Whither Goest Thou?

That phrase has a tendency to turn up occasionally in books, sermons and poetical works. It is, as many such quotes are, Biblical in origin, although for some reason I thought I remembered seeing in in a poem by Keats or Tennyson at some point.

No doubt I did, but not as the first line, which is where my brain was subconsciously putting it.

Perhaps most famously, in recent years, it was used by Jack Kerouac in The Road. But it has also made an appearance in a variety of other works over the past couple of centuries.

It was the "modern" English translation of the Latin phrase "Quo Vadis" back when the Bible was first translated into vernacular English. Well, someone's vernacular. Vernacular enough for most English speakers to understand it when the dude on the funny stage read from in on a Sunday morning, which put it miles ahead of the Latin version.

What I like about it is the fact that it contains three words we don't use in English any more - but more than that, it actually uses three morphological constructs we don't use any more. This simple question contains entire language concepts that have been dropped from the English language.

I bet you ten dollars that, if you walked into a hair dresser's or a supermarket and asked the nearest twenty-something native English speaker to explain the grammar and vocabulary involved in those three words, they wouldn't be able to. Many of them would probably struggle to tell you what the question even means. We simply don't have those words or those grammatical constructs in our language anymore.

BUT - and here's the kicker - almost everyone else is still using them. If we understood what went into the question "whither goest thou?", we would be in a better position to learn other European languages. Having studied Shakespeare, Middle English and Anglo Saxon in my youth, I've long had the opportunity to wrap my head around these concepts, but I've seen how the other people in my class struggle with them.

You can sometimes see people not only struggling, but actively resisting. "It's too complicated!" you can feel them saying, "why do I have to learn something I never use in my own language?"

I do it myself with Estonian. There are a few points where my brain just says "Nope, that's a little bit stupid, and I'm not playing". I'm trying to talk myself out of such behaviour - to just relax my grip on what a language should do, and accept what it actually does instead, but sometimes things are just a little too "foreign" for my tiny brain, and I find myself trying to push the English simplicity onto the Estonian complexity. It never works, unfortunately.

Anyway, back to "whither goest thou?"

To start with: Whither.

We once had three different words to express what we now cover with "where".

Whither? = where to?
Where? = where (now)?
Whence? = where from?

Bad joke that only works with abandoned interrogatives:

Two men were walking over a bridge when they stopped to look into the brook. One sighed deeply and said: "Look at those fish! They are such happy little fish." The other man looked at him with disdain and said: "You can't say that. Whence do you know they are happy?" The first man thought about it for a little while and said: "I know it from this bridge."

Yeah, I know. Terrible and not very funny, but it showcases the way we used to use our language. Whence was used to discuss time and place, and was often used to mean "how?" so there's a little play on multiple meanings in there. If you think about it carefully, you still won't find it funny.

Anyway, as I was saying, many other modern European languages still use separate words for these concepts - especially those which, like English, come from Germanic origins. Take German, for example:

Whither? = Wohin?
Where? = Wo?
Whence? = Woher?

Or try Russian on for size:

Whither? = куда?
Where? = где?
Whence? = откуда?

Estonian:

Whither? = Kuhu?
Where? = Kus?
Whence? = Kust?

Italian (and French) does more or less the same as modern English, and has one word for "where", to which they add words to indicate the "to" or "from". That word, by the way, is "dove". I recently spend a good ten minutes on a bus trying to remember what the word "dove" meant. I passed a street called Dove Street, and the phrase "dove andiamo" popped into my head, and for the life of me I could not remember what "dove" meant. I could remember that "andiamo" was "we go" or "let's go", but for some reason I just couldn't put the pieces of the puzzle together. This was made doubly annoying because I'm not learning Italian, and therefore shouldn't care.

To continue: "Goest" and "thou"

These two are quite closely related. You see, once upon a time, we changed the endings of our verbs to match the person doing them. It's called verb conjugation, and we don't do it anymore. Not really. Not in anyway that we actually notice. Pretty much everyone else does, though. When we did it, it looked a bit like this:

I go
Thou goest
He/she/it goeth
We/you/they ...

Well, actually, the plurals are a bit tricky. Depending on where you came from, it may be "goeth", "go" or something else. But whatever it was, all of the plurals were the same.

These days we have:

I/we/you/they go
He/she/it goes

So "goeth" is the verb "go" in second person singular conjugation. Which makes perfect sense, because it is with the word "thou", which is the second person singular pronoun.

As I have previously rabbited on about, we used to have plural and singular second person pronouns (actually, we also had a dual form, but quite frankly that was just weird). That's exactly what most other languages have. You have "I" and "me", "thou" and "you", "he/she/it" and "they".

The plural also doubles as the polite form, so you might address a singular person as "you" or "vous" or "Sie" or "teie" (depending on the language) until you got to know them better, or unless they were noticeably younger (or poorer) than you. You would use "thou" for a youth, a peasant or a friend.

So, in the question: "Whither goest thou?", we have an interrogative we no longer use, a verb conjugation we no longer use and a pronoun we no longer use - but all of which are still in use in other European languages.

Not bad for something that is, essentially, a friendly way to say "where are you going?"