It’s a lot spiffier than this antiquated relic of the 2000s, but it covers a congruent mix of language-related topics. The About page features a Chekhov quote and a list of beliefs (Dogs are the best people; All English is Good English; No such thing as a wrong pronunciation); topics include phrasal verbs, No Irish in the House of Commons, The Irish and the definite article, I goes to work: subject-verb agreement, and many more, some of them listed at Kattullus’ MeFi post, from where I got the link (e.g. Shetland or Zetland ?, featuring yogh [Ȝ]). I learned something about my adopted region from this one:
It is almost a rite of passage, for those trained in the English language of New England, to confuse an outsider by using the phrase “downcellar”. This is a phrase that means both generally “downstairs” and also “in the basement”, and can be used regardless of what floor the speakers are on, or whether they are even indoors.
The phrase “down cellar” is not a recent evolution or an informal term, being attested as far back as the 1700s. Rather it is a product of an older and broader use of the preposition “down” which meant “towards”, evolving through the common directional construct “downtown”.
And though the term is not exclusive to New England, being reported by speakers in surrounding regions as well, it dovetails with a broader New England English proclivity for the direction “down.” New Englanders use it as a catch-all for generalized motion towards, saying things like “down the store”, “down the beach” and “down Quincy Market”.
Regardless of where we are geographically, the direction of travel is “down east” or “down town”, with “uptown” being decidedly too fancy a place to go. We even go “down the Cape”, from Western Massachusetts and Rhode Island, though the phrase “down Cape” has a more specific meaning: to the better beaches past Hyannis!
As an old-style blogger, I wish the entries were dated and there were archives (at least, I can’t find any), but never mind the nitpicking, it’s a good find.
The term ‘down east’ for the part of coastal Maine that is adjacent to Canada is said to come from sailing terminology. The prevailing wind is easterly, so a ship heading downwind from New York or Boston would reach the upper Maine coast. That’s the usual story, anyway.
Down east and down Cape were the ones that sounded completely natural to me—and as she says, down Cape is a more specific idiom. (I couldn’t have told you where on Cape Cod down Cape actually began though.)
The blog archives can be accessed from front page, and there are only four pages of posts (thirty-nine posts total), so it’s not too bad to navigate. The main annoyance I see is that you have to mouse over an image to see the title of a post. That, and the lack of metadata on posts, makes it look like something from 2008.
The use of down, meaning toward(s), is not limited to New England. My wife is from the East Midlands in the U.K. and tells me that it’s common there as well. Nottingham dialect “We goo-in down Buhwuh” translates to RP as “We’re going down Bulwell”. Bulwell is northwest of the center of Nottingham, so down doesn’t imply compass direction.
The blog archives can be accessed from front page
I see what you mean, but that’s not what I mean by “archives” (and it will get ever more unwieldy as more posts are added). I want a link labeled Archives where you click to find posts from each month of the blog’s existence. Is that too much to ask? If I can do it, so can they!
A discussion of “down the shore,” which is not a New-England-ism but a Greater-Philadelphia-ism (complete with quotes from Ben Zimmer): https://billypenn.com/2022/05/27/down-the-shore-phase-origin-philadelphia-new-jersey/
Wanna go down pub is supposedly very widespread in England.
There’s also ‘down the ocean’ in Baltimore, pronounced ‘dane yation.’
Widespread in the north, no doubt, in the south we go down ‘the’ pub. Also locative ‘I’m down the pub’, ‘down the fishmonger’s’. ‘Downcellar’ is weird and awesome and I will use it henceforth, but as cuchuflete mentioned, the other examples are totally normal in the uk in general (not the Cape thing).
How much of the examples from Britain (and presumably also Ireland) just originated with the tendency to omit some prepositions that are mandatory in North American English?* That’s what, “I’m down the pub,” sounds like to me—a reduced form of, “I’m down at the pub.” The New England form has both fixed idioms, like downcellar (which I have certainly heard, but, as I noted above, definitely sounds peculiar to me) and down Cape, and a general sense of “towards.” “I’m going down the store,” sounds like dialectical New England speech to me, since there is clearly movement involved. On the other hand, “I’m down the store,” indicating a current location, sounds like speech from the British Isles—and, as I said, I interpret it as originating with a dropped “at.”
