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This spring we're reading the whole poem together at the Dead Language Society book club. I wrote about why it deserves your time here: www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/why-you-sh...

Why you should read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This spring’s book club pick

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Here's what that wilderness ride looks like in the original: Sumwhyle wyth wormez he werrez and with wolves als, Sumwhile wyth wodwos þat woned in þe knarrez, Boþe wyth bullez and berez, and borez oþerquyle, And etaynez þat hym anelede of þe heʒe felle.

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But when Gawain rides out through frozen wilderness, the poet switches to a Norse-inflected English: - "felle" 'mountain' comes from Old Norse "fell/fjall" - "dryʒe" 'patient' comes from Old Norse "drjúgr"

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One of the joys of the poem is how it plays with language. For example, when characters are at court, the language turns French: "plesaunce" 'pleasure,' "prys" 'excellence,' "ioye" 'joy.' In some of these lines, every content word is French, with English supplying only the grammatical glue.

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That's the opening of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," written in the 14th century by a poet whose name we’ve lost. The poem survives in a single manuscript that nearly burned in the Cotton Library fire of 1731. Like Beowulf, we nearly lost it entirely.

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

A green man rides into King Arthur’s court. Green skin, green clothes, green horse. He offers a game: any knight may swing his axe if he’ll accept a return blow in a year. Gawain takes the deal. The head comes off… then the body picks it up and rides away.

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His verse combines rhyme with alliteration, merging the old Germanic ways with the newer French fashions. It’s a glimpse at an English that might have been. It helps that it’s a great story too.

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

The anonymous poet of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” was a near-contemporary of Chaucer, but he wrote in a dialect so different from London English that Londoners like Chaucer would likely have struggled with it. His vocabulary is four times as Norse as Chaucer’s.

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Linguists tend to talk about “Middle English” like it was one thing (myself included). But Middle English was the most diverse period in the history of the language. If you only know “The Canterbury Tales,” you've only seen one kind of Middle English.

Why you should read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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Eventually, the "ny" sound became an "ng," which isn't far away in the mouth. The pronunciation of "Menzies" as "Mingus" is still heard, but it's competing with the version said with a 'z.' The language changed — albeit in a small way — simply because printers didn't have a letter.

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Hence the modern pronunciation of Mackenzie: with a 'z' sound. The case of "Menȝies" is a bit more complicated. Traditionally, it's pronounced like "Mingus." It likely came from a Norman French name Mesnières, which ended up sounding like "Menyers" in Scots, hence the use of yogh: Menȝies

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The 'ȝ' got replaced with a 'z': they looked similar and 'z' was easier to print. The names were still pronounced with 'y' sounds by those in the know. But not everyone was in the know. When others encountered spellings with 'z,' they did the sensible thing: they pronounced them with a 'z' sound

The surnames "Menzies" and "Mackenzie" were never meant to be pronounced with a 'z.' The original spellings used the medieval yetter yogh, which looked like this: ȝ Yogh once represented a 'y' sound in both English and Scots. So the name "Mackenȝie" was actually pronounced like "Mackenyie."

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Latin has been a part of English since before there was an English. Full story here: www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/why-you-sp...

Why you speak more Latin than you think

The Latin words in the ancestor of English

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You've got to reverse the sound changes they've undergone. And when you do, you see that they sort into three distinct layers, some borrowed before the Anglo-Saxons ever set foot in Britain. Even the most homely, Anglo-Saxon-sounding words in your vocabulary might be Latin in disguise.

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The reason: they were borrowed so long ago that their distinctive Latin shape has been worn away by centuries of phonetic erosion. There are many stealth Latin words hiding in everyday English: "kettle," "kitchen," "pit," "wall"... How do we know these are Latin at all, when they look so English?

Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

"Pound," "street," and "cheap" are Latin words in disguise. They come from "pondo" (by weight), "strata" (paved), and "caupo" (innkeeper). They look nothing like the long, fancy words we normally associate with Latin borrowings: "formula," "curriculum," "decimation." What's going on here?

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You don't need to learn Latin, French, or Ancient Greek to figure out where a word comes from, or roughly when it entered the English language. Allow me to present: The Bluffer's Guide to Etymology. Five simple rules to get it right, most of the time. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-to-gue...

A bluffer’s guide to etymology

How to guess the age and origin of any English word

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Around 80% of English words were borrowed from other languages. You can often work out where a word was borrowed from (and when!) just by looking at it. It works because words carry visible stamps of where they come from: suffixes, silent letters, even stress patterns. These also map onto dates.

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

The words themselves give it away: in their spelling, their suffixes, and even where the stress falls. English words wear their history on their sleeve, if you know what to look for. I’ll show you the system tomorrow. www.deadlanguagesociety.com

Dead Language Society | Colin Gorrie | Substack

English is weirder than you think. A weekly dive into the hidden history of everyday words. Click to read Dead Language Society, by Colin Gorrie, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subsc...

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Here are four words: knight, courage, fabricate, hypothesis. Without looking anything up, you can tell: - What language each word came from - Roughly when it entered the English language How?

