Unit HEN - A Sample

Where we say How do you know that …? Geoffrey Chaucer might have said How wostow that …? From this we can see two or three differences between the English of the fourteenth century and that of today. The verb witen, a cognate of German wissen, has disappeared, leaving only a few traces in such words as unwittingly. The syntax of questions has changed, the inversion of subject and verb having given way to the use of do as an auxiliary verb.

Chaucer wrote “How lyketh thee my wyf and hir beautee?”. Here again we see a question being formed by the inversion of subject and verb. In this case the subject is my wyf, the verb lyke being used as we use the verb please today. It therefore follows that the verb is in the third person, this being indicated by the morph –eth. We no longer distinguish number or case for the second person pronoun; we use you throughout. The pronunciation of the long vowels has changed since Chaucer’s time; he would, for example, have pronounced the vowel in the word wyf as /i:/, as opposed to the diphthong /ai/ that most of us use today. The word beautee is a French import; 500 years earlier an Anglo-Saxon poet would probably have used the Germanic fægernis, the word that has come down to use as fairness. These are a few examples of a myriad of changes – semantic, phonological, morphological, syntactic – that have constituted the evolution of the living organism that is the English language.