Au Jour de Hui and Yesterday: How Language Changes

Being on the cusp of a new year, it seems somehow fitting to write about change – namely, language change. But street change also provides a fitting metaphor:

Like yesterday - I got out of the subway at 86^th St and Lexington and headed toward the new Panera Bread café to meet a student. As I walked, I had a sudden memory of 86^th St in the mid-1980s, when there were still some wooden storefronts and even a few German restaurants, which were then just remnants of an earlier era when the whole neighborhood was filled with German stores and families. Now 86^th St is lined with the sleek, glassy storefronts found in any mall in America. This change was slow but steady, but now, from a sidewalk view, the street looks completely different from 25 years ago.

Language, as discussed by Guy Deutscher in his enthralling book, “The Unfolding of Language,” is subject to similar forces of destruction and creation that keep all living languages -- not just English – fresh and well, even despite heavy resistance: preservationists support neighborhoods as well as language (where they’re called “prescriptionists”), each group trying its best to maintain tradition and standards – succeeding, at times, for a while.

But change usually finds its way in the end.

In “The Unfolding of Language,” Deutscher shows how all languages constantly seek shorter and easier ways for speakers to express themselves; this is a principal part of the “destructive” element of language, while the “creative” aspect comes up with substitutes for old words as well as new words and expressions.

Grammatical patterns and easy rules are also key to language. Grammar mistakes are usually the result of something not fitting a pattern or having a rule not well understood. Young children make natural mistakes, saying, for example, “I writed you a letter,” following a past tense pattern they have perceived. My blog, “Between you and I” (4/28/2009) is an example of people misunderstanding the pattern (“You and I” as subjects vs objects) and grammatical rule (using object pronouns after prepositions); my blog, Lie and Lay (9/3/2012) is another case of people confusing patterns and rules, both persisting for decades until they are finally reaching a critical mass of acceptance.

To some, those changes above are still cringe-worthy. That’s because they’re new; but the older changes are ones we don’t even realize were once cringe-worthy to a different generation. Take regular English plurals:  the simple “s” or “es,” are standouts of clear patterns and easy rules. But back in Old English, when such Germanic-rooted counterparts as “men,” “women,” “children,” “mice,” and “geese” were normal plurals, a simple “s” no doubt seemed barbaric to the older generation. The “s” on plural nouns was not chosen in an alphabet lottery; rather, it is the souvenir of the plural “a-s,” once reserved for certain types of masculine nouns; gradually, new generations of English speakers began tweaking the rule so it resembled the system we have today.

Then there are case systems, where words have certain endings to show their function in a sentence. Modern Russian, German, and Hungarian have case systems, as did ancient Latin and Old English. Many Latin scholars have considered the case system as the pinnacle of form and structure and its destruction as linguistic doom. But linguist Deutscher points out that the case system itself was created through the same forces of tearing-down and building-up to make things easier:

For example, a noun like “store” would once have been followed by words meaning “to the” to express movement toward it; the “to the” words are called “post-positions” because they came after the noun, as in “I’m going store to the.” Gradually, the post-position words just became the ending to the original noun, so that “store to the” became “storetothe” –  as in,“I’m going storetothe.” This so-called case ending was simply linguistic evolution – but even that ultimately proved too confusing for use in modern Latin languages:

French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese have all done away with case endings, putting “to the” before the noun (as a prepositional phrase); even so, each of those languages developed a new shortcut: “a + le” = “au” in French; “alla” in Italian; “al” in Spanish, or “a” (with an accent) in Portuguese.

Another example of word-shortening that Deutscher gave was the French word, “aujourd’hui,” which means “today.”  The “hui” part of the word was abbreviated from what Deutscher assumes was the pre-recorded Latin “hoc die,” which meant “on this day.” By the time Latin was recorded, the word for today had been shortened to “hodie,” which Old French gradually pared down to “hui.”

But what happened to “hui” is like what happens when I write a thank-you note: somehow, “thank you,” or “thanks” just seems too short, so I usually add a heart-felt “so much” for emphasis. In the same way, “hui” felt a little short to the Old French-speakers, who began adding a more emphatic “on the day of” to “today,” creating, “au jour de hui” that eventually became the single (though awkward, I think) “aujourd’hui.” But now even that consolidation has new layer – with the informal French term, “au jour d’aujourd’hui” or literally, “to the day of to the day of today,” meaning “right now” -- instead of the more general “now.”

The point is, as we near January 1, time brings change – for better or worse, but hopefully more often for the better. On today’s streamlined 86^th Street, there are perhaps many who wax nostalgic for the old German place over Panera Bread (though the Heidelberg’s still there, on Second Avenue). But few English speakers today would want to go back to the knotty boughs of Old English. Rather, let us see English as a steady, flowing work in progress. Cheers!

