Menu Close

Author: Steve the vagabond

Hi, I created Silly Linguistics. If you like life on the silly side, you have found just the right place

Solresol

Meet the most colorful and musical conlang
by Joana Bourlon

Are constructed languages “real” languages ?

Some people would say yes, since just like “real” languages, conlangs conform to their own grammar, and their own syntactical, morphological and pronunciation rules.

Others would argue that conlangs and ‘actual’ languages share one great dissimilarity that sets them apart : ‘real’ languages (such as English) evolve in a natural setting and tend to reflect the culture of their speakers. Thus, if the main purpose of a constructed language is universality (as is the case of Esperanto for instance), it can never be fully achieved, as once a conlang gains more and more popularity, it will start adapting to the culture at hand, will start changing at different local levels and ergo cease being universal.

Why bother creating a constructed language ?
In his book The Dictionary of Made-up Languages, Stephen D. Rogers presents many valuable reasons for constructing a language, such as giving oneself a challenge, giving depth to a fictional civilization, exploring ideas “such as how a society might be if the native tongue contained no words having to do with time”, offering a language that is nationally neutral, allowing communication between speakers of other languages, and of course, fixing faults in the languages that already exist.

Solresol, arguably one of the first documented conlangs, was invented in the 19th century by composer and music teacher François Sudre, and covers at least three of the reasons listed above.

Firstly, Sudre really took up the challenge he gave himself : he started working on the Solresol language in 1817, and arguably continued working on it up to his death in 1862. What started as a remote communication system using the sounds of musical instruments, was later proposed to (and rejected by) the military as an encoding system.
Nevertheless, Sudre continued to develop Solresol until it ended up becoming one of the first truly universal languages, preceding Esperanto by more than 60 years.
Not only that, but solresol also managed to fix a major flaw in language : the lack of a certain level of inclusivity. Solresol was devised in a way that made it possible for people with visual and/or hearing impairments, as well as people with mutism to communicate with everyone using Solresol.

So, how does Solresol work ?

Structure
Solresol is based on the solfège musical scale : Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol (sometimes called ‘So’), La, Si (or sometimes ‘Ti’). You may also be familiar with another form, known as the major C scale : C, D, E, F, G, A, B (but this scale is not used when communicating in Solresol).

Each note in Solresol corresponds to a color : just like a rainbow, the first note of the scale Do (or C) is red, and the last one Si (Ti or B) is violet. What’s in between also follows the rainbow color pattern : Re is orange, Mi is yellow, Fa is green, Sol is blue and La is indigo.
In order to construct a word, you need to choose from the 7 notes and put them together. For example, Monday in Solresol is Sol-Sol-Do. There’s a certain sequentiality that’s inherent to Solresol : SolSolRe means Tuesday, SolSolMi gives you Wednesday, SolSolFa – Thursday, and so on. Another example of solresol’s sequentiality can be found in the personal pronouns : DoRe means ‘I’ or ‘we’, DoMi means ‘you’, DoFa – ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’.

Another neat feature of SolReSol is the grouping of word-meanings by note. Each word begins with a note and every first note of the word represents a group of concepts :

Note,Corresponding Color ,Group meaning,Example of a word,Translation
Do , red,People, food, qualities,dolafala,bread
Re , orange,Family, Home, Clothes,resifasi,brother
Mi , yellow,A person’s actions, esp. their faults,milasila,To conclude; conclusion; solution
Fa , green,Sea, Travel, War, country,fasollasi,boat
Sol (or So), blue,Arts & Science,siremimi,physics
La , indigo,Industry & Commerce ,ladomire,shop
Si (or Ti) , violet,Politics & government,sirelado,senator

Note Corresponding Color Group Meaning

Solresol also offers a rather elegant way to construct antonyms, by reversing the order of the syllables. For example, MiSiSol means good fortune while SolSiMi means misfortune. Following the same logic, DoMiSolFa means intelligence, but FaSolMiDo means stupidity or inability.

