# Reading Old English **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 18, 2003, 12:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765 "2003-02-18T00:54:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![yBeayf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/e274bd/32.png) [@yBeayf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yBeayf)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 3:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/41 "2003-02-21T03:51:16Z")
**Monty** , of course Japanese is not Indo-European. How about any of the other languages I mentioned? What about Mandarin or Vietnamese? Also note: the grammatical features I mentioned are not exclusive to Indo-European languages, but they way they are used in Esperanto is very Indo-European. ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/42 "2003-02-21T05:18:26Z")
> [@](#): > > Seems missing the nuance is about all esperanto is good for… Actually, that’s a function of the skill of the translator. ---
**Author:** ![hazel-rah](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/73ab20/32.png) [@hazel-rah](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hazel-rah)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 8:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/43 "2003-02-21T08:29:29Z")
> [@](#): > > Oh, Japanese does mark plurals (when used). There’s a morpheme used to change the ending of, you guessed it, nouns. Just out of curiosity, what is it? I remember there being a ton of suffixes used with numbers that differed according to the shape of what you were counting, but never learned anything you could add to a noun that would indicate “more than one.” Or the verb, for that matter. It was just kind of determined by the context. -fh ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 11:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/44 "2003-02-21T11:10:53Z")
The Japanese plural ending, such as it is, is -_tachi_. But it is not frequently used, and then only with words for people. E.g. _onnatachi_ ‘women’. Whoever said Japanese verbs are conjugated like European verbs has no idea what he’s talking about. European verbs are conjugated for person, number, mood, and tense. None of those (except a distinction between present & past tense) appear in Japanese verbs. Instead, Japanese verbs are inflected for level of politeness and negativity. Another point discussed above: the Great Vowel Shift. It didn’t just come to a stop in Shakespeare’s day. Some vowels kept shifting until the late 18th century. ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/45 "2003-02-21T15:34:44Z")
Is it still going on? What changes are occurrung now? ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/46 "2003-02-21T16:41:51Z")
yB: You are being obstinate about this. Your assertion was that Esperanto used a particular method in its grammar and thus that proves that it’s decidedly Indo-European. I proved that there is another language which uses that same method in its grammar and thus, going by your logic, that language must also be Indo-European. Since the language I showed used that same method in its grammar is Japanese, most decidedly not an Indo-European language, your assertion falls to pieces. As to Vietnamese: The words are essentially monosyllabic. The verbs are not conjugated at all. There are, however, words to indicate past, continuing, and future actions. Since Vietnamese uses these words the same way English does (I will go = To^i se~ ddi / I did go = To^i dda~ di), your argument still doesn’t hold water as Vietnamese is most decidedly also not an Indo-European language. Jomo: I did not say that Japanese verbs are conjugate for all of the above. I did say that they are conjugated for tense: Nomimasu = I drink / Nomimashita = I drank). Please put on your reading hat and read what I actually said: > [@](#): > > _Originally posted by Monty_ > Japanese also changes the verb ending for conjugation. & also what yBeaf said: > [@](#): > > _Originally posted by yBeaf (with bolding by Monty)_ > Things like marking case and number in nouns by changing the ending, adjective / adverb distinction, **conjugated verb endings, etc. are all very Indo-European features**. Notice, if you will, the commas around “conjugated verb endings.” They aren’t exclusively Indo-European features; they’re linguistic features. As I said above, not even a nice try. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/47 "2003-02-21T16:43:26Z")
& I just put on my own reading hat: All I did say was that Japanese verbs are conjugated and that conjugation appears as an ending to the verb. Also, a perhaps better expression than “linguistic feature” would be “grammatical feature.” ---
**Author:** ![yBeayf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/e274bd/32.png) [@yBeayf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yBeayf)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/48 "2003-02-21T17:00:11Z")
**Monty** , I am sorry for doubting you. You have convinced me that the grammar of Esperanto bears no resemblance to any Indo-European grammar. Apologies to all for continuing the hijack. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/49 "2003-02-21T17:54:39Z")
All this goes to show that English is like the Los Angeles of languages. Nothing lasts and it changes radically from century to century. The ability to form complex words describing abstract concepts out of native elements? Gone like the Victorian houses of Bunker Hill. All those wonderful inflections for case, gender, mood, and number? Ripped out like the Red Car tracks. The sense of the language as a cohesive whole, instead of a mishmash of loanwords, with lower and higher levels of use being handled by Anglo Saxon and French derived words, respectively, demolished like so much more of our heritage. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/50 "2003-02-21T18:09:41Z")
I can’t tell if you’re being snide or sarcastic about it, yB. I’m just saying that it’s not based on that; not that it doesn’t resemble it. What I kind of like about Old English is case. Even Modern English today has a remnant of that (he, him, his, etc.). ---
**Author:** ![yBeayf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/e274bd/32.png) [@yBeayf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yBeayf)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/51 "2003-02-21T18:38:55Z")
I _love_ case, and would be more than happy to see it return to English (though it most certainly will not happen within my lifetime.) I love the old Indo-European case system, and regret its passing in most IE languages (except Balto-Slavic! Yay Slavonic!) Perhaps a better alternative would be to try to encourage the use of Old English as an everyday language. It is much more elegant than Modern English (imo). ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/52 "2003-02-21T18:48:39Z")
Good luck. Case went away for a reason. It really doesn’t add any information that context doesn’t already supply, except in a few cases (no pun intended) where simple clarification fixes things. Note that, even as you pointed out, most IE languages have reduced case considerably. But you already knw that… Have fun with Russian and Lithuanian and leave case out of English. “Whom” do you think you are, anyway…? ---
