Bookaholic

The Future of English

(Grammar, not history)

How we speak and write is how we think. The prescriptionists of language, known as grammarians, strain to put every utterance, every word, into its own box (this is an Adjective, this is a Verb). In some ways, their rationalist approach does simplify language. By doing so, they fool us into thinking it’s simple.

I start from a different point. Noam Chomsky made the cogent observation that language seems to be an innate ability of humans at a very young age — to hear and speak a language. Chomsky showed a generative pattern that could lead to a full language, notm, however, requiring a universal language or universal grammar. Let’s start from our own early experience.

The English language has shown a remarkable propensity to grow like a weedpatch, ever resistant to neat rows of categorization. Gnarly roots show in the quaint spellings captured during the years that printing took over Europe, spellings that no longer reflect pronunciation in any known area of spoken English. That’s the subject of a different chapter.

Here I intend to explore the “future of English (tenses).” Latin, its associated languages, and others simply modify a verb to create a future tense. English, however, a bastard language, went with the Germanic branch to attach “helping” words to a verb to indicate an event or time not yet occurring (or perhaps never to occur), i.e. the Future.

In other words, English verbs do not have a distinct future form. The stratagem of “helping” or auxiliary words opened the door to a wide variety of futures, depending on your choice of helping words. Here is my list, and you’re welcome to comment to add your own:

I will go (I’ll go) = I have every intention of going

I shall go = I commit myself to going, though I may be grudging in my commitment

I am going to go (I’m gonna go) = I’m stating that I’m planning on going

I would go (I’d go) = I am willing to go, if certain conditions are true

I could go = I have the ability to go but am not necessarily planning on going

I should go = I feel an obligation to go

I ought to go (I oughta go) = I feel obliged to go but am reluctant

I may go = I haven’t decided definitely whether I’m going or not

I might go = I could go if I wanted to

I must go = there’s no way around it, I am going whether I want to or not

I have to go (I hafta go) = I can’t get out of going (also used to describe an urgent bathroom trip)

I’ve got to go (I gotta go) = I can’t stay any longer because of other commitments

I’ve got to get going (I’ve gotta get goin’) = Sorry, I can’t stay. I’m already late

I’m good to go = I’m ready

In other words, we English-speakers have a variety of futures to play with. Or, another way of stating it is, We’re a bit foggy about our future.

Looking up from the rock I was propped up against, I focused on a branch, several branches bobbing in the light wind. Then, not sure how my mind clicked a connection as I was pondering my own life’s direction, I felt as if I were a branch, bending to time and circumstance. But as I had been trying to write a business plan to organize my many activities, I followed the branches back to the trunk, the roots — and all the things I’d done, whether for others or for my own amusement, all seemed related — to me (duh). I was the tree.

A tree, as a metaphor, suddenly seemed more appropriate than business owner or entrepreneur. I wasn’t really after money or solving problems. I was going in several directions, creating, producing, dropping seeds in people’s minds (well, that’s how I imagine it). And I know, you can see it in any woods, that every tree has wounds and unique shapes, some branches flourish and others stagnate. To me this was making sense of my life in a new way.

Many, no, most of my activities have not produced fruit or flourished, but for a tree, that’s not the point. A tree does what a tree does; a bird sings because birds sing. Humans, we have such a variety of things we do, and we do them because we can. Our lives are shaped by outside forces working for or against inner strengths — that’s how I see it.

This past week, I encountered a teacher in Second Life who is creating a whole world based on the Pardoner’s Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. A medievalist, she is recreating the environment in which the story might make sense. Of course to us moderns, a “pardoner” is a rather obscure profession: it’s the person who sells indulgences so that people may save themselves from going to Hell (later on, Luther had a problem with that). Chaucer’s trick is to have the Pardoner admit up front that he himself commits all the sins that he is pardoning others for, and then he gives the pitch anyway — the ultimate hypocrisy.

I have to admit that when I was in college I passed my Chaucer course by nodding and smiling, without ever entertaining the notion of craft. But it brought me back to a principle I may have mentioned before: Who is saying What to Whom — and Why? For the medievalist, the point was to get students back into the 14th century, reading, perhaps even reciting, the Chaucerian words with the same appreciation she had for them.

