Grammatical And Other Gender

This post might look it belongs on the other blog. The reason it doesn’t will, I hope, become clear as I go on, unless of course I indulge in my usual obscurantist verbosity. I hope I won’t.

Grammatically speaking, English is now a genderless language. This fact leads to confusion because we do seem to have gendered third person singular personal pronouns, and don’t we know it? However, we lack a full grammatical gender system as found in other related European languages. I’m trying to do this post entirely from memory, and unlike the previous one, this one’s supposed to be true, but it may not be because I may not be remembering things correctly. However, from memory, I seem to recall that Armenian lacks gender, which if true is probably because of interaction with the genderless Caucasian languages spoken nearby. Apart from that, Bengali I’ve heard has a gender system practically identical to that of English, i.e. it has gendered third person pronouns which refer mainly to women and men separately plus a neuter pronoun which refers to everything else. Farsi, sometimes called “the English of Asia” due to its simple grammar, lacks gendered pronouns of any kind.

Confusion may result from the assertion that English lacks grammatical gender. So as not to distract you from the rest of what I’m going to say here, I’ll clarify that. In English, we talk about “she”, “it” and “he”, we have indefinite gender singular pronouns “they” and “one” and genderless pronouns such as “this”, “that”, “these” and “those”. We also have a common vs neuter set of pronouns in “who” vs “what”. Other things are also going on. We have an apparently single exception to using “it” for inanimate objects when we talk about ships and boats which is sometimes extended in various ways, for instance to countries and other vehicles. However, we do not have grammatical gender, because a complete grammatical gender system extends way beyond pronouns. The simplest form of gender system in Western European languages which most British English speakers are familiar with is the French system, where nouns are feminine or masculine with no neuter, and this affects not only which pronouns are used with them but also articles and adjectives, including present and past participles. This is about the minimum which can be expected from a real grammatical gender system. English, and Anglo-Norman with which it merged, used to have actual grammatical gender, but this didn’t survive, possibly because the two languages, with different systems, merged. Anglo-Norman French was almost entirely just feminine and masculine, with the lone neuter pronoun «ço» meaning “this”, whereas English had a similar three-gender system to German, with feminine, neuter and masculine. The confusion between referring to nouns in two different gender systems probably led to its demise.

They can be a lot more pervasive than that though. For instance the second and first person pronouns can also be gendered. This happens in the Spanish plural “vosotras” and “vosotros” for “you” in the familiar plural and even in the first person “nosotras”/”nosotros”. Tocharian languages I think even have feminine and masculine first person pronouns. Arabic and Hebrew are part of the Afro-Asiatic language family, which regularly has a feminine and masculine two-gender grammatical system. They have second person feminine and masculine pronouns. In some languages, gender also influences verbs in the sense that there are separate forms for feminine and masculine conjugation using finite verbs rather than just participles. This is about as far as it goes, I think.

Because we live in Europe and are surrounded by languages with gender systems, we tend to assume this is normal for foreign languages, but actually it isn’t. Grammatical gender does occur in hundreds of languages, including most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages, but probably the majority of languages have no gender. The distribution is patchy. Dravidian languages in South India have gender. It’s also sporadically present in Australia, New Guinea (which is not surprising as there are six hundred languages there) and the Americas, with a few in Afrika south of the Sahara. However, the Afrikan gender systems are not related to sex.

Gender as we tend to come across it consists either of feminine and masculine, or feminine, neuter and masculine. The Celtic languages have the first system, as do Western Romance with a few exceptions in Italian, whereas German and the Slavic languages have the second, although Slavic is a bit more complicated than that. However, several European languages have a different kind of gender system which is more like our “who”/”what” system apart from being grammatical rather than semantic. These are the various other Germanic languages: Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. I don’t actually know if Frisian has this system, but as it’s the closest continental European language to English it would be interesting to find out. These systems have the common and neuter genders, and there is no feminine or masculine in grammatical terms. In Danish in particular this is very useful, because Danish is a mumbled language whose words can be hard to distinguish. Hence the Danish word for “frog” and “seed” is the same but has common or neuter gender depending on what it means, as is the word “øre”, which either refers to the currency unit or “ear”, again depending on gender. Danish suffers from lacking the tones used in Norwegian and most Swedish which make it easier to distinguish between otherwise similar words, although it does use a glottal stop for a similar purpose. These gender systems, however, have nothing to do with sexes.

