Somebody found a Kentucky county's 1912 eighth grade final exam [Reported on Yahoo-News].
I was surprised to see grammar question #4:
I was surprised to see grammar question #4:
What properties have verbs?
I assume this means "What properties do verbs have". That is how we would write the phrase today. I wonder, is there some rational reason why "Do you have" triumphed over "Have you" (as well as "Do not be" over "Be not")?
Consider the German "Was haben Sie zu Essen?" In English, its word-for-word translation is "What have you to eat?" which sounds wrong, today, but once was right. That kind of "Germanic" phrasing was common for most of English's history, I think. I remember seeing it in Shakespeare [circa 1600], and Gulliver's Travels [1700s] and Moby Dick [1850] as well. Even Lincoln, in 1862, wrote to General McClellan, "Have you any more perfect knowledge of this?"
Experts say that the extra "Do" comes from Celtic:
Consider the German "Was haben Sie zu Essen?" In English, its word-for-word translation is "What have you to eat?" which sounds wrong, today, but once was right. That kind of "Germanic" phrasing was common for most of English's history, I think. I remember seeing it in Shakespeare [circa 1600], and Gulliver's Travels [1700s] and Moby Dick [1850] as well. Even Lincoln, in 1862, wrote to General McClellan, "Have you any more perfect knowledge of this?"
Experts say that the extra "Do" comes from Celtic:
In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, John McWhorter [....] first demonstrates how Anglo-Saxon, brought to England in the Fifth Century A.D. by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, and which we tend to call Old English, morphed into Middle English over half a millennium or so. In the process, its Germanic grammatical constructions were nearly all replaced by a grammar that is seen to be Celtic, resembling Welsh and Cornish, including in particular our tendency to use "do" as a "helper verb": "Do you want to go?" or "I didn't take it!" have replaced "Want you to go?" and "I took it not!". The former are Celtic constructions, the latter, Old English but with modern spelling. [From "Three Steps to English" by Polymath07]
If that's the case, why did such major verbs as "to be" and "to have" retain the Germanic structure so long?
By the way, one reason the 1611 King James Bible seems so poetic may be that it doesn't follow, at all, the way we use this "do-helper" today:
By the way, one reason the 1611 King James Bible seems so poetic may be that it doesn't follow, at all, the way we use this "do-helper" today:
The Gospel of John, Chapter 6 [KJV]
26 .....[Y]e did eat of the loaves, and were filled.
27 Labour not for the meat which perisheth.....
Translation:
"You all ate the loaves and were filled. / Do not labor for the meat which perishes..."
"You all ate the loaves and were filled. / Do not labor for the meat which perishes..."
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