Writing

There are multiple ways you can write in SolReSol : you can transcribe the syllables of the notes that compose your words (as we’ve seen so far in this article), you can use just the first letter of each music syllable (you can write ‘fasollasi’ as ‘fsols’, keeping in mind that Si can be shortened to ‘s’, and Sol can be shortened to ‘so’), you can also write in Solresol by using the musical scale on the three or the usual five lines.

After Sudre’s death, Vincent Gajewski – president of the commitée for the study and advancement of Solresol – invented a stenography containing 7 simple symbols to reflect Solresol. The symbols on their own are rather easy to reproduce, but in order to form a word they need to be bound together. For short words it’s rather easy to use this script. For instance, in order to write ‘dore’ (meaning ‘I’) you need to make a circle and put a line on top of it. For longer words you need to put in more effort : for example in order to write mifamifa (laziness) you need to draw a semi circle (as a little frown without the eyes) attach a backslash to it, then attach a semicircle, and the attach a backslash. This seems to be a bit much for expressing “laziness” (as ironically, is the three-syllable English word for it).

Speaking

Do Solresol speakers need to be able to sing in order to speak solresol ?
OK, confession time. The title of this article is perhaps a bit misleading. Even though SolReSol employs the seven music syllables to represent the sounds available in the language, SolResol is not exactly a musical language.
For one, you don’t really need to pitch your voice lower or higher when speaking in Solresol. You just need to pronounce the syllables.
What’s more, there isn’t really a distinctive melody forming along while speaking (or playing) solresol in a musical manner : you can try this for yourself by playing (or singing if you can) DoRe MiLaSol SolReSol (or if you feel like it you can type ‘io pcx c pxpc’ into this virtual piano website). Congrats ! You’ve just said ‘I love language’ in Solresol. Up to you to decide if there’s any melody in that sentence.

You can also communicate in SolReSol without uttering a sound. To do this, you can either trace in the air the 7 stenographic signs invented by Vincent Gajewski (see above), or you can touch different places of your left hand (or the left hand of your interlocutor if you want to be understood without making any sound or visible signs) with your right index in order to communicate. For example, to say ‘Sir’, you need to touch the tip of your middle finger and then the tip of your ring finger.

Another possible way of communication can be done with color. Imagine I’m showing you a yellow flag, followed by a violet one, then a yellow one, and finally a red flag. Thanks !

Milasila

Do you know any Solresol native speakers ? Me neither.
There are many probable reasons for this phenomenon.
For one, when going deeper into the grammar, Solresol doesn’t seem as logical as we’d wish it to be. For example, in order to differentiate feminine-gendered words from masculine or neutral ones, you need to prolongate the last sound of the word : for example in order to say ‘sister’, the word is the same as for brother, i.e. ‘resifasi’. In writing, this difference can be indicated by a small line on top of the last letter. In speaking you need to put an accent on the last sound of the word and thus pronounce resifasi-i. If you are communicating by touching your interlocutor’s left hand, things can get awkward pretty fast.

Another possible explanation is the limited number of words. Solresol contains a grand total of 2 660 words. That comes as no surprise given that the building blocks are only seven. In comparison, in English the number of estimated words in use is around 171 000, and this figure does not account for obsolete or lost words.

Lastly, the most probable reason for the relatively limited number of Solresol speakers can be found, again, in the fact that Solresol didn’t develop naturally to reflect a given culture.
Despite Solresol’s many qualities and potential, one of the main reasons people learn languages is to be able to communicate with as many people as possible. But who knows what the future holds ? Maybe one day Solresol could dethrone English as the lingua franca.

Was it William or Guillaume?

