Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (12 page)

It is more or less accepted that the Vikings must have had something to do with this. Modern Danish and Norwegian didn’t exist yet; rather, the Vikings spoke the ancestor of those languages, an early branch of Proto-Germanic called Old Norse. Old Norse was, like Old English, a language all ajangle with suffixes like Latin.

When the Vikings came, one of their first tasks was to communicate with the Anglo-Saxons. This was not as tough a proposition for them as the one they would have faced had they invaded Greece. It is assumed that speakers of Old English and speakers of Old Norse could probably wangle a conversation. To ask “Do you have a horse to sell?” an Old English speaker would say
“Haefst þu hors to sellenne?,”
which would have made some kind of sense to an Old Norse speaker since in his language it went
Hefir þu hross at selja
?

Understanding was one thing, but reproducing what he heard was another. For the Old Norse speaker, Old English was familiar but different, kind of like driving on the wrong (I mean, left!) side of the road in England feels to an American at first. Old English had endings in the same places and used in the same ways—but
different
endings. Take the word for “to deem, to judge”:

This was a basically bookless realm, recall, and so a Norseman did not see tables of endings laid out neatly on a page like this, nor did anyone teach him the language formally at all (short of perhaps being told occasional
words
, but that doesn’t allow you to express yourself). It was an oral world—people just talked; they didn’t write or read. The Norseman just heard these endings being used on the fly. It must have been confusing, and as such, tempting to just leave the endings off when speaking English, since he could be understood without them most of the time. This was the recipe for what eventually became Modern English, where the only remnant of the present-tense conjugations above is the third person singular -
s
, a little smudge left over from ye olde -
th
.

Yet, as always, the ancient world left us no actual descriptions of Vikings making their way in English and how well they did at it. We can infer a little from things like an eleventh-century inscription on a sundial, written in Old English by someone with a Scandinavian name, “Orm Gamalson”:

Thus a Scandinavian was writing in English: that’s one glimpse at one Viking who wrapped his head around the language. But we’ll never know anything about Orm, including how he learned English, much less how he actually rendered it in his everyday speech. And that historiographical lacuna has allowed some linguists to propose that the Orm Gamalsons had nothing to do with English taking it all off.

They point out that Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish have lost almost as many endings as English has, and Dutch and Frisian are not too far behind them. In the present, for example, Swedish and friends even surpass English; here is how to conjugate “to call” in Swedish—i.e., you don’t!

But this observation misses the forest for the trees. While other Germanic languages have sloughed off a certain number of endings, they have never done so to the radical degree that English has. For example, the
kallar
conjugation business acknowledged, not a single one of them in Europe does without classifying their nouns according to gender.

Gender, to an American English speaker, is like water fountains. An American in Paris may notice after a while that there are virtually no water fountains: long before bottled water became commonplace in America, having to buy it in Paris was a minor inconvenience that an American had to get used to. However, it was a mistake to think that an absence of water fountains was something particular to Paris, or even France. Water fountains are uncommon in Europe in general; it’s America that has been a little odd in having them in such proliferation.

In the same way, an English speaker trying a European language runs up against gender in Spanish’s
el sombrero
for
the hat
but
la luna
for
the moon
and thinks of it as something annoying about Spanish, but then will also encounter it in French, Russian, Greek, Albanian, Polish, Welsh even! It’s English that is odd in not having gender,
⁴
even among the Germanic languages.

Proto-Germanic had not one but three genders—masculine, feminine, and neuter—and in some cases modern Germanic languages retain all three, in such user-hostile cases as each piece of silverware in German having a different gender: spoons are boys, forks are girls, knives are hermaphrodites. Usually, just two genders remain—but remain they do, showing no signs of going anywhere. In Swedish, a big goose is masculine,
en stor gås,
but a big house is what is called common, and comes out
e
tt
stor
t
hus
, where
ett
is the common form for
a
and the adjective takes a common ending -
t
.

English is, as always, the odd one out on this. It is the only genderless Germanic language, except for one dialect of Swedish—but then there is another Swedish dialect, and others in Denmark, that retain all three of Proto-Germanics’ genders.
No
modern dialect of English retains gender—not marked on nouns like Spanish’s -
o
and -
a
endings, not in the form of distinct articles like Swedish’s
en
and
ett
, and certainly not with endings on adjectives. In fact, English is the only Indo-European language in all of Europe that has no gender—the only one.
⁵

Here is where we come back to the question as to whether we can usefully say that English’s loss of suffixes “just happened.” If that’s all there was to it, why did it happen only to a single Indo-European language in Britain and nowhere else in Europe?

