Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

by John Mcwhorter

  The Celtic impact on English, then, shows us that truly novel things can happen to the way a language puts words together and yet its speakers will continue to understand one another, and the language can go on to be the vehicle of a great literature.

  My experience suggests that at this point, many people will still have trouble shaking a sense that observing these “rules” is part of being a respectable member of society. And it is true that in the reality of the world we live in, we cannot say Billy and me went to the store in a formal speech without seeming crude and untutored to many audience members; nor will my arguments change the convictions of those who write house style sheets for copy editors.

  I would hope, however, that we might think of these things as what they are: arbitrary fashions of formal language that we must attend to just as we dress according to the random dictates of the fashions of our moment. Remember that what is considered “proper” English varies with the times just as fashion does.

  There was a time when pedants hoped that English could pattern like Latin and not end sentences with prepositions. That fashion passed.

  There was a time when pedants developed a minor obsession over English’s tendency to use expressions like have a look and make a choice rather than look and choose. That fashion passed.

  In our time, pedants are engaged in a quest to keep English’s pronouns in their cages instead of me being used as a subject after and and they being used in the singular. Whether that fashion will pass I cannot say, but we do know that it is nothing but one more fashion. Russians happen to prefer smothering their food in sour cream much more than Americans, and in Russia the space occupied in modern American culture by wine is occupied by vodka. These are cultural differences, distinctions of vogue. Similarly, Russians with their “We and the wife” do not know our fashion of policing pronouns to make sure they never venture beyond their original meanings. Today as in the olden days, we are dealing with vogue indeed. People in the seventies did not think sideburns, wide collars, and bell-bottoms were more “logical” than previous fashions. It was just what people were delighted by in a passing sense, then, for a while.

  We are taught that these errors are a sign of some possible catastrophe if they are allowed to persist. But I’m not sure people are aware of how languages have a way of holding together. Nothing reminds me of this more than the truly screwed-up English in the funniest book ever written in human history, The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English. It was written in the late 1800s by a Portuguese man described by Mark Twain in the introduction to a latterly printing as an “honest and upright idiot,” who neither spoke nor even read English, and was under the impression that he could render English by just plugging English words into French sentences. The book is almost two hundred pages of the likes of this, one of my favorite bits in it, a vignette about fishing called “The fishing”:

  That pond it seems me many multiplied of fishes. Let us amuse rather to the fishing.

  I do like-it too much.

  Here, there is a wand and some hooks.

  Silence! There is a superb perch! Give me quick the rod. Ah! There is, it is a lamprey.

  You mistake you, it is a frog! Dip again it in the water.

  Perhaps I will do best to fish with the leap.

  Try it! I desire that you may be more happy and more skilful who a certain fisher, what have fished all day without to can take nothing.

  Now, that’s errors for you. And notice that no native speaker of English ever sounds anything like this and never has, regardless of their attendance to “errors.” I have no idea, for example, what “the leap” referred to. I also submit “you mistake you,” so marvelously erroneous, as a sample of what “wrong” English really can be, in considering whether modern English speakers are prone in any meaningful way to “errors.”

  I also submit that that very way of putting it, “you mistake you,” leads us into the next chapter. There is a reason why one puts it as “you mistake you” in Portuguese and French—and normal Germanic languages—but not English. It’s part of a bigger picture—one with Vikings in it.

  Three

  WE SPEAK A BATTERED GRAMMAR

  WHAT THE VIKINGS DID TO ENGLISH

  English, as languages go, and especially Germanic ones, is kind of easy.

  Not child’s play, but it has fewer bells and whistles than German and Swedish and the rest. Foreigners are even given to saying English is “easy,” and they are on to something, to the extent that they mean that English has no lists of conjugational endings and doesn’t make some nouns masculine and others feminine.

  There is a canny objection one sometimes hears out there, that English is easy at first but hard to master the details of, while other languages are hard at first but easy to master the details of. Purportedly, then, Russian means starting out cracking your teeth on its tables of conjugations and case markers and gender marking, but after that it’s smooth sailing.

  Nonsense. English really is easy(-ish) at first and hard later, while other languages like Russian are hard at first and then just as hard later! Show me one person who has said that learning Russian was no problem after they mastered the basics—after the basics, you just keep wondering how anybody could speak the language without blacking out. English is truly different. Why?

  Not because so many immigrants have learned it, either amid the British slave trade or later in America. We must always ask: in our modern world, how would the way the language is spoken by subordinate people, usually ridiculed as “bad grammar,” make its way into how middle-class native-born people spoke, and especially how they wrote? Some words, maybe—but as always, grammar is key. There is the way the Bosnian cabdriver speaks English now—and then there is the way the people on National Public Radio talk. Just how would Zlatko the cabdriver’s locutions affect how Terry Gross expresses herself? Obviously, not at all—even if there were millions of Zlatkos.

