Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

by John Mcwhorter

  Notice that, usually, Old Norse’s endings are different from Old English’s. An Orm Gamalson learning English found a little stumbling block almost every time he started to use a noun. But—the dative plural was one of the only places he got a break: the -um suffix was one of the only ones that Old English and Old Norse happened to have in common.

  It was predictable, then, that people like Orm Gamalson had a way of holding on to -um for dear life as the rest of the noun endings burned off: it was familiar to them from Old Norse. The persistence of -um only in the Northumbrian dialect, then, was a calling card from the Vikings.

  Why Not the Celts?

  In terms of dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s, we must assess whether another group of people speaking something other than English were the ones who beat the grammar up. If the Celts gave English meaningless do and progressive -ing, then maybe they also, as non-native speakers, knocked off the bells and whistles, right? After all, if they added things like do, then why wouldn’t they, speaking “Englisc” as a second language, also leave off endings and such? This is, in fact, the opinion of the small school of linguists arguing for the Celtic impact.

  The problem with this idea is that, as we have seen, the eclipse of endings correlates so perfectly with just where Vikings settled. If the Celts were responsible, then the endings would have dropped away throughout England, or at least in regions where Celts, rather than Vikings, were more densely settled. They did not. Rather, where something is clearly traceable to Celtic, it is a Celtic construction being added to English, such as meaningless do and the Northern Subject Rule.

  According to theory on what happens when languages encounter one another, this negative evidence re the Celts is just what we would expect.

  The Celts had a different experience with English than the Vikings did. The Vikings settled and coped with English, and all indications are that Old Norse in England lasted not much longer than the first generation of invaders. History records no enclaves in England where Old Norse was spoken for generations after the invasions. The Vikings spread themselves out, and wherever an Orm Gamalson settled down, what was se habla’ed was English—and Orm’s children likely had the same orientation toward Old Norse as Jewish immigrants’ children in America in the twentieth century had toward Yiddish. Old Norse was the Old Country; English was the native tongue—cool, in a word. The difference between then and now was that for Orm, Jr., writing was an elite, marginal decoration in daily life; he likely never went to anything we would call school. As such, the “off” English of his dear old Hagar-the-Horrible Dad was what he spoke, too. This was the root of the curiously simplified Germanic language I am writing in.

  In contrast, Welsh and Cornish were spoken in England long before the Angles and Co. came, and lived on beside English for a millennium plus. Celtic and English have been set on a long, slow Crock-Pot simmer with one another in the mouths of bilinguals over all of that time. This stewing phenomenon has a technical name: linguistic equilibrium, as granted it since the nineties by linguist R. M. W. Dixon.

  In situations like this, as a group slowly picks up a new language over centuries but continues to use its native one more usually, they do not simplify the new language. Rather, they season it with constructions they are used to, but otherwise learn that new language fine. The two languages stew together. Soon, the language they are learning looks a little like their native one.

  One sees this all over the world. Because of high rates of intermarriage between groups, the aboriginal languages of Australia as well as of South America tend to be deeply mixed with one another in terms of grammar. One language’s endings will pattern like the ones from the language spoken down the river, even though the languages are not closely related. Another language will belong to a group where verbs come at the end of a sentence, but its verbs come in the middle because the languages of another group down in the valley are like that, and on and on. Clearly, the people have been learning one another’s languages since time immemorial. But—none of the languages are “broken down” or streamlined in the way that English is, compared with its Germanic family members. The languages stewed—they did not boil down.

  It’s the same in other situations. In India, the Indo-Aryan languages (Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali) and Dravidian languages (Tamil, Telugu) have been stewing for millennia—but none are particularly simplified. African languages like Xhosa and Zulu inherited click sounds from nearby Khoisan languages—more stewing over long periods. Yet Xhosa and Zulu are decidedly not simple. This is part of the South African constitution in Zulu, namely, the sentence “We recognize the injustices of our past”: Siyakukhumbula ukucekelwa phansi kwamalungelo okwenzeka eminyakeni eyadlula. We don’t need to break that down to see that there’s nothing precisely user-friendly about Zulu (and the c in ukucekelwa is a click sound!).

