Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (16 page)

Apparently, one feature, the erosion of suffixes, was something that had a way of creeping into the writing even of Anglo-Saxon scribes committed to presenting the language in its Sunday best. Thus we see the suffixes already falling off rapidly in the northeasterly dialects Vikings were exposed to. Suffixes, after all, are little. Using one rather than another does not always feel terribly disruptive. Do you say
roofs
or
rooves
? Whichever you prefer, does the alternative you “don’t like” sound
foreign
, or just not “what you like”? If you engaged in an act of sneaking last week, would you say you
sneaked
or
snuck
? And again, whichever one you “don’t like,” do you hear the other one as “not English”? Suffixes give you wiggle room.

But the other things, to people writing Old English, felt more disruptive. If the “right” way was
I
feared me of
financial ruin
, then
I feared financial ruin
was not just a matter of some little ending being different, but a whole different way of casting the sentence. This, like
Did you see what he’s doing
?, was the kind of thing that would make it onto the page only at the dawn of a new day.

The scholars who are even skeptical that the Vikings were responsible for suffix decay miss this crucial difference between scripture and writing. In a classic monograph, two of them address “schwa drop.” “Schwa” is the technical term for the muddy little sound in the
a
of
about
or the
o
in
lemon
. By “schwa drop” they refer to Old English endings written as -
e
that were pronounced like the
a
in
about
, which in the Northumbrian dialect can be seen to disappear in documents closer to the Battle of Hastings. They note “Schwa drop occurred in the North long after Norse had died out there, so even though there is ‘simplification’ here, it can’t be blamed on a language contact situation.”

But yes, it can. These scholars are assuming that Anglo-Saxons lived in a world where things happening in everyday speech were immediately committed to the page. They neglect that even after Vikings’ descendants were no longer speaking Old Norse, what a scribe would feel appropriate to engrave for posterity onto vellum with quill and ink would not be the “off” way that these Viking descendants were speaking English, whether or not they still spoke Old Norse. There would be something analogous to a seven-second delay.

Of course, we need not assume that the original Anglo-Saxon constructions were utterly dead as of Middle English. After all, the Vikings had occupied only half of the country. Rather, as often as not, the Viking impact rendered things that had once been
required
into things that were just
optional
, after which there was a snowball effect.

For example, when Jane Austen uses
be
-perfects that sound weird to us now—
I am so glad we
are
got acquainted
—we certainly will not assume that she was genuflecting to
Beowulf
. She really talked that way. But the key point is that in all the other Germanic languages but one, as Austen wrote, the
be
-perfect was much more vital than it was in her English, and in those languages it lives today, going nowhere. Why, in Austen’s time, was it on the ropes at all in English, while thriving elsewhere in Germanic and beyond? French and Italian show no signs of letting it randomly “disappear.” The Viking impact—i.e., what distinguishes English from the other Germanic languages as well as French and Italian—got the dissolution started.

To traditional History of English scholars, my claim about what the Vikings did may seem hasty. But as with the Celtic issue, this is largely a matter of what we see as proof.

When it comes to charting how English got to be the way it is now from what it was in
Beowulf
, the common consensus is all about
describing
rather than
explaining
. “The such-and-such suffix -
en
eroded into -
uh
, then
x
centuries later it is gone entirely except in this document, likely written in a conservative register due to influence from factor
y
; meanwhile -
um
eroded into -
en
; see in Figure 7 how the erosion took place at such-and-such a rate in documents from this region but more slowly in documents from that region . . .”

That is, this kind of work shows us what happened decade by decade in the English
scriptures
. Treating
scripture
as the only valid or interesting evidence in studying how English changed in ancient centuries risks leaving untold forever an interesting chapter in the saga of English. This is especially unsavory in that treating the peculiarity of Modern English as a matter of chance is like walking past cars parked along a street and happening upon one with the windshield broken in, three hubcaps gone, and no license plates, and deciding that all of this must have happened via ordinary wear and tear.

Maybe lightning did in the windshield. The hubcaps could have fallen off of their own accord and been picked up by trash collectors. But what about the other cars sitting intact? Okay, one car up the street is missing
one
hubcap. Another one has a hairline crack in its back window. But obviously, someone broke into this particularly smashed-up car. Something happened to it. Attention must be paid. We should report this car. Especially since this happens to be a neighborhood well known as a favored haunt of—oh, let’s just toss the analogy and say
Vikings
!

Those who are uninterested in reporting this car are playing Monopoly, while those who are interested in reporting the attack on it are the ones bringing in a game of Clue and finding little interest. The Monopoly players like Monopoly; Clue just doesn’t happen to be their bag. But as with the Celtic case, the Clue players happen to be in a better position to identify the truth than the ones enjoying Monopoly.

The Monopoly players are, to bring back the car analogy, like municipal photographers assigned to make snapshots of each street in the city every five years. They have no way of explaining why this particular car is so banged up, and really, they don’t care. They have done their job to depict this car’s state from one moment to the next and that’s all. Photographers document—but historians explain.

