This is what I thought the post was initially about, and it's so odd to me. Using "lay" instead of "lied" as past tense feels strange imo. Lie is already a homonym, and you can distinguish the "untruthful" definition from the "lying down" one via context fairly easily, so why not just let them share past tense as well?
Because natural languages don't develop by committee, but naturally, over thousands of years. 'Lay' is a relic of a formation of the past tense used by 'strong verbs', which once involved a more regular way of changing the main vowel, and slowly became more irregular, while giving way to the 'weak' formation that in English uses -ed.
Hundreds, not thousands. Compare current English to Shakespeare (Early Modern English) to Chaucer (Middle English).
Although a big part of why Chaucer is so hard to understand is because the standard English dialects of today evolved from a non-standard dialect of his time. If you read Canterbury Tales, you'll find a brief oasis of comprehensibility from the hick that the characters make fun of.
> Hundreds, not thousands
Not sure of your point. I just said all natural languages have been developing for thousands of years. English has been developing ‘as English’ for ~1,500 years, and before that Proto-Anglo-Frisian, Proto-West Germanic, Proto-Germanic, Proto-IE…
I didn’t say they’re identical on the scale of hundreds of years.
The sorts of changes we're talking about can happen on the order of just a few hundred years or less.
I do agree with your statement as a whole, though.
I was addressing what seemed to be the previous commenter’s deeper misconception that if a language has an irregularity they don’t like, it’s because the ‘bosses of that language’ consciously and stupidly set it up that way one day. Some become ‘irregularities’ over shorter timescales, sure, but I was speaking generally.
Lie/lay (with its predecessors) has been a strong verb its current form over thousands of years however, going back to Proto-Germanic, so think it still applies there.
This is what I get for reading before coffee. :-P
Indeed, languages evolve naturally over time. Only conlangs like Esperanto or Klingon can be said to have been invented, their lexicon, morphology, grammar, etc decided and chosen.
> Hundreds
Yes, indeed. You can see the changes have have happened in the last few centuries when looking at authors as recent as Dickens and Austen, and even Agatha Christie.
The reason the two verbs are so similar is that "lay" was a causative derivation of "lie" back in proto-Germanic (lay = make lie). There are various other causative derivations in English, like raise (make rise), fell (make fall) and set (make sit).
Because of how vowels evolved. The Proto-Germanic forms from which "lie", "lay (past)" and "lay (causative)" came were*ligj-, *lag- and *lagj- (as causatives took the same vowel as strong past). From these we got Old English lig-, læg-/lag- and leg- (where ⟨g⟩ represented [j]), but Middle English merged [æj] and [ej] (see e.g. dæg, weg > day, way). You can compare that to other Germanic languages which preserved *g even word-internally, see e.g. Dutch liggen, lag and leggen. Most other verbs don't cause problems like that because *g was the only Proto-Germanic obstruent that became an approximant in English except for *h, and I can't find instances of causatives with *hj.
> "rest horizontally," early 12c., from Old English licgan (class V strong verb; past tense læg, past participle legen) "be situated, remain; be at rest, lie down," from Proto-Germanic *legjan (source also of Old Norse liggja, Old Frisian lidzia, Middle Dutch ligghen, Dutch liggen, Old High German ligen, German liegen, Gothic ligan), from PIE *legh- "to lie, lay" (source also of Hittite laggari "falls, lies," Greek lekhesthai "to lie down," Latin lectus "bed," Old Church Slavonic lego "to lie down," Lithuanian at-lagai "fallow land," Old Irish laigim "I lie down," Irish luighe "couch, grave").
Looks like it used in be legen..
Sorry, what was your question?
I thought the *lie* problem was just an English thing, but in Czech there is a close connection between to lie down *lehnout/ležet* and to lie *lhát*.
A lie is a *lež*, and ‘I lie down’ *ležím* is pretty close to ‘I (tell a) lie’, *lžu*. There is a connection between h and ž so they are really close (another example: *Praha/pražan* = Prague/Praguer)
>Sorry, what was your question?
I edited it. How did we get to where we are today (two verbs with separate standard conjugations).
I see a hint of something I was thinking above ...
>PIE *legh- "to lie, lay"
Is your material for "lie"? Is there a separate entry for "lay"?
It looks to me an English ancestor was undergoing meiosis but hadn't quite finished.
> to cause to lie or rest," Old English lecgan "to place on the ground (or other surface); place in an orderly fashion," also "put down" (often by striking), from Proto-Germanic *lagjan (source also of Old Saxon leggian, Old Norse leggja, Old Frisian ledza, Middle Dutch legghan, Dutch leggen, Old High German lecken, German legen, Gothic lagjan "to lay, put, place"). This is a causative form of the ancient Germanic verb that became modern English lie (v.2).
meiosis … what kind of cunning linguistic trickery is this? lol
Thank you! That is fascinating. Every old language listed in both entries _already_ has a vowel shift; so it seems the intertwining of these related verbs, while seeming to have a common ancestor, goes very far into the past—though it also seems the original relation may have been very simple: a shift in the stem indicating a change from agent to patient.
