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Teow: I love linguistic questions!

I scurried around and found a PDF of a study done on the history and development of do-support in English. You can read the full story here. It's a bit difficult, for me at least, to get my head around the technical grammatical reasons for why this development took place, but I can take home the main story of what happened.

"Do-support" is the use of the word "do, does, did" in compound verb constructions. In Modern English usage, it is most commonly found in:

1) negative declaratives (NEG DECL)

I did not steal the cookies from the cookie jar!

2) negative questions (NEG Qs),

Did you not think about the consequences?

3) affirmative transitive adverbial and yes/no questions (AFF TRANS & Y/N Qs)

Did you steal the cookies from the cookie jar?

4) affirmative intransitive adverbial and yes/no questions (AFF INTRANS & Y/N Qs)

Did you cry at all?

5) affirmative wh-object questions (AFF wh-Qs)

What did you think was going to happen?

But the construction you're looking for in the example "I did weep" is apparently called the "contact-do", where a "do, does, did" is simply inserted in front of a verb. Sometimes this occurs in Modern English without sounding archaic. I'll steal the examples from the study I referenced:

a. We do HOPE that you have had a pleasant flight, and that you will consider Albatross Airlines when making future travel plans.

b. My Point...And I Do HAVE One [Ellen DeGeneres]

To me it sounds like some kind of emphasis is implied, but the author of the study says that there might be some other shade of meaning to it.

Now for the history. Apparently Old English did not use auxiliaries with verbs, or did not have as much dependance on auxiliaries as English does now. It was like German in this respect:

Old English, an early ancestor of Modern English, was a Germanic language with many of the properties of contemporary German. Most importantly, Old English was essentially a V2 language, verbs were fully inflected, and there was no distinct subclass of modal verbs comparable to what we find in Modern English. (Culicover, p. 2-3)

So Old English started off without do's in front of verbs. But then many technical things (beyond my ability to keep up with this paper) happened and in Middle English, and all of the six aforementioned types of do-support came into play. Apparently the first five constructions were not quite as universally applied as the last one, the contact-do. But while all of the first five types gained more prominence, the contact-do ("he did grieve") mostly faded from view by the end of the 17th century.

Each of these grows in the percentage of cases that do is used versus the percentage of cases where it could be used, from the period 1400–1425 to the period 1650–1675, with the exception of contact-do. This use peaked in the mid-16th century and then declined until it was virtually unattested by the end of the 17th century. (Culicover, p. 34)

Apparently specific verbs like know, say, and think didn't take do-support in negative constructions (do-support type 1) until comparatively recently, from the end of the 19th century. Hence we still might say if we're being ironic or dramatic, "I think not!" or "I know not the law of this place."

Hope that gives an idea of what happened

Ooh good luck with the cosplay! That's pretty hardcore that you'll be dyeying your hair colour for the Doctor Who screening though. I hope it all comes together very nicely.

A woman is so proud of her ninja turtle poodle.

NO WAYYYYYYY

And yeah, I used to really passionately dislike the art of Tomokazu Komiya, but now it looks really interesting compared to all the other TCG artists. I love how the flat colours interact. The one style that I never got around to liking, though, was the 3-D rendering kind of style. The one that looks like an artist made it in a 3D program, back before 3D programs were good.

Happy birthday Buizel! I hope it's been an awesome day!

CHANT