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  The first assumption is that after their arrival in England in A.D. 449, the Germanic invaders routed the Celts in more or less a genocide, leaving mere remnants huddling on the southwesterly fringes of the island. From here, it has traditionally been concluded that Celtic languages could not have had any impact on English for the simple reason that no Celtic speakers survived the genocide to influence the language.

  But the truth is that the genocide of an entire society inhabiting vast expanses of territory is possible only with modern technology. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes did not possess anything we would consider modern technology. How, precisely, were they to kill practically every Celt outside of Wales and Cornwall—that is, in an area about the size of New England? With swords? How many people can you get at? Remember, there weren’t even guns yet. And even when Dutch and English colonists in South Africa had guns, African peoples there, like the Xhosa and the Zulu, gave them enough of a run for their money with spears that even though the whites ended up subjugating the blacks under apartheid policies, the blacks still today vastly outnumber the whites. There was no way to kill everybody.

  In that light, whatever havoc the Germanic invaders wrought, there were not, apparently, very many of them. Early Anglo-Saxon chroniclers like the Venerable Bede had it that the invaders “overran” Britain. But writers of their era did not have access to substantial and regular news from all over the land, satellite photography, or our conceptions of demography or even scholarship. Bede was even writing three centuries after said “overrunning,” which as Bill Bryson notes “is rather like us writing a history of Elizabethan England based on hearsay.” Bede could easily document as “overrunning” what was actually a compact number of violent, destructive encounters.

  Comparative genetics has recently confirmed that this was the case. By tracing mutations in mitochondrial DNA in women and on the Y chromosome in men, we can reconstruct the migrations of human populations since the emergence of Homo sapiens. It turns out that only about 4 percent of British men’s genetic material is traceable to a migration from across the North Sea. Moreover, essentially none of British women’s genetic material traces back to such a migration, meaning that the invaders were not couples with children, such that women and young’uns would bulk up the total. Rather, the invaders were just a bunch of guys. In fact, evidently the famous Germanic invaders numbered about 250,000, about as many people as live in a modest-sized burg like Jersey City.

  We will never be able to bring the Celts of this era back to life to ask them whether they felt terribly “exterminated,” nor do official records survive that would allow us to check for ourselves. However, there have always been clues that are problematic for the genocide account. A burial site with graves both in the style of Germanics across the North Sea and in the style of Celts (with the body buried crouching and facing north or northeast) suggests not genocide, but Celts living alongside Germanics. The very fact that after the invasion, archaeologists find no abrupt transformation in material culture suggests that Celts survived in numbers robust enough to pass on their cultural traditions permanently.

  A valuable snapshot comes in the laws established by Ine, a seventh-century king of Wessex (in an era before any individual considered himself the king of England as a whole). Two centuries after the Angles and company supposedly exterminated the Celts, the stipulations of Ine’s laws indicate a Britain where Celts are numerous and well integrated into society. The wealhs (Welshmen in modern parlance) Ine repeatedly refers to and legislates for include lowly slaves, respectable landowners, and even horsemen serving the king. The main lesson, as Ine devotes one law after another to establishing precisely how much compensation a Welshman’s family or owner gets if he is killed, is that subjugated though they usually were, the Celts were there, in numbers.

  The scenario Ine’s laws depict brings to mind, in fact, the situation of American blacks before Emancipation, right down to the fact that wealh, while coming down to us as Welsh, was not the name the people had for themselves (which was Cymry), and in Old English meant “foreigner,” with a goodly tacit implication as well of “slave.” In southern America before the end of the Civil War, Africans and their descendants were subjugated, but were still part of the warp and woof of existence for whites, outnumbered them, and included in their number a class of free farmers and artisans.

  The genocide story, then, has fallen apart. Genes, archaeology, documentary evidence, and sheer common sense leave it dead in the water. Typical assumptions such as magisterial popular chronicler David Crystal’s that the Celts hung around for a brief spell as slaves and brides but their “identity would after a few generations have been lost within Anglo-Saxon society” can no longer be accepted.

  This leaves us with a simple fact about what happens when languages come together: they mix. There is no recorded case in human history in which languages were spoken side by side and did not spice one another with not only words, but grammar. This means that even without recordings of seventh-century Celts speaking “Englisc” and peppering it with phrasings copying Celtic grammar, we can assume that this was the case, because it quite simply must have been.

  Taking a cue from the slavery analogy, we see that Jamaicans today speak a hybrid language, popularly called patois, that was born when African slaves learned English and filtered it through the languages they had been born to. Here is a sentence in patois:

  Unu main mi tingz, no tiek non gi im.

  You all mind my things, don’t give him any.

  The word unu is unfamiliar in English itself, but it is the word for you in the plural in the Igbo language of Nigeria, which many early slaves in Jamaica had grown up speaking. Patois phrases it Don’t take any give him because many West African languages string verbs together in just this way, such as the Twi language also spoken by many African slaves in Jamaica:

  O de sekan no ma me.

  he took knife the gave me

  “He gave me the knife.”

