Language -- Childer Books

I saw something recently on John Allison's strangely delightful webcomic, Scary Go Round, that blew my mind in a nerdy, linguistically trivial way. It was a page in his then-current story, Murder She Writes, a murder mystery (as the title suggests) set in an isolated lodge in the Welsh mountains[1]. I have excerpted the relevant panel below:

Murder She Writes [a]

What I would draw your attention to is the character on the far left and especially her dialogue. That character is Charlotte Grote, a main protagonist of the story and in the larger Scary Go Round universe. She's your average, pre-teen sleuth who loves to solve mysteries. Sometimes she's a bit daft.

But what is she talking about? "The kings of childer-books?" What are childer-books?

As might be evident from the similarity of words (it is even more apparent in the context of the story), "childer-books" is another term for children books, or the even more common (at least to my experience) "children's books." Charlotte, or Lottie for short, comes from the fictional town of Tackleford, in West Yorkshire, England. And in some dialects in Northern England, childer is in fact the accepted plural of child, in place of the otherwise standard "children." But what interests me here is not just John Allison's accurate use of modern dialect (though that is noteworthy in itself), but the history behind that specific piece of dialect. Childer as a plural form of child is unusual in modern usage, in that it is restricted to that specific geographical region, and it is not applied, so far as I know, to any other nouns--for example, we do not say "bather" to mean more than one bath, we say "baths" (though our pronunciation of that word may differ depending on where we are from). But historically speaking, childer is not strange at all--in fact, it is more "regular" than the current standard form of children.

Beowulf is good Ol' English [b]

This goes back all the way to Old English, the language spoken on the British Isles by their Germanic occupants (or invaders) from 449 to 1100 CE. This language was significantly different, in form and appearance, from our own; it is not the language used in Shakespeare or the King James Bible, both decidedly Modern English works. It is the English used, most famously, in the alliterative poem Beowulf sometime around 1000 CE, and also used by Ælfric the Grammarian in his religious and prose writings earlier that century as well as the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People about 730 CE. As for the differences, the writing style of Old English was distinct from Modern English, both when specialized lore-masters still used the Germanic runes now called "Futhorc" from the first six letters of that alphabet, and even later when the Roman alphabet was introduced, because early English writers learned the Insular script from Irish Christians rather than the Italian style (you can see a sample of the Insular script in the fragment of the poem Beowulf pictured above). The vocabulary of Old English would also appear alien to most Modern English readers, even though a significant portion of our own word-stock is drawn from it. To illustrate this, the first few lines from Beowulf, transcribed into our modern script,* are given below with a translation.

*The letter æ is called ash and pronounced as the "a" in that same word. The letters þ and ð, called thorn and eth, are pronounced as the "th" in thin and this respectively.

Hwæt, wē Gār-Dena                     in gēardagum,
Lo! we of Spear-Danes                in old days,

þēodcyniga                                    þrym gefrūnon,
of the people's kings,                   glory have heard,

hū ðā æþelingas                            ellen fremedon!
how the princes                           courage accomplished![c]

Old English has some very apparent differences, then, from Middle English (Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales), Early Modern English (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Henry IV), and Late Modern English (anything written in the last 200 years).  But it is still in fact the same language, and there is an equally apparent continuity running all the way from Old to Late Modern English. The survival in dialect of "childer," rare as it is, is one of those marks of continuity.

This is because Old English had more ways of declining its nouns than modern English does. To 'decline' a noun means to change (or 'inflect') the noun based on its part of speech. For example, in Latin, the word for "girl" would be written puella if it were the subject of a sentence, but puellae if it were the indirect object. That is the difference between "The girl (puella) gave a gift to me" and "I gave a gift to the girl (puellae)." Modern English preserves this difference between nominative and dative only in its personal pronouns, for example: "She gave a gift to me" and "I gave a gift to her."

