Plasma Pool

Behold, the Lord’s Prayer in Old English:

Fæder úre, ðú ðe eart on heofonum,
Sí ðín nama ġehálgod.
Tó becume ðín riċe.
Ġewurþe ðín willa
On eorþan swá swá on heofonum.
Urne ġedæghwamlíċan hlaf syle ús tódæġ.
And forgyf ús úre gyltas,
Swá swá wé forgyfaþ úrum gyltendum.
And ne ġelæd ðú ús on costnunge,
Ac álýs ús of yfele. Sóþliċe.

You may call me a nerd, but I love impressing new acquaintances by reciting this little gem, and I have yet to meet anyone who wasn’t at least mildly intrigued that this used to be English. “It’s so different, it sounds like [Swedish/Norwegian/Danish],” they usually marvel. But none of them make* the next — to me, obvious — inquiry: how did we get Modern English out of that?

The answer is simple: language changes. This is an entirely uncontroversial answer, and people readily accept it when we’re talking about the change from Old to Modern English. However, the moment I say that language change is afoot today, I invariably lose half my audience. I tell them that a lot is arguably one word, or that they can be used in the singular, and they look at me like I just hit a puppy with a nine iron.

I hate to be the bearer of such shocking news, but it’s true. Meanings change, words are smashed together and eroded, and then smashed together again with other words. This has been happening for so long that I can guarantee you if you could dissect and surgically separate any word in this sentence, you’d find that each of them is a Frankenstein’s monster of little mangled bits, cobbled together by millennia of fusion and erosion.

Take the story of the word above. In old Old English (not a technical term mind you), this word was ufan, pronounced [oo van]. For some unknown reason, speakers found this word to be too darned short for the job, so they tacked the word be on the front. This was a common way of synthesizing prepositions in those days, as we can see from fossils like below (be-low) and behind (be-hind). Since vowels don’t like to butt up against one another, be-ufan was quickly contracted to bufan. Later, unsatisfied with bufan, speakers prefixed it with a-, itself probably a contracted form of at or on. The resultant form abufan stuck around for a while; long enough for the tides of time to pound away the ending -an and leave us the tiny remnant -e, which we maintain in spelling to this day. The word abufe — now spelled above — has survived to Modern English, but the process has not yet finished. There is another word lining up to glom on: the word up. These days it’s extremely common to hear up above, and undoubtedly sometime in the future, up will become a withered symbiant, like those who went before it.

You may protest that up above isn’t ‘correct’, but be assured that your counterpart 500 years ago would have said the same thing when a- was fusing, and his predecessor when be was fusing. In fact, the root ufan wasn’t a linguistic atom either. It’s related to the word over, so there is likely a dedicated philologist out there who could tease out a root uf and a suffix -an, and the longer words from which those eroded. Surely, there was someone back in the day who bemoaned even that contraction!

Thus is the fabric of our language; words are stitched together, only to fray with time, so another swatch must be added to maintain its integrity. This has been happening since language arose, and it will continue as long as language exists. So, when they say that alot, gonna, and eachother are ‘incorrect,’ they may as well be screaming into the wind. The reason people make these spelling mistakes in the first place is that in their minds, the words are treated as one. No one would argue that auxiliary verb would should be spelled will did, although that is likely its etymology. If I dare say, in 200 years, when gonna has completed the transition to auxiliary verb, no one will require it be spelt going to. Similarly, when a lot has finished the transition to article, no one will insist it be written as two words, just as today we do not enforce the etymological spelling of the article every: ǽfre ǽlċ.

We just so happen to be at a point in history when the etymology of the words alot and gonna — should I be so audacious to call them words — is still apparent. However, I promise that in due time, their derivations will become opaque. The use of the word lot to mean quantity is already becoming rare, and it shall soon go the way of ufan, preserved only as a remnant in an seemingly indivisible word. If we deny this process, we are not only being needlesly oppressive to new generations of language learners, we are rejecting one of the mechanisms by which language has managed to stay alive through thousands of generations of speakers.

But wait! There is no need to lament the years we dedicated to learning to spell. I’m noggonna s’jest y’ferget evrything y’no abaut inglish spelling; there is still some reasonable standard to which we can hold ourselves, after all, we do need to communicate. But there comes a point when practicality should trump tradition, and we should do some housekeeping, tossing spellings like knight and thorough into the rubbish bin where they belong. Despite what my father might tell you, dirt is not patina, and there is no reason to burden our children with learning antique spellings of words and phrases, just for nostalgia. We should be on the lookout for new linguistic developments, adjusting our spelling when necessary, and maintaining convention where warranted.

*Correct me, I dare you.