And in any case, the issue goes way beyond endings. There is a great deal more about English that is curiously “easy” as Germanic goes.

This occurred to me several years ago when I was spending a month in Germany, trying to bone up on my vocabulary by reading a German translation of one of my favorite books. I kept trying to maintain the fiction that the only significant difference between German and English is that German has
der
,
die, das,
and a bunch of endings while all English has is little old
the
and just a few endings. But it just isn’t true.

Beyond endings, German grammar is “busier” than English’s. You have to watch out for more things, split more hairs. And that’s also true of the Scandinavian languages, regardless of their scanty little old verb conjugations. It’s true of any Germanic language, from Proto-Germanic on down over these past three thousand years. Except English.

For example, I said that
You mistake you
for
You’re mistaken
from the wacky English example would be germane to the Viking issue. What I meant was that the misled Portuguese gentleman thought of
you mistake you
as normal because
you mistake yourself
is the way you put it in French (
Tu
te
trompes
) and Portuguese (
Tu
te
equivocas
) (both meaning “You ‘yourself’ mistake”).

This is a quirk common in European languages, that often you do things “to yourself” which in English you just do. It tends to be with verbs having to do with moving and feeling. So in English,
I have to go,
but in Spanish,
Tengo que ir
me
(“I have to go ‘myself’ ”). With moving, this makes a kind of sense to an English speaker, although it seems a little redundant to us to have to specify that I am exerting the act of
go
-age upon
myself
. But the ones involving feelings are something else:
I remember
in English,
Me
acuerdo
in Spanish (“I remember myself”), meaning not that you are idly recalling a past image of yourself, but that the remembering is something that happens to you, thus affecting not something or someone else, but you. While about the only Modern English versions of these are
behave yourself
, to
perjure yourself
, and
to pride yourself
(
upon
), many European languages mark hundreds of verbs in that way.

It’s a frill—a language doesn’t need to mark that things obviously personal in fact—Golly!—involve the person in question. But some languages just do, especially in Europe. Germanic languages are included: in German
You
mistake you
comes out as
Du irrst
dich
(“You mistake yourself”), and
to remember
is
sich
erinnern
. In Frisian, if I am ashamed,
Ik skarnje
my
(“I shame me”); to have the same feeling in Iceland is to
skammast
sín,
or among Yiddish speakers to
shemen
zikh.
In Dutch, one does not just
move
, one
bewegt
zich
(“moves oneself”). In Swedish to move is similar:
röra
sig.

All of this would have been same-old same-old to an Old English speaker. Today’s
behave yourself
and
pride yourself
are fossils from a time when, for example, if I was afraid
Ic ondrēd mē
, i.e., in a way, “bedreaded myself,” and to look at something was to, as it were, “besee oneself to” it:
Beseah he
hine
to anum his manna
(“Looked he himself to one of his men”). But over a few centuries in Middle English documents, we watch this “self”-fetish mysteriously blow away like autumn leaves. Today it is gone, while alive and well in all the other Germanic languages.

To strike an archaic note, in English we start popping off
hithers
and
thithers
. 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. It’s something you still have to pick up in German: “Where’s the coffee?”
Hier.
But
Come here!
is
Komm her! “Komm hier”
marks the foreigner; I’ll just bet that’s one of the things Germans say to imitate English speakers’ schoolboy German. German also has its
thither
(
hin
) and
whither
(
wohin
), and in fact there is no Germanic language that has no directional adverbs of this kind. These are
Germanic
languages, after all: precise, specific!

But one Germanic language doesn’t care so much about dotting
i
’s and crossing
t
’s. And it used to. Old English had a good old-fashioned trio:
hider, þider,
and
hwider
. These were passed down into Middle English as
hither
,
thither,
and
whither
. But they eventually blew away like autumn leaves. Today they are gone.

Quite a few European languages have a word that refers to people in a generic sense. Spanish’s
Se
habla español
is the most familiar example:
se
here means “you” in the sense of “one.” In French this is
on
. In German it is
man
:
Hier
(not
her
!)
spricht man Deutsch
(“One speaks German here”). As it is in most of the other Germanic languages (an exception is that in Icelandic the word for
men
,
maður,
subs for
man
). This means that in Germanic languages there is almost always a nice, filled-out array of pronouns making lots of distinctions, like in Swedish: