Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English

I have found this book very enjoyable to read, as well as impressively authoritative. Its topic matter has been controversial for some time now. This book will help professional scholars and others with an interest in the subject understand the acute need for a fundamental re-appraisal of how much English really was influenced by Celtic during the many centuries since the Angles and Saxons first crossed over to England. I recommend it very highly indeed.

Before Rome, there was the Celtic Empire which believe it or not ruled not only Britain but much of mainland Europe as well.

By the time of King Arthur (around the year 500), the Celts and their empire had been reduced to a minor enclave in the western part of Great Britain.

In this way they faced off against invading Germans and created Old English.

According to John McWhorter one of the interesting features of Old English was exemplified by the following sentence:

"I am reading now."

As you can see, the above sentence employs not one but two verbs to describe the action being 1) "am" a doing verb which says which verb is being done and 2) "read" or the verb describing the actual action.

McWhorter says that this use of an unnecessary "doing" verb is similar to the construction of sentences in Celtic and Cornish which existed in Britain at the time.

In this way, the language of the conquerers became itself conquered an event which had been and would continue to be repeated in linguistic history.

Aside from this interesting story, McWhorter also uses this book to make short work of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which says that some languages lack certain concepts thereby deliminating absences of knowledge of their subject peoples. The original example was Hopi which supposedly had no words for future events...supposedly consistent with a cyclical view of Hopi time.

By actually looking at Hopi McWhorter made the point that it actually does have future tenses and that all languages have more or less the same capacity for diverse communication. It's the more or less which actually becomes the interesting part of the story.

For that story as well as a great treatment of English itself I would refer you to this excellent book by a master linguist and story teller.

Finally! Finally! Finally! Someone with a brain has used a scientific approach to sort out exactly why we speak English in such a funny way when compared to other European languages!

I've always wanted to know why English has no (or no longer has) masculine or feminine (or neuter) nouns. WHY?! Every other European language has them (or most of them, anyway -- 2 out of 3 ain't bad).

Unlike other languages we don't change an adjective to match the gender or number of the noun it's describing. Unlike other Germanic languages we don't tweak nouns to denote whether they're a direct or indirect object.

And then there's the ever superfluous "do" and the way we go about "-ing"ing all the time:

"What did you say you're doing today?"
"I said I'm singing, Fay." (Hey, at least it rhymes.)

Although other European languages have a present progressive tense, speakers don't use it unless they want to stress what it is they're doing to some dolt who didn't hear them the first time or doesn't know what singing is.

But then there's the way we us "do" all the time. I never had the privilege of studying Welsh or Celtic so I thought this strange grammar was unique to English, but I knew it didn't exist in any other Germanic language so I always wondered WHY we do what we do when we speak. NOW I KNOW!

I haven't finished the book yet so I hope Mr. McWhorter explains whey we always "will" do things in the future. Why do we say "will" when other languages adjust their verb endings to indicate future tense? Is this also from Welsh and Celtic influence?

What astounds me is how scores of linguists have dismissed this influence for well over a century. Although Mr. McWhorter doesn't think it's bigotry I do; the English have always looked down their noses on, well, just about everybody! They made a concerted effort to kill the Welsh language and have done their best to obliterate Gaelic from Scotland and Ireland. Whether they admitted (or admit) it or not, I'll be most linguists both living and dead view these neighboring tongues as simply inferior.

And not only is Mr. McWhorter's book THE MOST INFORMATIVE BOOK ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGAUGE but it's also a fun read, amusing and humorous. It is not a stale scholarly work but rather and exciting scholarly work that brings English of the past alive with evocations of warrior Vikings who didn't just practice hit-and-run guerilla warfare (though they did plenty of that in Britain and elsewhere in Europe) but stayed in England and settled down, married and raised families. And, thankfully, butchered English into a grammatically simpler language.

Too bad they're not around today to wrestle all our ludicrous spellings into submission. Maybe I'll start the ball rolling:

Tu bæd ðær ar no Vikingz arønd tuday tu tame Englic.


OMG! I just invented NEW ENGLISH! I mean NU ENGLIC!

(I'm using the useless 'c' to represent our 'sh' sound, just so ya know. I originally had a more phonetic spellings but Amazon's text abilities are, apparently, limited. But hey, it's a start!)

As a foreign language teacher, a writer and an avid reader, I am intensely interested in vocabulary and grammar, and find the subjects fascinating...nerdy though that may be. I have studied other languages more than I have studied English however, and for that reason (among others), I found this volume intriguing. McWhorter addresses certain aspects that I had thought of on many occasions, and others I had never thought of at all. The book is very easy-reading, with the slightly corny wit of a hardcore academic linguist with a sense of humor, though I can see how, if you are not well-versed in grammatical terminology, it might be a bit difficult to get through. If however you have a basic knowledge of grammar terms and an interest in the history of the English language, I would highly recommend this book.

This is another engagingly written book by John McWhorter, this time about the "weirdness" of the English language. He builds a good argument that Welsh and Cornish were very influential in early grammatical development and also that the hundreds of years of Viking settlement in England profoundly altered the language in such a way that it deviated quite a bit from other Germanic tongues.

One of my favorite tidbits of information is that in contrast to English, the other Germanic languages stayed grammartically similar to one another, making it significantly easier for a Dutch speaker, say, to learn Swedish or German than it is for an English speaker. There. That makes me feel better!

The author is such a humorous and droll writer he leads the reader wanting to learn more.