Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (14 page)

For example, China was ruled by foreigners for much of its history, including the famous Mongolian regime of Genghis Khan, as well as Manchus from 1644 to as recently as 1911. However, the languages of the rulers had no effect on Chinese. The foreigners ruled from their compounds, using interpreters to communicate with the outside. Actual Chinese people largely encountered the foreigners in occasional interactions with soldiers—if at all. Chinese as spoken by millions across a vast land was unaffected.
⁷
In Africa, colonial languages, like English, French, and Portuguese, have certainly poured words into small local languages—but they have had almost no effect on these languages’ grammars. How one uses the
grammar
in, say, Chichewa in Malawi has nothing to do with the English Malawians learn in school and see in the movies.

As such, even the fact that the very king of England was Danish for a spell (Cnut, from 1016 to 1035) can tell us nothing as to whether his native Old Norse had any significant effect upon the
grammar
of English as spoken by everyday people. What we need is evidence that Scandinavians speaking incomplete English would have been so common that children would have heard this faulty rendition as much as, if not more than, regular English—to the extent that “foreigner” English affected what they grew up using as everyday speech.

Imagining this requires putting on our “antique” glasses: children in this era did not go to school, did not read, and there was no “standard English” that they encountered in the media, because in ordinary daily life there was no media to speak of. To children in Anglo-Saxon Britain, language was something you heard people around you—and no one else—speaking. You didn’t see it on the page. In getting a sense of how in such a setting the Vikings would have passed on their rendition of English to the ages (and, eventually, to the page you are reading), three things are useful.

First, in many places they were quite densely concentrated: in some parts of the Danelaw most people were of Danish ancestry. This means that “Scandi”-sounding English would have been a matter of not just the occasional Dane or Norwegian here and there (“Mommie, hwy spæketh he like thæt?”),
⁸
but a critical mass of people.

Second, in documents, we clearly see that English gets simpler first in the north—where the Scandinavians were densely settled. Old English came in at least four dialects. The one usually written in was West Saxon, which is to us today “normal” Old English. But one of the dialects spoken in the Danelaw region was Northumbrian. In Northumbrian toward the end of Old English, as the Battle of Hastings was looming, the conjugational endings were already wearing out, as if someone were having trouble keeping them apart. Sometimes, all the endings in the present tense except the first person singular were the same, -
as.
This is Old English? And by Middle English, in the north, this erosion continued—in the plural the final consonant flaked away, leaving a mere -
e
:

But take a look at what Southern Middle English was still like, where there had been no Vikings—normal Old English:

So it’s not that the endings just fell apart all over England out of some kind of guaranteed obsolescence. They fell apart in a particular place—where legions of foreigners were mangling the tongue!

It was the same with gender: it starts flaking away in Northumbrian Old English, while down south all three genders held on possibly into Middle English. Even as recently as the late nineteenth century, rural folk in the extreme southwest in Dorset were still dividing things between a “personal” and an “impersonal” gender. “Personal” things were not only people but all living things and, for some reason, tools. So, of a tree,
He
’s a-cut down.
But of water,
It
’s a-dried up.
Even demonstratives still came in two genders:
this
water
was impersonal, but in the personal one, said
theäse
tree
. Also, the V2 rule started unwinding, predictably, in the north; it held on in the south, including in Kent in the southeast, for much longer.

Finally, our friend Orm Gamalson even left us a crucial window into English as rendered by speakers of Old Norse. Gamalson was writing in the Northumbrian dialect, in which noun suffixes were as much a mess as the verb ones were. In other dialects of Old English, when one wrote of something happening on a ship,
ship
was in the dative and took an -
e
ending:
scipe.
But in Northumbrian, one just said
in scip
: the -
e
was gone. In the same way, in Gamalson’s inscription, as it goes on from where we left off with it earlier, he places the rebuilding of the minster “in King Edward’s days,” which he wrote as
in Eadward dagum
. There are two interesting things about those three words.

First, Orm left off the possessive ending. Just as today, in other Old English sources
Eadward
would take an -
s
suffix to indicate the possessive:
in Eadwardes dagum.
In Orm’s part of England people were leaving off endings—but not elsewhere. Orm’s part of England was, also, where, well, Orm was. It was Scandi-land, where people not raised in English were speaking it as part of the everyday routine, leaving the niceties off.

