Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

by John Mcwhorter

  Every one of these things is an obstacle to the English speaker’s mastery of German. They all seem, to us, to come out of nowhere, just like the fact that German nouns come in masculine, feminine, and neuter flavors (meiner in meiner Tochter is the feminine dative; if a son were in question, then it would be meinem Sohn). Mark Twain, in his essay “The Awful German Language,” nicely summed up the experience of an Anglophone learner of German: “The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure in complicating it in every way that he could think of.”

  The crucial fact is that an English speaker might be moved to make a similar assessment of all of the other Germanic languages, for pretty much the same reasons. For example, the Dutch version of the sentence is Zei zij tegen mijn dochter dat mijn vader alleen gekomen is en zich beter voelt? in which the words occur in the same order as in the German.

  The question is why, indeed, Said she to my daughter that my father alone come is and himself better feels? is so silly in English alone. The Germanic languages, of course, have their differences, and not all of them parallel the German one quite as closely as Dutch does. To a Norwegian, for instance, a sentence with the words in the German order of Said she to my daughter that my father alone come is and himself better feels? would seem a little off, but still highly familiar. The Norwegian version is:

  Sa hun til dattera mi

  said she to daughter my

  at faren min er kommet alene

  that father my is come alone

  og føler sig bedre?

  and feels himself better

  Here we have many of the same sorts of things that motivated Twain to say, “A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is.” The same Said she . . . ? (Sa hun . . . ?), is come (er kommet), and “feeling yourself” (føler sig), plus gender: the my for my daughter is mi but the my for my father is min.

  That is, in a sense one “should” be able to say in English Said she to my daughter that my father alone come is and himself better feels? After all, you can say something similar in every other offshoot of Proto-Germanic but English. Only to English speakers does the sentence sound like something someone with brain damage would say. This shows that something was different about how Old English evolved.

  English’s Germanic relatives are like assorted varieties of deer—antelopes, springboks, kudu, and so on—antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme. English is some dolphin swooping around underwater, all but hairless, echolocating and holding its breath. Dolphins are mammals like deer: they give birth to live young and are warm-blooded. But clearly the dolphin has strayed from the basic mammalian game plan to an extent that no deer has.

  Of course, dolphins are also different from deer in being blue or gray rather than brown. But that is the mere surface of the difference, just as English’s foreign words are just the surface of its difference from German and the gang. English is different in its whole structural blueprint.

  This is not an accident. There are reasons for it, which get lost in chronicles of English’s history that are grounded primarily in lists of words, words, words.

  In this book, I want to fill in a chapter of The History of English that has not been presented to the lay public, partly because it is a chapter even scholars of English’s development have rarely engaged at length.

  Why is English grammar so much less complicated than German’s—or Norwegian’s, Icelandic’s, or any other Germanic language’s? Because the Scandinavian Vikings did more than leave us with words like skirt and get. They also beat up the English language in the same way that we beat up foreign languages in classrooms—and twelve hundred years later we are still speaking their close-but-no-cigar rendition of Old English!

  Why does English use do in questions like, say, Why does English use do in questions? The reader is vanishingly unlikely to have ever encountered another language where do is used the way it is in English, and that’s because linguists barely have either, out of six thousand languages in the world. Or is it just an accident that English speakers have to say He is feeling better where almost all the other Germanic languages would say He feels better—as would most languages in the world? Well, Welsh and Cornish, spoken in Britain long before English, and spoken alongside it for more than fifteen hundred years, have both the do and the -ing usages. Most scholars of The History of English insist that this is just a coincidence. I will show that it is not. While the Vikings were mangling English, Welsh and Cornish people were seasoning it. Their rendition of English mixed their native grammars with English grammar, and the result was a hybrid tongue. We speak it today.

  I want to share this first because it makes The History of English more interesting than successive waves of words, decorated with sidebars as to how the grammar changed a bit here and there for no particular reason. Second, once we know the real history of English, we can understand that certain things we have been taught about our language and how we use it are hoaxes. It is not true that saying Billy and me went to the store or Tell each student that they can hand in their exam on Tuesday is “illogical.” Nor is it true that the structure of people’s native language reflects, in any way we would find interesting, how they think. We will also see further counterevidence to the idea that English is uniquely “open” to new words, in little-known secrets about English’s vocabulary before it was even considered English.

  It’s not, then, all about words that just happened into our vocabulary. It’s also about things speakers of other languages did to English grammar, and actions speak louder than words. The real story of English is about what happened when Old English was battered by Vikings and bastardized by Celts. The real story of English shows us how English is genuinely weird—miscegenated, abbreviated. Interesting.

  Let’s go back to the middle of the fifth century A.D. in Britain, after the Romans left, and look a little more closely at the landscape than we are usually taught to.