Within Europe, several languages completely lack gender. These include Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, Sami and Basque. They may distinguish by pronouns between animate and inanimate objects, but this has no influence on the rest of the grammar. Caucasian languages, which are also European although we tend not to remember them here in Britain, are also genderless.

There is another phenomenon where gender distinctions are made between different classes of referent but all humans, or animate objects, are of the same gender. These tend to be called “noun classes” rather than genders but they are actually the same kind of system. Swahili has something like nine or ten noun classes. Unlike European genders, they have a very clear system, where for instance artifacts such as knives all have the same class, all animate objects have the same but groups of animates have a different class. Another one is abstract objects. I had a surprising conversation with a Swahili speaker once who didn’t realise this was how Swahili worked, which presumably either means it’s subconscious or they chose to learn each word and how it was pluralised, influenced words around it and so forth, separately. Swahili pronouns are not gendered, so it makes no difference to the one thing English speakers would expect it to.

Mandarin Chinese and Malay/Indonesian (which are more or less the same language) have no gender as such, but they do have a system of counting which classifies the objects counted in a similar way. In the same way as we say “fifteen head of cattle”, Indonesian counts animals by tails, “ekor”, and it and Mandarin have obligatory words inserted before the noun. Our daughter actually used to do this in English when she was first learning to speak in full sentences, referring to certain objects as “loaves” when she counted them but not others. Japanese kind of has first person singular gendered pronouns because when they do use their words for “I” and “me”, women tend to use different words than men. This is strange because there is no other gender at all in Japanese.

Turning now to the history of grammatical gender in English, I will begin with prehistory. Proto-Indo-European itself was spoken before the invention of writing, but can be reconstructed. Hittite and the other Anatolian languages, spoken at the start of the Iron Age, are a kind of sister group to all later recorded languages in the family and are therefore a kind of fossilised stage in the development of the original language which indicates the process whereby gender systems emerged. It basically works like this. In Hittite there are two genders, animate and inanimate. This seems quite logical to me, and is similar to the “common”/”neuter” system found in Scandinavian languages and Dutch. These did function as genders, changing the form of adjectives associated with them and being inflected differently in the nine cases, but they are only somewhat like the systems found in the likes of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. What is thought to have happened is that there were three classes of referent approached differently in terms of grammar. There were most inanimate objects, and we would refer to each of them as “it”. Then there were two other classes of object, one consisting of agents and the other of adjectives. Hence a spear might be in the agent class, because it does something, whereas a flower might be in the adjectival class because it’s beautiful, i.e. mainly conceived of by an attribute. Since men were perceived as the “doers”, they were masculine, and because women were perceived as being rather than doing, e.g. being beautiful, they were feminine. It’s important to note, though, that it isn’t a case of a whole class of items being considered feminine in the human sense, or another whole class being considered masculine. It’s completely the other way round. There is a class of objects thought of as what they are, including women, and another class of objects thought of as what they do, and this includes men. Sex is secondary. Then there’s a third class which falls into neither category. That’s how it happened.

This was also only the initial situation. Words change their meaning over time, people think words which rhyme have the same gender and so on. All Latin names for trees are second declension feminine nouns even though they end in “-us” like all the second declension masculine nouns. “Manus” is also feminine. Due to the similarity, in Italian and related language, all these nouns have now become masculine. There has also been confusion between first declension neuter plurals ending in “-a” and feminine nouns, so for example the plural of “opus” is “opera” , but the latter is now a singular feminine noun.

Back to English though. Proto-Germanic had three genders: feminine, neuter and masculine. Originally, the words for “they” were also gendered. Gothic has “ijos”/”eis”/”ija” for “they” in the plural, with separate forms for feminine, neuter and masculine. Icelandic has the same distinction: “þær” “þau” “þeir”. Icelandic is important to English pronouns because our own third person plural pronoun, “they”, is inherited not from West Germanic but Old Norse, which is practically the same language. In Old English, by the time it was written down at least, made no distinction between its plural words for “they”. The only survival from this word is today’s “’em” for “them”, which is colloquial, but the word was “heo”/”hie” in the nominative and accusative, “him”/”heom” in the dative and instrumental and “hira” in the genitive. This compares to the singular feminine “heo”/”hie” in nominative and accusative, “hire” in the genitive, dative and instrumental. The neuter and masculine are the same as each other in the dative and instrumental and in the genitive, i.e. “him” and “his”, but otherwise differ, being “hit” and “he” in the nominative and “hit” and “hine” in the accusative. This mixture of somewhat confused forms is typical of pronouns in West Germanic: it’s seen today in the German “sie” and “Sie” for “she”, “they” and the polite form of “you”, and in “ihr” and “Ihr” for the informal plural “you” in the nominative, “her” in the genitive and “their” and polite “your”, again in the genitive. I haven’t conversed in Old English as much as in German, but I’ve never encountered any problems with the fact that these are homonyms. Notably, their word for “they” is often the same as their word for “you” and it doesn’t cause confusion.

