Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

by John McWhorter

Over half of Japanese words are from Chinese, and never mind how eagerly the language now inhales English words. Almost half of Urdu’s words are Persian and Arabic. Albanian is about 60 percent Greek, Latin, Romanian, Turkish, Serbian, and Macedonian, and yet it is not celebrated for being markedly “open” to new words.

The parent to all of these languages was spoken about twenty-five hundred years ago in what is now Denmark (and a ways southward) and on the southerly ends of Sweden and Norway. We will never know what the people who spoke the language called it, but linguists call it Proto-Germanic.

German’s word for entrance is Eingang, Dutch has ingang, Swedish ingång, Yiddish areingang, Icelandic innganga. Before the Invasion of the Words, Old English had ingang, but later, English took entrance from French.

English, then, is the only Germanic language out of the dozen in which there could be a sentence like Did you see what he is doing? rather than Saw you what he does?

Old English, for example, came in four flavors: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and West Saxon. Most Old English documents are in the West Saxon dialect, because Wessex happened to become politically dominant early on.

Until well into the twentieth century, for Indonesians, the written language of books and newspapers and the one taught in school was Classical Malay, about as different from how people actually spoke as Shakespeare’s English is from how we do.

There is a similar situation today in Arabic-speaking countries. In, say, Morocco, the Arabic used in writing is one thing, preserved on the page and kept as close to the language of the Koran as possible. The Arabic actually spoken is another thing, morphed fifteen hundred years away from the written variety and now a different language entirely.

English, an almost curiously different thing, began. Middle English was, indeed, a profound transformation of Old English. Partly, yes, in terms of words—a bunch of French ones started pouring in—but also in terms of grammar.

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.

Middle English is what had been gradually happening to spoken Old English for centuries before it showed up in the written record.

In Russian, unlike in a “card-carrying” Indo-European language, you do not “have” something: rather, something “is to” you: “I have a book” is U menja kniga (“to me is a book”).

English is not, then, solely an offshoot of Proto-Germanic that inhaled a whole bunch of foreign words. It is an offshoot of Proto-Germanic that traded grammar with offshoots of Proto-Celtic. The result was a structurally hybrid tongue,

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.

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

Come hither, go thither, but stay here or stay there. Hither, thither, and whither were the “moving” versions of here, there, and where in earlier English.

Future tense marking in English is a highly subtle affair, much more so than in other Germanic languages. Could you explain what the difference in meaning is between I will go, I’m going to go, and I’m going?

Decade after decade, no one has turned up anything showing that grammar marches with culture and thought in the way that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claimed. At best, there are some shards of evidence that language affects thought patterns in subtle ways, which do not remotely approach the claims of Whorf.

the sheer difference between Germanic and other branches of Indo-European makes a strong case that Proto-Germanic, before it split into today’s Germanic languages, was already a language deeply affected by adults of some extraction learning it as a second language.

The lesson: the idea that there was once an English somehow pristine, a pure issuance, is false. Even the Proto-Germanic language that gave birth to Old English was one that had seemed, to those who spoke its own Proto-Indo-European ancestor, perverted by speakers of something else.