English’s simplicity is, in terms of explanation rather than mere documentation, weird. It is evidence of a blind-siding by adults too old to just pick up English thoroughly the way children of immigrants do. The Scandinavian Vikings left more than a bunch of words in English. They also made it an easier language. In this, in a sense, they clipped Anglophones’ wings. The Viking impact, stripping English of gender and freeing us of attending to so much else that other Germanic speakers genuflect to in every conversation, made it harder for us to master other European languages.

To wit: so many people spoke English the way a lot of us speak French and Spanish that “off” English became the seedbed for literary English. I’m writing in it now. We speak not only a bastard tongue, but one with roots in its own mangling. English is interesting in much more than which words we use.

And knowing that, we are in a position to understand why it isn’t true that, as we are often told, our grammar indicates what kind of people we are. To be a modern Anglophone is not to be a psychologically abbreviated version of an Anglo-Saxon villager. If you doubt that anyone has ever implied such, read on.

Four

DOES OUR GRAMMAR CHANNEL OUR THOUGHT?

HINT: DOES ENGLISH GRAMMAR
CHANNEL YOURS?

 

 

 

 

To understand that English has developed not just via new words but also through the emergence of new grammar puts in a new light a notion about language you may have heard about.

One of the most popular ideas is that a language’s grammar and the way its words pattern reflect aspects of its speakers’ culture and the way they think. Countless times I have witnessed the hush in a classroom when introducing undergraduates to this hypothesis. If one doesn’t pick this up in college, one will catch it in newspaper and magazine articles about indigenous groups, or even in bits of folk wisdom floating around. 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.

This idea that grammar is thought became influential from the writings of Edward Sapir. We met him in the previous chapter venturing that English speakers came to find nuance irritating. Even that point had hints of the language-is-thought persuasion—supposedly the erosion of various aspects of English grammar was due to some psychological leaning in its speakers. But Sapir ventured only passing speculations in this vein.

It was Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf who picked up the ball and ran with it, in the 1930s, publishing several pieces on the subject which served as its foundational texts. The hypothesis is known, therefore, as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

The hypothesis has also failed. Repeatedly and conclusively.
⁹

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.

Yet the Sapir-Whorf idea is cited enthusiastically in textbooks even today, and is a favorite approach to language by journalists. In 2004 a
New York Times
writer supposed that the language of the Kawesqar tribe in Chile has no future tense marking because, having been nomads traveling often in canoes in the past, they would usually have been so unclear on what was going to happen in the future that there was no need to ever talk about it (!). Never mind that Japanese has no future markers either, and yet the Japanese hardly seem unconcerned with the future. The point is that this
Times
writer would not have even floated such a notion if it weren’t for the seed planted by Whorf’s work seven decades previously. Whorf, even though he died in 1941, lent us a meme.

However, with an awareness of how languages actually come to be the way they are, we are in a position to truly understand how hopeless the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is. The idea that our take on the world is mediated by refraction through our grammar, such that the world’s six thousand languages generate six thousand correspondent world views, is deeply appealing. It is also mistaken.

After all, is the way I think shared with all of the other Anglophones of the world—or even just all Americans—and reflected in the language I am writing in right now? Was the change from Old English
grammar
to Modern English
grammar
—not vocabulary—determined or even partially affected by the transformation of England from feudalism to industrial capitalism?

The answers to both questions would have to be yes, from the way Whorf wrote. His pièce de résistance was an observation about the language of the Hopi: that it does not mark time in any way. He argued that this made Hopi speakers think in a way completely different from us Westerners, with our persnickety obsession with past, present, and future. The Hopis, he argued, think of time as cyclical, to the extent that they even have a concept of “time” as an ongoing process in the way that we do.

Grammars do differ in what concepts they choose to mark. Spanish marks gender on nouns. Japanese does not, but it has markers showing whether a noun is a subject or object. All grammars mark some things; no grammar marks everything. Whorf’s idea was that which things a grammar happens to mark determines what its speakers perceive most readily in their daily lives:

Whorf, like many of his followers, was not quite clear as to whether he thought that grammar, once accidentally morphing into certain patterns, channeled culture, or that culture determined how grammar morphed. Presumably, there was a “dynamic” two-way relationship. But his basic point was the correspondence between grammar and thought patterns, and hence culture.

Therefore, Western scientific advances presumably correspond to our languages’ rich tense marking: “Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are recepts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them.” This is why, therefore, it was not Native Americans who gave the world theoretical physics.

Whorf, as it happened, was a fire insurance inspector by day, and perhaps it was partly because of this that he did not know Hopi very well. Quite simply, Hopi has as much equipment for placing events in time as any language. Here is
Start sharpening your arrows; we’re going hunting
:

 

Hopi renders the statement as something like
You’ll have sharpened your arrows, then we will go hunting.
And in doing so, we see two indications of pastness, and a thoroughly typical future marker. Hopi does not render the sentence as something like
Sharpen your arrows, as our hunting occurs in the cycle of time.
Yet Whorf’s claim about Hopi was quite explicit; i.e., that Hopi has “no words, grammatical forms, constructions, or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time, or to past, or future, or to enduring or lasting.”