AD 1155, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire.

The light of a late winter afternoon reaches feebly through a cloister window. The light is thin, but it is enough to illuminate the work of the elderly monk as he writes.

He sits alone. Everything here is new: a new abbot at Peterborough, a new king in England, even the room he sits in smells of fresh lime mortar. His hands stiffen and ache with the chill of the winter wind blowing in from the garth.

The work must be done today. He is old, and Abbot William has little patience for old things. He will certainly not allow an old monk to spend ink or parchment, much less the time of a skilled scribe, on what, for the abbot, is one man’s vain fancy: writing in English.

But is it vain to record the nineteen years of war they have recently endured? Is it merely one man’s fancy to want to continue the chronicle handed down by those who came before through war, fire, and conquest?

I ne can ne I ne mai tellen alle þe wunder ne alle þe pines ðat hi diden wrecce men on þis land

‘I do not know how, nor am I able, to tell all the outrages or all the suffering that they inflicted on the wretched people in this land.’1

He will finish it today and have done with it, even if — even though — he is a poor writer in English. He has tried his best to write properly, the way the chronicle began. Nevertheless, his task is too great to be cowed. He thinks of the words of St Paul: But though I be rude in speech…

He writes on over the hours, the lines above browning and deepening as he writes the lines below. His back hurts, his hand aches, and his eyes squint in the light, which has now almost gone completely.

At last, his task is almost complete. In the final lines, he records the death of King Stephen and the end of the bad times:

Þa þe king was ded, þa was þe eorl beionde sæ; ⁊ ne durste nan man don oþer bute god for þe micel eie of him.

‘When the king was dead, the earl [Henry II] was overseas; but no one dared do anything but good for the great fear they had of him.’2

Like the passing of a sudden sickness, the wickedness departed from the land with the death of Stephen. There was now a new king. Perhaps this Henry will even be a good king. But that will be for some younger man to write about.

No younger man ever continued the Peterborough Chronicle, as this text is known to us today.

The entry for 1154, which described the end of Stephen’s reign and the beginning of the reign of Henry II, is the last entry in a chronicle whose first entries were compiled in the reign of King Alfred (871–899).

Copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as we call the chronicle more generally, were kept, and kept up to date, in several locations in England. We know of nine today. The practice of keeping the chronicles up to date was gradually abandoned in various places around the time of the Norman Conquest, or shortly thereafter. The Peterborough copy kept the tradition alive the longest, but it too died out after the entry for the year 1154.

To linguists, the Peterborough Chronicle is the most interesting version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle because it spans what they consider two separate periods in the language’s history: the bulk of it is written in Old English, but the later continuations, such as the one I dramatized above, are written in early forms of Middle English.

To the scribes who wrote down the continuations, however, they probably didn’t seem like two different forms of the language. For these 12th-century monks, English was English. It’s just that people used to write a bit differently in the old days. Properly. What we see today as a break between two distinct periods, they likely saw as slow change, or, more likely still, degeneration.

Linguistically, at least, great changes are often imperceptible to those going through them. It makes you wonder: are we also at the end of an era without realizing it?

As modern as pleated collars

Like Caesar’s Gaul, the history of the English language is conventionally divided into three parts: Old, Middle, and Modern English.

Old English is said to have lasted from the Anglo-Saxon settlement (around AD 450) until the Norman Conquest (AD 1066), or soon thereafter: AD 1100 is a popular round number. After that, we had Middle English, which lasted until about AD 1450 or so, and, finally, Modern English continues the story into the present day.

As you may well imagine, there’s nothing magical about these dates. From the point of view of the language, things stayed basically the same between December 31, 1449 and January 1, 1450.

Language change doesn’t announce itself as a revolution. Instead, it shows up as complaints that kids say things differently (and wrong), or that old people speak strangely and embarrassingly. Or it appears as a slight cringe at the terminology employed in an old book you’re reading.

Within the three broad periods in the history of the English language, there were big differences between the language as it was at the beginning of a period and at its end. Ask anyone who’s read Shakespeare — written, ostensibly, in Modern English — just how much it can change.

Nevertheless, divisions have to be made somewhere, and the convention is to divide the history of English into these three periods — Old, Middle, and Modern, with boundaries at roughly these three points (AD 1100 and 1450).

But, at the risk of sounding like a two-year-old, why?

Why do we do this? Why three divisions and not five? Why divide them at AD 1100 and 1500, rather than 800 and 1700?

And why does Modern English last so long?

I could have sworn “Goldilocks” was one of his…

Not everyone accepts that the last five centuries of the English language belong under a single label.

For this reason, it’s very common to subdivide modern English into Early Modern English and Present-Day English (or Late Modern English), with a dividing line between them somewhere in the 18th century. I like 1700 as a round number. This gets us around the awkwardness of putting William Shakespeare in the same linguistic category as William Faulkner.3

But even so, Early and Late Modern English are usually treated as subdivisions of Modern English. Modern English, including both periods, is usually understood as the proper overarching category to set in opposition to Old and Middle English.

This schematic rule of three is not given by nature but has a particular birth date and a particular parent. The originator of this organizational scheme is none other than Jacob Grimm, a pioneer not only of the study of folklore but also of comparative linguistics.

In his 1848 work Geschichte der deutschen Sprache ‘History of the German Language’, Grimm split the history of the German language into three periods: Alt-, Mittel-, and Neuhochdeutsch, or Old, Middle, and New High German.

Grimm’s choice to split the German language in this way came not from the facts of the language’s history, but from a general belief he had in a Gesetz der Trilogie, a Law of Threes, which he saw as pervading nature and language.4

This compulsion to find threes everywhere you look seems to be a part of human nature. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called it triadomany, a craze for threes. Grimm seems to have been particularly afflicted.5

Whatever the reason for its origin, the schema was soon applied to English by the philologist Henry Sweet, who also coined the term Old English, to replace the name Anglo-Saxon, which he considered barbarous.6

So before we can really ask when a period begins and ends, we have to notice that the familiar threefold frame for thinking about linguistic history is imposed upon that history rather than arising from it. We are still stuck in Jacob Grimm’s triadomany.

The three-part division works well enough for English, except when it doesn’t. The existence of Early Modern English as a category is a good example of this. Even Sweet, godfather of the triadomaniacal division of English into Old, Middle, and Modern, admitted subdivisions: three each in Old and Middle English, and two in Modern English.

But nevertheless, even if we are to accept the overall validity of the threefold division — as we more or less have to be, since everyone else does — we are still left with the problem of determining where the boundaries between the three periods are. Given that language change is continuous rather than discrete, is there ever truly a way to divide the periods of a language without lapsing into arbitrariness?

This is written in Extremely Late Old English

There are two categories of criteria for dividing periods in a language’s history: Internal criteria, that is, those arising from within developments in the language itself, and external criteria, those arising from factors in history writ large: wars, migrations, technological change, etc.

Linguists, being linguists, have occasionally tried to come up with exclusively internal criteria for the periodization of a language. Henry Sweet, perhaps in a fit of triadomaniacal inspiration, came up with one influential criterion, which has to do with word endings.

For Sweet, Old English is the period of full endings, Middle English is the period of levelled endings, and Modern English is the period of lost endings.

To show what he means by this, let’s take a look at the four words Sweet himself uses as examples: moon, sun, son, stones (in the plural).

When we trace these word forms back through Sweet’s three periods, they show us what he meant by full, levelled, and lost:

• Old English: mōna, sunne, sunu, stānas

• Middle English: mōne, sunne, sune, stǭnes

• Modern English: moon, sun, son, stones (pronounced with no vowel in the ending)7

In Old English, the vowels in the endings of the four words are kept separate: a is distinguished from e, which is distinguished from u. I

n Middle English, all of these vowels are spelled e, and pronounced as schwa (the indistinct vowel in the first syllable of above). This is the levelling that Sweet considered so distinctive of Middle English: the vowels of different endings are pronounced the same.

In Modern English, all of the vowels in these endings have disappeared, leaving only the final -s to mark the plural stones. This is what Sweet means by lost endings.

Sweet also gave examples of authors whose work he considered to fall within each period. For Old English, which he divided into three subperiods: Alfred the Great (c. 849–899), Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 955–c. 1010), and Laȝamon (the late 12th- or early 13th-century author of the poem Brut).8

Unfortunately, Sweet’s internal criterion doesn’t quite work. As the linguist Roger Lass has pointed out, there is levelling of endings even in the work Sweet calls most typical of Early Old English, the works of Alfred the Great.

For example, in Alfred’s preface to the Old English translation of the Cura Pastoralis, fully 5% of the vowels in endings and other weak positions are spelled in a way that suggests the author had confused them with other vowels.9

The problem is that the process Sweet chose to demarcate the phases of English doesn’t line up cleanly with any of his stages. The levelling of endings began in Proto-Germanic and isn’t even complete today: many dialects of English still distinguish Rosa’s and roses, or proven and provin’. Does that mean we still speak Old English? No, it does not.

Even though Sweet’s internal criterion didn’t end up working, we still use his overall schema of Old, Middle, and Modern English. We don’t use Sweet’s exact dates anymore, but there is remarkable consistency in the dates we do use.