  Linguistic equilibrium is what happened between the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts. Celts blanketed the land and had done so forever. Suddenly they were dealing with bands of marauding Germanic speakers, who ended up never leaving. Life changed, but the land remained blanketed with Celts being the Celts they had always been. The Celt could still use their Welsh or Cornish with the people around them whom they had always known—there was no “genocide,” after all. Over generations, the flavor of Welsh and Cornish bled into their way of speaking Englisc—not just in words, but in grammar. The result after a while was that the typical Celt could speak English just fine—but with a Celtic infusion in the grammar. That was Chapter One. But meaningless do and progressive -ing are complications, not simplifications. They are stewings.

  Many scholars arguing for Celtic influence suppose that Celts would have had particular trouble with English in places where Old English had something in its grammar that Celtic did not. For example, Welsh does not have case marking on its nouns. There are those who assume that this meant that Welsh speakers would have been inclined to omit them when speaking Old English. This is reasonable on its face, but it isn’t what happens in situations of linguistic equilibrium. People amid linguistic equilibrium learn the new language just fine, even the hard stuff.

  For example, in China, there are dialects of Mandarin developed by speakers of languages of a different family, Altaic (the shop-window rep is Turkish, but the family stretches far, far eastward). Altaic speakers were encroached upon gradually by Mandarin speakers over long periods. Mandarin is a tonal language—tone is part of how you tell one word from another. Altaic languages do not have tone. The exotic Mandarin dialects created by Altaic speakers dealing with Mandarin-speaking new-comers have Altaic word order and other grammatical features from Altaic—but they also all use tones just as Mandarin does, despite how hard tones are to learn. That is, speakers of tone-free Altaic languages learned thoroughly decent Mandarin, including the tones, while seasoning it with some Altaic things they were used to.

  In the same way, the Celts would have seasoned English, but otherwise learned it, including English cases even if, say, Welsh had none. The Celts’ impact on English was what we saw in Chapter One. In this chapter, we must focus on other people.

  The Big Picture

  As with the Celtic influence on English, we must deduce what the Vikings did to English. No one was on-site chronicling how the language was changing decade by decade. Orm Gamalson might record that a minster was “tobrocan & tofalan”—broken and fallen down—but kings, monks, bureaucrats, and scribes in ancient England, to whom writing was scripture rather than scribbling, hadn’t the slightest inclination to get down on paper for posterity observations of the likes of “Yon Vikinges Englisc is most tobrocan & tofalan!”

  Comparison reveals what was going on even if no one at the time bothered to describe it. Among Germanic languages, Icelandic, spoken on a remote island, has (1) rarely been learned by foreigners and (2) is also the least simplified member of the family. Even today, its grammar is so little changed from Old Norse that Icelanders can read the epic eddas in Old Norse written almost a thousan
d years ago. Icelandic has three genders; most of those case endings and conjugations we saw in Old Norse are still used in everyday language in Reykjavík; and it’s got the “you mistake you” quirk, hithering and thithering, V2, a be-perfect, and most everything else the well-dressed Proto-Germanic descendant wears.

  Icelandic shows that there is nothing inevitable about a language tossing off its suffixes and what linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir called “nuance” over time. Linguists call a language that has a way of holding on to what is passed down to it “conservative.” Ordinarily, languages’ grammars are rather conservative—like Latin, Greek, and Russian.

