"Would" from Dory to Lilly

Hello sister!

The other day, I was sitting in Linguistics learning about Early Modern English. You and I have talked about how the random fun facts thrown out by our professors are often the best things about our classes, and I got one the other day that was especially interesting.

So, nowadays, we mostly only use the word "would" to put a verb into conditional tense.  As in, "If I won the lottery, I would pay off my college tuition."  We can also denote conditional with "could" or "should."  Now, it's kind of strange of English to form conditional tense like this--I believe most languages do so with a verb ending instead.  (This makes forming and understanding conditional in French right confusing--there's no way to make the distinction in meaning between "would," "could," and "should" except by context.)  I've been wondering idly about why English forms conditional like this, and I believe I may have a clue to the answer.

In Old English (and even up to Early Modern), the word "would" was a verb: a form of the verb "to will," vaguely synonymous with "to wish."  This usage still survives in one phrase that I can think of in Modern English: "I would rather." What's interesting about this, though, is that in modern usage we don't think of the "would" of this phrase as the verb.  We put the emphasis on "rather," thus in effect creating the word "to rather," which pretty much means the same thing as "to prefer."  Originally, the "rather" in this phrase was....an adverb? We even turn this phrase into a contraction: "I'd rather," attaching even less importance to what was originally the verb and making this a conditional phrase when it really has no business being one.  When this common phrase was formed, I'm guessing the stress would fall differently; something like "I would, rather, that my tea had more sugar in it."

So, what happened to "would" between Old and Modern English? Well, somehow we started using it to show the a verb was conditional.  Originally, a phrase like "I would do my laundry" actually meant I wish to do my laundry.  Since then, it's gone through a change in meaning so that it now means that if circumstances were different, I would be doing my laundry, but alas, something has come up and I simply can't.  It has no meaning that I actually want to do my laundry in the modern usage.

So, as "would" became a conditional marker and its meaning changed, while simultaneously the conjugated form of pretty much every verb was changing drastically, the original meaning of "would" got left behind, surviving only in the one phrase "I would rather."  Well, it also shows up in Modern English with its original usage when someone is trying to make their language sound archaic.  For example, Lord of the Rings.  Also, the book I'm reading right now, which uses it profusely:

He closed his eyes. "Adjunct, I would be there when the time came."
She was silent and he knew without opening his eyes that she was studying him, gauging his worth.  He was beyond unease and beyond caring. He'd stated his desire; the decision was hers.

....Did all of that make sense?  I would know your opinion. :D

"The First Indo-Europeans" from Lilly to Dory

Hello, sister mine!

We've had a few conversations lately concerning the Indo-Europeans, so I'd like to share some of the things we've been discussing in class about them that you might find interesting.

But first, some overview for our readers who may not be familiar with the subject matter:

Almost all the modern European languages can be linked together linguistically, first into categorical branches, and then to a single historical common language, known as Proto-Indo-European.  Here's a diagram posted by Dory in one of our earlier posts (click for the post and a more in-depth description) that shows these connections:

It's called "Proto-Indo-European" because it's been reconstructed, based on ways of tracing the history of words (known as etymology) to find words in other languages which share a common historical root.  Because of this type of analysis, we know it has to have existed, but until recently relatively little was known about the people who actually spoke it.  However, you can tell quite a bit about a culture from its language!

First, we know through the archaeological record that the Indo-European culture originated in what is now Ukraine.  This is supported linguistically, as the modern Ukrainian language is the most similar to the reconstructed Indo-European language as compared to the other branches.

Here is where it starts getting cool, and why I love Anthro-linguistics...

We know the Indo-Euros were a pastoralist society, meaning their sustenance was based around herding some kind of animal (like sheep, cattle, goats, etc).  Typically, this "type," if you will, of culture will fall into certain patterns as far as its societal organization and spiritual beliefs.  In this case, the hierarchy follows thus: the shepherd watches over the flock as the father watches over his family (they tend to be male-dominated) as the leader watches over his tribe as a father-like deity watches over his people.  This is seen in many modern-day societies, and indeed can be spotted in the organization of Western culture and the terminology of modern Christianity (which stems from Judaism, which originated within a pastoralist group); "the good shepherd;" "sacrificial lamb;" "guide your flock;" etc.  The Indo-Euros are thought to have worshiped a god called "Sky Father," or "Diaus Pater" in it's reconstructed form, which is the root of words like "Dios" (Spanish), "Zues" (Greek), "Deu" (French), and "Dyw" (Cornish).

Now, the Indo-Euros weren't just ANY pastoralists.....

They were horse lords.

And, they had iron weapons before anyone else, making it easy for them to go around conquering all of their agrarian neighbors which is how their culture, language, and belief system spread across Europe so fast.  The blending of Indo-European and the languages of the groups they conquered is probably what kicked off the separate dialects that later evolved into the different language branches.

So, there is a certain mysterious culture that has been in Europe as long as anybody and whose language is very mysteriously indeed NOT a descendant of Proto-Indo-Euro.  They are the Basque.

My thoughts concerning this are largely centered on the idea that perhaps the ancient Basque were isolated enough to escape the notice of the conquering Indo-Euros, and so were able to keep their language where others were not.  What I'm wondering is, how did the ancient Basque live?  Were they agrarian, or were they perhaps nomadic?  This would link them to another European group who also speaks an independent language and managed to escape Indo-Euro influence: the Gypsies.

