YOU’VE GOT TO BE IN IT TO BE IN IT, INNIT?

The tag question ‘innit?’ seems to be found increasingly in the speech of a younger generation of British English speakers, with the final consonant pronounced as a glottal stop rather than the [t] suggested by the spelling. It is invariant for both person and number, can follow any verb and seems only ever to be uttered with a falling intonation. Much of the influence of other languages on English has been brought about through inward invasion and proselytizing on one hand and outward conquest on the other. ‘Innit?’, by contrast, is largely the result of the more benign process of immigration, seemingly having its origin in the languages of those from Asia who have settled in Britain over the past 50 years. Hindi ‘haina’ (‘is no?’) has been suggested as one of its roots. I have heard invariant ‘isn’t it?’ myself in Sri Lanka.

If the seed was Asian, it has found fertile soil in Britain. Invariant tag questions are not new in English. ‘What?’ was once an all-purpose tag, as in this 1906 citation from Katherine Mansfield: ‘Good-bye, Miss Thornton, awfully jolly evening – what?’ In some dialects even invariant ‘innit?’ may already have been established before the recent growth in its use through the possible influence of Welsh. In any case, ‘Bit cold today, ‘innit?’ is as likely as ‘Bit cold today, isn’t it?’ Invariant ‘innit?’ can thus be seen as the grafting of a foreign construction onto an existing English one.

If invariant ‘innit?’ shows a grammatical influence rather than the more common lexical one, there are precedents, if we accept pronouns as well as verb forms as grammatical aspects of language. Old Norse, the language of the Viking invaders of the eighth and ninth centuries, replaced the Old English third person plural pronouns with ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘theirs’, and ‘are’ became the third person plural form of ‘be’ If they were accepted because of the prestige associated with the invaders then the appeal of ‘innit’ derives from the opposite end of the social spectrum: it has become particularly popular among those of a chav disposition. This may partly explain resistance to it among an older and more conservative generation, although there is nothing linguistically unusual about invariant tags. They are found in French, (‘n’est-ce pas?’ and ‘hein?’) German (‘nicht wahr?’ and ‘oder?’) and Arabic (‘mush Hayk?’).

Those who abhor such developments might reasonably be charged with linguistic nimbyism. Even those who accept language change may not like it when it occurs in their own lifetimes. In ‘Jolly Wicked, Actually: The 100 Words That Make Us English’ Tony Thorne suggests that ‘[innit] may eventually come to influence mainstream English’. Whether it does so remains to be seen, although, if the Urban Dictionary is to be believed it is already moving into areas beyond the tag question: a mark of affirmation in ‘innit tho’ and even a predicative adjective in ‘wow, those shoes are so innit’ . In another 1000 years, or sooner, our descendants, if there are any, may think no more of it than we do of those ancient Scandinavian interlopers.

Say Boo To You

Since my last post, I have recorded some more boos. They illustrate the way English might have sounded at different times during its history.

 

Audio Boo

Audio Boo is an application that allows audio posts in the way that YouTube allows video posts. It could turn out to be a good resource for hearing how English is spoken around the world. I have already used it myself (here) to give some idea of how English might have sounded 1250 years ago and 650 ago.

DESCRIBO, PRAESCRIBIS, PROSCRIBUNT

Here is an edited version of two posts I have published elsewhere.

Grammar, in so far as it is an account of the way native speakers put together units of meaning to make words and the way they put together words to make sentences, is necessarily descriptive. Hostility to between you and I or ending a sentence with a preposition or the use of less for things that can be counted ignores the fact that many, many native speakers of English say such things all the time. However, even in the prescribing eighteenth century there was at least one enlightened soul, the chemist Joseph Priestley, who wrote in ‘The Rudiments of Grammar‘ in 1761

It must be allowed that the custom of speaking is the original and only just standard of any language.

130 years later the philologist Henry Sweet, also swimming against the prescriptive tide, wrote

In considering the use of grammar as a corrective of what are called ungrammatical expressions, it must be borne in mind that the rules of grammar have no value except as statements of facts: whatever is in general use in a language is for that very reason grammatically correct.

Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum express the same sentiment for our own time. In ‘A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar‘, they write

Grammar rules must ultimately be based on facts about how people speak and write. If they don’t have that basis, they have no basis at all. The rules are supposed to reflect language the way it is, and the people who know it and use it are the final authority on that. And where the people who speak the language distinguish between formal and informal ways of saying the same thing, the rules must describe that variation too.

None of this is to deny that there is a place for guidance on how to use language for specific purposes. Publications usually want to ensure a uniform style and they produce manuals to promote it. Instruction in public speaking, essay writing, plain English and so on can also be valuable, but it is more likely to be successful if it is presented as the means of effective communication rather than as the means of correct communication. We all know how to apply the rules of English grammar correctly by the time we go to school.

