by John McWhorter
John McWhorter has been one of those unique authors
whose books I can buy without knowing anything in advance and I know I will
enjoy it. He can take a dry topic like linguistics and make it interesting and
entertaining. He does not have the pretentious, stuffy writing style that is
common among professors and intellectuals. McWhorter really understands the
layman and writes his books with that in mind.
In Our
Magnificent Bastard Tongue McWhorter is giving us an important part of the
history of English that has not been told by the scholars, much less known by
the average English speaker. He presents a contrast between the Grand Old
History and the untold story of the English language. The former is the
traditional story of the development of Old English into Modern English in
which the language takes on massive amounts of new words in three successive
waves, first with the Vikings, then the Normans, and finally with Latin. It is
a story about words and where they came from: etymology. And that is
McWhorter’s beef (French word) with the story. He is a linguist and linguists
do not spend time focusing on etymology because they are more interested in how
those words are put together, that is, syntax, or grammar. That is where the
untold story of English begins.
The thesis of the book is that English has lost a
lot of grammar given how languages tend to change over time. English grammar
is, simply, weird. The real story is about what other people who do not speak
English did to the language. It was “battered by Vikings and bastardized by
Celts” (p. 18). McWhorter says that most scholars treat the similarities
between English and languages such as Welsh and Cornish as a coincidence and he
sets out to prove otherwise. He also wants to dispel myths about the nature of
the language and how we use it, “properly” and “improperly.”
Without giving a book report I want to give a broad
summary of how he develops his argument. Chapter one is about the Welsh nature
of English grammar, especially the “meaningless do.” My favorite part of the
book is the section where he explains why we have the word “do” and how odd it
is compared to other languages. He also talks about the “-ing fetish” that
Celtic languages share with English. The message in chapter two is that “the
notion that people are always slipping up in using their native English is
fiction” (p. 59). Chapter three is about how the Vikings made English an easier
language to learn and why it is difficult for English speakers to learn
European languages. In chapter four McWhorter debunks the myth that we can gain
insight into a particular group’s culture by looking at its grammar. The most
intriguing chapter was the fifth and last and in it he puts forward a
hypothesis that Proto-Germanic (the root language of the Germanic languages,
including English) may have had some contact with a Semitic-speaking group, the
Phoenicians in particular. He provides some evidence and an argument that they
were capable of making it all the way around the Iberian Peninsula and up to
Germany. It was a very thought-provoking and interesting way to end the book.
By the end of the
book you do understand that English has a very interesting story about where it
came from and how it became the language we recognize today. McWhorter wants to
understand that English developed, like most others, as foreigners made their contributions
by speaking the language in their own way. Thus, we should not be so rigid
about grammar as a body of rules that has remained unchanged for a long time.
After reading this book you will not think about English the same way ever
again.
