Actually, Bastard is similar in tone to my book from 2001, The Power of Babel. It represents the way I talk to a class, as well as the way I think – to me, nerdy stuff like this is great fun. Bastard is also like my previous books in that I am arguing for some rather controversial positions (Babel was not much of this kind but the other books, on language as well as race, are). However, I don’t think these positions in Bastard should be controversial at all, and part of doing something about that is planting a seed with the public.
Can you talk about your goal in researching and writing about “the untold history of English?”
The typical narration of how English became English is that Old English was brought to England and – big surprise – it took on a lot of words from the languages spoken by other people who moved to England. I have never found that especially remarkable, particularly when the GRAMMAR of Old English was also vastly transformed, in ways that have nothing to do with, say, French and Latin. In my research I noticed that English was first of all a mixed language also in terms of its grammar as well as its words, and that English is also “damaged goods” as a grammar, in a fashion: it’s what happened when Vikings picked up okay but faulty English and passed it on to their kids.
On pages 129-131 you talk about what intrigued me most: how English was slimmed down by the Vikings. Specifically you write: “…the Vikings did more to English than shave off its endings…” and on 131 you refer to “the erosion of suffixes.” Can you summarize for us that phenomenon?
The Vikings simplified Old English. The reason learning Old English for us is like learning German is because Old English was a normal Germanic language. [Modern] English is not, and much of that is in that we have many fewer conjugational suffixes than normal Germanic languages do, we have no gender, we have no modern distinction between here and there vs. hither and thither (all other Germanic languages maintain that distinction) and so on.
Also, why is it important for us to know this? Does it contribute to the flexibility and plastic nature of spoken and written English?
In a way, it actually leaves out some nuances, I would say. Germanic languages other than English leave a lot less to context because their grammar makes them mark things like hither vs. here.
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