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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English | 
 enlarge | Author: John Mcwhorter
Publisher: Gotham
Category: Book
List Price: $22.50
Buy New: $14.63
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New (36) Used (8) from $12.79
Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 26726
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 1592403956
Dewey Decimal Number: 420.9
EAN: 9781592403950
ASIN: 1592403956
Publication Date: October 30, 2008
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Product Description
A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar
Why do we say I am reading a catalog instead of I read a catalog ? Why do we say do at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Language distills hundreds of years of fascinating lore into one lively history.
Covering such turning points as the little-known Celtic and Welsh influences on English, the impact of the Viking raids and the Norman Conquest, and the Germanic invasions that started it all during the fifth century ad, John McWhorter narrates this colorful evolution with vigor. Drawing on revolutionary genetic and linguistic research as well as a cache of remarkable trivia about the origins of English words and syntax patterns, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue ultimately demonstrates the arbitrary, maddening nature of English and its ironic simplicity due to its role as a streamlined lingua franca during the early formation of Britain. This is the book that language aficionados worldwide have been waiting for (and no, it s not a sin to end a sentence with a preposition).
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Not the vanilla version November 30, 2008
Found Highways (Las Vegas)
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
To paraphrase John McWhorter: Normal people are interested in words while linguists are interested in grammar.
In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, John McWhorter calls this everyday, normal-person view of the English language "the vanilla version" of the history of English. In this version Germanic tribes invaded England, pushed the Celts to the fringes of the British Isles, and eventually Old English (Beowulf) became Middle English (Chaucer) became Modern English (Shakespeare), with infusions of Latin and Norman French after the Conquest in 1066. In the vanilla version, English lost its case endings on its own and became the most gramatically simple Germanic language.
McWhorter, a specialist in creoles and contact languages, has another theory, which gives the Celtic languages (especially Welsh and Cornish) credit for influencing the grammar of English.
He pays as much attention to history as to linguistics, and presents evidence that large numbers of Celts were not exterminated by the small numbers of Vikings who invaded and eventually settled in the northern and eastern part of England, the Danelaw. He demonstrates that English (unlike every other Germanic language) has grammatical features in common with Celtic languages--for instance, the "meaningless do" ("Do we eat apples?") and using gerunds (like "using" in "I'm using a gerund") as a normal present tense.
In fact, hardly any other language has these features, so it's just not reasonable to assume English and Celtic developed them coincidentally.
McWhorter says we've been misled by what he calls the "post-Norman Conquest blackout of written English," the 150 years or so after the Norman invasion when French became the "scribal" language in England. The changes to Old English (with the typical features of a Germanic language like Old Norse, from which it is descended) must have been happening earlier in the vernacular language, but scribes recorded the more old-fashioned, conservative forms of written English. (I'm writing this review in a more conservative style of English than I use in speech. That's what people do when they write--they do things like use "whom" instead of "who" as a direct object, or they use a lot of parenthetical remarks.)
Over the course of more than a century after 1066, English scribes got out of the habit of writing in that conservative, "scribal" English--they wrote in French. After succeeding generations of immigrants and their descendants began speaking English instead of French, they started writing legal and other documents in their own language--English--but they felt free to transcribe an English closer to the way they actually spoke.
So what appears to be a sudden simplification of grammatical structures (losing case endings, etc.) actually happened gradually due to the influence of languages that English was in contact with, like Welsh or Cornish.
McWhorter also touches on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the idea that language determines culture, or "channels thought," as McWhorter puts it. He disagrees with this hypothesis. If you want to read the opposite view, try another interesting new book--Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, by Daniel L. Everett.
I haven't even mentioned McWhorter's theory about the influence of Phoenician on Scandinavian and Germanic languages, and therefore English.
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is a relatively short book (small format, 197 pp.) but it's full of information I'd never read before about the history of English. I agree with McWhorter's last word:
Interesting.
