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This seriously has me perplexed. I feel examples would better explain my question:

"What did you eat?" vs "What ate you?" *

Where did you go? vs "Where went you"?

using negation: not

"I ate not bread today" vs "I did not eat bread today"

"Did you eat bread today? Yes, I ate bread today, but he did not eat bread today." (why inconsistent use of "do"?)

*"what ate you" may be ambiguous on the subject or who is doing the eating due to no difference between the subject and object form of the formal second person "you", unlike familiar "thou/thee" which makes the sentence so much clearer: "what atest thou" vs "what ateth thee"

Cadmus
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2 Answers2

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This phenomenon is known as do-support. As for why it exists, Wikipedia has this to say:

The origins of the construction in English are debated: some scholars argue it was already present in Old English, but not written due to stigmatization.  Scholars disagree whether the construction arose from the use of "do" as a lexical verb in its own right, or whether periphrastic "do" arose from a causative meaning of the verb or vice versa.  Examples of auxiliary "do" in Old English writing appear to be limited to its use in a causative sense, which is parallel to the earliest uses in other West Germanic languages. Some scholars, such as linguist John McWhorter, argue that the construction arose via the influence of Celtic speakers. Others contend that the construction arose as a form of creolization when native speakers addressed foreigners and children.

alphabet
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Your examples are showcasing:

  1. interrogative clauses (commonly known as "questions"). In English, questions are formed by inverting the subject-verb order and using the conjugated form of "to do" as an auxiliary verb (called "Do-support") with the original verb as a bare infinitive.

For Wh-questions, which use Wh-words, the Wh-word is put at the front of the the clause (this is called "Wh-fronting"), but the inversion still stands.

These "Wh-words" are either interrogative determiners (e.g., "Which farm did that?"), or interrogative pronouns (e.g., "Who did this?")

  1. Negations (which are the negative clauses, which use negative polarity items). In English, the negation is formed by using the conjugated form of "to do" as an auxiliary verb (called "Do-support") with the original verb as a bare infinitive.
Greybeard
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ARGYROU MINAS
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  • Negation requires an auxiliary verb, and so does subject-auxiliary inversion, which is required for questions. Do-Support provides a dummy auxiliary when one is required, but there is not one in the clause. So naturally those are the examples. – John Lawler May 05 '23 at 22:48
  • Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please [edit] to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center. – Community May 05 '23 at 22:50
  • @JohnLawler I don't understand, are you suggesting I edit the answer to provide more info? Is there anything wrong with my answer? – ARGYROU MINAS May 05 '23 at 23:02
  • Also is there an actual requirement of using an auxiliary verb? I know inversion is required. The reason I asked this is that other similar languages like spanish and german and archaic english followed very similar rules (spanish and german still dont use "do" with "not") – Cadmus May 05 '23 at 23:08
  • English no longer makes questions by inversion alone. The inversion must be between the subject and the first auxiliary verb. In German one can ask Kam er?, but in English you can't say *Came he? since there's no auxiliary. In this situation, one uses do, which is a dummy like the it of It's raining. – John Lawler May 05 '23 at 23:14
  • Incidentally, I just posted a question of my own (the reason I came to this community today in the first place :P ) regarding questions without the inversion. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/607126/negative-interrogatives-questions-without-do-support-didnt-you-have-a-lectu – ARGYROU MINAS May 05 '23 at 23:17
  • What about "Whence came you?" – Cadmus May 06 '23 at 03:34