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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English
A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar
Why do we say "I am reading a catalog" instead of "I read a catalog"? Why do we say "do" at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Language distills hundreds of years of fascinating lore into one lively history.
Covering such turning points as the little-known Celtic and Welsh influences on English, the impact of the Viking raids and the Norman Conquest, and the Germanic invasions that started it all during the fifth century ad, John McWhorter narrates this colorful evolution with vigor. Drawing on revolutionary genetic and linguistic research as well as a cache of remarkable trivia about the origins of English words and syntax patterns, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue ultimately demonstrates the arbitrary, maddening nature of English--and its ironic simplicity due to its role as a streamlined lingua franca during the early formation of Britain. This is the book that language aficionados worldwide have been waiting for (and no, it's not a sin to end a sentence with a preposition).
Why do we say "I am reading a catalog" instead of "I read a catalog"? Why do we say "do" at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Language distills hundreds of years of fascinating lore into one lively history.
Covering such turning points as the little-known Celtic and Welsh influences on English, the impact of the Viking raids and the Norman Conquest, and the Germanic invasions that started it all during the fifth century ad, John McWhorter narrates this colorful evolution with vigor. Drawing on revolutionary genetic and linguistic research as well as a cache of remarkable trivia about the origins of English words and syntax patterns, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue ultimately demonstrates the arbitrary, maddening nature of English--and its ironic simplicity due to its role as a streamlined lingua franca during the early formation of Britain. This is the book that language aficionados worldwide have been waiting for (and no, it's not a sin to end a sentence with a preposition).
230 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2008
About the author
John McWhorter
42 books1,601 followersJohn Hamilton McWhorter (Professor McWhorter uses neither his title nor his middle initial as an author) is an American academic and linguist who is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specializes on how creole languages form, and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena.
A popular writer, McWhorter has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, City Journal, The New Yorker, among others; he is also contributing editor at The Atlantic and hosts Slate's Lexicon Valley podcas
A popular writer, McWhorter has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, City Journal, The New Yorker, among others; he is also contributing editor at The Atlantic and hosts Slate's Lexicon Valley podcas
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 962 reviews
September 23, 2014
A fantastic book! I have not come across anyone, not even Steven Pinker, who does such a good job of showing you how exciting linguistics can be. His bold and unconventional history of the English language was full of ideas I'd never seen before, but which made excellent sense. And, before I get into the review proper, a contrite apology to Jordan. She gave it to me six months ago as a birthday present, and somehow I didn't open it until last week. Well, Jordan, thank you, and I'll try to be more alert next time!
So, the book. I'm a linguist of sorts myself, though a rather different kind to McWhorter: his work has centered around the things that happen to grammar when different languages come into contact with each other, while I use grammar as a way to construct speech-enabled software. But, as you'll see a bit later, the fact that we both give a central place to grammar means that our research directions have more to do with each other than you might first think. In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, McWhorter looks at the history of the English language from his unusual viewpoint. The language has clearly changed a lot since it came into existence; why did it evolve the way it did? McWhorter's answer is that the big changes happened when speakers of different languages started mingling together. He focuses on three changes of this kind.
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)
So, the book. I'm a linguist of sorts myself, though a rather different kind to McWhorter: his work has centered around the things that happen to grammar when different languages come into contact with each other, while I use grammar as a way to construct speech-enabled software. But, as you'll see a bit later, the fact that we both give a central place to grammar means that our research directions have more to do with each other than you might first think. In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, McWhorter looks at the history of the English language from his unusual viewpoint. The language has clearly changed a lot since it came into existence; why did it evolve the way it did? McWhorter's answer is that the big changes happened when speakers of different languages started mingling together. He focuses on three changes of this kind.
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)
June 25, 2024
English language is weird. It’s an oddball. It just doesn’t fit, just like that middle red-haired child that suspiciously looks a bit like the neighborhood milkman. And it’s nice to know that it’s not just the feeling of a former seven-year-old who still feel the mortification of trying to spell “Kat” instead of “Cat” on the blackboard in front of my classmates happily enjoying the Schadenfreude.
McWhorter notes that traditionally the “evolution” of English is presented more of, as Terry Pratchett once noted on an unrelated subject, “things just happen, what the hell”. Basically, take the Anglo-Saxon Germanic language of the invaders, add a pinch of Norman French, let it stew a bit and then sprinkle some seasoning of Shakespeare and voila! The weird things that don’t fit — like that pesky “do” in questions and negations, the lack of gendered nouns and case endings in verbs other than just in the third person singular, the “-ing” ending for present tense (“I’m writing” vs. normal and expected in other languages “I write”) or non-Germanic word order are kinda glanced over.
The oddness, however, as McWhorter argues, can be easily explained by the fact that Anglo-Saxons did not arrive into the linguistic vacuum but that a small number of newcomers got to rub elbows with the population the islands already had. Enter the Celts and all that Welshness that otherwise gets ignored.
And then the Vikings, running into all that Celtified language and simplifying it in the English-as-a-second-language style.
McWhorter here focuses on the grammar of English rather than the vocabulary, which was very interesting. He makes a good point (and a few hilarious examples) of how stringing words along without respect to the grammar of the foreign language, even if seemingly closely related, is comic at best. And English being what it is because the speakers of different languages spent time together is a wonderful idea - culture mixing at its best. Celts and Vikings according to him gave English its oddness, and proto-Germanic itself may have been the result of Semitic and perhaps even Phoenician influence, and the way he explains it really makes perfect sense, in the fun and engaging way, with some shade thrown at the language pedants and Sapir-Whorf hypothesis adherents in the process.
4.5 stars.
McWhorter notes that traditionally the “evolution” of English is presented more of, as Terry Pratchett once noted on an unrelated subject, “things just happen, what the hell”. Basically, take the Anglo-Saxon Germanic language of the invaders, add a pinch of Norman French, let it stew a bit and then sprinkle some seasoning of Shakespeare and voila! The weird things that don’t fit — like that pesky “do” in questions and negations, the lack of gendered nouns and case endings in verbs other than just in the third person singular, the “-ing” ending for present tense (“I’m writing” vs. normal and expected in other languages “I write”) or non-Germanic word order are kinda glanced over.
“Did you ever notice that when you learn a foreign language, one of the first things you have to unlearn as an English speaker is the way we use do in questions and in negative statements? Take Did you ever notice …? for example. Or I did not notice. We’re used to this do business, of course. But it’s kind of strange if you think about it. In this usage, do has no meaning whatsoever. It’s just there, but you have to use it. One cannot, speaking English, walk around saying things like Noticed you ever? or I not notice. English has something we will call meaningless do.”
The oddness, however, as McWhorter argues, can be easily explained by the fact that Anglo-Saxons did not arrive into the linguistic vacuum but that a small number of newcomers got to rub elbows with the population the islands already had. Enter the Celts and all that Welshness that otherwise gets ignored.
“English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.”
And then the Vikings, running into all that Celtified language and simplifying it in the English-as-a-second-language style.
“English, in this light, is the odd one out, and what distinguishes it from its relatives is that it underwent marauding hordes of Vikings who never went home, and proceeded to speak the language, as they did so much else, Their Way. They never wrote down that they were doing so—most of them couldn’t write anyway. But Icelandic stands as virtual confirmation that adult learners screwing things up was a key factor in how English came to be the way it is. The people who can still read ancient sagas live on a remote, undisturbed island. The people whose language became the most user-friendly member of the family live on an island nearer the Continent, that was, due to that proximity, lustily disturbed by invading migrants.”
McWhorter here focuses on the grammar of English rather than the vocabulary, which was very interesting. He makes a good point (and a few hilarious examples) of how stringing words along without respect to the grammar of the foreign language, even if seemingly closely related, is comic at best. And English being what it is because the speakers of different languages spent time together is a wonderful idea - culture mixing at its best. Celts and Vikings according to him gave English its oddness, and proto-Germanic itself may have been the result of Semitic and perhaps even Phoenician influence, and the way he explains it really makes perfect sense, in the fun and engaging way, with some shade thrown at the language pedants and Sapir-Whorf hypothesis adherents in the process.
4.5 stars.
April 13, 2023
I’ll just say at the outset that I’m not a linguist, nor someone with expertise in linguistics, so I’m not qualified to make a judgment on the author’s arguments as opposed to those of other linguists. What I can say with confidence is that I found this a marvellously entertaining book that also clarified many things for me in terms of the differences between English and other languages, and in how languages develop and change.
The examples I use below are mine and not taken from the book, so if I have made any mistakes they are mine and not the author’s.
English falls within the Germanic language group, and Prof. McWhorter shows us how it is something of a prodigal son, as the other Germanic languages match more closely to each other than any of them do with English. There are two particular aspects of English grammar which he attributes to the influence of the Celtic languages of the British Isles, what he terms “The Welshness of English.” One of those is the “do” construction in English, as when we say “Do you see/understand/know” etc. In the other Germanic languages, and indeed in most other Indo-European languages, these words are phrased with the equivalents of “see you/understand you/know you”. Those other languages don’t feel the need to throw in an extra “do”, and it’s argued that English adopted this from the Celtic languages spoken in Britain before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, and which would have continued alongside Old English for many generations. The second aspect is the use in English of the progressive present - constructions like “I am eating” or “I am writing”. In German the phrase “I am eating an apple” would be “Ich esse einen Apfel”. Frisian is described by academics as the language closest to English, and Google Translate tells me the same phrase in that language is ”Ik yt in appel”. Again, English is unusual in insisting on the “…ing” form, and again Prof. McWhorter attributes this to the influence of Celtic.
Intuitively this sounds right to me, as the progressive present is a very common form in Celtic. I live in an area where Scottish Gaelic was the majority language until about the 1960s, and it’s noticeable that the English spoken in this area uses the progressive present to a greater degree than elsewhere in the UK. People use constructions like “I’m seeing” and “I’m hearing” which are the forms used in Gaelic. I have neighbours who, when I visit them, will ask “Are you wanting a beer, Ian?” The “Are you wanting…” form would be considered odd outside the Highlands but almost exactly replicates the wording in Scottish Gaelic “A bheil thu ag iarraidh lionn?” (SG doesn’t use the indefinite article). You can imagine that when Gaelic speakers became bilingual they starting speaking English with syntax that matched their own language, and that has since been preserved in the local idiom.
Prof. McWhorter then turns to certain simplifications that have developed in English, such as the loss of gendered nouns, and the reduction in the number of cases. He argues that this came about through a merging of Old English with Old Norse in the early medieval period, when the island was settled by substantial numbers of Norse speakers. The two languages were quite similar but had differences, especially in case endings, and when the two groups interacted they may have smoothed out the niceties of grammar to aid understanding.
There’s a bit of a digression when Prof. McWhorter includes a section criticising the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, essentially the argument that an individual’s world view is significantly affected by the grammar they speak. He accepts that use of grammar may affect thought in very subtle ways and at a subconscious level, but not to anything like the degree often suggested. Personally I found his arguments persuasive, but have no personal expertise in the issue.
Lastly, Prof. McWhorter takes us all the way back to Proto-Germanic, and to certain unusual features which separated it from other early Indo-European languages, but which Proto-Germanic shared with the Semitic languages. He tentatively expresses support for a hypothesis that Proto-Germanic was influenced by Semitic speakers, most likely the Phoenicians, although he acknowledges the etymological evidence is thin, and that there is a major problem in terms of evidence that Proto-Germanic speakers ever interacted with the Phoenicians. This seemed the weakest of the arguments put forward in the book, but it was still an interesting idea to read about.
It may be that my enthusiasm for this book reflects my own lack of knowledge of the subject area. I’ve often said that my favourite books are those that introduce me to new ideas, and this definitely achieved that. For me, a tremendously enjoyable read.
The examples I use below are mine and not taken from the book, so if I have made any mistakes they are mine and not the author’s.
English falls within the Germanic language group, and Prof. McWhorter shows us how it is something of a prodigal son, as the other Germanic languages match more closely to each other than any of them do with English. There are two particular aspects of English grammar which he attributes to the influence of the Celtic languages of the British Isles, what he terms “The Welshness of English.” One of those is the “do” construction in English, as when we say “Do you see/understand/know” etc. In the other Germanic languages, and indeed in most other Indo-European languages, these words are phrased with the equivalents of “see you/understand you/know you”. Those other languages don’t feel the need to throw in an extra “do”, and it’s argued that English adopted this from the Celtic languages spoken in Britain before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, and which would have continued alongside Old English for many generations. The second aspect is the use in English of the progressive present - constructions like “I am eating” or “I am writing”. In German the phrase “I am eating an apple” would be “Ich esse einen Apfel”. Frisian is described by academics as the language closest to English, and Google Translate tells me the same phrase in that language is ”Ik yt in appel”. Again, English is unusual in insisting on the “…ing” form, and again Prof. McWhorter attributes this to the influence of Celtic.
Intuitively this sounds right to me, as the progressive present is a very common form in Celtic. I live in an area where Scottish Gaelic was the majority language until about the 1960s, and it’s noticeable that the English spoken in this area uses the progressive present to a greater degree than elsewhere in the UK. People use constructions like “I’m seeing” and “I’m hearing” which are the forms used in Gaelic. I have neighbours who, when I visit them, will ask “Are you wanting a beer, Ian?” The “Are you wanting…” form would be considered odd outside the Highlands but almost exactly replicates the wording in Scottish Gaelic “A bheil thu ag iarraidh lionn?” (SG doesn’t use the indefinite article). You can imagine that when Gaelic speakers became bilingual they starting speaking English with syntax that matched their own language, and that has since been preserved in the local idiom.
Prof. McWhorter then turns to certain simplifications that have developed in English, such as the loss of gendered nouns, and the reduction in the number of cases. He argues that this came about through a merging of Old English with Old Norse in the early medieval period, when the island was settled by substantial numbers of Norse speakers. The two languages were quite similar but had differences, especially in case endings, and when the two groups interacted they may have smoothed out the niceties of grammar to aid understanding.
There’s a bit of a digression when Prof. McWhorter includes a section criticising the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, essentially the argument that an individual’s world view is significantly affected by the grammar they speak. He accepts that use of grammar may affect thought in very subtle ways and at a subconscious level, but not to anything like the degree often suggested. Personally I found his arguments persuasive, but have no personal expertise in the issue.
Lastly, Prof. McWhorter takes us all the way back to Proto-Germanic, and to certain unusual features which separated it from other early Indo-European languages, but which Proto-Germanic shared with the Semitic languages. He tentatively expresses support for a hypothesis that Proto-Germanic was influenced by Semitic speakers, most likely the Phoenicians, although he acknowledges the etymological evidence is thin, and that there is a major problem in terms of evidence that Proto-Germanic speakers ever interacted with the Phoenicians. This seemed the weakest of the arguments put forward in the book, but it was still an interesting idea to read about.
It may be that my enthusiasm for this book reflects my own lack of knowledge of the subject area. I’ve often said that my favourite books are those that introduce me to new ideas, and this definitely achieved that. For me, a tremendously enjoyable read.
