One aspect of the English language which baffled me for many years, until I came up with a solution, was the use of the sibilant forms. These I describe as follows; “sh” as in ship, “ch” as in chip, “j” as in gypsy, and “zh” as in vision. The problem is this:
If English came from invaders from surrounding countries, how do we have these forms of consonants, when the surrounding countries don’t use them? The Welsh language doesn’t use any of these, and they are not really part of Dutch usage. French and German use only 2 of 4, Danish perhaps just the “sh”.

But when I say that they are not part of Dutch, there is an exception in what is known as the diminutive, ‘t verkleinwoord. It is ubiquitous in the vernacular press and news. Almost any noun can be formed into its diminutive by the addition of -je or -tje, or sometimes -etje, depending on the original word ending, producing the “ch” sound at the end. So, for example, a man can be turned into a “little man” by writing “mannetje”. This form can be used to indicate a familiar item as opposed to a small one, so that mannetje could indicate a male animal, a dog rather than a bitch. All of these diminutive words are neuter in gender, so that in the case of “mannetje” this represents a neuter male animal. Confused? So am I.

So it’s a modern Dutch idiom, why should we be bothered? Because it also occurs in German with “Männchen”, and in Frysk. So it’s clearly been around for a long time. But it won’t be found in old documents because it’s a slang form. And it’s not used in English, but….

It was that little bird in the garden that finally convinced me that we have it, and just how extensively it is used in English. The chaffinch is seen as the commonest bird in Britain, and probably in most of Northern Europe. The brightly coloured male bird can be seen and heard in our gardens giving his alarm call “fink, fink, fink” but never “finch”. The Germans call him “fink” and the Dutch “vink”, just as he says, so why do we say finch?

Because he is small and familiar, he readily attracts the diminutive, so I could write in Dutch “het vinkje” to produce the sound finch. When looking through old texts and trying to understand how words were pronounced in olden times, we have no idea. But I can be confident that the call that this small bird makes has not changed in the last 2000 years. That is why this bird was crucial in forming the theory.

At this point I started to look for more words that could be diminutive forms. One problem that it resolved for me was that of the town of Brigg. It was obviously named because it was a bridge, the only one for miles around, so why is it spelt so? If we look in the Domesday Book there are a lot of places which have a name which currently ends in -bridge, but in Domesday they are mostly written as -brige or -bruge. Did people pronounce it differently in 1086, or should we see -brige pronounced as bridge? The answer to the first part is that by far the majority of places were pronounced in 1086 exactly as they are today. But we can see from the Dutch “brug” and the German “brücke” that the original word was brig or brug, so that a main large bridge would be written as brig, as in the town Brigg, and a small village bridge would take the diminutive form as in Dutch becomes “bruggetje”. Since in many English dialects the word bridge is pronounced without any audible vowel, it’s easy to see “bruggetje” reducing to bridge. I see the word bridge as being derived from an unrecorded form “beruggen”, to form a bridge; one can visualise a person on their hands and knees, where their back forms the platform of the bridge. We do not use the word “rug/rück” for back in modern English, but we have the word ridge which is another diminutive formed from this original word.

Thus when the Domesday recorder, or his local advisor, hears a village name ending with “-bridge”, it can be recognised as a diminutive, a slang form, so that the original word “brige” can be used. It must also be noted that Domesday was written in Latin, to be read by non English speakers. The four sibilant forms which I mentioned earlier are not used in Greek, and in my view are not a part of classical Latin, so a diminutive form could not be allowed to stand in a Latin document.

A similar situation occurs with names ending with -ditch. The 2 words dyke and ditch have survived alongside each other since ancient times. The Dutch word “dijk” now has a slightly different meaning, but the common intention of a man made structure is preserved, and produces the English verb dig. One example from Domesday is Ditchford, which is written as DICFORD. Here again the slang diminutive has been recognised and reduced to its original form.

Another word which is useful to follow, because we can trace its history, is church. Like most words in the Christian religion church is derived from Greek, the original language of the written Gospels. These tell us that the Apostles referred to Jesus as Kyrios, Κυρισς, meaning Master or Lord, which becomes translated into Latin as Dominus. The adjective form of the word is kyriakos, κυριακός, so we have today the Greek word Kyriakee, Κυριακή, for Sunday, and Keerykas, Κήρυκας, for preacher. As the religion became widely adopted first by the Franks in the sixth century, and later by the English in the seventh, it seems quite practical that they used the word kerk/kirk for their place of worship, in contrast to the ekkleesia, εκκλησία, close out, word used in Rome. The main established churches of their rulers in the main cities would be Kerk, and the smaller villages would use the diminutive form “kerkje”. This gives us the final “ch” of church. For the first “ch” we need to see how words like Latin “castra” becomes “chester” in English, but in Welsh remains without the “ch” as “caer”. One comparison is the Frysk language version “tsjerk” and its diminutive form “tsjerkje” which is pronounced almost the same as church. And who was the first man to build the “tsjerkjes” for the Frisians? St.Willibrord, an Englishman.

The use of the perfect tense seems so much to depend on the words that follow, spoken or unspoken. I agree that ‘once’ does not follow the perfect tense, but the refrigerator sentence can be a real stickler, to my way of thinking.

My take on ‘did you put the butter in the fridge’ is that the unspoken words might be ‘after you cleared the table’. ‘Have you put the butter in the fridge’ would need to be followed with ‘yet’, leading to more words like “well, don’t please, I still need some”.

I belong to a chat group whose members are predominantly in the United States, with one member having been brought up in England until the mid-50′s, and so in the paragraphs written by the US folk there is, to my way of thinking, some pretty awkward grammar, most of the writers avoiding the use of the perfect tense almost entirely. My English-born friend and I have more haves and hases in our paragraphs than anyone else!

However, after my immediate response to all this, I began to feel like the centipede who tumbled into the ditch and when she recovered, could not remember which leg came after which. The use of the perfect tense is so instinctive that I have begun to think of it as almost idiomatic…no doubt quite incorrectly, but there you are.

Blessings for continuing with your so very interesting, informative and utterly delightful blog.

(sorry if this came twice – my server is not behaving well and says one thing while doing another)