If you think English is weird, Cornish (which was essentially dead from some time after the 1780s until a revival movement began in the early 1900s) has two different forms of the basic verb "to be" — a long form and a short form, used in different grammatical constructions. And with more irregularities and odd variants than you can poke a stick at (as we say in Australian English). Far more than even the English verb "to be" has.
Oh yes, and there's an old story about that epitaph you refer to (whether true or a joke, I don't know). It seems there was a longer and more poetic version of it carved on a gravestone somewhere:
Apparently “bewared” was used in the 19th century: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bewared. I realise that it will have been a neologism (now not very neo), but that reinforces your point really that English is resilient enough to happily create neologisms along standard lines for any word it wants to. It also provides a counter-point to your point about common words being irregular: if we more often needed to refer to people bewaring in the past, we would no doubt adopt bewared. Perhaps the tendency to retain antique irregular forms is sharply bimodal: the most common words stay antique because they are so naturalised; the least common words stay antique because no one needs or cares to modernise them. (This also applies to quoth.)
That’s really interesting to learn that it was a full-fledged verb until relatively recently! I wonder why “beware” has lost the ability to function in the past.
I was thinking as I read that section about beware that if you were writing in the past tense, you could write "he was wary of the dog".
I think "bewared" sounds odd because although "beware" is probably a verb with a "be-" prefix (like become and beget), it sounds like the speaker is saying in the imperative mode, "Be ware!" (be wary!)
Yeah, my first wild-assed guess was that it was related to the fact that “beware” is basically used only as an imperative. Even sticking with present tense, we’d never say “I always beware of the dog,” right?
Yes you're right - I would say "I am always wary of the dog".
Sometimes words just fall out of use, too. In German, you can say both kämmt (pronounced kemmt) and ungekämmt, but in English, we only have unkempt. Presumably at some point, we did have kempt, but as it no longer sounds like the past participle of "to comb", probably due to the Great Vowel Shift, it fell into disuse.
My guess is that it was never really a full-fledged verb but that the systematising Victorians turned it into one artificially. But because it is used so infrequently, the artificial systematisation didn't stick as it did in so many of the Victorians' other such efforts.
Not really sure it would have qualified as a "full-fledged" verb in the past. According to the OED, the only attested forms other than "beware" seem to be past and present participles, not conjugaged forms (no "he bewares" or "I bewared").
That's a great explanation. I've always wondered about how strangely "to be" is conjugated in all the languages I know. I'm currently relearning Scottish Gaelic for a hiking trip in the Hebrides this summer. (I'm just hoping to find someone to say ANYTHING to. Bless my heart.)
Anyway, their forms of "to be" are strange in similar ways. They have 2 separate verbs to choose from. One for predicate objects, like "John is a teacher", and another for adjectives "I'm tired." Then in past and present, you have a basic form for all subjects, a negated form, an affirmative and a negative question.
One of those basic present forms is is "Is" and it's affirmative question is "An" the other verb is "Tha" (pronounced ha) and it's question is "à bheil?" These look on the surface to fit right into the PIE pattern you laid out here.
Scottish Gaelic, however, is VSO, which must be pretty rare among Indo-European languages. I wonder how THAT would happen.
This is a really interesting question: Scottish Gaelic (and its relatives) have separated two different functions that we have merged in “to be.” For the copula (linking predicate objects), the present-tense “is” form is descended from *h1es-, while the past “bu” is from *bhuh-. Very much like Latin in this way! The one that goes with adjectives “tha” is from another root altogether, one meaning ‘stand’. I love the Celtic languages!
They've been simplified (read: Englished) for centuries, but I've still got a hate-on for all those extra "h"s everywhere. Also having to put verbs first.
Tha mi sgìth. (you don't pronounce the two T's. or the last H.)
That's because "tha" is the lenited variant of an older tá, still found in the dialects of Ireland. Sgìth probably has inflected forms where the /h/ surfaces, like plural scíthe (again, in the dialects of Ireland).
I wonder the same thing. How did Latin end up with sum, es, est, which French turned into je suis, tu es, il est? Their future and past tenses went even further astray: eram, eras, erat; fui, fuisti, fuit. Future: ero, eris, erit.
Did we have anything similar to these in pre-English?