As an editor, my goal would be entirely different for the same material. Chaucer had his specific audience in mind, and, like an investigative reporter, he apparently set out to expose a system that others accepted without questioning. However, my audience, as I see it, are the students and teachers of today in a different country with a much changed language. To my mind, the old language is a barrier, even the subject matter of theology is dusty. Is there a pertinent comparable situation in our modern society? Yes, it crops up in the news all the time: Reker, the anti-homosexual ranter, caught with a “rentboy.” Jim Bakker, evangelist, caught in disgraceful affairs. Politicians paying lip service while accepting tons of money for their next campaign.

The medievalist and I tussled the argument about “modernization” back and forth, but it really wasn’t an argument. She was a different tree offering raw fruit, and I would be creating processed materials. In the end, I’d be happy to see a forest grow up from both of our efforts.

When I started publishing in the mid-1970s, the issue of the sexism of the third person singular pronoun came up. With new authors, we would just advise them of our concern. But when our Mudborn Press broke up (she kept the name, I went with Bandanna Books for my FBN), and I became interested in publishing classic texts, I soon confronted the sexism issue directly.

Obviously, the older authors had no idea that there might be a concern about using “he” or “man” as applying equally to women as to men, and there are historic reasons for that. Until the 18th and 19th centuries, girls were not traditionally sent to school, so why bother with he-and-she when the only readers were male?

In Plato’s Athens, women were not part of the political process; his writings were on major themes of honor, justice, and such, so we moderns assume that he included all persons in his ideas. But when he writes The Republic, it’s clear that he didn’t. We tend to gloss over that, so that today we read his philosophy as universally applicable. Is it? That’s a question for an editor to be worth asking.

When I launched Bandanna Books, my very first book published was a version of the I Ching. Simple, straightforward, right? But the model in almost every entry was the Prince or the noble man, the good man. Again, were women explicitly to be excluded? In a number of instances, women’s roles are mentioned separately from those of men. Nowhere is there an instance of a woman held up as a model. Does that negate the ideas in the I Ching about right living and judgment? Again, we like to read it as if these were universal truths or guides. How should the text read then, if English has a gender split in the third person singular?

I gave it a lot of thought, tried and rejected several ideas before coming up with what I call “humanist pronouns.” I noticed that we already had a set of non-sexist-tagged third person pronouns, interrogative pronouns: “who,” “whose,” “whom.” These are ordinarily used when we don’t know the person or gender and are asking. But what if we started using, with the same pronunciation, “hu,” “hus,” and “hum”? The spelling is similar to what one would expect, the sound is familiar, and even the sense is close to what one expects to hear. “Someone is knocking. See hu’s at the the door.” “A customer left a package. I picked up hus package and put it away.”

This, I believe, works better than using the plural in place of the singular, or he/she, hir, s/he, him and her, or other constructions that I’ve seen.

Some authors are careful in their writing, so that little or no
“gender editing” is required. This is generally true of Shakespeare, Poe, and others. Yet a few books, starting with the I Ching, require major surgery.

What has been the response? I did a little survey, and got something like 8 positive, 2 negative responses from teachers who used the books in their classes. It hasn’t caught on with anyone else, as far as I know. College textbooks go out of their way to keep their texts from being sexist, sometimes going to extremes of rearranging sentences to avoid using any pronoun at all.

Will I continue using the humanist pronouns? That depends on the text at hand, the audience, the acceptance. It’s my best effort at regularizing English.

Actually, the concern has spread to other languages, most of which have explicit masculine and feminine nouns, pronouns, adjectives, sometimes even neuter pronouns. Their solutions, the ones I’ve seen, tend to tack on the second gender with a slash to the ends of words.

Why do I care? Why is this issue important to me? Because I have changed genders myself, and I am forced to ask other people to change their pronouns for me. Now, if we had a non-sexist third person pronoun, that would not be required.

