March 27 - wise words

It's Friday and I watched "Can We Help?" on ABC TV as usual. My favourite segment is "wise words" with Kate Burridge (Professor of Linguistics at Monash University). Tonight's question from Syaakir, NSW was -

"Why is the plural of chief, chiefs not chieves?"

Kate's reply - "The older word is ‘thief’. It was around in Old English times (it appears as early as the 7th century). At that time, English speakers always turned ‘f’ into ‘v’ when it occurred between two vowels — so one thief, but two thieves (the vowel in the plural ending was originally pronounced). This pronunciation rule is no longer a living part of our language and what we’ve been doing over the past few hundred years is regularising words like thieves, so they fit in better with what is now the usual rule for making plurals. The plural of ‘cliff’, for instance, is no longer ‘cleves’. There are some words that have been quite successful in resisting this kind of regularising. Typically, these are everyday words; think of leaf and its plural leaves. The word ‘chief’, however, didn’t come into English until the 14th century from French. So it arrived after this pronunciation rule had disappeared from the language – chief therefore has always been regular (chief-chiefs).

As an aside, it seems that words relating to fairy tales or fantasy have somehow been successful in retaining irregular plural forms. It almost seems as if irregularities like wolf-wolves, dwarf-dwarves and elf-elves-elvish have now become a feature of this style of writing. Tolkien himself, I suspect, has a significant role in this linguistic development, particularly with respect to the success of the form dwarves. In this case, the plural of dwarf was originally regular; in other words, dwarfs. So even though it sounds older, dwarves is actually a new form. The earlier pronunciation of dwarf was ‘dwerg’. It ended in a consonant not unlike the gutteral [ch] sound at the end of Scottsh ‘loch’. English eventually lost this sound — in this case, it changed into ‘f’. However, this change happened long after we’d lost the pronunciation rule that changed ‘f’ to ‘v’ between vowels. Hence, the plural of dwarf was always dwarfs, pure and simple. Tolkien chose dwarves, even though as a philologist he knew this was historically wrong. He has a note to this effect in the beginning of ‘The Hobbit’. He writes, ‘In English the only correct plural of dwarf is dwarfs, and the adjective dwarfish. In this story dwarves and dwarvish are used’. These forms have an antiquated ring to them, and even though in ‘Lord of the Rings’ Tolkien offers a different explanation, I feel sure it’s primarily this reason that he chose dwarves to describe the ancient people in his tales. The popularity of Tolkien’s writing, I think, will mean that archaic forms like elves, elvish, wolves and, indeed, the late arrival dwarves will not be regularised to elfs, elfish, wolfs and dwarfs but will remain as an earmark of the fantastical."

I think this is a great example of life following art. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings is a favourite of mine because when Tolkien did his research for the trilogy he studied Finnish folklore and he based the Elvish language on Finnish.