So, what are your thoughts?  Do you know something about the Basque or Gypsy cultures that would support this hypothesis, or am I completely off?

Love, Lilly

"Gust" from Dory to Lilly

This will be a short one, but I just wanted to tell you something neato.

So I was pondering the word "disgusting" the other day.  There are three parts to the word: "dis," "gust," and "ing," two of which we know the meaning of. "Dis-" means something along the same lines as "un-" or "not."  "-ing" turns a word into an adjective or gerund (or a verb if you want to get less technical.)  Basically, the word tells us that the thing we're describing is not...whatever "gust" means.  Which means "gust" meant something at some point in our language's history, probably something to do with taste.

At this point in my thought process, the very similarly-sounding French word "dégoûtant" (pronounced day-goot-on) popped into my head--it's the French word for "disgusting," and if you recall my post about the accent circonflexe, the accent circonflexe, seen here above the 'u,' indicates pretty reliably that there used to be an s right there.  AND, the cool thing about the word "dégoûtant" is that "goût" means "taste" in French.

So, if you followed all of that, you may decide to hypothesize along with me that there used to be a word in English, "gust," that meant "taste."

Having brought my thought process that far, it occurred to me that I should, like, test this theory.  So I consulted our best friend the Oxford English Dictionary and found this:

SUCCESS.

:D

"Visualization" from Dory to Lilly

Lillah, something happened in my Teaching Literature class today that made me question myself.

This is a good thing, I suppose, since we should always question our most dearly held assumptions when striving for more education.  But still, I feel extremely uncomfortable in thinking that I may not be as awesome a reader as I thought I was.

Namely, I don't visualize while reading.  There is no movie playing in my head.  We've been talking a lot in class about how to teach various "reading strategies"--stuff like predicting, making inferences, activating background knowledge, and visualizing.  I am ready to accept that visualizing can indeed be a useful strategy while reading, but personally I don't find it terribly useful.

Now, this is strange, because in other areas I'm an extremely visual person.  I like photography and art.  I draw comics to help me make sense of hard concepts.  My notes in class usually look something like this:

When I write in books it looks like this:

And when I plan out essays it looks like this:

So, I have no idea why I don't visualize what I'm reading--it's not something I ever did, or considered necessary for understanding or enjoying a book.  When I admitted this to a couple classmates, one of them asked, "Wait, so what IS going on in your head?"  Well,  other stuff.  It's not that I'm not engaged with the text, it's just that the visual details aren't terribly important to me in the face of things like emotions, relationships between characters, and the craft of the words themselves.

It seems to be this very closely-held tenant of teaching literature that students MUST LEARN HOW TO VISUALIZE THE TEXT, and I'm rather questioning that.  Am I just weird, or are there other people out there that find visualization not only unnecessary, but distracting?

Because seriously, having a movie playing in my head while reading sounds terribly distracting.

So, do you visualize?  Is it really like a movie constantly playing in your head?  I just can't even imagine that....

Explain this to me please, sister. o_0

Love, Dory

"Domestication" from Dory to Lilly

Lillah, I'm thinking about pets.  What does it mean to be domesticated?  Easy answer: an animal is domesticated if it can't survive without humans.  But there seems to be a grey area there.  I'm thinking especially about food. Are they domesticated when their body literally doesn't function right without a human there to take care of them and do things like regulate their food intake?

I'll look at our family's pets for examples.  This hypothesis is prompted by Benvolio Fish:

I left for the weekend, and when I came home, Benvolio was, like, horrifyingly fat.  Unfortunately, I forgot to tell one roommate that the other roommate was feeding him, so he got fed twice a day.  And I think the one roommate, whom I did not instruct on how to feed him, fed him rather a lot.  AND HE ATE ALL OF IT.  This led me to a realization: Benvolio can't tell when he's eaten enough, or too much, so I have to regulate that for him.  My hypothesis is based on the fact that bettas are ridiculously overbred. Soooo many health problems can result from the slightest change in water temperature, or pH, or food intake, or stress level.  He wouldn't last a week in the wild.  I think that somewhere along the line of single-trait breeding for longer fins and specific colors, the instinct to regulate their own diet got bred out of bettas.  Weird crap like that can happen when you breed for one or two specific traits.  (Ask me for more on this if you want, cuz it's interesting but kind of a tangent.)

In contrast, Spats:

She is a growing kitty, and she eats SO MUCH.  When we first got her, she ate more than Smudge and Bubblegum combined, and she hasn't really slowed down since.  But she knows what she's doing: she's perfectly healthy, not overweight at all.  For the enormous amount of energy she spends playing all day and not sleeping 18 hours a day like a normal cat, she knows that she needs a lot of food.

This is what makes me wonder: are cats fully domesticated?  They still know how to take care of themselves.  I don't know, though, whether they would be able to survive without humans.  Even feral cats still eat out of humans' garbage.  They still have the instinct to hunt, but would they be able to catch enough food to live off of?

I've heard that dogs (wolves) started being domesticated (several thousand years ago) when they started following humans around and eating their scraps.  Eventually, they started being friendly enough to form a symbiotic relationship with humans, helping them hunt and then sharing the meat. And then we got these things:

I don't think this is a symbiotic relationship anymore...

What do you think?  You quite possibly know more about this than me.

Love, Dory