The Worst Words are Germanic
I have been taking a deep dive into function words this week. You may not be familiar with the term. I wasn’t either, until recently. Function words are, basically, words that would be easier to use in a sentence than to define. When we say <apple> or <run>, we get a picture in our minds that doesn’t form when we say <to>, <is>, or <what>. Content words give us a clear picture in our minds, and function words don’t.
Instead, function words are like links in a chain. I picture them like the couplers between train cars. I just had to look up <couplers>. That’s the word for the bolts and chains that keep one car connected to the next. In many ways, these little devices are far less important to the overall train than the cars themselves. Just like my not knowing the word for them, we know far less about them than the train cars, which are easier to define as refrigerated, box, or passenger car. In school, we spend the lion’s share of our time talking about the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that make up our ideas, while spending much less time exploring the wriggly little things like pronouns, modal verbs, prepositions, articles, and determiners that connect them to each other.
However much we overlook them, though, they actually make the train what it is. Without them, a train would not be a train, but a collection of cars alone on a track, listless and, literally, unhinged. All those train cars wouldn’t be connected.
Function words connect our ideas together. Without function words, we couldn’t use content words. This sentence would no longer make any sense. Instead, it would look like this: Sentence longer make sense.
These words make up (depending who you ask and what sources they use) somewhere between 50% and 60% of written text, despite accounting for only 0.1% of the total words in the English language. They are used constantly. We cannot get around them. They are everywhere.
What I have found recently is that 97% of them are Germanic in origin. That means they came over to the island of Britain on the first boats from Jutland, the peninsula that is now the country of Denmark, and despite an onslaught of French and Latin from the religious and economic ruling classes in the ensuing centuries, and despite 80% of the original Old English (Germanic) words being obliterated by that onslaught, the group of 300 to 400 words that make English work survived almost unscathed, and, for the most part, unchanged.
What does that mean? It means that, no matter how much we try into push Latin grammatical rules on top of English, these words will always wriggle free. It means that no matter how many French spelling patterns we teach, these words will stay ferociously incapable of conforming to them. It means that the outward look of our language and the inner workings of our language come from completely different sources.
In my mind, it means we have to spend more time understanding these words and how they work - how they function. We should look to German for our grammar rules, not Latin, or any other romance language. We need to tell students that they are dealing with a language that will never act like it looks, and will never behave like they are told it will. And, we need to admit to ourselves that these mighty little words form the basis of all our communication. We need to stop pretending they are exceptions to the rule of English, and instead celebrate them as being English itself. They form a base that can be filled with any words we choose, from anywhere on Earth, spelled however we want. These are the mighty, the few, and the brave little words that make English what it is.
The English Language runs on function words, and function words are Germanic.
