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Question about language grammar etymology. In French the question «Do you love?» can be written as «Aimez-vous?» in German — «Mögen Sie?», but in English — «Do you love?». Why should we use the verb «to do» in order to form the question? Why, according to the English grammar, it is not possible to build the question only with words inversion, e.g. «Love you?» like in French or German?

In other words, why English which has quite a common Latin/Roman base with French and German has such different question building form.

Thanks.

Mike
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    Because we hold on a running vote on how we're going to do things and that's what won. ... Why is very rarely an answerable question in linguistics. – StoneyB on hiatus Apr 28 '14 at 18:46
  • And... have we no questions without "do"? – oerkelens Apr 28 '14 at 18:48
  • I'm not sure if this is on-topic on ELU or not, but I don't think it is here... "Why does English do something other languages don't" doesn't seem in scope, and I think Stoney's right that it's probably not answerable. But I'm going to pass this question over to ELU and see what they think of it; maybe there's some interesting scholarly answer about the evolution of language that someone over there can come up with :) – WendiKidd Apr 28 '14 at 18:53
  • English has a common Latin/Roman-base with such European languages, as French and German, including set of tenses, words etc. And that is why I'm asking about difference in question building rules. – Mike Apr 28 '14 at 19:04
  • @snailboat, my question is kind of grammar etymology, why English uses such form of question building, with verb to do and not just word inversion. – Mike Apr 28 '14 at 19:08
  • See What is the origin of the 'do' construction?, the question I am closing this as a duplicate of, and our dedicated do-support tag. – RegDwigнt Apr 28 '14 at 19:19
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    And of course "English which has quite a common Latin/Roman base with French and German" is rather inaccurate to say the least. English is a Germanic language, French is a Romanian one. Completely different word families. Note that Slavic languages form questions in a different manner from both English and French, and Japanese forms questions in a completely different manner still. Different languages are different, otherwise they'd be the same language. – RegDwigнt Apr 28 '14 at 19:25
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    Also, in French questions, inversion is unusual. The more common way of asking a question is a rising intonation. Vous aimez le foot ? – KCH Apr 28 '14 at 22:47
  • When you ask a question using "do" Do you... ?, or use do in negative form I don't.... You're not using the verb "to do" but an auxiliary. You mustn't view it as a verb because it has no lexical signification. You can view it as a prop to the verb that helps build a question since there's a rule (as others have told you in natural languages rules are usually arbitrary as far as grammar is concerned) that a negative or interrogative sentence needs an auxiliary, "do/did" is the auxiliary (i.e. "help", "prop") that is used when no other auxiliary is needed. – None Apr 29 '14 at 10:06
  • @KCH. I would not say question inversion is unusual in French. It's just not as common as using est-ce que which can be compared to auxiliary do in English, as far as questions are concerned, doesn't work with negative sentences of course. Question by intonation Vous aimez le foot? is only used in spoken French and not considered correct when writing. – None Apr 29 '14 at 10:14
  • @RegDwigнt. I think it would be worth pointing to that question I've just hit upon. – None Apr 29 '14 at 10:17
  • @Laure right on, but that's exactly what I tried. The word "question" in my comment is linked to just there and this question is closed as a duplicate of that. :)) – RegDwigнt Apr 29 '14 at 17:22
  • @RegDwigнt. Sorry, I'd only seen your link to that question What is the origin of the 'do' construction?. Hadn't see the one to English questions and negation with do in syntax – None Apr 29 '14 at 17:30
  • @Laure yeah I probably made it unnecessarily confusing by linking to two questions rather than just one. The idea was to cover all bases, to provide the best overview. There are more related questions still linked from either. But your latter link and the duplicate notice on this post do point to the same place, which got pretty much the best answer so far, and by an actual linguist to boot. – RegDwigнt Apr 29 '14 at 17:35

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The simple answer, of course, is for mutual intelligibility--because you have to pick one order, and there's no particular reason to pick one over another.

If you're asking about etymology, we can venture a guess as to what caused the split between English grammar and the German and French varieties. In Middle English and Early Modern English, you could form some questions using a construction similar to the French:

Lovest thou me?

was equivalent to:

Dost thou love me?

Note the -st ending on the verbs, which indicated the second person singular. English later lost this ending and the distinct second person singular pronoun.

At the same time, the "do" construction was used in the imperative as well as for questions:

Do you love him, madam; love him well.

You could also frame the imperative as:

Love thou; love and be loved in return.

Without the -st marker to separate "do thou love him" from "dost thou love him," or "love thou" from "lovest thou," there was an ambiguity. And speakers resolved that ambiguity, as of today, by reserving "do you" for questions and "love [you]" for the imperative.

chapka
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