Free The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson Page A

today—write, wrote, written—is really quite recent.
    The common pattern in these changes was for the weak verbs to drive out the strong ones, but sometimes it worked the other way, so that today we have torn instead of teared and knew rather than knowed. Many of these have become regularized, but there are still 250 irregular verbs in English, and a surprising number of these are still fluid—so that even now most of us are not always sure whether we should say dived or dove, sneaked or snuck, hove or heaved, wove or weaved, strived or strove, swelled or swollen.
    Other words underwent changes, particularly those beginning with n, where there was a tendency for this letter to drift away from the word and attach itself to the preceding indefinite article. The process is called metanalysis Thus a napron became an apron, a nauger became an auger, and an ekename became (over time) a nickname. By a similar process, the nicknames Ned, Nell, and Nan are thought to be corruptions of "mine Edward," "mine Ellen,"
    and "mine Ann." [Cited by Barber, page 183]
    But there were losses along the way. Today we have two de-monstrative pronouns, this and that, but in Shakespeare's day there

    THE MOTHER TONGUE
    hair and hairs that is effectively lost to us today when he wrote,
    "Shee hath more haire than wit, and more faults than hairs."
    ( Other languages possess even further degrees of thatness. As Pei notes, "The Cree Indian language has a special that [for] things just gone out of sight, while Ilocano, a tongue of the Philippines, has three words for this referring to a visible object, a fourth for things not in view and a fifth for things that no longer exist.") [Pei, The Story of Language, page 128]
    Some of the changes since Shakespeare's time are obvious. Thee and thou had already begun a long decline (though they still exist in some dialects of northern England). Originally thou was to you forms can present a very real social agony. As Jespersen, a Dane who appreciated these things, put it: "English has thus attained the only manner of address worthy of a nation that respects the ele-mentary rights of each individual." [The Growth and Structure of the English Language, page 251]
    The changing structure of English allowed writers the freedom to express themselves in ways that had never existed before, and none took up this opportunity more liberally than Shakespeare, who happily and variously used nouns as verbs, as adverbs, as substantives, and as adjectives— often in ways they had never been employed before. He even used adverbs as adjectives, as with
    "that bastardly rogue" in Henry IV, a construction that must have seemed as novel then as it does now. He created expressions that could not grammatically have existed previously--such as "breath-ing one's last" and "backing a horse."
    No one in any tongue has ever made greater play of his language.
    He coined some 2,000 words—an astonishing number—and gave 64

    THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS
    us countless phrases. As a phrasemaker there has never been any-one to match him. Among his inventions: one fell swoop, in my mind's eye, more in sorrow than in anger, to be in a pickle, bag and baggage, vanish into thin air, budge an inch, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, the milk of human kindness, remem-brance of things past, the sound and the fury, to thine own self be true, to be or not to be, cold comfort, to beggar all description, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, to be cruel to be kind, and on and on and on and on. And on. He was so wildly prolific that he could put two catchphrases in one sentence, as in Hamlet's observation: "Though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honored in the breach than the obser-vance." He could even mix metaphors and get away with it, as when he wrote: "Or to take arms against a sea of troubles."
    It is terrifying to think that had not two faithful followers, the actors John Hemming and Henry