Readers reply: how were the small words in English created?
How were the little words – such as I, you, an, and – created? Felicity Miles, St Albans
Post new questions below or send them tonq@theguardian.com. Readers reply In the same way that the big words were created. Only quicker. dylan37
What you refer to as “small” words are what bilingual dictionary-makers sometimes, paradoxically, refer to as “long words”, because they produce the longest, most complex and difficult-towrite dictionary entries. They are what grammarians refer to as “delexicalised” words, which means they are used as grammatical tools rather than having particular concrete meanings. An example is “the”, which can only be defined by talking about its function in the sentence. Interestingly (and this goes part way to answering your question), because these grammatical words are the basic building blocks of our language (on which we “hang” the other, more meaningful words), they are more often Anglo-Saxon in origin, rather than having more recent Latin or AngloNorman (ie “French”) roots. mjback
Such small words are not just small, they are also all grammatical words (unlike other small words such as “fly” or “net”, for instance). Grammatical words are typically created through a process called grammatical is at ion, whereby a “normal” word, typically designating an idea that is a bit more concrete starts being used in new ways.
The process typically involves a loss of the original, concrete meaning, a reduction of the form (which becomes shorter, less likely to be stressed, but also less variable) and an increasingly constrained use (in some cases, you just have to use that word and in others you can’t; it is more subject to rules). A good example is the verb “do”, which has become an auxiliary. When it is a normal verb, you can often replace it with “make” or “perform” and you can conjugate it in all sorts of way and it can be stressed. When it’s an auxiliary, the meaning of action has pretty much disappeared, you can’t use forms like “have done” and in some sentences you just have to use it for the sentence to be correct (in a question or with a negation, for instance). Presumably, all the words listed went through a similar process, but what original “normal” word they came from, I have no idea. elskuligr
The indefinite articles “a” and “an” evolved from an Old English numeral (pronounced “aahn”) for “one, lone, single” via grammaticalisation. (Old English did not have articles, just as this grammatical category – or part of speech – is absent from the majority of Slavic languages, which instead structure information by relying on more flexible word order.) The Old English precursor of the conjunction “and” in turn meant “thereupon, next”, and derived from the Proto-Germanic root *unda (and originally from the ProtoIndo-European *en “in”).
Together with other function words such as the definite article “the”, prepositions such as “of ”, “in”, “to”, “for”, “with”, “on”, the complementiser “that”, pronouns, and “light” and auxiliary verbs “be”, “do” and “have”, they make up the Top 20 most frequent words of the English language – and a fair share of every text. Longer, content words are always further down the frequency lists – a characteristic shared by all natural languages.
Today’s first-person singular pronoun derived from Old English “ic” (and in turn from Proto-Germanic “ek” and Proto-Indo-European *eg). In northern England, the syllable had got shortened to a single vowel by the mid-12th century, though in some areas – especially when the next word would begin with a vowel – the forms “ik” and “ich” stuck around up until the 14th century, and in some southern dialects until as late as the 18th century.
“You” comes from the accusative form of the plural Old English pronoun “eow”. The widespread influence of French (and the pronoun “vous”) in England in the aftermath of the Norman conquest began to gradually push out the singular nominative “thou”, with “you” and “ye” (the latter in some dialects in northern England and Scotland) initially used to address superiors, subsequently strangers and equals, and eventually becoming the generic form of address by the late 16th century. language-scientist
The abandonment of the second person singular/familiar in English (aside from some ritualistic uses such as “with this ring, I thee wed”) really saddens me. I notice it constantly since I use English, French and Dutch on a daily basis; French and Dutch both retain the equivalent. It’s such a handy concept! So handy that American English has created a new, explicitly plural second person pronoun, y’all (contraction of you all). The old plural pronoun is now a singular one, and this kludge is needed to replace the plural. It’s madness! cerealcat
I think one of the most interesting aspects of this question is that these are not simple signs that relate to things, or qualities, or processes in the world. Words such as “dog”, “rain”, “run” and “yellow” refer to such features of the world; in principle you can probably teach your cat or dog signs that refer to them. But they will never learn words such as “I”, “you”, “and” or “an” – the concepts are far too difficult. In particular, they require abstract thinking, which probably no non-human animal is capable of. Just think what “an” means, by contrasting it with “the”. “We saw the elephant” means “we saw the elephant that you know or we were previously talking about”. On the other hand “We saw an elephant” means “we saw an elephant that you don’t know about or which we haven’t previously mentioned”. So it is a tool to keep track of the set of things that are being referred to. It’s complex, very complex, so non-human animals probably cannot deal with it. So … where do these words come from? They come from the increased brain size and power that distinguishes humans from (most? all?) animals. incorruptible
Basic pronouns, articles, and connectives exist in virtually every natural language. They certainly existed in Proto-Indo-European, the oldest ancestor language of English that we know about, which was probably spoken about 6000 years ago in the Pontic steppe (north of the Black Sea).
Proto-Indo-European had long since fractured into myriad tongues before anyone who spoke it learned to write, so everything we know about it comes from comparing its descendant languages. It is theorised, for example, that the modern English “I” comes from the Proto-Indo-European *éԟh₂. The asterisk means that this a reconstructed word, not one we have direct evidence of, and experts dispute what sound “h₂” was, since it disappeared very quickly in almost all descendants of Proto-Indo-European. But what we do know about this word is that it was the predecessor of the first-person pronoun in an enormous range of languages across Europe and Asia – from English, to Spanish, to Lithuanian, to Farsi, to Bengali.
The unsatisfying answer, though, is that deeper than that, we don’t know.
Six thousand years ago is barely scratching the surface of the deep history of human language usage. Before Proto-Indo-European there was something else, and before that something else, and before that something else, stretching right back to the dawn of humanity. The question of how the simplest words were first created is more or less the same question as how language itself developed, which is something that we still have very little understanding of at all. alvinrow
Back in 1971 I worked in Bristol and we had a van driver who was around my age at that time, mid 20s, who astounded me by using “‘thou” for you, “casn’t” for can’t, and “thee”, which was also used as you. So sentences from him would be something like “Thou casn’t do that” or “What’s thee doin’ today”? I loved hearing him talk in this old-style English with his Bristolian accent and I responded with my Hampshire one! How those small words and other similar ones survived through him in those days always delighted and surprised me! shadsfan
I tell my OAP students of English that language evolved from an “er”. When our distant ancestors had exhausted all the different pronunciations of “er”, one of them added “ah” and they developed all its possible meanings, which led to “oh”, “uh” … and later “uh-ho”. Then I explain that the first scribes of English were Latin and French monks in Great Britain, who, perpetually merry with mead, made a mess of spelling, which, centuries later, publishing companies saw it profitable to not correct (more dictionaries and grammars sold).
This is not all tongue in cheek. Observing letter sequences in one-syllable words, I have deduced the empirical rules that give “rede, reed, read, reede, reade, reid, reide and reyde” the same pronunciation and which, together with some history, also permit the sound “norly” to be correctly spelt in 100s of ways. Can anyone write one sentence that contains the many meanings of the word “right”? werdswerth