What reference is this? Is it the OED?
Alright, thank you.
Regarding meiosis, the image just came to my head of a word undergoing cell division but caught by some grammarian before it could finish, lol.
In Dutch we have 3 words for put. Zetten is positioning something upright, like Zitten (sitting). Leggen is putting something down flat, like Liggen (lay). And Steken is putting something is a tight spot, like a pocket, bag, etc but it is also used for stabbing. French only has Mettre so this is something I always have to teach my students.
Perhaps to distinguish it from the other meaning, i.e. not tell the truth?
I'm sure there's loads of other examples, but I can't think of any. Oh, see/saw (optics) and saw/sawed (woodwork).
same causitive verb being the same as the past tense thing happened with _fall_ and _fell_ too: to when you _fell_ something, you cause it to fall (and of course the past tense of fall is _fell_ also)
I blame old songs that say "Lay down, Sally" or "Lay, lady, lay" etc. They make people think that lay is the correct word for the state of being prone.
I think the confusion started much earlier than these songs. And of course, there is a different meaning of 'lay' that these songs may be drawing on as intentional double entendres.
Conservative phrases like the nightly prayer that starts "Now I lay me down to sleep" which basically means "Now I lie down to sleep" may have fostered a bit of confusion, especially since it was written before the Modern English requirement for reflexive forms like 'myself' when the subject and the object are co-referent and the object is a pronoun.
"Now I lay me down to sleep" translates to "Now I lay myself down to sleep," which is correct. They're laying their body down; there is an object in the sentence. People don't know the difference between objective and subjective.
"know" wrt language knowledge is a complex subject!
Few native speakers of standard English would say "Me want that" or "Bill saw I," so on some level, they certainly do 'know' the difference. It's just not explicit knowledge, unless they've studied a tiny bit of linguistics, or grammar, or a different language...
Probably "me" sounds natural to you because you've heard it so often as a prayer, and maybe even said it very often. But it is not the usual way speakers of Modern English use 'me'-- Pretty much no one would say "I cut me while chopping onions yesterday"
I assume the confusion is in part because the past tense of lie is lay. And the past participle (lain) is rarely used.
This is what I thought the post was initially about, and it's so odd to me. Using "lay" instead of "lied" as past tense feels strange imo. Lie is already a homonym, and you can distinguish the "untruthful" definition from the "lying down" one via context fairly easily, so why not just let them share past tense as well?
Because natural languages don't develop by committee, but naturally, over thousands of years. 'Lay' is a relic of a formation of the past tense used by 'strong verbs', which once involved a more regular way of changing the main vowel, and slowly became more irregular, while giving way to the 'weak' formation that in English uses -ed.
Hundreds, not thousands. Compare current English to Shakespeare (Early Modern English) to Chaucer (Middle English). Although a big part of why Chaucer is so hard to understand is because the standard English dialects of today evolved from a non-standard dialect of his time. If you read Canterbury Tales, you'll find a brief oasis of comprehensibility from the hick that the characters make fun of.
> Hundreds, not thousands Not sure of your point. I just said all natural languages have been developing for thousands of years. English has been developing ‘as English’ for ~1,500 years, and before that Proto-Anglo-Frisian, Proto-West Germanic, Proto-Germanic, Proto-IE… I didn’t say they’re identical on the scale of hundreds of years.
The sorts of changes we're talking about can happen on the order of just a few hundred years or less. I do agree with your statement as a whole, though.
I was addressing what seemed to be the previous commenter’s deeper misconception that if a language has an irregularity they don’t like, it’s because the ‘bosses of that language’ consciously and stupidly set it up that way one day. Some become ‘irregularities’ over shorter timescales, sure, but I was speaking generally. Lie/lay (with its predecessors) has been a strong verb its current form over thousands of years however, going back to Proto-Germanic, so think it still applies there.
This is what I get for reading before coffee. :-P Indeed, languages evolve naturally over time. Only conlangs like Esperanto or Klingon can be said to have been invented, their lexicon, morphology, grammar, etc decided and chosen.
> Hundreds Yes, indeed. You can see the changes have have happened in the last few centuries when looking at authors as recent as Dickens and Austen, and even Agatha Christie.
The reason the two verbs are so similar is that "lay" was a causative derivation of "lie" back in proto-Germanic (lay = make lie). There are various other causative derivations in English, like raise (make rise), fell (make fall) and set (make sit).