The Language of the Norman Conquest and Beyond

Marc Pomerleau, Université TÉLUQ, Quebec, Canada

Statue of Guillaume le Conquérant in his hometown of Falaise, Normandy
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The answer to our title question is not straightforward. For most speakers of French, the Conquérant’s name is Guillaume whereas for English speakers, the Conqueror’s given name is obviously William. Who’s right then? I would say that both are right because it is a question of perspective. But that would be a simplistic answer and there is a whole complex story behind it. By looking at the linguistic history of Guillaume/William’s life and endeavours, we will attempt to shed light on part of the story.

What do we mean by Guillaume/William’s real name anyway? Is it the name on his birth certificate, the name his parents called him, the name he preferred to use or the name found in historical records? Until recently, it was common to translate the name of historical or public figures (Jeanne d’Arc/Joan of Arc, Eiríkr Rauði/Erik the Red, Fernão de Magalhães/Ferdinand Magellan, etc.). Guillaume/William lived in the 11th century, so he is no exception to this custom. That’s why he’s called Guillermo in Spanish, Guglielmo in Italian and Vilhelm in Swedish.

We also tend to apply our current way of seeing and doing things to historical events. In this sense, our first instinct would be to look at the Conqueror’s birth certificate to find out if his birth name was indeed Guillaume or William. However, a thousand years ago, birth certificates did not exist as we know them today, and surnames were rare. It was common in many ancient civilizations to keep records of the population, but the main concern was general numbers, not names. They only started to record data related to births in Western Europe around the year 1500.

In France, Catholic parishes were required to keep a Baptism Register from 1539 on. Guillaume/William was born 500 years before this requirement, meaning that it is unlikely that there is a conventional birth certificate out there. And even if there had been some sort of certificate stating his birth, recordkeeping was not consistent a thousand years ago and not many records from the 11th century survived all the wars, revolutions, fires, and other calamities to make it to the 21st century. Moreover, documents were written in Latin, not in the languages people actually spoke. So, relying on the Conqueror’s birth certificate to validate his name is rather a vain endeavour. Trying to find out how his family and friends called him in daily life, or how he preferred to be called, is also far-fetched, if not mission impossible.

One of the ways to attempt to answer our question is to go back in time and recall the period when Guillaume/William was born, specifically, the linguistic reality in which he was born. One thing we can be sure of, is that he was not born in a place where contemporary French or English were spoken.

Norman, French and France

In Guillaume/William’s time, the Normans did not speak French, but (Old) Norman, one of the langues d’oïl, a group of languages that included the language of Paris, which was not French yet. In fact, there were (and still are) many languages spoken across the territory that was to become France. In the northern part of the country, said languages of oïl flourished (oïl being the way they said “yes”; oïl became oui). Among these languages were Norman, Picard, Walloon, Francien and many more. Francien was the language of Paris and surrounding areas and later formed the core of modern French. It is important to bear in mind that the idea of a standard and national French language did not exist yet. The territory of France was also very different from what it is now, and the kingdom was composed of various counties and duchies, including the Duchy of Normandy. French and France as we think of them today simply did not exist, as you can see on the maps below.

The Normans, or at least the ruling class of Normandy, including Guillaume/William’s family, were descendants of Vikings who settled in the region from the end of the 8th century to the 11th century. The word Norman literally means “man of the North”. Although the Normans had Scandinavian ancestry, their Norse language did not survive more than a few generations in Normandy. They adopted the local language, which later came to be known as Norman (it wouldn’t have been called “Norman” before the Normans got there). For its part, the Norse language only left a few traces in the region, namely in the toponymy (e.g., the name of the village called Cricquebœuf comes from the Norse kirkja + buth meaning house by the church).

The Language of Guillaume/William

As we just explained, despite Guillaume/William being of Norse descent, his family and fellow countrymen abandoned their language within a few generations after landing in Normandy. In Guillaume/William’s case, it was some six generations since his ancestors, including the ruler of Normandy Rollo/Hrólfr, had left Scandinavia. Therefore, the Normans, and even more so their descendants, many of whom were born of mixed unions, learned the language of oïl already spoken in the area.

