Jamie Smith's Reviews > Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

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.