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In the early thirteenth century, Genghis Khan united a variety of Mongolia's nomadic tribes. Because of the Mongolians' exceptional skill as horsemen, Genghis Khan was able to conquer many of his neighbors. In 1204, he subdued the Uyghur people in what is now Xinjiang, a western province of China. There, he captured a scribe named Tata-tyngaak and commanded him to adapt the Uyghur alphabet
¹
to write Mongolian. The Mongols were such fierce horsemen they were able to conquer their neighbors in all directions (
Map 11.1
), such that by the time of Genghis Khan's grandson, Kubla Khan, the Mongolian Empire had spread west across the Eurasian steppe, as we saw in Chapter 8. In 1271, Kubla Khan established the Yuan Dynasty, the first foreign dynasty to rule all of China, which lasted almost another 100 years. Still today, the horse is important in Mongolia, and not only because they outnumber the people there by an order of four to one.

Horses and horse culture are woven into the Mongolian language and thus exemplify the kind of ethnosyntax described in Chapter 2. The typical way to say ‘Welcome' in Mongolian is
tavtai morilnɔ oo!
Another, older way to say it is
morilooroi
, literally ‘come by horse please.' Certainly, no one says this any more, because a Mongolian is now likely to arrive at a friend's house by car, bus, or other modern means. However, the word
mor
‘horse' is still found in the usual phrase
tavtai
mor
ilnɔ oo!
It is furthermore a gentle welcome,
tavtai
meaning ‘peaceful' [arrival by horse]. The unremarkable word
bracelet
in Mongolian also reveals an equestrian connection. In English, the word was borrowed from French, and in French, the association is with
bras
‘arm,' the location on the body where the bracelet is placed. In Mongolian,
bogoivč
‘bracelet' is also associated with a body location, namely
bogoi
‘wrist.' However, both of these words derive from the verb
bogoidax
‘to lasso.' A bracelet is thus the action of
encircling the wrist with a rope. The Mongolians are never far, linguistically speaking, from their horses.

Why are horses relevant at the outset of Chapter 11? Because in this chapter, we endeavor to explain what we can of the specific ways languages catch up to conditions when we have historical records of them. We know what we know of the history of Mongolian because there are 800 years of recorded history. The Mongolian script is, furthermore, written vertically top to bottom and has the rhythmic curves it does because Genghis Khan wanted to make sure his scribes could write it while riding their horses. Now, there's a technological innovation to keep an empire up and running. In this chapter, we want to exploit the records produced by such technological innovations, including those of today's digital archives, in order to look more closely at how languages change over time. In Chapters 3 and 7, we outlined the principles and methods of historical reconstructions that give us a picture of languages before recorded history. Here, in Chapter 11, we examine what we can of language and language change when we have written and/or digital records at our disposal.

We now put the linguistic flesh on the bones of the various stories we have been telling throughout Chapters 3–9. Because the time period of Chapter 10 lies far outside written history, we cannot reconstruct any linguistic specifics for that chapter. We take each chapter in turn.

In the discussion of morphological typology, we noted English speakers' preference for the invariable word. This preference shows a particularly complex and delayed way in which language is always catching up to conditions. Old English, a West Germanic language, had rich inflectional morphology with five syntactic cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and instrumental. As a result of the Danish invasions of England in the eighth and ninth centuries, the case system of Old English started to weaken as speakers of a North Germanic language, Old Norse, began to interact with the West Germanic speakers of Old English. Because the two languages' case (systems) did not fully agree, speakers became understandably confused. Often the oldest records of a Western European language are in the form of translations of Latin texts. However, Old English has unusually ample written records that are not translations of Latin texts, and so examples of the breakdown of the case system can be found in records of the ordinary language.

One example will suffice: the ninth-century manuscript known as
Oðere's Voyage
describes an account of a voyage into the North Sea by a man named Oðere. In the midst of the description, the following prepositional phrase stands out:
on ðæ
m
oðera
m
ðri
m
daga
s
‘on the third day.' The first three words
ðæm oðeram ðrim
are in the dative plural case marked by a final -
m
, since they are in a phrase that begins with the preposition
on
. However, the head of that prepositional phrase, namely
dagas
‘days,' is not in the dative case but rather in the nominative. The so-called correct dative form would have been
dagu
m
, but evidently the writer of this account did not feel that
dagum
sounded right, despite the fact that the three preceding words had the final
-m
ending of the dative plural. Something about the noun
dagas
in this speaker's
mind could be separated and made distinct from the preceding adjectives modifying it. The breakdown of the case system took hundreds of years with thousands of speakers making millions of linguistic decisions moving in the same direction as the writer of Ođere's voyage.