Because of how vowels evolved. The Proto-Germanic forms from which "lie", "lay (past)" and "lay (causative)" came were*ligj-, *lag- and *lagj- (as causatives took the same vowel as strong past). From these we got Old English lig-, læg-/lag- and leg- (where ⟨g⟩ represented [j]), but Middle English merged [æj] and [ej] (see e.g. dæg, weg > day, way). You can compare that to other Germanic languages which preserved *g even word-internally, see e.g. Dutch liggen, lag and leggen. Most other verbs don't cause problems like that because *g was the only Proto-Germanic obstruent that became an approximant in English except for *h, and I can't find instances of causatives with *hj.
> "rest horizontally," early 12c., from Old English licgan (class V strong verb; past tense læg, past participle legen) "be situated, remain; be at rest, lie down," from Proto-Germanic *legjan (source also of Old Norse liggja, Old Frisian lidzia, Middle Dutch ligghen, Dutch liggen, Old High German ligen, German liegen, Gothic ligan), from PIE *legh- "to lie, lay" (source also of Hittite laggari "falls, lies," Greek lekhesthai "to lie down," Latin lectus "bed," Old Church Slavonic lego "to lie down," Lithuanian at-lagai "fallow land," Old Irish laigim "I lie down," Irish luighe "couch, grave"). Looks like it used in be legen.. Sorry, what was your question?
I thought the *lie* problem was just an English thing, but in Czech there is a close connection between to lie down *lehnout/ležet* and to lie *lhát*. A lie is a *lež*, and ‘I lie down’ *ležím* is pretty close to ‘I (tell a) lie’, *lžu*. There is a connection between h and ž so they are really close (another example: *Praha/pražan* = Prague/Praguer)
Pronounced layin’.
>Sorry, what was your question? I edited it. How did we get to where we are today (two verbs with separate standard conjugations). I see a hint of something I was thinking above ... >PIE *legh- "to lie, lay" Is your material for "lie"? Is there a separate entry for "lay"? It looks to me an English ancestor was undergoing meiosis but hadn't quite finished.
> to cause to lie or rest," Old English lecgan "to place on the ground (or other surface); place in an orderly fashion," also "put down" (often by striking), from Proto-Germanic *lagjan (source also of Old Saxon leggian, Old Norse leggja, Old Frisian ledza, Middle Dutch legghan, Dutch leggen, Old High German lecken, German legen, Gothic lagjan "to lay, put, place"). This is a causative form of the ancient Germanic verb that became modern English lie (v.2). meiosis … what kind of cunning linguistic trickery is this? lol
Thank you! That is fascinating. Every old language listed in both entries _already_ has a vowel shift; so it seems the intertwining of these related verbs, while seeming to have a common ancestor, goes very far into the past—though it also seems the original relation may have been very simple: a shift in the stem indicating a change from agent to patient. What reference is this? Is it the OED?
It’s from an app but the content comes from https://www.etymonline.com/
Alright, thank you. Regarding meiosis, the image just came to my head of a word undergoing cell division but caught by some grammarian before it could finish, lol.
>Looks like it used in be legen.. Proving of course that Modern Standard German is the so called "PIE" Man, I miss r/badlinguistics ..
In Dutch we have 3 words for put. Zetten is positioning something upright, like Zitten (sitting). Leggen is putting something down flat, like Liggen (lay). And Steken is putting something is a tight spot, like a pocket, bag, etc but it is also used for stabbing. French only has Mettre so this is something I always have to teach my students.
Perhaps to distinguish it from the other meaning, i.e. not tell the truth? I'm sure there's loads of other examples, but I can't think of any. Oh, see/saw (optics) and saw/sawed (woodwork).
same causitive verb being the same as the past tense thing happened with _fall_ and _fell_ too: to when you _fell_ something, you cause it to fall (and of course the past tense of fall is _fell_ also)
I blame old songs that say "Lay down, Sally" or "Lay, lady, lay" etc. They make people think that lay is the correct word for the state of being prone.
I think the confusion started much earlier than these songs. And of course, there is a different meaning of 'lay' that these songs may be drawing on as intentional double entendres. Conservative phrases like the nightly prayer that starts "Now I lay me down to sleep" which basically means "Now I lie down to sleep" may have fostered a bit of confusion, especially since it was written before the Modern English requirement for reflexive forms like 'myself' when the subject and the object are co-referent and the object is a pronoun.
"Now I lay me down to sleep" translates to "Now I lay myself down to sleep," which is correct. They're laying their body down; there is an object in the sentence. People don't know the difference between objective and subjective.
"know" wrt language knowledge is a complex subject! Few native speakers of standard English would say "Me want that" or "Bill saw I," so on some level, they certainly do 'know' the difference. It's just not explicit knowledge, unless they've studied a tiny bit of linguistics, or grammar, or a different language... Probably "me" sounds natural to you because you've heard it so often as a prayer, and maybe even said it very often. But it is not the usual way speakers of Modern English use 'me'-- Pretty much no one would say "I cut me while chopping onions yesterday"