Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

Table of Contents

 

 

ALSO BY JOHN MCWHORTER

TOWARDS A NEW MODEL OF CREOLE GENESIS
THE MISSING SPANISH CREOLES:
Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages
WORD ON THE STREET:
Debunking the Myth of a “Pure” Standard English
SPREADING THE WORD:
Language and Dialect in America
LOSING THE RACE:
Self-Sabotage in Black America
THE POWER OF BABEL:
A Natural History of Language
AUTHENTICALLY BLACK:
Essays for the Black Silent Majority
DOING OUR OWN THING:
The Degradation of Language and Music and
Why We Should, Like, Care
DEFINING CREOLE
WINNING THE RACE:
Beyond the Crisis in Black America
ALL ABOUT THE BEAT:
Why Hip-Hop Can’t Save Black America

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_©
2008 by John McWhorter

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McWhorter, John H.
Our magnificent bastard tongue: the untold history of English / John McWhorter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-1-592-40395-0

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Introduction

Was it really all just about words?

The Grand Old History of the English Language, I mean. The way it is traditionally told, the pathway from Old English to Modern English has been a matter of taking on a great big bunch of words. Oh, yeah: and shedding a bunch along the way.

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 invading in 787. They speak Old Norse, a close relative of Old English, and sprinkle around their versions of words we already have, so that today we have both
skirts
and
shirts
,
dikes
and
ditches
. Plus lots of other words, like
happy
and
their
and
get
.

Round Two: more words from the Norman French after William (i.e., Guillaume) the Conqueror takes over “Englaland” in 1066. For the next three centuries, French is the language of government, the arts, and learning. Voilà, scads of new words, like
army
,
apparel,
and
logic
.

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.

Too, there are some Dutch words here and there (
cookie
,
plug
), and a little passel from Arabic (
alcohol
,
algebra
). Plus today we have some from Spanish, Japanese, etc. But those usually refer to objects and concepts directly from the countries in question—
taco
,
sushi
—and so it’s not precisely a surprise that we use the native words.

These lexical invasions did leave some cute wrinkles here and there. 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. We
commence
because of French; in a more mundane mood we just
start
, using an original English word.
Pork, très
culinary, is the French word;
pig
— très beastly—is the English one. And then even cuter are the triplets, where the low-down word is English, the really ritzy one is Latin, and the French one hovers somewhere in between: Anglo-Saxon
ask
is humble; French-derived
question
is more buttoned up; Latinate
interrogate
is downright starchy.

But there’s only so much of that sort of thing. Overall the Grand Old History is supposed to be interesting by virtue of the sheer volume of words English has taken on. We are to feel that it is a good, and perhaps somehow awesome, thing that English has been “open” to so many words.

Yet even that doesn’t hold up as well as often implied. Throughout the world, languages have been exchanging words rampantly forever. Languages, as it were, like sex. Some languages resist it to an extent for certain periods of time depending on historical circumstances, but no language is immune. 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. Rather, quite simply, Albanians have had a lot of close interaction with people speaking other languages, unsurprisingly their vocabulary reflects it, and no one bats an eye. The same has been true with English—and Persian, Turkish, Vietnamese, practically every Aboriginal language in Australia, and . . . well, you get the point.

As such, the lesson that the difference between Old English and Modern English is a whole lot of new words is, for me, something of a thin gruel.

Don’t get me wrong—words are nice. I like them. I am no more immune than the next person to taking pleasure in tasty etymologies such as that the word
tea
started way off in one dialect of Chinese, was taken up by Malays, and subsequently by the Dutch traders in their lands as
thee
, and was first pronounced “tay,” coming to be pronounced “tee” only later, while that same
ea
spelling is still pronounced “ay” in names like
Reagan
.

Yet my impatience with the word fetish of typical popular treatments of The History of English is based in the fact that I happen to be a linguist. Etymology is, in fact, but one tiny corner of what modern linguistic science involves, and linguists are not formally trained in it. Any of us sought for public comment are familiar with the public’s understandable expectation that to be a linguist is to carry thousands of etymologies in one’s head, when in fact, on any given question as to where a word comes from, we usually have to go searching in a dictionary like anyone else.

Linguists are more interested in how the words are put together, and how the way they are put together now is different from how they were put together in the past, and why. That is, we are interested in what the layman often knows as “syntax,” which we call grammar.

By grammar, we do not mean the grim little rules so familiar to everyone from school—i.e., “grammar school.” We mean, for example, the conjugational endings on verbs in European languages (Spanish
hablo
,
hablas, habla
). We mean things like, in Japanese, word order is completely different from English, such that a sentence like
Craig met his wife in London
would come out
Craig London in his wife met
.

Think of it this way: you could cram your head full of every Russian word, and yet find that Russian six-year-olds were little Churchills compared to you walking around bursting with isolated words but unable to conjugate, mark nouns for case, use words in the proper order, or pull off any number of things fundamental to saying even the simplest things.

A Russian once told me sagely that it’s better to be alone than to consort with just any person who happens into one’s life:
LučŠe byt’ odnomu čem s kem popal,
which comes out literally as “Better to be alone than with who falls (i.e., “falls into one’s orbit,” “happens into the picture”). Uttering that meant that she knew to use a particular form of the word for
better
rather than another one, to use a particular case form on the word for
one
to mean “alone” (
odnomu
), and to mark the word for
who
in the instrumental case (
kem
) which, in that word, comes out irregular. She knew to use a particular form of the word for
fall
that one uses when referring to a single occurrence of falling (the -
pal
part of
popal
) rather than to the extended process of falling (in which case it would be a different form, -
padaet
).

Words alone, then, were only the very beginning of what she did in uttering that sentence, and really, to linguists not even the fun part. The fun part was how she combined the words to make a sentence. She was not only uttering Russian words one by one—she was subjecting them to grammar.

Well, English has grammar, too. Thus my frustration with The History of English as a story about words comes from the fact that The History of English is also a story about grammar. To wit, the pathway from
Beowulf
to
The Economist
has involved as much transformation in grammar as in words, more so, in fact, than in any of English’s close relatives. English is more peculiar among its relatives, and even the world’s languages as a whole, in what has happened to its grammar than in what has happened to its vocabulary.

As such, the focus on words cannot help but bring to mind someone who has fitted out their ranch house with a second floor, knocked out all of the nonsustaining walls, and added on a big new wing on both sides, and yet month after month, all any of their friends mention when they come over is two new throw rugs.