The arrival of Norman French in England with William the Conqueror in the eleventh century took a further toll on Old English inflectional morphology, this time in the gender system. Old English had three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. By the time Norman French arrived in England, the PIE three-way gender system in French had decreased to two: masculine and feminine. Norman French for ‘the flower' was
la flour
, a feminine noun. It so happened that Old English for ‘the flower' was
đæt bled
, a neuter noun. What were speakers to do in the face of such a clash? We know the answer. They replaced
bled
with
flour
and discarded the gender distinction. Incidentally, the Old Norse word for ‘flower' was
blom
, and English speakers borrowed that word as well. It has survived as
blossom
. The point is: the confusions and choices ensued until the eventual collapse of both the case and gender systems.

Hundreds of years later, speakers are still trying to level out the remaining differences in the case system of the pronouns, with the relative and interrogative pronoun
who/whom
distinction gone the way of the dodo easily 100 years ago or more, although it is still sometimes taught in classrooms. Eventually the current competition between
between you and me
and
between you and I
will sort itself out and no doubt in relation to which way the other pronouns go. Perhaps the leveling will be complete, and subject and object pronouns will have one form for all speakers. Or perhaps English will become diglossic with stable and salient H and L versions, with H reserving for itself the prestige of pronoun distinctions, and L the language of the home and/or the hoi polloi.

Whatever may happen to the pronouns, English speakers are still left with what might be called the historical wreckage, to speak here very metaphorically, of the synthetic Indo-European past. In Chapter 3, we compared English typologically to Chinese, the latter typing very nicely as an analytic language with little morphologic variation in its forms. In Chinese, the word ‘three' is
san
, and the word ‘ten' is
shí
, and they combine without morphological change in combinations to make both ‘thirteen' and ‘thirty.' English, by way of contrast, has not one but three forms of the concept ‘ten':
ten
, -
teen
, and -
ty
and two forms of the concept ‘three':
three
and
thir
-. English also retains pairs of words that hide the workings of a polysynthetic morphology, which means that it is difficult to separate out the different parts of the word-formation process, as in the relationship between
young
and
youth
,
foul
and
filth
,
broad
with
breadth
,
whole
or
hale
with
health
. Speakers do what they can with the materials at hand and the need to get through their day, and the languages they speak are fascinating refractions of imperfectly applied processes that nevertheless always seek some kind of grammatical equilibrium.

You will remember from Chapter 4 that during the French Revolution, Abbé Grégoire was determined to annihilate all forms of language in the newly forming nation-state
that were not
Île de la Cité
French. Two hundred years later, it is clear that he made an impact in reducing language variety in France. However, he did not succeed in wiping all non-Parisian forms of the language off the map. In any case, he was never going to be able to stop any, much less all, varieties of French from changing.

There is evidence that colloquial modern French is becoming a VSO language, given the quantity of utterances like:

Such an utterance is a statement, and the subject
ce coin
comes after the verb. The (formerly) subject pronoun
il
‘he/it' is now functioning less like a subject pronoun and more like an agreement prefix. The transforming of both subject and object pronouns into clitics in French is occurring throughout informal speech. Although it is perfectly grammatical to say:

it is more normal to say:

where
le
is now an object pronoun. The point is that languages can and do change their word-order preferences over time. In the last 2000 years, the SOV preference of Latin has transformed into the SVO preference of spoken French, which is further transforming into a VSO language.

With regard to this shift to head-marking in progress in the grammar of French:

• it is a hallmark of the spoken language;
  
• it is pervasive and not limited only to subjects and objects but is also found in the genitive-type:
  il
  en
  a marre Paul
  des études
  ‘he (genitive
  en
  ) has enough Paul of studies'/‘Paul is tired of his studies';
  
• the change is more widespread in the southern half of France and so is presumably the place where the shift originated; and
  
• the grammatical information about the subject
  ce coin
  ‘this corner,' which has not yet appeared, has already been signaled by the (soon-to-be former) pronoun
  il
  , which is migrating in spoken French toward becoming a clitic associated with the verb.
  