Almost everyone divides Old English from Middle English between 1050 and 1100, meaning that the later continuations to the Peterborough Chronicle are written in a different phase of the language than the chronicle’s main body. Likewise, the boundary between Middle and Modern English almost always falls between 1450 and 1500.

So where does this unanimity come from?

What have the Normans ever done for us?

The language itself doesn’t seem particularly keen on giving us clear guidance on when one phase begins and another one ends. So what most linguists and historians do today is use external criteria for determining the boundaries between stages in the history of a language.

These external criteria are political and technological events rather than sound laws. To divide Old from Middle English we have the most famous date in English history: 1066, the Norman conquest, an event whose consequences on the history of the English language cannot be understated — although they can be misdated. Or, if you’re the kind of person who likes a round number, you can use 1100 instead.10

The next great date is 1476, which often serves as the boundary between Middle and Modern English. This is the date of Caxton’s printing press, another event which would have dramatic effects on the course of linguistic history. A good date to use, then, unless you want to round up or down to an even half-century.

If, after all that splitting, you’re still in the mood to subdivide Modern English, 1776 is a good date to do it: this is the year of American independence, which first broke the political unity of English speakers in a dramatic way, and opened the door to multiple standard forms of the language.

For that reason, the Cambridge History of the English Language chose this date to divide its early modern and late modern volumes. Others have chosen 1650 or 1700. Whichever date gets us on the opposite side of Shakespeare seems to do the job well enough.

Of course, the problem of the falsely crisp cutoff remains, whatever date you choose. But at least the problem of arbitrariness is solved to a degree. Choosing an external criterion gives linguists and historians an escape hatch out of the difficulties that we have seen in Sweet’s attempt to find an internal criterion for dividing language periods.

So if we are comfortable with external criteria for dividing language stages, we’re confronted with a new question. Has anything as consequential as the Norman Conquest or the invention of the printing press happened lately?

Or, put another way, has Modern English (1450–) actually ended already without us knowing?

Some changes have wanished

We can only call an end to a period when we realize something has changed. It can only be done in retrospect.

Let’s accept, for the sake of argument, that 1776 marked the beginning of Late Modern English. When does it end? Have we experienced any great event since then with reverberating linguistic consequences?

Almost certainly.

The English-speaking world has been rather busy over the past 250 years. We’ve had, among other things, two world wars, the inventions of the telephone, the computer, and the internet, and the proliferation, through a sequence of colonialism and decolonization, of many independent countries where English is spoken.

All of these things have changed English. But have they changed it enough to make it useful to talk about a new phase in the history of the language?

We may try to look to histories of the English language for guidance, but they are of no help to us: they typically peter out around 1800. It’s not for a lack of evidence. After 1800, we have more than ever before. We even have audio!

And it’s not for a lack of things happening. Language is in a constant state of change; even as you read this there are multiple vowel shifts, each on the scale of the Great Vowel Shift, at work reshaping dialects of English. Maybe even your own!

But it’s hard to know which of these changes will end up spreading as you’re watching them happen. Some changes which seem of great importance today may end up as footnotes to linguistic history.

Did you know, for example, that there were varieties of speech in 19th-century England that interchanged v and w?11 If you’ve read Dickens, you know. This is Sam Weller’s accent from The Pickwick Papers, in which Dickens depicts Weller as saying things like avay instead of away, and circumwented for circumvented. This sound change never caught on, and, 150 years later, it’s been almost totally forgotten.

On the other hand, one slightly shifted vowel — say, an a that sounded too much like an e — could end up setting off the next Great Vowel Shift.

The reason no one tends to talk about anything after 1800 in the typical History of the English Language textbook is that we’re simply too close to the question to know with certainty what will matter.

And, when we zoom in even more to the present day, historical linguists tend to leave the question of language change in contemporary English to sociolinguists. The two have a relationship like the one historians have to journalists: just as journalists are said to write the first draft of history, sociolinguists capture variation in progress that future generations of historical linguists will write up in about two hundred years.

But, acknowledging the difficulties posed by our lack of perspective, we can still try to draw a line in the sand. The question is: where?

Of course, they would spell it Americanisation

If we’re going to split today’s English from Late Modern English, I think the best place to do it is somewhere between 1900 and 1950.

One of the big stories in the first half of the 20th century is, of course, the two world wars, which created a decisive break in so many ways with the world of the 19th century.

From a linguistic perspective, this new phase of English has been marked by three forces, two of them in competition.12

One is centrifugal: this is pluricentricity, or the shift away from a single standard for the English language.

A pluricentric language is one where multiple standards exist. Think of the different standards as used in Britain and the United States, not to mention Australia, New Zealand, and English-speaking Canada and South Africa. Each of these countries has developed a standard English of its own, which, while not differing extensively from other standard Englishes, may differentiate further over time.13

The second force has been homogenization: the influence of communication technology, such as the telephone and television, and the increased ease and affordability of travel, have tended to make people speak and write more like each other, wherever they happen to be within the English-speaking world.

Couple this with the fact that the centre of cultural gravity in the English-speaking world shifted from Britain to the United States during the same period between 1900 and 1950, and you get a recipe for Americanization (sorry, Americanisation) of non-American varieties of English, something much complained about in the British press.

Alongside these two forces there has also been a third: colloquialization. Simply read a novel from this year alongside a novel from the 19th century and you’ll see exactly what I mean. The gap between speech and writing has narrowed.

While in previous centuries the written word had a standard of its own, which was rather distant from the spoken language, the 20th century brought in a norm of writing more like we speak. Of course, we don’t write exactly like we speak, even now. But that’s a topic for another day.

These differences may lead you to the conclusion that the 20th century beginning sometime between 1900 and 1950 marks a new phase in the history of the English language.

I’m not entirely convinced. I think we’ll only know the true importance of the changes of the 20th century after we’ve had another century to digest them.

There’s a quotation attributed to Chinese statesman Zhou Enlai, who, when asked by Henry Kissinger about the impact of the French Revolution — which had occurred almost two centuries prior to this conversation — is reported to have said, “It is too soon to tell.”14

I feel that way about the changes the English language has undergone in the twentieth century. For now, I’m going to say the same thing the monk in Peterborough would have said. We’re speaking the same language today that we spoke 200 years ago. It’s all English, or, Modern English, in our case. We just speak it a little differently now.

But ask me again after another 200 years.

Works Cited

• Clark, Cecily (1958). The Peterborough Chronicle 1070–1154.

• Lass, Roger (2000). “Language periodization and the concept ‘middle’.” In Taavitsainen et al. (eds.), Placing Middle English in Context, 7–42.

• Mair, Christian (2006). Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization.

• Sweet, Henry (1891). A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical.

On the 3rd of June, we dined at the house of Mr. Uppington, a stationer lately removed to Cheapside, who had, by the enviable combination of industry and frugality, raised himself to a state of respectable ease, a circumstance which he took no small pains to let be known generally.

He had furnished his rooms with a great quantity of books, which he had arrayed, contrary to the usual practice, by the colour of their bindings.

Now there sat at the table, opposite our host, Dr. Barleygrow, whom I had brought thither at Mr. Uppington’s peculiar request, the latter having so long desired the acquaintance of so celebrated a scholar.

The conversation turning upon the education of his son, Mr. Uppington remarked that he had lately corrected the boy for saying I am goin’, and had instructed him that he must always say I am going, for that the termination -ing, being the participle in the present tense of the verb to go, contains three letters, each deserving of its full dignity, and that to leave any of them unpronounced was a vulgarism fit only for the unlettered.

Dr. Barleygrow had listened to our host’s lecture in silence, and at length delivered himself thus:

BARLEYGROW. Sir, you have laboured to plant in your son an error, and watered it with your paternal authority.

UPPINGTON. An error, Sir? Surely the rule, that the g of the termination ing ought to be pronounced according to its full virtue, is well established by the best grammarians.

BARLEYGROW. It is established, Sir, in the manner in which one who settles by intrusion is established upon another man’s land: by disordered habit and not by right. Speech is the master, Sir, and writing its loyal servant. For did not men speak long before any man scratched a mark to record their words?

UPPINGTON. Surely, Sir, but you must confess—

BARLEYGROW. Or are we to believe that there was a scrivener or amanuensis present in Paradise, when Adam named the beasts? Writing, Sir, has no other office than the noble task of recording what the tongue has uttered. Yet your grammarian would have it otherwise. He bids the living speech bow to the dead letter and correct itself by the rule of the page. It is a very Saturnalia of speech, Sir, wherein the master must wait at table upon his own footman, and call it good order.

UPPINGTON. Yet surely, Sir, you will grant that the dropping of the g, as when a man says huntin’ and fishin’ and shootin’, is the mark of low breeding, a condition out of which I am glad to have schooled myself.

BARLEYGROW. Then you have schooled yourself out of the company of dukes, Sir, to keep company with your grammarians. Your huntin’ and your shootin’ have been spoken in the best halls in England by men whose breeding no stationer of Cheapside ought to despise.

UPPINGTON. Can it be so?

BARLEYGROW. Indeed, Sir. The man secure in his station speaks as he pleases. It is the man too eager to improve himself who watches every syllable, as a servant new to a great house watches his feet upon the stair, lest a single slip prove his undoing.