Lie vs. Lay

 Lie vs. Lay:
These verbs are now synonyms, though some grammarians may disagree.
The big debate: According to the dictionary …

“Lie” means to be in a flat or horizontal position; or to be in a state of inactivity, concealment, or expectation (like “to lie in wait”). This verb is “intransitive,” or has no object:  A person might lie down on a bed; a dog might lie outside on the grass; a book might lie on the shelf; a tiger might lie in ambush. When a person or thing is lying down, there is no other activity connected to the subject.

“Lay,” is the “transitive” one – or the one that takes a direct object and is comparable to the word “set” or “put”:  “I always lay my keys on the table near the door;” “I laid the baby down in the crib;” “the cat laid his ears back, ready to pounce.”  In the phrase, “to lay down the law,” the meaning is “to apply.”

WHY THE LANGUAGE CHANGE

See for yourself – and spot the confusion. Here are both words in base form, simple past tense, and past participle:

LIE    LAY    LAIN

Vs


LAY  LAID   LAID


In short, it's messy: the past tense of “lie” is the same as the base form of “lay.” To fuss over these verbs has proven too much for most people -- particularly when the meaning is clear whichever verb is used. Whether a lion is laying in a tree or lying in one, the mental image is the same.

It is now decades since I first started hearing “lay” instead of “lie,” and people who now use “lay” instead of the traditional “lie” are educated, intelligent people
-- so there is no social stigma. “Lie” and “lay” are either used interchangeably – or with a preference for “lay” – in movies and on TV, in books and magazines, digital and print, and in everyday conversation. Noted linguist John McWhorter validates the synonymous meaning of the two verbs himself in his book, “What Language Is” (2011). In effect, the distinction is now lost well enough so that both are correct and no cause for further debate.
 

The Letter ‘H’ vs. The French

Hi, hello, and how are you today?

The “h” sound – so basic to English – is such a difficult sound for people whose language does not include it. The French, for instance, have a tough time with it. Though the letter “h” is included in their alphabet and appears in many words (heure, honneur, herbe, etc.), the breathy English “h” is simply silent in French.

The letter H goes back to the ancient Egyptians and archaic Greeks (800-450 BC), with its symbol thought to represent a fence or posts. From there, it passed into Old Semitic, Phoenician, Etruscan, and Latin, where it had the “ha” sound we recognize in English. H was likewise originally pronounced in early Latin-based languages but then lost over time. In Spanish, however, other h-sounding letters emerged – like x, j, and sometimes g; in current Portuguese, “r” sounds like “h” – with Roberto becoming “Hoberto” and rock and roll, sounding like “hock and holl.”

H is also found in Germanic languages, which includes English, and that’s where we get most of our h-words, like “house,” “here,” “how,” and “heart.” There are just a handful of h-words in English that have a silent h -- hour, honor, honest, heir, and herb – as a nod to their French ancestry. 

Of all the letters in the alphabet, the H stands out for being dropped and added and dropped and added again, or not, in such a wide variety of languages -- from dialects of Dutch, Norwegian, and Belorussian to cockney English and northern Irish. The standard English name of the letter itself (“eitch” – not “heitch”) reflects this ambivalence, since the H in its name is silent.

When spoken, H is actually a sound called a “fricative,” a category including f, v, and z; fricatives are produced by partially blocking the flow of air from the vocal passage; this tends to limit the amount of air let out of the mouth, which is a good thing. Treating H as an exhalation -- a natural tendency among French speakers learning English -- can lead to trouble: for example, exhaling the H’s in the line, “In Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen” (from the musical “My Fair Lady”) could easily induce hyperventilation.

Still, until I started teaching, I had never paid much attention to H. I hand it to my French students whose difficulty pronouncing h-words has highlighted the hidden havoc this particular sound can wreak. My longtime French friend, Helene (pronounced sans h, as “ay-len”) was the first to tip me off to this trouble when she would say, “I’ll see you in “alf an how’r” (not “half an hour”).

That is, Helene could say the h-sound but tended to place it where it was not wanted and not say it where it was. Such difficulties have become more apparent the more I teach. A sentence like, “Amy will take her to the airport in half an hour,” often comes out as, “Haimy will take air to zee hairport in alf an how’r.”
When a sentence starts with a vowel, such as in the “Amy” sentence above, adding the initial H seems instinctive; thus, a sentence like, “It’s nice to see you,” becomes, “Heets nice to see you.” But practice, focus, and a smidgen of breath-holding helps modify that particular tendency.

On the other hand, when an English sentence is supposed to start with an h-sound, Francophones tend to drop it: with “How are you?” or “Here he is,” for example, typically come out as “Eere ‘e his” and “Ow har you?” (“How” is doubly tough for the French because not only does the “h” sound not exist in their language, neither does the “ow” sound -- not even to express pain: when we say “Ow!” they say “Ai!”)

This “h-reversal” could be caused by the speaker’s attempting to make the h-sound by exhaling -- but who ends up inhaling before the h-word and exhaling on the next word instead. Problems arise when equal weight is given to each word – thus, each word becomes its own special landmine, with all the arrhythmic English words and exhaling and inhaling. A sentence like, “I burned my arm on the oven the other night,” which does not even have an h-word in it, can still produce several: “Hi burned my harm on zee hoven zee hozzerh night.”

One method I use for helping students suppress the unwanted “h” is to have them group the words as we say them – with some words and syllables stressed and others barely acknowledged, which sounds like: AMy’ll take’erto th’AIRportin HalfnOWr. To start, I begin with two-word combinations where the end-sound of the first word, when extended, can connect to the initial sound of the second: “how-w-are;” or “my-y-y-arm.” The long “e” sound, when extended, produces a “y” sound that is easily linked: “he is” becomes “hee-y-izz;” “the other” becomes “theee-y-other.”

The same method helps with other word combinations where the second word starts with a vowel, such as: “looked at” which becomes “look-t-at;” or “tried it,” which becomes “try-d-it.” This is similar to the verbal liaisons that we are taught when learning French: “Comment-t-allez vous?” and “Vous-z-etes;” and when done in either language, the result is more natural-sounding and fluid.

There are sounds in every language that confound non-native speakers. That’s partly what creates a foreign accent – and is also an eye-opener for the native speaker who takes the mother tongue for granted. Given that, I will end this piece with a question I found on Google that made me laff-f-out loud. To the French speaker who answered, I give a huge, heartfelt, high-fiving, “Hurray!”

Why can't French people say the "h" sound?
Q. Apparently, the sound does not exist in their language? Why is this so? What the hell kind of language doesn't have the "h" sound? It's the sound that humans make when they inhale and exhale. They make that sound when they laugh. It's intrinsic to the human species, so how can anybody not be able to make that sound? Why do they say 'ockey and 'amburger?

A. French people CAN make the sound. You are very right, we make that sound when breathing and laughing. When you are writing a text in French and you want to write the laughing sound, you do use hahahahhhaha because that is how it sounds.

However, French is a very flowing language. If they pronounced the 'h's French would sound terrible, all broken up like English. They simply do not say the 'h' because it sounds ugly with the beautiful flowing sound of French.

If you know someone who speaks French, get them to say ''J'ai joué au hockey en mangeant un hamburger'' the way a normal French person would, without pronouncing the ''h''s of hockey and hamburger. Then get them to say the sentence again, pronouncing the ''h''s. You will see that it will sound like an ugly mixture of German and French if they do.

So that is why they don't say the ''h'' sound.

Source(s):
Fluent French speaker with a good lot of common sense.
2 years ago

All About VOUS

“What right do you have to speak to me?!”

The above question, when spoken in French, and in France, and uttered with just the right blend of arrogance and disgust, has the verbal power of a swift kick in the Gallic family jewels, so it is said.

A French student of mine told me that when she was a young girl and beginning to travel about in Paris on her own, she was to demand that phrase (but in French, of course) of any stranger who spoke to her: “De quel droit m’adressez-vous la parole?”

Here in the semi-egalitarian U.S., we generally feel everyone has “the right” to talk to everyone else; it’s what comes out of the mouth that matters. And most of the time, what comes out are benign comments about the weather; a request for directions or to take one’s picture; or the inevitable shared eye-rolling and related chit-chat when standing in line at the post office or grocery store.

Wherever people go in the United States, we are constantly speaking and sharing off-the-cuff opinions or remarks with people we don’t know and may never see again. Partly, that’s the American culture – but the relative informality of our language helps us: for instance, unlike in other languages, English has only one “you” and speakers are not required to consider social status or age difference or even gender.

The French culture, by nature more formal and social-conscious than American, uses its language to keep strangers at bay, beginning with the strategically loaded pronoun, “you.” French has two forms of “you”: one informal, “tu,” for showing closeness to friends, relatives, children, and pets; and one formal, “vous,” for showing respect and formality to authority figures and elders; using “vous” also helps maintain a certain social distance – between not-so-close friends, and of course, those of a different class. The two “you”s help keep relationships clear, you could say.