  The patois case is an example of what happens when there are so many people speaking a language in a non-native way that new generations speak it that way instead of the original way.

  There are similar cases around the world. Another one involves the famous click sounds in a family of languages, Khoisan, spoken in southern Africa by hunter-gatherers. Those clicks are extremely rare worldwide. Outside of the southern half of Africa, the only language in the entire world with clicks is a way of talking, now extinct, that speakers of one tiny aboriginal Australian language made up for use in male initiation rites! (The people’s everyday language is Lardil; the click talk was called Damin.) Among the languages with clicks in southern Africa, as it happens, are several that are not in the Khoisan family but are spoken nearby, such as Zulu and Xhosa (the native language of Nelson Mandela). Given that clicks essentially do not exist anywhere else, it is obvious that earlier forms of Zulu and Xhosa mixed with click languages.

  The way that English uses do and -ing just like Celtic, then, is predictable. Celts, less exterminated than grievously inconvenienced, had to learn the language of the new rulers. The Celts’ English was full of mistakes—that is, ways of putting words together that worked in Celtic but were new to Old English. However, over time, this Celtic-inflected English was so common—after all, there had only ever been 250,000 Germanic invaders—that even Anglo kids and Saxon kids started learning it from the cradle. After a while, this was Englisc—just as in Jamaica, after a while, Don’t take none give him was the way one spoke English there, and in what is now South Africa, using click sounds like the hunter-gatherers became the way one spoke Xhosa.

  Right? Well, for History of English scholars, still not. The genocide is, to them, only one reason to see the Celtic-English mirrorings as accidental.

  Assumption Number Two: Shitte Happens

  The body of scholarship on The History of English is replete with detailed descriptions of meaningless do and the verb-noun present tense just “happening.” We are to a
ssume that chance alone could have nudged English into coming up with meaningless do and a verb-noun present.

  To the scholars working in this vein, meaningless do and the verb-noun present are just same-old same-old as languages go. To them, saying that English got these features from Celtic just because Celtic has them is like proposing that anteaters, because they have long tongues and eat insects, must have evolved from chameleons. In that case, we easily see that plenty of animals have long tongues and even more eat bugs, such that there is no scientific reason to assume that anteaters evolved from chameleons.

  The problem is that these scholars have usually had little occasion to look hard at languages outside of the Germanic family. They are unaware that, as it were, in actuality very few languages have long tongues, and that even fewer both have long tongues and also eat bugs. They do not realize how very special English is—or that it is inescapable that Celtic languages made it that way.

  In the do case, the distraction is that in many colloquial dialects of Germanic languages, one can use do in a way kind of like English’s meaningless do. But only kind of.

  The issue is sentences like this colloquial German one:

  Er tut das schreiben.

  he does that write

  This means “He writes that,” and in terms of word order, it certainly looks like Ye Olde do in the Hamlet passages—that is, it looks like German’s version of He doth write. However, in fact, it isn’t—it is something quite different.

  For one, German’s version is optional. One might say Er tut das schreiben, but the simple Er schreibt das is also alive and well, and in fact, much more usual.

  Then, most importantly, meaningless do is meaningless, but German’s do is meaningful. It is used when you want to emphasize some part of the sentence. When you put stress on what you want to emphasize, you might also toss in a do. So: imagine if now and then you fall into moods where you enjoy taking a knife and stabbing pillows open. Suppose you run out of pillows but you still have that nagging urge, and then you see a laundry bag bulging full of clothes. A thought balloon pops up over your head: Maybe I’ll cut the bag open!

  Well, in German the thought balloon would read:

  Ich tue vielleicht den Sack aufschneiden.

  I do maybe the bag cut-open

  So, German do is an optional trick, used only in the present tense, as one factor in the way you emphasize something. Obviously this is nothing like the way we use do in English, in which to negate a sentence or to make it a question, you have to stick in a do no matter what, and the do has no meaning of its own. No dialect in any Germanic language other than English uses do in this way; at best, there are dialects that use it in variations on how German does.

  History of English specialists seem to suppose that it’s just that English merely drifted one step beyond German’s do—making it required instead of optional. But if that were so natural, so same-old same-old, then surely it would have happened in some other Germanic language sometime. Also keep in mind that each Germanic language comes in a bunch of dialects, many of which are quite different from the standard. If meaningless do is so unremarkable and could have “just happened,” then surely some small dialect of something somewhere—some villagers in the northern reaches of Sweden, some farmers down in some Dutch dell, some Yiddish speakers in a shtetl—somebody, somewhere would have come up with their own meaningless do just by virtue of shitte happening. But they haven’t.

  Nor do, apparently, any other human beings beyond Europe. Meaningless do is not a long tongue—it’s a tongue used as a leg. Some readers will think perhaps of a language like Japanese, where quite often a verbal concept is expressed as “doing” a noun, such as travel being rendered as to do travel; here is Taroo travels:

  Taroo ga ryokoo o suru.