*Dropping prepositions like that is another common mistake that Brits make when writing American characters. No matter how good his accent is, a character who says, “I went out the school,” is never going to be convincing as an American.
Although I might well say “he’s down the pub”, I would actually find “down the pub” cromulenter in e.g. “he’s going/gone down the pub”, i.e. as an object of motion rather than a locative of rest.
I don’t think I would use the construction with anything except pubs, and possibly fish-and-chips shops. (Construction Grammar is the One True Path.) Certainly not libraries, schools or hospitals, at any rate.
“down the town” or “down town” can mean “in[to] the city/ town centre”, where there is no such thing as “up town”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hCuMWrfXG4E
And Eastenders used to go (perhaps still do go) “up West” for a night out in the sinful English capital.
Would one say “down (the) attic”? Or “down” with an elevated part of a hilly town?
Y says :
It seems that the use of “down the…” is largely in a domestic context, and as DE says in quite restricted contexts. I’d say he’s “down the bottom of the garden” although the garden’s quite flat or “down the allotment”, but not “down the garden”. The pub is v. common, but perversely if it’s the local shop it’s : “he’s round the shop”.
A comparison might be the German “ist auf der Post/Bank” or “auf die Bank/Post gegangen..”. As I understand “auf die” is quite restricted, although topically it also includes “auf der Wies’n” or a Messe.
French “chez le…” seems similar.
What the chomskyites would make of this, I don’t know.
Some AmE dialects have locative “over to”, but I’m not sure which ones.
And it’s not universal with these examples.
That is literal: you’re on a flat surface outdoors (Wiese “meadow”). It’s extended to Fest and further to Feier and Party.
There are also cases, however, where logic cannot decide and different “literal” interpretations are used in different places: auf einem Baum “in a tree”.
@dm
That one makes literal sense to me, i.e., you are perched on a branch or in a crook (unless you are a cat or Spiderman). Compare “auf der/die Toilette”, and the mirth caused when a hapless English speaker uses “in”.
auf einem Baum
Kusaal does the same:
Tiliilʋŋ yir bɛ nɛ tiis la zug.
stork home exist FOCUS trees the head
“The stork’s home is in the trees.”
where zug “head” is used, as very often, as a postposition “on, onto.”
My grandmother had locative to. I think. I only heard it in the past tense “I was to Owosso yesterday” and the parallel with Spanish fui also occurred to me. Was it locative to or an occasional, situational irregular past tense for go/went? Or did locative to in Spanish eventually lead to the irregular past tense of ir via a generalization of the usage?
OED (entry from 1912!):
While zuhause is standard, zu Berlin is no longer used (except in the family names of the former nobility). Back in the 1970s I was rather surprised that the official name of Cologne university was “Universität zu Köln” (the university had been (re)rounded after the war, so it wasn’t an old name). I don’t think anybody would use “zu” + city name today.
Why does Google Books have two full-read copies of John Morris’s The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers Related by Themselves 3rd Series but none of the 1st Series (1658 citation)??
God bless the Internet Archive.
Revised (at least partially) in 1986 — give Burchfield his due! He added “Earlier and later U.S. examples” to that part of the old entry, including the ones from 1795, 1818, and 1977 that you quoted.
Somebody has to mention “I’ve been to Oklahoma,” which doesn’t work with any other tense or aspect of “be”.
The article on almond milk seems to be contradicted by the included almond milk recipe from The Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary (1723). It’s for crushed almonds boiled in milk and then sieved, which is the same thing as anise milk (milk boiled with crushed anise for flavoring) or indeed the more modern concoction of chocolate milk, but that’s quite a different thing than almond milk (juice from crushed soaked almonds).
