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Explore · Spelling and grammar
Why is English so irregular?
It isn’t, if you know the history. It is, if you don’t.
English is built in layers. Each wave of speakers brought its own words, its own sounds, and its own spelling habits, and English kept almost all of them. Most of what looks random is a fossil from one of these layers.
The layers of English
↑ newestoldest, the foundation ↓
Ask the history
The questions students ask most, about spelling and grammar. Tap one to see what happened.
Three ways to say it
Because English kept its native words and borrowed French and Latin ones for the same ideas, it often has three words where other languages have one. They sort themselves by formality: the plain English word for everyday talk, the French word for polished speech, and the Latin word for the textbook. Read across each row and listen to the tone rise.
Explore · Another view
A strange grammar
The usual history of English is a story about words. The linguist John McWhorter argues that the grammar tells a stranger story, shaped by the people who learned English as a second language.
This section follows his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (2008). Several of his ideas are still debated by historians of English, so you will find the usual account beside his at the end. Weigh the evidence and decide for yourself.
What the Celts added
English is the only Germanic language that needs an empty do to ask a question or say no, and the only one that uses -ing for the ordinary present. McWhorter points out that the languages already spoken in Britain, Welsh and Cornish, have both habits.
Try it
Take the Celtic grammar out
McWhorter asks what English would sound like if it had been brought to an empty island instead. Here are everyday sentences, and how a typical Germanic language would put them.
The first rendering is his; the others follow the same pattern, modeled on German.
Slide through time
How we got “I am hunting”
The Welsh parallel
Mae Mair yn canu.
“Is Mary in singing”: Welsh says what Mary is doing right now with a verb-noun, just as Old English did.
Do, the Cornish way
Mi a wra cara. · Gwra cara?
“I do love.” “Do you love?” Cornish uses do as an empty helper, just as Shakespeare’s English still did in plain statements: “My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time.”
A Welsh rule in northern England
Betty and Shirley walks, but they walk.
In some northern English dialects, the verb changes depending on whether the subject is a noun or the pronoun they. No other Germanic language does this. Welsh and Cornish do.
But where are the Celtic words?
Only a handful of English words are traced to Celtic, which has long been taken as proof the Celts had no influence. McWhorter argues that grammar can travel without words, and points to burial sites that mix Celtic and Germanic customs, and to the seventh-century laws of King Ine of Wessex, which set rules for Welsh landowners, horsemen, and slaves.
What the Vikings wore away
Every Germanic language has simplified a little over the centuries. English simplified far more. McWhorter argues that the cause was generations of adult Norse speakers learning English by ear, and children growing up speaking their version of it. Pick a feature to see an example.
It started in the north
The endings, gender, and verb-second order all wore away first in the north and east of England, where Scandinavians settled most densely. Down south, where there were no Vikings, the old endings held on much longer.
A Viking writes in English
Orm Gamalsuna bohte Sanctus Gregorius minster … in Eadward dagum
“Orm Gamalson bought St. Gregory’s minster … in King Edward’s days,” on an eleventh-century sundial in Yorkshire. Orm leaves off the possessive ending other writers used: Eadwardes.
Why not the Normans, or the Celts?
The Normans were a small elite who lived apart from ordinary English speakers, so they left words, not grammar. The Celts lived beside English for centuries and learned it fully, seasoning it with their own habits. McWhorter calls one a slow stew and the other a boiling down.
Why it took so long to show
If the Celts started speaking English in the 400s, why does the empty do not appear in writing until the 1300s? McWhorter’s answer: written Old English was a formal standard, copied by scribes for centuries, while everyday speech kept changing out of sight. After 1066, English was rarely written for about 150 years. When it came back, writers wrote something much closer to how people talked.
A mystery further back
McWhorter ends with a puzzle from before English existed. Proto-Germanic turned p into f and t into th, a change unusual in its family. It formed past tenses by switching vowels (sing, sang) far more than its relatives did. And a large share of its words, like those for blood, bone, and hand, have no known ancestor. The linguist Theo Vennemann has proposed that Proto-Germanic took shape as Phoenician traders learned it. Intriguingly, in the Punic dialect of Phoenician, spoken in Carthage, words that once began with p had come to begin with f.
How sure is this?
Not very, and McWhorter says so. He calls the case unsettled and wants many more word origins and archaeological evidence before it could be accepted. His larger point stands either way: there was never a pure English. Even its ancestor was shaped by outsiders.
Two ways to tell it
Most histories of English, including the books on this site’s reading list, give the usual account. McWhorter disagrees. Historians are still arguing, which makes this a good place to practice weighing evidence. What would it take to settle each question?
Ideas and examples in this section are paraphrased from John McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (New York: Gotham Books, 2008). In his words, “Our language is a magnificent bastard.” To hear more from him, try his podcast, Lexicon Valley.
Explore · Syntax
How sentences changed
The words of English changed, but so did the way English builds a sentence. Old English let word endings show who did what to whom. Modern English uses word order and little words like of, to, and do instead.
Six hands-on pieces follow the biggest changes in English syntax, from about 900 to today. Every example comes from a real text or follows the patterns those texts show.
1. Who bit whom?
Shuffle the same three pieces in Old English and in English today. Watch what happens to the meaning.
Old English, about 1000
English today
- Subject (the doer)
- Verb
- Object (the one it happens to)
- The ending that marks the job
Se and þone
se hund · þone hund
Old English the had different forms for different jobs. Se marked a subject, þone an object. German still does this: der Hund, den Hund.
Why we lost the endings
English stress falls on the first syllable, so endings were spoken weakly and blurred together. Contact with Norse speakers sped it up. Once the endings stopped doing their job, word order had to.
Talk about it
Write a sentence where changing the word order changes the meaning. Then write one where it doesn’t. What is the difference?
2. The verb in second place
Old English, like German today, liked to put the verb second in a main clause, whatever came first. Slide through the centuries and watch “Then went he” become “Then he went.”
Still here
Verb-second leftovers
- Here comes the bus.
- Never have I seen such a thing.
- “I’m tired.” “So am I.”
- Where did she go?
These sentences still put the verb before the subject. They are fossils of the old rule. In Old English subordinate clauses, the verb often went last instead: þæt hē hām ēode, “that he home went.”
3. Saying no
Over a thousand years, English negation went around a circle that linguists call Jespersen’s cycle: a small word gets weak, a stronger word joins it, the old word disappears, and the cycle starts again.
Two negatives
He never yet no vileinye ne sayde
Chaucer stacks three negatives to describe the Knight: he never said no rudeness to no one. In his English, more negatives meant a stronger no.
Who made it “wrong”?
In 1762 Bishop Robert Lowth’s grammar declared that two negatives “destroy one another” like a math problem. Speakers of many Englishes kept using them. See Who owned English?
Talk about it
“I don’t know nothing” is never misunderstood. If everyone knows what it means, what makes a rule a rule?
4. Asking a question
For most of its history, English asked questions by flipping the subject and the verb: “Know you the way?” Then the empty helper do took over. Pick a statement and turn it into a question, the old way and the new way.
Question machine
Both at once
Shakespeare had it both ways
- Saw you the weird sisters?Macbeth, 4.1: the old flip
- What do you read, my lord?Polonius, Hamlet, 2.2: the new do
- Do you see nothing there?Hamlet, 3.4
Around 1600 both patterns were normal. By 1700 the do question had won with nearly every verb. Be, have, and helpers like can and will still flip: Are you ready? Can you swim?
5. Endings give way to little words
An Old English noun changed its ending for each job in the sentence. Pick a form of cyning, “king,” to see what English uses now instead.
Fossil endings
A few case endings survive. The king’s son keeps the old genitive -es. Him and whom are old dative forms. Once and always carry an old -es that meant “at” or “by,” as in Old English dæges, “by day.”
Of, to, by, with
As endings faded in Middle English, prepositions did their work: of for the genitive, to and for for the dative. French de and à may have encouraged the habit.
Talk about it
German still has four cases. If you were learning English as an adult, would you rather have endings or strict word order? Why?
6. One sentence, four eras
“Give us this day our daily bread,” from the Lord’s Prayer, in four translations. The colors show each part of the sentence. Notice where the object goes, and where the endings disappear.
- Verb
- To whom (us)
- Object (the bread)
- When
- Ending that marks the job
For teachers
Lesson: Why word order matters
Big idea
English traded word endings for word order. That is why “The dog bit the man” and “The man bit the dog” mean different things, and why we need do to ask questions.
