Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

by John McWhorter

Mark Twain, in his essay “The Awful German Language,” nicely summed up the experience of an Anglophone learner of German: “The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure in complicating it in every way that he could think of.”

While the Vikings were mangling English, Welsh and Cornish people were seasoning it. Their rendition of English mixed their native grammars with English grammar, and the result was a hybrid tongue. We speak it today.

The patois case is an example of what happens when there are so many people speaking a language in a non-native way that new generations speak it that way instead of the original way.

Once in Germany I told a waitress not to put onions in my salad or I would become der kotzende Fremder (“the vomiting foreigner”).

I hate onions.

When the Norman French conquered England in 1066 and established French as the written language of the land, for the next century-and-a-half there is almost no written English that has survived. Then after relations with France began to sour in the early 1200s and English started to be used as a written language again, we see a brand-new, slimmed-down English, as if it were in an “after” picture in a diet ad.

What was once a mistake is now ordinary. The

lesson, quite simply, is that the conception that new ways of putting things are mistakes is an illusion.

There is a canny objection one sometimes hears out there, that 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 of.

In fact, English is the only Indo-European language in all of Europe that has no gender—the only one.

The simple fact is that adults have a harder time learning languages than children and teenagers—and this was an era when there was no Berlitz, no language instruction beyond someone on the fly telling you, “Here’s the word for . . . ,” and for the most part, not even any writing.

This depresses me.

adult learners screwing things up was a key factor in how English came to be the way it is.

The idea that our take on the world is mediated by refraction through our grammar, such that the world’s six thousand languages generate six thousand correspondent world views, is deeply appealing. It is also mistaken.

Bloom did an experiment that showed Chinese speakers less alert to hypotheticality when reading stories in Chinese than English speakers reading the stories in English.

This is good for my research.