A quick check for the likes of mandelen melck and mandelmelck in Middle Dutch texts doesn’t provide further clarity as to what it might’ve meant in that particular language, i.e., is there dairy in there or only almond juice. One text speaks of monks receiving almond milk while fasting (“mandelmelck in der vasten die broeders te geven”), but without further research it’d be reckless to draw conclusions from that phrase one way or the other.
Mind, the idea that white substances of any sort could be called milk is eminently plausible. For example in Dutch the white juice from plants is called milkjuice (melksap). That’s a slightly different matter than what almond milk specifically might’ve referred to, and of course it may well be both depending on time and location.
This isn’t my dialect, but my impression is that the opposite of “down cellar” is “up attic”, as in Robert Frost:
Previously at Language Hat: GO TO/BEEN TO.
>Somebody has to mention “I’ve been to Oklahoma,” which doesn’t work with any other tense or aspect of “be”.
Well, not in standard, but my point was that my grandmother did in fact follow this usage with another tense – specifically “I/he/she was to…”
I apparently also mentioned this in the thread kts points to.
– Have you ever been to Oklahoma?
– Have I ever? I’m being to Oklahoma right now!
A: When are you coming to Odessa?
B: But I am in Odessa!
A: Nu, when are you coming next time?
I thought, what was that that bothered me with this post. And now I know. It should go like this “Sonya Mathews Has a Blog, Yeah-yeah-yo”
@trond
You are joking, but there is a point here.
I am being difficult
but not
*I am being tired (unless you are an unfortunate victim of Winnie Mandela’s overly zealous supporters, and then it would probably be “tyred”)
I’ve been difficult.
I’ve been tired.
I get that there’s a distinction, but I’d love to hear someone succinctly define it.
Also, Jerry, obviously I inferred that you meant tense and aspect of the verb “to be”. Did you specifically mean forms of “be”?
That’s a very interesting contrast.
CGEL doesn’t seem to address this specifically, but on p167, it talks about various ways in which the “progressive”, contrary to the usual rule, can combine with expressions of a static situation:
Agentive activity: “He is being tactful.”
Waxing/waning: “He is making more and more mistakes.”
Temporary state: “She is cycling to work this week.”
“I am being tired” evidently doesn’t qualify.
Kusaal has two kinds of deverbal adjective: one which shares a stem with the verb imperfective, and has a sense like the English gerund/participle in -ing used as a premodifier:
pu’a kʋʋdir “murderous woman” (kʋʋd, imperfective of kʋ “kill”)
tikʋʋdim “poison” (“killing medicine”: tiim “medicine”)
tivʋnnim “oral medication” (vʋn, imperfective of vʋl “swallow”)
The other kind is formed from the perfective stem by adding -lʋŋ (plural -lima), and is only possible if the verb perfective can be used in a resulting-state meaning:)
pu’a kpiilʋŋ “dead woman” (kpi “die”)
pu’a gɛɛnlʋŋ “tired woman” (gɛn “tire”)
fu-aanlʋŋ “torn shirt” (aaen “tear”)
dʋgkɔɔlʋŋ “broken pot” (kɔ “break”)
So I suppose you might claim that in English, “difficult” is an imperfective adjective, and capable not only of its default “habitual” sense, but also progressive-imperfective in these limited contexts, whereas “tired” is a perfective adjective and therefore never susceptible of being interpreted as progressive.
Interestingly, “I am being tired out” (by my opponent’s alternating shots to the right and left of the tennis court) seems to work. Does the mind reject it over confusion about whether “tired” is an adjective or a participle. I might even accept “I am being tired by my opponent’s…”
I am being retired only works for me as a participle. It can’t mean “I retired a few weeks ago and I’m still being retired.”
Patterning on DE’s Temporary State example, I can’t say “I am tired this week.”
Interestingly, “I am being tired out” (by my opponent’s alternating shots to the right and left of the tennis court) seems to work
Yes it does. I reckon that’s because it’s a finite progressive passive, rather than a use of “tired” as a predicative adjective.
Kusaal differs from English in that you can’t have a progressive passive either: although the particle nɛ after an imperfective verb form usually makes it progressive (as opposed to habitual):
M nuud daam.