Mr. Uppington confessed that he remained unconvinced. But I could not but observe that he did not, for the rest of the evening, utter a single word ending in -ing.

Excerpt from the Life of Barleygrow.1

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 57,000+ 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 my most in-depth work, including longer essays that trace the mysteries of English to their source, practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (currently) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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An overworked suffix

The rest of the evening must have been jolly difficult for our dear Mr. Uppington — nigh on impossible, I imagine.

It’s hard to speak English without the suffix -ing, because it does so many jobs. Not only can it transform a verb into a noun, in the so-called gerund form (swimming is good exercise), but it can also turn a verb into a kind of adjective (the swimming boy), or pair up with to be to tell us what someone is doing right now (I am swimming).

Three jobs is a lot of work for a single suffix. But times are tough in the world of English grammar. Almost every suffix has had to take on multiple jobs, and -ing is no exception.

It wasn’t always like this though.

The three jobs performed by the suffix -ing used to be done by two wholly separate suffixes, with no relationship between them whatsoever.

One of these suffixes was the ancestor of -ing. The other — despite all appearances, entirely unrelated to -ing — was the distant ancestor of -in’, the g-dropping form that Uppington tried to rid from his son’s speech, and which generations of schoolteachers and grammar mavens have tried so hard to rid from the English language.

Ironically, when we say I’m goin’ or the swimmin’ boy, we’re using a form far more ancient than the one the sticklers prefer.

Read more

This time, we covered:

• The three hunts of Sir Bertilak

• The three hunts of Lady Bertilak

• The one temptation Gawain actually succumbs to

If you’d like to participate in a future book club, you can do so by signing up as a paid subscriber below.

Read more

He’s lived too long. He’s sure of that now.

Sea spray flecks his cheek. He’s close to where he found the barrow. Just one mile more, although a mile for an old man bearing a heavy load is no small distance.

He utters no word of complaint — who would he say it to, anyway? — and keeps going.

It wasn’t always like this. Once it was good. He was young and the world seemed to be young with him. The hoofbeat of horses, the screech of hawks flying overhead, the sound of the harp, he can hear them all still when he closes his eyes.

And then there is nothing. Not even the servants who used to polish his armour. They’re all gone now. Taken by death, or bloody battle.

And yet some things still remain. The golden cups, the sword that once won him glory. Things. Just things. There’s no one left to swing the sword, no one to carry the cup.

He has lived too long. A warrior is not meant to walk bent with age. He should have died before, a good death on the field of battle. And yet he lived, when better men did not.

He carries his bag to the barrow. The mound is empty now, but he will fill it. He’ll fill it with a lifetime of treasure, an immense inheritance he would sooner bequeath to his son or his sister-son. But they are gone, so it goes to the earth, the mother of us all.

He stands before the mound, and places the sack down. He takes out a single cup and holds it up before the barrow, as if he were drinking her health. Then he speaks his word of bequest.

“Hold these treasures, Earth, now that men no longer can.” He looks at the cup, and down at the treasures. “These things once came from you. So have them again. The bright helm will tarnish. The sword will grow dull. The coat of mail that even iron could not bite will be, at last, devoured by rust.”

He places each item carefully in the barrow, giving each its place of honour. And, as he sets them carefully down under the earth, he says the names of the friends who once carried them, of those who lived not nearly long enough.

The wind carries his words into the far distance. Whether anyone heard them, not even a wise man can say.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 55,000+ 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 my most in-depth work, including longer essays that trace the mysteries of English to their source, practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (currently) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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Why people bounce off Beowulf

What you just read is a prose adaptation of an episode in Beowulf, the foundational poem of English literature. It’s a work of Old English verse composed by an unknown poet sometime between the eighth and eleventh centuries, recounting — among many other things — the heroic adventures of a man named Beowulf.

It is also a miracle of survival. The world it describes vanished centuries before the poem was set down. The poem itself almost vanished too: it comes to us in a single manuscript whose pages still bear the scorch marks of the fire which, in 1731, nearly took it from us.

The episode I adapted above is called the Lament of the Sole Survivor. This passage occupies just 40 of the poem’s 3182 lines,1 features a character who is never named — he’s never even referred to in any other part of the poem. And yet, despite its brevity, I think the Lament is the key to unlock what the Beowulf poet is trying to tell us.

I’ve spoken to many readers over the years who “bounced off” of Beowulf: they came in expecting monster fights aplenty, and ended up reading a poem whose narrator seems distractible, even flighty: unable to hold his attention on what is most interesting about his story. Which is the monsters, right?

Beowulf, you see, has an image problem.

By reputation, Beowulf is a poem about fighting monsters. And it’s not entirely undeserved: Beowulf does indeed fight three monsters in the poem.

As a young man, he fights first the ogre-like creature Grendel, then Grendel’s mother, and finally, as an old man, he confronts a fire-breathing dragon.

These fights are beautifully written and wonderfully cinematic, some of the most thrilling combat scenes ever written in English. Their influence runs directly into the foundations of modern fantasy: J. R. R. Tolkien lifted Smaug from the dragon in Beowulf almost wholesale, and most of the dragons we’ve met since are his spiritual descendants.

But the fight scenes are relatively short: when you combine them, they amount to about 13% of the total poem.2 The remaining 87% of the poem consists of, well, everything else, including a generous helping of digressions, in which we’re treated to legends, lore, and plenty of stories-within-stories.

What makes this frustrating for readers is not just that they came wanting to read about monster fights and ended up having to keep track of the jockeying for position of rival claimants to the Swedish throne. That stuff can be fun too, as any Game of Thrones fan will tell you.

But many of these digressions seem irrelevant to the main story. For example, the poet spends hundreds of lines in the third part of the poem recounting the wars between the Geats3 and the Swedes, which have dubious relevance to the main action of the section: Beowulf’s fight with the dragon.

As a result of all these digressions throughout the poem, many readers never even make it to the Lament of the Sole Survivor, which takes place around three quarters of the way through the poem. It too is a digression, but, if we understand it correctly, it provides the crucial clue to unlocking the rest of Beowulf.

Beowulf is not a story about killing monsters which happens to be told by a distractible poet. Instead, think of Beowulf as a three thousand-line version of the Lament of the Sole Survivor: an extended farewell to a vanishing world. It just happens to be punctuated by three monster fights.

To understand why the poem works — and why it isn’t the mess of digressions it appears to be — we need to understand the world of Beowulf. Fortunately, the poet tells us a lot of what we need to know. We just need to learn how to listen.

The world that was

What we hear, when we listen carefully, is a single theme: strength inevitably declines into nothingness. This pessimistic theme repeats throughout the poem, at various scales, both intimately, in the lives of individuals, and more grandly, in the fate of whole peoples.

The most obvious example is the life of Beowulf himself, who sees his strength flower in his youth and decline in old age. But it is also present in the Lament of the Sole Survivor, and in the dire predictions of the fate of Beowulf’s people, the Geats, which occupy a large portion of the end of the poem.

Even the beginning of the poem closes on a funeral, recounting the earlier great deeds of the Danes. The present state of the Danes, however, is much reduced. They are beset by troubles, principal among them the monster Grendel, but also the unsubtle hints the poet gives of coming strife, both with other peoples, and within the Danish court, between the king’s nephew and his own children.

The constant repetition of this pattern of decline, told at various scales and in various ways throughout the poem, is what leads to the elegiac mood — a mood of lament for what has been lost — that pervades the poem.

What makes this mood so appropriate for Beowulf is that the poet didn’t have to invent a lost world to mourn. The poem’s events take place over a span of fifty years in late fifth-century and early sixth-century Scandinavia. Many of the events are fantastical, of course, but the core setting was a real time and place. And it really did vanish.

The poem itself was composed later — it’s unclear exactly how much later — under circumstances we can’t reconstruct with any certainty.4 But much of the poem bears the characteristic traces of something that evolved out of oral tradition. Through this oral tradition, memories of that era persist in the poem.

Beowulf is set in the era that archaeologists call the Early Germanic Iron Age, from around AD 400–550. It is bookended by two historical events: at the beginning, the collapse of Roman authority in Western Europe (an event in which Germanic peoples played no small role), and at the end, a climate disaster set off by volcanic eruptions in AD 536–540, which caused a large-scale decline of living standards in Scandinavia.

During this period, while Western Europe was undergoing severe decline, Scandinavia entered its Golden Age. You should take the phrase “Golden Age” literally: immense hordes of gold were deposited in Scandinavia during this period. The gold was ultimately of Roman origin, but the wealth flowed north with the decline of Roman power in Western Europe and the rise in the power of the Germanic peoples, who began to organize themselves into kingdoms.

This Scandinavian Golden Age came to an end, in part due to the climate disaster of the mid-6th century, and in part because the wealth of southern Europe had been exhausted. The gold stopped flowing.

This is the background against which I recommend you read Beowulf, a poem which traces the career of a hero living in the final, declining, years of this period. It’s entirely appropriate that a poem written about that time should be a poem of mourning.

But I digress

Even if Beowulf is an elegy, why does the poet seem incapable of telling it without digressions? Why, immediately after Beowulf has defeated Grendel, are we treated to a retelling of two unrelated stories about characters we never meet: a dragon-slaying hero named Sigemund and a wicked king named Heremod? What do they have to do with Beowulf?