Awesome, Colin! I know you don't tend to go too technical with languages' inner workings, especially when talking PIE in past articles, but I'd love to see you explain why *hes- (can't do subscripts on my phone) can't do the past tense, *bhuh- can't do the present, and why *hwes- can do all: what are the suffixes used and why they can or can't work with each root.
Thank you! In a nutshell: it has to do with aspect rather than tense, which is a description of how the event described by the verb is perceived: as extending over time (durative) or as something that occurs at a point in time (punctual). PIE roots appeared to be inherently punctual or durative. Certain tense forms (present, imperfect) were used with durative roots; another one (aorist) was used with punctual roots. You could change a punctual root to a durative one or vice versa by using endings and other changes (e.g. reduplication). But these changes acted like changing verbs into nouns in English: there are a variety of techniques (-tion, -ing, -al, etc.) but it’s unpredictable which verb will use which. And some PE roots, for no good reason, had no options for switching classes. *h1es- was one of them. So there’s still a mystery at bottom. But hopefully it’s a more interesting mystery that what we started with!
Modern Swedish (repeat: Modern) has done a super simplifying act with its verb "to be": att vara is the infinitive form (for Shakespeare buffs - att vara eller inte vara). In usage it becomes, simply - the present = är and the past = var, for all numbers. Thus, jag är, du är, han/hon/det är - vi är, ni är, de är. Past forms as used today are equally straightforward: Jag var, du var, han/hon/det var, and so forth. I don't know if it was laziness or common sense that caused these changes during the modern period (I know that Colin would have a more sophisticated explanation), but it is an interesting phenomenon when compared to Modern English (actually all of the Englishes, Old, Middle and New). However, earlier versions of Swedish were not as simple. But between friends we'll just agree to ignore them. :-))
Fascinating read as always, Colin! Thanks to my high school Sanskrit, I was able to recognize certain parallels across the different Indo-European languages. I knew about the Latin "est' being cognate with the Sanskrit "asti" and Persian "ast".
But the real revelation was "bhuh". Sanskrit actually managed to retain the root word in its original PIE meaning of "to become/grow", and as such the verb takes a philosophical meaning in certain contexts. Not just that, the name for Physics in Sanskrit and Hindi is "bhoutika shastra" (lit. 'Physical Sciences') where the bhoutika is a declension of the root word "bhuh". I find it amazing that physics and bhuh share an etymological root that goes back at least 6000 years!
Actually, it's quite similar in French. With 'je suis' (I am), 'j'étais' (I was).
The verb 'aller' (to go) is also very irregular in both languages : 'je vais' (I go), 'j'allai' (I went) and 'j'irai' (I will go). Maybe for the same reasons, being a very common verb too ?
This is an interesting test case. In Spanish the infinitive of “to go” is “ir.” The same stem shows up in French in the future tense - e.g., “j’irais.” Meanwhile, Spanish has no word for “to go” that looks like the French infinitive “aller,” but the conjugated present tense forms of “to go” are very similar between the two languages. Both have the same written form of “you go”: “tu vas.” And they have the similar third person “il/elle va” and “él/ella va”
What happened within the mishmash of vulgar Latin that spawned these two language and their bastardized conjugations of “to go”?
Thank you for this great piece! I so often wish I had found you when I was teaching basic reading to middle schoolers. Will you write a piece about "are?" I read something a long time ago about "are." It said that we can see in literature the evolution of "be" into "are" in society. Some author wrote a piece in which a girl says to her father, "Bide where you be." The father tells her not to talk in such a low class way. She apologizes and changes it to, "Stay where you are." I wish it had stayed, "Bide where you be!" But I have hope....perhaps "What you be doing?" will become standard English.
Absolutely fascinating! In Icelandic the *bhuh root survives in the versatile verb að búa, which means to live, dwell, but the past participle, búinn, also means done, finished. It’s used to indicate having recently done something: I’m done reading this book, ég er búinn að lesa þessa bók, meaning I’ve just read it.
Another little kink of English: somewhere along the way, you would know when Colin, we lost the simple past tense of “go”. We kept the participle “gone” but for the preterite we substituted “went”, which (I’m only guessing) was the past tense of “wend”, a verb that is now hardly used. German, “ging”, and Icelandic, “gekk”, kept it, and I assume it’s the same in other Germanic languages.
What was it about those tribes on the steppes who sort of overran everyone from the Atlantic to India … !