We will not describe the Norman language here, but rather look at some of the features that will help us analyze the difference between the Conqueror’s name in English and French—it has everything to do with the Norman language.

Among the differences between Norman and French, is the way many words starting with a “k” sound (written with a “c”) in Norman have evolved differently in French, becoming “ch”. This is why we can say that English words such as “cabbage”, “cancel” “castle” and “cauldron” came from the Norman “caboche”, “canceler”, “castel” and “caudron” rather than from the French equivalents “chou”, “chanceler”, “château” and “chaudron”. This feature differentiating Norman from French is attributable to a distinct evolution from Latin, and the similarity between Norman and English is attributable to the long-lasting Norman presence in England.

Another difference between Norman from French is the way certain words start with a “w” in Normand and “g” in French. This feature is attributable to Germanic influence on Norman. This influence is twofold: a) The Franks, a Germanic tribe, settled in various Latin-speaking areas of Europe, including Gaul in the 5th century. These people spoke Old Frankish or Franconian, a language that left marks on the Latin that evolved into the various languages of oïl in what is now northern France and part of Belgium; and b) In Normandy, the presence of the Vikings, who spoke another Germanic language, Norse, reinforced the Germanic influence on the local language. This did not happen with other languages of oïl such as Francien, the language that would become French. Concretely, the cognates of many French words that start with a “g” start or started back then with a “w” in Norman, and made their way into English with that “w” sound: The word “wait” comes from the Norman “wait” rather than from the French “gait” (see guetter) and “war” comes from the Norman “werre” rather than from the French “guerre”.

And here comes the name William/Guillaume. In Old Norman, the version starting with a “w” prevailed: Williame or Willame. The same happened in other northern languages of oïl, such as Picard with Willaume and Wallon with Willaime. The influence of Germanic languages is straightforward, as shown by the equivalent names in Germanic languages, such as Willelm in Anglo-Saxon, Wilhelm in German and Willem in Dutch. However, the “w” in some of these versions may have been pronounced “v”, as in most North Germanic or Scandinavian Languages (Vilhiálmr in Old Norse, and Vilhelm in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish).

In the central languages of oïl, in the languages of oc (southern France) and in most other Romance languages, the “g” form dominates: Guillaume in French, Guilyômo in Franco-Provençal, Guilhèm in Occitan, Guillem in Catalan, Guillermo in Spanish, etc. There is a Latin version of this first name starting with a “g”, Gulielm (such as on the 17th century painting below), but also a version with a “w”, Willelm, just like in Anglo-Saxon. The latter is the one found on early Latin texts depicting William/Guillaume, including the Bayeux Tapestry.

Painting of Gulielmas Conqister (circa 1620; unknown author)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Bayeux Tapestry
On the Bayeux Tapestry, a cloth nearly 70 metres long which tells the story of the Norman conquest of England in 1066, namely the battle of Hastings, the Latin reads Willelm many times, but it is spelled in different ways. Remember that Latin was a language with declension, and that the written form of Willelm could be the following, depending on its function in a sentence

Even though the tapestry bears the name Bayeux and was kept for centuries at the Bayeux Cathedral in Normandy, it was most likely made in England. Moreover, it is not clear if the embroiderers, most probably Anglo-Saxon women, had any knowledge of Latin or if they were even literate. The language, the style and the spelling allude to an English influence, including in the proper names. The different spellings of Willelm could therefore be attributable to both Latin declension and English influence. There are 19 occurrences of Willelm on the Tapestry, in the following forms: Willelm (10 times); Willelmi (5 times); Wilgelmum (twice), Wilgelm (once) and Willelmo (once), the latter is depicted here:

Extract from the Bayeux tapestry showing the name Willelmo
Source: Adapted from Wikimedia Commons