The reason I’ve written this out rather than used a table is to emphasise the detail of what’s going on. In some circumstances, the word for “they” is the same as the one for “she” and in others it’s the same as the words for “it” and “he”. There is therefore, just as in German today, a lot of ambiguity here. As with German, this is often resolved by the form of the verb, because it would be plural when the pronoun is plural and singular along with the pronoun. In the meantime, “his” and “him” could be neuter or masculine. The ambiguity might, of course, be the reason we ended up with an Icelandic word for “they”, but it’s also interesting that we don’t say “him” or “‘im” even informally to replace “them”, but instead use a form derived from the Old English dative and instrumental, in both objective forms.

These, though, are just the pronouns, and in Old English there was a complete grammatical gender system. Each noun was feminine, neuter or masculine. Bear in mind that this was grammatical gender, not gender as the word is often used in English. The gender of a noun, as in many other language, was determined by its ending, including complete words. For instance, there’s a street in Canterbury called Burgate, from a feminine word for “city”, “burg”, and the neuter word for “gate”, “geat”. The whole word “burg-geat” is neuter, because the last word in the compound is neuter. Every noun that ends with “-a” is masculine, compared to the Latin tendency for such nouns to be feminine (but not always, e.g. “agricola”, “nauta”). There were various suffixes which conferred gender reliably such as “-dom”, as in “wisdom”, “-had”, as in “cildhad” (“childhood”) and “-scipe”, as in “friendship”, all masculine, and the feminine “-nes”, “-o”, “-ræde” and “-ung”: “rihtwisnes” – “righteousness”; “bieldo” – “boldness”; “hatræde” – “hatred” (that might be a spelling mistake on my part); “scotung” – “shooting”. One word for “man”, “mann” is masculine, as is “wer”, also meaning “man” as in “werewolf”. However, the main word for “woman” is “wif”, i.e. “wife”, and this word is neuter. Moreover, the ancestor of our current “woman” was “wifmann”, which is masculine. “Cild” and “bearn”, both words for children, are neuter, as is “mægden” (“maiden”). Hence if you started a sentence talking about a “wifman”, you would then refer to that person as “he” throughout it. Similar things happen today in Gàidhlig incidentally, so it still happens in Britain. I am personally accustomed to saying “it” when referring to a child or baby. The takeaway from this is that the whole time Old English was spoken there was only a loose anchor between pronouns and what we might call biological sex, or gender in the social sense, and likewise between grammatical and social gender.

Going back to the Old English pronouns, it’s notable that the forms of the singular third person have changed a fair bit and the plural has practically disappeared. The situation is complicated by the fact that the dominant dialect of English over most of the period before the Norman Conquest was West Saxon, spoken in Wessex, whereas the English in which this is written is descended from the Mercian dialect, spoken in the English Midlands. In particular, this means that the diphthongs written as “eo” and “ea” are not the direct ancestors of any modern English sounds. Hence the “heo” and “heom” above might be said not to survive, although related words in other dialects did. The distinctions between the likes of final A, E and U were lost, replaced by the schwa “murmur” vowel. This meant in turn that any grammatical distinction made through these vowels was also lost, and since these, among other things, were responsible for gender distinctions, these went too. Hence although different pronouns might’ve been used to refer to different nouns, they weren’t accompanied by as complex a gender system as previously. All that was left was an occasional “-e” appended to adjectives in the plural and after “þe”, as in “þe olde worlde”. Gender would still have shown up with the various demonstrative pronouns, although even here they were more inflected in the South. This left the personal pronouns, which were also changing.

