, in Scotland, a raid came to mean a hostile incursion.

The word raid in the sense of a military expedition was borrowed back into English from Scots in the early 19th century due largely to the influence of one man, the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832).

Scott (who wrote in English) is best known today for his historical novels, such as Ivanhoe (1819), Rob Roy (1817), and Waverley (1814). Many of Scott’s novels — Ivanhoe is a notable exception — were set in Scotland during the 17th and 18th centuries.

In fact, by the time Scott was writing in the early 19th century, the word raid was largely obsolete in Scots. Scott revived the word from old Scottish ballads, many of which were concerned with raids to and fro across the English border, to lend colour to his novels and poetry.

From Scott’s works, the word passed into the English language in general, and has been so thoroughly adopted that few people today are even aware that it has its origins in a Scots word which was once of exclusively antiquarian interest.

You’re a Grammarian, Harry

The word glamour is the Scottish cousin of a family of words which, at first glance, seem to have little to do with each other. Grammar and grimoire are two other, well-known members of this family. There are also the obscure cousins gramarye, an archaic word that means ‘occult learning,’ and glomery, the title of a post at the University of Cambridge, with somewhat unclear responsibilities.

All these words come into English as loanwords from French, or variations on French loanwords. They all derive ultimately from a single Old French word gramaire, which had two basic meanings in Old and Middle French: ‘the science of the rules of language,’ and ‘sorcery, or a book of sorcery.’4

Which of the two was the original meaning? And how do the two meanings relate?

The French word gramaire came from the Latin grammatica, which was a clipping of the phrase ars grammatica ‘the art of letters.’

Ultimately, like so much of the Romans’ high culture, it derives from the Greek: ars grammatica is a calque, or a word-for-word translation, of γραμματική τέχνη grammatikḗ tékhnē.

From this, we can tell that the original meaning was in fact the more prosaic one, the one having to do with the rules of language. This is the meaning that is preserved in the English word grammar, and, for that matter, the Modern French word grammaire.

The other side of the Old French word gramaire, the one having to do with the occult arts, split off into another word, grimoire. The word was altered under the influence of a Germanic root grīma ‘mask,’ which does not survive as a separate word in French. It did exist in Old English in exactly that form: grīma ‘mask,’5 and it survives into Modern English as grime, which, if you get enough of it on you, can act as a mask.

As for grimoire, it still exists, both in French and English, although it now refers specifically to a book which purports to teach sorcery.

The connection between the two meanings isn’t immediately obvious, but it makes more sense when we understand the broader meaning of grammar in the Middle Ages.

It was the science of the rules of language, but it meant, more specifically, the science of the rules of the Latin language, since that was the only language anyone saw fit to study in a systematic fashion at the time. In fact, until the 16th century, the English word grammar was solely used to refer to the grammar of the Latin language.6

Because only educated people knew Latin, grammar (and Old French gramaire) came to refer to the learning of educated people in general. And who knew what they were getting up to in those ivory towers of theirs: it could be (and sometimes was) things like magic and astrology. This is how words meaning grammar came to refer to magic: and this meaning is preserved in the archaic English word gramarye.

Perhaps it’s the great distance between the two meanings of the original Old French word gramaire that lead to this profusion of variants: in English, grammar was retained as a linguistic term, and grimoire specialized in magic.

And here too is the Scottish connection: in Scotland, a form glamer (spelled variously) arose, meaning ‘magic.’ The word is first attested in Scots in 1715, as far as I can tell,7 and was formed from the word grammar by a process called dissimilation, where two instances of the same sound become different.

This is especially common when you have sequences of r…r and l…l in words, which seems to be hard to pronounce, so one of the two will flip: an l to and r or an r to and l. The pronunciation — but not the spelling — of the word colonel is an example of this process.

Like raid, the Scots word glamer only came to prominence in English, albeit under the anglicized spelling glamour, through the good offices of Sir Walter Scott. He used it his poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805):

A moment then the volume spread,
And one short spell therein he read.
It had much of glamour might,
Could make a ladye seem a knight; (Last Minstrel, 3.9.9–12)

He also, helpfully, included a footnote defining glamour for the English-speaking reader:

Glamour, in the legends of Scottish superstition, means the magic power of imposing on the eve-sight of the spectators, so that the appearance of an object shall be totally different from the reality. (ibid., footnote to line 3.9.11)

Before long, it took on its present-day meaning of, as the OED puts it, “An attractive or exciting quality that makes a person or thing seem particularly appealing or desirable.”

This usage emerged as early as 1840, only a few short decades after Scott’s introduction of the word into English in the first place. The older, magical meaning, on the other hand, is a mystery to most. It persists barely into the present day by virtue of its use in certain works of fantasy fiction.

The Uncanny Valley

Many of the Scots loanwords into English have something in common with glamour: they deal with the gruesome, the eerie, or the uncanny. In fact, each of these three words is itself a loanword from Scots.8

The reason that Scots loanwords into English tend to relate to the supernatural is a function of the context through which Scots words came into English. We’ve already seen two words that made the jump from Scots to English through literature, in particular, through the historical novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott.

But Sir Walter Scott was not an isolated phenomenon. He was rather part of a wave of literature coming out of Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries, literature which embodied — and sometimes invented — the distinctively Scottish.

Scott built upon the work of authors such as James Macpherson (1736–1796), the author of the Ossian poems,9 and, the man of the hour, Robert Burns (1759–1796).10 Together, these three authors (and others) presented a romantic vision of Scotland as a land of mystery, ancient tradition, and brooding wildness.

Scotland became a convenient “other” for the English mind, a mind caught in the throes of Enlightenment rationalism. Here was a land on their doorstep which had never been a part of the Roman Empire, where perhaps some link to a deep, dark, and authentic past might still linger.

The work of Scottish Romantic writers like Macpherson, Burns, and Scott helped to solidify this image with their tales of ghosts wandering on windswept moors, witches’ sabbaths in ruined churches, and goblins with the power to bewitch the mind.

This Romantic version of Scotland was a compelling package, and it was delivered to the world in special language. In some cases, this was genuine Scots; but, more often, it was English with just enough of a Scottish flavour to make it feel authentic. But these Scottish Romantic poems and novels were a pathway for Scots vocabulary about the magical, strange, and bizarre to enter the English language.

Uncanny is one of these words. Today, uncanny is used most often to mean ‘uncomfortably strange,’ as in the famous uncanny valley effect, where something that looks almost human, but not quite, is found more repulsive than something that doesn’t look particularly human at all.

Etymologically, uncanny is the negative form of an adjective canny, which was present both in Scots and northern dialects of English, and which originally meant ‘knowing, wise.’ The adjective canny is related to the modal verb can, which now means ‘be able to,’ but which originally meant ‘be acquainted with’ or ‘know how to.’ So someone who is canny is someone who can — that is, knows — many things.

But words are slippery things, and meanings change over time. In Scots, canny acquired other meanings like ‘skilful,’ ‘pleasant,’ and ‘safe from harm.’ That covers a lot of ground, but they’re all broadly positive things. Likewise, uncanny tended to be a negative word, with such meanings recorded before 1700 as ‘malicious,’ ‘aggressive,’ and ‘untrustworthy.’11

After 1700, uncanny branches out further in Scots to meanings like ‘awkward, careless,’ ‘hard, violent,’ and ‘dangerous.’ It’s this last meaning which became the key: something uncanny was dangerous, and an uncanny person was not to be trifled with.

Often an uncanny person was dangerous precisely because they were in league with dark forces. In Scott’s novel Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer (1815), the word is used in reference to a woman who, while serving as a guide, keeps muttering strange things. This, quite naturally, frightens her followers, one of whom complains to the other:

‘Captain,’ said Dinmont, in a half whisper, ‘I wish she binna uncanny! her words dinna seem to come in God’s name, or like other folk’s. Od, they threep in our country that there are sic things.’

‘Captain,’ said Dinmont, in a half whisper, ‘I wish she weren’t uncanny! Her words don’t seem to come in God’s name, or like other folk’s. Gosh, they insist in our country that there are such things.’ (Scott, Guy Mannering)

This is roughly the meaning of uncanny that entered English, although the notion of danger isn’t always present. Sometimes that which is uncanny is simply strange. Unlike raid and glamour, there isn’t a single author or work that we can point to as the conduit by which the word came from Scots to English. But it arrived just the same.

It’s appropriate that we should be discussing uncanny, because, to the English speaker, the Scots language itself appears to occupy a linguistic uncanny valley.

As the closest living relative of the English language, Scots hovers just beyond comprehensibility for English speakers, at least in writing.12 It’s so close… but it’s just not English. But rather than triggering revulsion, Scots gave those 18th- and 19th-century English readers a frisson of excitement at being offered a glimpse at a mysterious alternative path that English might have taken.

Of course, for speakers of Scots, what the English saw as mysterious and romantic was just their language. It had words for daily realities of washing the dishes just as much for the eerie mysteries of ancient lore.

But, as the Scottish Romantics found, it’s the eerie mysteries that sell books. And, through the 18th- and 19th-century literary craze for all things Scottish, the Scots language left its mark on English, not as an accurate portrait, but as a curated collection of the strange and the uncanny.