Both the linguistic history of Normandy and the written evidence show that the conqueror’s name was most likely closer to William than to Guillaume. This being said, and as we have stated above, it was common to translate names in the past. Thus, it is normal that for French speakers, the Conquérant’s name is Guillaume, as it is Guilherme o conquistador for Portuguese speakers and Wilhelm der Eroberer for German speakers.
Nevertheless, for the French, he can only be Guillaume. And it goes beyond linguistic and historical considerations: He is considered a French hero and is part of a particular French narrative of national history, of France as a rather monolithic cultural and linguistic block. Calling him William le Conquérant would be akin to accepting that a national hero was not exactly French, but that he came from a place that is considered a mere region of France and that his mother tongue was not French, but a mere patois as other languages of France are called in a somewhat depictive manner. The same could be said about Napoleone Bonaparte, who was Corsican and only began learning French after his ninth birthday. But that’s another story and the French are not the only ones to indulge in this practice.

Why “good”, “better”, “best”?

We have “tall”, “taller”, and “tallest”, “high”, “higher” and “highest”, “big”, “bigger” and “biggest”.

Why do we not have “good”, “gooder” and “goodest”? Or rather, why is it not something like “bet”, “better”, “best”, where “bet” means “good”?

What we have here is something linguists call “suppletion”. This is where a word is used so often in a certain context that it takes the place of the original form. The word “good” comes from a Proto Germanic word *gōdaz which is itself from Proto-Indo-European *gʰedʰ- which meant to unite.

Over time the word “good” got associated with a desirable quality and lost its meaning as “unite” and shifted to its modern meaning. Interestingly though, it is related to the word “gather” which is closer to the original Proto Indo European meaning.

Ok, so “good” replaced the original form of the word whose comparative was “better” and superlative was “best”. But what was the original word?

It was “boot”. No, not the thing you wear on your foot. There is actually another word with a completely different origin that ended up being spelled the same as the word for a type of footwear (the word boot comes from French).

This word has fallen almost out of use but it still holds on in a set phrase “to boot” as in “He is a good painter, a great cook to boot”. It comes from Old English bōt which meant “help” or “relief”. It is related to the Old Norse bót (which meant remedy) and German Buße which is a penance or fine.

What originally got me into languages are the cool stories that are sitting all around. We use these words every day and we don’t even realise the weird and wonderful histories many of them have

Language – tree or machine?

Are languages like trees? Did they grow and evolve slowly over time? Or did they get invented by some clever person and require knowledge and skill to operate and will break down if not kept working by skilled professionals? The answer is a bit complicated. But let’s start with a clarification. What is a language? Nowadays we would probably say that a language is something that has people speaking it and media such as books, TV shows and movies.

But what was language like before media? How were words used and what were people’s attitudes about words? If you grew up in western society, then you probably had language education. While things are changing now, my generation and many generations before mine were told many things about languages and about how to use words.

“Don’t say ‘me and my friend'” “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition” “Don’t split an infinitive”. All of that advice was not based on how the language actually works. The “split infinitive” rule comes from Latin where it is literally impossible to split the infinitive since an infinitive is a single word.

In English, as in other Germanic languages, splitting the infinitive is a completely normal thing to do. This “rule” came about because someone had an idea and imposed that idea on people learning the language in a classroom.

Teaching style and punctuation and common practises is a good idea as it allows someone to more easily assimilate in the larger speech community as they grow up. But some of the downsides of this approach is that it gives a lot of people (me included while I was growing up) the idea that language is static and there are right and wrong ways to use it.

I have learned a lot since starting Silly Linguistics and it has changed how I view language, and in particular how words are used. Language is a lot more flexible and changable than a lot of us realise and it will continue to change as society and culture changes.

When I was growing up, I viewed language the same way I viewed computer science or maths. It was a system invented one day and you learned how to use it similarly to how you learn how to drive a car or change a tire. Don’t get me wrong, language is a skill, and it is something you learn but the truth is a lot more grey, and actually, much more interesting than I thought it was when I was growing up. I got excited by the odd anecdote about languages but I would often go back to computers and forget about languages.

