5

The Forces of Creation

A conference room. The conference logo is draped on the wall behind the speaker. At one end of the table sits the chairman, a distinguished columnist. Next to him, a young academic is fiddling with the projector and arranging his first slide:

The chairman glances uneasily at the screen behind him, but assumes an air of official optimism as he rises to introduce the speaker.

CHAIRMAN: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the afternoon session of the George Orwell Centenary Conference, dedicated to debating a passionate concern of that great author: the state of the language – whither it is heading, and how it was ever let hither. I trust you all took full advantage of the luncheon break to repair your spirits after the doom and gloom of this morning’s session. For I believe we shall all need our wits about us as we attend to the speaker this afternoon, who, as you may well have gathered, is promising to play something of the devil’s advocate. Without further ado, then, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our guest speaker, Chris de Troy. Dr de Troy’s theories, I am led to believe, have recently been making waves throughout the academic community and further afield. His recent book [hastily rifling through his notes], Bakunian Linguistics: Toward a Dialectic of Categorical Deconstruction, has established him as a leading expert in the field of … um, his field. He will talk to us today about ‘Creation through Destruction’.

DR DE TROY: Cheers. I can only hope I won’t live up to your diabolical expectations … but if you are fearing a rather different ‘take’ on language, I certainly won’t let you down. As I was listening to the speakers this morning discussing the sorry state of the language, and lamenting its destruction and decay, I was wondering how to find a polite way to begin my talk. But to be frank, the only phrase which sprang to mind was: ‘Guys, you’ve got it all wrong. You’re completely missing the point.’ Because, you see, without these much maligned forces of destruction, language would never have developed in the first place. Without what you write off as so much decay, we wouldn’t have got much beyond grunts and groans. I’d even go so far as to say that if Mikhail Bakunin had only directed his zeal to the study of language, rather than to permanent revolution, he would have gone down in history as a thinker of extraordinary insight, way ahead of his time. Because as far as language is concerned, Bakunin is spot on: the forces that create grammatical structures in language are nothing other than the by-products of destruction.
    The main thrust of my argument is fairly simple: the starting point, which I take it we can all agree on, is that grammatical elements don’t just appear out of thin air. And if things like prepositions, case endings or tense markers were not consciously invented, they must have developed from something that’s already there. But from what? Now, it’s hardly breaking news that grammatical elements such as prepositions originate ultimately from normal nouns and verbs like ‘back’ or ‘go’ – didn’t we hear only this morning someone complaining about the invasion of Americanisms like ‘back of’, which is displacing the preposition ‘behind’? And I won’t be spilling the beans if I also tell you that metaphor provides the raw materials for grammatical elements. What might come as more of a surprise, though, is how exactly the transformations from content to grammar proceed. What is responsible for turning nouns and verbs into grammatical elements? And here, I think, is where the Bakunian theory can offer a real breakthrough, since the point I’ll be pressing home today is that the builders of new grammatical structures are none other than the forces of destruction that were vilified so enthusiastically in this morning’s session.
    I realize that this claim may seem far-fetched, so what I’d like to do now is give a few actual examples of how the transformations work on the ground. The first example is fairly simple, and involves the English verb ‘go’. I’ll try to demonstrate how the forces of destruction took hold of ‘going to’, a phrase that was simple, solid and set in its ways, and turned it into something entirely different, a grammatical element marking the future tense. And once we have deconstructed ‘going to’, I’ll move on to some fancier grammatical structures, like the French verbal system and the case system of Latin, and show that even these are really just the result of destruction.

Next slide, please. Have a look at these two English sentences:

Are you going to the concert this evening? No, I’m gonna stay at home.

Let’s suppress – a least for a moment – any hang-ups we might have about correct and incorrect usage, and just consider the transformation that ‘going to’ has undergone. In the first sentence, ‘going’ is still a completely normal verb, but in the second, no one is actually going anywhere – quite the opposite – someone is planning to stay put. So ‘gonna’ in the second sentence has lost its status as a verb of movement, and functions as a mere grammatical element, a future marker very similar to the auxiliaries ‘will’ or ‘shall’. Somehow, ‘going to’ has managed to turn itself into part of the structure of language. This transformation may seem strange at first, but I’m going to argue that what’s behind it is nothing other than metaphor and the much maligned erosion in meaning and sounds. You only need to compare the two sentences to see that metaphor must have had something to do with it, because the first ‘going to’ deals with movement in space, but the second refers to time. Erosion of meaning has had a hand in the process too, since the first ‘going to’ has a full meaning all of its own, but the second has lost its independent meaning, so that ‘gonna’ no longer denotes a separate action. And finally, erosion in sounds was clearly involved, because whereas the first ‘going to’ has hung on to its original complete form – no one would say ‘are you gonna the concert’ – the second ‘going to’ has been pared down to ‘gonna’.

A member of the Royal Society for the Protection of the English Language, who this morning had presented a loving obituary for the pronoun ‘whom’, can hold back no longer.

RSPEL MEMBER: But surely, Dr de Troy, you are not claiming that ‘going to’ changed into a structural element merely because of a simple metaphor and some rather sloppy pronunciation? I can’t see how metaphor or erosion could have actually transformed the verb into an auxiliary, and tipped it over from one syntactic category to another, from an ordinary content word into a grammatical marker.