Most English nouns now only decline for two forms--an 'endingless' form for the singular (whether subject, object or whatever), and a form ending in -s for the plural or genitive (the possessive case, which we now write with an apostrophe, -'s). Singular dog, plural dogs; one bath, more than one baths; and so on. There are exceptions, however: one deer, more than one... deer; one foot, two feet; singular child, plural children... or childer. We often call these "irregular nouns," and we may view them with some amount of embarrassment or light apology to those who have to learn this "irrational" language as a second or foreign tongue. But many of these irregular plurals, including all of the examples given above, are part of our inheritance from Old English, which had many ways of declining a plural noun, and were quite "regular" in their time. For example, deer (from the Old English dēor, or animal) belonged to an entire group of words which attached no ending to their roots to form the plural--thus the singular and plural forms of "deer" are identical (other examples existing in Modern English would be sheep and swine). Foot, which is almost unchanged from Old English, came from another group of words, "root-consonant stems," which were unique for the fact that many of their forms (including the nominative plural) were created by changing the vowel sound in the word itself--foot to feet, man to men, tooth to teeth, and others.

Finally we come (back) to child. Child, from Old English cild, has a more complicated history. It comes from a fairly rare group of nouns in Old English that formed their plural by adding an r to the end of the word, and so the expected plural of modern child would in fact be childer--which in the particular Northern British dialect that Charlotte speaks, it is. However, in the rest of English language, child developed a second plural, children. It did this through analogy to another group of nouns in Old English, which declined their plural by adding an n to the end of the word; the only original, extant example of this declension in today's language is the plural oxen.[2] Children is a double-plural then, because it retains the r of its original plural ending and adds an -en by analogy. Similar words in Modern English are brethren and kine, a poetic plural of "cow."

This is perhaps an unnecessarily long explanation that does not, for most people, adequately explain why I got so excited about seeing the word "childer" in a webcomic. It may be that I am what linguist Stephen Pinker calls a "language maven," a term he does not invest with much love or respect.[3] A language maven is basically a self-proclaimed language expert, or, perhaps more kindly, language enthusiast. I at least seem to be of the kind he finds least offensive--the wordwatcher. "Unlike linguists, wordwatchers train their binoculars on the especially capricious, eccentric, and poorly documented words and idioms that get sighted from time to time. ... I don't think they do any harm, but (a) I never completely believe their explanations, and (b) in most cases I don't really care. ... For me, wordwatching for its own sake has all the intellectual excitement of stamp collecting, with the added twist that an undetermined number of your stamps are counterfeit."[d] While I have heard two different, spirited arguments against Pinker's classification of "language mavens," I can pretty well accept his criticism on this point, and I may have just written a blog post on stamp collecting. Granted, in pursuit of this particular stamp, we have covered a lot of ground in English language and history, defined a few of the basic terms for how language works, and explained at least three other commonly misunderstood and maligned words in the English language. So even stamp collecting can have its benefits. But really, I just find it terribly interesting, and I can only hope my readers do as well.

Linguistic stamp collecting [e]

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Notes:
[1] Actually, John Allison's Scary Go Round and Murder She Writes are independent comics, though set in the same universe and hosted on the same website -- www.scarygoround.com . The website also hosts another comic by Allison, Bad Machinery, which includes his most recent stories.

[2] The "n" plural was nearly as popular as the "s" plural for a time; 'tree' had the plural treen, 'eye' became eyen, and more than one 'house' were housen. These examples, along with almost all others, are taken from John Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language[c].

[3] The term, Pinker points out, actually originated with William Safire, who used the term self-descriptively on his weekly column "On Language" in The New York Time Magazine. 
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References
[a] John Allison, Murder She Writes, Webcomic, http://www.scarygoround.com/scare/?date=20111121
[b] Beowulf manuscript, image found on Google Images
[c] John Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language, 6th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2010), 110.
[d] Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Creates Language (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), Ch. 12 Language Mavens, e-book. 
[e] Postage stamp collection, image found on Google Images