Tolkien — yes, that Tolkien — once asked the same question. Before he became famous as the author of The Lord of the Rings, he was a professional Anglo-Saxonist, and a scholar of Beowulf. The consensus in the field when he began his career was that these digressions were defects in the poem, whose only use was as a scrap-heap to be rifled through for historical information.

At least that was the consensus until 1936, when Tolkien gave a lecture that changed the way people saw Beowulf forever. In that lecture, which he called Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,5 he argued that the digressions weren’t a defect at all. They were essential to the structure of the poem, which, by the way, was actually a great work of literature.

For Tolkien, the digressions served to furnish the world in which Beowulf operated. Not only do they maintain the elegiac mood that saturates Beowulf’s world, but they populate that world with other heroes — and villains — who serve as examples of what a man can become.

The digressions show us what was praiseworthy in this world and what was contemptible. For example, let’s look more closely at the two digressions that follow immediately after Beowulf has slain Grendel: the story of Sigemund the dragon-slayer and the story of Heremod the wicked king.

Why these stories at this moment? They serve to place the actions of Beowulf, the character, within the context of what is morally possible in the world.

A hero could rise as high as Sigemund, fighting dragons singlehandedly and freeing its hoarded treasure. Or he could sink as low as Heremod, who refused to distribute treasure to his people. Instead, he kept the wealth to himself, like a human version of a dragon, and like Sigemund’s dragon, he too met his end for it.

The poet does not make the conclusions explicit for you. He simply places the images of Sigemund and Heremod in proximity and lets you work out what it means. As a result, other answers than the one I’ve given here are possible, probably even necessary, which leads me to my final point: Beowulf is one of those few, special texts that, to adapt Walt Whitman, contains multitudes. No matter how much you look into Beowulf, it never seems to exhaust its ability to surprise you.

Because Beowulf is so inexhaustible, I have a word of advice for anyone set on reading it.

You must re-read Beowulf

You’re not going to get everything out of Beowulf in your first reading. You may not even be able to exhaust what Beowulf has to offer in a lifetime, although I’ve not yet attempted this.

My experience has been that Beowulf yields up something different every time you approach it. Depending on the stage of life you find yourself in, you may be more attracted to the boastful energy of the young Beowulf, or perhaps you’ll identify more with the older Beowulf looking back on his long and storied life.

Your interests may change: on one occasion you may read Beowulf with an eye for the monsters and the fighting. Another time, your interests may lie in uncovering the politicking of the Danish court, or untangling the sequence of events that made up the Swedish-Geatish wars discussed in the final part of the poem. You may become fascinated by the balance struck between Christian and pre-Christian elements in the poem, or the folkloric material that several of the episodes in Beowulf seem to have been drawn from. Suddenly, one day, you may be seized by a desire to learn more about what archaeology can tell us about the period.

There are many ways to enjoy Beowulf, and you don’t have to choose just one. If you’re anything like me, different interests and themes will take hold of you on different occasions as you re-read the poem.

But re-read you must. Because Old English — the language Beowulf was written in — is essentially a foreign language, most people will read Beowulf in translation (and here’s some advice for choosing your first translation). The need to read in translation, however, can be a blessing in disguise, because you can simply change your translation and the poem becomes half-new once again.

Of course, if you’ve truly been bitten by the Beowulf bug, you’ll want to read it in the original Old English. If this sounds like it describes you, I’ve written up some (rather comprehensive) advice on how to get started.

If you do want to read the original, I won’t sugar-coat it: Beowulf is a challenging text, even for students of Old English. But you don’t need to be able to read the poem fluently to derive some benefit from knowing a bit of Old English, even when you’re reading a Modern English translation.

Translators always have to make interpretive decisions, and these decisions are often hidden to you, the reader. If you know Old English well enough to pick out which word in the original corresponds to which word in the translation, you’d be wise to have the original open alongside the translation as you read. You’ll be surprised at how a word that you thought was of great significance in the translation turns out to correspond to nothing at all in the original: it’s simply been added to make the Modern English flow better.

You can get the same effect by reading multiple translations, as different translators tend to make different decisions. By seeing where translators differ, you get a sense of what parts of the original give them the most trouble. That’s also where all the fun is, once you learn Old English.

There is, however, one joy that the Old English reader has which is entirely withheld from the reader of a translation: the joy of the sonic texture of the original.

Beowulf was written in alliterative verse, which — if you’ve never heard it recited — has a propulsive energy which is hard to replicate. Many translators have attempted to capture this energy in their Modern English renderings, but none, in my opinion, have truly succeeded. How could they? Keeping the meaning intact while also working within the constraints of alliterative verse in Modern English is virtually impossible.

Whether you end up reading Beowulf in translation or in the original, knowing what to expect is half the battle. If you go in expecting a heroic succession of monster fights, you’ll be puzzled, perhaps even disappointed, by the other 87% of the poem. But if you understand what that other 87% is doing, you’re going into your encounter with Beowulf armed with everything you need to enjoy it.

So go pick up Beowulf. At 3182 lines, it’s something you can read in a few hours. This is a poem that will keep you company for the rest of your life.

In a way, Beowulf is like the Sole Survivor. It too has come through great dangers to stand before us as the last witness to a world that no longer exists. But unlike the Sole Survivor, whose name was lost forever, the glory of Beowulf will never truly die, as long as we keep reading it.

P.S. Want to hear some Old English?

If you’d like to listen to Beowulf — and other Old English texts — in the original, I’ve been working on a way: an app called Ekho, which is an audio library providing definitive recordings of historical texts in the original language, beginning with Old English and Ancient Greek.

My recording of Beowulf is currently available on the app and covers up to the end of the fight with Grendel, with new content added every month.

Full disclosure: I have a stake in the project, so I’m not a neutral party here. But if you’re the kind of person who wants to read Old English literature in the original language, I think you’ll really enjoy it.

What’s especially fun about Ekho is that the voice actors (myself included) use carefully reconstructed historical pronunciation schemes, so you can hear Beowulf and other texts as close to how they would have originally sounded as possible.

They have a rotating free sample text for each language: currently, for Old English, it’s The Wanderer — another fine example of Old English elegy, by the way.

Listen here!

Works Cited

• Fulk, Robert D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. (2008). Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 4th edition.

• Tolkien, J. R. R. (1936). Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

It was upon a morning of uncommon brilliance, in the Year of Grace one thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven — a date, dear reader, which shall presently disclose its peculiar significance — that an Englishman of the better sort ventures forth to take the air.

Our Englishman is, you must understand, one of those gentlemen so very emblematic of this our Victorian Era, secure in the conviction that, in taking his constitutional, he is rendering some small service to the Empire. Her Majesty has need of healthy tailors, barristers, sea captains, and the like.

On such a day as this, nothing can disturb his equanimity. Or so it appears to our Englishman, until he passes by a small but uncommonly deep pool, of the kind often to be found in the English countryside, wherein he espies a man thrashing about.

A damnable fuss, thinks our Englishman, the fellow is making. He walks on, quickening his pace somewhat, the better to pass the pool with dispatch.

But the man flailing in the pool catches sight of the Englishman, and cries out, “I will drown! I will drown!”

The Englishman can discern from the drowning man’s accent that he is a Frenchman. Or a German. Some manner of foreigner, at any event.

Our Englishman hesitates. The matter does appear to be of some seriousness. Nevertheless, presently, after a moment’s reflection, he walks on.

“I will drown!” calls the man in the pool a third time. “I will drown, and no one shall save me!”

The Englishman pauses at the side of the pool, an inward conflict stirring within his breast. Ought he to save the man in the pool? After what seems an eternity, the Englishman arrives at a decision. He walks on, and leaves the man to drown.

Later that same evening, the Englishman recounts his encounter with the Frenchman of the pool to his friends at the club, satisfied in the knowledge that he has acted rightly. He is, after all, nothing if not a respecter of persons.

One of his friends, a Scotsman, is astonished. “How could you leave a man to drown, even if he be a Frenchman?”

The Englishman, with great solemnity, returns, “It was no easy matter. Indeed, I was obliged to overrule every natural inclination of brotherhood to do so. But I could not but respect his wishes. As the man himself declared, ‘I will drown. No one shall save me.’”

“But why,” rejoins the Scotsman, with the bluff directness of his race, “did you not heed his petition? Was he not, in plain terms, asking for aid?”

“Certainly not,” observed the Englishman. “As the eminent Bishop Lowth has plainly laid down in his Grammar, will, when predicated of the first person, as in I will, indicates desire. Shall, when predicated of the third person, denotes command or injunction. The Frenchman’s express desire was to drown, and his command to me was precisely that I do nothing. Though it pained me as an Englishman, I was compelled to obey.”

The Scotsman is dumbfounded, and later lays the matter before the local constabulary, who, having weighed the particulars with due gravity, are pleased to certify that no wrongdoing whatsoever has been committed.

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 (currently) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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A joke like this is first recorded in 1804, mocking the rather bizarre state of affairs that once prevailed in English — or, more correctly, in particular kinds of English of southern England — regarding the use of the words will and shall.