  One

  WE SPEAK A MISCEGENATED GRAMMAR

  THE WELSHNESS OF ENGLISH

  The first chapter in the new history of English is that bastardization I mentioned.

  German, Dutch, Swedish, and the gang are, by and large, variations on what happened to Proto-Germanic as it morphed along over three thousand years. They are ordinary rolls of the dice. English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.

  The Kinks

  Did you ever notice that when you learn a foreign language, one of the first things you have to unlearn as an English speaker is the way we use do in questions and in negative statements? Take Did you ever notice . . . ? for example. Or I did not notice. We’re used to this do business, of course. But it’s kind of strange if you think about it. In this usage, do has no meaning whatsoever. It’s just there, but you have to use it. One cannot, speaking English, walk around saying things like Noticed you ever? or I not notice. English has something we will call meaningless do.

  Most languages, unsurprisingly, have no interest in using the word do in a meaningless way. If you’ve studied Spanish, you quickly learned that to put a verb in the past, you do not stick in a past form of the verb for do. Did she talk? is not Hago ella hablar? Nor do you jam in do to make a sentence negative—She does not talk is not Ella no hace hablar but Ella no habla. Nor is it Elle ne fait parler in French, or Ona ne delaet govorit’ in Russian, Hi lo osa ledaber in Hebrew, or—you get the picture.

  Did she walk? feels utterly conventional to us, when if you step beyond English, you look for do used that way and come up short.1 None of the other Germanic languages use do the way English, ever the wayward one, does.

  Then there is this -ing thing. We are given a tacit sense that tense marking in English works like this:

  But if you think about it, I write is not really present tense. Imagine you’re at your laptop writing an e-mail and someone asks what you’re doing and you say “I write.” It’s impossible to imagine that said by anyone
without a foreign accent, and one imagines that the e-mail such a person would write would be full of mistakes. “I write” would be, quite simply, incorrect. Your answer would be “I’m writing.”

  “I write,” on the other hand, is what you would say to express something more specific: that it’s something you do on a regular basis. I write, usually, from about ten A.M. to one P.M. The present tense, in English, is expressed not with a bare verb, but with the progressive -ing. The bare verb has a different meaning, which linguists call habitual.2

  Yet once again, that’s not the way it is in any other language you learn. In Spanish, your answer if asked what you were doing would be “Escribo.” The French person would answer “J’écris.” Sure, both of these languages and many, many others have ways of calling attention to the fact that you are in the process of writing the letter at this very instant: in Spanish, Estoy escribiendo, in French, Je suis en traîn d’écrire. Germanic languages do, too, like German’s Ich bin am schreiben, which comes out as “I am on the writing.” But it’s the decidedly peculiar individual who is given to stressing for every one of their actions that they are indeed in the process of accomplishing it at this very instant . In a normal language, you use a progressive construction when there’s a reason to. Otherwise, to answer “I write” sounds perfectly fine in most languages. But in English, it sounds vaguely funereal, and -ing is the ordinary way to use the present tense.

  English, then, is the only Germanic language out of the dozen in which there could be a sentence like Did you see what he is doing? rather than Saw you what he does? Since none of the other offshoots of Proto-Germanic seems to have sprouted oddities like these, one might ask whether there is a reason that English has.

  And if one asks that, presumably it will strike one as germane that there happen to be languages with precisely the same oddities spoken right on the same island where English arose, long before English got there.

  Yet most scholars of English’s history find this neither germane nor, really, even interesting. Why?

  Uninteresting Likenesses

  The languages in question belong to another Indo-European subfamily, Celtic. There are only a few of these languages today, although they once held sway across vast swatches of Western Europe. Irish Gaelic is one of them (and its variant Scottish Gaelic, an export to Britain, another). But the ones most of interest to us are those of Britain: Welsh in Wales and Cornish in Cornwall.3 The last native speaker of Cornish died in 1891, but there is a hardy revival movement for it today.

  If English is the odd one out as Germanic languages go, Celtic languages are odd ones out as Indo-European languages go. Verbs sometimes coming last in German strikes us as weird enough, although it is actually ordinary worldwide. But in Celtic, verbs come first in a sentence, which is less ordinary worldwide, and downright freaky within Indo-European languages. There are other features in which Celtic marches to the beat of its own drum, and two of them are the way it uses do and -ing.

  Take a look at this in Welsh. Nes means “did.” Welsh puts words in a different order than English, and so nes is always first. What’s interesting is that it is there, just as in English:

  Welsh uses do in the same meaningless way that English does. Do just sits there taking up space, not contributing any meaning to the sentence.

