badlinguistics

(Dated: 1 April 2022) The pronoun ‘they’ seems deceptively simple at first glance - ask any eleven-year-old and he or she could tell you that it is used to refer to two or more people or objects. Or at least that might have been what was taught to them in school, and while it is not inherently wrong, our understanding of this pronoun has changed over the years, and in this modern day and age, ‘they’ carries a lot more weight than what meets the eye. The concept of singular ‘they’ has been around for centuries, with the Oxford English Dictionary tracing its roots back to 1375 in the poem Willam and the Werewolf , where it makes its appearance in reference to an unspecified person. Transcribed into modern English, it reads " Each man hurried . . . till they drew near . . . where William and his darling were lying together." This example shows that the idea of altering meanings of words to suit the writer’s needs was already present long before the language was developed into...

“English is such a complicated language!”   No it is not! Or at least, present-day English (PDE) isn’t, when compared to its Old English (OE) ancestor. And we have the Vikings to thank for that. It is believed that extensive language contact between Old Norse (ON) – the language of the Vikings – and OE led to the simplification of many features of OE to better accommodate the similarities and differences in both languages. These simplified variants have largely been retained, and many of these features can still be observed in the English we use today, as I will (attempt to) illustrate through snippets of Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge .  (Why this choice of text? Because I bought the book for Literature class many years ago, and I thought I should find some use for it other than leaving it out as a decorative item collecting dust on my shelf.) Decay of Suffixes Both OE and ON were highly synthetic languages, relying heavily on the use of inflections to indicate t...