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

"Should" comes from the Old English verb "sċulan," whose earliest known meaning was — you guessed it — 'to owe.' So the Old English word "sċyld" meant both ‘debt’ and 'guilt.' German still uses the related word "Schuld" for both. How much of our moral language is debt collection?

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Something similar happened in Latin. "Dēbēre" 'to owe' became an 'ought' word too: it gave birth to Spanish "deber," French "devoir," Italian "dovere," all meaning both 'owe' and 'should.' Even 'should' comes from debt.

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

"Ought" is the past tense of "owe." At least, it was originally. Both words come from he Old English verb "āgan," which meant 'to have.' The ‘owe’ meaning comes from a phrase "āgan tō ġieldenne" 'to have (something) to pay.' Eventually, we dropped the "tō ġieldenne" 'to pay' portion.

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This is where the deep history of English begins: www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/what-came-...

What came before English?

Watch now | The story of Proto-Indo-European

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Its descendants include English, as well as Hindi, Greek, Russian, Welsh, and many hundreds more. Our reconstruction of their common ancestor is detailed enough to tell us what its speakers ate and drank, how they buried their dead, and even the names of some of their gods.

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The method: compare what the descendant languages still share and work backwards from there. The biggest success story of this comparative method is the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, likely spoken around six thousand years ago on the grasslands north of the Black Sea.

Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Linguists can reconstruct long-dead languages that no one ever wrote down. These reconstructions can be surprisingly precise: individual words, grammar, sound changes, even something of the world the speakers inhabited. But how?

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So it’s fitting that it’s through words we remember them too. This is the first instalment of A Deep History of English: the story of how English became what it is, one mystery at a time. The first mystery: why "is," "was," and "be" look nothing alike." www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/why-the-ve...

Why the verb “to be” is so irregular

The answer is six thousand years old

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

The explanation reaches back six thousand years, to a dead language spoken on the grasslands north of the Black Sea by people who left no writing. They founded no cities, built no pyramids. The immortality they hoped for came from the words of poets, who would spread the glory of their great deeds.

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

English is full of mysteries hiding in ordinary words. The verb "to be" is one of the strangest. Its forms "is," "was," "be," look nothing alike, as if the word had been assembled from spare parts. It was.

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

The verb "to be" is three completely unrelated words stitched together. "Was" comes from an ancient root meaning ‘to spend the night.’ "Is" comes from a different root entirely. "Be" comes from yet a third (the same one that gives us "physics" and "future").

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On this theory, these words started as nicknames: thousand-year-old versions of "doggy" and "piggy." These words tend not to show up in Old English texts because they're informal: not the kind of thing monks write about. That's one theory, anyway: we'll probably never know for sure.

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Some scholars think it might be a nickname. One clue: dog belongs to a cluster of English animal words that all share an unusual shape. We have "dog," "pig," "stag," "frog," "hog," even "earwig." They're all terms for animals, the kinds of things we might give cute nicknames to.

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The word "docga" is the ancestor of "dog." But it has almost no written history before that, and no clear relatives in any other language. By 1500, dog had replaced hound. The upstart won. So where did dog come from?

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In Old English, the word for ‘dog’ was "hund" too, a word which survives in "hound." It's traceable back thousands of years to link up with its cousins in Latin "canis" and Ancient Greek "kýōn." Then, around the year 1050, a different word appears: "docga."

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

The word "dog" is something of a mystery. All of English’s relatives have something like "hound": German has "Hund," Dutch has "hond," Swedish has "hund." Yet only English has a word like "dog." Why?

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If you want to know how iambic pentameter actually works (and why it's simpler and more intuitive than most English classes make it seem), I've got you covered: www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-iambic...

How iambic pentameter really works

And why it works so well in English

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Think of the rhythm: "I dó not knów" fits differently into a line than "I knów not" or "Í know nót." The same kind of variation made it useful to have the two alternatives: "knows" and "knoweth." The extra syllable of "knoweth" sometimes made all the difference in a line of iambic pentameter.

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

This week I wrote about three things Shakespeare’s English gave him that our English no longer provides. One of them was the coexistence of "I know not" and "I do not know." This was a choice between competing grammatical constructions, but it had consequence for the poetic metre.

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

My take: it’s the application of Shakespeare’s undeniable genius to a language that was exactly ready for him. But it wouldn’t stay that way for long. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/shakespear...

The age when English could do anything

And why we wouldn't have Shakespeare without it

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

In a study of the vocabulary range of thirteen Elizabethan playwrights, Shakespeare ranked… seventh, behind writers most of us have never heard of. Yet read these other writers (say, John Webster or George Chapman) and you’ll see instantly that Shakespeare is special. But why?

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Writers alive during that window could do things with English that we simply can’t today. Then the sugar high ended. Tomorrow’s piece is about what that window looked like from the inside. www.deadlanguagesociety.com

Dead Language Society | Colin Gorrie | Substack

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Old grammatical forms were dying, and new ones were struggling to be born. And nobody had sorted through the mess: there were no comprehensive dictionaries or grammars yet. The result was an explosion of linguistic possibility.