I’ve just finished reading Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English by John McWhorter. It’s a very interesting, although slightly confusing, book about the history of English. That’s English as in the language “what I speak”.
Interesting because in it McWhorter tries to demonstrate that the early (as in mostly pre-Medieval Old English) history of the English language is far more complex but understandable than most scholars are prepared to admit.
Confusing in that as a non-linguist and someone who was never hot on the technicalities of grammar (the one probably because of the other) I don’t easily appreciate the niceties of some of his argument and examples. I would undoubtedly benefit from re-reading it.
It’s a short book but it covers an immense amount of ground. McWhorter starts with the argument that English was moulded by interaction with the Welsh and Cornish languages (all display features found nowhere else in the world). He ends with the suggestion that Proto-Germanic (the root of all modern Germanic languages including English) is a bastard off shoot of Proto-Indo-European made that way by interaction with Phoenician language(s). His concluding paragraphs give you a flavour:
English … [a]n offshoot of Proto-Indo-European borrowed a third of its vocabulary from another language. That language may have been Phoenician … Its speakers submitted the Proto-Indo-European offshoot to a grammatical overhaul … they could not help shaving off a lot of its complications, and rendering parts of the grammar in ways familiar to them from their native language. This left Proto-Germanic a language both mixed and abbreviated before it even gave birth to new languages – and meant that it passed this mixed, abbreviated nature on to those new languages.
One of them was Old English, which morphed merrily along carrying the odd sound patterns, vowel-switching past marking, and mystery vocabulary from Proto-Germanic … Old English was taken up by speakers of yet another language … Celtic ones. As Celts started using English more and more over the decades, English gradually took an infusion of grammatical features from Welsh and Cornish, including a usage of do known in no other languages on earth.
Not long afterward … Vikings speaking Old Norse picked up the language fast, and gave it a second shave … English’s grammar became the least “fussy” of all of the Germanic languages …
The result: a tongue oddly genderless and telegraphic for a European one, clotted with peculiar ways of using do and progressive -ing – with … a great big bunch of words from other languages. Not only Norse, French, Latin, and Greek, but possibly Phoenician …
The vanilla version of The History of English will live on. But its proponents have not had occasion to engage with the underground stories I have attempted to share with you, or, having done so briefly, have opted to sweep them under the rug …
… English is … Interesting.
Interesting indeed!