How Dead Languages Work

240412 How Dead Languages Work by Coulter H. George


This is a Cook's tour of six ancient languages – Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Hebrew. Five the of the languages are Indo-European. The odd man out is Hebrew.

The author, Coulter H. George, knows and loves language. You can tell this from his allusions, witty asides, and nerdish intensity on case and declension. His approach is to examine the phonology of the language – how the language sounds – followed by the grammar of the language – how thoughts are put into words – and, then, these ideas are put into practice by reading a great work in the language, such as Homer in Greek and Tacitus in Latin. From this, even those of us who are not gifted with language skills obtain a sense of what it would be like to read these texts in their original languages. George brings out the uniqueness of each language, such as the brevity of Latin, where so much is done by the declension of words through case endings. Similarly, he explains the craziness of Old Irish spelling where letters are inserted to indicate that a sound is palatized or mutated. For example, my middle name is “Sean” pronounced “Shawn” not “Scene.” In “Sean” the “e” after the “S” communicates the “Sh” sound.

Well why not? How does an “h” after an “S” make the “Sh” sound?

Convention.

But Irish and Welsh extrapolate this approach to a degree that speakers of Sassenach Anglo-Saxon find impossible to pronounce, such as the memorable “Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i'w gyfieithu,”

And there is a funny story about that phrase, which George shares as follows:

in 2008, an official road sign appeared in Swansea with the English “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only” translated into Welsh as Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i'w gyfieithu, which actually means “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work for translation.” Now a more rigorous proofreading system should no doubt be in place to prevent such slips, but, for our purposes, it's worth pointing out that there's not a single word in the Welsh sentences above that resembles anything in either the actual or the faulty English translations, with the possible exception of nid, which looks like it could be a negative word (and negatives are indeed there in both English versions).

George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 178). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

I am the opposite of gifted with language, but I love etymology. I was fascinated to find new etymological roots. Geroge offers intelligible discussions of phonological changes in Indo-European.

The discussion of grammar in the various languages also helps to explain the quirks of English. I am so much closer to understanding the mysteries of “lie/lay”:

In short, what's happening here is that the vowel changes caused by umlaut are not being applied to the present-tense stem but to something resembling the past-tense stem: set may not look like an umlauted form compared to sit, but it does when compared to sat. And the same is ultimately true of lay as well. Transitive lay (of to lay the book on the table) goes back to the umlauted form of the intransitive past lay (that is, the lay of the book just lay there on the table):

George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 107). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

Well, it's complicated.

Here is George's gloss on the John 3:16:

Take, for instance, the version of John 3:16 found in the tenth-century Wessex Gospels:29 God lufode middaneard, swā þæt hē sealde his āncennedan Sunu, þæt nān ne forweorðe þe on hine ġelyfð, ac hæbbe þæt ēċe līf.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (KJV, 1611)

Consider for now just the first ten words in Old English. All but one of them, āncennedan, has a fairly clear Modern English descendant, and we could rewrite it as follows:

God loved mid-yard, so that he sold his ‘one-kind' Son

George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 117). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

“Mid-yard”? Sold?

George explains “mid-yard” as follows:

“Middaneard is a compound of middan and eard. The first half is comparable to the modern prefix mid-, but it is less clear what exactly eard represents, since this second element was subject to variation within Old English between eard and ġeard. The latter variant, with the word that gave rise to Modern English yard (showing the same change of ġ to y seen above, with the pronoun ġē becoming ye), shows especially well the close cultural relationship between Old English and its sister language Old Norse. In Norse mythology, the world as inhabited by ordinary people was known as Miðgarðr, generally anglicized to Midgard.31 It was called this because it was enclosed (a yard is, ultimately, an enclosure) in the middle of various other worlds that were not accessible to ordinary mortals. But, as a term referring to the world of men, the second element of Old English middanġeard was later on reinterpreted as earth, giving rise to the term Middle Earth, popularized by J. R. R. Tolkien, himself a scholar of the early Germanic languages. In either case, the Old English version of John 3:16 comes across as decidedly more Germanic once one recognizes that the word for “world” is virtually the same as a key place name in one or the other of these two mythologies, the Vikings' and Tolkien's.

George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 118). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.


So, Mid-yard leads to Midgard and to Middle Earth and the thing you mow during the summer.

Concerning “sold”:

Drop the final -e, and sealde is only a vowel away from its modern counterpart sold, but there's also been an important change in sense, too: Old English sellan meant simply to give something away, whereas Modern English sell entails the receipt of money in exchange.

George, Coulter H.. How Dead Languages Work (p. 118). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

This is fascinating stuff...if you like this kind of thing.

For a lot of people, the references to cases and grammar and to the positioning of tongue to pronounce sounds will be a deal killer. I listened to this book as an audiobook and I found the book sufficiently interesting in terms of “gosh-wow! That's why we do that” insights to keep me going. It also gave me a sense of how other languages work, which was interesting. But if you are not interested in things linguistic, this will probably not be your cup of tea.