  Note that Welsh is different from English in one way: it uses do in “normal” sentences, affirmative ones as well, as we see in that third sentence. When a Welshman states Nes i agor, they are using the words that come out in English as “I did open,” but not with an emphatic meaning as in our I did open. They mean it as if we were speaking English in the Elizabethan period and said, “Since it was so hot out, I did open a window for you.”

  But in that people still said things like that then, English was more like Welsh than it is today. Even further back in Middle English, one might say for “You wept” Thou dudest wepe. Our sense that to speak fake “Olde English” means sticking “dosts” and “doths” all over the place corresponds to a Middle English reality, which persisted for centuries afterward. Here is Gertrude in Hamlet, addressing same:

  Alas, how is’t with you

  That you do bend your eye on vacancy,

  And with th’incorporal air do hold discourse? (III, iv, 120-22)

  Upon which he answers (147-48):

  My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time,

  And makes as healthful music.

  English has gone its own way since and dropped this do usage in affirmative (“neutral”) sentences, keeping it in the negative and question contexts. But there was a time when English was even more like Welsh on this score than it is now.

  Or how about English’s progressive construction, as in Mary is singing. In English, -ing leads a double life. In one guise, it makes a verb into a gerund, which means that it makes the verb into a noun. One sings, and one may enjoy that which is known as singing, a noun: Singing is fun. As a matter of fact, gerunds are sometimes called “verb-nouns.”

  Then, -ing has a second identity, when it is used in the progressive construction: Mary is singing. Here, singing is not a verb-noun—Mary is singing does not mean “Mary embodies the act of rendering song.” Singing in Mary is singing is just a verb, specifically what is called the present participle form of a verb. Our -ing is two things.

  The important point is the fact that in English, as we have seen, this progressive Mary is singing construction is our present tense. If someone asks you what you’re doing as you warble “Just the Way You Are,” your answer must be “I’m singing,” not “I sing.” Interestingly, in Welsh as well, to answer that question you must use a progressive construction: Welsh and other Celtic languages have the same -ing fetish as English. Remembering that Celtic word order is odd to our eyes and ears, in Welsh, if someone asks, “What’s our Mary doing?”, the answer is not “Mary sings” but “Mary is in singing”:

  Mae Mair yn canu.

  is Mary in singing

  Canu is the verb-noun for sing in Welsh: “Mary is in the act of singing.”

  Now, to be sure, in Welsh the present is expressed with a verb-noun progressive, while in English’s Mary is singing progressive, singing is not a verb-noun but a participle. However, the participle is just a latter-day morphing of what started as a verb-noun. Just as with meaningless do, what English does now is a drifting from what first was even more like Celtic.

  It went like this. In Old English one could say “I am on hunting” to mean that you were hunting. This was, obviously, just like the Welsh “Mary is in singing.” Then in Middle English, the on started wearing down and one might say “I am a-hunting,” just as we now say “Let’s go” instead of “Let us go.”

  Then before long, the a- was gone completely—as in the way we casually say “ ‘Tsgo” for “Let’s go”—and hence, just “I am hunting.” Ladies and gentlemen, the birth of a present participle. Celtic was English’s deistic God—it set things spinning and then left them to develop on their own. But that first spin—I am on hunting—was key. It was just like Welsh.

  And it’s not just Welsh. Cornish down south has the same kinks about do and -ing. The way to say I love is:

  Mi a wra cara.

  I at do love

  Sort of an Elvisesque “I’m a-doing loving,” except it is a perfectly normal sentence in Cornish, and its do is used the same way with negative sentences and in questions:

  Gwra cara?

  do-you love

  Then it has the same mysterious drive to use verb-nouns for the present tense. Here is She is buying vegetables, in which the word for buy is a verb-noun:

  Yma hi ow prena hy losow.

  is she at buying her vegetables

  So: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes brought a language to Britain in which a sentence like Did you see what he is doing? would have sounded absurd. The people already living in Britain spoke some of the very, very few languages in the world—and possibly the only ones—where that sentence would sound perf
ectly normal. After a while, that kind of sentence was being used in English as well.

  And yet specialists in the history of English sincerely believe that English started using do and -ing by itself, and that it is irrelevant, or virtually so, that Welsh and Cornish have the same features. You can page through countless books and articles on The History of English, and even on specifically the history of meaningless do or the -ing present, and find Celtic either not mentioned at all, actively dismissed, or, at best, mentioned in passing as “a possible influence” (read: of no significant bearing upon the issue).

  There is clearly something strange about this, but it is not that legions of scholars are incompetent, stubborn, bigoted against Celts, or anything else of the sort. Rather, they come at the issue with certain established assumptions, reasonable in themselves, which if held, understandably leave one comfortable treating such close correspondences between English and Celtic as accidents.

  Those assumptions, however, are mistaken.

  Assumption Number One: The Celts All Just Died