Some of you may have even been exposed to memories of learning a will/shall rule, a bit of prescriptive grammar requiring you to use shall to express future time in the first person (with I and we), and will otherwise. As our Englishman explained, using will in the first person indicated a wish, and use of shall outside of the first person meant a command or prohibition.

This rule, which I believe is moribund today if not utterly dead, caused grief to generations of schoolchildren and learners of English as a second language due to its counterintuitive nature.

That it was equally vexing to everyone can be seen from the fact that the identity of the drowning man differs from telling to telling. Sometimes he’s French, sometimes German, and sometimes even Scottish.

I, for one, do not lament the loss of the will/shall rule, at least in my capacity as a writer and speaker of English.

But, as a linguist, I’ve always found it fascinating. It could only have arisen at a very particular point in the history of the English language, when two different verbs were competing to serve as the substitute for English’s missing future tense.

If it seems strange that I’m saying English has no future tense after about 700 words of discussing will and shall, let me clarify that I mean that English has no single verb form associated with future time, nothing equivalent to the past tense forms was, sang, or waited. The past is a proper tense in English, as is the present. The future is not.

That’s not to say English has no way of expressing the meaning of future time. In fact, it has several: besides the bare present — the verb without any ending at all — such as in we leave at daybreak, we can also use modal verbs such as will and, less often, shall.

Modal verbs, by the way, are verbs like will, shall, can, must, and friends: they express notions of possibility and necessity rather than describing actions or states. They have many special properties, among which is the fact that they never take -s (He sing-s but He can sing; never ❌He cans sing)

There are other options for marking future time in English beyond modal verbs. Probably the most common is the going to construction, as in I’m going to leave at daybreak.

There are some subtle differences between these various ways of marking future time, and restrictions on when each can be used. If you’re a native speaker of English, you instinctively know all this already, even if you don’t know you do.

Future time can be indicated with:

1. The present tense, along with explicit time marking: We leave at daybreak. The sun sets at 7:30pm tonight.

2. The present tense, in a subordinate clause: If you see her there, say hello for me. I’ll leave when I’m ready.

3. The present progressive, along with explicit time marking: I’m actually seeing that movie later today.

4. The modal will, especially when you’re talking about a plan you’re making in the moment: You know what? I will have the cheesecake.

5. The going to construction, especially when describing plans made earlier: I’m going to stop by the supermarket later; do you need anything?

To make matters more complicated, many of these strategies also have other uses. For example, the bare present is also used for habitual action (He smokes.) or proverbial statements (Birds of a feather flock together.) The modal will is also used for suppositions (That’ll be Emma at the door.) or for proverbial statements (Boys will be boys.).

And then there’s the modal shall, which seems at once roughly synonymous with will, yet differing in formality or the precise situations in which it’s used, not to mention the will/shall rule that caused so much grief to our poor German/Frenchman in the pool above.

It’s all a very strange state of affairs. Why did English develop such a baroque system for pointing out when an action has yet to happen?

As is so often the case, this weirdness is a family affair. In fact, we can learn a lot about why English is so strange by looking at its relatives, both near and far. Germanic languages all developed remarkably similar strategies for marking the future.

What’s strange is that they all did so separately, as if each language had been acted on by some outside force, compelling it to come up with a way to express future time. In fact, that is likely exactly what happened.

Read more

This time, we covered:

• The symbolism of the Pentangle, or endless knot

• Gawain’s ride north

• Sir Bertilak’s uncanny resemblence to another hoge hathel

• The agreement between Gawain and Bertilak

If you’d like to participate in a future book club, you can do so by signing up as a paid subscriber below.

Read more

I’m surprised that a war has never begun over a point of grammar.

Wars have begun over a pig, a bucket, and an ear, but so far never grammar.

Which, as silly as it may sound, is more surprising than you may think. Language is simultaneously public and private property, which makes it particularly prone to conflict.

A language exists as knowledge in our individual minds — so my English feels like mine and no one else’s — but at the same time it’s also a means of communication and a way of signalling that you belong, which makes English feel like a shared project that we all have a stake in.

When someone uses a bit of grammar you don’t approve of, it can feel like they’re endangering that shared project. But when someone doesn’t approve of your grammar, it can feel like a personal insult. Conflict seems inevitable.

And much to the dismay of grammarphobes the world over, grammar is inescapable: it’s not just the choice of one word or another, but a fundamental part of the logic of the language itself.

Luckily, disputes over grammar haven’t yet escalated to the point of international conflict. But wars of words are relatively common, especially where the choice of variant has become associated with different national identities.

Verb forms seem especially prone to these kinds of disputes: think of British got vs. American gotten, British dived vs. American dove, and British sneaked vs. American snuck.

This last form, snuck, is still controversial, even among American writers.

As late as 2010, the Paris Review‘s blog could still draw fire for using snuck. Although no injuries were reported, I wonder if the conflict might have been avoided altogether if the anti-snuck side knew just what the word represented: a living fossil from an ancestor of English, one spoken before the birth of Socrates.

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.

This is the second 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. Read it from the beginning here.

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 (currently) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Subscribe now

In spite of continued anti-snuck ire, snuck seems to be winning. When the American Heritage Dictionary asked its usage panel (consisting of a group of 200 prominent writers) in 1988, two thirds disapproved of snuck. But when they asked the same question again to the panel convened in 2008, three quarters approved.1

Although its rise to respectability has been quick in recent years, snuck was long considered a provincial, inelegant, or unsophisticated alternative to sneaked.

The more regular past tense form sneaked does have the advantage of age: it’s the form used when sneak first appeared in the written record, which it does relatively late: around the year 1600.

Snuck is indeed a relative newcomer to the language. The first attestation the Oxford English Dictionary gives for snuck dates back to 1887, although it almost certainly circulated in speech before then. The OED reports that it first appeared in a New Orleans newspaper called The Lantern, and retained its regional associations for the first part of its life.

Along with that regional stamp, snuck had all the usual connotations of innovative grammar: it was informal, and therefore unsuitable for use in writing.

That lasted for a while: but snuck eventually escaped the American South, made its way into print, and, as the AHD’s Usage Panel attests, into the canons of acceptable use as well, even if there were a few dissenters remaining in 2010.

It’s not common for a new irregular verb to be born. As we saw in the previous instalment of this series, irregular verbs tend to be fossils, remnants of older layers of the language which linger on because the words are too common to clean up.

That’s not the case with snuck. It can’t be an ancient fossil because even the word sneak itself is modern: its first attestation is younger than some of Shakespeare’s plays. In fact, sneak is first attested in none other than Shakespeare (Henry IV, Part I, 1598), although the word probably existed before it was written down.

Instead, snuck is more like the newest member of a very ancient club. The verb sneak just looked enough like one of the members that the doorman waved it through.

The rules of this exclusive club date back two thousand years or more, to a time when an ancestor of English was spoken in the forests around the Baltic Sea.

Established, 500 BC

We don’t know what these peoples would have called themselves, or even if they would have had an idea that they were all part of an overarching group. We give them the name Germanic, which is a linguistic designation: we work backwards from their language, which we call Proto-Germanic.

Like Proto-Indo-European (PIE) before it, Proto-Germanic has been given this name because it is the ancestor of the Germanic family of languages, which includes German, unsurprisingly, but also Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, and, most importantly for our story, English.

Because these early Germanic peoples didn’t leave us any writing — or nearly any, depending on how you date the earliest runic inscriptions — we must reconstruct their language as we did their Indo-European ancestors.

So when we write their words, such as *harjaz ‘army’ or *berhtaz ‘bright,’ we add an asterisk in front, just as we did for the PIE words in Part 1 of this series. This indicates that the word has been reconstructed rather than attested in writing.2

You can draw a clean line of descent back from English as it is spoken today, all the way to this Proto-Germanic language. There’s no clean break where Proto-Germanic, or some intermediate language, decisively ends and English begins. Equally, there was no single moment we can identify when PIE became Proto-Germanic.

Nevertheless, there are conventional dates we give to Proto-Germanic: 500 BC–AD 200. The earlier boundary is set by the dating of one particular sound shift which divides PIE from Proto-Germanic: the change of PIE *k into Proto-Germanic *h.3

The story involves cannabis.

As Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC) tells us, the Scythians — his vague term for northern peoples — had recently introduced the cannabis plant to the Greeks. If these Scythians were in fact the speakers of Proto-Germanic or a close relative, their language could not have gone through that *k to *h sound shift by the time they gave cannabis to the Greeks: otherwise, the Greeks would have heard something more like hannapis.4

A Proto-Germanic word sounding like *hannapis did undoubtedly exist later on, however: we know this because it gave us, through the Old English intermediary hænep, our modern word hemp.

Although there are details in this argument some might quibble with — were the Scythians really the same peoples who spoke Proto-Germanic? — the dating of 500 BC is generally accepted as close enough to be useful.

On the other end, the year AD 200 is derived from the first appearance of writing in Germanic languages: the famous runic inscriptions. These are generally short phrases on objects such as combs and brooches; first appearing in the late 2nd century AD, they show languages beginning to diverge from one another.5

Although the Proto-Germanic language was descended from Proto-Indo-European, the speakers of Proto-Germanic lived very differently from their linguistic ancestors.

Instead of the treeless plains of the steppe, they inhabited the forests and marshy lowlands around the Baltic and the North Sea, in places we now call Jutland, southern Sweden, and the coast of northern Germany.

They were settled rather than nomadic: they raised cattle, sheep, and pigs. They lived in longhouses with the family at one end and the cattle at the other, likely to share heat through the long winters. They grew oats, wheat, and barley in small fields which they fertilized with manure from the same cattle they shared quarters with.6

Much of what we know about these Germanic peoples of the north comes from their interactions with the Roman Empire, their mighty neighbours to the south.

The Romans represented both threat and opportunity: they could be partners in trade or opponents on the battlefield, depending on the day. The Roman army represented a place where a young warrior from the north could make a good living. As a result of these interactions, it was Roman writer Tacitus who gives us the first written account of the Germanic peoples.

In his book Germania, written AD 98, Tacitus describes a warlike society, one organized around institutions such as the extended family and the war-band. It was a society which took oaths and hospitality very seriously. Although Tacitus saw these early Germanic peoples through a distorted lens, much of what he described has been corroborated by later evidence.

It’s also from the Romans that we start to hear the voices of these peoples, albeit in distorted form.

Tacitus, for example, gives us the names by which some of these Germanic tribes and confederations called themselves. There are some familiar names if you know your European geography: Suebi (compare Swabia, a region in Germany), Frisii (Friesland), Chatti (Hesse), among many others. These names, filtered through Roman ears, are some of our earliest evidence of Proto-Germanic words.

But we get far more evidence for what Proto-Germanic was like by looking at the languages that came after, among them English. As a result, the sounds, grammar, and vocabulary of the Proto-Germanic language is fairly well understood.

It’s in Proto-Germanic that the club was founded that snuck sneaked into.

Why it’s easier to become weak than strong

Every Germanic language makes a distinction between two different types of verbs. They’re classified based on how they form the past tense.

Some verbs — most verbs — add a suffix. In English, this suffix is usually spelled -ed. So dance becomes danced, attack becomes attacked, and prognosticate becomes prognosticated. These are called the weak verbs.

Others change something on the inside: sing becomes sang, wind becomes wound, ride becomes rode. These are the strong verbs, and the vowel-changing pattern itself has a name: ablaut, German for ‘vowel alternation.’

This opposition between weak and strong verbs is unique to the Germanic family. In every Germanic language, there is a group of more or less regular verbs that form the past tense by adding a suffix like -ed.

This is called the dental suffix, because the d-sound in -ed is formed near the teeth, as are the other variants of this suffix in English and other Germanic languages, such as -t as in English dealt, the -de in Swedish kallade ‘called,’ and the -te in German werkte ‘worked (on a handicraft).’7

Of the two types, the strong verbs are much older. They preserve a pattern for expressing the different tenses of verbs — a pattern that has its roots in PIE, but which died out in almost all the descendant languages.

But ablaut lived on in Germanic. In fact, it became even more prominent there. Germanic languages took the ablaut patterns present in PIE verbs and streamlined it, creating a system of different verb classes.

A verb class is simply a group of verbs which all work in the same way. In Proto-Germanic, the different verb classes each had a particular pattern of alternating vowels.

It’s easiest to see how it works by looking at an English example, but all Germanic languages work more or less the same way: one class of English strong verbs marks the present tense with an i-vowel and the past tense with an o-vowel: ride/rode, drive/drove, write/wrote. These verbs form a class because they all express their past tense forms in exactly the same way: by replacing i with o.8

The weak verbs, on the other hand, were an innovation peculiar to the Germanic family. Because weak verbs are present in every Germanic language, linguists have concluded that weak verbs must have been there in their common ancestor, Proto-Germanic.

This newer family of weak verbs was much more regular than the older strong verbs, and, as a result, were much easier to learn. And so, as English developed over the centuries, the proportion of strong verbs has continued to shrink.

New verbs have almost always been formed as weak verbs: for example, the past tense of google is googled, not gogle. Even the absolute number of strong verbs has decreased, since many strong verbs have become weak over time (until the 16th century, we used to say I holp rather than I helped).9

So snuck is truly a rarity: a new strong verb.

Weak verbs becoming strong is extremely rare, although it does occur from time to time, as in the case of snuck. Other examples of verbs with weak-to-strong transformations in their past are dig, wear, ring (a bell), and — also controversial — dive, which all had weak verb forms before they acquired dug, wore, rang, and dove.

To understand why it’s easier to become weak than strong, we need to explore one of the most powerful — and hardest to predict — forces in language change: analogy.

Brang, bote, wope

The human mind learns language as a mixture of memorized facts and rules that can be applied in many situations.

For example, the fact that man has the plural men is a fact a learner of English must memorize. But the fact that dog has the plural form dogs can be learned as a rule, because — unless otherwise specified — English nouns form their plural by adding -s.

This simple plural rule — plural = singular + -s — began its life as the special plural ending of one type of noun. But it ended up taking on a life of its own, and gradually took over every noun in the language.

Veterans of standardized tests will recognize the process by which this occurred. The SAT in particular is famous for its “analogy questions,” which require you to apply a relationship between one pair of items to another pair, like this: “Hand is to glove as foot is to _______.” (shoe)

Analogy in language change works in much the same way: when speakers need to form the plural of, say, the word eye, they may perform an analogy: singular dog is to plural dogs as singular eye is to plural ______ (eyes).

Originally, the plural of eye was eyen; the reason it’s not eyen anymore is analogy.

The reason analogy is such a powerful force in language change is that learning things by rule saves mental effort. Analogy allows us to extend rules beyond the words they originally applied to.

When a word is common enough, it tends to resist analogy: we hear it so often that there’s not much effort expended to memorize it. This is why, as we saw in Part 1, it’s precisely the most common verbs in a language that are irregular.

But any irregularity present in less common verbs tends to get removed by analogy: this is why strong verbs have tended to become weak over time. The regular way of forming the past tense — the weak verb way, by adding -ed — exerts a gravitational pull in the minds of a language’s speakers, pulling formerly strong verbs into its orbit.

But strong verbs are not entirely irregular either. There are islands of regularity within the strong verbs, such as the i~o pattern we identified earlier: ride/rode, drive/drove, and write/wrote.

This rule, too, has its own gravitational pull, albeit a weak one. But it was strong enough to drag in the verb strive, from Old French estriver ‘compete,’ which is a rare example of a borrowed word becoming a strong verb.

Strive became a strong verb, with past tense strove, on analogy to drive and its past tense drove. Another one that sneaked — snuck? — by the bouncer.

We see the same thing happen with children. A child who has learned that sing has the past-tense form sang may surprise you by saying she brang her teddy bear to the picnic.10 The strong verb pattern in sing/sang has taken on a life of its own, and, by analogy, a non-standard verb bring/brang emerges.

Now, the verb bring is itself irregular, albeit a different kind of irregular: bring/brought is in fact a weak verb in origin, which you can tell from the -t ending denoting the past tense.

But the kind of irregularity in bring/brought is more irregular than sing/sang, because the i~a alternation in sing/sang occurs in other verbs. Sing/sang forms a group with sink/sank, ring/rang, swim/swam, and others.

It’s this semi-regularity that analogy latches on to. And this is the source of snuck: although the precise ea~u alternation we see in sneak/snuck is not found elsewhere in English, a phonetically very close alternation i~u is found in dig/dug and stick/stuck.

The similarity between sneak and stick, although not exact, was enough to allow sneak to join the strong verb club. There was enough of an island of regularity around verbs like dig and stick for the forces of analogy to “regularize” sneak/sneaked.

There’s an irony here: analogy usually produces regularity, but, in producing snuck, it made sneak less regular than it had been before.

Why sneak and not some other verb? That is likely to remain a mystery. But snuck seems to be here to stay, at least in North America.11 It’s no danger to the shared project that is the English language.

If anything, it’s part of what makes English the language it is. Despite all the imported words that English picked up over the years, the Germanic heritage of English remains a living force. It’s strong enough to invent new strong verbs thousands of years after the system of strong verbs was first established in Proto-Germanic.

The grammatical pattern that took shape 2500 years ago in longhouses on the shores of the Baltic Sea lived on in 19th-century New Orleans, and it lives on today. Perhaps it will even claim another verb: drug for dragged still hovers outside the threshold of literary respectability, but that’s nothing a future war of words can’t solve.

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Works Cited

• Bybee, Joan L., and Dan I. Slobin (1982). “Rules and schemas in the development and use of English past tense.” Language 58: 265–289.

• Haselgrove, Colin, Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, and Peter S. Wells, eds. (2023). The Oxford Handbook of the European Iron Age.

• Smith, Jeremy J. (2007). Sound Change and the History of English.

• Todd, Malcolm (2004). The Early Germans.

• Xu, Fei, and Steven Pinker (1995). “Weird past tense forms.” Journal of Child Language 22: 531–556.

Some historical figures seem prone to attracting anecdotes. The anecdotes are often spurious, but we don’t seem especially bothered when we learn they’re bogus.

These apocryphal stories attach themselves to the great wits of their age. This is, for example, how George Bernard Shaw became associated with the joke that English spelling is so chaotic that ghoti was a possible spelling of the word fish.