DE TROY: Well, rather than philosophizing about this on an empty stomach, why don’t we first munch through some detail, and have a look at what actually happened to ‘going to’ over the last few centuries? Because we’ll be in a much better position to argue about what caused this transformation once we’ve reviewed the history of this phrase …

RSPEL MEMBER: Fire away, then.

DE TROY: OK. As you would expect, ‘going to’ originally meant ‘walking’ or ‘travelling’ somewhere: ‘going to London’, ‘going to the market’, and the like. The phrase ‘going to do something’ seems to have made its entrance only in the fifteenth century. One of the earliest examples is found in an appeal sent to parliament in 1439 by the burghers of Scropton in Derbyshire, who were trying to secure the arrest of a runaway called John Forman. In their petition, they allege that Forman had previously been lawfully arrested for ‘diverse grete and notable causes and offenses’, and dispatched under guard to the nearby Castle of Tutbury. But on the way the convoy was ambushed by Robin Hood style guerrillas, and this is how the worthy burghers describe what happened next:

as they were goynge to bringe hym there … cometh one Piers Venables … with many othere unknowen, in manere of Werre, Riote, Route, and Insurrection arraied, with force and armes, and … toke awey the saide John Forman fro theym.

Examples like this one make it pretty clear that ‘going to do something’ started out simply as a kind of shorthand for ‘going somewhere, in order to do something’. ‘Going’ meant walking somewhere, and ‘to’ just marked the intention to do something. The Sheriff and his minions were actually walking to Tutbury, with the aim of bringing Forman there, and it was en route that they were ambushed.
    But in the following decades, ‘going to’ slowly starts sliding down the long slippery slope towards abstraction. About forty years later, in 1482, we find another example of ‘going to’ followed by a verb, which is perhaps the first sign that things are really on the move. This example comes from one of the earliest books ever printed in English, the Revelations of St Nicholas to a Monk of Evesham. The story relates a monk’s journey through purgatory, and his meeting with various people who recount their sufferings. One chapter tells how Saint Margaret intervened on behalf of the tormented soul of a sinful woman, who in a large convoy

was goyng to be broughte into helle for the synne and onleful [unlawful] lustys of her body.

During the procession to hell, the woman is so cruelly afflicted by devils and wicked spirits, and her cries are so anguished, that lo, a great light shines from on high: Saint Margaret appears, takes pity on the poor soul, and saves her.

RSPEL MEMBER: But I really do not see how this example is different from your previous one. Surely, the phrase ‘going to’ here still refers to the physical act of going – didn’t you say just now that the woman was moving in a procession on the way to hell?

DE TROY: Sure, but if you look carefully, you’ll see that the emphasis here is on something else. The passive form of the verb, ‘to be brought’, shifts the focus away from any intention on the part of the woman – after all, she can’t really have been intending to go to hell, can she? So the physical movement mainly serves to highlight the more abstract implication: the fact that the woman will soon be brought into hell and made to suffer for her sins.

RSPEL MEMBER: That all sounds rather impressionistic to me.

DE TROY: It has to be, because the actual situation involves both the physical aspect of moving and the abstract dimension of time. But that in itself is illuminating, since in the metaphors of everyday language, the shift from concrete to abstract usually has some basis in experience, and here you have exactly that basis: the woman is moving – albeit rather unwillingly – towards her suffering, and this means that she’s about to suffer.

A journalist from the front row, who has been assiduously taking notes, now butts in.

JOURNALIST: But I thought that an image only becomes a true metaphor when it flies away from that basis in experience and is used in a new environment.

DE TROY: Actually, this is exactly what happens to ‘going to’ later on. But if you examine its history closely, you’ll see that it never really ‘flew away’ – it was more like a slow creeping away from that basis in experience. For at least a century after the Revelations, not much seemed to change, except that ‘going to’ appeared a bit more frequently with the abstract sense in the foreground. On the whole, though, the phrase still held tightly on to the sense of physical movement. Even in Shakespeare’s plays, from the end of the sixteenth century, ‘going to’ is still used only when actual movement is involved, as you can see in this example from The Two Gentlemen of Verona:

DUKE: Sir Valentine, whither away so fast?

VALENTINE: Please it your Grace, there is a messenger that stays to bear my letters to my friends, and I am going to deliver them.

JOURNALIST: So when do things finally hurry up and get a move on?

DE TROY: Only during the seventeenth century. The sense of future in ‘going to’ comes increasingly to the fore, while the physical movement remains somewhere in the background. Take this example from a play called Women Pleased, written by John Fletcher in 1620. I think you’d all agree that ‘going’ is not quite the activity at the forefront of Penurio’s mind:

PENURIO: Pray ye take me with ye.

THIRD GENTLEMAN: To supper do’st thou meane?

PENURIO: To any thing that has the smell of meat in’t: tell me true, Gentlemen, are not you three now going to be sinfull…? I have found your faces, and see whore written in your eyes.

RSPEL MEMBER: Yes … but isn’t this still rather vague? After all, even here there is actual movement involved.

DE TROY: Sure. But only a little later, we start finding cases where the metaphor really has taken wings. Look at this next example from 1642. In April of that year, Charles I was prevented from entering Hull and its big arms depot, or ‘magazine’. A few weeks later, he summoned the gentry of Yorkshire, and tried to rally them to his cause by whingeing on about how he was being betrayed left right and centre:

To be short, You see that My Magazine is going to be taken from Me, being My Own proper Goods, directly against My will; the Militia, against Law and My Consent, is going to be put in execution … All this considered, none can blame Me to apprehend Dangers.