Vocabulary
syntax, subject, verb, object, case, inflection, preposition, negation, inversion, auxiliary
Activity
Give pairs five Modern English sentences on cards, cut into words. Shuffle them and sort the results into “same meaning,” “new meaning,” and “not English.” Then try the Old English shuffle above and compare.
Exit ticket
Rewrite “Knowest thou the way?” and “I know not” in today’s English. Name the helper word you added and explain what job it does.
Sources: Elly van Gelderen, Analyzing Syntax through Texts: Old, Middle, and Early Modern English (2017) and A History of the English Language (2006); Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language; Otto Jespersen, Negation in English and Other Languages (1917); Robert Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762). Old English prayer from the West Saxon Gospels; Middle English from the Wycliffe Bible; Early Modern English from the King James Bible (1611).
Explore · Word parts
The roots lab
Most long English words are built from smaller parts, and the parts have meanings. Learn a few dozen and you can decode thousands of words.
Pick a part to see the words built from it. Each part is colored by the layer of English it came from, so you can see Old English, Latin, and Greek working side by side.
Word surgeon
Take a word apart. Find the part that carries the meaning, and pick what it means.
Word 1
Score: 0
Choose the meaning of the highlighted part.
Explore · Primary sources
Read it in the original
Five famous openings, in the spelling their first readers saw. Tap any word to see what it means and where it came from.
Turn on color by origin to watch the layers of English appear, or show the modern words under every line.
Explore · The alphabet
Letters we lost
Old English was written with a few letters that modern English has dropped.
They came from runes and Irish handwriting. French-trained scribes and, later, printers who had no type for them pushed them out. Choose a letter to hear its story.
Explore · Side by side
One prayer, a thousand years
The Lord’s Prayer is one of the few texts translated into English in every period, which makes it a perfect measuring stick.
Pick a word to trace it through the centuries. Watch fæder become father and rice give way to the French-flavored kingdom.
Explore · Sound change
The Great Vowel Shift
Between about 1400 and 1700, every long vowel in English moved. Spelling stayed behind.
Pick a word, then drag through the centuries. The chart shows where in the mouth the vowel is made: front to back, and high (tongue raised) to low. Each vowel climbs one step, and the two at the top have nowhere to go, so they break into the diphthongs in bite and house.
Stages after Roger Lass (1999), as given in Elly van Gelderen, A History of the English Language (2006). Pronunciation hints are approximate. Why do great and steak rhyme with mate? They stopped one step early, and the older pronunciation stuck.
Explore · Vocabulary
Where everyday words come from
English borrowed so many French and Latin words that they now outnumber native ones in the dictionary. But not in conversation.
Of the thousand words English speakers use most often, more than four in five come from Old English: the, and, have, mother, water, love. French takes the lead as the words get rarer and more formal.
Percent of words in each frequency band. Data from Williams (1975), as given in van Gelderen, A History of the English Language (2006), Table 1.2.
Explore · Geography
The whale-road
How a language from a corner of the North Sea reached every continent.
Step through the centuries. The early chapters zoom in on the North Sea; the later ones open out to the whole world.
Land outlines from Natural Earth (public domain). Arrows show the general direction of movement, not exact routes.
Explore · Living varieties
Englishes of the world
There has never been just one English. Every variety has its own history and its own rules.
Linguists study these varieties the way they study Old English: as systems, not mistakes. Several keep features that standard English lost, and some have grammar standard English lacks.
Explore · Etymology
Word journeys
Every word is a small history. Some changed their meaning entirely; some changed their shape by accident.
Nice once meant foolish. A nickname was once an ekename. Filter by where a word began.
Explore · Just for fun
Write your name in runes
Before the Latin alphabet, the Anglo-Saxons carved the futhorc: angular letters made to be cut across the grain of wood.
Type a name or a short phrase. Each rune had a name that was also a word, so your name carries hidden meanings. This is a modern transliteration: the Anglo-Saxons spelled by sound, not by modern English letters.
Finale · Test your ear
Which English is it?
Read the line and pick its period. Look for the clues you have met along the way: lost letters, old endings, thee and thou, and spellings that have not settled yet.
Question 1 of 8
Score: 0
Choose an answer to see the explanation.