Everything changed in 2014 when I got involved with High Valyrian from Game of Thrones and through it I got exposed to linguistics. Maybe it wasn’t my teachers’ fault. Maybe I just never engaged enough. I guess I just decided one day that English class was boring and I hadn’t given it much of a chance from that point on.

I just had a light bulb moment a while ago and I realised that language is like improv. You make up things as you go along and see what happens. When you were growing up and before you were taught specific rules about languages you probably heard people talking about the family dog and you would say “Look at the doggy” or something like that. You heard words and you repeated them. Toddlers learn hundreds of words a month.

Toddlers try out lots of things. They pull the cat’s tail and stick their biscuit in the sand and practise their walking by going from room to room. This exploratory trait does not stop at language. They try out different sounds. There are some theories that say that the equivalents of “mama” and “papa” sound so similar world wide because they are just the babblings of toddlers converted in the minds of adults into words.

“mama” has an M and “papa” has a P. Both sounds are made with the lips and they are some of the first sounds made by babies. What is interesting about first language acquisition is how fast and well it happens for the vast majority of children. They are born with the ability to make sound through crying and that’s about it. But soon they are saying things like “papa” and “kitty” and then things like “I’m hungry” and then “I want to go to the park”.

This process has been repeated for thousands of years. Do we really need people telling children how to speak? It should be as silly as explaining to a 5 year old how to breathe. In our tribal past people would just speak and the language would evolve and change like a lava lamp. Then some grumpy grammarians came along and said “Don’t say ‘me and my friend'” and “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition”.

As for the “me and my friend” thing, a lot of people would come up with some reason why it is wrong. But these arguments miss a point. No one would say “That giraffe doesn’t look enough like a zebra”. Of course they wouldn’t. That’s absurd. Then why are we looking at an utterance and saying “This is wrong”. A giraffe got to be the way it is today through small changes over time. We should understand how the giraffe evolved, not tell it that it’s wrong.

Similarly, it would be much interesting to look into why people say “me and my friend” than just say it is wrong. Science is showing more and more how our minds are set up for the complex task of perceiving speech sounds, decoding them, parsing them into sentences, trying to understand the message and do the whole thing the other way to go from our thoughts to a series of sound waves to transmit our message.

If language is a natural process and came about through our biology then we should look at it through a scientific lense. After learning more about languages and linguistics I quickly came across the descriptive method which looks at how language is actually being used rather than how some say it should be used and I found that the descriptive method is a more interesting approach but it is also scientific and is slowly revealing to us how this system came about and how it works.

So we go back to the original question, is language a tree or a machine? Well, this question itself is a bit of a trick. Trees are themselves living things that change and grow over time. They have their own internal machinery, just of a biological nature, instead of a metallic one.

Languages are machinelike in that they are complex and have many moving parts. But they are very unmachinelike in that they change over time, are very flexible and have ways of adapting to changes around them. There are some who say that language might have evolved once tens of thousands of years ago and spread quickly from that point to all the humans living at that time.

Those humans then moved from Africa to the Middle East, Europe, Asia and beyond, bringing language with them. If this theory of single origin is correct it means that all world languages are related, some more closely than others, but all having a common source. Just look at the range of languages we have. We have languages where you can communicate complex thoughts with a single long word and we have others where you need to use lots of extra words before or after other words to express the desired nuance.

I don’t want to give people the impression that descriptivism is “anything goes” (which is far from the truth) or that prescriptivism (prescribing usage) is the devil. Each has their place in the world. Language plays a lot of functions in the world and in places, such as a legal document, language becomes quite regimented. But I do want people to realise that language is a lot more than what you may realise it is.

It is not just something for Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. It is something for all of us. Language is our heritage as humans. We can create new words and share new ideas with the world. We are literally born to do it and that should be celebrated.