Well, I do not know Russian , but in Croatian the *h1esmi - I am - is "jesam", and is then inflected regularely: jesam, jesi, je, jesmo, jeste, jesu. And in Croatian we still have the tenses aorist and imperfect and use them for the different kinds of verbs: the ones describing ongoing processes or the ones describing short-term or finished processes.
Right now I'm fostering 3 cats. One of them is named Bug and a couple of weeks ago, I said to him "Bug! Near the Dnieper! Are you a Proto-Indo-European?"
I have my first linguistics exam in two weeks and this was such a great piece to read before that. This subject is both interesting and complicated. I'm having such a great time studying it!
I must fully defer to linguists to tease out how languages have evolved through sound sequences. (I’m sure there is a better label for this process, forgive my ignorance.) One example I know is doeth becoming does.
Today we have a new word “meme” -a photo or cartoon with a pithy statement expressing commentary, irony or ridicule about current events or thought. How do we pronounce “meme”? Some say “meem”, some say “mehm”, some “mem”. Perhaps since the word likely started out written more than spoken actually saying it is sketchy. I have heard TV journalists use all three pronunciations.
So, here’s a challenge: who can predict how this word will be spoken 100 years from now?
Wow, do they really? Richard Dawkins invented the word as analogous to “gene” and I think everybody who knows this pronounces it with a long E (though of course even “genetics” shortens the E).
If you think English is weird, Cornish (which was essentially dead from some time after the 1780s until a revival movement began in the early 1900s) has two different forms of the basic verb "to be" — a long form and a short form, used in different grammatical constructions. And with more irregularities and odd variants than you can poke a stick at (as we say in Australian English). Far more than even the English verb "to be" has.
Oh yes, and there's an old story about that epitaph you refer to (whether true or a joke, I don't know). It seems there was a longer and more poetic version of it carved on a gravestone somewhere:
"Look on me, stranger, where I lie;
As thou art now, so once was I.
As I am now, so shalt thou be —
Prepare thyself to follow me."
Underneath which someone else had scrawled:
"To follow you I'll not consent
Until I know which way you went."
"you can poke a stick at (as we say in Australian English)."
How strange! Don't you know you're supposed to *shake* a stick at it? We do in American English.
Poking the stick is more effective, quite obviously. 😜🇦🇺😁
No, if the shaking doesn't work, step 2 is poking it.
Also, I'm not poking anything in Australia unless a native says it's completely harmless.
Enjoyed this, as always!
Apparently “bewared” was used in the 19th century: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bewared. I realise that it will have been a neologism (now not very neo), but that reinforces your point really that English is resilient enough to happily create neologisms along standard lines for any word it wants to. It also provides a counter-point to your point about common words being irregular: if we more often needed to refer to people bewaring in the past, we would no doubt adopt bewared. Perhaps the tendency to retain antique irregular forms is sharply bimodal: the most common words stay antique because they are so naturalised; the least common words stay antique because no one needs or cares to modernise them. (This also applies to quoth.)
That’s really interesting to learn that it was a full-fledged verb until relatively recently! I wonder why “beware” has lost the ability to function in the past.
I was thinking as I read that section about beware that if you were writing in the past tense, you could write "he was wary of the dog".
I think "bewared" sounds odd because although "beware" is probably a verb with a "be-" prefix (like become and beget), it sounds like the speaker is saying in the imperative mode, "Be ware!" (be wary!)
Yeah, my first wild-assed guess was that it was related to the fact that “beware” is basically used only as an imperative. Even sticking with present tense, we’d never say “I always beware of the dog,” right?
"Beware the Ides of March" does sound much better than "Yo, be wary of the middle of the month".
Yo, cracked me up.
Yes you're right - I would say "I am always wary of the dog".
Sometimes words just fall out of use, too. In German, you can say both kämmt (pronounced kemmt) and ungekämmt, but in English, we only have unkempt. Presumably at some point, we did have kempt, but as it no longer sounds like the past participle of "to comb", probably due to the Great Vowel Shift, it fell into disuse.
I’ve heard people use “kempt”, but only archly.
And I never thought about the root! Obvious now that you point it out.
yes people do use it, but notice that when you typed it, a red squiggle appeared under the word :D
I might, but only to be snarky, and if a sign was present.
How about "bewore"?😄
Funny, I was actually thinking if it was a particular class of strong verb bewor could have been the past singular form and beworon the past plural.
