I confess to finding Early Modern English somewhat dull, for as a native speaker of English generally interested in foreign languages, it’s only with Chaucer and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that things get sufficiently exotic for me. Nonetheless there are evidently some surprises to be found even as late as the 17th century. Terttu Nevalainen’s textbook An Introduction to Early Modern English speaks of how the Southwestern dialect of English retained the Old English pronoun iċ ‘I’ in its VC form while other dialects dropped the consonant. This form is attested not only on its own, but in numerous contractions e.g. cham ‘I am’ < Ich am. By way of illustration, Nevalainen quotes a passage from the verse play Gammer Gurton’s Needle attributed to William Stevenson:

Hodge. Cham agast by the masse, ich wot not what to do.
Chad nede blesse me well before ich go them to
Perchaunce some felon spirit may haunt our house indeed,
And then chwere but a noddy to venter where cha no neede,

Tib. Cham worse then mad by the masse to be at this staye
Cham chyd, cham blamd, and beaton all thoures on the daye,
Lamed and hunger storued, prycked vp all in Jagges
Hauyng no patch to hyde my backe, saue a few rotten ragges.

Hodge. I say Tyb, if thou be Tyb, as I trow sure thou bee,
What deuyll make a doe is this, betweene our dame and thee.

(Nevalainen points out that the fact that the Hodge character reverts to the standard form I underscores that this is a stage dialect instead of authentic dialect writing.)

The website of BBC News has a feature today titled ‘20 examples of grammar misuse’. Readers had written in about what ‘ungrammatical’ elements in contemporary speech peeved them, and 20 of them were selected for the article.

What is frustrating is when people get so cranky over language change that is quite natural and doesn’t create any obstacle to understanding. Take this one:

15. There is also confusion over lend and borrow. I keep hearing school children asking ‘to lend your pencil’ when what they actually mean is to ‘borrow’ the pencil.
Ian Walton, Bedford

I am fairly sure that the use of the English verb in both sentences has a long history at least in the dialects. For a clear example from another language, Swedish now uses its cognate att låna in both senses. The meaning ‘to borrow’ can be emphasized with the adverb ut ‘out’ or by specifying the indirect object, but Swedes don’t appear to have any problem understanding the difference in cases like jag ska låna dig en tia ‘I will lend you ten kronor’ and får jag låna telefonen? ‘may I use your telephone?’

Then you get bizarre demands like this:

17. I don’t like it when people say: I can go there ‘by foot’ instead of ‘on foot’…the right preposition to use is on.
Daniela, Urbana, IL

And no discussion of grammatical ‘mistakes’ in English would be complete without saying that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition:

19. A classic confusing rule is the one that states that one is supposed never to end a sentence with a preposition. While this is easy and appropriate to follow in most cases, for example by saying ‘Yesterday I visited the town to which she has just moved” instead of ‘…the town she has just moved to’, it becomes troublesome when the verb structure includes a preposition that cannot be removed from it, as in ‘At work I am using a new computer with which my manager recently set me up”, which cannot correctly be changed to ‘…I am using a new computer up with which my manager recently set me’.
Philip Graves, Stockholm, Sweden

Why are we still anxious over a centuries-old fallacy based on the idea that English grammar must be just like Latin? Come on, Philip. You’re in Sweden, where people aren’t ashamed of the way their Germanic language orders its words.

Last October I wrote a post about the interesting innovations in Nigerian pidgin English as heard in the songs of Fela Kuti. Evidentally I am not the only linguist interested in Fela Kuti’s music, as I’ve discovered an old paper on the topic. Back in 1998 Markus Coester of the University of Mainz wrote a paper entitled ‘Language as a product of cultural contact: A linguistic approach to Fela Kuti’s lyrics’. Coester writes by way of introduction, ‘What Fagborun calls code-mixing – in his eyes “the most interesting of all modes of communication in the Yoruba territories” – strongly inheres in Fela Kuti’s lyrics. Code-mixing “may, at times, comprise Yoruba, English and/or Pidgin in one and the same sentence, depending on the level of education of the speaker.”’ We get such rigorous analysis of Fela’s language as, discussing the song ‘Sorrow, Tears & Blood’:

Assuming that Fela Kuti is describing a police action in progress even the very first lines give evidence that the language applied is not ‘pidgin­proper’ In ‘pidgin­ proper’; ‘e run’ is supposed to mean ‘he ran’ (‘E run’ = ‘e come run’, as the tense marker ‘come’ can be omitted without distorting the meaning of the sentence.)