Why do people say “me and my friend”?

Short answer: English probably works differently than we think it does

Long answer: People use their native language effortlessly provided they don’t have something physically wrong with their brain or any other sort of mental impairment.

Language is an amazingly complex thing. We have adjectives, nouns, pronouns, adverbs, verbs, conjunctions and all sorts of other things. When children grow up, they just hear the language around them and they just pick it up. How they actually do this is a matter of the most cutting edge research, still, after all these years linguistics have been around.

The way people speak tells us something about not only English itself but also how people think. Let’s look at the sentence “We need to move the meeting from 1pm to 2pm”. This makes perfect sense to us, but it actually reveals something about our cognition.

We view a meeting as an object and that it can be moved. But a meeting actually doesn’t exist physically. It is just an agreement amongst some people to meet at a certain time. Time itself is another concept effortlessly handled by the human mind and language but imagine someone with no concept of time. You couldn’t move a meeting because you couldn’t refer to “later”. You could only refer to “now”.

Another way we can see how language reflects how the mind works is how words carve out their own space. Mend means something slightly different to repair. Hurt means something different to inflict pain. Hound and dog are also different. People use words and those that hear them interpret them and use them to try to understand what other people are saying.

They use their understanding of the word to send their own messages and back and forth words go from person to person. The process is not perfect and no word is fixed in meaning but shifts slightly over time.

This is because people interpret words slightly differently as they hear them and use them differently to other people. Over time these slight differences add up and a word like “silly” which is cognate with German “selig” once meant “blessed”. Word change meaning over time because of people. How meanings change over time gives us an insight into the mercurial workings of the human mind.

Past tense forms of words have also changed over time. “sneaked” used to be the way people made “sneak” into the past tense. Now there is “snuck” because people looked at “stick” and “stuck” and by analogy made “sneak” and “snuck”. These constructions that are constructed by analogy are all over the place. It’s another example of how the human mind processes and uses language.

Language is not immovable, but rather a fluid and ever changing thing. People take in language from around them and instinctively work out the rules of this system they are using. People’s idiosyncratic interpretations of words and structures make small changes in words and structures and language slowly change over time.

Now, what does this have to do with “me and my friend”? Well, by a certain way of looking at things, “me and my friend” even at the beginning of a sentence is perfectly alright. I know what you are thinking, “I was thought that it has to be “my friend and I”” and “No one says “Me went”, so you can’t say “Me and my friend went””. There are lots of ways of analysing language. The people who use these arguments are merely using their own line of reasoning and that is perfectly ok. I am merely showing a different way of looking at things.

I have never liked the demonisation by some people of the construction “me and my friend”. As I have tried to make clear in the first part of my article (and by providing many examples) language is an organic entity invented and changed and kept alive by the minds of people in the world. The sentence “That way of speaking is wrong” when speaking of native speakers is simply absurd to me.

Would people look at a penguin and say “That bird should be able to fly. A flightless bird is just wrong” or “That animal has a trunk. No animal should have a trunk. It is just wrong”. I think most people would say that is a silly thing to say. I think it is because many people in literate societies hold up the written word as the best version of their language and end up disliking divergences from that version of the language.

But only about 200 languages in the world are regularly written out of the about 7000 languages in the world. Language is spoken, words are invented, die out, new constructions come in and old constructions get forgotten. The question should not be “Why do people say “me and my friend”?” but “What does the construction “me and my friend” say about English?”

Even after all these centuries of studying language, there is still so much more to be learned. People pick up language effortlessly and speak it effortlessly, yet it is so remarkably complex. It is a bit like walking. You are never taught to walk, you just walk. You aren’t taught to speak, you just speak. Just being able to do something does not always mean you cognitively know how you do it. So my point is, you can actually speak a language perfectly well and still not know how it actually works.

So let’s get to the question at hand, if “me and my friend” is perfectly valid, even at the beginning of a sentence, what does that tell us about English?

