The video How Far Back Can You Understand Northern English? nominally lasts twenty minutes, but it will take longer if, like me, you keep pausing it to read the footnotes. It was sent me by rozele, who says:
it’s a dialect coach called simon roper’s retrogression through cumbrian english from circa 2000 to circa 1200, followed by some overall comments, and then a subtitled (both IPA and a standard u.k. english rendering) repetition, with enough on-screen notes on his reconstruction to make me wish youtube had 10-second jump controls. i don’t know a lot of northern english dialectology, so can’t check his work, but i was quite impressed, on a bunch of levels.
one bigger-picture tidbit from the notes that was news to me, though i’m sure it’s familiar stuff to many of the hatters:
“In the north, from the Middle English period onwards, verbs agreeing with ‘thou’ tended to take the ending ‘-s’ (‘thou does’), unlike in the south where they took the ending ‘-(e)st’ (‘thou dost’). This remained true into the 20th century, and as far as I know is still true in northern dialects that retain ‘thou’.”
(which has me wondering whether the stereotyped u.s. quaker use of “does” in 2sg, which i’d always assumed was generalized from the 3rd person, is just a northernism. and it seems somehow relevant to the current singular “they are”, too.)
I learned a great deal from it, including the word gled ‘(red) kite’ (OED: “the Old Germanic form was probably *gliđon- and with o- umlaut gleđon-, < glið- weak grade of the root of *glîđan to glide v.”). At one point he discusses ingressive speech, which we covered in 2014. I was surprised how far back I could mostly understand what was being said (I think I started losing the trail around the fifteenth century), but my immersion in British cop shows has given me a head start in northern dialects — thanks, Vera, and thanks, rozele!
re “thou does”, isn’t that just the Northern Subject Rule in action?
Is ‘it’s you that sings’ (from the wikipedia article) not standard? What would the rest of you say?
‘Gled’ is one of those words that wanders across the border, although in Scotland where there aren’t many kites it seems to as often refer to a buzzard.
The “It’s you that xxx” construction is a bit weird, and akin to some of the discussion at https://languagehat.com/i-who-is/
Absent the “it’s” you can find, e.g., “thou that singest” in Tennyson where “that singeth” would sound odd to my ear.
Re Quaker usage, D.H. Fischer’s schematic explanation of American regional variation tried to peg the colonial Delaware Valley as not just Quaker but somehow north-of-England (the way New England was East Anglia and the Tidewater South the West Country), but I don’t know how accurate that was and I think maybe he was talking North Midlands rather than NORTHern northern in an English context. The actual borderers from English Cumberland get separately allocated to the Scotch-Irish settlers of the Appalachians.
@Lars: from what i can tell (see below), no. according to the wikipedia summary: “Present-tense verbs may take the verbal ‑s suffix, except when they are directly adjacent to one of the personal pronouns I, you, we, or they as their subject.” [emphasis added]
some snippets counter to that exception, from a very quick search:
the librarian in Philadelphia Story, in 1940: “What does thee wish?”
a random quaker substacker, last week, quoting “an old Quaker story”: “Friend mule, Thee knows I am a Quaker.”
a late-18thC “Philadelphia merchant and ship owner”: “As thou does not write the best Hand, I think thou had best get a Clerk to write thy Letters.”
and, apparently, william blake: “Does thou know who made thee?”
‘It’s you that sings’ is a bit weird because you presumably know that you sing, but something like ‘it’s you that goes there most often’ (where the new information is that you know more about the place than I do) isn’t. To me, anyway.
In small world news, Nynke de Haas who appears to have provided that example is a good friend of the friend of mine previously mentioned who wrote a PhD thesis on Norn. I don’t *think* they met in Edinburgh…
Now I’m wondering if that’s a reduction (supposed Texan breakfas, pl. breakfases; Tyrolean 2sg ending -/ʃ/, following */st/ > /ʃt/, as also in 3sg /ɪʃ/ “is”) or original (i.e. -/sθ/- > -/stθ/- never happened or at least was never grammaticalized; it’s known to have happened independently in English and German anyway, being consistently absent in the oldest OHG).