September 15, 2019
Like many on this site, I decided to read this because of Manny’s enthusiastic review. And I am glad I did. As a teacher of English as a foreign language, it seemed high time that I understand something of the language’s history. This book was an excellent choice, since it focused on that aspect of English most pesky to foreign speakers—grammar—while avoiding the too-often-told story of the growth of English vocabulary via French and Latin.
McWhorter begins by focusing on two distinctive features of English grammar: the so-called ‘meaningless’ do (as in, “Do you eat rabbits?”) and the use of the progressive in order to talk about the present (as in, “I am going,” rather than simply “I go”). Not coincidentally, these two aspects of English cause some of the most persistent errors in my students. In Spanish, just like in every other European language I know, there is no auxiliary verb needed for negations or questions. You can simply ask “¿Comes conejos?” Similarly, in Spanish, as in German or French, you can use the simple present to refer to what you are doing now; thus, a Spaniard can say “Voy” (I go) to express a current movement, and they reserve “Estoy yendo” (I am going) for special emphasis.
Curiously, no other Germanic language has these features. Indeed, they are absent (according to McWhorter) from every other European language, with the notable exception of the Celtic languages (specifically, Welsh and Cornish). This leads him to the quite natural supposition that the indigenous Celtic languages exerted an influence on the Old English spoken by the invading Anglo-Saxons. He musters quite a number of evidences and arguments in support of this thesis, to the extent that I was pretty worn out by the end of the chapter.
To be fair, this idea is considered quite controversial in the academic community, so McWhorter felt the need to champion it in full battle array. Nevertheless I think the maxim “Know your audience” applies here. I presume most readers of this book will be, like me, non-specialists, with little reason to be skeptical of the Celtic influence; to the contrary, it struck me as extremely plausible. So McWhorter’s harping on the point was simply taxing. In any case, if he is looking to influence the academic community, a short popular book is not the medium to do it.
McWhorter’s next chapter deals with the Viking influence, which he holds responsible for the jettisoning of much of Old English’s serpentine Germanic grammar, resulting in the relatively “easy” language we have today. And he rounds out the book by making the considerably more speculative argument that Proto-Germanic diverged in such a distinctive way from Proto-Indo-European because a large number of Semitic speakers (Phoenicians who had made it to Denmark) learned the language. At this point I began to have reservations about McWhorter's method. Despite the reasonableness of the Celtic-English and the Scandinavian-English hypotheses, the cumulative effects of McWhorter's arguments was to weaken each.
McWhorter’s specialty is researching how languages influenced one another historically; and one begins to suspect that this academic orientation leads him to see evidence for this phenomenon everywhere. To me it is unsatisfying to write a history of English as a series of stories, however plausible, of how it was influenced by other languages. This is because, logically, in order for there to be distinct languages capable of mixing there must first be languages capable of transforming without any linguistic contact. It can all begin to sound like a biologist who insists that the reason elephants have tusks is because proto-elephants mated with proto-walruses epochs ago.
This is an unfair comparison, of course; and to repeat I think his Celtic argument is quite strong. However, the more one reads, the more McWhorter’s method can begin to sound unsettlingly like Just-So stories. Some inconsistencies in the arguments make this clear. For example, he brushes aside the paucity of Celtic vocabulary in English, while citing the many Scandinavian loan-words as evidence for Viking influence (not to mention the possible Semitic loan-words in Proto-Germanic). To me it seems prima facie dubious that Welsh and Cornish speakers were able to fundamentally transform English's grammar without leaving a considerable stockpile of loanwords. Importing words is the most natural thing in the world when learning a foreign language. I do it all the time, as do my students.
To objections like these McWhorter is always able to point to a case where a similar event occurred as the scenario he is describing. But, again, one surmises that the corpus of available examples is large enough to back up any claim he wishes to impose. McWhorter criticizes other linguists for ignoring the causes of language change. But is invoking the influence of other languages a satisfying explanation? To me this is of the same order as arguing that life on Earth originally came from Mars. Perhaps, but how does life arise in the first place?
Now, it may be unfair of me to nitpick what is, after all, a popular book. But if McWhorter saw fit to include so much argument in favor of his uncommonly-held opinions, I think it behooves readers to be somewhat skeptical, especially since the general reader has no specialized knowledge to ground her acceptance or rejection of McWhorter’s conclusions. For my part, I think a more expository and less polemical book on the history of English would have made for far more pleasing reading. Yet McWhorter is an engaging writer and an original thinker, so it was valuable to learn of his approach to linguistics.
McWhorter begins by focusing on two distinctive features of English grammar: the so-called ‘meaningless’ do (as in, “Do you eat rabbits?”) and the use of the progressive in order to talk about the present (as in, “I am going,” rather than simply “I go”). Not coincidentally, these two aspects of English cause some of the most persistent errors in my students. In Spanish, just like in every other European language I know, there is no auxiliary verb needed for negations or questions. You can simply ask “¿Comes conejos?” Similarly, in Spanish, as in German or French, you can use the simple present to refer to what you are doing now; thus, a Spaniard can say “Voy” (I go) to express a current movement, and they reserve “Estoy yendo” (I am going) for special emphasis.
Curiously, no other Germanic language has these features. Indeed, they are absent (according to McWhorter) from every other European language, with the notable exception of the Celtic languages (specifically, Welsh and Cornish). This leads him to the quite natural supposition that the indigenous Celtic languages exerted an influence on the Old English spoken by the invading Anglo-Saxons. He musters quite a number of evidences and arguments in support of this thesis, to the extent that I was pretty worn out by the end of the chapter.
To be fair, this idea is considered quite controversial in the academic community, so McWhorter felt the need to champion it in full battle array. Nevertheless I think the maxim “Know your audience” applies here. I presume most readers of this book will be, like me, non-specialists, with little reason to be skeptical of the Celtic influence; to the contrary, it struck me as extremely plausible. So McWhorter’s harping on the point was simply taxing. In any case, if he is looking to influence the academic community, a short popular book is not the medium to do it.
McWhorter’s next chapter deals with the Viking influence, which he holds responsible for the jettisoning of much of Old English’s serpentine Germanic grammar, resulting in the relatively “easy” language we have today. And he rounds out the book by making the considerably more speculative argument that Proto-Germanic diverged in such a distinctive way from Proto-Indo-European because a large number of Semitic speakers (Phoenicians who had made it to Denmark) learned the language. At this point I began to have reservations about McWhorter's method. Despite the reasonableness of the Celtic-English and the Scandinavian-English hypotheses, the cumulative effects of McWhorter's arguments was to weaken each.
McWhorter’s specialty is researching how languages influenced one another historically; and one begins to suspect that this academic orientation leads him to see evidence for this phenomenon everywhere. To me it is unsatisfying to write a history of English as a series of stories, however plausible, of how it was influenced by other languages. This is because, logically, in order for there to be distinct languages capable of mixing there must first be languages capable of transforming without any linguistic contact. It can all begin to sound like a biologist who insists that the reason elephants have tusks is because proto-elephants mated with proto-walruses epochs ago.
This is an unfair comparison, of course; and to repeat I think his Celtic argument is quite strong. However, the more one reads, the more McWhorter’s method can begin to sound unsettlingly like Just-So stories. Some inconsistencies in the arguments make this clear. For example, he brushes aside the paucity of Celtic vocabulary in English, while citing the many Scandinavian loan-words as evidence for Viking influence (not to mention the possible Semitic loan-words in Proto-Germanic). To me it seems prima facie dubious that Welsh and Cornish speakers were able to fundamentally transform English's grammar without leaving a considerable stockpile of loanwords. Importing words is the most natural thing in the world when learning a foreign language. I do it all the time, as do my students.
To objections like these McWhorter is always able to point to a case where a similar event occurred as the scenario he is describing. But, again, one surmises that the corpus of available examples is large enough to back up any claim he wishes to impose. McWhorter criticizes other linguists for ignoring the causes of language change. But is invoking the influence of other languages a satisfying explanation? To me this is of the same order as arguing that life on Earth originally came from Mars. Perhaps, but how does life arise in the first place?
Now, it may be unfair of me to nitpick what is, after all, a popular book. But if McWhorter saw fit to include so much argument in favor of his uncommonly-held opinions, I think it behooves readers to be somewhat skeptical, especially since the general reader has no specialized knowledge to ground her acceptance or rejection of McWhorter’s conclusions. For my part, I think a more expository and less polemical book on the history of English would have made for far more pleasing reading. Yet McWhorter is an engaging writer and an original thinker, so it was valuable to learn of his approach to linguistics.
February 16, 2009
This is an extraordinarily delightful little book that highlights some of English's lesser known idiosyncrasies because, as the author notes, English is not just a collection of words, nor is its genius an markedly unusual openness to new vocabulary.
I first encountered John McWhorter with his book The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language Paperback, which traced the evolution of languages from a "first language" and which is also highly recommended. (Actually, having read The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music Language Mind and Body Paperback, one could argue that there never was a "first language" since it's entirely possible that the first homo sapiens with the language instinct were talking to themselves before they ever began communicating with each other.) This book continues in Babel's vein, focusing on English.
The first chapter discusses two characteristics of English not found in any of its Germanic cousins but that is found in Celtic languages. Namely, the meaningless "do" and using the present participle (-ing) to express the present tense. For example, in the sentence "Did she go to the store?," "do" isn't really necessary - "She went to the store?" could (and does in other tongues) work just as well but English doesn't like to say it that way. And while it's fallen out of use in modern English, Shakespeare used it in positive statements all the time - "She did go to the store, Yorick!"
And in all other Germanic languages (and, again, in nearly every other extant ones), to say you are doing something in the present tense, you say (for example) "Er schreibt" - "he writes." English, however, likes to say "He is writing," reserved "he writes" for something like "He writes for a newspaper" or "He writes every morning from 9 to 10."
In Chapter 2, McWhorter focuses on the somewhat arbitrary nature of grammar. While he supports the idea that a language needs a standard grammar and that it should be taught, as a linguist McWhorter wants to point out that language and grammar are constantly evolving and that nonstandard grammar is only "wrong" depending on context. Arguing before the Supreme Court, one probably wants to avoid ebonics or Jamaican patois but within the appropriate milieux, those two variants make perfect sense (and are no less expressive and complex than standard English, no matter the detractors).
Chapter 3 discusses why English has lost the case endings that learners of other Indo-European languages must struggle with (amo, amas, amat...). Briefly, it's all the fault of the Vikings. In the 8th century AD much of north and central Britain fell to Viking invaders (the Danelaw), effectively wiping out all of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except for Wessex. However, the Northmen were in a decided minority and wound up learning Old English as a second language. Being adults learning a second language, they learned it imperfectly, dropping the case endings and passing on this "battered" English to their children. (McWhorter points out that the only case ending to survive in Northumbrian English was one that matched its Scandinavian equivalent - the dative plural, as it happens, pp. 115-6.)
In Chapter 4, McWhorter sets out to demolish the popularly conceived idea that grammar shapes thought. First posited in any serious manner by Benjamin Whorf, the idea is that a language's grammar shapes how its speakers view the world. Thus, the Kawesqar of Chile have no concept of the future because they have no future tense marking. Of course, neither does Japanese, yet it is perfectly capable of letting its speakers express themselves regarding future events. And then there's Whorf's prime example - the Hopi language, which he claimed had no tense marking at all. This turns out to be nonsense - the Hopi are capable of understanding tense and their language can and does make temporal distinctions. They just don't do it as English speakers do.
McWhorter does allow that the neo-Whorfian reformulation of Whorf's original thesis may hold some validity but not much explanatory power. It may highlight an interesting quirk in a language, but little else. As McWhorter writes: "The idea that the world's six thousand languages condition six thousand different pairs of cultural glasses simply does not hold water. The truly enlightened position is that, by and large, all humans...experience life via the mental equipment shared by all members of our species. No one is `primitive,' but just as important, no one is privileged over others with a primal connection to The Real" (p. 169).
The final chapter is the most exciting for me because McWhorter discusses a hypothesis for why proto-Germanic (English's "grandfather") developed an interesting characteristic - a sound shift from "p," "t" and "k" to "f," "th" and "h," respectively. The sound morphing is unusual in that the former sounds are stops, the latter fricatives ("hissy" sounds in McWhorter's words). It's hard to see why, in isolation, a "p" would become an "f." However, if proto-German had been in contact with a language rich in fricatives, it's more than possible.
Recent archaeological evidence and linguistic reconstructions are suggesting that a Semitic influence is responsible, most likely Phoenician or Punic (Carthage), Phoenician's "daughter." Both civilizations had documented contact with Northern Europe around the right time (last half of the 1st millennium BC). The evidence is circumstantial, probably forever so, but strongly suggestive. Phoenicia had trading stations on the Atlantic side of Gibraltar (the Tarshish of Biblical fame) and Britain had long been a source of tin so it's not impossible to imagine a relatively large Semitic presence in proto-Germanic's bailiwick whose only evidence remains in the oddities of Germanic sound change.
I strongly recommend this general work, even if you're not particularly interested in languages. It's short and written entirely for a nonspecialist audience but appeals to language fans as well. I'll also take this opportunity to recommend McWhorter's other work.
I first encountered John McWhorter with his book The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language Paperback, which traced the evolution of languages from a "first language" and which is also highly recommended. (Actually, having read The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music Language Mind and Body Paperback, one could argue that there never was a "first language" since it's entirely possible that the first homo sapiens with the language instinct were talking to themselves before they ever began communicating with each other.) This book continues in Babel's vein, focusing on English.
The first chapter discusses two characteristics of English not found in any of its Germanic cousins but that is found in Celtic languages. Namely, the meaningless "do" and using the present participle (-ing) to express the present tense. For example, in the sentence "Did she go to the store?," "do" isn't really necessary - "She went to the store?" could (and does in other tongues) work just as well but English doesn't like to say it that way. And while it's fallen out of use in modern English, Shakespeare used it in positive statements all the time - "She did go to the store, Yorick!"
And in all other Germanic languages (and, again, in nearly every other extant ones), to say you are doing something in the present tense, you say (for example) "Er schreibt" - "he writes." English, however, likes to say "He is writing," reserved "he writes" for something like "He writes for a newspaper" or "He writes every morning from 9 to 10."
In Chapter 2, McWhorter focuses on the somewhat arbitrary nature of grammar. While he supports the idea that a language needs a standard grammar and that it should be taught, as a linguist McWhorter wants to point out that language and grammar are constantly evolving and that nonstandard grammar is only "wrong" depending on context. Arguing before the Supreme Court, one probably wants to avoid ebonics or Jamaican patois but within the appropriate milieux, those two variants make perfect sense (and are no less expressive and complex than standard English, no matter the detractors).