The fact that the ghoti joke was first recorded before Shaw’s birth hasn’t dislodged the association in the public mind. Shaw didn’t come up with it, but it’s the kind of thing that Shaw would have come up with, and that’s enough.

No one has attracted more of these spurious anecdotes than Winston Churchill.

One that is very close to my heart as a linguist concerns a bit of grammar. As one version of the story goes, Churchill had written an important speech to deliver in the House of Commons. As was his usual practice, he submitted the speech to the Foreign Office for comment before delivering it.

When it returned, it bore only a single remark: he had ended one of his sentences with a preposition, and the editor suggested a revision to correct the error.

Churchill replied with a note: “This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”

In other versions, it’s not arrant pedantry that Churchill took issue with, but impertinence or bloody nonsense. You can read a full account of Ben Zimmer’s investigation of the ultimate origin of the anecdote here, but it’s unlikely that it ever happened, especially to Churchill.

This anecdote has survived — and maintained its association with Churchill — because it’s truer than true: Responding to a pedantic editor with a cutting jibe is exactly what we expect Churchill would have done in this situation. Whether it actually happened is entirely besides the point.

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 (in progress) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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The pedantic editor, or, less flatteringly, the grammar Nazi, is a figure most of us have some personal experience with. Churchill’s quip is satisfying because we’d like so much to reply to our would-be editors that way. By following the editor’s rule to the letter, he demonstrated just how absurd it is.

But why does this absurd rule — don’t end a sentence with a preposition — exist? After all, prepositions seem like fine things to end English sentences with. And yet, ending sentences with prepositions is a practice of which many people disapprove.

A grammatical construction can only be controversial when there’s a genuine choice whether to use it or not. And there is a choice here: for every sentence in English that you could end with a preposition, there’s also an alternative which avoids doing so.

For example, both of the following sentences are said and understood by English speakers the world over:

• Who did you give the book to?

• To whom did you give the book?

With this choice come connotations. Who did you give the book to? sounds more casual than the rather formal-sounding To whom did you give the book?

If you followed the pedantic rule, you’d be forced to sound formal all the time, which is not something up with which you should put, any more than Churchill did.

So the question becomes: why does English have a choice in these situations? And why does the choice of a bit of grammar carry so much social weight?

The second question has a simple answer: I can even tell you the exact person to blame, if you’re in the mood to point fingers. But the first question is by far the more interesting one, and we can’t answer it without telling the story of a revolution in English grammar often left out of the history books.

Read more

This time, we covered:

• Where and when the poem was written

• The Gawain poet’s Middle English dialect

• Norse vs. French vocabulary

• Who was the Green Knight?

• Among other things.

If you’d like to participate in a future book club, you can do so by signing up as a paid subscriber below.

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It’s raining. I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s April in England.

Around me on the platform the commuters are assembling for the 7:42 train. The man in the grey hoodie has been pacing for twenty minutes, explaining his startup idea. The young woman next to the bin is recording something which I assume is destined for TikTok.

I can see the barista who made it through the window of the station café. I think his nose ring might violate some sort of health code. Beside me, someone in a Lululemon gilet is telling a woman I’m sure he literally just met all about his morning routine. He’s really into cold plunge and morning pages.

Better her than me.

I look down at my phone. I’m reading Chaucer.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote...

I look up from the screen at the dreary weather. This Aprill‘s shoures don’t feel quite so soote — that is, sweet — to me.

I return to my screen and read on. The crowd around me grows thicker. I try to ignore them and focus on what I’m reading. This is a great part of the Tales, where Chaucer starts to describe the condicioun and degree of the company of pilgrims he’s found himself in: the prioress, the merchant, the cook, the pardoner.

If you haven’t read The Canterbury Tales, this all might sound a bit strange. Who is the prioress? Who is the merchant? Who — and what — is a pardoner? Don’t these people have names?

Some of them do, but Chaucer doesn’t really care about their names. These characters aren’t individuals, but types. Each one stands for a whole category of people that you’d run into in 14th-century England.

The Canterbury Tales is a masterpiece of world literature in part because of the satirical portraits it paints of these typical specimens of late medieval English life. Often, Chaucer seems to praise them, but the little details give away that we’re not entirely meant to approve of these characters: the judge whose best talent is making himself look busy, the monk who enjoys hunting and eating more than the simple life, or the doctor who thought gold (given to him) was the best medicine.

But who was this Geoffrey Chaucer, apart from a keen observer of human nature? He was an English poet, diplomat, and civil servant whose career spanned the late 1300s.

He was an English poet in two senses: one, he was himself English, and he wrote his poetry in English. The second sense is the significant one. He wrote in English at a time when English had, for centuries, been a language of relatively low prestige.1

French was spoken at court, and Latin was the language of scholarship. It was Chaucer’s English-language works that showed that English was a language fit for serious literature, and none more so than The Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales as a collection of stories within a frame story: a collection of pilgrims gathered at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, just south of London. They are bound for Canterbury, and in particular, to the shrine of Thomas Becket, also known as Saint Thomas of Canterbury. The shrine was a major destination for pilgrims in late medieval England.

Canterbury is about 60 miles (96 km) from London. Today, that’s a train ride of just over an hour. But in Chaucer’s day it would have been a journey of three to four days.

To pass the time on their journey, the company of pilgrims gathered at the Tabard decided to tell stories. These stories are the Tales themselves. But, before the tales proper, Chaucer spends some time introducing each of the pilgrims. This part is called the General Prologue and it’s the source of the character portraits that Chaucer became famous for.

The cast of characters that Chaucer lampooned in the 1300s are still with us today. Some of the surface details have changed, but human nature has not.

If Chaucer were with us today, what would he make of these modern-day pilgrims, waiting on the platform of the commuter train? Would he see the Prioress live on in the influencer filming for Tiktok? Would he be able to look at the startup founder in the hoodie and see the spiritual descendant of the Merchant in his beaver cap?

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 (starting next week!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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I think he might. So I rewrote Chaucer’s General Prologue, this time adapted for the 7:42 train. I wrote it in Chaucer’s Middle English, with Modern English translation alongside. Read whichever version you want, or both: but don’t be afraid of the Middle English. You’ll understand more than you might expect. If you want to read aloud, I wrote up a guide for pronouncing Middle English last week.

I’ll begin as Chaucer did, with a reverdie, that is, a piece of verse celebrating of the return of spring. You can read Chaucer’s here.

His is sophisticated: he begins with an elaborate sentence cataloguing the effects of the season on plants, animals, and human beings, full of references to astrology, mythology, and the latest advances in 14th-century botany.

Mine begins rather more humbly, with a complaint about the English weather:

Whan that Aprill with his morwes colde
When April, with its cold mornings,

Hath dryuen folk from bed, though noon be bolde,
has driven people from bed, though none are bold,

And every wight moot risen vp bitime
and every person must get up on time

The trayn to kacche er it hath rong his chime,
to catch the train before it rings its chime,

Than longen folk to coffey and to bedde
then people long for coffee and for bed,

But stonden in the stacioun in stedde,
but stand in the station instead.

And pilgrimes been alle, that moten fare
And pilgrims they all are, who must travel

Toward hire offices with heuy care.
toward their offices with heavy hearts.

Bifel that as I waited in the reyn
It happened that, as I waited in the rain

At Caunterbury for the morwe trayn,
at Canterbury for the morning train,

Ther was ycome into that weste place
there had come into that barren place

A compaignye of folk of sondry grace.
a company of people of various kinds.

Ful twenty wightes preste for to wende
A full twenty souls, ready to travel

To Londoun Toune, and I shal comprehende
to London, and I shall describe

Of ech the condicioun, and trewly telle
each one’s situation, and truly tell

Hir craft, hir cloth, hir chere, and eek hir spelle.
their craft, their clothes, their bearing, and also what they said.

Some fun Middle English words in this section:

• wight. being, person.

• moot/moten. must.

• bitime. early.

• sondry. various, different.

• prest. ready, eager, prompt. (cf. French prêt ‘ready‘)

• chere. face, expression, mood, behaviour. (cf. Spanish cara ‘face’; becomes Modern English cheer, as in good cheer)

• spell. story, statement, conversation. (the source of -spel in Gospel, i.e. ‘good news’)

The Influenser

The Influencer is the modern equivalent of Chaucer’s Prioress. In the Prioress, Chaucer shows us a woman who is concerned with being seen correctly. The Prioress was a nun, but a rather worldly one: she kept pampered lapdogs and wore a brooch that read Amor vincit omnia, or “Love conquers all.” Her exquisite table manners came not from a monastic rule but from a courtly romance.

Today we’d call her “performative.” After six hundred years, the platform has changed, but the performance has not.

Ther was an INFLUENSER, fair and free,
There was an INFLUENCER, fair and gracious,

That hadde ygadered folk in greet plentee;
who had gathered people in great abundance.

Hir “folweres,” as men clepen hem, I gesse,
Her “followers,” as they’re called, I believe,

Weren ten thousand, no more ne lesse,
were ten thousand, no more, no less,

And yet she knew nat oon of hem by name,
and yet she didn’t know a single one of them by name,

But louede hem alle, saide sche, the same.
but loved them, she said, all the same.