When scientists discover a new type of dinosaur in a dig, they might tell the world “this changes everything we know”. Well, I don’t think this construction in English goes that far, but it does fly in the face of what a lot of us have been taught.

So why then has “me and my friend” been so derided? Because it violates a so-called law where all elements in a subject must be in the nominative case. I say so-called because clearly this law is being violated and it is not out of ignorance. Just like the flightless bird violating the idea that all birds fly, this English construction should not be derided but rather it should lead people to ask, “why is English behaving in this way?”

Should a new species be discovered, scientists would immediately ask, “what can the emergence of this species tell us about their environment and about natural selection?”

In this case “me and my friend” is pointing to some trait of English that is a bit different than languages around it. That construction simply does not appear in other languages. Yet it is popping out of mouths of many English speakers, which following from the animal analogy should tell us that something is going on.

“me and my friend” is what is called a compound subject. The whole construction is considered a subject, but it is made up of a number of nouns. A single noun would just be a subject, but two or more creates a compound subject.

“Ego et rex meus” is a compound subject from Latin meaning “me and my king”, or literally “I and my king”. So in Latin, they clearly follow this rule that all constituents of a compound subject must be in the nominative.

What is this nominative and accusative?

Well, in English we say “I went to the store” but “He gave it to me”. “I” is the nominative form and “me” is the accusative form. When a noun is in subject position, it takes the nominative form and when in object position it should take the object form. So “He saw my friend and me” is fine because “my friend and me” are in object position so they both take the object form.

But if this was the rule then no native speaker would ever say “my friend and me” at the beginning of a sentence. No native speaker EVER says “Me go-ed to store” or “Us is here”. Clearly there are certain patterns that are followed by native speakers when using pronouns. “my friend and me” is an anomaly only if you look at it as an anomaly. It goes against what would appear in another language, but English is not Latin or any other language that would never use the equivalent of “my friend and me”.

When someone knocks on the door, and you ask “Who’s there”, you can reply “Me”. In Swedish though, people say “Det är jag” which literally translated is “It is I”. The fact that people say “me” in response in English tells us that cases behave a bit differently in English.

So why do people say “me and my friend” even at the beginning of a sentence? Because in a compound subject, the role of the compound subject itself (whether it be at the beginning of the sentence or at the end of the sentence) does not dictate the forms needed in the actual compound subject.

When looking at a construction used by native speakers we need an explanation that actually comes up with a reason for something happening and doesn’t just dismiss it as a mistake. English treats pronouns differently than other languages. When a subject such as “I” gets a noun or another pronoun added to it, the rules change. “I” becomes “me and my friend”. This compound subject can then be used anywhere in the sentence, such as “He saw me and my friend”.

In my view, this construction is common enough and consistent enough to be considered a proper part of the language and shouldn’t be looked down on. People who look down on this construction are using the standards of other languages which is never the right approach. Each language has its own history and its own ways of doing things.

But I also understand that we don’t understand. By that I mean that we don’t really understand language very well and our attempts to understand it have sometimes created theories that don’t fit 100% with reality. Trying to fully apply the nominative accusative system in the same way it is used in Latin sometimes caused perfectly natural English to be considered a mistake.

When people are taught a certain way it changes their speech patterns and in some cases leads to hyper correction where people say “He say my friend and I” which actually violates the Latin-derived rule many school teachers teach. But again, language is a part of culture and teaching is part of culture too and “my friend and I” is just as much a product of human cognition as “my friend and me” and I won’t spend the rest of this article in turn looking down on “my friend and I” because that would be a bit hypocritical after telling people not to judge.

At the very least I would like to get people to look at speech coming from native speakers with a bit more of a open mind and not to immediately condemn certain forms as wrong. Language is weird and wonderful and the more we can have fun with it rather than making it a chore, the more we can begin to discover what language can really do and what it means to us.