**Author:** ![yBeayf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/e274bd/32.png) [@yBeayf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yBeayf)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/53 "2003-02-21T18:53:30Z")
Yes, but you see, I have certain beliefs regarding the aesthetics of languages, and that case should exist is one of them. I don’t think case will return to Modern English anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean I can’t work to promote the use of languages that contain case (such as Old English). ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/54 "2003-02-21T20:47:02Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by John Mace \* > \*\*Good luck. Case went away for a reason. It really doesn’t add any information that context doesn’t already supply, except in a few cases (no pun intended) where simple clarification fixes things. Note that, even as you pointed out, most IE languages have reduced case considerably. > > But you already knw that… > > Have fun with Russian and Lithuanian and leave case out of English. “Whom” do you think you are, anyway…? \*\* Case does supply useful information. If you think you can go through life without knowing wheter Horace ate the olives or the olives ate Horace, good luck. When case inflections diminish, languages usually have to resort to other machinations of supplying the same information. English syntax is far more rigid than Latin syntax for that reason. ---
**Author:** ![hazel-rah](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/73ab20/32.png) [@hazel-rah](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hazel-rah)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/55 "2003-02-21T21:09:36Z")
But just as effective! ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2003, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/56 "2003-02-21T21:51:06Z")
“Horace ate the olive”. Perfectly understandble and neither noun has any indication of case. I rest my case. Me don’t want to hear anything more about case!!! ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2003, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/57 "2003-02-22T16:50:39Z")
> [@](#): > > Me {1st person singular _accusative case_} do {differs from _does_ which is used to differentiate 3rd person singular present tense} not {negative} […] That enough for you, John? 😃 yBeayf: It actually appears we might be kindred spirits of a sort. What sparks your interest in Linguistics? As for me, I’m majoring in that at UC-Davis. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2003, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/58 "2003-02-22T17:37:54Z")
Once upon a time, before linguistic science was developed, it was thought that “primitive” peoples spoke grammatically simple languages, while “civilized” white Europeans spoke grammatically complex languages (i.e., Latin). That language developed complexity through the onward march of civilization. This has long been thoroughly debunked. Languages of naked Indians recently discovered in the Amazon rainforest, or tribes in the interior of New Guinea, or Eskimos, show a huge variety of grammatical forms, polysynthetic structure, complexity that would utterly baffle any of us who tried to learn them. Meanwhile, English is nearly as analytic as Chinese (using a minimum of changes in the form of a word and a fixed word order). Some linguists argue that no language is really any more complex than any other, when you take everything into consideration. A language that is more complex in one way will be less so in another way, and vice versa, so that it all pretty much evens out. Recent thinking about this question suggests that morphology grows and sheds complexity in cycles. Proto-Indo-European shows signs of having gradually developed grammatical gender out of an earlier distinction between animate and inanimate nous. The case endings of Proto-European seem to have gradually formed out of independent particles that became fused with the headwords. In other words, pre-PIE had a simpler, perhaps analytic morphology that grew inflections. First the inflections were agglutinated and then became fused into a synthetic structure. Meanwhile Chinese, today a totally analytic language, was highly inflected 2,000 years ago. As it dropped its inflections, different words started to sound alike and tones were developed that helped tell them apart. As complexity decreased in one area, it grew in another. Contemporary modern Chinese shows some hints of moving toward agglutination or inflection again. English dropped most of its inflections and became more like Chinese in structure than any other Indo-European language. Sanskrit was as highly inflected as any Indo-European language, but as it changed into modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars, all its inflections were lost. Modern I-A languages like Hindi have compensated by using particles attached to the ends of words to show case and verb conjugations, in other words, an agglutinative structure similar to Turkish. Which seems to replicate the process by which Proto-Indo-European developed inflections in the first place. ---
**Author:** ![Dreaming\_of\_Maria\_Callas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/f14d63/32.png) [@Dreaming\_of\_Maria\_Callas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dreaming_of_Maria_Callas)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2003, 6:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/59 "2003-02-22T18:52:58Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Jomo Mojo \* > \*\*Proto-Indo-European shows signs of having gradually developed grammatical gender out of an earlier distinction between animate and inanimate nous > > … > > Meanwhile Chinese, today a totally analytic language, was highly inflected 2,000 years ago. As it dropped its inflections, different words started to sound alike and tones were developed that helped tell them apart. As complexity decreased in one area, it grew in another. Contemporary modern Chinese shows some hints of moving toward agglutination or inflection again.\*\* Cites? I’m really not trying to give you a hard time, I just find that what you’re saying conflicts with the view I already had both of PIE and Chinese. Everything I read on the evolution of Chinese states that it originally was without tones, yes, but was nonetheless monosyllabic like other Sino-Tibetan languages. And I agree with you on how modern Chinese is moving towards inflections. It doesn’t take much of a jump from postpositions (like “zai…de sha[r]ng tou”, “on top of”) to case endings. Wow, this thread keeps getting ceaselessly hijacked. UnuMondo ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2003, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765/60 "2003-02-22T22:12:10Z")
[Let’s land the aircraft here, then, UnuMondo.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=164932) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/reading-old-english/155765.md?page=4)