When English speakers encounter Scots today — something which happens all too rarely outside Burns Suppers — they may find that it retains a hint of the glamour that the readers of the Romantic era found in it: a compelling combination of the strange and familiar. But if you look past the glamour, you’ll find something even more compelling: a living, breathing cousin of the English language.

Ancient and medieval texts are full of surprises.

For example, one group of people living near the Baltic apparently had access to refrigeration technology in the late 800s (according to the Old English Orosius).

Or here’s another one: there was apparently a kind of magnetic wood in India that could attract not only metals but also any sparrows which happened to fly too close. If the log was big enough, it could also pull in sheep and goats!

But weirder still is what we read in the 13th-century Icelandic saga Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, which tells us that Old Norse and Old English were, in fact, one language:

Ein var þá tunga á Englandi sem í Nóregi ok í Danmǫrku.

‘Then (c. AD 1000) the language in England was the same as in Norway and in Denmark.’

Naturally, these kinds of claims invite a healthy suspicion. Jackson Crawford and Simon Roper have a great video where they test it out, and reenact a hypothetical conversation between a speaker of Old Norse and Old English as a kind of “experimental linguistic archaeology.”

They set their conversation in the East Midlands of England around AD 1000. Jackson Crawford played a speaker of the Danish variety of Old Norse, and Simon Roper played a speaker of late Mercian Old English. These dialects will be relevant later.

Their conversation is well worth watching in its entirety (it only lasts a couple of minutes), if for no other reason than to hear what these languages sounded like pronounced in a conversational manner.

But for us the important thing is what they concluded from this experiment, namely that two people trying to make themselves understood to each other across this linguistic divide would indeed have succeeded.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society. I’m Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language and its relatives.

Subscribe for a free issue every other Wednesday, or upgrade to support my mission of bringing historical linguistics out of the ivory tower and receive two extra Saturday deep-dives per month.

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If these heroes of Germanic linguistics Youtube are correct, the two languages were therefore — to some degree, at least — mutually intelligible. And, according to the mutual intelligibility criterion, that means they are best thought of as two dialects of a single language.

And yet… it certainly doesn’t feel that way. At least in my experience, it’s not particularly easy, even for a skilled reader of Old English, to start reading Old Norse texts without some training.

I forget exactly when I started reading Old Norse, but it was after I’d been studying Old English for at least four years. By that point my ability to read, write, and speak Old English had advanced to what I’ll call, for modesty’s sake, a very functional level.

Therefore, when I picked up my first Old Norse text — Hrólfs saga kraka (the Saga of Hrólf Kraki) — I expected to find it pretty easy, buoyed as I was by the reputation of the two languages as mutually intelligible.

What I found, however, was that I could understand only about 80% of the words I encountered at first glance. This might seem like a lot. But, well, it isn’t. There’s no way you can follow a story with only 80% comprehension. Even though my Old English was surely helping me, it wasn’t helping me enough to read the text with ease.

So I set myself to studying Old Norse, which has been a delightful experience.

But I was troubled: why was Old Norse so hard for me, a proficient speaker of Old English, to understand? Was I the problem? Or were the two languages really as mutually intelligible as advertised?

To figure out the answer, I did what I usually do: read a stack of books. And what I found in those books is that Simon and Jackson were right. It’s likely that Old English and Old Norse were indeed mutually intelligible, but probably only in certain contexts.

To understand why this was the case — and why my Old English ability didn’t translate into Old Norse — we need to become familiar with the history of Old Norse and Old English, the circumstances which brought Old Norse to England, and the linguistic and psychological processes by which we understand other accents in our native language.

This quest will take us through the domains of literature, linguistics, and the study of place names (of all things). Let’s begin.

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It’s a new year and, as usual, people have all sorts of weird resolutions.

Some have resolved to run a marathon in 2026. Others are finally going to finish that novel they’ve been working on.1 Still others are going to slow down and learn to appreciate the beauty in the small moments of life, like the first ray of sunshine cast through their bedroom window on a lazy Saturday morning.

Like I said, people are weird.

But you had to come up with something even weirder, didn’t you? You want to learn a language. Worse, you have this crazy idea that it might be fun to learn a language that no one even speaks anymore.

No, no, you protest. It’s not you. It’s a friend. Sure, a “friend.” Whatever you say. Send them this article then, because they’re about to go on the linguistic equivalent of the Oregon Trail.

My job is prevent you — I mean, your friend — from dying of dysentery along the way

First, know this: Language learning is hard, whether the language is living or dead. Most people who try to learn living languages fail, for all sorts of reasons.

With dead languages, the odds of success are even slimmer. Unless you hang around with a very particular crowd, you’re unlikely to find conversation partners. And, unless you have a time machine, you can forget about travelling for immersion.

I don’t want to scare you. You can do it, especially if you have the right resources. But, just as important as your learning materials is your attitude. Any language — especially a dead language — is going to require years (plural) of sustained effort before you get to the point where you are able to read books in the language, or pass for a Roman senator, or whatever else you want to do.

And it is worth it. Being able to communicate with those who have been dead for centuries or even millennia, and to begin to understand their lives and world in their own terms, is a joy like few others.

But let me suggest to you that not every dead language2 is an equally good place for you to begin. Take it from me: I’ve studied seven dead languages now, each of which I’ve studied for at least a year. In the case of two of them (Latin and Old English), I’ve also reached a level where I can teach them professionally.

This tier list is a record of my experience in studying each of the seven languages, a record of my joys and sorrows as I’ve persevered through all manner of adversities in trying to, for lack of a better phrase, get good.

In coming up with the tier placements, I considered both the intrinsic ease of learning the language (assuming you’re starting from an English-speaking background), as well as the quality and quantity of resources available to learners. And, of course, all this is somewhat subjective.

My ratings aren’t a statement on the value of the languages. Each of these languages is a precious gift, and each is worth every minute you might spend on it!

Now for the list, in order from easiest to hardest.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society. I’m Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language and its relatives.

Subscribe for a free issue every other Wednesday, or upgrade to support my mission of bringing historical linguistics out of the ivory tower and receive two extra Saturday deep-dives per month.

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1. Latin

Latin is a language, as dead as dead can be,
It killed the ancient Romans, and now it’s killing me.
-Anonymous

Latin is practically synonymous with “dead language.” It’s without a doubt the most popular ancient or medieval language to learn, at least in the English-speaking world.

It also has a bit of a reputation as a hard subject. Which is why it may surprise you that I’ve listed it here as the easiest dead language to get started with. Part of the reason for this is that Latin has lots and lots of good resources (which we’ll discuss in short order). But the sadder part is that, even though Latin can be a challenging language to learn, the others… are worse.

The biggest reason for Latin’s fearsome reputation is that it’s a heavily inflected language, meaning that words appear in lots and lots of different forms.

Nouns have different forms depending on their function in the sentence: one form for the subject of the sentence (the dog chases the cat), one form for the direct object (the cat chases the dog), one form for possessors (the bone of the dog), and so on. These different forms are called the different cases of the noun, and, if you’ve never studied a language which uses cases, it takes some adjustment.

Fortunately, however, because Latin is the most popular of all of the dead languages, it’s also blessed with the most and best resources available for any of them. This is why I recommend Latin as a good first dead language.

If you’re studying as an autodidact, it’s eminently possible to make good progress with Latin. Start with Hans Ørberg’s brilliant reader Lingua Latina per se Illustrata (LLPSI). More specifically, since LLPSI is a series, start with the first instalment: Familia Romana.

One day I’ll write up a long explanation of why this book is so great. But here’s the short version: it teaches you Latin by telling a story, gradually introducing you to the vocabulary and grammar of the language as you progress through the book’s 35 chapters.

The entire book is also written in Latin, including all the grammatical explanations. But that’s not really why the book works, at least in my opinion. The real reason the book works is that you’re led gradually through the language while your mind is otherwise occupied with the story of the rich, and not altogether sympathetic, Roman aristocrat Iulius and the misadventures of the members of his household.

Most students find that Familia Romana is not itself enough to get them to authentic literature on its own, but, luckily for those students, there are many talented authors and broadcasters (sounds more dignified than Youtubers) out there creating material for Latin learners, including Luke Ranieri, Carla Hurt, Satura Lanx, and the good people at Latinitas Animi Causa.

Rating: S-Tier / Easy

2. Old English

It might surprise you to see Old English ranked as slightly harder to learn than Latin. That seems a bit weird: sure, Latin has given English a lot of vocabulary, but it’s still from a different family altogether.

Old English, on the other hand, is literally an earlier form of Modern English (well, mostly). How could it be harder to learn than Latin?

Well, Old English is deceptive. It looks easy at first, with all the familiar words: hand means ‘hand,’ hūs means ‘house,’ bera means ‘bear.’ This certainly gives a speaker of (Modern) English a leg up. Old English does require you to learn some grammatical forms — cases, verb conjugations, even grammatical gender — but far fewer than Latin. And it’s true: you only have to learn a few forms for each word.

But Old English grammatical endings are also trickier to learn than Latin equivalents, because the same endings do multiple jobs,3 making it harder to create mapping between form and meaning.

For example, -e is the dative singular ending for some nouns, the nominative singular for others, and for still others it’s the accusative singular ending. Couple that with lots of stem changes (so changing a word is also a matter of changing the internal vowel, not just adding an ending), and endings which appear or disappear depending on the shape of the root, and Old English grammar is actually in many ways harder than Latin!

But it’s definitely doable. There are pretty good resources out there. Shameless self-promotion, I wrote one of them: a progressive Old English reader called Ōsweald Bera: An Introduction to Old English. It aims to provide Old English students with a similar experience to what Lingua Latina per se Illustrata provides to students of Latin,4 teaching the language by telling a delightful (my editor asked me to say delightful) story about the misadventures of a talking bear in Anglo-Saxon England.

I actually wrote a whole post in late 2024 describing a curriculum for learning Old English, so rather than blather on here about it, I’ll send you over there.

Rating: S-Tier / Easy

3. Sanskrit

This ranking might also be controversial. Sanskrit seems like it’ll be very difficult. It’s got a different alphabet and the words are mostly unfamiliar unless you already know an Indian language (although if you do yoga, you get some words for free!). There are endings upon endings to learn, and the grammar is much more elaborate than Old English, or even Latin.

But, despite all this, Sanskrit is, in my opinion, not nearly as scary as advertised. Yes, it has a lot of forms to learn, but the forms are much more straightforward and logical than even the forms of Latin.

Because there are more forms to learn, by and large, there’s a more equitable division of labour among them: each grammatical form does one thing and one thing only. As a result, learning endings feels more like learning vocabulary than learning grammar.

Sanskrit tends to be written in the Devanagari script, which is also used today for Hindi. This is mostly a matter of convention: historically, Sanskrit has been written in a variety of scripts. But you’ll need to learn Devanagari in order to read editions of Sanskrit texts published today.

Devanagari does present a challenge, but it’s a finite one. There are lots of symbols to keep track of, but many of them are very rare. Once you’ve learned the common symbols, you can put off learning the rarer symbols for when you encounter them in words. So the writing system is more of an initial speed bump than a serious impediment.

Sanskrit also has the enormous advantage of having one of the best introductory readers available for any language, and it’s completely free. The amazing (and, as far as I know, anonymous) team behind the Amarahasa project have written a sequence of easy Sanskrit stories, similar to Familia Romana or Ōsweald Bera, although unlike these books, Amarahasa stories are primarily adaptations of popular Sanskrit texts, such as the Ramanaya, Bhagavad Gita, and Buddhacarita (‘Acts of the Buddha’), told and retold at various levels of difficulty.

I can’t recommend Amarahasa enough. It, even more than Familia Romana, was one of the inspirations for Ōsweald Bera. Couple that with grammar guides either from Learn Sanskrit or the University of British Columbia Sanskrit programme and you’ll be able to enter into the vast and beautiful world of Sanskrit literature: a world that few in the English-speaking world know very much about.

Rating: A-Tier / Fine

4. Old Norse

Old Norse is closely related to Old English: both are medieval Germanic languages, and, as such, the two have a lot in common, not just grammatically but also culturally. So everything I’ve said about the intrinsic difficulty of Old English applies to Old Norse as well.

The big difference between the two of them is that, with Old Norse, everything is just a little bit more challenging. The words are less recognizable, there are more grammatical forms to learn, and there are more crazy stem changes to keep track of. It feels like learning Old English on hard mode.

But the rewards are, if anything, greater. The subject matter of Old Norse prose is — for most modern readers — more intrinsically interesting than the things the Anglo-Saxons wrote about. Old English prose tends to deal in saints’ lives and homilies. These are interesting to some, but to most they can be a bit of an acquired taste.

Old Norse prose, on the other hand, has the sagas, accounts of the doings of legendary heroes and villains, multigenerational feuds between Icelandic chieftains, and fights with supernatural monsters. Most readers don’t need to train their taste to like this material.

The great difficulty with Old Norse is the resources, or rather, the lack thereof. I don’t mean to suggest that there are no good resources. In fact, there are many good explanations of Old Norse grammar around, such as from the UT Austin’s Linguistics Research Centre, P. S. Langeslag’s guide to Old Norse grammar, and Jackson Crawford’s Old Norse video course.

But there is, to date, no easy reader of Old Norse — at least, not to my knowledge. The best place, therefore, to start is with Jesse Byock’s student editions of sagas: Þorsteins þáttr stangarhǫggs and Vápnfirðinga saga. These are great: they gloss all words, give you grammatical help, and include essays explaining cultural context. Everything you’d want in an intermediate reader.

The problem is that you need to start with the intermediate reader, and it can be painful to do so without a large enough vocabulary and basic model of the grammar already in your mind. Reading these texts as a beginner is a halting experience, as you have to look up almost every word and new grammatical form.

It is possible to make progress this way (I know from experience) but I don’t recommend it, not unless you’ve already studied another ancient language and know how the process goes under more ideal circumstances. Also, Old English helps so much with Old Norse — and is so much easier to learn — that I would recommend prospective students of Old Norse start there, and gain at least an intermediate level in Old English before proceeding to Old Norse.

Rating: A-Tier / Fine

5. Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is probably the second-most popular ancient language to study, and it’s not hard to understand why. It’s the original language of three of the most important texts (or collections of texts) in the history of the Western world: Homer, Plato, and the New Testament. And that is just scratching the surface.

Unfortunately, all of that richness is locked behind a challenging grammar. In fact, I believe that Ancient Greek has the hardest grammar to master of any Indo-European language that I have studied.5 The weird thing is that the grammatical system is basically the same as that of Sanskrit. But, in my experience at least, it feels a lot less intuitive.

One example of the trickiness of Ancient Greek is that there is (in Attic, at least, which is the dialect you learn from textbooks and classes) a system of vowel contractions, where two vowels appearing side by side change into another vowel by a complex series of rules.

For example, ε + ο = ου (or, in Roman letters, e + o = ū). This sort of thing happens in Sanskrit as well, but the combinations there make a lot more sense, to me at least. You more than occasionally have to mentally undo these contractions in order to know how to use a word.

I don’t mean to use this section to complain about Ancient Greek. It’s been around a lot longer than I have, and it’s earned the right to have whatever grammar it wants.

You may even find Ancient Greek grammar relatively manageable. But the difficulty of Ancient Greek isn’t just in its grammar: it’s in the combination of the grammar with the resources available for learners. Unlike Old Norse, there are actually quite a few easy readers out there for Ancient Greek, for example, Athenaze, Logos, and Thrasymachus.

These readers are intended to be easy. In practice, however, they are fairly hard. At least, they’re much harder than Familia Romana is for most Latin learners (and even that is no walk in the park).

Even though each of them is a great resource, and their authors deserve a lot of praise for making Greek as accessible as they have, no reader on the market truly makes things easy for beginners. A lot of effort is still required, and the pathway up the mountain is steep and occasionally rocky.

Greek requires some fortitude, so I would advise interested students to consider trying Latin first, and getting used to studying an ancient language in a more forgiving environment before tackling Ancient Greek.

Now we come to the end of the Indo-European languages on this list. The final two languages are entirely unrelated to any of the previous languages (as far as we know…). They both work very differently from the languages we’ve talked about so far, grammatically speaking, at least. This makes them harder but all the more rewarding. But proceed with caution if you’re a beginner to language learning.

Rating: B-Tier / Moderate

6. Biblical Hebrew

It’s not really correct to call Biblical Hebrew a dead language, but I hope you’ll forgive my speaking loosely.

I won’t sugar-coat it: Biblical Hebrew is a very difficult language. As a Semitic language, the way its grammar works is very unlike the Indo-European languages we have been discussing so far.

Words do change to express different grammatical categories, but these categories are marked by changes within the words rather than (or in addition to) adding different endings.

This situation is similar to what happens with Old English and Old Norse, where grammatical information is frequently expressed by changing the vowel. Even Modern English does this to a certain extent: compare the present tense sing with the past tense sang.

Biblical Hebrew elevates these internal vowel changes to an art form: basically every verb works this way in Hebrew (as do many nouns), which means that learning a word is not just a matter of learning a word. You also need to learn the various patterns of vowel changes that the word is subject to.

This makes things, in a word, hard. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that you’ll have to learn a new writing system, which is not the end of the world, but it’s written from right to left, which takes some getting used to for your brain (or, at least, my brain felt that way).

Making your life as a student even more difficult is the fact that there are few resources available for Biblical Hebrew which have been made using modern paedagogical methods. One resource that is informed by second language acquisition research, and which many students report benefiting from, is the Youtube channel Aleph with Beth,6 which slowly and gradually introduces Biblical Hebrew grammar through comprehensible input-style videos.

The best textbook out there is Lily Kahn’s The Routledge Introductory Course in Biblical Hebrew. It deals with Biblical Hebrew grammar in a comprehensive way, and even includes short graded reader-style compositions to help ease the reading burden. But this is still very much a grammar reference book, and it gets you into lots of complicated details and technical terminology right away.

