before BABEL -macrofamilies
based on progress in theoretical linguistics. In order to push the research frontier, we linguists need to identify the basic building blocks of language, its “atoms”, in Mark Baker’s memorable metaphor, and examine carefully how they play out in linguistic evolution.
SEE TWO of them: MAN, NOT
part A OUR FIRST WORD : man (and woman)
First consider its history merely within English over the past millennium and a half. Today, it is pronounced /mæn/ and means one of two things: either ‘an adult male person’ or ‘a person of either gender’.
The latter meaning, however, is considered sexist by many, and is thus falling out of use. Words such as chairman, fisherman, and policeman are thus being replaced by such gender-neutral forms as chairperson, fisher, and police officer, just as mankind is yielding to humankind. But as the gender-neutral meaning of man is still evident in manslaughter and in the phrase no man’s land.
As it turns out, the meaning of ‘an adult male’ is relatively new. In Old English (roughly, prior to the Norman invasion of 1066), this word—pronounced then with a vowel articulated further back in the mouth—did not mean a ‘male person’ but had only the gender-neutral sense of ‘a human being, person (male or female)’.
The word acquired the sense of ‘adult male’ in Middle English.
Prior to that time, an adult male was a wer, as distinguished from a wif, which then meant ‘woman (of any marital status)’, as it still does in idiomatic expressions like old wives’ tale and in the compound midwife, originally meaning ‘with woman (during labor)’. The word wer began to disappear in the late 13the century and was eventually replaced by man, which retained its old, more general meaning as it acquired the new, gender-specific one. (The term wer did survive, however, in such terms as “werewolf,” which make one wonder whether a female lycanthrope should be referred to as “wifwolf”.)
Note also that the Old English man had additional meanings besides ‘person’, including ‘servant, vassal’, as in all the king’s horses and all the king’s men (we retain this meaning to this day). Thus, clearly the meanings of even “ultraconserved words” show considerable change over much shorter periods than 15,000 years.
Pronunciations of such core terms change too, as I indicated above with the shift in vowel articulation in man through the history of English. Within the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, the reflexes of the reconstructed ancestral Proto-Germanic form *manwaz include:
Old Norse maðr, Danish mand, Gothic manna. In other Indo-European branches we find Sanskrit (Indic) manuh, Avestan (Iranian) manu-, Old Church Slavonic (Slavic) mozi. The latter is related to the Russian form muzh, found in the Russian version of the odd “Stone Age” passage above.
This plethora of phonological forms in related languages is a result of sound changes, different in each family.
part A OUR SECOND WORD: not
“Jespersen’s Cycle”
Not began its career in the mid-13th century as an unstressed variant of the emphatic noht/naht ‘in no way’, not unlike pas in the modern French two-part ne… pas negation.
Both English and French are undergoing the so-called “Jespersen’s Cycle” (named after a Danish linguist and Anglicist Otto Jespersen).
- In the first stage of this cycle negation is expressed by a single preverbal element;
- in the second stage, a postverbal emphatic element is added and made obligatory; and
- in the third stage, this postverbal emphatic element replaces the preverbal element, making the latter optional or eliminating it altogether.
Thus, in Old English negation was expressed by a preverbal ne, as in ic ne seah (literally ‘I not saw’). In Middle English, the same sentence was expressed as I ne saugh noht (literally ‘I not saw nothing’). Finally, in Early Modern English (around the time of Shakespeare), this sentence became I saw not (eventually, lexical verbs stopped inverting around negation and the so-called do-support was introduced to give us the modern I did not see).
In a parallel development, Old French had only the preverbal negation, as in jeo ne dis (literally ‘I not say’). In Modern Standard French both a preverbal and a postverbal element are obligatory, as in je ne dis pas (literally, ‘I not say nothing’), while in colloquial French, which represents Stage 3 of Jespersen’s Cycle, the preverbal ne is optional, so that je dis pas is perfectly acceptable.
