Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

by John Mcwhorter

  However, unlike in the other chapters, this will not be the place where I muse as to why linguists have not accepted Vennemann’s case hands down. Part of why his work is not mentioned in traditional sources is that most of it is published in obscure venues and often in German, while the main other source on the subject argues for influence from Semitic on Germanic only within a larger case for Semitic’s impact on Indo-European as a whole, in two magnum opuses so majestically magnum as to ward off all but super-specialists and obsessives.

  However, the truth is that even if the Phoenician case had been presented in Anglophone reader-friendly articles in prominent journals, it would stand as a mere intriguing possibility until there are etymologies of a good several dozen of the orphan Proto-Germanic words. At this point, there are only about fifteen Semitic etymologies, and many of them are not of orphan words, but proposed as alternative etymologies for words long considered ordinary descendants from Proto-Indo-European.

  More archaeological evidence would also help. That scholars have so far not been even looking for such evidence means that the effort may be fruitful, but it must be put forth. Moreover, scholars uninterested short of detailed historical documentation of how many Phoenicians settled exactly where, and whether or not they picked up Proto-Germanic and passed their rendition down to future generations, would be unclear on the scripture versus writing issue we have seen in this book: in 500 B.C. no Phoenician could have conceived of committing such mundane observations into writing. The linguistic data would have to be allowed to clinch the case, as with the Celtic and Viking impacts on English.

  However, in those cases, we at least know that the relevant people were in England at the right time. One broken pot cannot make the case for the Phoenicians, especially since Phoenician goods could easily have been carried to Northern Europe amid trade, without the Phoenicians themselves traveling with them, much less settling there for good and transforming the local language forever.

  Yet I cannot resist tossing in one more thing pointing in a certain direction. One of the Phoenicians’ main colonies was at Carthage in North Africa. Carthaginians were champion travelers; as much Phoenician migration started there as from today’s Middle East. In the Phoenician dialect spoken in Carthage, Punic words could not begin with p. The words that began with p in earlier Phoenician had come in Punic to begin with—three guesses—f. Fopcorn in Tunisia!

  What Proto-Germanic Was, What English Is

  Unsettled though it currently is, the Phoenician case is worth ending this book with. First, I think the evidence is suggestive enough that it demands wider airing than it has gotten thus far. Second, however, even if there never emerges enough evidence to support the specific idea that Proto-Germanic was Proto-Indo-European as rendered by Phoenician adults, the sheer difference between Germanic and other branches of Indo-European makes a strong case that Proto-Germanic, before it split into today’s Germanic languages, was already a language deeply affected by adults of some extraction learning it as a second language. “Fopcorn.” Sleep, slept, write, wrote. Every second case and tense marker from its ancestral language lost to the wind. Every third word unknown in the language that gave birth to it.

  The lesson: the idea that there was once an English somehow pristine, a pure issuance, is false. Even the Proto-Germanic language that gave birth to Old English was one that had seemed, to those who spoke its own Proto-Indo-European ancestor, perverted by speakers of something else.

  Long before Old English started taking on words from Old Norse and then French and Latin, in a fashion that we today read as so cosmopolitan, Proto-Germanic had taken on countless words from some other language. Yet the isolated, parochial tribespeople who spoke it were not cosmopolitan in the least. They knew and cared little of the world beyond them except as a prospect for land and plunder. They were not hoarding new words as part of building a mighty literature, as they were illiterate. They took on new words because there were new people among them who used those words—as humans have done worldwide since the dawn of our species, and as Old English speakers did—passively, unremarkably. The diversity of the English vocabulary is something we should celebrate as evidence of Anglophones’ universal humanity, not as a feather in our cultural cap.

  Meanwhile, Old English’s grammar was not, in any logical sense, an untainted system later ill-used by lazy moderns. It was the product of the distortion of Proto-Indo-European by adults ill-equipped to master it fully. People today bemoan the eclipse of whom’s marking of the accusative, unaware that Proto-Germanic speakers let go four of the cases that Proto-Indo-European speakers used. The world kept turning. You don’t like nucular? Well, how do you think the likes of “fopcorn” sounded to a Proto-Germanic speaker watching that kind of pronunciation spread? Yet we today have no interest in undoing the “damage” and saying “pah-ther” instead of “father.”

