A few years ago I read an interesting feature in Nature in which Harvard researchers Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel and Martin A Nowak had applied evolutionary modelling to language. What they discovered is that the English language follows similar patterns to those found in nature.
Image by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.
They have a great 2013 TED talk here:
For example, past-tense irregular verbs are disappearing in direct proportion to the rise of regular verbs - the more succesful 'species' are surviving at the expense of the others. The researchers tracked the status of 177 irregular verbs in Old English through linguistic changes in Middle English and then modern English. Of these 177 verbs that were irregular 1,200 years ago, 145 stayed irregular in Middle English but just 98 remain irregular today.
Regular past-tense verbs tend to have '-ed' on the end (e.g. sorted, finished, passed, kicked etc.) whereas irregular past-tense verbs have a variety of forms (e.g. got, awoke, began, became etc.). And it seems that words that cannot be regularised by the addition of an '-ed' are falling out of use. Nowak et al cited the example of 'wed' and predicted that 'wedded' will eventually become the norm. So goodbye 'newly wed' and hello 'newly wedded'. The researchers also suggested that a verb used 100 times less frequently will be made extinct 10 times as fast. So, as 'wed' is barely used these days, it will become 'wedded' that much quicker. I checked the Oxford English Dictionary today and it says that 'wed' can be the past tense of 'wed'. However, Webster’s New World College Dictionary - the one followed by Associated Press and many news organisations, lists only 'wedded' for the simple past tense.
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The English language is the most successful language on this planet. It is infinitely flexible, can borrow from other languages, and can evolve into new forms (American English, Indian English etc.) without losing meaning. It cna be spleled bdaly and sitll be udnertsood. It does not suffer the complications of gender and multiple conjugations and has a simple (though it could be simpler) alphabet of just 26 letters. However, being a mongrel language, various spelling oddities have crept in throughout history meaning that we've been left with some bizarre pronunciations like 'rough', 'initial' and 'sword' that bear little relation to the letters used. I'm told by non-Brit chums that it's an easy language to learn to speak but much harder to learn to write.
And then there are the so-called 'Rules of English'. Like any rules, these are regularly bent, broken and beaten to within an inch of their lives.
Let's take a common example - I before E except after C.
Really? What about species? Or sufficient? Or science (and why is there a C in science anyway?)? And there are plenty of words that don't have 'I before E' such as neighbour, weigh, eight, vein ...
The truth is that many of these 'rules' were invented by 19th century grammarians who desperately wanted their home-grown language to be as pure as the divine Latin. Sadly, this was never going to work in a language that can count among its ancestors not only Latin but Greek, Turkish, Indian, the Celtic tongues, Eastern-European languages etc. Which is why rules like 'You cannot split an infinitive' are nonsense.
In Latin, the infinitive form of a word is 'unbound' - free of all descriptors or modifications. Hence, it doesn't really convey much information e.g. amare (to love), monere (to warn), ducere (to lead), audire (to hear) etc. So you cannot physically split an infinitive in Latin because it normally consists of a single word. However, in English, an infinitive invariably consists of two words, the first usually being 'to' (e.g. to go, to do, to play). So why can't we split an infinitive? Trust me, it's perfectly safe and acceptable to do so. To accidentally stumble. To loudly applaud. To boldly go where no one has gone before. Kirk did it. Picard did it. So can you.
Image: Nothing Ahead on Pexels.
And the idea that you cannot start a new sentence with a conjunction is also rubbish. I did it just then. And again. And again! It's perfectly okay to start a sentence with words like 'and' or 'but'. The Bible does it. Shakespeare did it. Dickens did it. The fact that your primary school teacher got all eggy about it is neither here nor there. She simply didn't want to read 30 essays that sounded like this:
'For my summer holidays we went to Devon. And we went on the beach. And we rided on a donkey. And we had an ice cream. And my daddy got drunk. And my mummy hitted him with a deck chair.'
Incidentally, when children are learning to speak, they automatically create regular verbs like 'rided' and 'hitted'. We instinctively look for patterns and children make predictions based upon them. So is it any wonder these forms are on the increase?
I like this evolutionary model of language. I like the fact that new words enter the language every year and obsolete words vanish. Why keep a word if no one uses it? Yes, they are fascinating linguistic fossils and provide some entertainment (and good Scrabble scores). But that's it. If no one groaks or chantepleures or acts like a parnel or a lapling any more, then why keep these words on life-support? Switch the machine off and move on. There are plenty more words in the dictionary and even more on the horizon.
All of which brings me to swearing. When I was a young man, I was told that there were only two obscene words in the language: 'The F word' and 'The C word'. The fact that the words themselves were only ever described in such a coded form just made them even more taboo it seemed to me. But why? Why did these two words - just two different combinations of four letters - why did they become so bad? How did they accrue such a taboo status?
Well, the story is long and confused and it would take an entire books to cover it. Suffice to say that it's onl;y been in relatively recent human history that they've got themselves a bad name. And it's completely undeserved. So I like the fact that they are slowly being normalised by their inclusion in books, TV and film. L like the fact that Eve Ensler is reclaiming the word cunt for womanhood by extolling its virtues in her Vagina Monologues; even to the extent of getting the audience to shout it out loud. And national tresure Stephen Fry makes a valid point about the word fuck in his book Paperweight:
'If school teachers describing animals talked about the way in which they fucked rather than 'the mating process', if barristers and judges used 'fuck' in court cases where penetration is an issue, instead of relying on those strange forensic phrases 'intimate contact' and 'physical relationship', if parents used it when explaining reproduction to their children, then a generation would grow up for whom the word held no more mysterious guilty terrors and strange dirty thrills than the word 'omelette'. What would that do to the sex crime statistics? Were we to have taboos about the word 'kill' or the words 'maim' and 'torture', however, it might perhaps be healthy: cruelty and homicide are things we really should be ashamed of.'
Image by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.
The English language is a joy; possibly the greatest invention of the British peoples. But the reason it is so successful is that it has been allowed to evolve. It's never at rest long enough to become stagnant. Language is all about the communication of concepts, information and emotion. So I'm naturally against anything that dumbs the language down or makes it less accurate for conveying information. So let's rid ourselves of ridicualous business jargon which appears to be designed solely for the purpose of obscuring simple concepts with a hedge of words. Recent examples I've discovered include community property (a jointly-owned home), skills ecosystem, trending over, and anything that includes the word solutions. I'm sorry but 'Farming Machinery Solutions' means exactly the same thing as 'Farming Equipment' when it comes to describing what your company supplies.
And, at the same time, let's welcome terms like pimped, deepfake, and stoozing (the practice of borrowing money from a credit card during the card's introductory no-interest period and then investing that money to earn the interest as a profit) and let's celebrate clever new words and terms like hasbian (a lesbian who has become heterosexual), groomzilla, multi-dadding, surgiholic and duppie (a person who once had a high-status or high-paying job and must now work in a menial or lower paying job). They enrich and empower the language.
We want our language to be the cheeky mongrel that enjoys robust health and long life, as opposed to the in-bred pedigree that can only look forward to medical complications, crossed-eyes and an early death. Bear in mind David Crystal's words in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language:
'Vocabulary is the Everest of a language'.
Let's stay at the top, eh?
Oh, and if you're fascinated by our language like I am, I highly recommend the RobWords Youtube channel (click here). Here's a sample of his goodies:
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