I live in the United States, where equality is part of the law of the land, even when our Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” The universal “he” has not disappeared; I don’t know if it ever will. I would like to see another option continue to be available.

My fascination with the English language, the one I grew up with but didn’t pay that much attention to, has led me to understand it from various angles. Lately I rediscovered a little booklet I had done called the Deadword Dictionary. DD was devoted to all those words that seemed unnecessary or were “orphaned” words — by which I mean words which in previous ages may have had a connection to a root word that has since been lost. “Unbeknownst” is a good example. We don’t say “beknownst” and I’ve never heard “beknown” or even “beknow” used in a sentence, so the branch to “know” has been severed, although “unbeknownst,” floating off by itself, continues to haunt our dictionaries as a lost orphan. Do we really need it in a rational language?

Well, the point I’m coming to is that English is somewhat irrational. Pronunciation is another quirky aspect of English. I woke up thinking about “flange,” the ending of which is not pronounced the same as in “change” or even “orange.” And there’s the famous “I had a cough even though the bough had been through enough.” That’s five different pronunciations for one ending! And neither “g” nor “h” are sounded.

So, I was thinking of calling my new minim opus Quirky English, but now I’ve decided on “Exceptional English” for a double-edged title. Think of it as advanced English; a lot of the “correct English” sounds, spellings, and vocabulary are exceptions to one rule or another. By putting all the exceptions to rules in one place, I’m hoping to provide a handy resource for struggling English learners. Plus, it’s a lot of fun for me to point out the warts and anomalies of my own language.

If you enjoy puncturing the prissy as much as I do, I invite you to send me examples that you think should be in such a booklet. Exceptional exceptions will be acknowledged if and when I publish the work.

As of this evening, you can find these titles, mostly how-to books and two college survey textbooks, on eBid:

Biology. Concepts and Connections. Campbell, Reece, Mitchell, Taylor.

Principles of Modern Chemistry. Oxtoby, Gillis, Nachtrieb.

The House Book. Terence Conran.

Encyclopedia of German Tanks of World War Two. A complete illustrated directory of German battle tanks, armoured cars, self-propelled guns, and semi-tracked vehicles 1933-1945.

Masters and Johnson. Human Sexual Response.

Chapman Piloting. Seamanship and Small Boat Handling. Elbert S. Maloney.

McCall’s Book of Afghans.

The Dancer’s Book of Ballet Crafts. (Dancewear, Accessories, and Keepsakes)

Quilting, Patchwork, and Appliqué.

Pretty miscellaneous, but I pick up what I can, trying to salvage what we know for the future.

One thing I learned from being a writer and then an editor — you can make things up all you want, and it might be beautiful, even fashionable. But the things that are important for us to carry on come from what we know. Really know. It might be a technique in choosing the right wood for a job, it might be a dark secret hard to admit even to yourself but that nevertheless is true.

As an editor, starting out with no idea of what I wanted, I settled on this criterion: What is the writer trying to do, and did they accomplish it. Sometimes I don’t get past trying to figure out the first part. As time went on, I determined that most of the writers whose material I saw weren’t trying to do much of anything at all — but it always delighted me to find the occasional surprise. Maybe that’s what it came down to, after reviewing hundreds upon hundreds of MSS, I kept looking forward to the possibility of being surprised.

I’m going to restart an old project of mine—and you can help, by voting. Here’s how it works. The Deadword Dictionary is dedicated to spotlighting words we might well abolish. These are orphan words, words used in perhaps only one expression and without which the English language could do just fine. I don’t hate deadwords, I find them fascinating. Anyone learning and using English may find deadwords actually very useful.

Your part is to vote your comment on whether the word should live or die. Have you ever used the word, or do you expect ever to use it in the future? Here’s the first one:

“Cahoots” is used in the expression “in cahoots with” someone. One never finds it in the singular; its meaning is to share a secret plan or plot, usually with a person or persons not otherwise commonly associated with the individual under discussion. “Joseph Kennedy was reputed to be in cahoots with Chicago mobsters to help swing the election to his son Jack Kennedy.”