But second, the -
um
suffix on
dagum
is revealing. It is a dative plural, and in Northumbrian, this solid suffix hangs on even while the others are wearing away in cases like
scip
for
scipe
and
Eadward
for
Eadwardes
. Even as the Old English era is winding down and even in other Old English dialects, this -
um
suffix is starting to undergo natural wear and tear and morph into the likes of -
en
, in Northumbrian it’s always right there as -
um
, shining like a star.

And there’s a reason. You can see it in this table. We come back to Old English’s
stān
for
stone
, and
armr
in Old Norse meant (get ready . . . !) “arm”:

Notice that, usually, Old Norse’s endings are different from Old English’s. An Orm Gamalson learning English found a little stumbling block almost every time he started to use a noun. But—the dative plural was one of the only places he got a break: the -
um
suffix was one of the only ones that Old English and Old Norse happened to have in common.

It was predictable, then, that people like Orm Gamalson had a way of holding on to -
um
for dear life as the rest of the noun endings burned off: it was familiar to them from Old Norse. The persistence of -
um
only in the Northumbrian dialect, then, was a calling card from the Vikings.

In terms of dotting our
i
’s and crossing our
t
’s, we must assess whether another group of people speaking something other than English were the ones who beat the grammar up. If the Celts gave English meaningless
do
and progressive -
ing
, then maybe they also, as non-native speakers, knocked off the bells and whistles, right? After all, if they added things like
do
, then why wouldn’t they, speaking
“Englisc”
as a second language, also leave off endings and such? This is, in fact, the opinion of the small school of linguists arguing for the Celtic impact.

The problem with this idea is that, as we have seen, the eclipse of endings correlates so perfectly with just where Vikings settled. If the Celts were responsible, then the endings would have dropped away throughout England, or at least in regions where Celts, rather than Vikings, were more densely settled. They did not. Rather, where something is clearly traceable to Celtic, it is a Celtic construction being
added
to English, such as meaningless
do
and the Northern Subject Rule.

According to theory on what happens when languages encounter one another, this negative evidence re the Celts is just what we would expect.

The Celts had a different experience with English than the Vikings did. The Vikings settled and coped with English, and all indications are that Old Norse in England lasted not much longer than the first generation of invaders. History records no enclaves in England where Old Norse was spoken for generations after the invasions. The Vikings spread themselves out, and wherever an Orm Gamalson settled down, what was se habla’ed was English—and Orm’s children likely had the same orientation toward Old Norse as Jewish immigrants’ children in America in the twentieth century had toward Yiddish. Old Norse was the Old Country; English was the native tongue—cool, in a word. The difference between then and now was that for Orm, Jr., writing was an elite, marginal decoration in daily life; he likely never went to anything we would call school. As such, the “off” English of his dear old Hagar-the-Horrible Dad was what he spoke, too. This was the root of the curiously simplified Germanic language I am writing in.

In contrast, Welsh and Cornish were spoken in England long before the Angles and Co. came, and lived on beside English for a millennium plus. Celtic and English have been set on a long, slow Crock-Pot simmer with one another in the mouths of bilinguals over all of that time. This stewing phenomenon has a technical name:
linguistic equilibrium,
as granted it since the nineties by linguist R. M. W. Dixon.

In situations like this, as a group slowly picks up a new language over centuries but continues to use its native one more usually, they do not simplify the new language. Rather, they season it with constructions they are used to, but otherwise learn that new language fine. The two languages stew together. Soon, the language they are learning looks a little like their native one.

One sees this all over the world. Because of high rates of intermarriage between groups, the aboriginal languages of Australia as well as of South America tend to be deeply mixed with one another in terms of grammar. One language’s endings will pattern like the ones from the language spoken down the river, even though the languages are not closely related. Another language will belong to a group where verbs come at the end of a sentence, but its verbs come in the middle because the languages of another group down in the valley are like that, and on and on. Clearly, the people have been learning one another’s languages since time immemorial. But—none of the languages are “broken down” or streamlined in the way that English is, compared with its Germanic family members. The languages stewed—they did not boil down.

It’s the same in other situations. In India, the Indo-Aryan languages (Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali) and Dravidian languages (Tamil, Telugu) have been stewing for millennia—but none are particularly simplified. African languages like Xhosa and Zulu inherited click sounds from nearby Khoisan languages—more stewing over long periods. Yet Xhosa and Zulu are decidedly not simple. This is part of the South African constitution in Zulu, namely, the sentence “We recognize the injustices of our past”:
Siyakukhumbula ukucekelwa phansi kwamalungelo okwenzeka eminyakeni eyadlula.
We don’t need to break that down to see that there’s nothing precisely user-friendly about Zulu (and the
c
in
ukucekelwa
is a click sound!).