As evidence of this, I was in the train this week and a family was sitting nearby. We passed an office block under construction. One of the two boys, who must have been around five, said without prompting They’re building a house. He wasn’t old enough to understand the difference between a house under construction and an office block under construction, but he was old enough to know the rules of English grammar perfectly.

Think what that means. He had to know that it is possible to use a pronoun without an expressed antecedent, and he knew which one to use. He knew he had to use the present progressive to describe a continuing event and he knew how to form it. That meant choosing are as the right form of be and knowing that it can be contracted to ‘re. He also had to know that he should add -ing to the basic form of the main verb. He then had to realise that he was speaking of an indefinite house which required house to be preceded by an indefinite article and he had to know it was a rather  than an. Knowing it was preceded by a he then had to know that the noun should be in the singular and not the plural. On top of all that he had to be able to put the words in the right order to conform with the rules that require the subject to be placed before the verb and the object after it and the determiner to precede the noun. Not matters of grammar, but he also had to know what words to use and how to manipulate his mouth to produce them.

It’s an extraordinary feat, but one which we all perform without instruction and without effort. For those interested, the rules are codified in large and expensive books such ‘A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language’ (just over 2 kilos, according to David Crystal, if you like to buy your grammar by weight) but native speakers do not need to learn the rules from a book. Learning about grammar, however, is a different matter. It’s like learning about respiration or digestion. We don’t need to learn about them to be able to use them in our daily lives, but doing so can be enormously helpful in all sorts of other ways.

An Indefinite Sovereign

Sneaky comment in ‘The Sunday Times’ today:

Her Majesty the Queen, a monarch, of London, celebrated her 83rd birthday.

About Time Too

I recommend Geoffrey Pullum’s broadside against Strunk and White, regarded as holy writ by generations of American students. His conclusion gives the flavour:

English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.

I Could Of Told You That

Here’s a thought to get some of us spluttering. Would of (and similar) could be the standard spelling in 100 or 200 years’ time for would have. Before you start harrumphing, recall that orange should properly be spelled norange; apron, napron; and nickname, ickname. But there’s a puzzle. Why is there no drift in the opposite direction? Why do those who might, in all innocence, write would of for would have not write bag’ve nails for bag of nails?

Txtng

Both those who condemn texting and those who promote it may be interested in the project described here.

Comparative Grammar

Here’s one of my posts from Facebook. Perhaps it will attract more interest here than it did there.

If you ask a group of people for some examples of ‘poor grammar’, you will get a variety of answers, not all of them to do with grammar. However, there are some that are more or less certain to be put forward. They include split infinitives, ending sentences with a preposition, double negatives, the use of the third person plural pronoun to refer to a singular antecedent and the use of ‘hopefully’ as a sentence adverb. I find it a little surprising that these hoary old misconceptions still abound. I find it even more surprising that others do not.

For there are those who apparently die a little inside, or whose ears bleed, or who want to commit a violent crime when they encounter sentences such as ‘Where is it at?’ or ‘I didn’t see nothing’ or ‘If a student fails the exam, they must take it again.’ Those afflicted, however, seem quite happy to use ‘like’ where sterner critics would call for ‘as’, ‘due to’ where ‘owing to’ would be the choice of the true pedants and ‘love’, ‘hate’ and ‘stand’ intransitively (‘I love / hate / can’t stand when . . . ’) where those verbs cry out for a complement.

Why such selectivity?

How much have you learnt? Have you learned anything?

Regular verbs in principle form their past tense by adding -ed. In speech the inflection is realized in three different ways. I moved ends with /d/, but jumped ends with /t/ and I decided ends with /ɪd/. The pronunciation is influenced by the final sound of the stem. Move ends with the voiced consonant /v/ and we follow it with another voiced consonant /d/. Jump ends with the unvoiced consonant /p/ and so we follow it with unvoiced /t/. Decide already ends with /d/, so we have to place a vowel between it and the /d/ of the past tense, and so we produce /ɪd/.

So far, so good, but how do we account for alternatives such as learnt/learned and spelt/spelled? Both stems end with a voiced consonant, so we would expect learned and spelled to be the only possible spellings and /lɜ:nd/ and /speld/ to be the only possible pronunciations. And yet we find not only the spellings learnt and spelt, but also the pronunciations /lɜ:nt/ and /spelt/. It’s tempting to say it must be something to do with the nature of the consonants /n/ and /l/. But spant and /spant / are never alternatives to spanned and /spand/ and spurnt and /spɜ:nt/ are never alternatives to spurned and /spɜ:nd/.

Why the apparent anomaly?