Now, notice one more thing: the order of the first three or four words –
il est joli
,
je le connais
,
il en a marre
– stays the same, as they are in standard/formal French. The syntax remains; the interpretation of the elements changes. These are good
examples of an adage well known to historical linguists: yesterday's syntax is tomorrow's morphology.

The question can now be asked: Is this head-marking shift related to other developments in the language? The answer given by Stephen Matthews, author of the article “French in Flux” (1989), is Yes. The reinterpretation of the pronoun
il
as a new clitic is related to other grammatical evidence that pronouns are generally being reinterpreted throughout the language. As mentioned in Chapter 8, French is the Romance language with the most radical phonology, that is, the most distant from Latin, with significant loss of endings both on nouns showing gender and verbs showing person. Given the erosion of the endings on verbs, personal pronouns have long been necessary to indicate who or what is doing something. With the exception of the second person plural/polite
vous
‘you' form, there is no audible difference in the overwhelming majority of verbs for the other persons. There is a visible written difference, but in French (as in English), writing preserves what were phonetic differences hundreds of years ago. Thus, today, the colloquial conjugation of
parler
‘to speak' is:

As you see, all forms of the verb are pronounced [paʀl] except for
vous parlez
‘you (plural/polite) speak,' which is [paʀle]. The form of the first person plural has been left blank, because leveling of endings on verbs has continued to now include a strong tendency for the first person plural
nous
‘we' to be doubled by the indefinite pronoun
on
‘one.' In the phrase
nous on parle
‘we/one speaks,' the verb form is again [paʀl] and is opposed to the more formal/standard
nous parlons
where the form of the verb is [paʀlõ].

The point here is that although the personal pronouns operated for hundreds of years simply as personal pronouns, they now seem to be functioning overall as clitic markers. The once purely emphatic statement
moi je parle
‘
I'm
speaking' was made by adding the stressed pronoun
moi
to the phrase. Now, however, the
je
seems to function as part of the verb as an agreement marker, and the
moi
is now there to indicate who is doing the speaking in a nonemphatic way. Further evidence that the personal pronouns have morphed into clitics can be seen in the fact that they cannot now be used deictically. When pointing to someone in English, it is perfectly natural to say: “She's French.” However, in French, you now have to say, “
Elle, elle est française
.” This doubling is redundant only if the second
elle
were actually (still functioning in the speaker's mind as) a pronoun. Finally, in the varieties where the head-marking shift is strongest, these (former) pronouns no longer undergo subject–verb inversion in questions of the standard sort:

The more normal spoken way to say this now is:

Three points can now be made, all relevant to this chapter as a whole:

• When a grammatical change is taking place in a particular language, it does not do so all at once. Rather, changes occur item by item. For French, the changes in the pronouns may well have begun with the first person
  moi je parle
  , since it is the prototypical deictic expression, and then extended easily to the other persons
  toi tu parles
  ,
  lui il parle
  , and
  eux ils parlent
  ; what is interesting is to see how there has been parallel cliticization throughout the language.
  
• What looks like doubling or even redundancy in
  moi je parle
  , where the ‘I' is marked twice (once with
  moi
  , a second time with
  je
  ), is actually common cross-linguistically as a language shifts from dependent- to head-marking.
  
• These new structures, these reinterpretations, often arise when a grammatical structure first used for a certain effect becomes so widespread that it loses its effect and becomes the norm.
  

It seems to be the case in French that these newer structures arose and are still most common in affective utterances, ones that have a stronger emotional pull on the speaker than other utterances. Matthews (1989:196) offers a host of examples:

and

as well as

along with other expressions of admiration, disapproval, annoyance, frustration, delight, and so forth.

Although the French language has not been affected by the series of invasions that so dramatically reformed English, it is the case that French, just like every other language, has its share of variants, because it has its share of speakers and speech communities. Out of these communities come the forms that are in play and available for
other speakers to either adopt or reject. It could very well be that the strong sense of standardized French in the north is (one of) the condition(s) the speakers in the south are pressing off and away from.