  Besides, English drifted into its streamlined state long before the colonial era, when it was still a language only occasionally written in, and spoken by only some millions of people on a single island. The reason English is easy is a story which, like the Celtic one, traditional linguists have missed most of, in favor of seeing an uncanny number of developments in the same direction as “just happening,” though they are unheard-of in any other Germanic language or, often, anywhere on earth.

  Namely, the Danes and Scandinavians who invaded and settled Britain starting in the eighth century battered not only people, monasteries, and legal institutions, but the English language itself.

  Before we go on, by the way, don’t worry that “Germanic” means keeping track of twelve vastly different tongues. Really, just think of it as four.

  The first “language” is Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, sometimes called Mainland Scandinavian. These three are variants of the same language; their speakers can converse.

  The second language is Dutch. “Dutch” for us can include Frisian, a close relative, and Afrikaans, which is Dutch after centuries of separate development in South Africa.

  The third language is High German. Yiddish is an offshoot of what also became High German, and is in essence a German dialect with a lot of words from Slavic and Hebrew. Some Yiddish scholars bristle when you say that, but it’s true, with all due respect for Yiddish’s position in a culture quite separate from the Teutonic one. So you can just think, for our purposes, of “German.”

  Finally, there is Icelandic. Faroese is so similar to it that you can just think of a general “Icelandic.”

  That really is all you need: Volvos, Vermeers, Volkswagens, and Volcanoes.

  The Tip of the Iceberg: Suffixes

  Traditional scholarship on The History of English recognizes that the Vikings played a part in a single thing that happened to English besides words, words, words. Namely, as we have seen, Old English shed a lot of endings in its day, such that in comparison Middle English seems like one of those nearly hairless cats
.

  It happened on verbs as well as nouns. Where in Modern English we have I love, you love, he loves, we love, where the only ending is the third person one with its -s, Old English had ic luf-ie, þū luf-ast, hē luf-að, wē luf-iað. (Quick sidebar on something we’ll see a lot of in this chapter—nothing hard: in Old English spelling, þ was the th sound in thin, and ð was the th sound in this.)

  It is more or less accepted that the Vikings must have had something to do with this. Modern Danish and Norwegian didn’t exist yet; rather, the Vikings spoke the ancestor of those languages, an early branch of Proto-Germanic called Old Norse. Old Norse was, like Old English, a language all ajangle with suffixes like Latin.

  When the Vikings came, one of their first tasks was to communicate with the Anglo-Saxons. This was not as tough a proposition for them as the one they would have faced had they invaded Greece. It is assumed that speakers of Old English and speakers of Old Norse could probably wangle a conversation. To ask “Do you have a horse to sell?” an Old English speaker would say “Haefst þu hors to sellenne?,” which would have made some kind of sense to an Old Norse speaker since in his language it went Hefir þu hross at selja?

  Understanding was one thing, but reproducing what he heard was another. For the Old Norse speaker, Old English was familiar but different, kind of like driving on the wrong (I mean, left!) side of the road in England feels to an American at first. Old English had endings in the same places and used in the same ways—but different endings. Take the word for “to deem, to judge”:

  This was a basically bookless realm, recall, and so a Norseman did not see tables of endings laid out neatly on a page like this, nor did anyone teach him the language formally at all (short of perhaps being told occasional words, but that doesn’t allow you to express yourself). It was an oral world—people just talked; they didn’t write or read. The Norseman just heard these endings being used on the fly. It must have been confusing, and as such, tempting to just leave the endings off when speaking English, since he could be understood without them most of the time. This was the recipe for what eventually became Modern English, where the only remnant of the present-tense conjugations above is the third person singular -s, a little smudge left over from ye olde -th.

  Yet, as always, the ancient world left us no actual descriptions of Vikings making their way in English and how well they did at it. We can infer a little from things like an eleventh-century inscription on a sundial, written in Old English by someone with a Scandinavian name, “Orm Gamalson”:

  Orm Gamalsuna bohte Sanctus Gregorius minster tobrocan & tofalan & he hit let macan newan from grunde . . .

  “Orm Gamalson bought St. Gregory’s minster broken and fallen down and had it made anew from the ground . . .”

  Thus a Scandinavian was writing in English: that’s one glimpse at one Viking who wrapped his head around the language. But we’ll never know anything about Orm, including how he learned English, much less how he actually rendered it in his everyday speech. And that historiographical lacuna has allowed some linguists to propose that the Orm Gamalsons had nothing to do with English taking it all off.

  They point out that Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish have lost almost as many endings as English has, and Dutch and Frisian are not too far behind them. In the present, for example, Swedish and friends even surpass English; here is how to conjugate “to call” in Swedish—i.e., you don’t!

  But this observation misses the forest for the trees. While other Germanic languages have sloughed off a certain number of endings, they have never done so to the radical degree that English has. For example, the kallar conjugation business acknowledged, not a single one of them in Europe does without classifying their nouns according to gender.

  Gender, to an American English speaker, is like water fountains. An American in Paris may notice after a while that there are virtually no water fountains: long before bottled water became commonplace in America, having to buy it in Paris was a minor inconvenience that an American had to get used to. However, it was a mistake to think that an absence of water fountains was something particular to Paris, or even France. Water fountains are uncommon in Europe in general; it’s America that has been a little odd in having them in such proliferation.

