I'm So Busy #1, Or, I Review Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

Okay, you guys, I am really busy.  I have not been able to write anything for the blog due to a high concentration of homework this weekend/week.  So what I'm going to do is show you my hastily, sloppily composed essays which are detracting from my posts here.  Dare I say that they are rather...  Slapdash???

Essay #1:  A Book Review of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue


Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, by John McWhorter, is all about how strange the English language is, and why it is so very strange.  In a scant two hundred and fifteen pages, published in November of 2008 by Gotham Books, McWhorter gives a very compelling argument that, while traditional takes on the history of English present it as a marvelous beast, they miss out entirely on what it is that makes English so special.  So, McWhorter presents his alternate history, appealing to evidence and to common sense, with myriad examples of various ways in which other languages have fundamentally shaped English.

In the introduction, McWhorter plainly lays out his beef with traditional histories.  The very first sentence of the book is, “Was it really all just about words?” (VII)  What he means by this, as he explains, is that traditional histories of English overemphasize that English is so weird because its vocabulary is so very large and composed of words from many other languages.  He gives examples of other languages which behave in the same way, such as Japan borrowing half of its vocabulary from Chinese, Urdu taking half of its own from Persian and Arabic, and Albanian being composed of “about 60 percent Greek, Latin, Romanian, Turkish, Serbian, and Macedonian.” (IX)  He points out that none of these languages, though they behave just like English, are “celebrated for being markedly ‘open’ to new words,” and that all languages, “as it were, like sex.” (IX) So, McWhorter is simply not satisfied with a history of English that is all about how many words it borrows.  He spends the rest of the introduction explaining that English grammar is what is truly unique about the language, that, among Germanic languages, it is absurdly weird.  He raises questions about various oddities, like the “meaningless do” (“Why does English use do in questions like, say, Why does English use do in questions?” (XXI)), and he previews the various chapters and sections of the book in a very brief fashion.  The list of items McWhorter wants to address includes the reasons he has come to his conclusions about the history of English, and what it means for how we see English today.

Chapter One is entitled “We Speak a Miscegenated Grammar” with a subtitle of “The Welshness of English”.  It is entirely concerned with the effects that English underwent as Germanic invaders flooded Britain.  McWhorter points out that Welsh and other Celtic languages are the only languages in the world to share the meaningless do trait with English, and some of the very few to share the progressive –ing tense, the gerund.  He appeals to common sense in saying that, obviously, Celtic languages fundamentally altered aspects of the Old English spoken by their invaders, peppering it with their own grammatical quirks in much the same way a native speaker of Spanish will produce oddities in their English grammar which can be directly recognized as coming from Spanish.  Furthermore, he accuses historians of English of completely ignoring these influences, writing off the quirks as random developments, even though none of the other Germanic languages have such constructions.  McWhorter then explains why historians have come to such wrong conclusions, by delineating and then refuting their assumptions, which are “The Celts All Just Died” (11), “Shitte Happens” (17), “Writing Is How People Talked” (31), and “Where Are the Celtic Words?” (44).  In that order, the refutations are, paraphrased, “No, millions of Celts cannot be killed by a few hundred thousand people with swords,” “It is incredibly unlikely that such grammatical oddities would develop randomly in English but not in the other Germanic languages,” “It is only recently that literacy is a common trait of the people, and, thus, it is only recently that people write as people talk.  Scholars in ancient times would have considered writing common speech a waste of their time,” and “Many languages possess grammatical oddities from other languages but very few words from those languages, such as Russian’s relationship with Uralic, and Indo-Aryan languages’ relationship with Dravidian languages.  Word exchange is simply not a universal.”

Chapter Two, entitled, “A Lesson from the Celtic Impact”, is about how ridiculous prescriptive grammar is in the face of this new history of English.  Given that standard features of English grammar are, in fact, merely the results of foreigners making grammatical mistakes, McWhorter argues, it makes no sense to go about condemning other such mistakes and trying to preserve some sort of pristine, “real” English; such a version of English never existed in the first place.  He gives more recent examples of criticisms which nobody takes seriously anymore, like ending a sentence with a preposition, or using “they” as a gender-neutral, singular pronoun.  A good deal of the chapter is spent giving examples of how illogical our grammar is, in order to show that prescriptivism cannot rest on any sort of logical foundation.

Chapter Three, entitled, “We Speak a Battered Grammar”, is concerned with what the Vikings did to English.  Whereas the Celts merely seasoned the grammar with their own quirks, says McWhorter, the Vikings marched in and tore it all to pieces, streamlining it, making it less “busy”.  Examples of things present in other Germanic languages but missing in English include a bevy of verb and noun endings and various grammatical “frills” like reflexive pronouns.  This really is the extent of Chapter Three’s content, but McWhorter manages to stretch it out to about forty-seven pages, by giving many detailed examples and inserting asides about why other linguists have not come to the same conclusions as he.

Chapter Four, entitled, “Does Our Grammar Channel Our Thought?” concerns itself with dispelling the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the idea that a language’s grammar fundamentally alters the way its speakers view the world.  McWhorter’s criticism rests mostly on two pillars, those being that the hypothesis’ proponents often do no research at all, and that other Germanic speakers’ thoughts are not particularly more complex or subtle even though the Vikings simplified English so very much, as he explained in Chapter Three.  This chapter is, mercifully, shorter than the previous one, without as much bloat, but it still batters the reader with too many superfluous examples, this time about how stupid McWhorter thinks Whorfian proponents are.

The fifth and final chapter is entitled, “Skeletons in the Closet”.  It is a look at the ways in which English was fundamentally altered before it even existed; that is, Chapter Five shows that Proto-Germanic is weird among Indo-European languages in precisely the same way that English is weird among Germanic languages.  Almost all of the text of Chapter Five is concerned with speculation about what culture may have had this influence on Proto-Germanic, and McWhorter settles on the Phoenicians as a likely culprit, citing their sailing prowess, some interesting archaeological finds of Phoenician, Greek, and Minoan pottery in the North Sea, and correlations between Semitic grammars and Proto-Germanic grammar.  McWhorter ends the book with the Phoenician speculation, and states that his history of English is not only more scientifically plausible, but also more interesting and dynamic than the bland view that English is just an odd collection of words. 

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is highly informative, and highly well-informed.  It does present a more interesting take on English history than most do, and is very convincing in its arguments.  McWhorter’s ideas about the lessons modern speakers and writers should learn from this picture of English are compelling; he even notes, on page 66, that the copy editor for the book expressly told him, after reading Chapter Two, that he was free to use “they” as a gender-neutral, singular pronoun.  The only real problem with Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is that, even at a mere two hundred and fifteen pages, it seems bloated.  There are just too many examples in some of the chapters, leaving the reader exasperated and waiting for McWhorter to get to his points.  Aside from that, the book is very much worth a look from anyone remotely interested in grammar and the history of English.