"A Revisionist History of English" November 16, 2008
Stanley H. Nemeth (Garden Grove, CA United States)
15 out of 20 found this review helpful
Linguist John McWhorter in his latest work advances a very well argued contrarian view of the development of the English language. The prevailing conventional view is that changes in English over time principally involve just the addition of new words from Latin, French, and, in the ages of exploration, words from everywhere. The conventional view rests centrally on the "hard evidence" reflected in surviving writings. Very adroitly, McWhorter reminds us that in early societies the written language was scribal and thus no necessary reflection of what the bulk of the non-literate population actually spoke. Nonetheless, the conventional view at its narrowest takes what merely survives in writing as a picture of the whole, imagining in doing so that it is being scientific and avoiding "airy assumptions." History, however, McWhorter reminds us, invariably involves much that is lost, requiring as well a reconstruction of events based on high levels of probability.
McWhorter rests his contrarian case on such arguments as he deals with other surviving bits of circumstantial evidence. His chief argument is that the history of English may best be understood as a consequence of the mixing of languages, not merely the addition of new words from foreign sources or the consequence of changes that "just happened." He seeks to explain the principal changes, not merely and dully to document them. Starting with the invasion of the British Isles by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes after the Roman departure, McWhorter disputes the notion that these invaders completed a successful Holocaust on the native Celtic peoples. He contends that two of the oddest features in English, separating it not only from other Germanic tongues but from all the other world's languages as well are the meaningless "Do" in such questions as "Do you do the dishes?" and in negatives, "No I don't do them," and the use of the present progressive, "I am doing the dishes," where other languages normally use just the present form, "I do the dishes." McWhorter's reminder is that these oddities were found in the neighboring tongues of Welsh and Cornish, and nowhere else. Occam's razor points to the conclusion that these Celtic tongues added certain features to Old English grammar, features which only become apparent in documents once English writing years later comes closer to actual English speaking.
While the Celts added such features to old English, the later Viking invaders, learning English as a Second Language, stripped it of many of its "hard" to master Germanic attributes. Thus, Old English had many of its endings shaved off, and it stands alone among European languages as free of gendered nouns.
McWhorter also presents a compelling critique of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that a specific language's grammatical structure determines the thought patterns of its speakers. His convincing rebuttal is that homo sapiens in essential respects are alike the world over, and that their needs and interests influence grammatical structure, not vice-versa.
Finally, McWhorter considers possible influences affecting Proto-Germanic even before one of its branches became Old English. He raises the possibility of a Semitic influence here, perhaps the result of European voyages by colonizing Phoenicians - all in all, a provocative hypothesis, deserving to be better known and worthy of further exploration.
This is a lucidly written and frequently witty account of today's lingua franca's history. It is at its heart a fascinating piece of detective work, and it is certain to interest a wide variety of readers.
English with Celtic grammer spoken by foreigners November 5, 2008
Afton W. Koontz
9 out of 15 found this review helpful
Why do we speak English the way we do? Is it trully the "easiest" Germanic language to learn? What's up with those extra nonessential "do's?" John McWhorter explores the answers to these nagging questions in an well written entertaining book. There are some areas that are a bit of a slogfest, especially if the last time you took grammer was as a high school freshman. As whole though you will find why English is the way it is, why the Celts played such an important part and why we should be grateful to invading Vikings for such a streamlined language. (I read this book as a digital version on the Kindle. There was one glaring typographical error but was probably due to the digital translation.)
Interesting but a bit difficult November 17, 2008
Thomas Fekete (Philadelphia, PA USA)
7 out of 14 found this review helpful
McWhorter is a talented writer with an interesting thesis to explore in this book. For a non-linguist, the book skates between fascinating and readable on the one hand and a bit of a screed on the other. Some parts are like stepping into an argument that has been going on for a long time, but you are not familiar with the topic or the previous commentary.
I suspect that much of what is in this book is correct. And I submit that most of it is quite fascinating. But the book is a bit of a chore to read despite its brevity.
Our Bastard Tongue December 12, 2008
Louis A. Pedrotti (Riverside, CA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
John McWhorter has done it again! As someone who gained his MA in Slavic linguistics at UCBerkeley, I once again am amazed at the depth and enthusiasm that he shows in his books. I would recommend his books to anyone who is would like to know where we came from, where we are now and where we will be, as an English-speaking people. Huzzah! (Make that three.)
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