What you might consider doing is learning Modern Hebrew first: it has the benefit of being a spoken language, and — while people debate just how close Modern Hebrew is to Biblical Hebrew, sometimes quite angrily — the two are certainly close enough for the one to benefit the other.

Rating: C-Tier / Hard

7. Classical Chinese

If you’re not familiar with Classical (or Literary) Chinese, it’s the form of Chinese which has served as a literary language for China and much of East Asia for over two millennia, similar to the position which Latin held in Europe until fairly recently. In fact, it’s more of a stretch to call Classical Chinese a “dead language” than the prior cases, since Classical Chinese phrases and idioms are commonly found as part of the formal register of modern written Chinese.

Classical Chinese is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the language in which the Chinese classics are written, including the Analects of Confucius, the Tao Te Ching of Laozi/Lao-tzu, and The Art of War of Sunzi/Sun-tzu, to mention the three most famous texts. It’s also the language of the great poetry of Li Bai and Du Fu.

In fact, there is so much written in Classical Chinese that to learn it is to open a door to a library which you will never exhaust in a lifetime of reading. As you may be able to glean from this description, Classical Chinese is a great love of mine, even though I’m far from an expert in it, despite a long period of study.

Like Biblical Hebrew, the language is extremely interesting grammatically for someone more used to Indo-European languages. Words do not change in any way to express any grammatical category whatsoever:7 composing sentences is strictly a matter of putting one word after another.8

By characters, I mean the characters of the Chinese writing system: 山有人, etc.9 And this brings us to another point. In its origin, Classical Chinese is the written form of Old Chinese, which was the spoken language of the central plains of China in the 1st millennium BC. The reconstruction of this spoken language is extremely challenging, due to the fact that the writing system, Chinese characters, represents sound only indirectly if at all.

So the convention is to recite Classical Chinese by saying the characters in their modern Mandarin pronunciation. So, for example, even though the character 山 ‘mountain’ is reconstructed in Old Chinese as *s-ŋrar (don’t try to pronounce it; you might summon an elder god by accident),10 most people will pronounce 山 in Classical Chinese texts the way it’s pronounced in a modern language, such as Mandarin shān.

Today, the language chosen to pronounce the characters in is Mandarin, but, in theory, you could pronounce Classical Chinese in Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, or any other language which uses (or has used) Chinese characters.

But, unfortunately, all modern languages have merged a lot of the sounds that Old Chinese would have kept separate, so, as a result, you end up not being able to distinguish between different characters. The result is poems such as Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den, in which every character is pronounced in Mandarin as shi (or occasionally si or she).11

This means that there isn’t really (to my knowledge) a tradition of speaking Classical Chinese like there is for Latin or Ancient Greek. This is a shame because the ability to speak ancient languages, and listen to them spoken, helps immensely with one’s ability to read and write them.

All of this — not to mention the fact that you have to learn Chinese characters, and none of the words have any relationship to anything you already know12 — is why Classical Chinese is difficult for English speakers.

To top it off, there are comparatively few resources available in English. But, nevertheless, few does not mean none: Bryan Van Norden has written an excellent beginner textbook Classical Chinese for Everyone. This explains much of the grammar of Classical Chinese and gives you some short passages to read. But you will not be an independent reader by the end of it. Instead, you might be able to progress to other introductory textbooks such as Rouzer or Fuller. If you’re interested in poetry, Archie Barnes’ textbook Chinese through Poetry (the official website is down, but it’s easily findable) is also a good choice.

Honestly, you’ll probably need to use all of them.

For grammar reference, the students of the same Archie Barnes have compiled their notes into Du’s Guide to Classical Chinese Grammar, which is a good concise reference. Edwin Pulleyblank’s Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar is less user-friendly, but more complete.

In any case, you’re not going to have an easy time. My advice would be to learn Modern Mandarin first, at least to an intermediate level, before tackling Classical Chinese. This will lighten the burden of learning the characters, and you’ll be able to access some of the resources out there written in Modern Chinese.

Rating: D-Tier / Insane

Conclusion

I hope I haven’t scared you off learning whatever language has piqued your interest! The truth is: if you want to make learning ancient languages part of your life, there’s never been a better time to do it.

Each one of the seven languages I mentioned has more, and better, resources coming out to help learners year after year. So even if you’re looking at the hardest of the hard languages, you can succeed. Just remember the principles of language learning, gird yourself appropriately, and go forth!

Image credits for tier list: Latin: The Capitoline Wolf (CC0, Wilfredor), Old English: Replica of the Sutton Hoo Helmet (CC BY-SA 3.0, Ziko-C), Sanskrit: Scene from the Ramayana, Old Norse: Mjǫlnir (CC BY 4.0, Ola Myrin, Statens historiska museum/SHM - The Viking World), Ancient Greek: Parthenon (CC BY 2.0, Steve Swayne), Biblical Hebrew: Caves at Qumran (CC BY-SA 2.5, Tamarah), Classical Chinese: Shi Jing.

Most people who set out to learn a new language fail.

It starts at school: in what other subject do we accept that the regular outcome of several years of study, under the guidance of professional teachers, is indistinguishable from not having studied at all?

There’s a reason that we’ve all heard (or said) something like this: “I took Spanish all through high school and all I can do is ask where the bathroom is”.

If that’s been your experience learning languages, you’re not alone. Learning languages is something we are really bad at, at least in the English-speaking world.

Once you’re out of school, the experience is no better. If you’re like a typical novice language learner, you’ve probably experienced the following sequence of events: you decide to learn a language, so you buy a book, register for a class, or download an app (you know the one I mean).

At first, you feel a sense of accomplishment: the first few words, maybe a phrase or two, emerge! You’re going around asking everyone where the bathroom is.

Over the next weeks and months, you spend lots of time, effort, and maybe also money, on these things. You’re getting the answers right in your book, you pass your class, and you’ve got a hundred-day streak on your app.

Then you meet a native speaker and try out your skills with a little conversation. And you soon realize that all the stuff you learned in class has vanished into thin air just when you needed it the most. Those verb conjugations you aced on the test are now nowhere to be found. And, even worse, you can’t understand half of what your new friend is saying: they just speak so fast!

It’s total conversational failure. You both switch to English after 90 seconds of pain.

What happened? You had learned everything about the language so well, and none of it was of any use to you when actually trying to use the language.

If you’re like most learners, you’ll conclude that it’s a hobby for other people, people who have talent at languages. You decide to take up an easier hobby, like sword eating or quantum physics.

But it doesn’t have to be this way!

The reason most language learners do so poorly is not because they are lazy, stupid, or because they lack the “talent” for language learning. It’s because we, as a society, have an inaccurate idea about what it means to actually learn a language. And this follows from an inaccurate idea about what language is.

Only when we truly understand what language is can we understand how not to fail at learning languages. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Why should you listen to what I have to say about this? For starters, I’m a linguist, which helps with the “what is language” part of the story.

Applying that understanding to the practice of language learning, on the other hand, requires a different skill set, so here are my more practical bona fides: I’ve been learning languages (and reflecting on the process) for over 20 years,1 and I’ve reached a high enough level in two of them (Latin and Old English) to teach them professionally. I’ve even written the first graded reader for students of Old English.

What I write here is informed by this experience, but I’ve only got part of the story. What has worked for me (or for some of my students) may not translate perfectly to your life. So, rather than give you an exact prescription for what to do, I will give you three principles that you can apply in a way that suits your own situation and interests.

Much of this article is based on linguistics and second language acquisition research, but I’m going to keep this explanation, as much as possible, free of jargon and excessively cautious academic language. There are citations in the further reading section for those who want to learn more. But, for the rest of you, I’m going to treat this like an emergency intervention, and get straight to the point.2

Language learning is in crisis. But we have a way out. And it all begins with understanding what a language actually is.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society. I’m Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language and its relatives.

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What is a language?

Learning a language is unlike other kinds of learning.3 This is because knowing a language is not like knowing other things.

As a result, the tools and strategies you have used to learn other things (like brute force repetition of facts) may not apply, and the best way to learn a language will look quite unlike the best way to learn anything else.

To understand why this is, we first need to understand what language actually is — or, well, let’s start with what it is not.

A language is not primarily a collection of facts you have to memorize, nor is it primarily a skill you can improve at with practice. A language is both of these things too, but only in a secondary way.

What a language is, at root, is an abstract and unconscious kind of knowledge. You can compare it to the tacit knowledge about the world that optical illusions take advantage of.

For example, in the Kanisza triangle illusion, we see a triangle in the centre of the image, even though there is, strictly speaking, no such triangle. There are only disconnected shapes which suggest the existence of a triangle:

This “contour completion” illusion rests on tacit knowledge that we have about how shapes tend to work in the real world. In the explanation given by the excellent website The Illusions Index:

It is generally accepted that contour completion is an example of the perceptual system rejecting ‘coincidence’, in the sense that a symmetrical arrangement of fragments and line elements as seen in the Kanizsa triangle is unlikely in the natural environment. A similar retinal stimulation is more often caused by one continuous surface occluding another, and so this is how the Kanizsa stimulus is represented by our perceptual system (Rock and Anson 1979).4

Knowledge of language, like knowledge of how shapes work, also leads to illusions. In fact, you could think of language as nothing but an illusion, the illusion that particular sequences of sound waves, or particular configurations of ink on a page,5 have meaning.

The goal in learning a language is to acquire so much of this tacit knowledge that the illusion becomes so strong that you can’t encounter these sounds or these symbols without associating them with a meaning. We call these sounds and symbols “words,” “phrases,” and “sentences.” And we give the name “understanding” to the illusion of meaning that results when we encounter them.

For certain sequences of sounds or symbols, which we call the words of our native language, the illusion has taken hold of us so strongly that we can’t help but bring their meanings to mind, even when we’d very much rather not, as happens in the case of schoolyard taunts and spoilers for television series alike.

We say, “I wish I could un-hear that!”, because we can’t imagine the idea that we could hear the words of our language and not have their meanings called to mind.

To have this illusion take hold of you, is, at its root, what it means to learn a language.

Normally we talk about this in the opposite way. We tend to say that you acquire the knowledge of a language. But turning things around and making the language the subject is an attempt to bring to the fore a distinction between the process of acquiring languages and the process of acquiring other kinds of knowledge.

Another important difference is that knowledge of language — unlike knowledge of world capitals or Roman emperors — is unconscious. Speakers of a language have access to mysterious feelings about what counts as a valid sentence in a language and what does not, but they don’t seem to know why some things work and other things don’t.

For example, if you didn’t hear what someone made for dinner, you can ask What did he make? But if you hear that he made ??? and eggs, you cannot ask 🚫What did he make and eggs?

Why not? It’s perfectly clear what is being asked here. Syntacticians have an answer, but if you ask a native English speaker who doesn’t happen to be a syntactician, he or she will just shrug and say, “It just doesn’t sound right.”

This spooky intuition that “it just doesn’t sound right” is the voice of the speaker’s unconscious knowledge of a language. It is the sound of the illusion breaking down.

All of this is what we’re trying to acquire when we learn a language. We can call this knowledge the mental representation of the language.

Yes, we also want the ability to speak in an unhalting manner. We want to be able to express ourselves as clearly as we do in our first language. We want to be able to pronounce words in ways that make us sound like we belong to the community of speakers of that language.

But all of this depends on the prior existence of a mental representation of the language.

I bring this up because it’s very common for language learners to bewail their lack of ability to produce the language, at least, compared to what they can understand. This is utterly normal. Productive ability always, always, always lags behind the ability to comprehend.

This asymmetry is there even in our first language: I am a native speaker of English, and as a result, I can read Moby Dick. But I doubt I could write anything as good as it.

So, as you review the strategies and tactics below, keep this in mind: what we are aiming for is the acquisition of the mental representation of the language. We want the illusion to take us.

The other parts of a satisfying relationship with a new language — the speaking, the writing — follow in the wake of comprehension.6

So how do you acquire a mental representation of a language, given that it’s tacit and abstract? It’s not like learning explicit facts.

This is where most of the strategies used by novice learners fail. They treat languages as sets of rules that you have to memorize consciously: this is an -ar verb, so it conjugates like this; this is a feminine noun, so it makes the adjective agree like this.

There’s lots of theoretical and experimental work out there examining this question. I’ll leave you some recommendations in the reading list below. In many ways, the exact process is still a mystery even to the scientists who research it. But we certainly know, in broad terms at least, how it works.

Here’s how it works.

More is more

If I could boil down all the advice I can give you into a single sentence, it would be this:

The core activity that builds up your mental representation of the language is decoding messages in the language.

Decoding messages means listening to the language, or reading it, in order to understand the message that is being communicated. Lots of things satisfy this criterion: reading books, watching TV and movies, listening to podcasts, even reading road signs all count. Conversation counts too, at least the portion of the conversation where you’re listening to the other person.

But just as many things count as decoding languages, many things do not. And, unfortunately, most of the things that novice language learners spend their time doing fall into this category of “not decoding messages.” So they spend lots of time doing what they think is learning the language, but don’t see corresponding results.

For example, the following activities involve decoding messages only minimally: reading textbooks, doing grammar exercises, studying flash cards, keeping up your app streak, and attending typical grammar-oriented language classes.

These things aren’t useless activities for the language learner, but they are mostly useless for building up your mental representation of the language. (I’ll get to what these things are useful for in a bit.)

And, what’s worse, these activities tend to be tiring, effortful and, in some cases, unpleasant.

To spend hours upon hours doing something hard without very much to show for it is a terribly dispiriting thing. It’s no surprise, then, that so many language learners give up so quickly, if their language learning diet consists mostly of classes, textbooks, and flashcard apps.

The tragedy of it all is that these are precisely the things novice language learners first attempt. But, after a few months of frustration, so many language learners conclude that it’s a hobby for other people, people who have talent at languages. But they’re wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Language learning is for everyone.

Now we come to our first practical principle of language learning: the time-on-task principle. This refers to the entirely unshocking reality that, the more time you spend doing the core activity of learning a language, the quicker you’ll make progress.

This is the linguistic equivalent of “exercise more if you want to get healthier.” Everyone knows it: the problem isn’t in the knowing, but in the doing.

The major obstacle here isn’t usually laziness or a lack of discipline. The obstacle is that people often spend lots of time doing things that don’t work. As I’ve alluded to already, not every activity branded as “language learning” actually helps you build a mental representation.

We can call time spent on the right things the number of contact hours you have with the language.

Properly understood, language learning doesn’t even require you to reshape your life around it (very much). The time-on-task principle means that the more time you spend, the better off you’ll be, as long as you’re spending your time on the right things.

Change your life in 10 minutes a day, give or take

How much time do you need to spend to make progress? That seems to depend on a few different things, some having to do with the activities you’re doing and others having to do with your level in the language.

First, not all activities are equally beneficial for building your mental representation of the language.

An hour spent reading a book or listening to a podcast, for instance, is almost entirely devoted to decoding messages in the language. But an hour spent on a popular language learning app (which will remain nameless) will be more of a mixed bag. That hour may involve some time spent decoding messages in the language, but these messages will tend to be isolated sentences without context. “The cat is playing the piano.” This means that you’re reorienting yourself to a new situation every few seconds, which slows you down.

Language learning apps typically also have you spend time on other activities beyond pure reading or listening. For example, it may try to focus you on how a particular grammatical construction is used, or treat you to flash card-like activities where you match vocabulary words in your target language with words in your native language.

These sorts of activities have their place, as we’ll discuss shortly, but they are not a replacement for the core activity of language learning, which is decoding messages. So, instead of counting 100% of your time spent on the app as contact hours with the language, you might only count, say, 50%. So it will take you 10 hours of time spent in the app to get 5 hours of contact time.

All that is fine if you have vast expanses of free time on your schedule. But I somehow suspect you don’t.

Some activities are even worse: I’ve been in language classes where only about 5% of the time was spent trying to understand messages in the target language. Ten hours of a class like that would only amount to half an hour of contact!

But let’s assume that you’re making the best use of your time, and focusing on the most beneficial activities, so that every hour you spend learning the language is a full contact hour. How much time should you expect to spend in order to make progress?

Here’s my experience: I find that I can make steady, noticeable progress on a language with as little as five contact hours a month, as long as it’s a language in which I’m at more or less a beginner level.

(You may find you take more or less time than me: on the one hand, I am more or less a professional language learner. Then again, I am probably still doing some things suboptimally.)

To save you having to get out your calculators, that equates to ten minutes a day reading or listening to a language, itself a pretty pleasant activity. And, for that investment, your life changes and you start on the road to bilingualism (and beyond).

When I get beyond the beginner level in a language, I find that spending merely five hours a month no longer suffices to keep up the pace of progress. Instead, I seem to stay at roughly the same place in these languages which I know better. For them, I find I need around ten hours a month for the progress to continue at the same pace. If, by some miracle, I manage to spend 20 contact hours with a language in a month, I see dramatic improvements in my level, provided it’s not a language where I already have a very high level.

I’d recommend tracking the time you spend learning a language for a few months. Not only is it motivating to see the number go up (and to know it corresponds to real increases in your knowledge of the language), but it’s easy to deceive yourself about how much time you’re actually spending on things.

It’s easy to get discouraged about your lack of progress, saying something like “I’ve been learning Spanish for three months.” But if it’s only five contact hours spread out over those three months, and those hours were spent doing the wrong things, lack of progress is exactly what you should expect.

As you can see from my example, the amount of time needed to make progress seems to increase as you get better in the language. But it also becomes easier to spend that time as you improve: you can read (or listen to) more things — and better things — as your level in the language increases, and you gradually make the transition from a learner of the language into a speaker.

Now it’s time to talk about exactly what goes on during these contact hours, which brings us to the next principle: the principle of quality.

The most important thing is to ______.

Long-time readers will know that both quantity and quality are words whose existence in the English language we owe ultimately to Cicero. They are ultimately Latinizations of Greek words meaning roughly, ‘how much-ness’ (< quantum ‘how much; how great’) and ‘what kind-ness’ (< qualis ‘what kind’).

