Ago

If you’re learning English as a second language, how do you pronounce the word ago? It seems straightforward: every dictionary and every native speaker will tell you agó.

You’ll pronounce it that way, and you’ll sound overeager and stilted. Three yéars agó. Two wéeks agó. A mónth agó. How lóng agó? It’s a stabbing rhythm that no native English speaker would ever use in this context. By contrast, in lots of European languages you do find that rhythm for the equivalent phrase: tertio anno ante, twee weken geleden, un mese fa, wie lange her? There are even dialectical or archaic words in English that display it: Five-and-thirty year agóne, not half an hour sínce, a gliff sýne. But not ago. 

This is the rule: when ago is used to qualify a specific amount of elapsed time, it gets attached as an unaccented enclitic to the foregoing word. Three yéarsago. Two wéeksago. A mónthago. How lóngago? A long tímeago. The same rule applies to time in the future, but with the enclitic from now — three yéarsfromnow, two wéeksfromnow, a mónthfromnow, how lóngfromnow? Here ago functions as an adjective, and modifies the unit of time to which it’s attached to make up a larger adverbial phrase. 

But there’s another family of phrases in which ‘ago’ does get accented. Lóng agó. Nót lóng agó. A lóng tíme agó in a galaxy far, far away. Or even, in a certain kind of utterance (perhaps you’re gazing wistfully into the fire): that was many yéars agó. This version of ago has a full accent on the second syllable, just like the dictionary says.

It is not an adjective at all, but an adverb in its own right meaning something like aforetime. When you say long agó, you’re not conveying any practical information about how far into the past a given event took place, but merely emphasizing that it is distant from the present. Here the grammatical relation between the two words is reversed: ago doesn’t modify long, but the other way around. More specifically, long functions as an intensifying qualifier for the adverb ago.

Thus there are in fact two ago’s that are clearly distinguishable in their grammar, pronunciation and prosody. The only complicating consideration is that one sometimes says long ago in order to really specify an amount of time. Though in writing it can sometimes look identical to the phrase I’ve just described, it’s actually just an instance of the enclitic ago and gets pronounced accordingly. The distinction is plain in speech. For example, imagine that your co-worker tells you that he signed some documents. You ask: How lóngago was that? (You’re actually wondering how long ago it was). Oh, not lóngago, he answers. And now imagine that your old friend from school brings up the time your teacher got eaten by a crocodile, and you exclaim: how lóng agó that was! Here you don’t mean to specify any particular amount of time, but are pointing to the passage of time itself.

The Oxford English Dictionary makes the correct distinction between adjective and adverb, even though it only offers the single pronunciation /əˈɡoʊ/ for both uses of the word. This is plainly wrong as far as modern usage is concerned. But it raises a problem of word-history, because after all it seems clear that at some stage in history ago really was pronounced with a full accent in both of its uses. Only at a later stage did adjective-ago decay into an enclitic. But just how long ago this took place is difficult to establish from written sources alone.

Poetry can be some help. For example, when Chaucer wrote 

I speke of manye hundred yeres ago
But now can no man see none elves mo

he didn’t seem to treat ago any differently than in the verses

And farewel! al our revel was ago

or 

‘Yis’ quod this carpenter, ‘ful yore ago’.

It would be no little task to trace the prosody of ago from the Middle Ages down to the present. And it would be made only more difficult by the fact that the meter’s own accentual claims were always liable to interfere with the natural pronunciation of a word. Quærere distuli; nec scire fas est omnia.