Name: Steven
Country and Region: Canada, British Columbia, Vancouver
Native Language: English
Student or Teacher: Student
Age or Grade: Graduate Studies

Subject of Question: Word origin

Question:
 The word "art" in the (Old English?) phrase of "Thou art a villian".

When was this word first introduced and where (root language and cultural
context) did it come from?  When and why did it shift to become "are"?  How
does it's history connect with the word "art" of "the art of dancing, or a
wonderful piece of art"?  Was it changed because the aesthetic term was
becoming more prominent?  Is there any correlation between "us" being "art"
(eg. thou art art, you are art)?

a lot of questions... thanks for all that you can do.

Not an unreasonable theory, but also not very likely, given what we know. The English verb 'to be' in its various conjugations is an amalgam of three distinct Indo-European words. 'Am', 'art', 'are' and 'is' from the Old Teutonic existential stem 'es-', the past tense 'was' from the stem OT stem 'wes-', meaning 'to remain', or 'stay', and 'be' from the OT 'beu-', 'beo-', meaning 'to come to be'.

For 'art', the original stem 'es-' became 'er-' in both Old English and Old Norse; '-t' was a pleonastic addition to indicate 2nd person. From about the 13th to the 16th century, the full conjugation was 'I am', 'thou art', 'he/she/it is', 'we be', 'ye/you beest', 'they beth'. In the 16th century a variant form from the north of England ('aron', 'aren', 'arn', 'are') worked its way into the southern dialect and replaced 'art', ' be', 'beest', and 'beth', completing the modern conjugation 'am', 'are', 'is', 'are', 'are', 'are'.

A combination of circumstances probably led to the adoption of 'are' over 'art' in the 2nd person singular. At the same time that the change to 'are' was occurring in the plurals, the 2nd person pronouns were also changing. The 2nd person plural 'ye' and the 2nd person singular 'thou' were both being replaced by 'you'. This convergence of the 2nd person pronouns as well as the similarity in pronunciation of 'art' and 'are' probably led to the dropping of the '-t' in 'art' and thence to conformity in the 2nd person conjugations. There may have been other contributing factors, such as popular writings or plays, but they probably would have had minimal effect on the general population.

The word 'art' as in "fine arts", on the other hand, comes from an unrelated Latin root 'ars, artis', which has remained remarkably unchanged throughout the years. And while "Thou art art" is a fine humanistic notion, it is unlikely that speakers would find that single phrase so infelicitous that it would motivate them to deliberately change the conjugation of such a well-used verb. Nor is it in fact likely that more than a handful of the English speaking population of the 16th century ever uttered those particular words. It is of course possible that such a change came about of its own accord, due to the increased use of the word 'art' in general and the necessity for distinction, but it would be very difficult to prove that such an increase actually occurred. Besides, Americans today say, "Those are our seats," almost every week at the football game, and they seem comfortable with the homophony of "are" and "our".

The notion of a broad "Renaissance" of the arts may be philosophically appealing, but scientific inquiry requires concrete data, which, in this case, is lacking. It seems far more likely, based on countless other documented examples of language change, that this substitution of "are" for "art" happened as a result of specific phonological and morphological changes in the plural forms of the English existential verb.

-Chris Frost
For Ask a Linguistics Tutor
3/14/01