When a writer writes, he or she discovers something new, something even the writer did not anticipate. I call that part of the writing experience “the book writing itself.” What was that something for you in writing this book?
Not precisely with this one. I wrote this one because a lot of the race writing I do is necessarily glum. Now and then I get a yen to write something where I can, metaphorically, smile on the page, and write about things that don’t make people angry, that involve precise answers rather than open-ended speculation and emotion, and so on. I got precisely that out of writing OMBT – I just wanted to share. If anything, the unexpected thing while writing it was that I found that other people seemed to enjoy the first draft. I thought it was going to be largely a project that only I liked!
Finally, how does your scholarship on OMBT differ (if significantly) from that of other writers on the subject?
OMBT is going to arouse some objections, I suspect, from traditional scholars on the subject. The idea that Welsh speakers lent the DO construction (“Do you know?”) to English and others is considered iffy by many specialists and too unknowable to be interesting by others. I think they’re wrong, and in 50 years, if I have anything to do with it, it will be in textbooks. But today, I suspect I am the only person writing on early English who would dwell on and argue for the Celtic hypothesis. Also, most specialists pay a certain lip service to the idea that Vikings simplified English grammar somewhat, but I think they miss the extent of it and neglect thinking about what a really weird language English is compared to every last one of the languages in its subfamily. What is discussed at length in the field are Vikings’ words. In OMBT one of my main missions is to show readers that languages are interesting not only because of words but because of how they are put together.
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