Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin

by Otto Jespersen

In historical times we see a gradual evolution of strict rules for word order, while our general impression of the older stages of our languages is that words were often placed more or less at random. This is what we should naturally expect from primitive man, whose thoughts and words are most likely to have come to him rushing helter-skelter, in wild confusion. One cannot, of course, apply so strong an expression to languages such as Sanskrit, Greek or Gothic; still, compared with our modern languages, it cannot be denied that there is in them much more of what from one point of view is disorder, and from another freedom.

This is especially the case with regard to the mutual position of the subject of a sentence and its verb. In the earliest times, sometimes one of them comes first, and sometimes the other. Then there is a growing tendency to place the subject first, and as this position is found not only in most European languages but also in Chinese and other languages of far-away, the phenomenon must be founded in the very nature of human thought, though its non-prevalence in most of the older Aryan languages goes far to show that this particular order is only natural to developed human thought.

Survivals of the earlier state of things are found here and there; thus, in German ballad style: “Kam ein schlanker bursch gegangen.” But it is well worth noticing that such an arrangement is generally avoided, in German as well as in the other modern languages of Western Europe, and in those cases where there is some reason for placing the verb before the subject, the speaker still, as it were, satisfies his grammatical instinct by putting a kind of sham subject before the verb, as in E. there comes a time when ..., Dan. der kommer en tid da ..., G. es kommt eine zeit wo ..., Fr. il arrive un temps où....

In Keltic the habitual word order placed the verb first, but little by little the tendency prevailed to introduce most sentences by a periphrasis, as in ‘(it) is the man that comes,’ and as that came to mean merely ‘the man comes,’ the word order Subject-Verb was thus brought about circuitously.

Before this particular word order, Subject-Verb, was firmly established in modern Gothonic languages, an exception obtained wherever the sentence began with some other word than the subject; this might be some important member of the proposition that was placed first for the sake of emphasis, or it might be some unimportant little adverb, but the rule was that the verb should at any rate have the second place, as being felt to be in some way the middle or central part of the whole, and the subject had then to be content to be placed after the verb. This was the rule in Middle English and in Old French, and it is still strictly followed in German and Danish: Gestern kam das schiff | Pigen gav jeg kagen, ikke drengen. Traces of the practice are still found in English in parenthetic sentences to indicate who is the speaker (‘Oh, yes,’ said he), and after a somewhat long subjunct, if there is no object (‘About this time died the gentle Queen Elizabeth’), where this word order is little more than a stylistic trick to avoid the abrupt effect of ending the sentence with an isolated verb like died. Otherwise the order Subject-Verb is almost universal in English.

XVIII.—§ 11. Compromises.

The inverted order, Verb-Subject, is used extensively in many languages to express questions, wishes and invitations. But, as already stated, this order was not originally peculiar to such sentences. A question was expressed, no matter how the words were arranged, by pronouncing the whole sentence, or the most important part of it, in a peculiar rising tone. This manner of indicating questions is, of course, still kept up in modern speech, and is often the only thing to show that a question is meant (‘John?’ | ‘John is here?’). But although there was thus a natural manner of expressing questions, and although the inverted word order was used in other sorts of sentences as well, yet in course of time there came to be a connexion between the two things, so that putting the verb before the subject was felt as implying a question. The rising tone then came to be less necessary, and is much less marked in inverted sentences like ‘Is John here?’ than in sentences with the usual word order: ‘John is here?’

Now, after this method of indicating questions had become comparatively fixed, and after the habit of thinking of the subject first had become all but universal, these two principles entered into conflict, the result of which has been, in English, Danish and French, the establishment in some cases of various kinds of compromise, in which the interrogatory word order has formally carried the day, while really the verb, that is to say the verb which means something, is placed after its subject. In English, this is attained by means of the auxiliary do: instead of Shakespeare’s “Came he not home to-night?” (Ro. II. 4. 2) we now say, “Did he not (or, Didn’t he) come home to-night?” and so in all cases where a similar arrangement is not already brought about by the presence of some other auxiliary, ‘Will he come?’, ‘Can he come?’, etc. Where we have an interrogatory pronoun as a subject, no auxiliary is required, because the natural front position of the pronoun maintains the order Subject-Verb (Who came? | What happened?). But if the pronoun is not the subject, do is required to establish the balance between the two principles (Who(m) did you see? | What does he say?).

In Danish, the verb mon, used in the old language to indicate a weak necessity or a vague futurity, fulfils to a certain extent the same office as the English do; up to the eighteenth century mon was really an auxiliary verb, followed by the infinitive: ‘Mon han komme?’; but now the construction has changed, the indicative is used with mon: ‘Mon han kommer?’, and mon is no longer a verb, but an interrogatory adverb, which serves the purpose of placing the subject before the verb, besides making the question more indefinite and vague: ‘Kommer han?’ means ‘Does he come?’ or ‘Will he come?’ but ‘Mon han kommer?’ means ‘Does he come (Will he come), do you think?’