Of course “he” still existed, as it does today. “It” emerged due to a dropped H. “Hie” survived at least into Chaucer’s time as “hi” and the genitive “hir”. “Heo”, the former feminine pronoun, turned into a confusing plethora of different words, including “he” and “ho”, and “hi” was accompanied by “he” as well as the new Scandinavian forms. In other words, it became entirely feasible for the word “he” to mean what we mean by “she” or “they”. This is the origin of generic “he”. There was pressure to resolve this situation, which was achieved by using the Scandinavian pronoun in the plural most of the time and by adapting the feminine “that”, which was “seo”, except of course that that diphthong had been lost, leading finally to “she”. So there was an apparent felt need to use a feminine pronoun at this point. Interestingly, and probably coincidentally, everyone was basically wearing dresses at this point too, the only gender difference being the heights of the waists. It’s hard to imagine how this situation would have arisen if the Bible had been interpreted the way it often is today, but that’s another conversation. “She” prevailed in about 1300, but the use of generic “he” persisted all the way into my lifetime and is even sometimes the source of contention today in 2023. The use of generic “he” is a good illustration of how the history of a word may not have any bearing on how it’s taken today. Nowadays, using generic “he” just is sexist, regardless of its history of originally including the feminine. I may be very attached to the history of language but I still recognise that it has its place. It does, for example, illustrate that the ability to refer to social gender at that point was considered vital, and this is not trivial as there were languages in similar situations where it wasn’t, so it says something about English society that this happened.

A more distinct animate third person singular pronoun was “ha”. This was also gender-neutral, but resembles neither “she”, “he” or “they” (“hi”) very closely. It persisted into the last century in some West Country speech and was adopted by Ursula Le Guin for the screenplay of her novel ‘The Left Hand Of Darkness’. It’s used sparingly today as a neutral pronoun, but is probably too exotic to catch on. However, it does date back to the Middle Ages.

Now for the question of apparently plural pronouns being used in the singular.

This occurs, for example, in Urdu, where married women tend to say “ham” (we) rather than “main” (I) because they’re used to referring to their whole household, and there’s the “editorial ‘we'” and the “royal ‘we'”. The former is when someone acts as a spokesperson and the latter is used by royalty in official proclamations. It also appears to crop up in the Bible but this may be a disguise for the possibility of these passages being polytheistic.

English is unusual in not using the singular “thou”, and in this respect it follows Anglo-Norman, which stopped using «tu» in favour of «vos», so I wonder if there’s a connection. The former English use of “ye” and “you” followed the French usage of these pronouns, the latter now being «vous», in that the plural was used for both the plural itself and formally, whereas the latter was informal and only ever singular. It’s used slightly differently in the King James Version of the Bible, simply to translate the singular and plural pronouns, making it look like “thou” is formal due to God being referred to in that way. This may have led to the erosion of the distinction in English, but I’m just guessing. It’s clearly in common use in 1611 CE, and also in the works of Shakespeare to 1613 which doesn’t get us (“me”?) much further. What seems to have happened is that during the seventeenth century, using “you” was thought polite and people were expected to be polite all the time. “Y’all” and “youse” are clearly attempts to address this, as is “you lot”, although that is definitely not polite. Quakers were well known to thou well past the time when standard English stopped, although they don’t do it any more and so it’s now only used dialectally. It’s also true that you’d probably have to know someone pretty well before you called them “thee”.

Bearing in mind the time scale, this finally brings me to “they”, which is enjoying a moment. “They” hadn’t planted itself in our language at the time of Chaucer, or at least the London dialect thereof. Being a Scandinavian word, it unsurprisingly moved from North to South. It’s used once in the text ‘Genesis And Exodus’, written in 1250 in Norfolk. Before that, the ‘Ormulum’, written in the previous century in the East Midlands, uses it, but since this area, where I happen to be sitting right now, had fairly recently been Danish, it’s not surprising it was present. The language of the Ormulum is idiosyncratic, using a spelling system seen nowhere else, and it’s also quite badly written. Also in ‘Genesis And Exodus’, “it” is used as a plural, and the word “his”, presumably because it has an S at the end, is too. All of this is going on while the English language is eclipsed by Norman French, so it was kind of decaying at the time. Chaucer does sometimes use “they” but not “their” or “them”. He died in 1400. There are also the reflexive pronouns, which nowadays are the likes of “herself”, “myself” and so on. Back then, they were used interchangeably with object pronouns, and the plural “-selves” forms didn’t exist. Therefore, “themself” crops up quite early, though not necessarily with a singular meaning.

