Tolkien used the colloquial or dialectal expression hear tell a few times in The Lord of the Rings. This expression appears in lots of dictionaries, and its meaning is simple to explain: to hear it said or to have been told (of). The interesting thing about this expression, to my mind, is the grammar. It looks like two main verbs in a row, but that is a pretty uncommon pattern in English. So is that what it is? Or is something else going on?
The Data
The expression appears five times, all in The Fellowship of the Ring. Four of those were said by Hobbits: Sam twice, Ted Sandyman, and an unnamed stranger. One was said by Gimli. The relevant quotes are below.
‘There’s a tidy bit of money tucked away up there, I hear tell,’ said a stranger, a visitor on business from Michel Delving in the Westfarthing.
The Fellowship of the Ring, A Long-expected Party
I heard tell of them [dragons] when I was a youngster, but there’s no call to believe in them now. (Ted Sandyman)
The Fellowship of the Ring, The Shadow of the Past
And I’ve heard tell that Elves are moving west. (Sam Gamgee)
The Fellowship of the Ring, The Shadow of the Past
Mithril! I have never seen or heard tell of one so fair. (Gimli Son of Gloin)
The Fellowship of the Ring, Lothlórien
I thought that Elves were all for moon and stars: but this is more Elvish than anything I ever heard tell of. (Sam Gamgee)
The Fellowship of the Ring, Lothlórien
Right away, we can see that there are two variants of the expression. In one variant, the object of the verb is a finite clause detailing information that is reported. The stranger has heard the rumor that there is lots of money in Bag End, and Sam has “heard tell” news that Elves are heading west.
The other variant uses the preposition of to introduce the topic. Ted has heard of dragons, Gimli has never heard of such a beautiful mithril shirt, and Sam has heard of various Elvish things.
Both patterns are also found with the individual verbs of our expression. You can “hear (that)” something happened; or “hear of” something; you can “tell (that)” something happened; or you can “tell of” something. Indeed, both patterns can be used with a wide variety of verbs, including also know and read. The two variants essentially seem to be patterns in the way topics of information can be introduced into a sentence, rather than something particularly noteworthy of the verb.
Another point to consider is the relationship between the verb(s) and the subject. Ted Sandyman has heard something regarding dragons, he doesn’t tell something regarding dragons. The stranger in the inn has heard about Bilbo’s wealth, but isn’t necessarily spreading the rumors himself. The subject of the sentence, in other words, has a relationship with the verb “hear”, but there seems to be an implied third party subject of “tell”. The relationship between the subject of the sentence and “tell” is more passive-like, but the verb is in the uninflected active form, not in the passive form.
Speaking of inflection, notice the tense marking. Logically speaking, there are three possibilities to mark past tense in a sequence with two verbs: “heard told”, “hear told”, and “heard tell”. The observed past tense is the last one, “heard tell”. Only one of the two words is marked, and it’s the first one.
That is only relevant, though, if “tell” is a verb. “Tell” can be a noun in English. Nouns in English are often divided into mass nouns and count nouns. Mass nouns do not need an article or plural marking to appear in a sentence (“Water is wet”), while count nouns do (“Dogs bark” and “The clothes make the man”). Our “tell” is not plural, nor is it preceded by an article.
Origins
Let’s start with the origins of this expression. Originally, in Old English as in Modern English, one could say something like “I heard him say”. In fact, you can get some kind of equivalent sentence in virtually any language. One way in which Old English and Middle English differed from Modern English, though, is in the treatment of indefinite subjects. That is, subjects that do not refer to a specific person or group, like “People say” or “Someone said”. For present purposes, we are talking about sentences like “I heard someone say”. In Modern English, we must use a word to for such indefinite individuals. We are very strict about that kind of thing nowadays. But in Old and Middle English, such non-referential arguments could be left out. Thus, in those older varieties of our language, we would say something equivalent to: “I heard say that”, meaning “I heard someone say that”.
Some examples are included below. Notice that while they all start with a form of “hear”, the accompanying verb varies: secgan ‘say’, told ‘told’, and spek ‘speak’. Here’s an example from Beowulf (lines 580-581) (copied from the OED and confirmed online). The order of the verbs is reversed from Modern English, but the pattern is there.
No ic wiht fram þe swylcra searoniða secgan hyrde.
‘Nor have I heard (anyone) speak of you and any such efforts’.
Another quote from the OED dated to 1330:
I haf herd told of þis duke Roberd.
‘I have heard (some) tell of this Duke Roberd.
From 1470:
I her spek of that man.
‘I hear (some) tell of that man.’
This tolerance for omitting indefinite arguments has vanished from Modern English. If we render any of the three examples above into Modern English, they sound quite bad: “Nor have I heard say of you”; “I have heard told of this duke”; “I hear speak of that man”.
For some reason, we have held onto the pattern just for “hear tell” as a set expression. If you go back and look through Tolkien’s uses again, you see that you can insert a “people” or “someone” between the two verbs and still get essentially the same meaning. Nowadays, “hear tell” is just a memorized expression.
A Point of Philosophy
One of the assumptions of modern syntactic theory is that the grammar of a language can generate all acceptable utterances. That is, if speakers of a language judge that a sentence is acceptable, then the grammar proposed by linguists must be able to account for it. Conversely, if speakers judge that a sentence is not acceptable, our grammatical description should be able to say why not. (That’s setting aside issues of speech errors, processing extremely complex sentences, and other things that just don’t enter into the topic of this post.)
In Modern English, we do not have cause to believe that there is a grammatical rule that allows indefinite arguments to be omitted from a sentence between “hear” and a verb of communication. The grammar of English puts an (objective case) noun/pronoun in that position. We cannot leave that argument out.
- I heard him tell a story.
- They heard her say her prayers.
- We’ve heard people repeat a rumor.
- I heard someone say the password.
Except in “hear tell”.
So, how should we handle this? I will consider two analyses.
Compound Verb
Since this pattern originally emerged out of a sequence of two independent verbs, we could look at this expression is as a verb-verb compound. It would be the verb hear compounded with the verb tell, with this new meaning of “to hear it said”. English has verb-verb compounds, though not many. You can “kick-start” a motorcycle, “force-feed” an animal, and “test-drive” a sports car.
I have two reasons I do not like this analysis, however. Either one of them I feel to be fatal.
First, the pattern of inflection. With verb-verb compounds, inflection always falls on the final verb: kickstarted, force-fed, test-drove. But as we saw above, our expression has the past tense heard tell, the first verb is inflected. That does not match the standard English pattern.
The other reason has to do with the semantics of how compounds are formed in English. In many cases, one of the two words forming the compound acts as the main word, the “head”, as grammarians call it. A fire truck is a kind of “truck”; truck is the head. “What do your Elf-eyes see?” We are talking about “eyes”, Elf just being the qualifier of what kind of eyes, so eye is the head. When you “kickstart” the motorcycle, the main goal of the described action is starting the motorcycle, not kicking it. The “kicking” is just a part of the process of “starting”. So start is the head. (Not all compounds have heads: a Bigfoot is a creature, not a size or a foot.)
In English, the head of a compound comes at the end. But in our expression “hear tell”, the dominant meaning must be “hear”, the first of the two verbs. Analyzing our expression as a compound would break that pattern, just as it would the inflection pattern.
I consider this analysis to be untenable.
Verb Noun Sequence
For our next analysis, let’s go with the idea that tell is a noun. This would make the expression a typical verb-object sequence, where the object does not include an article. Is there any reason to believe that is a good or bad analysis?
Other nouns behave the same in this context. As two relevant examples, consider news and rumor. Both are singular nouns, though news is a mass noun (“That is good news“) and rumor is a count noun (“That is just a rumor“). Both of them can be a bare singular object of hear: “We heard news of the accident” and “We’ve heard rumor of his declining health”. Tell in this case seems to have a meaning quite comparable to both news and rumor, so I see nothing wrong with such an analysis from a grammar point-of-view.
The only potential problem I see is somewhat troublesome, but not insurmountable. As far as I can tell, this proposed use of “tell” only ever appears in this one expression. Tell with the meaning of “news” or “rumor” or “that which is told” does not show up in regular, everyday writing. Generally speaking, “a tell” is a non-verbal, unconscious thing that you do that betrays your inner thoughts or feelings. That is a far cry different from the way it is being used here. This means we would be inventing a meaning for the word just to cover this one case. Not ideal.
But also not impossible. Some words have very restricted uses, sometimes only a single expression. Take the verb wine, for example. The verb? You can say: “He wined and dined his top client”. Wine in this case is acting as a transitive verb. But people do not usually use wine alone. “He wined his customers” sounds decidedly odd. This verb really likes to occur in the expression “wine and dine” (or sometimes “dine and wine”, though this is less common). Or consider: “That hotel nickels and dimes its guests”. These verbal senses of nickel and dime only show up in this exact expression.
While it is not ideal to say that tell has a nominal meaning that only shows up in one expression, it wouldn’t be unheard of in a language. This analysis has a problem, but not a fatal one.
Conclusion
Of these two analyses, it seems to me that taking “hear tell” as an idiomatic sequence of verb and noun is the best approach. There is a minor difficulty in giving tell a meaning unique to this structure, but it is preferable to breaking the grammatical rules of verb behavior that result from taking tell to be verb.
A Hobby for the Tome 