English is a fickle language. Just when the adult learning it as a second language thinks they’ve nailed how some aspect of it works, along comes an exception - or a gaggle of them - to throw them back into the depths of despair.
Take adjectives. On the face of it, what could be simpler than a rule that says to describe some aspect of a thing you simply pop the required adjective directly in front the noun? A red house, a large continent, a crooked politician.
English being what it is, that rule doesn’t work all the time. If you’re describing Usain Bolt, you might say he’s the fastest man alive, placing the adjective (which I have helpfully bolded for you) directly after the noun. But still it goes right next to it, duplex housing-style.
To the adult learning English, once this rule and its relatively uncommon variation are mastered you’d be forgiven for assuming you’re now free to move on to a new topic.
Not so fast, my innocent friend.
Adjectives that sit right next to the noun are called attributive and they are by far the largest group of adjectives in the language. But there’s another group called predicative adjectives that not only come after, but do so with a verb between them and the noun. The bastards.
Afraid is one of them. You can say a person is afraid but you can’t talk about an afraid person. Similarly non-conformist adjectives include afloat, alike, alive (as in “it’s alive!”), alone, ashamed, asleep and awake.
It’s no coincidence that these examples all begin with the letter ‘a’. There may be no harder working letter in English. As a prefix, it can mean on, in, into, of and at, for which we can thank Old English.
It can also operate as an intensive, as in ashamed or awake. Such words denote a single, often momentary instance of the root verb, and once again we can thank Old English for this version of the letter ‘a’.
(This kind of intensive is distinct from the intensive word form when you add your favourite expletive after a word or phrase, as in “what the hell is this?” This intensive adds no meaning, although it can certainly add a good deal of fun, especially as the expletives get more expletive-ey. You can also create an intensive with a carefully chosen prefix or suffix. It’s a wonderful thing to be an eminent person, but even more wonderful, surely, to be pre-eminent.)
‘A’ can also be an abbreviation of either of the two Latin words ad (meaning to or towards, as in aver) or ab (meaning from, away or off, as in avert). It can also mean not, as in amoral, and each, as in twice a day. Finally, until the 1800s it was a popular pastime to pop a onto the front of a gerund, as in a-hunting we shall go, a use Bob Dylan temporarily revived in his timeless folk song The Times They Are A-Changing. In this instance, the ‘a’ serves little other purpose than creating a pleasing and somewhat archaic rhythm to the phrase in question.
All these purposes still exist to this day, which makes ‘a’ not just a hard worker, but also a bit of a mongrel. There’s no way for the new student of English to know whether amoral means “lacking morals” or “stuffed full of them”; it could be either.
The Oxford English Dictionary summed this situation up nicely when it said “[I]t naturally happened that all these a- prefixes were at length confusedly lumped together in idea, and the resultant a- looked upon as vaguely intensive, rhetorical, euphonic, or even archaic, and wholly otiose.”
I have nothing to add to that wonderful sentence, which had me scurrying to the dictionary to check the meaning of otiose. But here’s another curious fact that’s occurred to me while writing this week’s newsletter. To describe a person at rest, we may say they are asleep or sleeping, but to describe someone who’s alert, we say they’re awake, not that they are waking.
I don’t know what this means or even if it means anything at all, linguistically speaking. Readers better informed than me - of whom there are many, as Bits and Specious makes clear this week - may be able to shed further light on this. Until then, think of it as another little conversation killer, gifted from me to you, for your next social gathering.
And remember, while you may find English a breeze because you learned it as a tyke, spare a thought for the brave souls who’ve tackled it as adults. Every second rule of English they master is accompanied by a galaxy of exceptions that you never have to give a second thought to because it doesn’t show up for you as an exception.
You lucky native-English-speaking sod.
Bits and specious
Last week’s newsletter touched on the strangeness of the names Harry, Sarah and Mary being transformed into Hal, Sally and Molly - the ‘r’ in each case being replaced by an ‘l’. Reader Christine Horrill provided this wonderfully enlightening explanation of why that might be:
“[F]rom a linguist’s point of view the sounds frequently represented by the letters R and L in English are very similar. They are both voiced liquids, and the tongue position is only slightly different between them. It is not unusual for a language to have only one of the pair. P and B (plosives), and W and V sounds are other pairs that appear in English where other languages might have only one. Try saying the pairs one after the other and noticing where your tongue and lips are. It’s why speakers of Asian languages can have trouble with R sounds but not L, and others with W but not V sounds.
“As languages change over time, changes in these pairs of sounds are quite common. So in the Pacific you see aloha and aroha, ariki and aliki, whare and fale, vaka and waka, vai and wai.
“R is technically more complex than L in terms of tongue position and according to the table below [from Wikipedia] typically children master the L sound first (4 vs 5 yrs old). The diminutive forms of names with R might come from junior members of the family who can’t say the R properly yet, and which everyone else thinks sounds adorable? Just a guess.”
Another reader, Lee G. Hornbrook, writes: “I studied linguistics for a time and have long had an interest in etymologies. The letters/sounds l and r are allophones in some languages. In Korean, l and r are represented by as the same letter. I’m … thinking l and r from “doll” and “Dorothy” are probably a result of the similarity in articulation (and the relationship between) of l and r.”
Every writer should be blessed with such knowledgeable and generous readers. Thank you Christine and Lee.
Quote of the week
I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
Woody Allen