The plural “they” appeared about a century before singular “they”. Grammatical gender was lost during the thirteenth century, just as the word “they” was being adopted into English. This could benefit from some grammatical context. American English uses generic “he” after “one”, as in “one does what he pleases”, whereas British English doesn’t: “one does what one pleases”. Singular “they” has tended to crop up in rather similar circumstances: “Had the Doctor been contented to take my dining tables as any body in their senses would have done …” – Jane Austen, ‘Mansfield Park’, 1814. The use of the English language before the eighteenth century was not strongly prescribed, but from that time on, such uses of “they” tended to be frowned upon on the grounds that it came across as plural, and “he or she” on the grounds that it was clumsy. Three important points come to mind here. Firstly, it’s actually three centuries older than singular “you”. Secondly, the use of generic “he” rather than “they” seems to be more American than British. Now I’m quite a fan of American English. For instance, I like the precision of “gotten” as a past participle better than “got”. Thirdly, Jane Austen used it, whose language is quite classical, focussed on sentence structure and balanced. It is of course possible that she was deliberately avoiding generic “he” because she mainly writes about female characters.

It is entirely standard usage to say something like “when the interview candidate comes in, make sure they have the right chair”, and I think in general that would go without comment or even being consciously noticed by most people. It’s a usage before meeting or otherwise encountering the person in question, and it may be the other singular usage, which seems to be newer, which bothers people. However, although I do think there are problems with the use of singular “they” which I’m going to outline later, I do think there’s a new usage, which is however difficult to define. It’s along the lines of assumed gender. Singular they is more often used in advance when someone’s gender is not known to be feminine or masculine. It’s now also used in arrears in this situation. That is, people now either claim the usage as a reported pronoun or it could potentially be used because appearances are sometimes deceptive. If a fool’s tiger and a real tiger were to have names with different grammatical genders, it might be advisable to use singular “they” if one didn’t know what one was seeing. It is quite possibly a question of evidence for gender: what was previously considered a sufficient condition for being gendered in a particular way is no longer, and only honest reporting of one’s pronoun could work. That’s probably the idea anyway.

It may be partly a question of semantic drift. I’m fond of saying that the words “silly”, “nice” and “gay” have changed their meanings dramatically, and in fact they overlap each other sometimes. It used to be common for people to object to the use of the word “gay” to mean “male homosexual”, but it sometimes seemed that they weren’t really deprived of a word and they could’ve said “gaudy”, “merry”, “happy” or many other words in its place. However, I don’t think this is all.

The English language is not very inflected. The present tense of regular verbs has only one variant, and sometimes not even that, namely “-s” for the third person singular. Hence if one does use singular “they”, maybe one could say “they is” or “they was”, but this is grating. There could potentially be a lack of important information. Other approaches can be taken though, such as wording things in the passive, using a genuinely plural “they”.

In conclusion then, grammatical gender is not gender, although it has been said that, for example, speakers of a language whose word for “bridge” is feminine will tend to use adjectives such as “elegant” to describe it, whereas when they speak a language whose word is masculine tend to describe them as “sturdy” and so forth, so it does seem to have a psychological effect. Singular “they” is older than singular “you”, and it may lose information to use it, but we’ve survived singular “you”. I actually prefer “it” because it’s a great leveller, but I’m also sure it’s very unpopular.

So Good They Said It Twice

Certain words have a tendency to change their meaning on a regular basis. These include the words “nice”, “silly” and “gay”. Interestingly these three words also tend to overlap in meaning. “Nice” in its earliest form meant “ignorant”, “silly” meant “blessed” at an early stage and “gay” has recently shifted to mean “lame” in the pejorative sense. Even the word “blessed” has shifted to mean “silly” in the contemporary sense. Another set of words like this, but rather distant from that triad in sense, is “Goth”, “Gothic” and the like.

Starting with proto-Indo-European, the stem “jhew-” meant “pour” and gave rise to the Greek “chyme”, which describes the fluid food becomes while it’s being digested. A D was added to this, making “jhewd-“, also meaning “pour” although presumably it was inflected or altered to a slightly different meaning. This became “hundo” in proto-Italic, meaning “I pour”, which became “fundo” in Latin, possibly due to another form. In Proto-Germanic, this word became “geutanã” (I can’t find the “a” with a hook underneath it), meaning “(to) pour” (there are two infinitives in English but not in many other Germanic languages), ultimately leading to the English “gut” and “ingot”, and related to the Proto-Germanic “Gautaz”, a mythical figure whose name means “he who pours out libations” and is connected to the word “God”. Some Germanic tribes have mythical founding figures. If you trace the Anglo-Saxon monarchs far enough back, you get to Woden, who is alleged to be Hengest’s great-great grandfather, meaning that the current King seems to be able to trace his ancestry back to a pagan god.

