Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

by John McWhorter

Round One is when Danish and Norwegian Vikings start invading in 787.

Round Two: more words from the Norman French after William (i.e., Guillaume) the Conqueror takes over “Englaland” in 1066.

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—

Because when French ruled the roost, it was the language of formality; in modern English, words from French are often formal versions of English ones considered lowly.

Pork, très culinary, is the French word; pig— très beastly—is the English one.

Throughout the world, languages have been exchanging words rampantly forever.

Some languages resist it to an extent for certain periods of time depending on historical circumstances, but no language is immune.

Jamaicans today speak a hybrid language, popularly called patois, that was born when African slaves learned English and filtered it through the languages they had been born to.

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.

There was a time when pedants hoped that English could pattern like Latin and not end sentences with prepositions. That fashion passed.

There was a time when pedants developed a minor obsession over English’s tendency to use expressions like have a look and make a choice rather than look and choose. That fashion passed.

English is easy at first

Nope.

One sometimes hears that Iran is home to a uniquely vigorous homosexual subculture because its third person pronoun is the same for men and women.

WTF?

Akkadian is often mentioned via the names of its dialects Assyrian and Babylonian. Aramaic was once so entrenched as the language of note in the Middle East and beyond that it was the language of administration under the Persian Empire, run in Persia vastly eastward of where Aramaic had arisen, despite the native language of Persia’s rulers being, well, Persian, completely unrelated to Aramaic. It lives on today among small groups, termed, for one, Syriac. Akkadian had z, s, sh, ts, and an h sound that you made with your uvula. Aramaic at the time had sh, dz, ts, and h. Snaky sounds.

This book is based on detours in my academic research.

Oh I really could not tell… 🙄