This must be ancient*; it’s been a while since a short *o or any such umlaut was posited for Proto-Germanic at all. Wiktionary has Scots gled in the right meanings – and says it’s a Norse loan; but the link to the Norse original doesn’t work, going instead to a Faroese word cognate with gladden.
* But not as ancient as the entries that call Proto-Germanic “Old Teutonic”.
I knew “gled”, though heaven knows why or how …
I’d say “it’s you that sing”, but I suspect that plenty even of unNortherners would say “sings.” It’s not a good example of the Northern Subject Rule, because many people default to third person anyway in a relative clause. You need “it’s them that sings” …
I see from the WP article that people have trotted out the “Brythonic influence” thing again here …
Welsh does not in fact do this:
Ein Tad, yr hwn wyt yn y nefoedd …
“Our Father, who art in heaven …”
However, when a third-person verb follows a plural subject it is plural, whereas when it precedes a (non-pronoun) plural subject it is formally singular. (Much as in Arabic.)
In Middle Welsh the unmarked sentence construction was what is now called the “abnormal order” (on account of it being the normal order), and here the verb usually agrees in number with the preceding subject, e.g.
A’r guyrda a doethant y gyt
“And the nobles came [pl] together”
All true Welshmen know that
Gwyr a aeth Gatraeth gan wawr
“Men went to Catraeth at dawn”
but in fact the singular verb aeth in this famous line is an exception to the general pattern.
However, in Cornish and Breton, which also normally use(d) the “abnormal order”, the verb is regularly 3sg regardless of the person or number of the preceding subject, and, given that this bit of Y Gododdin may well date to the seventh century, the singular there could well just reflect the original Brythonic construction, with the number agreement in Welsh being a later innovation, which Cumbric may not have shared.
I still think there are great problems with the Celtic-influence theory, but at least it relates to a part of England (and Scotland) where Cumbric really was spoken for quite a while.
Does Scottish Gaelic do this, Jen? I have a vague recollection that there is supposed to be Brythonic influence on Gaelic in some aspects of clause structure. If so, does it differ from modern Irish in this regard?
Homorganic lengthening featured twice (by its northern absence) from 15:11 onwards.
How much I understood actually went back up towards the end – there it’s pretty much just English pronounced the way it’s spelled…
Roper has an essay to accompany the video, with more details (on substack).
Margaret Fox, a founder and leading member of the Society of Friends (Quakers) was born and lived in Cumbria. Her home at Swarthmoor Hall was an early organizational center for the new religion. Perhaps this is why the U.S. Quakers spoke similarly.
Robert Burns, “Holy Willie’s Prayer“
Now I’m wondering if that’s a reduction
i could see an argument for that aligning with enough -s forms to be the starting point for a more general reanalysis shift to forms that usually match 3sg – assuming that quaker merchant, with his “thou had best get a Clerk”, wasn’t an outlier.
and @david: i’ve certainly been assuming that u.s. quaker usage comes mainly from northern english topolects, since that was the movement’s birthplace and stronghold. the quakerness (Friendliness?) is only really relevant for the retention of “thou/thee”, which could itself have been supported by slower adoption of singular “you” in the north.
Blake’s own handwritten version of ‘The Lamb’ https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/347905 clearly has ‘Dost thou know who made thee’.
@de
At least for Modern Irish (except Munster Irish), the indicative present verb is identical in 2ps, 3ps and 3pp. There is only one order (VSO). You can front the subject, e.g., Is mise a duirt é sin leat = I (emphatic) said that to you (lit. It is me who said that to you). This is not present but the above fronting sounds right to me only with the verb in the past (or frequentative present).
Thanks, PP. Sounds like the issue is moot in modern Irish.