The Goths seem to be named after such a mythical figure, and the word Goth tended to float around the Germanic people, giving its name to Gothenburg, the Gutnish dialect or language, the Geats mentioned in ‘Beowulf’ and the Jutes who settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight and were later massacred. The Goths themselves were a Germanic people like the Vandals, Norse, Angles, Saxons, Alans, Burgundians and Franks, but unlike them they fell upon such hard times that they were eventually completely lost. They called themselves (that phrase will become important) the “Gutþiuda”, which was also their land’s name. They crossed the Baltic and settled along the Vistula. Wulfila, whose name means “wolf cub” or “wolflet”, evangelised them in the fourth Christian century and converted them to Arian (not Aryan) Christianity, which includes the heretical belief that Christ was created and hadn’t existed ab aeterno. This led to the printing, and yes it was printed though with separate stamps, of the Codex Argenteus, a Gothic gloss of the Bible, which is the main source for the Gothic language today. All that said, their chief claim to fame was when the first king of the Visigoths Alaric I and his army reached the gates of Rome, at which point it’s famously been said that the people inside the city spoke a language with fewer inflections than the people outside it. This is probably true. It’s also tempting to believe that the fall of Rome was caused by the decay of the Latin language, with the existence of a more fusional language as spoken by the Visigoths somehow leading to a military advantage. Perhaps they were able to think more quickly than the Romans, or their conversations about strategy were faster because of it? I don’t take this idea seriously at all but I kind of wish it were true. It makes the idea of prescriptive grammar, that is, the notion that correct usage ought to be a certain way such as having no double negatives, saying “should have” rather than “should of”, or not overusing the word “like”, seem more valid. There is an argument, which I think doesn’t work at all in most cases, that that kind of grammar promotes clear and rational thought. All of this is rubbish, probably.

The actual reason Rome fell, according to Edward Gibbon, was that the Empire’s adoption of Christianity led to people focussing on the hereafter rather than trying to keep it going. If that’s true, it suggests that the Goths, being Arian Christians, were not so affected by it. In that case, is there some implication of the idea that Christ was “begotten and made” as opposed to “begotten, not made”, which would’ve led to them behaving differently. Another hypothesis is that the horseshoe was invented and made their exploitation of horses more efficient, and that actually might make sense even with the explanation employing the faith, because maybe they’d invented the horseshoe before they became Christian. As far as I can tell, the front runners of hypotheses regarding the fall of the Roman Empire are to do with ecological unsustainability, such as the Empire needing to maintain Rome through pillaging other lands as it conquered them, but I’m no historian. It is notable, though, that Wulfila is said to have refrained from translating the books of Kings in the Bible because he thought it would encourage them to wage war, so maybe they were just more successfully violent and aggressive than the Romans at that point.

This incident is the cause of the first semantic shift in the word “Gothic”, where it refers to the likes of architecture. This is because historians at a later date perceived Roman territory as being taken over by the Goths, and this was indeed somewhat true, with for instance the Visigothic kingdom in the future Spain and the Goths taking control of the Italian peninsula. Hence the distinctive architecture and calligraphy of a particular time during the Middle Ages came to be called “Gothic”. Apparently some early clockwork timepieces are also described in this way. It went on from there to be used to describe a genre of tales set in Gothic buildings, and their aesthetic led in the twentieth century to the youth culture.

The Goths were a large section of Germanic-speaking people who have now completely disappeared along with their language. Although they spread, in two halves, from Portugal to the Crimea, they were ultimately conquered, although there are traces of their language in Italian and Catalan, the word “Catalunya” possibly being a corruption of a word like “Gothland”. Surprisingly, their language seem to have survived in the Crimea into the late seventeenth century CE. They had fallen upon hard times in the later fourth century, being treated harshly by corrupt Roman officials and having to sell their children into slavery in exchange for rotten dog meat. This led to a war, and later a massacre of the Goths by the Romans, so although my knowledge of their history is limited I can certainly see that they may have become very resentful of the way the Romans behaved towards them. I don’t know if this was actually worse than the way they’d behaved towards other nations though.