There is no reason why we should expect past tense to be used in this particular context, especially as ‘Everybody run, run, run’ and ‘Everybody scatter, scatter’ occur later on in an indisputably ‘present tense context’. In line 3 Fela shows that he is aware of the grammatical structure of Standard English, using the preterite of ‘lose’. In Nigerian Pidgin English the verb in simple past should be formed with the time marker ‘come’ and the infinitive. The third line would be as follows: ‘some come lose some bread’ or with deletion of ‘come’, which is also possible, just ‘some lose some bread’. This is, of course, why ‘e run’ stands for ‘he ran’.

Line 4 of ‘Sorrow, Tears, and Blood’ corroborates to the use of the infinitive as a means of expressing past (if translated ‘someone nearly died’, referring to the previous past tense). However, the infinitive form could also indicate present perfect, e.g. in line 5.

As becomes obvious in my translation of both lines, I preferred present perfect, according to the context. Yet, this tense does not exist in Nigerian Pidgin. Basically there is a distinction of three different tenses in NP, namely past, present and future. However, there are certain ways of expressing, for example, present perfect although there are no such things as auxiliaries for forming verb phrases in the structure of NP. Rather, there are ‘aspect marker’:‘there are two main aspectual notions in NP. These are the imperfective and the perfective. The imperfective can be interpreted as either habitual or continuous’. The perfective aspect in NP is marked by the particle ‘don’ ‘which indicates completion, plus present relevance’. The interpretation depends on the context, in which it occurs or the semantics of the particular verb involved.

Unfortunately, this decade-old webpage is now unmaintained and the images no longer load, but the text is all still there.

Over the past month or so I’ve been listening to a lot of Fela Kuti. The great Nigerian musician, human rights activist, and would-be politician was from a squarely middle-class family and lived for some time in England and the United States, so his English was generally of the standard international variety. Nonetheless, elements of Nigerian English slip through. One of the most striking innovations for me is the wide use of the verb ‘quench’, which I first heard in Fela’s song ‘Zombie’ (from his 1977 album of the same name). In comparing soldiers in the Nigerian military to undead puppets, Fela twice uses the verb in the following sense:

Tell him to go kill, tell him to go quench…

Go on, quench, with your .45s…

As speakers of American English generally use this verb only in the phrase ‘to quench one’s thirst’, this seems odd indeed. The Oxford English Dictionary gives another definition To put out, extinguish (fire, flame, or light, lit. or fig.), which is perfectly understandable though rather Victorian-sounding. There’s even the definition To destroy, kill (a person); to oppress or crush., though the examples show that in this case the verb is used in a consciously metaphorical manner.

In Nigerian English, however, the use of the word seems to have widened greatly. It can be used intransitively, e.g. ‘the stove has quenched’. It is regularly used in the context ‘to put out, extinguish’, and—to judge from Fela’s further use of it in a number of his songs—its semantic scope has widened to the point that it’s a perfectly normal word for ‘to execute’ or ‘to murder’.

I find it remarkable how in one variety of English the word has become quite marginal, while in another variety its use has expanded. Language change in action. It is a pity, though, that I’ve been unable to find academic references for Nigerian English so that I might learn other ways in which it has developed individually.

Prof John Wells, phonetician at University College London who, I should imagine, needs little introduction, has an 2002 article up called “Whatever happened to Received Pronunciation?”. As a fan of the RP as a standard phonetic description of English and as a target for ESL students, I’m sad to see RP pass away, but the changes in English pronunciation that spur and accompany its demise are fascinating, and a good example of diachronic linguistics in action.