In modern Welsh, the default order in verbal clauses is VSO too. You can front the subject, but (as in Irish) that focuses it; this wasn’t the case in Middle Welsh. A’r gwyrda a ddoethant i gyd is just “And the nobles came together”, not “And it was the nobles who came together.”
Older modern Literary Welsh still used this “Abnormal Order” as the unmarked default; it’s standard in the 1588 Bible. Apparently it was killed off in the nineteenth century by prescriptivists who didn’t understand the linguistic history and thought that it was “illogical.” Presumably helped along by the fact that spoken Welsh had long since reverted to VSO.
The original marked-as-Quaker usage of the T-pronouns arose in England among the OG Quakers who were themselves adult converts to the new teachings. Presumably there was a mix depending on regional etc. background of: a) speakers who had grown up using the T-forms in specific “familiar” contexts who just needed to self-consciously repurpose them for use in other social contexts where they would piss people off; and b) speakers who had grown up using only the V-forms because the T-forms were already obsolete in their native form of English outside what you might hear in church or in poems, so they had to self-consciously adopt the whole thing. These two groups might have different intuitions and sensibilities about how to handle verb agreement.
The next step is the relocation to the New World where very few of the surrounding non-Quaker Anglophones are still using the T-forms in any context, so there’s no baseline there of verb-agreement practice to keep the Quakers from drifting wherever the wind took them.
There was a thou/thee discussion on Langage Log in the previous decade.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2732
@Kate Bunting: thank you for the catch! i shoulda known better than to cite from an online transcription without checking the illuminated book version (especially since my reproduction copy of Songs of Innocence and Experience is about four feet from where i was typing). /sigh/
@JWB: it’s exacly that post-emigration absence of external reinforcement that seems to me like reason to expect the u.s. quaker community’s internal usage to rapidly establish a standard (whether new converts simply modeled their speech on longstanding Friends or were actively corrected when speaking “incorrectly”). and with quakerism originally a northern movement – and beginning to spread to north america only a decade after george fox began preaching – it seems reasonable for that to be shaped by northern usage.
@david: thanks for that link! i’ll try to find time to follow the citations in it and attend to the comments. but the post itself seems to support a northernist explanation: the only “thou”ing and “-st”ing early quaker cited is william penn, who was a londoner (with a father from bristol and a dutch mother). i don’t take the late 19thC source as providing much evidence of anything: it would be odd if hypercorrection towards an ahistorically standardized “archaism” weren’t at play by then.
@rozele, Kate Bunting: Blake did sometimes tinker with the wording of his poems after their first publications. The Songs of Experience version of “The Tyger” differs slightly (one word of difference, although there are other, more divergent versions also) from the one I memorized from reading it to my daughter so many times.
You can compare the various versions here
…and in the oldest Old English, too, as mentioned in the LLog discussion.
with enough on-screen notes on his reconstruction to make me wish youtube had 10-second jump controls
…as opposed to YouTube’s existing 5 second jump controls?
(admittedly they’re not labelled anywhere so maybe the person who wrote it just didn’t know about them; they’re just left and right arrow while watching a video)
I didn’t know about them either! I think you just made my life noticeably easier. 🙂
I didn’t either!
The Log link that David provided had a comment quoting Penn himself explicitly on the grammatical question (well, on the pronoun, though not on verb agreement) in the 1698 work Against the Bishop of Cork’s Exceptions:
>though the Bishop confines us to Propriety, as the only Reason of our Practice, that he might the better Lash us with the Impropriety of Thee for Thou; which yet he might have spared, since nothing is more common with all People, than to take the like Freedom in Speech, in Cases as well as Tenses; not excepting the Learned themselves.
As the Log commenter said, Penn was a descriptivist. Pennsylvania had been chartered in 1681.
@J1M: i did not know! i may be none the wiser, but thanks to you i am usefully better informed!
Also Conservapedia – THE TRUSWORTHY ENCYCLOPEDIA, which none of the editors noticed for months – and people named Chasity.