Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

by John McWhorter

You may well know the saga already. Germanic tribes called Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invade Britain in the fifth century. They bring along their Anglo-Saxon language, which we call Old English.

Then come the words. English gets new ones in three main rounds.

Round One is when Danish and Norwegian Vikings start...

They speak Old Norse, a close relative o...

Round Two: more words from the Norman French

Then Round Three: Latin. When England falls into the Hundred Years’ War with France, English becomes the ruling language once more, and English writers start grabbing up Latin terms from classical authors—abrogate and so on.

was first pronounced “tay,” coming to be pronounced “tee” only later, while that same ea spelling is still pronounced “ay” in names like Reagan.

It went like this. In Old English one could say “I am on hunting”

Then in Middle English, the on started wearing down and one might say “I am a-hunting,”

The Vikings left about a thousand in English, and the Normans left ten thousand.

In Two Gentlemen of Verona,

I am going to deliver them

Valentine means that he is literally going in order to deliver the letters.

The preposition rule was cooked up in the seventeenth century under the impression that because Latin doesn’t end sentences in prepositions, English shouldn’t.

The split-infinitive business was a nineteenth-century fetish, and may also have been based on the fact that Latin doesn’t split infinitives—because

because its infinitives are just one word!

because student is singular and they “is plural.”

the following words and expressions extremely déclassé:

all the time (quality folks were to say always),

born in (don’t you know it’s b...

lit (What did I tell you, darling? i...

washtub (I don’t know why people can’...

Standpoint, to us a rather cultivated word, was spat upon for suppose...

it was also considered a tad vulgar to say Have a look at ...

English is easy at first but hard to master the details of, while other languages are hard at first but easy to master the details

Understanding was one thing, but reproducing what he heard was another.

It must have been confusing,

tempting to just leave the endings off when speaking English, since he could be understood without them most of the time.

Orm Gamalsuna bohte Sanctus Gregorius minster tobrocan & tofalan & he hit let macan newan from grunde

“Orm Gamalson bought St. Gregory’s minster broken and fallen down and had it made anew from the ground

in documents, we clearly see that English gets simpler first in the north—where the Scandinavians were densely settled.

So it’s not that the endings just fell apart all over England out of some kind of guaranteed obsolescence.

They fell apart in a particular place—where legions of foreigners were mangling the tongue!

The way Vikings rendered English sounded at first, to anyone without Scandinavian ancestry, “other” at best and “wrong” at worst.

two of them address “schwa drop.”

“Schwa” is the technical term for the muddy little sound in the a of about or the o in lemon.

The Scandinavian Vikings left more than a bunch of words in English. They also made it an easier language.

The Viking impact, stripping English of gender

a language’s grammar and the way its words pattern reflect aspects of its speakers’ culture and the way they think. Countless times I have witnessed

the standard Italian cappicola has morphed in Sicilian Italian to sound like this: “gabagul.”

say g and k to yourself and see how similar they are.

sound in the middle of “gabagul” is a version...

“gabagul” doesn’t have the old -a on the end of cappicola.

k morphing into h is

p morphing into f and t morphing to th

p’s becoming f’s

p becoming f

The process by which Proto-Indo-European sounds regularly changed into these other ones

was discovered, as it happens, by one of the Grimm brothers famous for collecting and penning fairy tales

is known to linguists as G...