JOURNALIST: Well yes, I suppose the arms depot couldn’t really have been wandering off anywhere.

DE TROY: Nor is this example just some isolated quirk of royal speech. There are a few other examples of a similar nature from around that time, and we even have an explicit remark made by a contemporary linguist to prove it. In a manual from 1646, Joshua Poole describes ‘going to’ as a ‘sign of the future’:

‘… going to’ is the signe of the Participle of the future, as … ‘I am … going to read’.

So by the middle of the seventeenth century we are no longer dealing with vague impressions. We have pretty clear evidence that ‘going to’ can be used as a future marker without any residue of the original meaning of movement.

JOURNALIST: And is that the end of the story?

DE TROY: In one sense, yes, since ‘going to’ was certainly an established future marker by the mid-seventeenth century. But to tell the whole story you’d have mention that at the time, ‘going to’ was still much less common than in modern English, and there were some contexts in which it had not yet appeared. It’s only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the future marker ‘going to’ really takes off.

JOURNALIST: And what about the eroded form ‘gonna’?

DE TROY: Unfortunately, it’s difficult to say for sure when that first cropped up, since the written sources don’t tend to reflect such ‘substandard’ pronunciation. The earliest recorded examples seem to come from Scotland, from around the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1806, the poet Alexander Douglas wrote: ‘Now Willie lad, I’m ganna gie You twa or three directions.’ The earliest ‘gonna’ quoted by the Oxford English Dictionary, though, is from American English, in 1913, a whole century later. And the jazz song ‘I ain’t gonna give nobody none o’ this jelly roll’ from 1919 is another early example. But it’s quite difficult to tell how long the pronunciation had been around before it made its literary debut.

*   *   *

RSPEL MEMBER: Dr de Troy, you have taken us on a fascinating historical perambulation, and told a touching tale of gentle changes in meaning. But I am still waiting for an answer to my original question: how exactly was an ordinary verb like ‘going to’ transformed into an auxiliary, a mere element of grammar? So far, we have not heard a single word about the real chemistry of changes from one syntactic category to another. When precisely did ‘go’ decide to stop being a content word and turn into a grammatical element, and how did this metamorphosis actually happen?

DE TROY: But don’t you see – that’s exactly why I went into the history of ‘going to’ in such detail. It was to show you that there was no dramatic volte-face, no sudden leap over the border between content and structure. There was no Berlin wall, no passport-control, not even a checkpoint between content words and grammatical elements. When you take a closer look at what happened to ‘going to’ in real life, all you’ll find is a peaceful story of very gradual erosion in meaning, followed by erosion of sounds.

RSPEL MEMBER: But you are not alleging, are you, that there is no difference between content words and grammatical elements?

DE TROY: No, but what I’m trying to get at is that words don’t walk around wearing different designer T-shirts with labels like ‘Content Word’ or ‘Grammatical Element’. It’s true that we distinguish between ‘content’ and ‘grammar’ when we talk about a language, but when you stop to think about it, the only valid reason for drawing the distinction in the first place is meaning: we call some words ‘content words’ because they have an independent meaning, and we call other words ‘grammatical words’ because they don’t. So in fact, all that was needed to push the phrase ‘going to’ from the camp of ‘content words’ to ‘grammatical words’ was the erosion of its original meaning as an independent action.

JOURNALIST: Still, I don’t see why you can’t put your finger on when exactly this change happened. Why can’t you say when it flipped from having an independent meaning to not having it any more?

DE TROY: Because having an independent meaning or not is not always a simple matter of black or white. Of course, a word like ‘tree’ has a simple meaning all of its own, whereas a word like ‘which’ is devoid of almost any independent meaning. When you consider these two extremes, the difference between the camps seems clear enough. But when you really get down to it and look closer, you’ll find there’s a considerable grey area in between. To take just one example, think of prepositions like ‘under’ or ‘with’. They may not have an independent meaning like ‘tree’, but are they really as empty as ‘which’? And it’s the same with ‘going to’. The reason why I wanted to run through its history in such detail was to show you that it never suddenly changed from black to white. It went through subtle shades of grey, depending on background, foreground, intention, implication.

JOURNALIST: I just don’t get what ‘intention’ or ‘implication’ have to do with the question of having an independent meaning.

