Yes, all
the old Indo-European inflected forms were present in English, but they have been mostly lost. Both Christopher
Tolkien and his father as well as other commentators (Hammond and Scull in
Reader’s Companion, for instance) discuss the lack of them. Modern English is neither terse nor precise in the way that Koine Greek was precise, and Koine Greek (I understand) was sloppy compared to the Classic Greek that Plato used, Attic Greek. (And yes, I know there were regional dialects. There are regional dialects of English. I cannot understand Scotsmen or Scots-Irish, and no one but the Irish can understand an inebriated Irishman or Bostonian.)
English is a compound language. Its base is a German tongue, Anglo-Saxon, with loan-words and phrases from Welsh, itself a compound language constructed from Latinized Celtic (Brittonic), or Celticized Latin: I can never tell. Then the Danes (and Norwegians) conquered northern and eastern England and brought Norse with them.
On top of this is layered Norman French, a Romantic language with lots of Norse stuff left over from the Vikings that settled northeastern France from the mouth of the Seine to the Atlantic coast, speaking a regional dialect of Old French, a mixture of Latinized Gaelic, Frankish (German again), and Norse (from the Vikings under Rollo two centuries earlier, whom the Frankish rulers could not dislodge). From this English is blessed with weird pairs of words describing the same thing:
beef is the meat the Normans ate from
cows, the
animals the conquered Anglo-Saxons kept for the Norman masters. (Also
pork from
pigs,
mutton from
sheep,
venison from
deer.) None of the
kings of England is believed to have spoken English as his first language until Henry IV usurped Richard II in 1399. King Edward III, their grandfather, passed a law that Normans had to conduct trials in English because most of the inhabitants of England couldn’t speak French. And the first acknowledged English work,
Canterbury Tales, was written by Geoffrey Chaucer, who served Edward III and Richard II. Chaucer was a lawyer, which might explain why he wrote in Middle (medieval) English: it was Edward III who required the lawyers to use that language.
During the Renaissance, there was a rebirth of literacy in Latin, and scholarly Latin (and Greek!) re-entered the language.
Anglo-Saxon used German syntax; this was replaced with Romantic syntax during the Middle
Ages, but with enormous flexibility in word placement and arrangement. Because the language has been written for a long time but undergone enormous erosion in pronunciation, spelling no longer matches pronunciation in many instances, and we have all sorts of arcane rules for pronunciation and archaic spellings and words. (Tolkien used these to great effect.)
Sometime after Shakespeare and the King James Bible (they belong to the same period, and because they use similar language and phrasing, are often confused by even reasonably well-educated English speakers, at least by modern standards), we mostly lost the second person singular:
thou, thee, thine.
Ye is second person plural:
ye/ge, eow/gu, eower/gur > (“>” means “became”)
you, you, your. And if that isn’t confusing enough,
thee was often written
þe, where “þ”, the letter “
thorn”, is pronounced “th” as in “
thorn”; and it was often written “
y” instead of “þ”, so that well-educated English speakers think a sign that reads “
Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe” is second person singular, when in fact it is old-fashioned spelling for “
The Olde Coffee Shoppe”. But well into the twentieth century, Quakers (the Christian sect) still addressed one another as “thou/thee”; and so do my wife and I on occasion, and it’s – where’s my
calendar? – AD 2018.
Ain’t English grand?
But it
would be nice to hear the various distinctions in dialect available in the Greek translation!
In Appendix F, part II, “On Translation”, Tolkien comments on this matter:
…Some attempt has been made to represent these varieties by variations in the kind of English used; but the divergence between the pronunciation and idiom of
the Shire and the
Westron tongue in the mouths of the
Elves or of the high
men of
Gondor was greater than has been shown in this book.
Hobbits indeed spoke for the most part a rustic dialect, whereas in Gondor and
Rohan a more antique language was used, more formal and more terse.
One point in the divergence may here be noted, since, though often important, it has proved impossible to represent. The Westron tongue made in the pronouns of the second person (and often also in those of the third) a distinction, independent of number, between “familiar” and “deferential” forms. It was, however, one of the peculiarities of Shire-usage that the deferential forms had gone out of colloquial use. [Alcuin: like modern English] They lingered only among the villagers, especially of the
Westfarthing, who used them as endearments. [Alcuin: like modern Quakers and some long-married couples] This was one of the things referred to when people of Gondor spoke of the strangeness of Hobbit-speech.
Peregrin Took, for instance, in his first few days in
Minas Tirith used the familiar forms to people of all ranks, including the Lord
Denethor himself. This may have amused the aged Steward, but it must have astonished his servants. No doubt this free use of the familiar forms helped to spread the popular rumor that
Peregrin was a person of very high rank in his own country.
It is a
mystery for me how you do know whether someone is addressing you with politeness or formally or with any other way. I can't tell if there are any lingual/syntax/grammatical differences, if there are any at all, on the supposed different ways of addressing others in English language.
How do you figure this out? ( this is a serious question. Not a rhetoric one
)
Intonation is first: is the speaker respectful or not? Is he direct or indirect? Direct is generally but not always less respectful: sometimes indirect is less respectful, depending upon context.
Context is critical: a compliment in one setting can be used as a rude insult in another. English has grown into a difficult, intricate language precisely
because it has lost its Indo-European inflections.
Bilbo’s “I know half of you half as well as I would like,”
etc, is not only a linguistic puzzle, but also a less-than-subtle commentary on modern English: did that speaker (or writer) just praise you or insult you? If you can’t hear his voice and intonation, it can be extremely difficult, maybe even impossible to tell.