No. No no no. 😵💫
My guess is that it was never really a full-fledged verb but that the systematising Victorians turned it into one artificially. But because it is used so infrequently, the artificial systematisation didn't stick as it did in so many of the Victorians' other such efforts.
Not really sure it would have qualified as a "full-fledged" verb in the past. According to the OED, the only attested forms other than "beware" seem to be past and present participles, not conjugaged forms (no "he bewares" or "I bewared").
That's a great explanation. I've always wondered about how strangely "to be" is conjugated in all the languages I know. I'm currently relearning Scottish Gaelic for a hiking trip in the Hebrides this summer. (I'm just hoping to find someone to say ANYTHING to. Bless my heart.)
Anyway, their forms of "to be" are strange in similar ways. They have 2 separate verbs to choose from. One for predicate objects, like "John is a teacher", and another for adjectives "I'm tired." Then in past and present, you have a basic form for all subjects, a negated form, an affirmative and a negative question.
One of those basic present forms is is "Is" and it's affirmative question is "An" the other verb is "Tha" (pronounced ha) and it's question is "à bheil?" These look on the surface to fit right into the PIE pattern you laid out here.
Scottish Gaelic, however, is VSO, which must be pretty rare among Indo-European languages. I wonder how THAT would happen.
This is a really interesting question: Scottish Gaelic (and its relatives) have separated two different functions that we have merged in “to be.” For the copula (linking predicate objects), the present-tense “is” form is descended from *h1es-, while the past “bu” is from *bhuh-. Very much like Latin in this way! The one that goes with adjectives “tha” is from another root altogether, one meaning ‘stand’. I love the Celtic languages!
They've been simplified (read: Englished) for centuries, but I've still got a hate-on for all those extra "h"s everywhere. Also having to put verbs first.
Tha mi sgìth. (you don't pronounce the two T's. or the last H.)
That's because "tha" is the lenited variant of an older tá, still found in the dialects of Ireland. Sgìth probably has inflected forms where the /h/ surfaces, like plural scíthe (again, in the dialects of Ireland).
I am so glad to see others who know a bit about Scottish Gaelic. And that it's not Irish.
If you go to Skye, they'll talk to you in Gaidhlig!
At least they did when I went there 25 years ago.
I wonder the same thing. How did Latin end up with sum, es, est, which French turned into je suis, tu es, il est? Their future and past tenses went even further astray: eram, eras, erat; fui, fuisti, fuit. Future: ero, eris, erit.
Did we have anything similar to these in pre-English?
Awesome, Colin! I know you don't tend to go too technical with languages' inner workings, especially when talking PIE in past articles, but I'd love to see you explain why *hes- (can't do subscripts on my phone) can't do the past tense, *bhuh- can't do the present, and why *hwes- can do all: what are the suffixes used and why they can or can't work with each root.
Thank you! In a nutshell: it has to do with aspect rather than tense, which is a description of how the event described by the verb is perceived: as extending over time (durative) or as something that occurs at a point in time (punctual). PIE roots appeared to be inherently punctual or durative. Certain tense forms (present, imperfect) were used with durative roots; another one (aorist) was used with punctual roots. You could change a punctual root to a durative one or vice versa by using endings and other changes (e.g. reduplication). But these changes acted like changing verbs into nouns in English: there are a variety of techniques (-tion, -ing, -al, etc.) but it’s unpredictable which verb will use which. And some PE roots, for no good reason, had no options for switching classes. *h1es- was one of them. So there’s still a mystery at bottom. But hopefully it’s a more interesting mystery that what we started with!
Modern Swedish (repeat: Modern) has done a super simplifying act with its verb "to be": att vara is the infinitive form (for Shakespeare buffs - att vara eller inte vara). In usage it becomes, simply - the present = är and the past = var, for all numbers. Thus, jag är, du är, han/hon/det är - vi är, ni är, de är. Past forms as used today are equally straightforward: Jag var, du var, han/hon/det var, and so forth. I don't know if it was laziness or common sense that caused these changes during the modern period (I know that Colin would have a more sophisticated explanation), but it is an interesting phenomenon when compared to Modern English (actually all of the Englishes, Old, Middle and New). However, earlier versions of Swedish were not as simple. But between friends we'll just agree to ignore them. :-))
Fascinating read as always, Colin! Thanks to my high school Sanskrit, I was able to recognize certain parallels across the different Indo-European languages. I knew about the Latin "est' being cognate with the Sanskrit "asti" and Persian "ast".
