The King’s English or Standard English has problems. It has additions, eccentricities and the occasional irregularity with verb conjugation that roll alongside its legitimate siblings. And that is perfectly fine. The author enjoins the everyday writer, linguist and anthropologist to write, talk and listen to English beast unencumbered. How? Because he has made it clear that English does not need fixing. Some linguists wear an “English is difficult” amulet. But the author pulls the chain on this idiom and replaces it with “English is easy.” And the once-archaic, as in Old English, becomes accessible. McWhorter truly makes the minutiae of English origins understandable to the non-linguist. In astrology this talent is termed ‘higher knowledge made plain.’ It is highly prized in the arts and sciences.
Chapter three: “We Speak a Battered Grammar” gets to the heart of the matter. McWhorter wrestles with the Viking role for the average speaker by asking who did what to English. He argues that it was the Vikings whodunit. And he uses a childhood anecdote about a rider who returns his bike with parts falling off to make his point:
What this [loss of grammatical features] means is that something happened to English. Someone did something to it. If a bike does collapse under its rider, then we know that earlier that day somebody loosened all of its screws so that it would fall apart after being ridden hard for a while. Somebody unscrewed English.
In languages, like sex, expect Shiite to happen.
After centuries of Norsemen invading England they had to learn, as adults, the local language. Just how did they cope with such a task McWhorter asks in a time of no Berlitz or formal language instruction? Learning English on the fly was no mean task. They did what any new-language learner would do — took linguistic shortcuts! The Norsemen stripped English down, cutting off the endings, especially the vowels. And by waving a magic word wand: most words in English now end in a consonant and Anglophones the world over never have to worry about gender or its agreement when speaking of mundane things such as socks and shoes. In this case [English], they don’t have to match. However, the author argues that the down side of this downsized language means that European romance languages, so highly prizes, are more difficult to learn. In this way English veers dramatically to the right and becomes a streamlined version of itself. McWhorter makes the case that English is easy to grasp and gets easier the more one knows. Russian, by contrast, is a bear to grasp and remains a bear no matter how fluid or familiar one becomes with it.
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.