How best to enjoy a book written by a linguist on the bastard origins of a language? Just read it. According to John McWhorter it’s about the linguistically incorrect. It's about letting the speaker speak and the writer write. While he does not implore writers to end sentences with a preposition, split infinitives with adjectives or begin a sentence with a conjunction, he does however; encourage the reader to relax his quandaries about new-word accumulations in English, over the centuries, up to the present day. Why? Because one thing is certain about all spoken languages, including English: it lives, it speaks to us and for us. It is also peculiar: it is a language of bastard, but known, origins.
The educated really need know one thing: that the roots of English are Germanic. The Introduction of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue traces “three main rounds” of European invasions that led from Old English to Modern English. It began with the Danish and Norwegian Viking invasions (787 A.D. onward), Norman French invasions and the 100 years English-French war bringing Latin with it (remember that Latin was the language of the literate of medieval France). McWhorter is about unearthing the very old roots of English.
That is what makes this book such a treasure: the author reminds us of the training of the linguist chiefly: “how words are put together and how the way they are put together is different from how they were put together in the past” a.k.a. syntax. However, his book bears a different stripe in that it reaches for something an anthropologist might master: etymology or the origin of words (and names).
His arguments are comforting if not convincing to some: there is no need to cut deadwood (or in this case dead words) from a living language. Like the stock market of yore, it should self-correct and discarded words will lose their value. But in a true sense, according to this book, there is really no such thing as penny stocks when it comes to playing loose with the lingo. Every newbie is both expected and welcomed. And the measure of its welcome will come in the form of its use.
Article comments
1 - Ruvy
When you're not writing on politics, Heloise, you can be very entertaining.
I did study linguistics and have a very clear understanding of the points you outline in John McWhorter's book. Living in Israel, I get to see an awful of Russian, and on a candy box that we had gotten for Rosh haShana, there were ingredients in Hebrew, Polish and four different languages written in Cyrillic letters. For me this was detective work because while most of the stuff written in the Cyrillic was also written in Hebrew, there was very little in English - the language I understand best. I can read Cyrillic letters, but do not necessarily understand the words I see. Nevertheless, I wanted to know which language was which of the ones written in Cyrillic.
The chocolate candy was made in Germany and is marketed by a Polish company in Eastern Europe and Israel.
The keys to solving the puzzle were two-fold: knowing that Ukrainian has kept many of the letters from the original Cyrillic alphabet designed by the Christianity hustling Greek monks who invented it - and knowing that while Russian has six case endings for its nouns (which is why it is such a bear, even for Russians), Bulgarian has dropped its case endings and is very much like English - and a lot easier to learn. In other words, someone did to Bulgarian what the Norse invaders did to English.
One of the things that happens when you drop case endings that word order suddenly gets a whole lot more important - and the other thing that happens is that you need to use a whole lot more words. So, the list of ingredients etc., with the most words was Bulgarian. The list of ingredients etc., with the strangest set of letters was the Ukrainian. The remaining two (one had to be Russian) I deduced by looking at the pictures of the candies - described in English, Polish and Russian, the dominant Slavic language. I then matched that to the list of ingredients and candies and my puzzle was solved.
I've kept that little box ("no, Reuven we didn't throw out your precious box", said the missus as she tried to extract it from the corner of the desk drawer where it had gotten stuck) as a memento of what lingusistics has taught me - and how to use induction and deduction to solve a mystery.
Thanks for the review. If I ever have the money, I might even order the book.