But the real revelation was "bhuh". Sanskrit actually managed to retain the root word in its original PIE meaning of "to become/grow", and as such the verb takes a philosophical meaning in certain contexts. Not just that, the name for Physics in Sanskrit and Hindi is "bhoutika shastra" (lit. 'Physical Sciences') where the bhoutika is a declension of the root word "bhuh". I find it amazing that physics and bhuh share an etymological root that goes back at least 6000 years!
Actually, it's quite similar in French. With 'je suis' (I am), 'j'étais' (I was).
The verb 'aller' (to go) is also very irregular in both languages : 'je vais' (I go), 'j'allai' (I went) and 'j'irai' (I will go). Maybe for the same reasons, being a very common verb too ?
This is an interesting test case. In Spanish the infinitive of “to go” is “ir.” The same stem shows up in French in the future tense - e.g., “j’irais.” Meanwhile, Spanish has no word for “to go” that looks like the French infinitive “aller,” but the conjugated present tense forms of “to go” are very similar between the two languages. Both have the same written form of “you go”: “tu vas.” And they have the similar third person “il/elle va” and “él/ella va”
What happened within the mishmash of vulgar Latin that spawned these two language and their bastardized conjugations of “to go”?
Great piece!
Thank you!
You really know how to tell a good story. Worthy of an Indo-European campfire, I would say!
Thank you for this great piece! I so often wish I had found you when I was teaching basic reading to middle schoolers. Will you write a piece about "are?" I read something a long time ago about "are." It said that we can see in literature the evolution of "be" into "are" in society. Some author wrote a piece in which a girl says to her father, "Bide where you be." The father tells her not to talk in such a low class way. She apologizes and changes it to, "Stay where you are." I wish it had stayed, "Bide where you be!" But I have hope....perhaps "What you be doing?" will become standard English.
Absolutely fascinating! In Icelandic the *bhuh root survives in the versatile verb að búa, which means to live, dwell, but the past participle, búinn, also means done, finished. It’s used to indicate having recently done something: I’m done reading this book, ég er búinn að lesa þessa bók, meaning I’ve just read it.
Another little kink of English: somewhere along the way, you would know when Colin, we lost the simple past tense of “go”. We kept the participle “gone” but for the preterite we substituted “went”, which (I’m only guessing) was the past tense of “wend”, a verb that is now hardly used. German, “ging”, and Icelandic, “gekk”, kept it, and I assume it’s the same in other Germanic languages.
What was it about those tribes on the steppes who sort of overran everyone from the Atlantic to India … !
I always (naively) understood "beware" as a contraction of "be aware". In which case the past would just be "was aware" (wasware?)
What happened to the present tense of to be in the Slavic languages (or, at least, Russian)?
Well, I do not know Russian , but in Croatian the *h1esmi - I am - is "jesam", and is then inflected regularely: jesam, jesi, je, jesmo, jeste, jesu. And in Croatian we still have the tenses aorist and imperfect and use them for the different kinds of verbs: the ones describing ongoing processes or the ones describing short-term or finished processes.
Right now I'm fostering 3 cats. One of them is named Bug and a couple of weeks ago, I said to him "Bug! Near the Dnieper! Are you a Proto-Indo-European?"
He only said "Meow?"
I have my first linguistics exam in two weeks and this was such a great piece to read before that. This subject is both interesting and complicated. I'm having such a great time studying it!
I must fully defer to linguists to tease out how languages have evolved through sound sequences. (I’m sure there is a better label for this process, forgive my ignorance.) One example I know is doeth becoming does.
Today we have a new word “meme” -a photo or cartoon with a pithy statement expressing commentary, irony or ridicule about current events or thought. How do we pronounce “meme”? Some say “meem”, some say “mehm”, some “mem”. Perhaps since the word likely started out written more than spoken actually saying it is sketchy. I have heard TV journalists use all three pronunciations.
So, here’s a challenge: who can predict how this word will be spoken 100 years from now?
Wow, do they really? Richard Dawkins invented the word as analogous to “gene” and I think everybody who knows this pronounces it with a long E (though of course even “genetics” shortens the E).
I have only ever heard it as MEEM, whether in person or on video. "Mem" is all right if you over-apply the silent E rule, but "mehm" is right out.