Chapter 3 discusses why English has lost the case endings that learners of other Indo-European languages must struggle with (amo, amas, amat...). Briefly, it's all the fault of the Vikings. In the 8th century AD much of north and central Britain fell to Viking invaders (the Danelaw), effectively wiping out all of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except for Wessex. However, the Northmen were in a decided minority and wound up learning Old English as a second language. Being adults learning a second language, they learned it imperfectly, dropping the case endings and passing on this "battered" English to their children. (McWhorter points out that the only case ending to survive in Northumbrian English was one that matched its Scandinavian equivalent - the dative plural, as it happens, pp. 115-6.)
In Chapter 4, McWhorter sets out to demolish the popularly conceived idea that grammar shapes thought. First posited in any serious manner by Benjamin Whorf, the idea is that a language's grammar shapes how its speakers view the world. Thus, the Kawesqar of Chile have no concept of the future because they have no future tense marking. Of course, neither does Japanese, yet it is perfectly capable of letting its speakers express themselves regarding future events. And then there's Whorf's prime example - the Hopi language, which he claimed had no tense marking at all. This turns out to be nonsense - the Hopi are capable of understanding tense and their language can and does make temporal distinctions. They just don't do it as English speakers do.
McWhorter does allow that the neo-Whorfian reformulation of Whorf's original thesis may hold some validity but not much explanatory power. It may highlight an interesting quirk in a language, but little else. As McWhorter writes: "The idea that the world's six thousand languages condition six thousand different pairs of cultural glasses simply does not hold water. The truly enlightened position is that, by and large, all humans...experience life via the mental equipment shared by all members of our species. No one is `primitive,' but just as important, no one is privileged over others with a primal connection to The Real" (p. 169).
The final chapter is the most exciting for me because McWhorter discusses a hypothesis for why proto-Germanic (English's "grandfather") developed an interesting characteristic - a sound shift from "p," "t" and "k" to "f," "th" and "h," respectively. The sound morphing is unusual in that the former sounds are stops, the latter fricatives ("hissy" sounds in McWhorter's words). It's hard to see why, in isolation, a "p" would become an "f." However, if proto-German had been in contact with a language rich in fricatives, it's more than possible.
Recent archaeological evidence and linguistic reconstructions are suggesting that a Semitic influence is responsible, most likely Phoenician or Punic (Carthage), Phoenician's "daughter." Both civilizations had documented contact with Northern Europe around the right time (last half of the 1st millennium BC). The evidence is circumstantial, probably forever so, but strongly suggestive. Phoenicia had trading stations on the Atlantic side of Gibraltar (the Tarshish of Biblical fame) and Britain had long been a source of tin so it's not impossible to imagine a relatively large Semitic presence in proto-Germanic's bailiwick whose only evidence remains in the oddities of Germanic sound change.
I strongly recommend this general work, even if you're not particularly interested in languages. It's short and written entirely for a nonspecialist audience but appeals to language fans as well. I'll also take this opportunity to recommend McWhorter's other work.
February 1, 2010
I read McWhorter's "The Power of Babel" a few years ago and thought it was terrific. His subsequent effort, "Doing our own Thing", was a major disappointment - self-indulgent, undisciplined, and essentially pointless. So I would have skipped this one (a cover blurb that squeezes the chestnuts "rollicking tour" and "rousing celebration" into the same sentence is generally not a good sign). Did I really need reassurance from yet another linguist that it's OK to split an infinitive, or to end a sentence with a preposition? But then there was Manny's recent rave review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/....
My reaction? Modified rapture at best. There's a kind of forced flashiness to McWhorter's style that I don't particularly enjoy. Calling English a dolphin in a family of assorted types of deer (the Germanic relatives of English) gets the point across, but the metaphor is nowhere near as clever as McWhorter seems to think, and spinning it out across two paragraphs ("antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme" - yeah, dude, we know what the word "deer" means, as if you hadn't already enumerated "antelopes, springboks, kudu, and so on" earlier in the sentence) is irritating, to say the least.
For the first 60 pages of this book, McWhorter sets out to answer the question of why English favors the use of "be" and "do" as auxiliary verbs in constructions like "I'm watching TV" (actual present, as opposed to the habitual present "I watch TV", a distinction which confuses the bejasus out of most non-native speakers), in questions ("do you watch"?), or negative statements. None of its immediate relatives, either on the Germanic or the Romance side, uses such a construction. Fair enough, it's not a completely boring question, though it's hardly the major mystery he makes it out to be either. I figured out the answer to this at about age 5, when I first started to learn Irish (Gaelic) -- it's a Celtic thing, see?
So that extended first chapter, in which the only point that is being developed is that the Celtic languages (Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic) influenced English syntax, hardly qualifies as a major revelation. Unfortunately, McWhorter beats it into the ground like the proverbial dead horse. For 60 pages. You start the second chapter with a sense of profound relief only to find - unspeakable horror - that he's not done. More statement of the profoundly obvious.
I guess this is the major reason for my inability to share Manny's rabid enthusiasm for this book. Like so many of his colleagues, McWhorter expends a lot of effort in addressing what I consider to be obvious linguistic strawmen - the notion that linguistics is just about etymology, the red herring of grammatical hypercorrectness, the idea that vocabulary is the only measure of influence of one language on another, the spectacularly uninteresting strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It's as if he's writing for a readership consisting exclusively of people who have never undergone the intellectual exercise of learning a second language. Because if you've ever gone through that particular struggle, it seems to me that you're guaranteed to have thought about language deeply enough to make much of the material in this book seem like little more than a statement of the bloody obvious.
And yeah, what the hell - it's a book about language, so I'll bitch. The shorthand term McWhorter uses throughout, that English employs a "meaningless do", seems infelicitous at best.
My reaction? Modified rapture at best. There's a kind of forced flashiness to McWhorter's style that I don't particularly enjoy. Calling English a dolphin in a family of assorted types of deer (the Germanic relatives of English) gets the point across, but the metaphor is nowhere near as clever as McWhorter seems to think, and spinning it out across two paragraphs ("antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme" - yeah, dude, we know what the word "deer" means, as if you hadn't already enumerated "antelopes, springboks, kudu, and so on" earlier in the sentence) is irritating, to say the least.
For the first 60 pages of this book, McWhorter sets out to answer the question of why English favors the use of "be" and "do" as auxiliary verbs in constructions like "I'm watching TV" (actual present, as opposed to the habitual present "I watch TV", a distinction which confuses the bejasus out of most non-native speakers), in questions ("do you watch"?), or negative statements. None of its immediate relatives, either on the Germanic or the Romance side, uses such a construction. Fair enough, it's not a completely boring question, though it's hardly the major mystery he makes it out to be either. I figured out the answer to this at about age 5, when I first started to learn Irish (Gaelic) -- it's a Celtic thing, see?
So that extended first chapter, in which the only point that is being developed is that the Celtic languages (Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic) influenced English syntax, hardly qualifies as a major revelation. Unfortunately, McWhorter beats it into the ground like the proverbial dead horse. For 60 pages. You start the second chapter with a sense of profound relief only to find - unspeakable horror - that he's not done. More statement of the profoundly obvious.
I guess this is the major reason for my inability to share Manny's rabid enthusiasm for this book. Like so many of his colleagues, McWhorter expends a lot of effort in addressing what I consider to be obvious linguistic strawmen - the notion that linguistics is just about etymology, the red herring of grammatical hypercorrectness, the idea that vocabulary is the only measure of influence of one language on another, the spectacularly uninteresting strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It's as if he's writing for a readership consisting exclusively of people who have never undergone the intellectual exercise of learning a second language. Because if you've ever gone through that particular struggle, it seems to me that you're guaranteed to have thought about language deeply enough to make much of the material in this book seem like little more than a statement of the bloody obvious.
And yeah, what the hell - it's a book about language, so I'll bitch. The shorthand term McWhorter uses throughout, that English employs a "meaningless do", seems infelicitous at best.
January 11, 2020
In the main John McWhorter is indulging himself in his area of expertise seeming demanding us to care about arguments within a fairly specialized study of language. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue may be little more than an effort to appeal to the populist interest in grammar that began with the fairly popular Eats, Shoots and Leaves. That was an effort to bring to the commoners the rather esoteric debate over the Oxford comma, McWhorter wants to argue for something else.
What is that something else? To tell you I’d have to care or have a lot of education in a specialized area. The idea is that somewhere between its proto Germanic roots and the modern English we all love, some things happened. Like all spoken languages, rules were made up or changed or imported from whoever happened to be speaking at the time. Since England played host to various invaders, many of them Norse, but of various particular varieties, they all had a whack at getting the grammar from there to here. Tellingly, most of this was done absent a written record so the debate is properly between experts who have to agree that they are all speculating.
McWhorter may be the more correct for all his displays of abstract, or is it obscure learning<?>. It is hard to know who he is pushing against and if they are as determined in their opinion. I came to resent the notion that he was going to go past the learned within his profession to get us folk excited.
Then, having read the best sentence in the book; the one beginning, “For the Final Chapter…” He writes: “Second, there is no logical conception of “proper” grammar as distinct from “bad” grammar that people lapse into out of ignorance or laziness,” Balderdash. How about this for a simple logical conception?
Either a particular construction promotes communication or it confuses. The reason for rules in a language is to create a common set of expectations such that a listener, and more importantly the reader does not have to guess what the words in that sequence are meant to mean. I suspect that McWhorter was particularly careful about the way the words on his contract were assembled, prefixed and suffixed.
Besides issues like regionalisms and the instability of fad expressions, meaning cannot be reliably conveyed absent some common rules about how things are said and written. Some odd hundred years ago, it may not have mattered if a typical Welshman was instantly understood by a random Irishman. Likely they would never meet.
Mine is not a plea for the kind of purity and fixity that the French expend so much energy to enforce, all languages are always in flux, including some of the dead ones. People still make words for use in Latin and Hebrew having been written by people with none of the common forms of 21st century technology have modern speakers who have made a leap across millennia. Languages change. And no charge for that insight.
What is that something else? To tell you I’d have to care or have a lot of education in a specialized area. The idea is that somewhere between its proto Germanic roots and the modern English we all love, some things happened. Like all spoken languages, rules were made up or changed or imported from whoever happened to be speaking at the time. Since England played host to various invaders, many of them Norse, but of various particular varieties, they all had a whack at getting the grammar from there to here. Tellingly, most of this was done absent a written record so the debate is properly between experts who have to agree that they are all speculating.
McWhorter may be the more correct for all his displays of abstract, or is it obscure learning<?>. It is hard to know who he is pushing against and if they are as determined in their opinion. I came to resent the notion that he was going to go past the learned within his profession to get us folk excited.
Then, having read the best sentence in the book; the one beginning, “For the Final Chapter…” He writes: “Second, there is no logical conception of “proper” grammar as distinct from “bad” grammar that people lapse into out of ignorance or laziness,” Balderdash. How about this for a simple logical conception?
Either a particular construction promotes communication or it confuses. The reason for rules in a language is to create a common set of expectations such that a listener, and more importantly the reader does not have to guess what the words in that sequence are meant to mean. I suspect that McWhorter was particularly careful about the way the words on his contract were assembled, prefixed and suffixed.
Besides issues like regionalisms and the instability of fad expressions, meaning cannot be reliably conveyed absent some common rules about how things are said and written. Some odd hundred years ago, it may not have mattered if a typical Welshman was instantly understood by a random Irishman. Likely they would never meet.
Mine is not a plea for the kind of purity and fixity that the French expend so much energy to enforce, all languages are always in flux, including some of the dead ones. People still make words for use in Latin and Hebrew having been written by people with none of the common forms of 21st century technology have modern speakers who have made a leap across millennia. Languages change. And no charge for that insight.
November 19, 2015
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Yup. That is a for real, honest to goodness grammatically correct sentence in the English language. Why it wasn't included in this book is a mystery for the ages, because it's a great bit of wordplay that shows how simple and yet crazy this language can be.
But still, this book was very interesting, if pretty academic and technical. This is the type of book that I would want to read along with the audio, because I learn best visually, but just listening was informative, even if I didn't absorb as much of it as I would have liked.
I did enjoy the etymology info, and the analysis of whether language plays any role in how people think - for instance if a language has no tenses other than present (I write vs I will write or I have written, for example), does that mean that the people who speak it have no concept of time? The author claims no, and I agree, though some have made claims of this nature in the past. It just makes no sense to me. Words are only part of language. Tone, context, prefixes and suffixes, etc also factor in.
I liked the author's reading of this book, and I think he did a great job with it, not only in English, but also all of the other comparison languages.
This was quite interesting and if you like language or etymology, I definitely recommend it.
Yup. That is a for real, honest to goodness grammatically correct sentence in the English language. Why it wasn't included in this book is a mystery for the ages, because it's a great bit of wordplay that shows how simple and yet crazy this language can be.
But still, this book was very interesting, if pretty academic and technical. This is the type of book that I would want to read along with the audio, because I learn best visually, but just listening was informative, even if I didn't absorb as much of it as I would have liked.
I did enjoy the etymology info, and the analysis of whether language plays any role in how people think - for instance if a language has no tenses other than present (I write vs I will write or I have written, for example), does that mean that the people who speak it have no concept of time? The author claims no, and I agree, though some have made claims of this nature in the past. It just makes no sense to me. Words are only part of language. Tone, context, prefixes and suffixes, etc also factor in.
I liked the author's reading of this book, and I think he did a great job with it, not only in English, but also all of the other comparison languages.
This was quite interesting and if you like language or etymology, I definitely recommend it.
August 9, 2019
Seems like every book on linguistics published in the past few decades has been contractually required to include a takedown of both Sapir-Whorfianism (the idea that a language's grammar/vocabulary shapes its speakers' worldview in any compelling way) and prescriptivism (imposing arbitrary rules of "correct" usage, despite the common and widely-understood use of "incorrect" grammar). And that's fine, I didn't mind listening to McWhorter play me the hits one more time.
But this book also included some theories that were new to me, and very interesting:
1) There is convincing evidence that Old & Middle English were shaped by generations of influence from Celtic-speaking adults learning the language and "seasoning" it with their own grammar, particularly meaningless "do" ("Do you like cats?" as opposed to something like "Like you cats?") and progressive "ing" ("I am feeding the cats" rather than "I feed the cats [right now]"). Both of these are found in the Celtic dialects of Welsh and Cornish, but in no other Indo-European languages, so McWhorter surmises that their appearance in English must be due to the influence of these dialects. This is controversial because it has been widely believed that Anglo-Saxon invaders killed off nearly all the Celts in Britain in the 6th Century, long before the English language picked up these quirks. McWhorter points out several flaws in this assumption.
2) The much-vaunted influence of French-speaking Normans (who conquered England in 1066 and maintained cultural influence for centuries) is, according to McWhorter, overstated. Sure, English still includes many French-derived words as a result of this history, but they were largely for "fancy" things associated with the aristocracy (e.g. the lords ate French-derived pork; poor farmers raised English-derived swine), and there really wasn't a lot of direct linguistic mixing. The ruling Normans mostly kept to themselves, and left very little imprint on grammar.
3) The stronger influence on English grammar - particularly in simplifying it, filing off case endings and so forth - came from the 8th-Century Viking invaders, who actually integrated with the local population and learned their language - though imperfectly, as adult-learners tend to.