DE TROY: Quite a lot, actually. Here is a slightly absurd example, which might help to drive the point home. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the story about the two Jewish merchants in Poland who bump into one another at the train station in Warsaw one morning. Both are competitors in the same trade, so they eye each other suspiciously, and one of them asks: ‘So where are you travelling today?’ ‘To Minsk,’ comes the cautious answer. ‘To Minsk, eh?’ the first says sceptically. ‘I know very well that you are only telling me that to make me think that you are actually going to Pinsk. But – I happen to know that you really are going to Minsk…’ And after a little pause he adds: ‘So tell me: why are you trying to deceive me?’
    You see, in real life, the actual meaning of what you say is often more than the literal sense of the words. What you say may not be exactly what you imply. How the hearer interprets what you said may not be exactly what you think you implied, and so on. In the joke, this is all brought to absurd extremes. But when we were arguing earlier about what exactly people meant when they said ‘going to’, we faced the same problem: we had to consider the context, the intention, what was in the foreground, what was in the background. The gist of the tale of ‘going to’ was that the original literal meaning gradually faded into the background, and the abstract sense came more and more to the fore. But it was never the case that ‘going to’ was transformed overnight from having the meaning of movement to being rid of it altogether.
    You could of course take one particular point, and just decide to call that the moment when ‘going to’ hopped across the border between content and structure. You could argue, for example, that this happened when ‘going to’ was first used in a context where movement was really no longer possible, say when Charles’s magazine was ‘going to be taken away’. But if you look at the history as a whole, it becomes clear that this choice would be somewhat arbitrary, because there never was a cataclysmic break at that or any other point. Charles’s ‘going to’ was just one step in a long and gradual process, brought about by a particular combination of metaphor and erosion in both meaning and sounds.

CHAIRMAN: I’d like to pose a rather different question, if I may. Suppose one accepts your analysis that all that is involved here is a ‘particular combination’, as you have just said, of metaphor and erosion. But isn’t this particular combination – how shall I put it – rather too particular? It is quite remarkable that metaphor and erosion in meaning should join forces in just the right way, and that the erosion of sounds should know when to clock in at just the right time. Such a coincidence seems almost too good to be true, don’t you think?

DE TROY: I know what you mean, but if you think that ‘gonna’ is a fluke, then maybe you’d like to explain why it is that exactly the same fluke somehow repeats itself in dozens of languages across the world. Just look at these examples:

CHAIRMAN: Now it is beginning to sound more like a conspiracy.

DE TROY: I bet Bakunin would have had something to say about the bourgeoisie’s paranoia of conspiracies during the last stages of capitalist decline. But seriously, there’s nothing especially mysterious about this ‘particular combination’ of metaphor and erosion. What happens to the ‘going’ verbs in all these languages is the result of two common motives that are always behind the scenes: the desire to enhance our expressive range on the one hand, and laziness on the other. The flow towards abstraction is a consequence of this expressive urge: even if a language already has a future marker, speakers will always seek fresher ways of emphasizing that something is really going to happen. For example, they may want to stress that something will happen very soon indeed. Just think of the promise ‘I’m going to do it right away’ – doesn’t it sound much more promising than a mere ‘I’ll do it’?

CHAIRMAN: But how does the erosion of sounds know when to start?

DE TROY: It doesn’t. It carries on regardless, and keeps on trying to hack away at everything all the time. But some constructions are more susceptible to it, while others are more resistant. So what happened to ‘going to’ was really just a consequence of its hackneyed use in its new domain. As long as ‘going to’ retained its independent meaning, it had a much stronger resistance, and this is why no one says ‘I’m gonna bed’. But once ‘going to’ lost its independent content, it became much more exposed, because it was now used more often, in more predictable circumstances, and with far less stress. So naturally, the temptation to take short-cuts in pronunciations grew, and the risk of misunderstanding decreased. In such conditions, the phrase was more prone to erosion than ever before, and so it’s not surprising that the bleached future sense was shortened to ‘gonna’.

JOURNALIST: So would you say that ‘go’ turns into a future marker so often because it’s the most obvious source for the abstract concept of ‘future’?

DE TROY: ‘Go’ is certainly one obvious source, but by no means the only one. The notion of future attracts metaphors from all kinds of places. You can imagine it as a kind of ‘functional sink’ into which different sources converge. Just think of the English future marker ‘will’. No one today would dare raise an eyebrow at such a thoroughly respectable grammatical marker, but originally ‘will’ was an entirely normal verb that simply meant ‘want to’ or ‘desire’.

JOURNALIST: Do you mean as in ‘unwilling’ and ‘as you will’?

DE TROY: Precisely, or as in the marriage vow of the Anglican church. Although hardly a bride or groom realizes it today, the original sense of the promise ‘I will’ was simply ‘I want to’ love, honour, cherish, and so on. But when one wants to do something, it often implies that one jolly well will. So ‘will’ underwent a process rather like ‘going to’, and eventually ended up as a future auxiliary. And again, there’s nothing peculiarly English about this development. The same path of change was traversed by languages all over the world. The Swahili verb taka ‘want’, for instance, ended up as the future marker ta, and the same thing happened to the Greek verb thélei.

*   *   *

CHAIRMAN: Dr de Troy, I must admit that I am quite taken with your account of ‘going to’. But there is something else that is troubling me. You have explained how the grammatical marker ‘gonna’ emerged as a result of erosion, and made a good case for your thesis on ‘creation through destruction’. But with all due respect, the substandard ‘gonna’ is hardly ‘the structure of language’, is it? It is just one grammatical marker, and quite a trifling one at that. Do you really expect us to believe these ‘forces of destruction’ can also produce the truly majestic architectures of language?

DE TROY: Well, Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day, you know. I see your point that ‘gonna’ seems like a kind of ‘baby structure’, but what I’m trying to get at is that the same forces that created ‘gonna’ can also create much more impressive structures. Actually, I was just about to mention another example, the French verbal system. Now I’m sure you don’t need to be reminded of the complex conjugation of the French verb, with its dozens of different endings, so I don’t want to worry about the details here. But just to make the point that it doesn’t suffer from lack of complexity, I’ve put the main tenses of the verb aimer, ‘love’, on a slide, and I think you will agree that we are no longer dealing with ‘baby structure’.