In our quest to understand how best to study a language, we began with the “how much” question, which we answered with “as much as possible.” We can now proceed to the “what kind” question, to which we’ve outlined a solution already: your study of a language should centre on the decoding of messages in the language, that is, listening to or reading content written (or spoken) in the language.

Because it gets awkward saying “listening to and reading” over and over again, let’s use what some of you may consider to be a barbarous word: consuming. And, instead of saying “content written (or spoken) in the language,” let’s say input.

So your task is to consume input. But the quality question still haunts us: what kind of input?

Ideally, you want it to be interesting. But intrinsic interest isn’t the only factor to consider. I don’t, for example, recommend a novice French learner begin with Les Misérables, nor would I counsel a Mandarin neophyte to pick up Dream of the Red Chamber.7

Anyone who has watched language learning videos on YouTube is probably shouting at the screen right now, waiting for me to say the magic phrase: comprehensible input. There, I’ve said it: the input you consume for the purposes of building your mental representation of the language should be comprehensible.

This may sound obvious. If what’s in front of you is functionally gibberish, how could you learn it? Of course the input has to be comprehensible! But it’s actually a bit subtler than that. If what’s in front of you is completely comprehensible, as if it were written in your first language, there’s probably not much left for you to learn from it.

Instead, what comprehensible input means in practice is that you’re looking for content where you’re in a Goldilocks-style sweet spot. Ideally, you’ll be able to understand the message being conveyed without understanding every word and bit of grammar in that message. As you consume this input, your mind get to work behind the scenes, building up a mental representation of the language, which includes not only the meanings of individual words, but also the more abstract and mysterious features of grammar.8

This process of working out what new forms must mean on the basis of context is more or less how your vocabulary grows in your native language: for example, when you see an unfamiliar word within a passage you otherwise understand well, you can usually triangulate the meaning of the new word using clues from the context you find it in.9

But this is only possible given an adequate understanding of the context. If the ratio of unknown-to-known items in a passage drops below a certain threshold, it’s no longer possible for you to work things out. The drop-off is quite sudden, and seems to occur somewhere around the 90% comprehension level. In other words, understanding ninety words in a hundred-word passage is insufficient to let you guess what the remaining ten words mean.

You can get an idea for what various levels of comprehension feel like by manipulating passages of English. Blanking out one word of a hundred-word passage shows you what 99% comprehension feels like. Blanking out ten gives you the feeling of 90% comprehension.

So let’s do an experiment to build up your intuitions about comprehensibility. Here are four passages of English, with different numbers of words removed, not at random, but focusing on the least common words. This matches the experience of second-language learners, who typically learn words in rough order of frequency. At what point do you stop being able to guess what the missing words might be in each passage?

99% comprehension

Countless writers have dwelt upon the taking of human life; some of them were rather commercial gentlemen who always gave an ear to the demands of their public, and their ______ were written for the money that they would put in their pockets; but others, and by long odds the greatest, were fascinated by their subjects. Both Stevenson and Henley were powerfully drawn by deeds of blood. Did you know they planned a great book which was to contain a complete account of the world’s most remarkable homicides? I’m sorry they never carried the thing out; for I cannot conceive of two minds more fitted to the task.10

95% comprehension

“Mrs. Dwyer is _________ paid to clean only the hall and lower stairway,” replied Ashton-Kirk, composedly. “And that she sticks closely to that arrangement is shown by the _________ of this upper flight. The dust upon the step is rather _____. If you will notice,” and he indicated a place on the second step, “here is a spot where a _____, flat object rested. That this object was a silk hat is positive. You can see the sharp impress of the nap in the dust; here is the ____ in the exact center of the crown as seen in silk hats only. And men who wear silk hats are usually well-dressed men.”

90% comprehension

“But there will be a _____,” said his friend. “And that may be what we need just now. Perhaps a few hours will mean _______. You can never tell. The best that we could get by __________ matters to Sime would be a ________ ______________ of Spatola, or the _______. And we can get that from him at any time. So you see, we lose nothing by waiting.”

“I guess that’s so,” Pendleton ____________, and again the car started forward. At the huge entrance to a ________ station they drew up once more.

Within, Ashton-Kirk ________ for the _______ _________ Agent and was directed to the ninth floor.

75% comprehension

“You say that the _______ of the ____ shows the person who ____ the ____ to have been ____________ with the place. I think you must be ____ here. Spatola is __________ with the place; he was here at the time. This is ______ by the ______ of the __________ ________ which followed the _______ of the ____.”

“It was not a ________ that made the _____,” said Ashton-Kirk. “Give me a ______ and I think I can _______ you of that.”

The ___ in the ____ was _______; the ____________ _______ at the ____ of the ______ leading to the ______ ____.

If you’re like most people, your ability to understand what is going on in the 90% and 75% comprehension passages is severely impaired.

As much as possible, you want your experience with the language to feel like the 99% and 95% comprehension passages above rather than the 90% or the 75% comprehension passages. This is what is meant by input being comprehensible.

Of course, you need to start somewhere. In the first phase of your learning, nothing aimed at native speakers of the language will be in any way comprehensible to you. You must therefore seek out materials directed at learners. This can be simplicity itself or a significant challenge, depending on the language you’re learning.

One of the benefits of having real, live, humans to speak to in the language is that they will — if they’re patient enough (or you’re paying them to do it) — adjust their language such that you can understand it. If you don’t have people to talk to (or all the qualified people are dead — this is the Dead Language Society, after all. Some of you may be all jazzed to learn Sumerian!) you’ll need to rely on written or recorded material.

If you’re a relatively inexperienced language learner, you may want to skip Sumerian for now in favour of Spanish, or another language with lots of good resources for learners.

Look for graded readers: these are books written with a limited vocabulary, so that learners have an easier time. Another option, in the earliest days, is to power through incomprehensible input. But this requires a lot of patience and active engagement.

That said, the very initial stages of language learning are often accompanied by a burst of motivation, so you are more likely to be willing to put up with suboptimal material for a while. And by the time that wears off, you’ll likely have a few hundred words under your belt, and you may find that the material which had been too hard had become, like Baby Bear’s porridge, just right.

Ownership

“Is that it?,” you may be asking. “You just do fun things like reading books and watching TV in the language, and eventually you get to a point where you speak the language?”

Well, yes. Sort of.11 I’m not done yet, remember. I still have one principle left to show you: the principle of ownership.

This is the principle that I’ve come to understand most recently, as a direct result of teaching and developing curricular materials.

I’ve found that simply consuming input — even when that input is comprehensible — seems to result in an excellent ability to comprehend, but a frustrating lag in the ability to produce. As I mentioned earlier, it’s entirely normal for production to lag behind comprehension.

But what you don’t want is for that lag to become a matter of frustration for you. Frustration leads to spending less time with the language or to quitting altogether.

I’ve found that this frustration tends to be alleviated by activities that give you a sense of conscious “ownership” of what you’ve already been acquiring unconsciously. Paradoxically, these include the very activities that I said were not effective at building up your mental representation:

• creating flash cards,12

• explicit grammar learning (reading books explaining grammar to you)

• doing composition exercises (e.g. turn this sentence from the active to the passive voice).

What do these things have in common? They all involve primarily conscious processes, and attention to the form of the message rather than its content. Exactly the things that don’t build up your mental representation.

This is why I once said things (to myself) like, “Don’t make flash cards! They’re not worth the trouble.” But I’m now convinced that I was wrong about this, and I’m proud to say that I’ve maintained a consistent flash card habit for the past 4 months. Please clap.

What are these activities doing for you? Each is probably doing something different, but I group them together because I think they have one thing in common: they make you feel comfortable as a participant rather than a spectator in the linguistic community.

The trick, however, is understanding the proper place of these activities in your learning practice. They are not the primary means by which you acquire knowledge. They should be applied only to things that you already understand well. And how do you come to understand things well? By consuming lots of input.

Think of these ownership strategies as multivitamins, and the consumption of input as your main course. Vitamins are great, and sometimes you need to supplement your diet with a multivitamin. But if you’re consuming primarily vitamins, something has gone wrong.

Most novice language learners end up in situations where they’re eating nothing but multivitamins and wondering why they’re starving. They would do much better starting off with a programme of listening to and reading easy material in the language for six months, and only then progressing to the apps, classes, and grammar books.

So there you have it, three principles to guide your language learning in 2026:

1. Time on task. The more of the right things you do, the faster you’ll make progress.

2. Quality. The right thing is consuming input at roughly a 95–99% comprehension level.

3. Ownership. Supplement your input with explicit study of vocabulary and grammar when you start to feel frustrated that you can’t produce things you already understand.

If you’ve been a frustrated language learner so far, I hope that 2026 is the year that changes for you. It is possible for you — for basically anyone — to learn another language, with the right tools and understanding. And it’s one of the most rewarding experiences you can have.

Reading List

To keep this article practical, I’ve avoided talking too much about second language acquisition research here. But many of the suggestions I’ve given in this article are in fact based on this research. Like any academic subject, there’s good and bad stuff out there. If you want to learn more about it, I recommend starting with a guide. Use one of the following books, which were written not for researchers but for language teachers or students.

• Henshaw, Florencia and Maris D. Hawkins (2002). Common Ground: Second Language Acquisition Theory Goes to the Classroom.