4) Even further back, Proto-Germanic appears to have been strongly shaped by contact with some other group of people, resulting in a similar simplification (Germanic languages are far less inflected than most other Indo-European ones) as well as a vast set new of vocabulary (often having to do with the sea, sailing, marine animals, and a few other specific topics). In all, about 1/3 of Proto-Germanic words have no cognate in other Indo-European languages. It's unclear who these people would have been, but McWhorter cites evidence for speakers of Semitic languages (e.g. Akkadian, Aramaic) as well as (shakier) evidence for Phoenician explorers & traders.
In general, the simplicity of English (and to a lesser extent, all Germanic languages) compared to the rest of the Indo-European family can be attributed to the influence - or bastardization, as McWhorter calls it - of multiple other cultures over the centuries. Non-native speakers today have a relatively easy time learning English as a result of these ancient non-native speakers ignoring or standardizing many of the language's complexities.
But this book also included some theories that were new to me, and very interesting:
1) There is convincing evidence that Old & Middle English were shaped by generations of influence from Celtic-speaking adults learning the language and "seasoning" it with their own grammar, particularly meaningless "do" ("Do you like cats?" as opposed to something like "Like you cats?") and progressive "ing" ("I am feeding the cats" rather than "I feed the cats [right now]"). Both of these are found in the Celtic dialects of Welsh and Cornish, but in no other Indo-European languages, so McWhorter surmises that their appearance in English must be due to the influence of these dialects. This is controversial because it has been widely believed that Anglo-Saxon invaders killed off nearly all the Celts in Britain in the 6th Century, long before the English language picked up these quirks. McWhorter points out several flaws in this assumption.
2) The much-vaunted influence of French-speaking Normans (who conquered England in 1066 and maintained cultural influence for centuries) is, according to McWhorter, overstated. Sure, English still includes many French-derived words as a result of this history, but they were largely for "fancy" things associated with the aristocracy (e.g. the lords ate French-derived pork; poor farmers raised English-derived swine), and there really wasn't a lot of direct linguistic mixing. The ruling Normans mostly kept to themselves, and left very little imprint on grammar.
3) The stronger influence on English grammar - particularly in simplifying it, filing off case endings and so forth - came from the 8th-Century Viking invaders, who actually integrated with the local population and learned their language - though imperfectly, as adult-learners tend to.
4) Even further back, Proto-Germanic appears to have been strongly shaped by contact with some other group of people, resulting in a similar simplification (Germanic languages are far less inflected than most other Indo-European ones) as well as a vast set new of vocabulary (often having to do with the sea, sailing, marine animals, and a few other specific topics). In all, about 1/3 of Proto-Germanic words have no cognate in other Indo-European languages. It's unclear who these people would have been, but McWhorter cites evidence for speakers of Semitic languages (e.g. Akkadian, Aramaic) as well as (shakier) evidence for Phoenician explorers & traders.
In general, the simplicity of English (and to a lesser extent, all Germanic languages) compared to the rest of the Indo-European family can be attributed to the influence - or bastardization, as McWhorter calls it - of multiple other cultures over the centuries. Non-native speakers today have a relatively easy time learning English as a result of these ancient non-native speakers ignoring or standardizing many of the language's complexities.
July 31, 2014
What a fun book! This is one of those rare times where I would suggest having the audio and actually following along in the book. The audio is wonderful because you actually get to hear all the wonderful languages McWhorter is referencing, also well as just here him gush and laugh while narrating. You can tell just how passionate he is about linguistics as well as making linguistics a known subject to the genpop. It was a lot of fun. But if you had the book to follow along in as well then you would have the visual comparison of the sentence structures. That would also be very interesting to look at.
None of it is too detailed, it really is just a basic introductory book. If you had any linguistic classes in college you will surely have heard most of this. I took Latin and German so we frequently touched on these subjects, but I never had a chance to go in depth into any of them. Truly fascinating subject, especially the history and formation of languages. So it will be old news to some people but in general I really appreciated his method. My only real complaint is that occasionally the analogies seemed forced and went on for too long. Thats not much a complaint though. All in all I thoroughly suggest this book. Its really made me reconsider English and how I speak and write ever day. What fun!
#deathtomeaningless'do'
None of it is too detailed, it really is just a basic introductory book. If you had any linguistic classes in college you will surely have heard most of this. I took Latin and German so we frequently touched on these subjects, but I never had a chance to go in depth into any of them. Truly fascinating subject, especially the history and formation of languages. So it will be old news to some people but in general I really appreciated his method. My only real complaint is that occasionally the analogies seemed forced and went on for too long. Thats not much a complaint though. All in all I thoroughly suggest this book. Its really made me reconsider English and how I speak and write ever day. What fun!
#deathtomeaningless'do'
April 9, 2010
Never thought Linguistics can be so much fun! Too many details to discuss. But if you ever wondered why, for instance, "you" has the same form for both singular and plural, why we say "aren't I" instead of the more logical "amn't I", why we use the meaningless "do" or "they" as a singular pronoun instead of he/she when the gender is not clear, you might get some answers or at least accept the fact that, in the author's own words, "shitte happens". He uses facts, comparison, logic and fun to explain why English is so different from all the other languages, how its grammar changed more over the years than other Germanic languages and emphasizes the differences between spoken and written language. The book is delightful, so well structured, documented & written, you don't need to be an English major or a linguist to enjoy it.
February 12, 2012
I am not an expert, but I did major in Linguistics in college. I found McWhorter's arguments horribly oversimplified and tedious to read. I'm glad that he is putting linguistic scholarship out there for the general public, but someone with even a rudimentary knowledge (or even a grammar or history nerd) would know.
Being familiar with some of the counter-arguments he suggests, I can say that he presents them in a manner intended to make them appear somewhat foolish, rather than addressing them properly. He does make good arguments about the adaptations he suggests, but the manner in which he goes about it is distracting and annoying. Going on a several-page rant about cars as a thinly-disguised metaphor for grammar is just beating the reader over the head with a stick, trying to make a point.
The book is self-referential, perhaps in an attempt to be light-hearted and comedic, but it fails miserably. The same examples come up again and again, and it feels like the author feels the need to impress the reader with his wide familiarity with languages. He makes many references to certain other languages and the places he traveled (sorry he was unable to find lemonade while in Scandenavia).
The section on the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis was mocking. The hypothesis does not mean that people can't understand a concept their language has no word for, it is about what one is obliged to think about every time ones speaks.
McWhorter dismisses the idea of something happening without any basis, but doesn't address the dozens of times within the history of Germanic or of English where we really have documented cases of that happening, ie the Great English Vowel Shift.
I found his idea that Germanic may have had Phoenician influences interesting… I don't feel the need to attribute Grimm's law to Phoenician sound changes- sounds moving around are not nearly as improbably as the author makes them sound. The fact that a third of Germanic words don't have an easily identifiable PIE relating is intriguing, but some of the words he cites are words that are very rarely adopted in linguistic shadings. The Online Etymology Dictionary proposes that in some cases, a desire to avoid "taboo" words may have lead to the adoption of other words, such as replacing the PIE *esen- with a less taboo word, something based on *bhle and which turns up in English as "blood." These alternatives get no space in McWhorter's account.
If you have an interest in linguistics, this may be an interesting read. Overall, I found it annoying to read and enjoyed neither McWhorter's manner of presenting his ideas nor the ideas themselves.
Being familiar with some of the counter-arguments he suggests, I can say that he presents them in a manner intended to make them appear somewhat foolish, rather than addressing them properly. He does make good arguments about the adaptations he suggests, but the manner in which he goes about it is distracting and annoying. Going on a several-page rant about cars as a thinly-disguised metaphor for grammar is just beating the reader over the head with a stick, trying to make a point.
The book is self-referential, perhaps in an attempt to be light-hearted and comedic, but it fails miserably. The same examples come up again and again, and it feels like the author feels the need to impress the reader with his wide familiarity with languages. He makes many references to certain other languages and the places he traveled (sorry he was unable to find lemonade while in Scandenavia).
The section on the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis was mocking. The hypothesis does not mean that people can't understand a concept their language has no word for, it is about what one is obliged to think about every time ones speaks.
McWhorter dismisses the idea of something happening without any basis, but doesn't address the dozens of times within the history of Germanic or of English where we really have documented cases of that happening, ie the Great English Vowel Shift.
I found his idea that Germanic may have had Phoenician influences interesting… I don't feel the need to attribute Grimm's law to Phoenician sound changes- sounds moving around are not nearly as improbably as the author makes them sound. The fact that a third of Germanic words don't have an easily identifiable PIE relating is intriguing, but some of the words he cites are words that are very rarely adopted in linguistic shadings. The Online Etymology Dictionary proposes that in some cases, a desire to avoid "taboo" words may have lead to the adoption of other words, such as replacing the PIE *esen- with a less taboo word, something based on *bhle and which turns up in English as "blood." These alternatives get no space in McWhorter's account.
If you have an interest in linguistics, this may be an interesting read. Overall, I found it annoying to read and enjoyed neither McWhorter's manner of presenting his ideas nor the ideas themselves.
August 5, 2022
3.5 stars
McWhorter’s The Power of Babel is a fantastic book and an excellent place to start if you wish you’d taken a linguistics class. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, purportedly a history of English, is a very different book. It’s a very short, quick read, and it’s informative and accessible and I’m glad I read it. But it’s more about bringing McWhorter’s specific arguments about English and language generally to the layperson than it is about providing an overarching history. Tellingly, its five chapters are organized from most to least persuasive, like a legal brief, rather than chronologically, like a traditional history.
Here’s what we get:
Chapter 1: Grammatical forms that came to English from Celtic languages
This is really cool and interesting. Basically, English does a couple of things that almost no other language on Earth does. First, there’s our obligatory use of the present progressive in circumstances where everybody else would just use the present tense. For instance, if you ask me what I’m doing right now, the correct answer is: “I’m writing a review.” Not “I write a review,” which only a non-native speaker would ever say—and someone new to English would say it, because other languages only use the present progressive if they really want to emphasize that something is happening right now. In English though, “I write a review” is only appropriate when discussing something done habitually, i.e., “I write a review of every book I read.”
Second, there’s our obligatory use of the word “do” in questions and negations: for instance, “Do you like apples?” and “I don’t like apples.” You cannot say in modern English, “Like you apples?” or “I not like apples.” Almost no other language, though, insists upon the insertion of an extra word like “do” in these contexts.
McWhorter’s explanation for this is that Celtic languages do both of these things. Old English—a Germanic language brought by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes when they arrived in England around 500 A.D.—did not have these constructions, and no other Germanic language has them either. But Welsh and Cornish (and presumably other extinct languages) do. Apparently linguists have overlooked this because the constructions showed up in written documents only many centuries later, while the Celts were assumed to have all died off mysteriously somehow. But in fact the evidence (including DNA, law codes, archaeological findings, etc.) indicates that the Celts were indeed around, as you would expect, while writing was so rare and prized that ancient forms were preserved in it rather than scribes’ attempting to write as people spoke. This is a really interesting chapter, and while McWhorter spends a lot of words hammering home his points—which are perhaps wasted on readers who have never heard the opposing arguments except in this book—they are quite persuasive.
Chapter 2: Native speakers can’t speak a language “wrong”
Grammarians seem to be a bugbear for linguists, and McWhorter points out here than languages are always changing, and also, no language is completely “logical.” (I am, you are, she is, but isn’t she, aren’t you…. aren’t I? Why not amn’t I?) This chapter is short and entertaining for its list of constructions people once thought wrong or gauche: “born in” (should be “born at”), “the house is being built” (should be “the house is building”), “standpoint” (illogical since you aren’t standing anywhere!), etc. I think he’s being optimistic to suggest people have gotten over prescriptions against, say, ending a sentence with a preposition: yes, this prescription was made up in the 18th century to make English sound more like Latin, but it’s still alive and well in some quarters. (A high school English teacher once explained to my class that he, as a grammar stickler, would hang back upon meeting a new person to avoid being the one to ask “where are you from?”, since there actually is no other reasonable way to ask it! Which seems like the height of absurdity now.)
Chapter 3: Complications in English grammar were stripped out by the Vikings
This is where I start to have some doubts. Essentially, Old English was much more of a Germanic language than the modern version is: it had cases and grammatical gender and rigid rules about verb placement and distinguished “here” vs. “hither” and a whole bunch of other stuff. Why did English lose it all, when related languages did not? This tends to happen to languages that are learned by overwhelming numbers of adults such that their “butchered language” becomes just “the language,” but I found McWhorter’s arguments that it was the Vikings responsible—rather than the Celts or the Normans or someone else entirely, or perhaps all of them in succession—less convincing. Compared to these other groups, the Vikings spoke a language that was already quite similar, so it seems like learning to plug in different word endings in the same way would be easy enough. And were there really that many Viking migrant men, who also spoke different languages from each other (otherwise, presumably they’d just have communicated in their own)? And even if tons of migrant fathers spoke “butchered English,” wouldn’t children just have learned the full version from their mothers anyway?
Chapter 4: Grammar does not channel thought patterns
This chapter refutes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language colors the way people see and understand the world. It sounds like that’s long been discredited in linguistic circles, but hangs on in the popular imagination, so this was a useful chapter for me even if unrelated to the rest of the book. Apparently Whorf’s facts in proposing the hypothesis were dead wrong: it was largely based on the notion that the Hopi language has no past/present/future tenses, and therefore they experience time cyclically if at all, when in fact Hopi does have and use tense markers. Meanwhile, Japanese actually does lack an explicit future tense, but this doesn’t prevent its speakers from planning for the future. Studies show some impact from language on thought, but it’s generally stuff that has no impact on your daily life: for instance, native speakers of a language with grammatical gender are inclined to think that if an object is given a voice in a cartoon, its gender should match the grammatical one.
Chapter 5: Proto-Germanic picked up words and sound changes from somewhere else, maybe the Phoenicians?
This chapter goes furthest back in time and is the most speculative. Apparently, when comparing Proto-Germanic to Proto-Indo-European (to the extent we can even do this, as reconstructing words from either of these depends on comparing words from their extant descendants), about 1/3 of Germanic words come from an unknown other source. Germanic languages also picked up some odd sounds, changing p -> f, t -> th, and k -> h. This bears some resemblance to Semitic languages, and one theory is that it all came from the Phoenicians. However, we’ll probably never know, as there’s no proof they were in the area at the time (and why only there and not the rest of Europe?).
Overall, certainly an interesting read, and if McWhorter spends a lot of time addressing counterarguments to his ideas in ways that frustrate some readers, I definitely prefer that to pretending a theory is widely accepted when it is not. This book provides plenty of food for thought, and is very short—not just in page count either; they’re small pages. I do find something about his forays into informality (humorous asides, or making fun of arguments by emphasizing them with italics and multiple exclamation points) somewhat jarring with his overall more scholarly tone. And I would have liked a more comprehensive history rather than one that just addresses a few key points. But this one is worth a read for those interested in the history of the English language outside of well-known word imports.