CHAIRMAN: This is certainly no ‘gonna’. But you are not implying, are you, that destruction could have given rise to such an edifice?

DE TROY: I am, actually. But I don’t want to bore you here with the history of each and every ending, so as an illustration, I’d like to look at the endings of just one of these columns: the future tense. The next slide shows the future endings of aimer again, and next to them, I’ve put a different set of endings, those of the present tense of avoir, ‘have’.

JOURNALIST: Even I can spot the resemblance, if that’s what you’re getting at. But do you mean that the future in French developed from the verb ‘have’? If anything, I’d guess that ‘have’ should have something to do with the past: j’ai aimé – ‘I have loved’.

DE TROY: That’s right: ‘have’ found its way into various constructions, and sure enough, the past tense j’ai aimé is one of them. But there was also another construction with ‘have’, which took quite a different course. In Late Latin, the forebear of French, the verb habere ‘have’ could be used to express obligation, just as in English ‘I have to do something’. So amare habeo meant ‘I have to love’, amare habes meant ‘you have to love’, as you can see here:

RSPEL MEMBER: Are you proposing that ‘I have to love’ changed into ‘I will love’? In my experience, no one starts loving someone simply because they have to.

DE TROY: No, well, maybe ‘love’ is not the best example … But here is a much better one, from a situation where what one has to do really is very close to what one will do. On the next slide, you can see a short extract from a document written by the Holy Inquisition in the Year of Our Lord 715. The inquisitors were called in to investigate an ownership dispute between the bishops of Siena and Arezzo, and their report mentions the testimony of a priest who piously told them how one of the parties in the dispute, a Lombard duke called Warnefrit, had tried to pressure him into lying under interrogation:

The Duke Warnefrit asked me:

I responded:

In the smug response of the priest – ueritatem dicere habeo ‘truth to.say I.have’ – we can see a perfect example of that basis in experience, where ‘have to’ and ‘will’ are practically one and the same. If one ‘has to’ tell the truth to the Inquisition, it is pretty damn likely that one ‘will’. But what makes this exchange even more revealing is the Duke’s question in the previous sentence. There, the sense of obligation has entirely faded away: when the Duke asks quomodo dicere habes, literally ‘what to.say you.have’, the last thing on his mind is what morality dictates – after all, he came in order to convince the priest not to tell the truth. So the meaning of obligation has entirely disappeared here – the Duke uses the dicere habes construction only to ask what the priest will say to the Inquisitors.

RSPEL MEMBER: I see that this is turning into yet another tale of gentle changes in meaning. But if I understood you correctly earlier on, what you promised to show was how those verbal endings emerged.

DE TROY: I was just getting to it. When the ‘have to’ construction was increasingly used with this bleached future meaning, something else happened: its form underwent substantial reduction. The first unmistakable sign of change appears in the writings of a guy called Fredegar. Not much is known about him, except that he lived in the seventh century, in what today would be France, and that he wrote a long rambling history of the Frankish kingdoms. Poor old Fredegar hasn’t had a very good press. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, no less, dismisses his Chronicle of the Frankish Kingdoms as ‘written in barbarous Latin and excessively dull’.

RSPEL MEMBER: Oh dear, that’s all we need …

DE TROY: But you see, it’s precisely this so-called ‘barbarism’ that gives us the first glimpse of the new reduced form of ‘have to’ in the Romance languages. In one of his numerous digressions, Fredegar describes a battle between the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and the Persian king Kavadh, which was fought around a border town called Daras. Fredegar offers a quaint explanation for how Daras got its name. Having defeated the Persians, Justinian had Kavadh brought to him in fetters, and demanded that he cede large territories. But Kavadh wouldn’t hear of it. He kept saying non dabo (‘I won’t give’), and Justinian kept answering daras (‘you will give’). And according to Fredegar, the town Daras was founded on the precise spot where the argument took place.

CHAIRMAN: As I’m sure you know, Dr de Troy, daras is not the correct Latin for ‘you will give’. It should be dabis.

DE TROY: But that’s exactly the point. Although Fredegar was writing in Latin, in this instance he chose a word from his ‘barbarous’ vernacular to explain the town’s name. Daras is in fact the first recorded example of the future tense in the Romance languages: it’s the contraction of the phrase dare habes ‘to.give you.have’.

JOURNALIST: Do you mean that the whole phrase dare habes was reduced to just daras? That’s pretty drastic, isn’t it?

DE TROY: Not as drastic as the month Augustus, which ended up as a mere ‘oo’. Daras is a fairly mild reduction compared to that, wouldn’t you say?

JOURNALIST: But isn’t something else going on here? We started off with two words, dare habes, but somehow they coalesced into one!

DE TROY: Sure, but there’s nothing very unusual about that either. The same happens with ‘going to’ and ‘gonna’, or words like ‘gotta’ or ‘gimme’ – and if this register is beneath you, then what about ‘don’t’, ‘let’s’, ‘o’clock’? In fluent speech we don’t pause between words, and the sounds just run into one another. Just think how difficult it is to work out in a foreign language where one word ends and the next begins. When you don’t know where the borders are meant to be, it is often impossible to hear them, because they are not really there in the sounds themselves.