As I’ve said, the Codex Argenteus is the main large text surviving today. There is also the Skeireins, which seems to be a Gothic translation of a Greek commentary on the Fourth Gospel. Although this is better than a lot of other languages at the time, for instance early Germanic runic inscriptions in the Elder Futhark or Irish Oghams (which are also in Wales incidentally), it isn’t like there’s a huge extensive body of literature as with Ancient Egyptian, the Greeks and the Romans. Consequently there are big gaps in what’s known about Gothic, and to my mind the actual use of the language itself as opposed to what seem to be glosses (word-for-word “translations” from another language), which might therefore obscure many features of its grammar, is lost. However, it hasn’t vanished completely. It’s written mainly in Greek-derived script, like Coptic and Old Church Slavonic, with a few runes used to fill in the missing sounds. Oddly, it actually uses Ψ for Þ even though later Greek employed Θ for the same sound, presumably indicating that in the early fourth century that sound was still an aspirated T in Greek, but this still doesn’t explain why it didn’t adopt the rune, as English and Old Norse did.

Being the earliest Germanic language which is extensively recorded, Gothic is a fair guide to what the ancestor of English, Icelandic and German was actually like. It did have a few idiosyncratic features of its own, such as the initial sound “FL-” as in “flea” becoming “ÞL-“, and it’s the only language I’m aware of which has no separate words for “this” and “that”, but on the whole it preserves an earlier stage of Germanic than is otherwise available. This leads me to an oddity among Germanic which has been largely lost but brings to mind something quite distinctive and odd about European languages generally. Unlike many other languages, European ones, including non-Indo-European ones such as Finnish, are strangely reluctant to repeat words and syllables as a way of conveying meaning.

To illustrate what I mean, I once had a Punjabi student who, instead of saying “is very different”, used to say “differ-differ”. I presume this is a feature of Punjabi, which is an Indo-European language and I believe most closely related to Romani, the language complex of the Roma people, which however like other languages spoken in Europe doesn’t have duplication. In other languages, such as Malay, repeating a noun is used to make it plural, which is like many features of Malay and Indonesian bafflingly logical and makes speakers of other languages wonder why we bother with the kind of grammar we have. It does happen in English, as with “blah-blah”, “boogie-woogie” and “tutu”, but it tends to be quite informal and seems to have no fixed function. Yiddish does it to express contempt of course, and that’s been borrowed into American English. English varies the vowel sometimes, such as with the word “flip-flop”. Afrikaans, which is very close to Dutch indeed, uses it, which is interesting because it isn’t a European language. Outside Europe it’s both very common and has specific grammatical functions.

The ancestral Indo-European language did appear to use reduplication, in particular to express certain inflections of verbs. In Sanskrit, the Class III athematic verbs express the aorist, preterite and the intensive. Where these verbs can be traced to a cognate in Germanic, it’s possible that such a verb would also be reduplicative in our own ancestral language.

Well, Gothic does this! Germanic languages historically have two main types of lexical verb plus some other unusual ones such as the preterite-present classes, though one type has been lost from Afrikaans, Bislama and Tok Pisin. These are the weak and strong verbs. In English, weak verbs generally either add “-ed” or “-t” to form the preterite and the past participle unless there’s a T already at the end, so we have “generated”, “burnt” and “cut”. There are also a few contracted verbs in this class like “have” – “had”. English strong verbs are gradually disappearing, but inflect nowadays by changing the vowel in the stem in the past and often add “-en” with another vowel change in the past participle: “drive” – “drove” – “driven”. Over the history of written English, many verbs have passed from strong to weak, an example from my own lifetime being “thrive”, but a few have gone the other way, such as “dig”. English strong verbs as they are now are, as usual, not as distinctly conjugated as they used to be since the plural preterite used to be like the past participle, and before that was distinct from both it and the singular preterite.

