John McWhorter About the Untold History of English

I found the book at Coop in Harvard Square and I didn't leave it till getting to the last page. The title is as provocative as the whole book: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. The author, John McWhorter, is a linguist passionate for Creole and the way it originated. Well, the book I've just read demonstrates that Mr. McWhorter sees English like Creole: a mixture of various languages.

Now, we all know that Old English was brought on the island by Anglo-Saxons, that after Hastings, Normans brought all kind of French words and that after the Hundred Years War English gave up French and found Latin in its search for high cultured models. Thus we have now doublets like pig and pork, cow and beef, also triplets like to ask, to question, to interrogate.

What we forget is that the specific of a language is not expressed in separate words, rather in the way words are arranged in sentences, and here comes Mr. McWhorter to start (or to commence) a fight with all other linguists: English grammar was influenced firstly by the native Celts (the use of do in interrogative and negative sentences, not to be found in any other Germanic language; also the use of the Present Continuous, again specific only to English), then by the Vikings (the elimination of all endings for verbs).

Good, and if you read it up to the end (as I did) you'll find out that Proto-Germanic was also kind of Creole: there are plenty of words that do not look at all like their correspondents in the other Indo-European idioms. Here the culprits seem to be the Phoenicians (great merchants and sailors).

If it is true or not, only Mr. McWhorter knows. It's a book you can read easily (if you jump sometimes on some tables of words in English/Welsh/Cornish), and it's very well written. The tone of the book, as I said, is very provocative, which makes sense, as the author is very far from the orthodox view on the history of English.

To have a better idea about the provocative tone in the book, here are the chapter titles (the explanations in parentheses are mine) :

• We Speak A Miscegenated Grammar (as Celts largely participated in the conception of English)
• A Lesson From the Celtic Impact (going on with the ideas from the previous chapter)
• We Speak a Battered Grammar (as Vikings have cut the endings of verbs, firstly in Northumbria, then it spread across the island)
• Does Our Grammar Channeled Our Thought (what was first, the egg or the hen? it doesn't matter too much, says Mr. McWhorter, who immediately starts to make comparisons between English, Hopi, Russian, and Japanese; that's the way it is)
• Skeletons In the Closet (the closet is Proto-Germanic and the skeletons were Phoenicians during their lives)

(A Life in Books)