RSPEL MEMBER: The way people mumble these days, I can hardly even hear the borders in English …

DE TROY: I’ll pass on that one. But the point is that in a language we understand, the identity of words as individual entities is maintained because they appear in different combinations – a word like ‘going’ does not have to be followed by ‘to’, since there are many other options that could come after it: ‘going away’, ‘going from’, ‘going out’, and so on. But when two words such as ‘going to’ or dare habes appear together extremely frequently, the border between them can lose its relevance, so that when the phrase is worn down, the two words fuse into one. So really, there’s nothing particularly mysterious about habes merging with the preceding verb and turning into an ending. And the other future endings arose in just the same way. I can think of no better illustration of ‘creation through destruction’:

JOURNALIST: And is this how the endings in all the other tenses of French developed?

DE TROY: In principle, yes. They didn’t all come from the verb ‘have’, of course, but the basic mechanism must have been the same.

*   *   *

CHAIRMAN: Far be it from me to nit-pick, but isn’t there a slight hitch to your argument? You seem to be implying that the different endings all developed from auxiliary verbs such as ‘have’. But doesn’t your theory presuppose that some verbs already had personal endings to start with? After all, the only reason why we ended up with so many future endings is that there were so many different person endings on the verb ‘have’ in the first place. In other words, the endings on one verb created the endings on the other. But where did the original endings on ‘have’ itself come from?

DE TROY: You are absolutely right – ‘have’ must have got these markers from somewhere. The actual origin of the endings on the French ‘have’ lies too far back in prehistory to tell us anything in detail. But if you want to get an idea of what the ultimate source must have been, then you don’t need to delve thousands of years into the past. You can stay with the present, and even with the same language.

CHAIRMAN: I must confess I don’t see how modern French can help here.

DE TROY: Then let’s try a little exercise in creative history. Imagine, for a moment, that the course of colonialism had gone rather differently, and that in the year 2000, a few enterprising missionaries from the Vatican in Nairobi had managed to set foot for the first time in the impenetrable forests by the river Seine, deep in the unexplored reaches of the European subcontinent. The missionaries try to make contact with the ferocious tribes that roam those dark forests, and after the first attempt ends rather stickily with one of them in the stew-pot – flambé dans son jus – they finally succeed in establishing cordial relations with the natives. Obviously, since the savages don’t speak a word of Swahili, they can’t understand the New Testament in the original. So the missionaries decide they had better make a translation into Frãsé, which is what the natives call their lingo. And to facilitate the task, the missionaries start by writing a grammar of Frãsé. Now, in describing the forms of the verb em (‘love’) in the present tense, the missionaries come up with a table looking more or less like this, showing the prefixes on the verb for the different persons:

JOURNALIST: It looks like Turkish to me.

DE TROY: Of course it looks odd, because it’s written as it sounds in the spoken language, rather than in the standard and highly archaizing French orthography. Does the following look less strange?

RSPEL MEMBER: Of course it does, but here, the pronouns tu, il, elle are clearly presented as independent words, while your funny phonetic rendering pretended they were part of the verb.

DE TROY: No, I’m afraid the pretension is entirely on the part of the archaizing written language, which shows the state of affairs centuries ago, not today. In the spoken language, the pronouns are in advance stages of merging with the verb: in phrases like Jean, il aime (‘John, he loves’), or lui, il aime (‘him, he loves’), the pronoun il has entirely lost the ability to stand on its own. So if French had never been written down, our missionaries would have had every reason to assume that these ‘pronouns’ were simply prefixes on the verb. They would hear the third person singular marker as a prefix il-, or even just i- when the verb begins with a consonant, as in i-fe ‘he does’. Of course, the pronouns of modern Frãsé are turning into prefixes, not endings. But in a language where the pronouns usually come after the verb, such pronouns would turn into endings instead.

*   *   *

CHAIRMAN: Dr de Troy, I am sure no one here present would wish to dispute that your examples are impressive. And I, for one, am certainly beginning to warm to your theory that destruction can create complex new structures. Still, everything you have told us so far has to do with verbs: person endings emerging from eroded pronouns, and tense markers emerging from auxiliaries. But we haven’t heard a single word on the majestic architectures that surround nouns. Are you trying to imply that it was just erosion that carved out the whole Latin case system, for instance?

DE TROY: I am, but the problem with working out the details of the Latin case system is that it’s so old – it was inherited from the Proto-Indo-European ancestor language, and must have emerged at the very least 6,000 years ago. Still, even if the details are obscure, the principles are fairly clear, especially since similar developments can be observed in other languages in more recent times. Take Hungarian, for instance, a language renowned for its large number of cases. Luckily, some of these cases only emerged during the last millennium, so we can catch them in the act. Here is a modern Hungarian phrase containing two instances of the case ending -ra, which means ‘to’ or ‘onto’:

But let’s jump back a thousand years, and look at the same phrase in a text from the eleventh century:

You can see that the modern case ending -ra started out as an independent word, a postposition rea, which performed the same function as a preposition like ‘to’, only that it came after the noun rather than before it. And this is by no means an isolated case – there are examples in lots of other languages of such postpositions eroding and fusing with the noun to become case-endings.

CHAIRMAN: Yes, but what about Latin? Could the whole case system really have emerged in this way, from postpositions?