  In comparison, even the other Germanic languages besides Icelandic are less conservative. It surely isn’t an accident that they also, roiling around on the Continent, where populations have been mixing and conquering one another forever, have been learned by foreigners much more than Icelandic. This is why German, Dutch, and Swedish have shed a lot more of Proto-Germanic’s suffixes than Icelandic. However, that’s pretty much all. Suffixes—small and usually pronounced without stress (or, in the term more common among laymen, accent)—are uniquely fragile. But otherwise, these languages retain the other complexities of Proto-Germanic. Largely, their coexistence with other languages (including one another) has been a matter of linguistic equilibrium—stewing, but not boiling down.

  English, in this light, is the odd one out, and what distinguishes it from its relatives is that it underwent marauding hordes of Vikings who never went home, and proceeded to speak the language, as they did so much else, Their Way. They never wrote down that they were doing so—most of them couldn’t write anyway. But Icelandic stands as virtual confirmation that adult learners screwing things up was a key factor in how English came to be the way it is. The people who can still read ancient sagas live on a remote, undisturbed island. The people whose language became the most user-friendly member of the family live on an island nearer the Continent, that was, due to that proximity, lustily disturbed by invading migrants.

  The Establishment View

  There is no body of traditional objections to the claim that Vikings remodeled English grammar, for the simple reason that the claim has not been made in any sustained way. There is a wan kind of acceptance that Vikings had something to do with one thing: the decay of the suffixes. But even here, most writers mention it only in passing, and as we have seen, there are those who deny even this and argue that the decay “just happened.” And otherwise, it is accepted that English lost all of the other Proto-Germanic frills just by chance.

  One reason this seems plausible to so many linguists is that they think the suffixes and maybe another thing or two are all English has lost from what Proto-Germanic passed down to it. The specialization endemic to modern academia means that few of these scholars do their work with grammar sketches of all of the Germanic languages and their histories in their heads, much less of languages around the world. They write mostly about English alone and, as often as not, just single features of its grammar.

  One scholar, for example, looks at how the “you mistake you” kind of sentence flakes away throughout Middle English, and announces that among Germanic languages, English has “an individual tendency to treat overt reflexivity as redundant.” But charting this as a mere “individual tendency” means stipulating that this eclipse happened in just one out of a dozen-plus languages, all the others of which were quite happy to require speakers to be utterly redundant in specifying that fear, remembrance, anger, and the like are something involving yourself just like washing and shaving are. To this scholar, for this to have happened by chance seems plausible because it’s only one thing. But we have to pull back the camera: “you mistake you” is only one of a dozen “individual tendencies” in English in the same direction. She is certainly aware of the loss of suffixes—but that means she thinks it’s just a matter of two things.

  Then other scholars see something flaking away in Middle English and propose an ad hoc explanation, without addressing the fact that the explanation is contradicted by all the other Germanic languages. One writer describing the eclipse of the generic pronoun man opines that when it morphed into a shorter form pronounced “muh,” it was “too weak” to survive—which leads to the question as to why weak forms even in English like y’ for you (Y’know?) will be with us forever, or why similarly “weak” short pronouns in all the other Germanic languages have been holding on for a thousand years.

  Or, one of the History of English stars I generally swoon to falls into what I regard as a rare lapse, describing step by step how English became the only Indo-European language in Europe without gender, and analyzing it as a “cumulative weighting of ‘decisions’ in favour of natural gender.” By “natural gender” he means biological gender (e.g., actor/actress) as opposed to the random kind of gender that assigns sex to silverware in German and operated in similar fashion in Old English. But the question is why English underwent the effect of this “cumulative weighting” while none of the other Germanic languages—and all but a few languages in all of Europe—did.

  Then there is the idea that even if English has lost some features, it has stayed at par in complexity with the other Germanic languages by developing new ones. Here, the problem is that the traditional scholars are not aware of how very much Proto-Germanic equipment English has tossed off. They do not realize what a long road English would have to travel to give German a run for its money the way Old English did.

