Why do we talk like this?

Is English an unusual language?  It's widely said to be so.  Yet the examples most people tend to cite are not really examples at all, while the true peculiarities of English include things that would never occur to most of its speakers.

One often sees posts claiming to be about ways in which English is strange or difficult, but these are usually just about oddities of spelling, which is a feature of the writing system, not of the language itself.  (When you study linguistics, the first thing they drum into you is that language is that which is spoken and heard -- writing is a separate thing, a representation of language rather than language itself.  Illiterate people have language just as much as literate people do; the majority of the world's languages have no written form at all, and they are real languages just as much as English or French are.  The way I think of it is, a language is like a person, while its written form is like a photograph or drawing of that person.)

It's also a fallacy that English is unusual in including so many words from other languages.  Many languages are like that.  More than half the vocabulary of modern Persian comes from Arabic.  About half the words in Japanese are from Chinese, and today Japanese is assimilating a huge number of new loan words from English.  Latin and Greek are well represented in the scientific and legal terminology of many modern European languages.  During my own brief study of Russian years ago, I couldn't help noticing the number of words that were obviously from German.  Such cases are not rare.

English is unusual in some ways.  Its phonology includes a larger number of distinct sounds than most languages do, and its way of articulating vowels is peculiar (compare the pronunciation of, say, "ago" with any word ending in the same "o" sound in German or French -- where most languages have a pure vowel, the English vowel trails off in a distinct "w" sound).  Some words change their vowel sound depending on whether they are stressed or not -- compare the pronunciation of "for" in the sentences "are you for us or for them?" vs "are you for us or against us?"  Such features make a native-speaker-like pronunciation very difficult for the foreign learner to achieve.  There are also idioms where word order can either change meaning or not depending on context -- "she turned the light on" and "she turned on the light" mean the same thing, but "she turned me on" and "she turned on me" mean very different things.  Such subtleties can easily confuse foreign learners.

But one of the weirdest features of English is a grammatical quirk which is almost unique in the world -- yet is so commonplace in speech that we never think of it.  The question which serves as the title of this post is an example of it.  Do you see it?

The feature I'm referring to is called "do-support".  It's the practice of inserting a meaningless word "do" in certain types of questions and negative statements as an auxiliary verb.  Here are some more examples:

Where do you want to go?
Do you like coffee?
No, I don't like coffee.

English belongs to the Germanic subgroup of the Indo-European language family, but no other Germanic language does this.  A "normal" Germanic language would word the above examples like this:

Where want you to go?
Like you coffee?
No, I like coffee not.

In fact, it's not just that other Germanic languages don't use do-support.  With one small exception which I'll get to in a moment, no other language in the entire world normally uses its word for "do" in this way.  But in English it's a mandatory part of correct usage.  Nobody goes around saying "where want you to go?" or "I like coffee not."  Talking like that would make people stare at you in astonishment.  To speak English correctly, you must use do-support.

Different languages have several ways of turning statements into yes-no questions.  Germanic languages other than English invert the order of subject and verb -- "like you coffee?"  Japanese adds a special word, ka, at the end of the sentence, like a spoken question mark, while Arabic adds a functionally similar word, hal, at the beginning of the sentence.  In Russian you make a statement into a question just by adding rising intonation -- "you like coffee" becomes "you like coffee?"  But "do you like coffee?" is a freak.  No other language forms yes-no questions that way.

(Oddly enough, the verb "to be" is exempt from do-support and forms questions the "normal" Germanic way -- we say "are you sick?", not "do you be sick?"  But all other verbs require do-support.)

In linguistics there are various hypotheses about where do-support came from, but it's John McWhorter who offers what seems to me to be the obviously correct one.  As I mentioned, there is one small exception to the global absence of do-support outside English -- the Celtic languages native to the island of Britain, such as Welsh and Cornish, which are survivals of the type of language spoken all over the island before the invasion of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes around 500 CE.  How those Celtic languages developed do-support is lost in the mists of ancient time, but they do indeed have it -- although it doesn't look exactly like English do-support because Celtic has a very different general word-order pattern than English does.

It used to be believed that the Germanic invaders exterminated the Celts throughout the area which is now England and replaced them with Germanic colonists, but an exhaustive genetic study a few years ago showed that the modern English people are, in fact, mostly descended from the Celts who were there before the invasion.  The invaders imposed their Germanic language and culture on the conquered Celtic people, rather than wiping them out and replacing them.

It cannot be coincidence that the only other languages on Earth that have do-support are native to the same island where the English language developed.  Both the Celts and the Anglo-Saxon invaders were mostly illiterate -- there were no schools to teach the Celts the new language, so they just picked it up on the fly as best they could.  It's hardly surprising that they would make errors in doing so, carrying over grammatical habits from their old language into the new one.  That must be how do-support got into English grammar.  The Celtic natives, speaking their badly-learned Old English, greatly outnumbered the Anglo-Saxon invaders who spoke it correctly, so it was their version of English that formed the basis for much of the language going forward.

So, yes, English is an unusual language in some ways -- and one of its rarest and weirdest peculiarities is something you use dozens of times every day without ever realizing how strange it is.