DE TROY: It must have done. One of the few case endings that still betrays something of its origin is the ablative plural ending -ibus, as in consul-ibus ‘by the consuls’. This -ibus probably contains traces of an Proto-Indo-European postposition *bhi, which is related to what ended up in English as the preposition by. But all this is highly speculative, of course, because we are dealing with such a distant time.

CHAIRMAN: Fair enough. But isn’t there another problem which you have not mentioned? In Latin, not all nouns have the same case endings. Different nouns have different sets, and that makes the whole system so much more elaborate. But if, as you claim, those case endings all came from postpositions, then shouldn’t all nouns have had exactly the same endings?

DE TROY: Actually, it’s quite likely that in the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European, there really was just one set of endings for all nouns – one size to fit all, as it were. But what made the system so much more complex was … none other than the forces of erosion. The postpositions fused with the nouns to become case endings, but the erosion did not stop at that. In the process of reduction, the case endings also merged with the final syllable of the nouns, and this is ultimately what produced so much variety. The actual details of this development are terribly fiddly, but here’s just one example. Look at the dative case endings of these two different ‘declensions’ of Latin nouns:

Although the two declension endings -ī and -ō look quite different, there are good reasons to think that they go back to just one ending in Proto-Indo-European: -ei. What made this ending diverge into -ī and -ō are different paths of erosion and fusion, depending on the sound at the end of the respective words. When -ei was added to nouns that ended in a consonant, like ped ‘foot’, the resulting form pedei was simply weakened to pedī. But when -ei was added to nouns that ended with the vowel -o, such as lupo ‘wolf’, the erosion took a different course. The original form lupoei was first reduced to lupōi, the form found in the most ancient Latin texts, and later on, the final i was dropped, to leave just lupō. So in fact, what’s rather grandly called the ‘second declension’ is nothing other than those nouns that originally ended in the vowel -o, and the ‘third declension’ is just those nouns that originally ended in a consonant.

JOURNALIST: So this huge mesh of forms in the Latin case system was created by erosion? You’re saying that the forces which later brought down the whole system are in fact the same ones that created it in the first place?

DE TROY: Exactly. You see, it’s just one downhill slope. First erosion creates the case endings by fusing postpositions with the noun, and later on, erosion rubs them away again:

*   *   *

JOURNALIST: Sorry for being a bit slow on the uptake, but there’s something that’s still bothering me. If erosion is behind it all, and if even the birth of new endings is really just a part of the same process of reduction, then how come words don’t just get shorter and shorter and shorter all the time, until they dissolve completely?

DE TROY: That’s a very good question. In fact, the great nineteenth-century linguist August Schleicher was troubled by exactly the same problem: seeing erosion all around, he concluded gloomily that in the future we will all end up communicating in monosyllabic grunts. But there was just one little thing he forgot. You see, you only have to add one more arrow to the diagram, going from the end back to the beginning, and it turns into a cycle. It’s true that erosion makes words shorter and shorter, but speakers also start stringing two words together again, for instance by putting a new postposition after the noun. And then the whole cycle can start afresh when the new postpositions fuse with the noun.

JOURNALIST: But what’s the point of stringing words together? Why bother?

DE TROY: Often the point is just to make a point, to be more emphatic. Think about it this way: you can do so much more with many words than you can ever do with just one. There’s actually a nice anecdote that illustrates this in the autobiography of the German historian Golo Mann, son of the novelist Thomas Mann. In 1923, when he was fourteen, Golo was invited to stay with a school-friend over the Christmas holidays. This was no ordinary school-friend, though, but the son of a certain Count Lichnowsky, a high-ranking diplomat. Golo had never been taught formal manners by his parents, so his stay in the Lichnowskys’ ancestral castle was marred by a few social solecisms. The most embarrassing incident occurred right at the end of his stay, when the boy tried to thank the Count formally for his hospitality. This is how he describes the occasion: ‘I knew I had to say thank you, but how? A few years later, I would have managed it correctly: “May I thank you for your generous hospitality, for all the unforgettable experiences…”’ and so on and so forth. But instead of gushing lengthily as etiquette would have it, the young Golo merely offered his hand to the Count, and tried to put as much emotion and gravity as he could muster into just two words: vielen Dank (‘many thanks’). Of course, this attempt fell rather flat, and the Count’s answer came prompt and cold: Bitte sehr (‘that’s all right’).

RSPEL MEMBER: Oh the good old days when at least some people stood on ceremony.

DE TROY: You’d be surprised, but the reason I’m telling you all this is that ordinary language operates according to very similar principles even today. There’s only so much you can do with a single word. You can spit it out with passion and intone it with gravity, but there’s a limit to the amount of emphasis you can invest in it this way. So what do you do if you want to add more weight? You add more words. You combine them, pile them up into longer phrases. And just to show you that this isn’t only about diplomatic politeness, here is a very proletarian example. What do you think ‘on the day of on the day of this day’ might mean?

RSPEL MEMBER: It sounds alarmingly like one of your dialectical deconstructions.