Meanwhile, in our English “one-You” world, keeping such distinctions clear is not always possible - or necessary – such as in post office lines, the grocery store, asking for directions or offering help, etc. We are a people who love to comment out loud, and having someone to share a complaint about the weather with tends to give us a boost. And not having to think about what “you” to use gives us freedom to have such random exchanges – what may sound personal to foreigners are really just ways we connect in a light, non-personal way.

Just the other day, I was eating a banana while standing at a corner on Park Avenue (New York being a capital of schmooze), waiting for the light to change. The man next to me said, “A banana! Now you’re making me feel guilty – I just ate a hot pretzel!” I just laughed and chided him on his nutritional habits before we both went our merry ways.

Practically speaking, this sort of exchange is impossible in French. To begin with, what “you” could you pick? You couldn’t use “tu” – using “tu” with any stranger who is not a child is insulting for the person being addressed; nor would “vous” be any good for a casual, light-hearted remark when the pronoun is specifically designed for formality and distance.

Between French people, it’s a linguistic oxymoron to have an informal exchange with someone (i.e., a stranger) you need to hold at a distance. A French friend agreed that making casual remarks to strangers is extremely awkward – and if attempted at all, would come off sounding like an emergency, or just simply weird.

A French airline pilot who often visits New York says he enjoys hearing Americans share little remarks with each other when on the street or subway. “You are a country made from pioneers,” he said. “Your culture was formed by helping each other, and sharing. Ours was not.”

When a person walks into a store in Paris, “bonjour” (“good day”) is exchanged between customer and sales person. But in the US, sales people typical say, “Hello, how are you today?” This greeting, according to several college-age French exchange students in New York, both astonished and embarrassed them. “Why would a stranger want to know how am I doing? Only people I know well ask me how I am,” one of the students explained. 

Of course, there were times long ago when English was quite formal: in Shakespeare’s time and earlier, there were two forms of “you” – “thou/thee” for more poetic use as a single pronoun and spoken to family and close friends (as in, “Wherefore art thou Romeo?”); the plural form, “you,” was the one used with strangers and authority figures. Over time, though, it was the less formal “thou” that got pushed out of everyday use, while the more formal “you” took over as the sole dominant form. Constant use dropped the formality of “you,” while “thou/thee” became perceived as formal, being used in only ceremonies, the Bible, and theater.

While today’s French may be much more informal than two hundred years ago, the rules regarding the use of “tu” and “vous” – and all the implications those rules represent – seem still very much in place. Thus, “vous” retains a strong hold in French manners – highlighting social distance and nuance in a way that Americans visiting France are generally excused for not understanding.

But see if you can find the “French” attitude in this English translation of a French joke:

A kangaroo walks into a café and asks for an espresso. He sits down at the counter, the barista gives him the espresso and the kangaroo pays 20 euros for the drink. The man next to him speaks up:

Man: Hello. How are you? (Bonjour. Comment allez-vous?)

Kangaroo: Fine … and you? (Bien...et vous?)
M: Pretty good. (Assez bien!)
K: But why are you talking to me? We don’t know each other. (Mais pourquoi m'adressez-vous la parole? On ne ce connaît pas!)
M: Well, it’s not every day a kangaroo comes into the café! (Bah, c'est que des kangourous comme vous on en voit pas souvent ici, dans ce bar!)
K: With espresso for 20 euros, that doesn’t surprise me! (Avec le café à 20 euros ça m'étonne pas!!)

If you caught the kangaroo’s line, “Why are you talking to me? We don’t know each other,” then you have grasped the essence of this blog. But just to make sure …

To fully test your new understanding of French street spontaneity (or lack thereof), try translating the following real-life dialogue between two random New Yorkers who don’t know each other. The setting is a chilly fall day that came after three warm days. A woman is walking along Madison Avenue, when a well-dressed man walking in the same direction speaks as he passes her:

Man: The one day I don’t wear a coat!

Woman (after turning to see that he is not crazy – just in need of a coat - says): Why not get a $5 scarf from the sidewalk vendor up the street?

Man: Good idea! Do you think beige would go?”

Woman: (Looking at his outfit) Perfect!

(The man stops at the table; the woman keeps walking.)

Now an imagined English version of the French, according to their cultural and linguistic parameters:

French man:

French woman:

If you realized that such an exchange could not ever take place, you are correct. The man is cold and under-dressed, but how could he possibly share this with a woman he does not know (and is not even interested in)? Words never even make it to his tongue.

For argument’s sake, though, let’s say the man starts to comment to the woman about the weather and how he should have worn a coat. The woman, suspecting he is either lecherous or crazy or both, lashes out, “De quel droit m’addressez-vous la parole?!”

The man slinks off to a café to warm up and finds himself sitting next to a kangaroo …