Ful fetisly she coude hir mete arraye
Very elegantly she could arrange her food

Upon a plater, in a certeyn waye,
upon a plate, in a particular way,

And take hir liknesse with mirour bright
and take her own likeness with a bright mirror

(A thyng no gretter than hir hond, all light)
(a thing no bigger than her hand, all shining)

And sende it forth into the worldes webbe
and send it forth into the world’s web,

That alle myghten seen, and so wolde ebbe
so that everyone might see it, and so her loneliness

Hir onlinesse a whil. For swich entente
might decrease for a while. For this was her intent:

Had she: to seemen blisful and contente.
to seem happy and content.

Hir clothes chaungen every wike, certeyn,
Her outfits changed every week, indeed,

Sche nolde leten hem be twyes seyn.
she did not want them to be seen twice.

The marchauntes sente hir robes, shoes, creeme,
The merchants sent her clothes, shoes, and creams,

Withouten cost, for folk to hire streme,
free of charge, for people stream to her.

And she hadde lerned wel this sotil art:
For she had learned well this subtle art:

That alle wolden haue an otheres part.
that everyone wants to have another’s lot in life.

Vocabulary:

• free. free; here gracious, noble.

• clepen. call.

• fetisly. skilfully, elegantly.

• mete. food. (becomes Modern English meat)

• onlinesse. loneliness.

• swich. such.

• certeyn. indeed.

• part. part, allotted portion, lot.

The Foundour

The Founder is like Chaucer’s Merchant: loud, outwardly prosperous, and secretly drowning in debt. The Merchant spoke “sownynge alwey th’encrees of his wynnyng” (always concerning his winnings). He was, the narrator notes drily, “a worthy man with alle,” though Chaucer never could learn his name.

The modern version has a hoodie instead of a Flemish beaver hat, but the elevator pitch is the same.

A FOUNDOUR ther was, with no berde at alle,
A FOUNDER there was, with no beard at all,

But smothe of cheke as maydenes in the halle,
but smooth of cheek as maidens in the hall,

In robes graye of sotil cloth, ful fyne:
in fine grey robes of subtle cloth —

A “hoodye,” as they seyen in his lyne.
a “hoodie,” as they say in his business.

He spak ful loude of thynges yet to rise.
He spoke loudly of things yet to arise,

And swoor he wolde chaunge al marchaundise.
and swore he would change all commerce.

“Disrupcioun!” cryed he to ech he mette,
“Disruption!” he cried to everyone he met,

And “Passioun!” and “Growthe!” — and yit his dette
and “Passion!” and “Growth!” — and yet his debt

Was gretter than his gold withouten doute.
was greater than his gold, without a doubt.

The investours, they folwed hym aboute
The investors followed him around

And gaf hym gold upon his worde aloon,
and gave him gold on his word alone,

For he had swich a fyr in euery boon
for he had such fire in every bone

That men bileeved he mighte do the dede,
that men believed he might accomplish the deed,

Though noon might saye wherto it coud lede.
though none could say where it would lead.

Vpon his flatte booke of glowynge light
Upon his flat book of glowing light

He tappede from morwenyng to the nyght,
he tapped from morning until night,

And every morwe roos er houre of pryme,
and every morning rose before the hour of prime (the first hour of daylight)

To rede the wordes of the olde tyme,
to read the words of the old time,

A book of “Habitz,” and to ronne faste,
a book of “Habits,” and to run fast,

Demyng he sholde be firste, nat the laste.
believing he would be the first, not last.

What was this grete thing he wroghte, his deed?
And what was this great thing he was building?

Pardee! An “app” for folk to parten breed.
By God! An app for people to share bread.

Vocabulary:

• lyne. line; here meaning class of persons.

• pardee. by God! (cf. French par Dieu ‘by God’)

• parten. share.

The Bariste

The Barista is the Cook, a genuine craftsman with real skill, undercut by a single deflating physical detail. Chaucer’s Cook could roast and boil and fry with the best of them, but… he had an open sore on his shin, which is mentioned right next to his finest dish, so you couldn’t eat without thinking of it.

The Barista’s nose ring does the same work: the narrator sees it on the train and can’t stop imagining what might fall on to the latte art. I still shudder to think of it.

A BARISTE ther was, of Southwerk toun,
A barista there was, from Southwark town,

That served a drynke of derknes, thik and broun,
who served a drink of darkness, thick and brown,

With swich a craft as nas yseen biforn:
with such craft as had never been seen before.

He drew forth milk in leeves and in thorn
He drew forth milk in leaves and thorns

Upon the face of every cuppe he wroghte —
upon the face of every cup he made —

A roos, a herte, a fern — al com to noghte,
a rose, a heart, a fern — all came to nothing,

For folk wolde drynke it up and nevere see
for people would drink it up and never see

The werk of art that flotede so free.
the work of art that floated there so graciously.

His armes were ypeynted and ful bare
His arms were painted and fully bare,

With serpentes, ankres, and a hare:
with serpents, anchors, and a hunting hare —

“Tattouwes,” the yonge folk hem knowe.
“tattoos,” as young folk know them.

He knew the benes of the world, I trowe:
He knew the beans of the world, I believe:

The hilles wher they be, the sonne and reyn,
the hills where they lie, the sun and the rain,

The rostyng craft — and tolde this tale ageyn,
the roasting craft — and told this tale again,

Ageyn, ageyn, to any wight he fond,
again, again, to any person he found,

Withouten stynt. He tolde it in ech lond.
without ceasing. He told it in every land.

He scorned the drynke of commoun folk ful soore
He scorned the drink of common folk deeply

And preised oonly that which coste the moore.
He scorned the drink of common folk deeply

A ryng he hadde thurgh his nose ypyght,
A ring he had pierced through his nose,

That low it heng, ful hevy to my sight,
which hung low and heavy to my sight,

Above the cuppe whil he wroghte his art,
above the cup while he worked his art,

And droppede now and eft. For al his part,
and dripped now and then. Of this,

I speke namore. Yet milk in leves ywroght,
I say no more. Yet milk drawn in leaves,

Swiche as he made, nas bettre to be soght.
such as he made it, none better could be sought.

Vocabulary:

• trowen. be of a certain opinion, believe, think.

• stynt. pause.

• ypyght. thrust, driven; from picchen. thrust, drive.

• droppen. drip.

The Counsaillour of Lyf

The Life Coach is the Pardoner, probably the most devastating portrait in the Canterbury Tales. The Pardoner sold pig bones as holy relics and peddled false promises of forgiveness to people too frightened to question him. He was brilliant at it, and he knew it: he openly confessed his tricks to the other pilgrims before later trying to con them too. (It didn’t work.)

The Life Coach runs the same grift, just in a different register: he takes wisdom you already had, repackages it, and sells it back to you at five hundred pounds a year — a bargain, really.

A PARDONER — nay, a COUNSAILLOUR OF LYF,
A Pardoner — no, a Life Coach,

For so he cleped hym, to man and wyf.
for so he called himself, to men and women alike.

With golden heer and teeth of whitenes shene,
With golden hair and teeth of gleaming whiteness,

And eyen brennyng with a fervour keene,
and eyes burning with a keen fervour,

He preched to folk of “Myndesettes” and “Trouthe”
he preached to people about “Mindsets” and “Truth”

And took ful many a pound of hire mouthe.
and took a good many pounds out of their mouths.

He sayd that euery wight had might ful swete
He said that every person had great power

To manifesten richesse at his feete,
to manifest riches at their feet,

If oonly he wold risen at matyne
if only they would rise at matins (before dawn)

And stare into the sonne, al divyne,
and stare into the sun, all divine,

And thinke his thoughtes in a wey ful clere,
and think their thoughts in a very clear way,

And paye him fyue hundred pounde a yere
and pay five hundred pounds to him a year,

To telle hem thynges that they herde seye
to tell them things they already heard

From moodres, wyues, and freendes, euery weye,
from mothers, wives, and friends, every way,

But dressed in bright and shinyng wordes newe.
but dressed in bright and shining new words.

For this was al his craft, and his vertu:
For this was all his craft, and all his virtue:

To taken wisdom folk alredy knewe
to take wisdom people already knew

And selle it eft in pakettes ful trewe.
and sell it back in packages all true.

He bar a book he quod that he had writen —
He carried a book he said he had written —

“Ten Steppes vnto Blis” — but he was smiten
“Ten Steps to Happiness” — but he himself was smitten

With derknes that he spek to noon alyue.
with a darkness he told to no one alive.

Of charitee he kept nat oon in fyue.
Of what he earned, he kept less than a fifth for charity.

Vocabulary:

• shene. beautiful. (cf. German schön ‘beautiful’)

• matyne. Matins, the first canonical hour (in the early morning)

Eventually, the train pulls in. The Foundour gets on, still on his phone, promising something to someone. The Influenser snaps a selfie before boarding. The Counsaillour of Lyf looks to be moving on to fresh prey. I decide to get on another car.

Tomorrow morning we’ll do it again. The clothes will be different, as will the coffee orders, but the tales will remain the same.

Perhaps some Chaucer will be watching me as well. I can imagine it now:

A CLERK ther was of SUBSTACK, long of writ
There was a scholar of Substack, long-winded in his writing,

That tolde the taals of wordes dede and dit…
who told the stories of words dead and done...

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.

Subscribe now

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.