June 21, 2006 at 6:57AM On the influence of the Celtic languages over English
It’s odd that an amateur like myself would ever need to correct a professional, but the recent Language Log post, “Speak we proper English?” needed it. Here’s what I wrote:
There was a small error in your recent Language Log post where you stated that English used the verb ‘do’ to indicate negation. It’s not. By itself, it’s used to indicate emphasis, as in “you do need to do such-and-such”. But couldn’t the use of ‘do’ + ‘not’ be better explained as a leftover of English’s V2 past?
And while I don’t know a huge amount about the Brythonic language, I do know a bit about the other Celtic languages, namely the Goidelic ones, specifically Irish. Irish uses the particle ‘an’ to form questions, and is unrelated to the verb ‘dean’. Example: <an bhfuil tú ag dul amach?> (”Are you going outside”). In Old Irish, this particle was ‘in’. Whether English somehow manage to pick up the use of verb inversion from some one of the Celtic languages (even though it’s not a feature by nature of the Welsh and the Goidelic languages by virtue of being VSO) and not French (where it actually occurs) is another matter.
However, one of the underlying points you made--English’s prodigious use of auxiliary verbs--is fine. This is a grammatical feature English could have realistically picked up from the surrounding Celtic languages. Ditto for the progressive.
Ooh! And appears I just found a bug in Textuality’s magic quotes code! Must fix that.