McWhorter’s The Power of Babel is a fantastic book and an excellent place to start if you wish you’d taken a linguistics class. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, purportedly a history of English, is a very different book. It’s a very short, quick read, and it’s informative and accessible and I’m glad I read it. But it’s more about bringing McWhorter’s specific arguments about English and language generally to the layperson than it is about providing an overarching history. Tellingly, its five chapters are organized from most to least persuasive, like a legal brief, rather than chronologically, like a traditional history.
Here’s what we get:
Chapter 1: Grammatical forms that came to English from Celtic languages
This is really cool and interesting. Basically, English does a couple of things that almost no other language on Earth does. First, there’s our obligatory use of the present progressive in circumstances where everybody else would just use the present tense. For instance, if you ask me what I’m doing right now, the correct answer is: “I’m writing a review.” Not “I write a review,” which only a non-native speaker would ever say—and someone new to English would say it, because other languages only use the present progressive if they really want to emphasize that something is happening right now. In English though, “I write a review” is only appropriate when discussing something done habitually, i.e., “I write a review of every book I read.”
Second, there’s our obligatory use of the word “do” in questions and negations: for instance, “Do you like apples?” and “I don’t like apples.” You cannot say in modern English, “Like you apples?” or “I not like apples.” Almost no other language, though, insists upon the insertion of an extra word like “do” in these contexts.
McWhorter’s explanation for this is that Celtic languages do both of these things. Old English—a Germanic language brought by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes when they arrived in England around 500 A.D.—did not have these constructions, and no other Germanic language has them either. But Welsh and Cornish (and presumably other extinct languages) do. Apparently linguists have overlooked this because the constructions showed up in written documents only many centuries later, while the Celts were assumed to have all died off mysteriously somehow. But in fact the evidence (including DNA, law codes, archaeological findings, etc.) indicates that the Celts were indeed around, as you would expect, while writing was so rare and prized that ancient forms were preserved in it rather than scribes’ attempting to write as people spoke. This is a really interesting chapter, and while McWhorter spends a lot of words hammering home his points—which are perhaps wasted on readers who have never heard the opposing arguments except in this book—they are quite persuasive.
Chapter 2: Native speakers can’t speak a language “wrong”
Grammarians seem to be a bugbear for linguists, and McWhorter points out here than languages are always changing, and also, no language is completely “logical.” (I am, you are, she is, but isn’t she, aren’t you…. aren’t I? Why not amn’t I?) This chapter is short and entertaining for its list of constructions people once thought wrong or gauche: “born in” (should be “born at”), “the house is being built” (should be “the house is building”), “standpoint” (illogical since you aren’t standing anywhere!), etc. I think he’s being optimistic to suggest people have gotten over prescriptions against, say, ending a sentence with a preposition: yes, this prescription was made up in the 18th century to make English sound more like Latin, but it’s still alive and well in some quarters. (A high school English teacher once explained to my class that he, as a grammar stickler, would hang back upon meeting a new person to avoid being the one to ask “where are you from?”, since there actually is no other reasonable way to ask it! Which seems like the height of absurdity now.)
Chapter 3: Complications in English grammar were stripped out by the Vikings
This is where I start to have some doubts. Essentially, Old English was much more of a Germanic language than the modern version is: it had cases and grammatical gender and rigid rules about verb placement and distinguished “here” vs. “hither” and a whole bunch of other stuff. Why did English lose it all, when related languages did not? This tends to happen to languages that are learned by overwhelming numbers of adults such that their “butchered language” becomes just “the language,” but I found McWhorter’s arguments that it was the Vikings responsible—rather than the Celts or the Normans or someone else entirely, or perhaps all of them in succession—less convincing. Compared to these other groups, the Vikings spoke a language that was already quite similar, so it seems like learning to plug in different word endings in the same way would be easy enough. And were there really that many Viking migrant men, who also spoke different languages from each other (otherwise, presumably they’d just have communicated in their own)? And even if tons of migrant fathers spoke “butchered English,” wouldn’t children just have learned the full version from their mothers anyway?
Chapter 4: Grammar does not channel thought patterns
This chapter refutes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language colors the way people see and understand the world. It sounds like that’s long been discredited in linguistic circles, but hangs on in the popular imagination, so this was a useful chapter for me even if unrelated to the rest of the book. Apparently Whorf’s facts in proposing the hypothesis were dead wrong: it was largely based on the notion that the Hopi language has no past/present/future tenses, and therefore they experience time cyclically if at all, when in fact Hopi does have and use tense markers. Meanwhile, Japanese actually does lack an explicit future tense, but this doesn’t prevent its speakers from planning for the future. Studies show some impact from language on thought, but it’s generally stuff that has no impact on your daily life: for instance, native speakers of a language with grammatical gender are inclined to think that if an object is given a voice in a cartoon, its gender should match the grammatical one.
Chapter 5: Proto-Germanic picked up words and sound changes from somewhere else, maybe the Phoenicians?
This chapter goes furthest back in time and is the most speculative. Apparently, when comparing Proto-Germanic to Proto-Indo-European (to the extent we can even do this, as reconstructing words from either of these depends on comparing words from their extant descendants), about 1/3 of Germanic words come from an unknown other source. Germanic languages also picked up some odd sounds, changing p -> f, t -> th, and k -> h. This bears some resemblance to Semitic languages, and one theory is that it all came from the Phoenicians. However, we’ll probably never know, as there’s no proof they were in the area at the time (and why only there and not the rest of Europe?).
Overall, certainly an interesting read, and if McWhorter spends a lot of time addressing counterarguments to his ideas in ways that frustrate some readers, I definitely prefer that to pretending a theory is widely accepted when it is not. This book provides plenty of food for thought, and is very short—not just in page count either; they’re small pages. I do find something about his forays into informality (humorous asides, or making fun of arguments by emphasizing them with italics and multiple exclamation points) somewhat jarring with his overall more scholarly tone. And I would have liked a more comprehensive history rather than one that just addresses a few key points. But this one is worth a read for those interested in the history of the English language outside of well-known word imports.
October 13, 2021
The first John McWhorter book I read was The Power of Babel, a serendipitous find in an airport bookstore. I spent the cross country flight deeply immersed in it, and was inspired to look for other books that focused on the intersection of language and history. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is not as engaging as Power of Babel, and while its writing style is accessible to non-specialists with an interest in languages, some of its content seems to be directed towards other linguists. McWhorter takes iconoclastic stances on several linguistics issues, and though he provides supporting evidence, casual readers will not have the background or the training to evaluate them, nor does he give a good explanation of the alternative hypotheses. Sometimes it felt like there was some academic score-settling going on, as he named the scholars who he felt were biased and wrong in their interpretations.
The first chapter starts with two interesting quirks of English, the meaningless ‘do’ and the use of the progressive for the simple present. English is the only Germanic language that uses the meaningless do, as well as the only Indo-European language other than Welsh and Cornish, and we use it a lot, as in “Do you see what’s wrong?”, where most languages would simply say the equivalent of “You see what’s wrong?” Also, if you have a book in your hand and someone asks what you are doing, you might say, “I am reading,” when in almost all other languages it would be “I read.” McWhorter uses these examples to build a case that English was significantly influenced by the Celtic languages spoken before the invasions of the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans that turned it into what we speak today. This is a minority opinion, not supported by most linguists, and while McWhorter justifies his position, there is definitely another side to the argument which does not get presented.
There is an interesting chapter which looks at grammar in theory and practice. Not surprisingly, it changes over time. Indo-European had eight cases, which had eroded to five by the time of classical Latin (six if you count the rarely used Vocative); four in modern German; and in English only possession is marked, with apostrophe-s. As case endings fall away, prepositions get added to the front of words to indicate their function in the sentence, like subject, object, or object of the preposition. Part of this is natural and happens over time with most languages. At the margins where languages meet, however, things can happen quickly. Whether via conquest, exploration, or commerce, people speaking different languages need to communicate. Grammatical complexities tend to get chopped off in the creoles that form, and by the second generation the creole is what children learn as their native language, which they pass on while the speech of their parents is forgotten.
I was surprised that the book spent an entire chapter debunking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the once popular idea that language structures thought, and that some people’s thinking is so different from our own that certain concepts are impossible for them to grasp, just as we ourselves are unable to comprehend some of the things they can wrap their minds around. Sapir-Whorf was discredited decades ago, and for McWhorter to spend time beating that dead horse felt to me as unnecessary as a chapter refuting the Flat Earth theory.
The book’s final chapter makes the point that English is not some simplified, degenerate offspring of a purer parent language. One of its main influences was Proto-Germanic, spoken around 500 B.C., which was itself a jumble of grammatical oddities. In particular, there was a shift in consonant sounds which is almost unique in Indo-European, where p, t, and k morphed into f, th, and h. This leads McWhorter into a discussion of what influences could have caused the changes, and a look at the possibility that a Semitic language could have been responsible. One idea, which is intriguing but not strongly endorsed either by archaeologists or linguists, is that the wide-ranging Phoenicians, who had already spread the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, could have also voyaged as far north as modern day Denmark and Sweden, and changed Proto-Germanic via trade networks.
McWhorter has an engaging writing style, and can clearly explain even fairly technical linguistics concepts. He is always informative and fun to read, but this book was a strange mix of generally accepted language history and his own particular and not widely supported positions. It is worth reading, and at only a little over 200 pages, it is not a weighty tome, but it is not his best work.
The first chapter starts with two interesting quirks of English, the meaningless ‘do’ and the use of the progressive for the simple present. English is the only Germanic language that uses the meaningless do, as well as the only Indo-European language other than Welsh and Cornish, and we use it a lot, as in “Do you see what’s wrong?”, where most languages would simply say the equivalent of “You see what’s wrong?” Also, if you have a book in your hand and someone asks what you are doing, you might say, “I am reading,” when in almost all other languages it would be “I read.” McWhorter uses these examples to build a case that English was significantly influenced by the Celtic languages spoken before the invasions of the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans that turned it into what we speak today. This is a minority opinion, not supported by most linguists, and while McWhorter justifies his position, there is definitely another side to the argument which does not get presented.
There is an interesting chapter which looks at grammar in theory and practice. Not surprisingly, it changes over time. Indo-European had eight cases, which had eroded to five by the time of classical Latin (six if you count the rarely used Vocative); four in modern German; and in English only possession is marked, with apostrophe-s. As case endings fall away, prepositions get added to the front of words to indicate their function in the sentence, like subject, object, or object of the preposition. Part of this is natural and happens over time with most languages. At the margins where languages meet, however, things can happen quickly. Whether via conquest, exploration, or commerce, people speaking different languages need to communicate. Grammatical complexities tend to get chopped off in the creoles that form, and by the second generation the creole is what children learn as their native language, which they pass on while the speech of their parents is forgotten.
I was surprised that the book spent an entire chapter debunking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the once popular idea that language structures thought, and that some people’s thinking is so different from our own that certain concepts are impossible for them to grasp, just as we ourselves are unable to comprehend some of the things they can wrap their minds around. Sapir-Whorf was discredited decades ago, and for McWhorter to spend time beating that dead horse felt to me as unnecessary as a chapter refuting the Flat Earth theory.
The book’s final chapter makes the point that English is not some simplified, degenerate offspring of a purer parent language. One of its main influences was Proto-Germanic, spoken around 500 B.C., which was itself a jumble of grammatical oddities. In particular, there was a shift in consonant sounds which is almost unique in Indo-European, where p, t, and k morphed into f, th, and h. This leads McWhorter into a discussion of what influences could have caused the changes, and a look at the possibility that a Semitic language could have been responsible. One idea, which is intriguing but not strongly endorsed either by archaeologists or linguists, is that the wide-ranging Phoenicians, who had already spread the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, could have also voyaged as far north as modern day Denmark and Sweden, and changed Proto-Germanic via trade networks.
McWhorter has an engaging writing style, and can clearly explain even fairly technical linguistics concepts. He is always informative and fun to read, but this book was a strange mix of generally accepted language history and his own particular and not widely supported positions. It is worth reading, and at only a little over 200 pages, it is not a weighty tome, but it is not his best work.
July 15, 2018
If the history of language excites you (as it does me), this is a fun, quick and accessible book. John McWhorter is a linguist, and his excitement for language is palpable. I recommend the audiobook version: McWhorter himself narrates, and he is admirably capable of rendering the various foreign language passages as they are meant to be heard (and not as I might have imagined them), and various lines are customized to apply to those listening rather than reading.
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is, of course, referring to English. McWhorter is making a few cases here: a major one is that English owes some of its structural oddities, when compared with other Germanic languages, to an early (5th/6th century) interaction with Celtic and Welsh speakers. He holds this position in opposition to mainstream linguist consensus, and we get to hear his side of the argument. I am not familiar with the other side's position, so I can't offer perspective on the debate itself. McWhorter strikes me as persuasive, even if I am subtly suspicious of how he characterizes the opposing viewpoint. The prime suspects in this analysis are English's progressive verb formations ("I am writing..." instead of simply "I write") and the presence of "meaningless do": an oft-repeated phrase in this book referring to our odd use of the word "do" ("Do you see my hairbrush?") that does not in itself convey any meaning. Twelve-or-so Germanic languages never managed to sprout these features, yet Celtic and Welsh have them. Coincidence? McWhorter spends a fair amount of time (maybe even an unfair amount: it gets repetitive) unpacking this argument and defending against counters. For example, he must explain why Celtic vocabulary did not also creep into English (he points to similar transfers in other language clashes), and why we don't see written evidence of this influence for nearly a millennium (written records enforced Old English grammar, and it wasn't until after the Norman conquest forced scribes to write in French for 150 years that English returned in written form with its Old English tradition broken and the vernacular in place).
I read this at a convenient time, as I am currently 143 days into studying German (using Duolingo and Memrise, apps which both keep records of "streaks"). There are constant references to German grammar and the difficulty of learning German that were helpful in terms of contextualizing what I've learned so far, and providing commiseration. Another major point about English origins focused on Viking influence. This Viking "butchery" involved a great simplification of English grammar, removing a number of cases (dative, accusative, and so forth) and uncoupling the gendering of nouns. McWhorter demonstrates how the timing works out for Vikings to have influenced our grammar simply by being second-language speakers and not picking up on all the complex conjugation rules. This butchered English was then adopted by their children and passed along.
Another hypothesis is that even farther back in time, somewhere before Proto-Germanic had fully separated from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), there was the influence of a Semitic language (he points the finger at Phoenician) in softening some of the hard sounds of PIE into the softer ones we see in Germanic languages. For example, f in "father" or German "vater" instead of the p in latin "pater". He makes the case for a few of some dozen-or-so words, and the historical context of Phoenician voyages, but admits this is a hypothesis that would require much more supporting evidence in order to claim as fact. And we may never have it. For now, it's an intriguing possibility.
There is one section of the book that doesn't fall under the banner of "our magnificent bastard tongue", but I'm guessing McWhorter found it was a pressing topic that he wanted to address. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that language structure dictates the underlying mental perception of the world, and so languages that contain unique words or constructions give their speakers special insight into the relevant concepts. There's a strong and weak form of this hypothesis, and McWhorter argues at length against the strong form while conceding that in small ways language does influence thought patterns. I agree on this, and am not sure how many people would take the stronger form seriously.
Another fun theme in the book is taking down the pervasive grammar rules: the province of pedants. You can't end a sentence with a preposition! You can't refer to "Sam and me" going to the store! You can't use the pronoun "they" when referring to a singular subject! And so on. Language is a living, mutating creature, and McWhorter laughs at those who try to freeze it in place or plant arbitrary usage flags. He points out many examples of illogic baked into English, and many hills that past pedants have died upon. As Baruch Spinoza said, "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them." This is a book that encourages us all to observe, enjoy, and understand.
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is, of course, referring to English. McWhorter is making a few cases here: a major one is that English owes some of its structural oddities, when compared with other Germanic languages, to an early (5th/6th century) interaction with Celtic and Welsh speakers. He holds this position in opposition to mainstream linguist consensus, and we get to hear his side of the argument. I am not familiar with the other side's position, so I can't offer perspective on the debate itself. McWhorter strikes me as persuasive, even if I am subtly suspicious of how he characterizes the opposing viewpoint. The prime suspects in this analysis are English's progressive verb formations ("I am writing..." instead of simply "I write") and the presence of "meaningless do": an oft-repeated phrase in this book referring to our odd use of the word "do" ("Do you see my hairbrush?") that does not in itself convey any meaning. Twelve-or-so Germanic languages never managed to sprout these features, yet Celtic and Welsh have them. Coincidence? McWhorter spends a fair amount of time (maybe even an unfair amount: it gets repetitive) unpacking this argument and defending against counters. For example, he must explain why Celtic vocabulary did not also creep into English (he points to similar transfers in other language clashes), and why we don't see written evidence of this influence for nearly a millennium (written records enforced Old English grammar, and it wasn't until after the Norman conquest forced scribes to write in French for 150 years that English returned in written form with its Old English tradition broken and the vernacular in place).
I read this at a convenient time, as I am currently 143 days into studying German (using Duolingo and Memrise, apps which both keep records of "streaks"). There are constant references to German grammar and the difficulty of learning German that were helpful in terms of contextualizing what I've learned so far, and providing commiseration. Another major point about English origins focused on Viking influence. This Viking "butchery" involved a great simplification of English grammar, removing a number of cases (dative, accusative, and so forth) and uncoupling the gendering of nouns. McWhorter demonstrates how the timing works out for Vikings to have influenced our grammar simply by being second-language speakers and not picking up on all the complex conjugation rules. This butchered English was then adopted by their children and passed along.
Another hypothesis is that even farther back in time, somewhere before Proto-Germanic had fully separated from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), there was the influence of a Semitic language (he points the finger at Phoenician) in softening some of the hard sounds of PIE into the softer ones we see in Germanic languages. For example, f in "father" or German "vater" instead of the p in latin "pater". He makes the case for a few of some dozen-or-so words, and the historical context of Phoenician voyages, but admits this is a hypothesis that would require much more supporting evidence in order to claim as fact. And we may never have it. For now, it's an intriguing possibility.
There is one section of the book that doesn't fall under the banner of "our magnificent bastard tongue", but I'm guessing McWhorter found it was a pressing topic that he wanted to address. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that language structure dictates the underlying mental perception of the world, and so languages that contain unique words or constructions give their speakers special insight into the relevant concepts. There's a strong and weak form of this hypothesis, and McWhorter argues at length against the strong form while conceding that in small ways language does influence thought patterns. I agree on this, and am not sure how many people would take the stronger form seriously.
Another fun theme in the book is taking down the pervasive grammar rules: the province of pedants. You can't end a sentence with a preposition! You can't refer to "Sam and me" going to the store! You can't use the pronoun "they" when referring to a singular subject! And so on. Language is a living, mutating creature, and McWhorter laughs at those who try to freeze it in place or plant arbitrary usage flags. He points out many examples of illogic baked into English, and many hills that past pedants have died upon. As Baruch Spinoza said, "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them." This is a book that encourages us all to observe, enjoy, and understand.
March 19, 2019
I love languages and learning how English developed and sounded over time is fascinating. This is definitely a book that you should listen to as the author himself reads it. It is an auditory treat to hear the history of English and other languages from whence it grew.
March 8, 2022
As a French-language learner, I have always been confused about the use of "Est-ce que" in French as a substitute for the English word "DO." (Not a perfect match, of course, but close enough.). BTW, out of the 6,000 languages on Earth, only English and Gaelic use "DO." However, unlike English, I have found that eliminating the "Est-ce que" in a sentence in French doesn't seem to matter so much anymore as far as "Duolingo" is concerned. I may be making a huge mistake, but for me, "Why bother" adding extra word, when I'm practically encouraged to drop it? I assume this is what McWhorter meant when he said that "What is written can often be strikingly different from what is spoken." The reason? The Germanic arrived in England after the Celts. And the two languages lived side by side for a thousand years. So, this was the little bit of what English speakers added to their own language. However this is controversial, since there is not a direct link, but how can you prove something that is only spoken and not written down.
With McWhorter's book, I finally have my answer about "DO" or as he calls it, "the meaningless DO" in the English language. He makes an excellent case of the Celtic language influencing English with "the meaningless Do." McWhorter also presents a different case for "the verb noun present." I.e. making a verb, like "feel" into a noun by adding "ING" "feeling." Apparently this is something that both the Welsh and the Cornish did also, and no other language. How could it be denied that since these three different influencers of English lived side-by-side with English?
I actually met the author Mr. McWhorter at a speaking engagement at the downtown LA Library, where he was being feted for his brilliance. However, when they asked for questions, I stood and asked him, why does an "h" word occasionally use the "an" (non-specific article) in front of it as in "an historic building" and sometimes not, "a history lesson." He dismissed my question out of hand while the interviewer, quietly tried for an answer, saying there is an aspirated "H" and an "un-aspirated H." Anyway, I was disappointed that McWhorter couldn't more deftly handle my question. But I've forgiven him because he is so smart concerning language, and he writes in a brilliant, yet matter of fact way that can amuse too.
With McWhorter's book, I finally have my answer about "DO" or as he calls it, "the meaningless DO" in the English language. He makes an excellent case of the Celtic language influencing English with "the meaningless Do." McWhorter also presents a different case for "the verb noun present." I.e. making a verb, like "feel" into a noun by adding "ING" "feeling." Apparently this is something that both the Welsh and the Cornish did also, and no other language. How could it be denied that since these three different influencers of English lived side-by-side with English?
I actually met the author Mr. McWhorter at a speaking engagement at the downtown LA Library, where he was being feted for his brilliance. However, when they asked for questions, I stood and asked him, why does an "h" word occasionally use the "an" (non-specific article) in front of it as in "an historic building" and sometimes not, "a history lesson." He dismissed my question out of hand while the interviewer, quietly tried for an answer, saying there is an aspirated "H" and an "un-aspirated H." Anyway, I was disappointed that McWhorter couldn't more deftly handle my question. But I've forgiven him because he is so smart concerning language, and he writes in a brilliant, yet matter of fact way that can amuse too.
October 23, 2012
When someone says to me in the course of conversation, "Here's an idea I had" I think to myself, "okay, let's see."
When someone runs up to me and grabs me by the bicep and says, "I'm telling you, man! This is how it went down!" I'm inclined to back away.
Listen, I don't know Fact One about the linguistic anthropology community. This is the first of John McWhorter's books that I've ever read. I don't know if he's King of the Hill or some weirdo that hangs out in the gutters. What I can tell you, though, is that his attitude throughout this book was off-putting to the degree that I'm inclined to disbelieve his theories just based on how weirdly insistent he was that he's correct.
Okay, to cut him some slack I recognize that he was looking for a conversational tone; this isn't some research article. Still, I marked a couple of phrases:
"The genocide story [a theory at odds with his own], then, has fallen apart. Genes, archaeology, documentary evidence, and sheer common sense leave it dead in the water."
"In any case, the paucity of Celtic words in English is no argument at all against meaningless do and present-tense -ing being due to Celtic influence."
[during an analogy about language influence] "The Robinsons learned how to play piano with their feet from the Jonses. Period."
"Those who are uninterested in reporting this car are playing Monopoly, while those who are interested in reporting the attack on it are the ones bringing in a game of Clue and finding little interest."
There are more, of course, but I feel that'll suffice. I was constantly distracted by McWhorter's desperate need to prove that he alone knows the truth about all this, man, and those other guys, they ... they don't know bupkis! See, this is how it is!
Two stars for a few instances of getting me interested in linguistic theory occasionally, minus all the rest of the stars for questionable attitude.
When someone runs up to me and grabs me by the bicep and says, "I'm telling you, man! This is how it went down!" I'm inclined to back away.
Listen, I don't know Fact One about the linguistic anthropology community. This is the first of John McWhorter's books that I've ever read. I don't know if he's King of the Hill or some weirdo that hangs out in the gutters. What I can tell you, though, is that his attitude throughout this book was off-putting to the degree that I'm inclined to disbelieve his theories just based on how weirdly insistent he was that he's correct.
Okay, to cut him some slack I recognize that he was looking for a conversational tone; this isn't some research article. Still, I marked a couple of phrases:
"The genocide story [a theory at odds with his own], then, has fallen apart. Genes, archaeology, documentary evidence, and sheer common sense leave it dead in the water."
"In any case, the paucity of Celtic words in English is no argument at all against meaningless do and present-tense -ing being due to Celtic influence."
[during an analogy about language influence] "The Robinsons learned how to play piano with their feet from the Jonses. Period."
"Those who are uninterested in reporting this car are playing Monopoly, while those who are interested in reporting the attack on it are the ones bringing in a game of Clue and finding little interest."
There are more, of course, but I feel that'll suffice. I was constantly distracted by McWhorter's desperate need to prove that he alone knows the truth about all this, man, and those other guys, they ... they don't know bupkis! See, this is how it is!
Two stars for a few instances of getting me interested in linguistic theory occasionally, minus all the rest of the stars for questionable attitude.
December 1, 2021
Well, this was little painful.
I love reading about languages - how they came to be, how they evolved, what is the story behind the words… That was the reason I chose this book, in fact, it was recommended to me by Amazon based upon the earlier purchases I made on this subject. I started to read it with having no idea who the author was, and was hoping for a fun and informative journey into the history of English grammar.
Instead I found a book full of strawman arguments, and mostly it felt like the writer is trying to convince his critics in his academic field on the theory he is defending. First of all the tone of the book disturbed me. It is written in a way that echoes “What everyone else believes is wrong, I have an alternative theory which is hundred percent true, and everyone else is absolutely horribly wrong.”
In the first few chapters he talks about Welsh and Cornish influence in English grammar. You can tell he’s very invested in this idea, because he keeps going over and over and over until the half of the book. The examples are similar argument is repetitive and unengaging.
I also did not like that he keeps repeating how English is much easier to learn than the other languages. He means other Indo-European Germanic languages, but he omits specifying this in many instances which makes a non-native English speaker as myself estranged. As a person whose native language is from a very different language family, and who learned English at a later age I found this argument very biased. It was definitely not easy to learn English, when I try to learn other languages like Latin or Spanish, I found them much more easier than learning English. So his personal experience definitely paints his view on the subject which proves that he’s very biased and he never thought of a non-native speaker’s perspective. I found the signs of his bias through the book, and by the time I was halfway I lost the interest because it was obvious that I was reading a very one-sided argument.
I did not check the author or other comments on this book on purpose until I finished it. Once I read it I did some research about his previous work and criticism of his work, which is abundant. One of the most striking criticisms was his habit of using very specific examples to prove his point even though the rest of the examples he purposefully omits do not follow his premise about his theory. I’m not a linguist and not even a native speaker, but I was able to sense this one sided fallacious arguments in the book.
I think this book should have been an article or maybe an op Ed in a journal. Throughout the book I felt like he was trying to get supporters for his fringe academic views, rather than informing the reader.
As for the narration: it is not great, it is not horrible. Probably the worst is that he keeps repeating himself throughout the book.
I learned a few interesting things, though I’m not 100% sure if they were accurate. So for the sake of those I will give it two stars.
I love reading about languages - how they came to be, how they evolved, what is the story behind the words… That was the reason I chose this book, in fact, it was recommended to me by Amazon based upon the earlier purchases I made on this subject. I started to read it with having no idea who the author was, and was hoping for a fun and informative journey into the history of English grammar.
Instead I found a book full of strawman arguments, and mostly it felt like the writer is trying to convince his critics in his academic field on the theory he is defending. First of all the tone of the book disturbed me. It is written in a way that echoes “What everyone else believes is wrong, I have an alternative theory which is hundred percent true, and everyone else is absolutely horribly wrong.”
In the first few chapters he talks about Welsh and Cornish influence in English grammar. You can tell he’s very invested in this idea, because he keeps going over and over and over until the half of the book. The examples are similar argument is repetitive and unengaging.
I also did not like that he keeps repeating how English is much easier to learn than the other languages. He means other Indo-European Germanic languages, but he omits specifying this in many instances which makes a non-native English speaker as myself estranged. As a person whose native language is from a very different language family, and who learned English at a later age I found this argument very biased. It was definitely not easy to learn English, when I try to learn other languages like Latin or Spanish, I found them much more easier than learning English. So his personal experience definitely paints his view on the subject which proves that he’s very biased and he never thought of a non-native speaker’s perspective. I found the signs of his bias through the book, and by the time I was halfway I lost the interest because it was obvious that I was reading a very one-sided argument.
I did not check the author or other comments on this book on purpose until I finished it. Once I read it I did some research about his previous work and criticism of his work, which is abundant. One of the most striking criticisms was his habit of using very specific examples to prove his point even though the rest of the examples he purposefully omits do not follow his premise about his theory. I’m not a linguist and not even a native speaker, but I was able to sense this one sided fallacious arguments in the book.
I think this book should have been an article or maybe an op Ed in a journal. Throughout the book I felt like he was trying to get supporters for his fringe academic views, rather than informing the reader.
As for the narration: it is not great, it is not horrible. Probably the worst is that he keeps repeating himself throughout the book.
I learned a few interesting things, though I’m not 100% sure if they were accurate. So for the sake of those I will give it two stars.
April 13, 2015
John McWhorter has done it again! For those who love language, there is no author better to educate and entertain on all matters linguistic. In the current work, he proves that Celtic grammatical structures have given English its "meaningless do" (as in "Do you know what I mean?") and its normative progressive present tense (as in "I am writing" rather than the more usual in other Germanic languages "I write"). He, in fact, rather belabors the point in the first chapter to an extent that can only be the result of some nasty academic attacks he must have endured on this particular topic. He expands a reference in his 2003 book, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care into a comprehensive discussion of the Viking role in simplifying English that explains many of the differences between Old and Middle English. He shows a somewhat less conservative side than he has shown in other works in his demonstration that getting fussy over grammatical errors (such as split infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions) is a futile occupation, since it is through errors that language changes and changes in language are inevitable. Finally, he takes on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and usefully corrects the more radical views that our language gives us our worldview, because our thinking is directed along narrow grooves dictated by our grammar. All of this is much more fun than I have made it sound in this brief synopsis. Try it; you'll like it.
June 23, 2009
Six assertions of unexplained significance are belabored into the first three repetitious soporific chapters(literally--1st & last book in all my years that put me to sleep within a page time after time):
1. Most linguists study individual languages & are ignorant of others.
2. This ignorance causes them to exceptionalize and mistake the reasons for changes in the English language.
3. John McWhorter aloneable to synthesis research and theory about all languages to discern the errors.
3. Changes in grammar from Old English to Middle English are remarkable and ignored by linguists in favor of attention to vocabulary changes.
4. Celtic and Viking influence account for these remarkable grammar changes.
5. The written texts linguists have relied on do not reflect Old & Middle English as it was actually spoke by any of the non-scribes .
6. English grammar is simpler than that of many other languages.
Tortorous analogies from McWhorter’s life and times are roadblocks, not detours. Nothing is illuminated.
Start with chapter 4,” Does Our Grammar Channel Our Thought?” It’s accessible without being codescending, succinct and better-edited
1. Most linguists study individual languages & are ignorant of others.
2. This ignorance causes them to exceptionalize and mistake the reasons for changes in the English language.
3. John McWhorter aloneable to synthesis research and theory about all languages to discern the errors.
3. Changes in grammar from Old English to Middle English are remarkable and ignored by linguists in favor of attention to vocabulary changes.
4. Celtic and Viking influence account for these remarkable grammar changes.
5. The written texts linguists have relied on do not reflect Old & Middle English as it was actually spoke by any of the non-scribes .
6. English grammar is simpler than that of many other languages.
Tortorous analogies from McWhorter’s life and times are roadblocks, not detours. Nothing is illuminated.
Start with chapter 4,” Does Our Grammar Channel Our Thought?” It’s accessible without being codescending, succinct and better-edited
July 14, 2011
While written in an entertaining and humorous tone, the author belabors a few points a little too much for my taste. He spends almost 70 pages establishing why he is unique among all linguists because of his belief that English has been influenced by Celtic languages. It really could have been written in half the length but he seems to enjoy his own voice.
There are multiple examples provided to support his theories, & he has made this accessible to non-academics, but his tone of "us" (anyone who agrees with him) vs. "them" (anyone who doesn't) is a little off putting bc he puts people on the defensive unnecessarily.
I'd recommend this in conjunction with an earlier book on the history of English bc this doesn't really delve into a history but sets out to debunk earlier theories about the history. So it's better read after other texts that outline more fully the actual history rather than simply focusing on a few idiosyncrasies of the English language.
It is a fast read and enjoyable, but by no means a definitive text for anyone who wants a basic history of how English came to be.
There are multiple examples provided to support his theories, & he has made this accessible to non-academics, but his tone of "us" (anyone who agrees with him) vs. "them" (anyone who doesn't) is a little off putting bc he puts people on the defensive unnecessarily.
I'd recommend this in conjunction with an earlier book on the history of English bc this doesn't really delve into a history but sets out to debunk earlier theories about the history. So it's better read after other texts that outline more fully the actual history rather than simply focusing on a few idiosyncrasies of the English language.
It is a fast read and enjoyable, but by no means a definitive text for anyone who wants a basic history of how English came to be.
December 12, 2019
I am a nerd, of course, but not even I expect to find linguistics riveting and funny. That’s what happens, though, when you find yourself reading something by a brilliant thinker who’s not afraid to challenge many of his field’s presuppositions and who can spin a good story out of otherwise dry stuff.
McWhorter has a couple of ideas that he both presents with stunning clarity and that he juxtaposes to the dominant thinking of other linguists. Above all, he has a sense that language carries the residue of the people who spoke it rather than the conquerors of those people. It’s a great and liberating sense as far as I’m concerned; these conquered people often vanished from history, but they have left their mark in the way we speak.
The first theory he explores is the notion that our English grammar owes far more to the Celts than we have otherwise imagined. When the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived as conquerors, they did not, as some historians have insisted, wipe out the existing Celtic population. Instead, they became an upper-class; as recent DNA evidence suggests, the Celtic Britons seem responsible for more than 90 percent of the genetic make-up of modern-day English.
The official language the island came to speak was indeed “Old English,” a descendent of Old German, but it had a number of grammatical quirks, mostly an absence of case endings and verb conjugations as well as an odd “meaningless do” that featured in sentences like “Do you want…” Where conventional linguistic history has it that these features either just fell away from disuse (something that did not happen to most other descendants of Old German) or emerged as quirks in the case of the “meaningless do,” McWhorter marshals all sorts of evidence to show that what we see is the evidence of a conquered people attempting to speak a new language but mangling it in the process. The Celtic British language indeed featured some of those grammatical elements, and it seems fairly convincing to think that those “second language speakers” of that time – who constituted a substantial majority – mis-learned the invaders’ way of speaking.
McWhorter applies similar thinking in a later era. Convention has it that the Norman Invasion, with its French speakers, infused Middle English with the novelties that eventually turned it into Modern English. And it is clear that we receive many Romance-language words through that transfusion. But vocabulary is a more superficial change in language than its core grammar. McWhorter argues that there were simply never enough Normans around to influence the everyday language; there were perhaps only ten thousand on an island with millions in population, and many of them rarely interacted with the common people.
Instead, says McWhorter, there’s a much more substantial infusion of population from a series of Viking raids. Those small-time conquerors – who tended to land near the coasts and establish colonies that eventually intermarried with the existing population – were ultimately both more numerous and more engaged in the commerce of everyday life. They are the ones, McWorter says, who brought about the further erosion of conjugation and case endings that is distinct to English. What’s more, he points out triumphantly, while the written record will always be far behind the conventional ways most people talk, the written records show that such changes began in the regions where the Vikings settled rather than in places closer to Norman strongholds.
He offers one more intriguing hypothesis from the same pattern of analysis. He notes that Old German is itself already a somewhat trimmed down version of its precursor Old Indo-European. Among other strange changes, it’s a rare language that goes from hard consonants tike ‘P’ to softer ones like “F,” as in Pater becoming Father. Using a kind of CSI—History of Language, he speculates that it’s possible the alternation we see is the result of a transfusion from the way Semitic speakers would have learned and bastardized the language.
Then, in perhaps the most speculative part of the book, he considers the possibility that the Phoenicians of Carthage – they of the Punic Wars, and speakers of Semitic Akkadian – may have had a larger geographic presence in the Scandinavian areas where Old German first emerged. That is, he proposes that our language has never been “pure,” that it has always been altered by contact with peoples who, though they have not gone onto political power, have mis-learned and passed along a new kind of speech.
If all that weren’t enough – a coherent story that gives a glimpse of academic controversy and still manages to stitch together different historical developments – this also offers the best grammatical defense I have ever heard for why I should let go the, to-me, ear-scraping sound of using the plural “them” to refer to individuals as a gender-neutral pronoun. First, he says, there’s evidence for such a use going back to Shakespeare and before; it’s always been a part of the language.
Second, he reminds me, no language is without its logical inconsistency. He offers a lot of great examples I can’t reconstruct, but most persuasively he points at the example of “aren’t I?” I’d never thought of it before, but – if numerical agreement is so important – then why does the singular I take the plural aren’t in such a situation? Logically it should be “amn’t I,” but we hear that as wrong. It’s just a reminder that this is how language works. It’s always got some illogical elements from its strange inheritance, and it’s never going to be entirely consistent.
What we have with which to write and speak is, it turns out, the record of many long-defeated peoples. We’ve lost their ideas and many of their words, but something of their experience has crept into what we know through the bastardization process of linguistic change. I knew a lot of this going in, but McWhorter makes me feel smarter, and he certainly entertained me along the way.
McWhorter has a couple of ideas that he both presents with stunning clarity and that he juxtaposes to the dominant thinking of other linguists. Above all, he has a sense that language carries the residue of the people who spoke it rather than the conquerors of those people. It’s a great and liberating sense as far as I’m concerned; these conquered people often vanished from history, but they have left their mark in the way we speak.
The first theory he explores is the notion that our English grammar owes far more to the Celts than we have otherwise imagined. When the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived as conquerors, they did not, as some historians have insisted, wipe out the existing Celtic population. Instead, they became an upper-class; as recent DNA evidence suggests, the Celtic Britons seem responsible for more than 90 percent of the genetic make-up of modern-day English.
The official language the island came to speak was indeed “Old English,” a descendent of Old German, but it had a number of grammatical quirks, mostly an absence of case endings and verb conjugations as well as an odd “meaningless do” that featured in sentences like “Do you want…” Where conventional linguistic history has it that these features either just fell away from disuse (something that did not happen to most other descendants of Old German) or emerged as quirks in the case of the “meaningless do,” McWhorter marshals all sorts of evidence to show that what we see is the evidence of a conquered people attempting to speak a new language but mangling it in the process. The Celtic British language indeed featured some of those grammatical elements, and it seems fairly convincing to think that those “second language speakers” of that time – who constituted a substantial majority – mis-learned the invaders’ way of speaking.
McWhorter applies similar thinking in a later era. Convention has it that the Norman Invasion, with its French speakers, infused Middle English with the novelties that eventually turned it into Modern English. And it is clear that we receive many Romance-language words through that transfusion. But vocabulary is a more superficial change in language than its core grammar. McWhorter argues that there were simply never enough Normans around to influence the everyday language; there were perhaps only ten thousand on an island with millions in population, and many of them rarely interacted with the common people.
Instead, says McWhorter, there’s a much more substantial infusion of population from a series of Viking raids. Those small-time conquerors – who tended to land near the coasts and establish colonies that eventually intermarried with the existing population – were ultimately both more numerous and more engaged in the commerce of everyday life. They are the ones, McWorter says, who brought about the further erosion of conjugation and case endings that is distinct to English. What’s more, he points out triumphantly, while the written record will always be far behind the conventional ways most people talk, the written records show that such changes began in the regions where the Vikings settled rather than in places closer to Norman strongholds.
He offers one more intriguing hypothesis from the same pattern of analysis. He notes that Old German is itself already a somewhat trimmed down version of its precursor Old Indo-European. Among other strange changes, it’s a rare language that goes from hard consonants tike ‘P’ to softer ones like “F,” as in Pater becoming Father. Using a kind of CSI—History of Language, he speculates that it’s possible the alternation we see is the result of a transfusion from the way Semitic speakers would have learned and bastardized the language.
Then, in perhaps the most speculative part of the book, he considers the possibility that the Phoenicians of Carthage – they of the Punic Wars, and speakers of Semitic Akkadian – may have had a larger geographic presence in the Scandinavian areas where Old German first emerged. That is, he proposes that our language has never been “pure,” that it has always been altered by contact with peoples who, though they have not gone onto political power, have mis-learned and passed along a new kind of speech.
If all that weren’t enough – a coherent story that gives a glimpse of academic controversy and still manages to stitch together different historical developments – this also offers the best grammatical defense I have ever heard for why I should let go the, to-me, ear-scraping sound of using the plural “them” to refer to individuals as a gender-neutral pronoun. First, he says, there’s evidence for such a use going back to Shakespeare and before; it’s always been a part of the language.
Second, he reminds me, no language is without its logical inconsistency. He offers a lot of great examples I can’t reconstruct, but most persuasively he points at the example of “aren’t I?” I’d never thought of it before, but – if numerical agreement is so important – then why does the singular I take the plural aren’t in such a situation? Logically it should be “amn’t I,” but we hear that as wrong. It’s just a reminder that this is how language works. It’s always got some illogical elements from its strange inheritance, and it’s never going to be entirely consistent.
What we have with which to write and speak is, it turns out, the record of many long-defeated peoples. We’ve lost their ideas and many of their words, but something of their experience has crept into what we know through the bastardization process of linguistic change. I knew a lot of this going in, but McWhorter makes me feel smarter, and he certainly entertained me along the way.
July 14, 2014
3/31/2010 McWhorter presents the reader with a mystery: why does English have the particular grammatical quirks that it does? He then proceeds to make a convincing, and amusing case for the culprits he has identified, notably by comparison to other times and places where languages have been brought together. It's simple, it's straightforward, it's plausible, and it's entertaining, even for those who know nothing of grammar. And it makes a nice companion to all those books (which I love) about all the words English has borrowed from other languages.
Library copy.
Library copy.
March 25, 2021
This is a pretty short and entertaining review of why English is so different from its closest cousins: the other twelve or so Germanic languages. There are three main characteristics that McWhorter explains that have no parallels.
The first one is the use of meaningless “do” in questions and negation (did you see him? No I did not.). The second is the odd continuous “-ing” to indicate present tense. In other Germanic languages, saying “I write” is perfectly normal to indicate that you are currently at the act of writing - in English you must say “I am writing”, otherwise people either assume you are a foreigner or that you are a writer. McWhorter argues these came from Welsh and Cornish, that were spoken on the island at the time of the English invasion. Since there are no other languages in the world (or not nearby, anyway) that have this structure, and they were on the same island... there really shouldn’t be much news to this. But apparently most scholars think it just evolved naturally - and he spends some time refuting their case.
The third oddity is English’s remarkable simplification compared to all other Germanic languages. While other languages have dropped endings and genders and conjugations over time, English grammar is downright stripped: no linguistic gender, only a couple endings, conjugation dropped completely, etc. McWhorter attributes this to the Vikings - namely, a bunch of adults having to learn a language and dropping much of the flourishes - and later this becoming the dominant language.
There are a few interesting tidbits about English history, a survey of many languages for comparative oddities, an analysis of written vs. oral language, and a short history of language evolution from early to medieval English.
I enjoyed it, but I did find it somewhat repetitive. And as far as the gist, I have summarized it here. This could have been a long article instead of a book. It is written with humor, and I do enjoy history, so overall it was worth my time. 3.5 stars.
The first one is the use of meaningless “do” in questions and negation (did you see him? No I did not.). The second is the odd continuous “-ing” to indicate present tense. In other Germanic languages, saying “I write” is perfectly normal to indicate that you are currently at the act of writing - in English you must say “I am writing”, otherwise people either assume you are a foreigner or that you are a writer. McWhorter argues these came from Welsh and Cornish, that were spoken on the island at the time of the English invasion. Since there are no other languages in the world (or not nearby, anyway) that have this structure, and they were on the same island... there really shouldn’t be much news to this. But apparently most scholars think it just evolved naturally - and he spends some time refuting their case.
The third oddity is English’s remarkable simplification compared to all other Germanic languages. While other languages have dropped endings and genders and conjugations over time, English grammar is downright stripped: no linguistic gender, only a couple endings, conjugation dropped completely, etc. McWhorter attributes this to the Vikings - namely, a bunch of adults having to learn a language and dropping much of the flourishes - and later this becoming the dominant language.
There are a few interesting tidbits about English history, a survey of many languages for comparative oddities, an analysis of written vs. oral language, and a short history of language evolution from early to medieval English.
I enjoyed it, but I did find it somewhat repetitive. And as far as the gist, I have summarized it here. This could have been a long article instead of a book. It is written with humor, and I do enjoy history, so overall it was worth my time. 3.5 stars.
November 27, 2023
Did I ever think I'd be chortling at a historical linguistics book? I did not.
John McWhorter is hilariously caustic, cynical, and acerbic.
This book is indeed, not a History of English. It is the Untold History of English, or rather, John McWhorter's pet rants about four topics:
- Celtic influence on English
- Viking influence on English
- why the Whorf hypothesis sucks
- possible Phoenician influence on Proto-Germanic
One gets the sense that McWhorter got fed up with certain ideas or lack thereof in the linguistics community to the point where he said, "Screw it, I'm writing a book!" And what we are reading is his personal rant. Which is what makes it so engaging.
I don't know enough to evaluate McWhorter's theories. For his first two, he rebuts common detractors. His last theory is too speculative to really evaluate at this point in time, but I suspect it's pretty creative.
The book is a fun and quick read and I recommend it.
John McWhorter is hilariously caustic, cynical, and acerbic.
This book is indeed, not a History of English. It is the Untold History of English, or rather, John McWhorter's pet rants about four topics:
- Celtic influence on English
- Viking influence on English
- why the Whorf hypothesis sucks
- possible Phoenician influence on Proto-Germanic
One gets the sense that McWhorter got fed up with certain ideas or lack thereof in the linguistics community to the point where he said, "Screw it, I'm writing a book!" And what we are reading is his personal rant. Which is what makes it so engaging.
I don't know enough to evaluate McWhorter's theories. For his first two, he rebuts common detractors. His last theory is too speculative to really evaluate at this point in time, but I suspect it's pretty creative.
The book is a fun and quick read and I recommend it.
April 10, 2018
Read March-April 2018
I came across this book during an audible sale and my fascination with linguistics (which has lain dormant and unattended ever since I finished an intro level linguistics course in college several years ago), reared its head and compelled me to give Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue a go. McWhorter is an enthusiastic, almost gleeful narrator and is a pleasure to listen to.
This book argues against viewing English as a uniform, stagnant language that must adhere to its many rules of grammar. Some points are over-belabored, but it's interesting to see how weird it is that the world at large seems to have adopted the idea that the rules of proper English should be followed to the letter, when all languages, including English, naturally change shape over time.
I think that it was compellingly written, in a way that is easy to process for any reader with a casual interest in linguistics (I wasn’t in danger of drowning in incomprehension). I think that there were some definite pros and cons to listening to this text rather than reading a physical copy. Listening gave me an excellent chance to process and really hear the similarities between languages that are drawn into comparisons throughout the book; but without being able to see the words on the page, it was harder to follow the structural similarities that don’t always come across clearly when I’m trying to listen to extended foreign language quotes or examples. Then there were some of the more convoluted explanations that defeated me, and I had to skip back and re-listen to several times; clarification would have been easier if I had the text in front of me. It’s a trade-off, if you choose one format over the other. I would actually recommend grabbing a text version to read along as you listen, because I think there is a lot to be gained from both formats.
My main complaint would be that McWhorter sometimes gets mired in an idea and then talks his way in circles instead of talking his way out (I swear if I heard the phrase “meaningless do” one more time…).
This book offers a fun overview of some of the weird idiosyncrasies of English and a surprisingly casual approach to modern changes in everyday English use. For example, singular “their.” I mean, I went the English degree route and I know for a fact that I had professors who were willing to die on that hill (forbidding its usage, of course. I more than once made the error of assuming singular their had sufficiently reached popular acceptance). I personally am a fan of accepting the changes in casual vernacular as they come. After all, just existing as a person who uses the internet is difficult if you refuse to comprehend the new abbreviations, slang, or syntax that slip into popular use almost constantly. Does anybody really enjoy the grammar police commenters who have to correct people who have clearly made a stylized choice to eschew formal English grammar in idle Facebook posts? Or even, for that matter, the people who feel so very deeply compelled to correct genuine spelling errors? Because, really, the internet in general is not a formal setting. That was actually one of the points that I found most interesting in this book. Not about the internet’s effect on casual speech patterns, because that topic isn’t really addressed, but rather the idea that people have probably always spoken a less “perfect” version of their language than they use when writing; the documentation only shows the formal language because that is what is being saved.
BIG LONG QUOTE (Which more or less encompasses the main point and tone of the whole book):
“Oh, those lapses, darling. So many of us walk around letting fly with “errors.” We could do better, but we’re so slovenly, so rushed amid the hurly-burly of modern life, so imprinted by the ‘let it all hang out’ ethos of the sixties, that we don’t bother to observe the ‘rules’ of ‘correct’ grammar.
“To a linguist, if I may share, these ‘rules’ occupy the exact same place as the notion of astrology, alchemy, and medicine being based on the four humors. The ‘rules’ make no logical sense in terms of the history of our language, or what languages around the world are like.
“Nota bene: linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not—I repeat, not—that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage. No argument there.
“The argument is about what constitutes artful and effective usage. Quite a few notions that get around out there have nothing to do with grace or clarity, and are just based on misconceptions about how languages work.”
I came across this book during an audible sale and my fascination with linguistics (which has lain dormant and unattended ever since I finished an intro level linguistics course in college several years ago), reared its head and compelled me to give Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue a go. McWhorter is an enthusiastic, almost gleeful narrator and is a pleasure to listen to.
This book argues against viewing English as a uniform, stagnant language that must adhere to its many rules of grammar. Some points are over-belabored, but it's interesting to see how weird it is that the world at large seems to have adopted the idea that the rules of proper English should be followed to the letter, when all languages, including English, naturally change shape over time.
I think that it was compellingly written, in a way that is easy to process for any reader with a casual interest in linguistics (I wasn’t in danger of drowning in incomprehension). I think that there were some definite pros and cons to listening to this text rather than reading a physical copy. Listening gave me an excellent chance to process and really hear the similarities between languages that are drawn into comparisons throughout the book; but without being able to see the words on the page, it was harder to follow the structural similarities that don’t always come across clearly when I’m trying to listen to extended foreign language quotes or examples. Then there were some of the more convoluted explanations that defeated me, and I had to skip back and re-listen to several times; clarification would have been easier if I had the text in front of me. It’s a trade-off, if you choose one format over the other. I would actually recommend grabbing a text version to read along as you listen, because I think there is a lot to be gained from both formats.
My main complaint would be that McWhorter sometimes gets mired in an idea and then talks his way in circles instead of talking his way out (I swear if I heard the phrase “meaningless do” one more time…).
This book offers a fun overview of some of the weird idiosyncrasies of English and a surprisingly casual approach to modern changes in everyday English use. For example, singular “their.” I mean, I went the English degree route and I know for a fact that I had professors who were willing to die on that hill (forbidding its usage, of course. I more than once made the error of assuming singular their had sufficiently reached popular acceptance). I personally am a fan of accepting the changes in casual vernacular as they come. After all, just existing as a person who uses the internet is difficult if you refuse to comprehend the new abbreviations, slang, or syntax that slip into popular use almost constantly. Does anybody really enjoy the grammar police commenters who have to correct people who have clearly made a stylized choice to eschew formal English grammar in idle Facebook posts? Or even, for that matter, the people who feel so very deeply compelled to correct genuine spelling errors? Because, really, the internet in general is not a formal setting. That was actually one of the points that I found most interesting in this book. Not about the internet’s effect on casual speech patterns, because that topic isn’t really addressed, but rather the idea that people have probably always spoken a less “perfect” version of their language than they use when writing; the documentation only shows the formal language because that is what is being saved.
BIG LONG QUOTE (Which more or less encompasses the main point and tone of the whole book):
“Oh, those lapses, darling. So many of us walk around letting fly with “errors.” We could do better, but we’re so slovenly, so rushed amid the hurly-burly of modern life, so imprinted by the ‘let it all hang out’ ethos of the sixties, that we don’t bother to observe the ‘rules’ of ‘correct’ grammar.
“To a linguist, if I may share, these ‘rules’ occupy the exact same place as the notion of astrology, alchemy, and medicine being based on the four humors. The ‘rules’ make no logical sense in terms of the history of our language, or what languages around the world are like.
“Nota bene: linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not—I repeat, not—that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage. No argument there.
“The argument is about what constitutes artful and effective usage. Quite a few notions that get around out there have nothing to do with grace or clarity, and are just based on misconceptions about how languages work.”
June 8, 2013
For my next non-fiction project, I'm been rummaging around in paleolinguistics and paleohistory: I'll tell you just why in a future post. Suffice to say that my most recent reading has led me back to the delightful Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter.
His unstated thesis is that English is a Creole language, with nothing pejorative intended in the phrase. What happened to English is that it was transformed when a prolonged wave of newcomers struggled to communicate with the people already living in England, dropping grammatical niceties right and left.
The result of this simplification is a Modern English that does not routinely give gender to nouns the way every other language in Europe does, has eliminated the case markers that make German, Latin and Ancient Greek such chores to learn, and picked up some interesting features found only in Cornish and Welsh.
McWhorter is a youngish linguistic scholar who has spent much time researching creoles, the new languages which people create when invaders, immigrants or people otherwise thrown together must figure out how to talk to each other and to a larger community. He argues that what has happened to English (and perhaps to an ancestor language, Proto-Germanic) over time is not a simply borrowing of thousands and thousands of words, but more fundamental changes in the way sentences are structured.
Languages and how people express themselves is something I find fascinating. This year I also had the pleasure of reading Mark Abley’s books, Spoken Here and The Prodigal Tongue which also deal with the history of language and where language, particularly English, is going. Abley tells a good story, but there is more here than well chosen anecdotes and some remarkable little known facts. Spoken Here has an important political question as its subtext. Abley is an Anglohone Quebec writer and Spoken Here was written against the backdrop of Quebec politics. Francophones think their language is in danger, while Anglophones here jealousy guard theirs, but nowhere in this book does Abley mention this, I think.
Nor does McWhorter, an African-American, talk much about Black English even though he has been criticized for comments he’s made elsewhere. While Abley’s and McWhorter’s books can be read with pleasure by language buffs of whatever colour or place of residence, a careful appreciation of them requires a little parsing of them for their political grammar. Speaking (or at least understanding) the same language is essential for determining where we go from here.
By the way, McWhorter- has nothing against heading toward a more electronic culture. He recently gave a TED lecture in which he called text messages "a linguistic miracle." Because the short, abreviation-filled communications bounce back and forth, they are much closer to how we speak than written communication has been up until now.
This "fingered speech" is far from being the end of the world. Language has always been changing he says. In his talk he cites :a passage from 1956 bemoaning the decline of language in young people … and then three more, all the way back to 63 AD when a pedant lamented everyone’s terrible Latin. (That “terrible Latin” eventually became French.) " McWhorter says, “Being fluent in spoken language, written language and writing-like-speaking language is an unconscious balancing act that allows each “speaker” to expand his or her linguistic repertoire."
February 7, 2010
A very interesting book with some new theories about the development of the English language from its Germanic roots. I like his comparisons of the members of the “gang” and even more since I am familiar with two of them (ok, one and a half). McWhorter shows without any prejudice that not only all human beings are equal but also all languages though they are very different. It’s an interesting point that a language with an “easy” grammar might be a bigger challenge for the speaker and that the English “meaningless do” really is as meaningless as our “der/die/das”.
As a pedant I can’t stop here. So just some petty criticism without substantial weight.
1. Call me humourless but I don’t need cheap jokes to read a scientific book. When he cites Shakespeare he does not need to tell me that Shakespeare did not refer to “Sports Illustrated” when he mentions a “magazine”.
2. “Ich tue vielleicht den Sack aufschneiden” is not an “option”, not even in a grammatical sense. That’s a sentence you would only tolerate coming from a toddler, but it just isn’t German even if all the single words are correct.
3. How to proof that the Phoenicians were in Germany and/or Denmark to teach us idiots good Phoenician grammar? One of the Phoenician Gods was called “Baal”. And one of our Germanic Gods was called “Balder”. Not exactly compelling if you consider that the Phoenicians as well as the Gotes had hundred of Gods and it would be more astounding if there were not two of them with similar names.
As a pedant I can’t stop here. So just some petty criticism without substantial weight.
1. Call me humourless but I don’t need cheap jokes to read a scientific book. When he cites Shakespeare he does not need to tell me that Shakespeare did not refer to “Sports Illustrated” when he mentions a “magazine”.
2. “Ich tue vielleicht den Sack aufschneiden” is not an “option”, not even in a grammatical sense. That’s a sentence you would only tolerate coming from a toddler, but it just isn’t German even if all the single words are correct.
3. How to proof that the Phoenicians were in Germany and/or Denmark to teach us idiots good Phoenician grammar? One of the Phoenician Gods was called “Baal”. And one of our Germanic Gods was called “Balder”. Not exactly compelling if you consider that the Phoenicians as well as the Gotes had hundred of Gods and it would be more astounding if there were not two of them with similar names.
September 8, 2010
Well, apparently there's a lot more to John McWhorter than that he just happens to be the guy that wrote this book. I guess once you've created a reputation as an esteemed, literate, intellectual African-American schooled in serious linguistics research, people will start throwing you in front of a camera and asking what you think about Obama and what your politics are (social conservatism). Of course I had to watch a few, and couldn't get beyond the fact that his upper lip absolutely does not move, creating a slight lisp that is kind of charming and very distracting. But see how tv makes me superficial? I want to talk about the book, which was very good.
Reading the last chapter, when you realize that all of his hypotheses are being presented here, instead of some obscure linguistics journal, available for little old laymen like me to pick up and peruse for our entertainment, the information kind of took on a holy-grail aura. Well, duh, all you fuddy-duddies, McWhorter has just made the whole linguistic field comprehensible for everyone; what are YOU doing? His writing does, at times, get a bit repetitive, and he takes some real liberties with his metaphors, maybe a bit too cute, but he sure is persuasive. If you're looking for specifics as to what McWhorter discusses, I recommend goodreads member Manny's review. (I dunno how to link him, but he comes up first)
Reading the last chapter, when you realize that all of his hypotheses are being presented here, instead of some obscure linguistics journal, available for little old laymen like me to pick up and peruse for our entertainment, the information kind of took on a holy-grail aura. Well, duh, all you fuddy-duddies, McWhorter has just made the whole linguistic field comprehensible for everyone; what are YOU doing? His writing does, at times, get a bit repetitive, and he takes some real liberties with his metaphors, maybe a bit too cute, but he sure is persuasive. If you're looking for specifics as to what McWhorter discusses, I recommend goodreads member Manny's review. (I dunno how to link him, but he comes up first)
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