Don't Decline Nouns... Let Them Bend.

In Faroese, and, I suspect, Norwegian, you don't decline nouns. You bend them.

Well. Of course it's the same thing: changing a word in order to show it's case or number or whether it's definite or indefinite... all of that lovely stuff. :)

But they call it bending and no force on earth will compel them to use 'decline' instead when they speak English. And at first I resisted this. Oh, I never really pretended not to understand their talk of bending. But I considered it quaint. Foreign. Below me. I myself always said decline and made a point of saying it soon enough after they said bend that it almost stood as a correction - but not quite.

And to what purpose? Yes, decline is more correct. And who could think of bending Latin words... the very idea is ludicrous. Decline and it's lovely wife Declension are well suited to that language. They're all part of the same exclusive club. But why not bend Faroese? Declining is formal and distant. Faroese is living.

Abstract ruminations aside... it occurs to me that bend really does fit with Faroese, and decline with Latin, in a clear and incontrovertible way: namely, they're part of the same language family. And this line of thinking brings me somewhere I've been before - to the very nature of percieved linguistic superiority, and the making of compound words.

In English, compound words, especially once we move past the most basic and utilitarian of them (doorknob and bedpost seldom attract attention), are relegated to a somewhat lower level of speech than their more showy, or, shall we say, ostentatious counterparts. Firearm, for example, seems amusing if we pause to break it apart. And let no man combine two words to form anything more important, unless he doesn't intend to be taken seriously. It simply isn't done in English. The equivalent, a loquacious circumlocution, is almost as bad, though technically correct.

Which sounds more impressive, after all, which sounds better: To say something moved like a wave, or to say it undulated?

Put your finger on why. Obviously knowing the word undulated puts the speaker into a certain rank by merit of education. But is it so fundamentally superior to say undulate than to use some normal, Anglo-Saxon English counterpart? Precision, one may argue, gives it the edge - why say in four words what one can say in one? This argument holds some reason. But in this case we can simply say wave, using it as a verb.

And consider the case of the ultra sophisticated Optometrist and the utterly pedestrian Eye Doctor. Or the acceptable Dentist and the laughably ignorant Tooth Doctor. Here we only have two words instead of one, and imagine that, to further close the distance, it were acceptable in English as in German or Norwegian to form a compound word of Anglo-Saxon roots. Here: Toothdoctor.

But Dentist is only: Dent- (Tooth-), and -Ist (-Er) (Shows Agency). So with the mist pushed aside, we have only... Toother. Toothperson. Is it really so superior to Toothdoctor?

Well, yes, for two reasons - one definitively based on a long defunct hierarchy, the other merely snobbish.

The first is that French Based Words, and through them Latin based words, were brought to England by conquerers, and so through force perceived as the dialect of the more educated and higher class. Speech filled with Anglo-Saxon roots could hardly be anything but common. A lovely legacy to carry with us to this day, but there it is.

The second is that Toothdoctor or Eyedoctor would be immediately recognizable to anyone, whereas we don't speak Latin or Greek nowadays, nor even a language directly derived from them, so we don't recognize the roots behind words that are. It requires a base amount of education, and indeed, a completely separate morpheme, to learn Dentist or Optometrist, so they can serve as indicators of status.

I am not making a call towards any movement. (:D As if I could inspire such things) In my mind, as in many others, the variety that the Norman invasion, among other influences, has lent to the English language is more than payment for any strange or unfair hierarchy of roots that it may have introduced. But merely consider the reasoning, and the history, before you judge... Why force the subject, and decline a noun, when you could simply let it bend?