• VanPatten, Bill, Megan Smith, and Alessandro G. Benati (2020). Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition.

If you prefer to get your information in audio or video form, the first author of the Key Questions book, Bill VanPatten, has several lectures and interviews available on Youtube. He also happens to be hilarious, which helps. This playlist is a good place to start.

Professor Barleygrow thumbs through the pile of colourful letters that have arrived for him. ‘Tis the season of the Christmas letter, a time to hear from acquaintances old and new about all their surgeries, renovations, trips abroad, and, of course, to learn of any newly minted dentists in the family.

Worst, he thinks, are the letters composed in Microsoft Word, printed out and signed at the bottom like so many letters of congratulation sent out of duty by Members of Parliament to centenarians in their constituency.

A pox upon all of it.

He almost says, “Bah, humbug!” to himself, but decides against it. That would be going too far.

As he sorts through the letters, sending most of them directly and without ceremony into the bin, Barleygrow’s eye is drawn to one that has come to him in garb much unlike the others. It is clad in a plain envelope, unbedecked by images of ivy or holly. It’s not even red, green, or gold.

Who could this be from?

He turns over the envelope and sees a familiar name, written with no steady hand, seemingly in crayon, above the return address.

He hastens to open the envelope and removes the letter inside. It reads as follows:

DEER PROFFESOR BARLE GRO,

MERY CRISMUS

YOUR FREND AND NEFEW,
BILLY

Billy! It warms the old professor’s heart that his beloved great-nephew (once removed) has remembered him this year.

His spelling, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired.

Barleygrow takes the letter to his desk and begins to pen a reply, which he starts by returning the greetings of his dear nephew. The remainder of the letter is occupied by a point-by-point correction of the young man’s spelling mistakes.

When Barleygrow reaches the matter of the correct spelling of the word Christmas, however, his pen pauses in midair. He sets it down. The boy’s spelling Crismus reminds him of something he once read somewhere. But where?

He’s now on the hunt. Where has he read Crismus before?

He ponders. He paces. He turns the question over in his mind. For a long time, nothing comes.

Then it hits him.

“The Verney Papers!” he cries out, to no one at all. He is alone in his office.

He searches through his files, which takes a while, as he’s not particularly organized. But, before long, he finds them: the Varney Papers. They’re a collection of 17th-century correspondence from one of the great families of Buckinghamshire.

In one of these letters, from 1639, the Lady Sussex spelled the holiday not as we would spell it today, like Christmas, but how she herself pronounced it: Crismus.

“The little plagiarist!” exclaims Barleygrow. He takes academic dishonesty very seriously. One word plagiarized at age six could become an entire dissertation plagiarized by the time Jimmy reaches the doctoral level. No, a stop must be put to this right away.

He crumples up his jolly reply and begins to write something much sterner. A copy will have to go to the Dean as well…

Merry Christmas, Professor Barleygrow.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society. I’m Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language and its relatives.

Subscribe for a free issue every other Wednesday, or upgrade to support my mission of bringing historical linguistics out of the ivory tower and receive two extra Saturday deep-dives per month.

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I’m just glad we don’t call it Grime-mas

Of course, we know Jimmy is no plagiarist. He’s merely spelled Christmas the way it sounds, as any young child might be tempted to do. Christmas is one of the weirder words in the English language, at least as far as its spelling is concerned.

The origin of the word, on the other hand, is clear enough: Christmas is Christ’s mass. The spelling makes that much more transparent than many other Old English compounds.

The difficulty is not in figuring out where the word Christmas comes from, but in how it came to have the pronunciation (and meaning) it has today.

When the word Christmas first appeared in the English language, it had the form Crīstes mæsse, literally ‘Christ’s mass.’

Since Christianity was brought to England largely through the labours of the Roman Church, it comes as no surprise that both parts making up the phrase Crīstes mæsse are Latin loanwords.

Crīst ‘Christ’ comes from Latin Chrīstus, which is itself a loanword from the Ancient Greek word χρῑστός khrīstós ‘anointed.’

The Greek word χρῑστός khrīstós is not a loanword. In fact, it’s a native Greek word: the past participle of a verb χρῑ́ω khrī́ō ‘to smear with (especially in reference to olive oil).’

And the verb χρῑ́ω khrī́ō has a long pedigree, going all the way back to the most distant ancestor of Greek, the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language. We know the root goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European because it has relatives in the other languages Proto-Indo-European spun off, among them English.

The native English relative of the Greek word χρῑστός khrīstós is the word grime, which is certainly something — altogether less pleasant than olive oil — that can get smeared on you.

Although the Ancient Greek word χρῑστός khrīstós isn’t a loanword, it is a kind of “loan concept.”

Being anointed with oil had a special meaning in a Biblical context. It referred to a ritual by which someone or something — often kings — became consecrated. The Hebrew word for a person so consecrated is מָשִׁיחַ māšîaḥ ‘anointed,’1 which is also the source of the English word Messiah, which is taken as a loanword.

While admitting that this is far from my area of expertise, I should explain briefly why the Greek language needed a word for messiah.

The concept of an ‘anointed one’ became rather important in the course of history. During the Second Temple period (516 BC–70 AD) within Judaism, it came to refer to a future king from the line of David who would rule the Jewish people, either in a political sense or in a more apocalyptic sense. This messianic idea took on a different character in the movement that would become Christianity, where the Messiah was identified also as the Son of God.

At this time, the Eastern Mediterranean had been under Greek-speaking rule for centuries, thanks to the conquests of Alexander the Great (356–323 BC). As a result, many Jews ended up speaking Greek, as did many of the early Christians. So these Greek-speaking Jews (and later, Christians) needed a word for this rather important concept of Messiah.

When there is a word or phrase in another language which you want to adopt, you have two options. One is to take the foreign word or phrase into the language directly, as Latin did in adapting the Greek word χρῑστός khrīstós into a Latin word Chrīstus.

The other option is to translate each individual part of the word or phrase literally. This is called a calque or a loan translation. Other examples of calques in English are brainwashing (from the Chinese 洗腦 xǐnǎo), flea market (from French marché aux puces), and worldview (from German Weltanschauung).

This is what the Greeks did with the Hebrew word מָשִׁיחַ māšîaḥ ‘anointed.’ Rather than taking the Hebrew word into Greek as a loanword,2 they made a calque using their pre-existing word for ‘anointed’: χρῑστός khrīstós.

So that’s what put the Christ in Christmas. And, believe it or not, that was the straightforward half of the job.

“Now go away”

The -mas in Christmas comes from the Old English mæsse, the source of Modern English mass (as in the church service). This is another Latin loanword. It comes from the post-classical word missa ‘dismissal.’

It’s post-classical in the sense that you’re not going to find missa used in this way in Caesar or Cicero. But missa does have impeccable classical precedents. It’s nothing but a noun formed from the past participle of the verb mittere, which gives us all the English verbs ending in -mit, such as transmit, remit, submit, etc., as well as words like mission ‘a sending.’

In the Classical period, missa meant ‘something sent’. It’s not too much of a stretch for ‘something sent’ to start to be used more abstractly for a dismissal, or a ‘sending away.’

The more mysterious question is how a word meaning ‘dismissal’ turned into a name for a liturgical service. There are two main explanations floating around, both of which rely on a dismissal that occurs during the service.

One is the missa catechumenorum or ‘dismissal of the catechumens,’ which occurs before the Eucharist.

A catechumen is someone who is undergoing instruction in the faith but who has not yet been baptized. In the early Roman mass, the catechumens were allowed to be present only for the first portion. They were required to leave before the Eucharist, hence the name ‘dismissal of the catechumens.’ From there, the whole service took on the name missa. This was St. Jerome’s explanation.

The other explanation is that the dismissal referred to the dismissal of the congregation, which occurs at the end of the service: Ite, missa est, which means ‘Go, it’s the dismissal.’3

Now we understand where each of the two halves of the word Christmas come from, and more or less how they reached the English language. But it’s actually the later history of the word Christmas that explains the great divergence between how it’s said and how it’s spelled.

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Divinity, serenity, insanity, and Christmas

The biggest mystery about the word Christmas is this: Given the way the word Christ is pronounced in Modern English, we might expect Christmas to share that same long i vowel — the sound we hear in the word my. But it doesn’t.

Depending on where and when you learned English, you may have learned that the i sound in mine or ride or write (or Christ) is called long i.4 Let’s run with that name: it’s actually useful here.

If you’ve learned other European languages, you’ve probably encountered the fact that the English long i vowel, the one in mine, doesn’t have much to do with the vowels spelled i in other languages, which tend to sound more like the ee sound in see.

The reason for all this is historical. The vowel we call long i in comes mostly from an Old English vowel which actually did sound like the i in other European languages. Today, when writing Old English, we spell long i like this: ī, with the line over top to mark it as long. So Modern English mine, ride, write, Christ correspond to Old English mīn, rīdan, wrītan, Crīst.

There was also a short version of that same vowel, which we write as i. This vowel has stayed more or less the same all through the entire recorded history of English. It always sounded more or less like the vowels in his (from Old English his), bid (biddan), or with (Old English wið5)... or, for that matter, like the vowel in Christmas.

