language

[thedarkproject]

English is strange.

In the simple past tense, we say "I solved" but to negate it, we say "I didn't solve"? Not only do you add in the negation as you might expect, but you have to add the auxiliary verb "did" because you can't negate normal verbs (unlike French where you surround it with 'ne' and then something like 'pas' or 'jamais' to signify the type of negation), which then means the original verb gets changed to match the auxiliary, so it becomes almost a different tense entirely.

But in the future tense, you can interchange "I will solve" and "I won't solve" easily enough with no confusion. Unless you start thinking about what the hell "won't" actually stands for.

At the moment I'm trying to teach myself Old English from a book, which is actually going better than I had expected, although even back then there seem to be a lot of irregularities much like the above one in Modern English. A year or two back, I posted on here about the attempt to translate Wikipedia into Old English. Back then it was all gobbledegook to me; now I can actually get the general gist of some of the articles. Maybe it'll inspire me back into learning German eventually.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

We say 'I solved' as shorthand for 'I did solve', which is perfectly logical in relation to 'I did not solve'.

It's only the contractions that bugger everything up, kids nowadays eh...

bmxbandit rob (bored and reading friends lists...)

[wood-elf.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure 'I solved' is shorthand for 'I did solve', even if they share the same negative form. Could be that whatever the correct way of negating the simple past was has fallen out of usage, so the way of negating the emphatic tenses (I didn't) has been tacked on to serve for both of them. Not totally sure about that. But it seems like there's a gap where past tense negation should be.

Arabic negation of the past also puts the sentence into the present tense - and interestingly, negating the future also has that effect. Then again, Arabic is sensible enough to have negating words that are different for each tense so you can tell them apart (lam + present negates the past, lan + present subjunctive negates the future...)

I intend to learn Old English one day. It's never going to be useful, but hey, it's fun.

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

It's the Gaelic looking words that confuse me in my attempts at comprehending Old English. Apart from those it looks like a weird mix of German, Icelandic and English with "C"s thrown in everywhere.

[thedarkproject]

Apparently most people think that Gaelic had very little influence on English, so I assume it's just that they look similar, with all the 'æ' stuff everywhere. The rest does look quite like German and Icelandic, and the 'C's in Old English mainly correspond to the 'sh' sound apparently.

I'd love to learn Gaelic too eventually, though whether the Irish or Scottish variety I haven't decided.

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

It's not the "æ"s, I am quite used to those, although I am not used to the stroke above it. It's words like "nīwlicum" that look queer to me

[thedarkproject]

Aha, right. Those are just pronunciation guides to signify longer vowels. I don't know if many or even any original texts featured those.

Do you know what nīwlicum means? Is it 'knowledge'?

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

I do not think so, judging from the context I found it in. I found it in this sentence here on the page on the second world war:

Sēo Ōðru Woruldgūþ wæs blōdigosta, deorwierþosta, and hīehst gūþ on nīwlicum stǣre.

I also notice that some of the modern stuff in there seems to borrow from Icelandic, and adapt it to Old English. Like the word for radio (which I can't find again) looks like an adaptation of the Icelandic word for radio: "Útvarp". Which is neat, since it is a composite of the words "út" (out) and the verp "varpa" (to throw), essentially meaning to broadcast, and these words can both be found in Old English and hence the composite is easy and looks fairly natural to me.

[thedarkproject]

That line looks to me something resembling, "The Second World War was the bloodiest, deadliest, and biggest war in known history", or something like that. No doubt I've got some of those words wrong though. The last word looks like it could also mean "star", after all.

I often wonder how modern writers of Old English decide on how to write modern words that didn't exist a thousand years ago, and I suppose that looking at the etymology of similar words in Icelandic or German and constructing them similarly is probably the most faithful way.

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

It does mean history, or at any rate that's the name of the category that also includes the battle of Hastings. That still leaves the mystery of where the original word comes from. In Icelandic knowledge can be any one of these words: Þekking, kunnátta, vitneskja, vitund or viska. In German I know these words for knowledge: Wissen, Ehrfahrung and Erkenntnis, none of which really match with "nīwlicum" or knowledge. Do you have any bright ideas?

[bloggerofdeath.livejournal.com]

you're one of these E-Prime people aren't you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

[thedarkproject]

No. :)

picky

[lost-in-moose.livejournal.com]

What I find most entertaining about all of this is that everyone thinks languages have to be logical, efficient, deterministic and non-reducible. Language; it's syntax, grammar and all of its paraphernalia associated tenses clauses/bullshit etc etc etc all started off as grunts, nose picking and some ear waggling no doubt followed by being or NOT being hit by a rock.

And you want the damned tenses to follow a decent lexical construct? OPTIMIST ALERT!

Re: picky

[thedarkproject]

You are mistaking my interest in the issue to be some sort of complaint at the irregularity. :) I am merely interested in how the language got to be that way. They're not as random as all that, given that almost every language in a wide geographical swathe from India up to Iceland comes from common roots.

Re: picky

[lost-in-moose.livejournal.com]

In that case I think it's because people don't think of abbreviations as multiple words. Don't, Didn't, won't, can't and others are all single words in our heads. Indeed they exist so that we can collapse multiple things into simpler terms that take less effort to use and arguably to think about.

Whether these simplifications are a good thing, or even the correct ansewr, is another matter.

Re: picky

[thedarkproject]

But that's not really the issue I was getting at. Whether you call it "didn't" or "did not" doesn't matter; the point is that "I solved" and "I did solve" are 2 different tenses, but "I did not solve" is the negative equivalent of both, as we have no "I not solved" style of term. So I wonder if there used to be such a distinction in English but we gradually forgot about it, like the distinction between thou, thee, and you.

Re: picky

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

"I solven't" sounds better (and more amusing) than "I not solved", in my opinion : þ