Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

by John McWhorter

Well, f, th, and h have something in common: all of them are “hissy” sounds.

P, t, and k are clipped sounds, called stops by linguists

Proto-Indo-European was quite poor in hi...

Proto-Germanic spoke a language with a lot of hiss in

folk started in Germanic as a word referring to a division of an army, and only later morphed into meaning a tribe or a nation.

We do know that the Phoenicians’ technology was up to the voyage,

What’s up, for example, with the passing references to two gods, Phol and Balder,

when Proto-Germanic’s sounds went weird, words that came into the language starting with b ended up starting with p

Vennemann has been the proponent par excellence of the hypothesis that Phoenician reshaped Proto-Germanic.

Long before Old English started taking on words from Old Norse and then French and Latin,

in a fashion that we today read as so cosmopolitan,

Proto-Germanic had taken on countless words from som...

You don’t like nucular?

Yet we today have no interest in undoing the “damage” and saying “pah-ther” instead of “father.”

English gradually took an infusion of grammatical features from Welsh and Cornish,

including a usage of do known in no other languages on earth.

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,

in addition, indeed, a great big bunch of words from other languages.

Not only Norse, French, Latin, and Greek, but possibly Phoenician—or if not, some other ...