Now let me train you to think like a linguistic detective. When we hear a vowel like mine in a Modern English word, we think “that vowel was probably a long ī in Old English.” When we see a vowel like his in Modern English, we think “that was short i in Old English.”

So the mystery is this: Why does the pronunciation of Christ differ between its use alone and in the word Christmas? Alone, in the word Christ, the pronunciation seems to imply a long ī in Old English. In Christmas, it seems to imply that it had a short i. So which was it?

We might think to consult the Old English manuscripts. But, in fact, the length of the vowel in the Old English form is unclear. When we write Old English today, we write the line over the long vowels to show they were long. But the Anglo-Saxons did no such thing. They just assumed you knew whether a vowel was long or short. So they wrote Crist.

So, if we want to know whether the i in Crist was long or short, we have to find another source of evidence.

Fortunately, we have just the right kind of evidence, albeit in a slightly later stage of the language. It comes to us from a book called Ormulum, written around the late 12th century. This book, almost uniquely for early English, writes long and short vowels differently. How does it write Crist? In a way that leaves no doubt that the author considered it to have a long vowel.6

So how did Christmas acquire a short vowel?

The reason can be found in a process that has occurred repeatedly throughout the history of English. Think of word pairs like divine vs. divinity, insane vs. insanity, or serene vs. serenity.

In each of these examples, the first vowel is the kind we’d expect to descend from a long vowel in earlier English: divine (long i), insane (long a), serene (long e).7 The second vowel is the kind you would expect to descend from a short version of that same vowel: divinity (short i), insanity (short a), serenity (short e).

You can listen to what these vowel pairs would have sounded like in Middle English below (although I swapped out insane/insanity for cave/cavity, since the word insane didn’t come into English until later):

Clearly each pair of words is related. So why does one have a long vowel and the other a short vowel?

What’s blood got to do with it?

The answer lies in a process called Trisyllabic Shortening.8 It’s a process that kept happening over and over again in the history of the English language. The precise details are intricate, and vary a little from one century to another, but the outline is constant: when English acquires sequences of a long vowel in a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, it shortens the long vowel.

So, for example, when the long ī vowel in Middle English divīne (here I’m marking the long vowel for clarity’s sake) is at the end of the word, it remains and becomes the vowel we get in Modern English divine. But when that same vowel is followed by the two unstressed syllables of the ending -ity, the long vowel shortens: divīne + -ity is not divīnity but divinity.

The same process also happened fairly early on in Old English, probably in the 7th century. Another religious — and simultaneously gory — example is how the word bless, with a short e vowel, originates from a form blēdsian ‘to consecrate with blood,’[^n] with the long ē we also see in blēdan ‘bleed.’

Yes, the word bless means to consecrate with blood. So watch who you sneeze around.

Now we can see how this applies to Christ (with a long ī) and Christmas (with a short i). The Old English phrase was Crīstes mæsse ‘Christ’s mass,’ or, put together into one word, Crīstmæsse. The long vowel ī is followed by two unstressed syllables, so it undergoes Trisyllabic Shortening to yield Cristmæsse.

And, voilà, Christmas with a short i.

The other changes in this word are relatively straightforward. The unstressed suffix on mæsse was lost towards the end of Middle Ages, yielding something like Cristmas.9 Around the same time, the t in the middle of the word fell out of the pronunciation.

This change wasn’t isolated to the word Christmas. The t also fell out in another word that had the same sequence of consonants: so the Old English word blostma ‘flower’ became the Middle English blosme, and finally, the Modern English blossom.

Clearly, Christmas is a word that has been through a lot during its sojourn in the English language. As a result, its pronunciation no longer matches its spelling particularly well. So why don’t we follow young Jimmy’s lead (and that of Lady Sussex) and change the spelling to something like Crismus?

It’s all run by an eastern syndicate

The reason that we spell Christmas in a way that makes its etymology plain is that it’s one of the few really ancient compounds whose etymology is indeed plain. Both of the elements in the compound Christmas have occurred alone (the independent words Christ and mass), even if their pronunciation in the compound has diverged from their free-standing pronunciation.

And the meaning of the compound has remained clear. The original meaning of Christmas was in no danger of being lost on the people of the Middle Ages or Early Modern period, when the spelling of English was still in flux. There was no need for a 14th-century version of Linus in the Charlie Brown Christmas special,10 who felt called to step up onto the stage to remind his friends, who had been going crazy for a rather commercial version of Christmas,11 what the holiday was originally about.

The word blossom, on the other hand, was not clearly related to any other word in the language. The t sound in the middle of the word could vanish without a trace left in the spelling, because it had no meaning for speakers.

Not so the t in Christmas. It had a meaning because it connected the word Christmas with the word Christ.

Medieval and Early Modern speakers of English knew very well what Christmas meant. The connection with Christ, which had been respelled with a ch, after the Latin original, was clear. By the time the spelling of English stabilized around 1700, the guardians of good taste chose to keep the Christ in Christmas, in spelling, at least.

And that is the story of how Christmas came to be such a Weird Word.

I wanted to take a moment to wish a Merry Christmas to you all and a Happy New Year! Thank you for making 2025 a lovely year on Substack. Be nice to your great-nephews (once removed) and enjoy some wassail (and if you want to have a really good time, look up the etymology of wassail). See you in 2026!

If you ever meet a linguist at a cocktail party and you have nowhere else you need to be, ask them what linguistics is. Go ahead, I dare you. They’ll probably tell you — although it may take a few minutes — that linguistics is the scientific study of human language.

Some linguists might add that they study the aspect of human nature which allows us to produce and comprehend language.

Speaking As A Linguist, I can assure you that they’ll mostly be glad you didn’t ask them how many languages they speak.

Linguistics has a broad mandate, and one that grant committees love: unlocking the secrets of human nature through studying the vagaries of verbs. It’s fantastic stuff, truly.

But this way of thinking about linguistics is relatively modern.

Before the 20th century, linguistics might better have been described as the study of European languages. Scholars were primarily interested in the structure, and especially the history, of the languages of Europe.

This early focus on Europe may seem parochial to us today, but the goal of studying language in those days was not to understand human nature, but to understand how specific languages developed over time.

At first, scholars were most interested in the languages with long and culturally important literary traditions, such as the classical and biblical languages (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew). But they also developed an interest in examining the older, pre-literary forms of the languages they themselves spoke. These languages were largely members of the Romance and Germanic families, such as French, German, and English.

At the time, practitioners would have called what they were doing philology rather than linguistics. The difference in terminology reflects a difference in aims: to define the two simply, a philologist studies languages the better to understand texts, while a linguist studies languages the better to understand human nature.

This philological study grew mostly out of the tradition of classics, which seeded the field with an interest in the old languages of Europe (and, to be fair, some parts of Asia) and a desire to understand how they gave rise to the continent’s modern languages.

This focus on Europe led to a skewed understanding of the nature of human language, one in which the particular features of European languages were mistakenly understood as being typical of all languages, no matter what continent they were spoken on.

But, as it turns out, European languages are peculiar. And when you look at them from a worldwide perspective, European languages even start to appear exotic.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society. I’m Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language and its relatives.

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Just as one doesn’t truly understand one’s own language before studying another, the peculiarities of European languages can only be appreciated in the wider context of what human language is like all over the world.

The horizons of the field would only be broadened in the early 20th century, owing to the influence of the particular flavour of linguistics which developed in North America.

This new American linguistics grew out of departments founded by the students of the anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1842). Accordingly, the discipline grew up in the United States1 under the influence of anthropology rather than classics.

American linguists busied themselves more with describing the grammatical systems of indigenous languages than with reconstructing the distant ancestor of Latin and Greek. Their work brought them into contact with languages which functioned very differently from the familiar European languages: when they learned about the structure of Navajo, Mohawk, and Quechua, they realized there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in their philology.

Their acquaintance with the indigenous languages of the Americas gave them the perspective necessary to see European languages for what they are: a cluster of languages which function in ways found only rarely in the wider world. The linguist (and insurance inspector!) Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) came up with a term to describe the characteristic behaviour of European languages: Standard Average European.

Whorf was a student of Edward Sapir (1884–1939), who was himself a student of Boas. For Whorf, the fact that linguists all had such a thorough grounding in Standard Average European languages, but knew comparatively little about the languages of the rest of the world, introduced a bias into the discipline. He worried that linguists were, even unconsciously, seeing European-like patterns in non-European languages.2

In the mind of Whorf and the linguists who have followed in his wake, it was important to avoid unconsciously importing a bias from European languages in order to do justice to the languages of the world which worked so differently.

Ironically, however, this focus on non-European languages led to a renewed interest in European languages. To avoid assuming other languages work like European languages, linguists had to become acutely aware of how European languages work, and how they do things differently from other languages.

In other words, linguists needed to learn to see European languages as exotic.

So what exactly do European languages do that makes them so exotic and unique? And how did they get that way? (Spoiler alert: the answer lies in the period most beloved of every Substack historian, the one that’s always sure to ignite a firestorm in the comments, the so-called Dark Ages.)

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