  Taroo travel does

  Persian is like this, too, so much that it has only a few hundred verbs per se—to speak Persian is to be accustomed to “doing a waking up” instead of awakening someone, and so on. But in both of these cases, do has literal meaning: one is “doing,” performing, the noun. And in neither language is do used with all nouns as meaningless do is used with all verbs. Japanese and Persian’s do is a meaningful word; meaningless do is a little cog of grammar that happens to have the shape of the actual word do.

  I make no claim to have checked all six thousand languages in the world for a meaningless do, but I am aware of precisely two approximations of it anywhere but in Great Britain, and then, only approximations.

  One is in a small language called Nanai spoken in Siberia, where it is be rather than do that is used meaning-lessly. To say They died, you can say “They died was.”

  Hjoanči buikiči bičin.

  they died was

  This does not mean “They were dead” or “They were dying”: the was is the third-person singular form, not the third-person plural form that would agree with they. The was word is just tacked on, with no meaning: “They died—uh, was.” A more graceful translation would be something like “What it was is that they died.” But even this is optional, like the Germanic dos.

  Then there is the Monnese dialect of Italian and a few other close relations, out of dozens of Italian dialects, where the word for do is used in questions:

  Ngo fa-l ndà?

  where do-he go

  “Where is he going?”

  But in these Italian varieties, do is not used in negative sentences, whereas in English, do is used in both negative and question sentences—just as in Welsh and Cornish. And then, in Welsh and Cornish, do is also used in “default” affirmative sentences and was as well in earlier English—Gertrude in Hamlet’s “That you do bend your eye on vacancy.” So, in some Italophone hamlets, so to speak, do has been yoked into service in a meaningless fashion—but not in the particular way that it was in English, which mirrored precisely how do was used in the Celtic languages spoken by the people whom Anglo-Saxon speakers joined in invading Britain.

  The only languages in the world that are known at present to have meaningless do as English does are (drumroll, please) none other than the Celtic languages. Can we really believe that the Celts had nothing to do with English’s meaningless do, which parallels it so closely and once did so even more? In fact, do we have any reason to consider that the Celts were anything less than the crucial factor, without whom English would have no meaningless do?

  This question looms ominously over all of the specialists’ “shitte happens” versions of how English got meaningless do. All of them are brilliant in themselves, but also seem to ignore that meaningless do as it exists in English is about as weird as finding an AMC Gremlin on the moon.

  One specialist tries that it all started with do being used to indicate that something is done on a regular basis—Cats do eat fish would mean “Cats are in the habit of eating fish”—and that something odd happened in negative versions of sentences like that. At first, Cats do not eat fish meant “Cats are in the habit of not eating fish,” as a kind of description of something specific about cat’s gustatory disinclinations. It was a description of a habit of cats, with do as the habitual marker. But obviously that sounds like a rather labored way of saying “Cats don’t eat fish,” and that’s exactly how people started processing it. Instead of “What cats do is not eat fish,” people heard “Cats eating fish is a ‘no’ ” That is, they heard the negation as the most prominent feature in the sentence and thought of the “habit” part as background. Thus a sentence that was first about do-ness became one about not-ness. Do started to seem like just some bit of stuff hanging around. It lost its “juice” and stopped meaning “regularly,” and eventually meant nothing at all, functionless like a hallowed old politician given a sinecure in acknowledgment of services rendered back in the day. Voilà, meaningless do.

  Now, if you didn’t quite get that or had to read it again in order to do so, it’s not surprising. To be sure, it follows more gracefully when expressed in terminology that academic linguists are trained in,
and the article in question is one of the most elegantly written pieces of scholarship I have ever read; it has always been, to me, almost pleasure reading—I’d take it to the beach. Yet the explanation is still a distinctly queer, Rube Goldberg turn of events. Nothing like that is documented to have happened to the word do in any other language on earth, and besides, the author even admits that in almost half of the sentences in the Early Middle English documents he refers to, do does not, in fact, indicate that something happens regularly.

  “Future research” will figure out why, he has it—but how about if future research shows that what created meaningless do was not that English speakers for some reason drifted into the peculiar hairsplitting reinterpretation of Cats are not in the habit of eating fish as meaning “It is not that cats eat fish,” but the fact that the people who lived in Britain long before English got there had meaningless do already?

  Then there are those who claim that meaningless do was a natural development in response to various ways that English’s grammar changed from Old to Middle English. For example, in Old English, verbs could sit in various places in a sentence—at the end, at the beginning, and so on, depending on what was next to it. In Middle English and beyond, verbs started sitting in the middle, after the subject and before the object, the way they do now (The boy kicked the ball). But there was an intermediate point when the general pull was toward the verb’s being in the middle, but there were still sentences like Wherefore lighteth me the sonne? (“Why does the sun light me?”) where the verb lighteth is before the subject sun. One way of thinking has it that meaningless do came in because when you use it, the verb ends up in the middle the way sentences by Middle English were supposed to go: