Nicholas Andresen

It meant something like blessed by divine providence plus fortunate in a way that suggests God likes you, what you'd call someone whose harvest was suspiciously abundant.

This is not a concept modern English speakers need to express very often.

We have other explanations for abundant harvests now, mostly involving synthetic fertilizer and GPS-guided tractors and Norman Borlaug.

So as medieval religious concepts became less central to daily life, the word drifted to cover more relevant territory.

First innocent, then worthy of sympathy, then pitiable, then foolish, finally becoming our modern word silly.

If nothing constrained these pressures, we'd all be communicating in maximally compressed grunts by now.

HNNG would mean please pass the salt and HNNG HNNG would mean I love you but I'm not sure we should get married.

Yet somehow I wrote this essay without once HNN-ing.

So what's holding language together?

The constraint is transmission fidelity.

Listeners must be able to decode what speakers are saying.

The message must get through.

Changes that would break comprehension don't survive.

This constraint is powerful.

It doesn't prevent change, obviously it doesn't, or we'd still understand Alfred, but it slows change, and it forces compensating repairs.

For example, when all those old English word endings eroded, confusion loomed.

If I say the dog bit the man but you hear it as the man bit the dog because I omitted the case markers that distinguish subjects from objects, things are going to get awkward fast.

So English developed a fix.

Word order became rigid.

In Alfred's time, you could arrange words freely because the endings carried the grammatical signal.