  What they think brings English back to par with German and the rest is, for example, the tricky English future tense. Future tense marking in English is a highly subtle affair, much more so than in other Germanic languages. Could you explain what the difference in meaning is between I will go, I’m going to go, and I’m going? They are not just interchangeable ways of expressing futurity. Try this: you tell someone that you’ve always wanted a pair of argyle socks and they say, “Okay, tomorrow we’ll buy you some.” Now, imagine if they said instead, “Okay, tomorrow we’re going to buy you some.” Notice how that second sentence has a different meaning—it sounds vaguely confrontational. Nobody taught you that—it’s a subtlety of English grammar. It’s hard, this English future—I am so thankful I learned it from the cradle. A non-native speaker I knew whose English was truly spectacular once said when I asked her age, “I turn twenty-five.” Mmm, not quite. It has to be “I’m turning twenty-five.” Only if you started with a time expression could you use the bare verb: “Tomorrow I turn twenty-five.” Subtle—or, to a non-native, hard.

  But this does not make English as grammatically complex as German or any other Germanic language, nor would another thing or two. This is first because English is a good dozen or more features behind the other languages, not just two or three. And then, on top of this, new little complexities have crept into the other Germanic languages as well, as happens to all languages.

  In German, one example is a passel of little words that convey nuances of personal attitude. Using them is indispensable to sounding like an actual human being in the language—and mastering them is possible only via a year or more’s exposure to the spoken language. Do you have your socks? is, in a vanilla sense, Hast du deine Socken? But you can also stick in the word auch—Hast du auch deine Socken?—in which case the sentence conveys “You have your socks, don’t you?” In this usage, auch conveys a subtle, personal note of warning, impatience, correction—and there are a bunch of little words in German with subtle, untranslatable meanings of this kind (e.g., schon, eben, doch, mal, etc.).

  In Swedish and Norwegian, it’s tone—the comic lilt that we often use to imitate these languages is not only a matter of a cute “accent,” but also conveys what words mean. In Swedish, anden can mean two things. Say it in the way that feels most natural to an English speaker—AHN-den—and it means “the duck.” Say it with a certain lilt impossible to convey on the page but not a mere “Swedish chef” singsong, more like sliding down the “ahn,” then leaping up higher onto th
e “den,” and then dropping off a bit (something like “ahn-DEn”), and it means “spirit.”

  All the Germanic languages have morphed into quirks of this kind, while also retaining so much more of their core Proto-Germanic equipment than English. English may be at a certain point along the complexity scale, and may inch a bit ahead now and then, but the rest of Germanic will always be several steps ahead—in Icelandicness plus their own driftings into further complexity. For example, linguists also often parry a claim that English is “easy” by mentioning what we call in this book meaningless do. But that’s only one more thing, and it was a copy from Welsh and Cornish, not something that morphed into the grammar on its own.

  Finally, something else that obscures the Vikings’ responsibility for English’s undressing is the old issue of scripture versus writing. To the traditional History of English specialist, what would show that the Vikings did more to English than shave off its endings would be if as far back as Old English—or more precisely, the dialects of Old English spoken in the Danelaw, like Northumbrian and Mercian—right around A.D. 800, I feared myself started being rendered as I am afraid, hither and thither dropped out of usage, V2 and the generic man pronoun were unknown, and all perfects were expressed with have instead of be. Instead, as we have seen, in Old English, all we see is the endings eroding. The other things start appearing only in Middle English, and fall away gradually.

  But in a world where writing was really scripture, this is what we would expect. The way Vikings rendered English sounded at first, to anyone without Scandinavian ancestry, “other” at best and “wrong” at worst. People writing Old English, poised to engrave the high, “proper” language on the page, would have been loath to waste ink on what they would have regarded as come-as-you-are colloquialisms that not all people use. Only after the post-Norman Conquest blackout of written English, when institutional memory of fashions in how one scribed the language had dissolved, would people allow themselves to put a more honest version of the language on paper. That is, what appears to be a stepwise evaporation of Proto-Germanic features in Middle English is actually a record of writers’ increasing comfort with putting things in writing that had happened to the language before the Norman Conquest.