“I drink beer.”
M nuud nɛ daam.
“I’m drinking beer.”
the particle can’t have that sense after a verb used passively, and has to be interpreted instead as a constituent-focus marker:
Daam nuud.
“Beer is drunk.” (in general, as a rule)
but
Daam la nuud nɛ.
“The beer gets drunk.” (You don’t, for example, take a bath in it.)
Not “Beer is being drunk.”
Kusaal also has the temporary-state exception thing, like English, though explaining how that works in Kusaal would probably be too much of an excursion into the minutiae of Kusaal syntax to inflict on my fellow-Hatters, even for me.
E-I-E-I-O – a long string of diphthongs, not necessarily with any [j] in it.
(The most West Germanic song of all! Complete with Celtic substrate…!)
On the other topic, I have thoughts, but I’m… currently too tired to sort them out.
@Ryan: Also, Jerry, obviously I inferred that you meant tense and aspect of the verb “to be”. Did you specifically mean forms of “be”?
I seem to remember Geoff Pullum saying at Language Log that you should never, ever (ever) write something like “the verb to be” instead of “the verb be“. I followed that, but I’m not in a position to endorse or dispute it.
I believe I was wrong when I said “I’ve been to Oklahoma” is allowed only in the present perfect. The past perfect sounds fine to me. “I’d been to Oklahoma three times before that trip.” 508 hits on ‘d been to at COCA.
Speaking of being wrong, yes, after you’d mentioned your grandmother, I should have said my comment about “been to” applied only to standard English.
CGEL pp1183ff goes extensively into the “to” of “to be” etc, which it calls an “infinitival subordinator.” They point out that “to VERB” cannot be regarded as a flexional form of the VERB lexeme (the traditional teaching) because this “to” precedes verb phrases, not just verb words; cf
“She wants me to lend him the money, so lend him the money I have to.”
“I have to lend him the money and find a solicitor for him.”
(And, of course, “to boldly go” …)
They also point out that although this “to” certainly originated from the homophonous preposition, it cannot be treated as a preposition synchronically.
They discuss an analysis of this “to” as an auxiliary verb, which makes more sense than you might think, but reject it in favour of an analysis as a verb-phrase subordinator. It differs from clause subordinators in that it need not come absolutely initially in the subordinate constituent, and that it can be stranded:
“She taught her children always to tell the truth.”
“She wants me to lend him the money, but I don’t have to.”
Kusaal n, traditionally regarded as a serial-verb linker, is in some ways analogous to English “to”, though I analyse it as a clause subordinator. In fact, n always does come first in its constituent, and it can’t be stranded. In Mooré (though not Kusaal), if you ask somebody to cite a verb (“what is the Mooré word for ‘run’?”) they’ll reply “n VERB”, e.g. n zoe.
(Slightly OT): If I ever went back to conlanging, I would definitely inflict affixes with no surface form* on the suspicious world.
__________________________
(*) The discerning reader will be able to infer the non-expressed underlying form from first principles. I.e., if English would need an extra word there…
Kusaal has not only affixes but several distinct words with no surface form.
But the best affixes are not merely zero, but negative:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disfix
Welsh plurals like plant “children” (singular plentyn) belong there too; the story that a word like plentyn is “singulative”, rather than simply singular, is a confusion, partly of diachronic and synchronic, partly of form and function. Synchronically, you form the plural of plentyn by removing the suffix and undoing the umlaut it causes.
Kusaal marks finite verb forms with a tone overlay unless they are subordinate, so verbs are marked as subordinate by removing the tone overlay.
Kusaal verb derivation boasts a reversive suffix, of all things, which has no surface form, e.g. yɛ “get dressed”, yɛɛg “get undressed” (monactional), yɛɛs “get undressed” (pluractional.)
For monactional -g and pluractional -s, cf (among many others) fi’ig “amputate (one body part)”, fi’is “amputate (many body parts)”; neither suffix is actually reversive.
Mooré has pidi “put shoes on”, pidgi “take shoes off” (monactional), piidi “take shoes off” (pluractional.)