DE TROY: Oh, I’m afraid it’s really something much more prosaic. Let’s see what you make of the history of the French word for ‘today’. Once upon a time, in the days before records of Latin began, there must have been a phrase hoc die, which meant ‘(on) this day’. By the time of attested Latin, this phrase had eroded and fused into one word, hodie ‘today’. Later on, in Old French, hodie was ground down into a meagre hui, but the French soon found that they couldn’t utter this paltry syllable with enough emphasis, so they piled up more words, and started saying au jour d’hui, literally ‘on the day of this-day’. But with repeated use, this became a set phrase, and so it fused into one word again: aujourd’hui. And nowadays in colloquial French, the same cycle is beginning all over again. A mere aujourd’hui is not deemed to have sufficient presence, and so to emphasize it, the French have started saying au jour d’aujourd’hui – literally ‘on the day of on-the-day-of-this-day’. As you can imagine, this usage is frowned upon by purists, but things have now sunk so low that you can find the phrase in practically any French dictionary, even if still labelled ‘colloquial’.

JOURNALIST: Ils sont fous ces Romains …

DE TROY: Maybe, but such cycles are not just a Gallic idiosyncracy. Take an English phrase like ‘up above’, and you’ll discover a no less hyperbolic history. Old English ufan meant ‘on up’ – it was the locative case of the preposition uf ‘up’. But this little ufan was not considered nearly sturdy enough, so it was reinforced by another preposition, be ‘by’, to give a beefier be-ufan ‘by on up’. But before long, be-ufan was assaulted by the forces of erosion, and ended up as a mere bufan. Naturally, the syllabically-challenged bufan had to be pumped up again, this time by the preposition an ‘on’, to give an-bufan ‘on by on up’. Later on, anbufan was ground down by erosion, and – to cut a long story short – ended up as the modest above. But it seems that a mere above doesn’t soar nearly high enough nowadays, so we sometimes feel the need to reinforce it with ‘up’, to give up above – literally ‘up on by on up’.

*   *   *

Let’s see, how am I doing for time?

The Chairman looks at his watch and gives a rather terminal glance.

DE TROY: OK, I suppose I’d better start rounding things off. Now, I know you might say that silly little examples like ‘up above’ or au jour d’aujourd’hui are rather marginal. But the principles that they represent are by no means confined to the fringe of language. They are thoroughly mainstream. We can see similar cycles, for instance, with postpositions that first merge with the noun to become case endings, are then chiselled away altogether, and then a new round of postpositions can begin the process all over again. And ditto with auxiliaries, which are squashed on to the verb to become tense endings, then drop off completely, only to make place for a new wave of fusions.
    So perhaps the easiest way of understanding these cycles of piling up, fusion and erosion is to imagine the forces that work on language as a kind of tireless compressing machine. Erosion keeps pounding at words, making them shorter and shorter. But shortened words are piled up into longer expressions, and the same forces of erosion then hack away at the pile, fuse the words and condense them into a more compact word once more. And so a new cycle begins all over again.
    To return to my original theme of creation and destruction, what I tried to show was that erosion can bring about changes that are very different from the ‘decay’ that attracted so much criticism this morning. Erosion is not only a negative influence on language, which tears away and rips apart existing structures. In combination with the piling up of words, erosion is also a regenerative force that constantly creates new and leaner structures from overweight multi-word phrases. Erosion is a highly useful compacting mechanism which allows us to convey ideas faster and more efficiently. Erosion checks the excesses of expressiveness, just as expressiveness repairs the excesses of erosion.

JOURNALIST: Well, all this is beginning to make sense. But if it’s all so straightforward, then I can’t help wondering why it took linguists so long to cotton on to the idea. Didn’t people like Schleicher know the examples you have just mentioned?

DE TROY: The funny thing is that they must have known about at least some of these examples, but they simply failed to grasp their significance, because they were so blinded by their admiration of the classical languages. Actually, there were a few linguists who were on the right track quite early on. Hermann Paul, for example, wrote as early as 1880 in perfect Bakunian spirit: ‘That which one calls construction comes about only through decay, and that which one calls decay, is just the further continuation of this process.’ But for most linguists, this didn’t really sink in until much later. Even as late as 1933, Leonard Bloomfield, who was by all accounts a giant in the field, could write something that now appears astonishing in its shortsightedness: ‘Merging of two words into one is excessively rare; the best-known instance is the origin of the future tense-forms in the Romance languages, from phrases of infinitives plus “have”: Latin amare habeo “I have to … love” > French aimerai “I shall love” … This development must have taken place under very unusual conditions.’

JOURNALIST: And did it?

DE TROY: About as unusual as rain in Wales. If you want, I can give you countless examples, from any language under the clouds.

CHAIRMAN: Ahem, I don’t want to put a dampener on things, but my watch tells me that we are beginning to run a little late. So unless there are very strong objections, I think we had better adjourn.

RSPEL MEMBER: But I still haven’t had a full answer to the question I raised in the beginning, about the change between syntactic categories!

CHAIRMAN: I am terribly sorry, but I’m afraid we really do have to stick to the schedule. Of course, this does not mean that the discussion cannot be continued informally over the coffee-break. I am sure we could all do with some liquid refreshment to mull over the many mergers of words and acquisitions of endings we have been bombarded with this afternoon. But for the moment, I think all that remains is to thank Dr de Troy for unleashing his destructive powers on us today.

A round of polite applause.

Unfortunately, the ensuing discussion about syntactic categories cannot be transmitted during prime time, but interested viewers can follow it in Appendix A: Flipping Categories, here.