Anglo-Saxon as she was written had seven strong verb classes. There were also dual pronouns, “wit” and “git”, for when there were two of someone, but no third person dual personal pronoun, but the verbs associated with them just used the plural. Gothic was, unsurprisingly, more highly inflected and did conjugate for the dual, something which is incidentally completely absent from Latin. I’ve seen it claimed that in the oldest Germanic, strong verbs were actually the main form of verb with weak verbs a minor feature of the languages, and extrapolating backwards this does seem to make sense but it’s a little hard to believe. The seventh class included the reduplicative verbs, of which there were two types. One changed the stem vowel, the other didn’t. The reduplication happened in the preterite. The verbs included: “haitan” – “hight” and “hey” (this is an interesting one); “laikan” – leap (the cognate is “lake”, meaning “play”); “slepan” – “sleep”; “letan” – leave, let go (cognate “let”); “tekan” – “touch”; “saian” – “sow”; “bnauan” – “rub”; “hahan” – “hang” (transitive only); “bautan” – “beat” (found as a loanword in Portuguese but possibly not in the bits of the Bible which survived); “trauan” – “trust”, believe; “gangan” – “go”, walk.

Leaving Gothic, at least for now, Old Norse also retained a few reduplicative verbs, including “róa” – “row”; “sá” – “sow”. The former was still reduplicative in Old Norse, the preterite being “rera” in the preterite active first person singular (“I rowed”), but the latter had undergone the common change of S or Z to R which occurred in Scandinavian and West Germanic, making the same part of the verb “sera”. This made the “-ra”-type ending and the similar endings for other parts of the preterite more like an ending for a small class of non-reduplicative verbs rather than reduplicative in themselves. That is, although the form of “row” was still reduplicative in form, it wouldn’t’ve seemed like it to the speakers of the language due to “sow” changing.

I’ve gone into these verbs in what is possibly quite tedious detail in order to test an hypothesis I had about them. I thought that reduplicative Germanic verbs tended to refer to repetitive actions, and to an extent I stand by this. Sowing seed, rowing and beating, for example, are clearly that kind of action. Sleeping could also fall into this category if it formerly meant something like snoring, and walking involves stepping forward repeatedly. It doesn’t seem to work for all of them. It is interesting that trusting, i.e. having faith, is in this class because some Christians see commitment to Christ as a one-time thing and others say that the perseverance of the saints is like someone holding onto a rope being saved from drowning, and it could be said that faith waxes and wanes in a cycle and is therefore a repeated rather than continuous action. Hence trusting in the Lord is something one has to do more than once. One of the many peculiar things I do is to say the Lord’s Prayer in Gothic, and if it gives me other insights like this, it’s definitely worthwhile. The others are not so obvious, but there is another distinctive feature which still shows traces in English. One of these is the verb “hang”, which we use in both strong and weak forms: hanged for execution and hung for the more benign action. Hence there is a distinction of some kind here which is unique in English so far as I can remember. The other is the remarkable verb “hight”, which is one of the two last traces of reduplicative verbs in English, and also the only synthetic passive in our language. English passives are almost always in the form “be called”, “be taken” and so forth, but “hight” is a passive in itself, and also looks suspiciously like it would’ve been “hey” in the active present. Hence when we say “hey”, coincidentally or not, we seem to be using the active voice of “hight”. It should actually be “hote”, which was a real English word. Moreover, the “GH” in “hight” descends from the Anglo-Saxon H in “heht”, which is a remnant of the reduplication which produces the likes of “haihait” in Gothic, although the passive is not reduplicative in Gothic and in fact it’s a preterite in English.

The other apparent remnant of such verbs in English is the past tense of “do” – “did”. This, however, is rather obscured by the development of all the weak verbs which use the “-ed” ending in the past, which in fact has been thought by some to be a descendant of an appended “did”, or rather its ancestor, although that idea may have gone out of fashion. If so, it’s a bit like the Old Norse “row” and “sow” extended to the whole weak verb system. Also in that class in Old English are fon – seize, preserved in its past tense as “fang”, which is no longer a verb, and also in the phrase “new-fangled”, and “feallan” – “fall”. These are not repetitive actions. “Hang” actually used to be the past participle “hangen”, the present being “hon”.

In English then, all this is, like the traces of the instrumental case, a tiny island of the way things used to be in the ancestor of our current language, except that this time it doesn’t survive in present day English at all unless you count “did”. “Hight” is no longer used, although Shakespeare did employ it.

All of this, that is the instrumental and the traces of a synthetic passive and reduplication in English, makes me feel like there could be a familiar-sounding version of modern English which nevertheless (remember?) drinks of the ancient font of our tongue in such a way that it’s more reminiscent of the ancient phase of the millennia-long string of parents and children, each of whom could understand each other, stretching back into prehistory, than of how we speak today. After all, we all know what led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, don’t we?