Why does 'Here comes he' sound so wrong?

Inverted Word Order in English

0:00Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. This week we'll talk about why here comes the bride sounds right, but here comes he doesn't. And then I have an update about Zipf's Law. Here comes the bride. Down came the rain. There goes the neighborhood. Here comes the sun. These are familiar English phrases. At a glance, they seem unremarkable. The words are simple.

0:30Their meanings are clear. Yet each of these sentences uses an unusual form of English word order. The subject comes after the verb. In English, the subject of a sentence usually comes first, followed by the verb. For example, I run. You go. She sleeps. But in the phrases we just looked at, the verb comes before the subject. Here comes the bride. If we convert these phrases into the usual English word order, we get the bride comes here, the rain came down, the neighborhood goes

1:05there, and the sun comes here. When we set these phrases right, they often sound wrong. So how did these phrases end up backwards, so to speak? And why does this unusual word order give them a different feel from their more normally phrased counterparts? Well, the answer is buried in a far corner in the history of the English language. Even though we still call it English, Old English was spoken so long ago that it barely resembles the English we speak today. One major difference between Modern

1:40English and Old English is that Old English had a much more flexible word order. This is partly because Old English nouns changed form depending on their role in the sentence. Those changes gave listeners clues about who was doing what to whom, separately from the word order of those words in a sentence. By contrast, Modern English relies much more heavily on word order to convey who does what to whom. In the sentence, the man made of fire, we know the man is the subject because it comes before the verb,

2:16and a fire is the object because it comes after it. Switch them around, a fire made the man, and meaning changes completely. In spite of this flexibility, Old English did have some regular patterns for arranging words, though. One important pattern was that verbs tended to come second. To put it another way, when something other than the subject came first in a sentence, the verb usually still followed it. This is easiest to see with an example. In Old English,

2:50you could say something like, the king came. That's the word order we're familiar with today. The subject comes first, followed by the verb. But in Old English, you could also say, then came the king. Here, then is the first word in the sentence. But notice that the verb came still comes right after it. In both example sentences, the verb is in the second position. That's what linguists call a verb second or V2 pattern. In Modern English, then came the king sounds like an inversion because we expect

3:26the subject to come before the verb. But in Old English, this kind of word order was perfectly normal. As centuries passed, the complex system of Old English noun endings faded away, and the subject first word order that defines English today became standard. Yet the inverted construction we've been discussing survived as an exception to the new standard. Its survival might seem kind of random, but it actually serves a useful communicative purpose. For example, phrases like, here comes the bride,

4:01there stood a house, and down came the rain. I'll put a direction or location at the beginning of the sentence. That gives them an announcement-like quality. Here is where something happened. There is where something exists. By putting the location or direction first, we establish the setting and then introduce the person or thing that appears. The effect is almost cinematic. Rather than simply describing what happened, we've given the sense of watching something unfold in real time. This construction

4:37gives the sentence a sense of action or urgency, something linguists describe as a presentational function. As it turns out, this inverted construction isn't limited to fixed phrases. We can also use it to create completely new sentences, like, here comes our train. Into the room walked a stranger. There go our chances of winning this game. These sentences sound totally natural, and you probably use similar constructions all the time without realizing it. But there is one thing that doesn't work with this

5:12construction. Pronouns. Try substituting he, she, or it into the sentences we just considered, and suddenly they sound off. Here comes it. Into the room walked she. There goes it. These might work for poetry or quirky wordplay, but you'd be hard-pressed to hear versions of these in everyday speech. So why? Well, as we've already seen, this construction is for introducing or announcing something. Pronouns, by contrast, tend to

5:45refer to something that has already been introduced. The difference between here comes John and here he comes is subtle but important. Here comes John announces John's arrival. Here he comes assumes we already know who John is. Our attention is simply being drawn to him as he arrives. This construction is an exception to the usual rules of English word order. But as we can see, even exceptions have rules. This

6:16particular pattern might be a holdover from Old English, but incredibly, English speakers today have an intuitive sense of which words can participate in this pattern and which ones can't. Of course, most of us navigate these rules without consciously knowing what they are, why they exist, or where they came from. When we hear, here comes John, we just think, yep, that sounds right. Well, here comes he, immediately strikes us as wrong. This little quirk of English is a testament to two important points. First, there's an

6:50enormous amount of implicit grammar we never learn in a classroom but somehow master anyway. And second, exceptions in language usually aren't random. There's often a reason why our language works the way it does. If we look closely at language and its history, even the most obscure and seemingly trivial exceptions to the rules often have a story behind them. That segment was written by Ray Belly, a longtime podcaster, musician, and language writer. You can find him at wordsforgranted.libson.com,

7:23and we'll put that link in the show notes.

Zipf's Law in Birdsong

7:34Next, I have a quick update about Zipf's Law, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago. That's the pattern where the most common words appear about twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third, and so on. You may remember that I said researchers had found that the sounds whales and maybe dolphins make follow Zipf's Law. Well, I just saw that researchers might have found that bird songs follow Zipf's Law too. The team, led by Tucker Gilman at University of Manchester, looked at recordings of about 560 birds in 11 different populations that

8:09included seven different species. The effect wasn't as strong as what people find in human written language and only appeared when they looked across all 11 populations together, but the researchers say the results are consistent with Zipf's Law in birdsong, and they want to study more bird populations

Family Words and Metathesis

8:26to confirm it. Finally, I have a familect story from Krista Hanna. Hi, Grammar Girl. My name's Krista Hanna Thompson. I'm in Ontario, Canada, and I have a familect that's accidentally two generations. So, when I was a kid, I had two younger brothers, and one of them, and I can't remember which, started calling spaghetti peschetti, and we all adopted it. So, for years, until we were all teenagers, we all called it peschetti, and at some point, we became too cool for peschetti and started

9:00calling it spaghetti. Well, when my now eldest child, who's 12, was a very little girl, she started calling it peschetti instead of spaghetti. So, I just went with it, and right now, my two kids will, now she said she's 12, so she's starting to call it spaghetti sometimes, but often, I get requests for peschetti. So, that familect accidentally spent two generations, and I suspect it's just with the sound being moved from spa to pus, I'm suspecting that's probably a pretty common familect. Thanks,

9:35Krista, Hannah. How fun! And you're right that people, and especially kids, switch sounds in words like that a lot. Linguists call it metathesis, and it's how we got the words bird and horse, which were originally brid and hross. And if anyone wants to hear more, I covered it back in episode 973, when I was writing about why people say nuclear instead of nuclear. Thanks so much for the call. Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Nat Hoops, Morgan Christensen, Maram El-Nagib,

10:09Stephen Schepanski, Holly Hutchings, Dan Feyerabend, and Rebecca Sebastian, who has five tattoos and is ready for her sixth. And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to like and subscribe.