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The verb "do" often serves a meaningless purpose in questions. John McWhorter argues in his book "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" that this is a direct influence of the Celtic languages. In all of my studies of linguistics and philology I have never before seen anything concerning this hypothesis. Is this a widely accepted theory? If so, who are some other proponents? If not, what are other theories about the origin of the meaningless "do?"

Example of meaningless "do." Do we need to go to the store?

In most languages, this phrase would roughly be stated as... Need we go to the store?

Thank you in advance for your answers.

Caleb Scott Bunch
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  • Is it really true that most languages use subject/verb inversion to convey "question format"? That seems counter-intuitive to me. The only other language I know is French, which obviously shares many syntactic features with English, so it's hardly surprising French works that way too. But globally? – FumbleFingers Nov 20 '15 at 21:56
  • @FumbleFingers I certainly can't answer for all languages but in the only two I know at least somewhat this seems to work. In German you would (I believe) have "Mussen wir zur Schule gehen?" when you're asking whether we need to go to school whereas "Wir mussen zur Schule gehen." states a fact. Surprisingly (to me when I thought about it) in Czech the question and the statement are only distinguished by intonation. Both would be "Musime jit do skoly./?" and whether you're asking or stating a fact depends on whether there is rising intonation at the end of the sentence. – DRF Nov 20 '15 at 22:32
  • I would point out that I've left out a decent amount of diacritics in the sentences. Mainly because tex doesn't work here and I'm too lazy to try and figure out how to type them. – DRF Nov 20 '15 at 22:33

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