  In the same way, an English speaker trying a European language runs up against gender in Spanish’s el sombrero for the hat but la luna for the moon and thinks of it as something annoying about Spanish, but then will also encounter it in French, Russian, Greek, Albanian, Polish, Welsh even! It’s English that is odd in not having gender,4 even among the Germanic languages.

  Proto-Germanic had not one but three genders—masculine, feminine, and neuter—and in some cases modern Germanic languages retain all three, in such user-hostile cases as each piece of silverware in German having a different gender: spoons are boys, forks are girls, knives are hermaphrodites. Usually, just two genders remain—but remain they do, showing no signs of going anywhere. In Swedish, a big goose is masculine, en stor gås, but a big house is what is called common, and comes out ett stort hus, where ett is the common form for a and the adjective takes a common ending -t.

  English is, as always, the odd one out on this. It is the only genderless Germanic language, except for one dialect of Swedish—but then there is another Swedish dialect, and others in Denmark, that retain all three of Proto-Germanics’ genders. No modern dialect of English retains gender—not marked on nouns like Spanish’s -o and -a endings, not in the form of distinct articles like Swedish’s en and ett, and certainly not with endings on adjectives. In fact, English is the only Indo-European language in all of Europe that has no gender—the only one.5

  Here is where we come back to the question as to whether we can usefully say that English’s loss of suffixes “just happened.” If that’s all there was to it, why did it happen only to a single Indo-European language in Britain and nowhere else in Europe?

  “But Wait, There’s More!”: The Rest of the Iceberg

  And in any case, the issue goes way beyond endings. There is a great deal more about English that is curiously “easy” as Germanic goes.

  This occurred to me several years ago when I was spending a month in Germany, trying to bone up on my vocabulary by reading a German translation of one of my favorite books. I kept trying to maintain the fiction that the only significant difference between German and English is that German has der, die, das, and a bunch of endings while all English has is little old the and just a few endings. But it just isn’t true.

  Beyond endings, German grammar is “busier” than English’s. You have to watch out for more things, split more hairs. And that’s also true of the Scandinavian languages, regardless of their scanty little old verb conjugations. It’s true of any Germanic language, from Proto-Germanic on down over these past three thousand years. Except English.

  For example, I said that You mistake you for You’re mistaken from the wacky English example would be germane to the Viking issue. What I meant was that the misled Portuguese gentleman thought of you mistake you as normal because you mistake yourself is the way you put it in French (Tu te trompes) and Portuguese (Tu te equivocas) (both meaning “You ‘yourself’ mistake”).

  This is a quirk common in European languages, that often you do things “to yourself” which in English you just do. It tends to be with verbs having to do with moving and feeling. So in English, I have to go, but in Spanish, Tengo que irme (“I have to go ‘myself’ ”). With moving, this makes a kind of sense to an English speaker, although it seems a little redundant to us to have to specify that I am exerting the act of go-age upon myself. But the ones involving feelings are something else: I remember in English, Me acuerdo in Spanish (“I remember myself”), meaning not that you are idly recalling a past image of yourself, but that the remembering is something that happens to you, thus affecting not something or someone else, but you. While about the only Modern English versions of these are behave yourself, to perjure yourself, and to pride yourself (
upon), many European languages mark hundreds of verbs in that way.

  It’s a frill—a language doesn’t need to mark that things obviously personal in fact—Golly!—involve the person in question. But some languages just do, especially in Europe. Germanic languages are included: in German You mistake you comes out as Du irrst dich (“You mistake yourself”), and to remember is sich erinnern. In Frisian, if I am ashamed, Ik skarnje my (“I shame me”); to have the same feeling in Iceland is to skammast sín, or among Yiddish speakers to shemen zikh. In Dutch, one does not just move, one bewegt zich (“moves oneself”). In Swedish to move is similar: röra sig.

  All of this would have been same-old same-old to an Old English speaker. Today’s behave yourself and pride yourself are fossils from a time when, for example, if I was afraid Ic ondrēd mē, i.e., in a way, “bedreaded myself,” and to look at something was to, as it were, “besee oneself to” it: Beseah he hine to anum his manna (“Looked he himself to one of his men”). But over a few centuries in Middle English documents, we watch this “self”-fetish mysteriously blow away like autumn leaves. Today it is gone, while alive and well in all the other Germanic languages.

  To strike an archaic note, in English we start popping off hithers and thithers. Come hither, go thither, but stay here or stay there. Hither, thither, and whither were the “moving” versions of here, there, and where in earlier English. It’s something you still have to pick up in German: “Where’s the coffee?” Hier. But Come here! is Komm her! “Komm hier” marks the foreigner; I’ll just bet that’s one of the things Germans say to imitate English speakers’ schoolboy German. German also has its thither (hin) and whither (wohin), and in fact there is no Germanic language that has no directional adverbs of this kind. These are Germanic languages, after all: precise, specific!