  For all of the pleasures of contemplating photographs of ancient manuscripts, reading about shirt versus skirt and pig versus pork, savoring strophes of Chaucer and reminding ourselves how good Shakespeare was, The History of English we are usually given is rather static. Some marauders brought Old English to Britain. The Celts scampered away. Pretty soon the Brits went cosmopolitan and started gathering baskets of words from assorted folks, such that now we have a bigger vocabulary than before. The only thing that happened to English grammar during all this time, other than minutiae only a linguist could love, is that it lost a lot of endings, and this made word order less flexible.

  The History of English is more than that. An offshoot of Proto-Indo-European borrowed a third of its vocabulary from another language. That language may have been Phoenician; certainly, there was some language. Its speakers submitted the Proto-Indo-European offshoot to a grammatical overhaul. As adults, they could not help shaving off a lot of its complications, and rendering parts of the grammar in ways familiar to them from their native language. This left Proto-Germanic a language both mixed and abbreviated before it even gave birth to new languages—and meant that it passed this mixed, abbreviated nature on to those new languages.

  One of them was Old English, which morphed merrily along carrying the odd sound patterns, vowel-switching past marking, and mystery vocabulary from Proto-Germanic, just as organisms morph along through the ages carrying and replicating mitochondrial DNA patterns tracing back to the dawn of life. Old English was taken up by speakers of yet another language—or in this case, languages: Celtic ones. As Celts started using English more and more over the decades, English gradually took an infusion of grammatical features from Welsh and Cornish, including a usage of do known in no other languages on earth.

  Not long afterward, speakers of yet one more language filtered English yet again. Vikings speaking Old Norse picked up the language fast, and gave it a second shave, so to speak, after what had happened to Proto-Germanic over on the Continent more than a thousand years beforehand. English’s grammar became the least “fussy” of all of the Germanic languages, impatient with “nuance” as Edward Sapir had it, and leaving its speakers, like Mark Twain, with a special challenge in mastering the complexities of other Germanic languages.

  The result: a tongue oddly genderless and telegraphic for a European one, clotted with peculiar ways of using do and progressive -ing—with, in addition, indeed, a great big bunch of words from other languages. Not only Norse, French, Latin, and Greek, but possibly Phoenician—or if not, some other language, but surely that.

  The vanilla version of The History of English will live on. But its proponents have not had occasion to engage with the underground stories I have attempted to share with you, or, having done so briefly, have opted to sweep them under the rug in favor of continuing in their accustomed grooves, to adopt the terminology of the Whorfian cited in the previous chapter.

  Understandable. But the actual History of English is not only more scientifically plausible, but also more interesting—worthy of engagement, retention, and further study—than the traditional one a
ll about the supposedly miraculous fact that people who invaded England left a lot of their words behind. Who has ever been truly moved by that?

  To bring the book full circle by quoting the Introduction, English is miscegenated, abbreviated. Interesting.

  Notes on Sources

  Introduction

  The translations of the oh-so-spontaneous sentence rendered in German, Dutch, and Norwegian were confirmed for me by Sean Boggs, Peter Bakker, and Kurt Rice, respectively.

  One

  WE SPEAK A MISCEGENATED GRAMMAR

  Welsh do: Gareth King, Modern Welsh: A Comprehensive Grammar (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 189.

  Welsh progressive: Ingo Mittendorf and Erich Poppe, “Celtic Contacts of the English Progressive?” in The Celtic Englishes II, ed. by Hildegard L. C. Tristram (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2000), p. 118.

  Cornish do: Henry Jenner, A Handbook of the Cornish Language (London: David Nutt, 1904), pp. 116-17.

  Cornish progressive: Mittendorf and Poppe, p. 118.

  Bryson quote: Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1990), p. 49.

  Genetic data on England: Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006), pp. 379, 412-13.

  Burial styles: Heinrich Härke, “Population Replacement or Acculturation? An Archaeological Perspective on Population and Migration in Post-Roman Britain,” in The Celtic Englishes III, ed. by Hildegard L. C. Tristram (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2003), p. 19.

  King Ine’s laws: Referred to in Härke, consulted in John M. Stearns, The Germs and Developments of the Laws of England Embracing the Anglo-Saxon Laws (New York: Banks & Brothers, 1889). (Kessinger Publishing reprint)

  Crystal quote: David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 8.

  Jamaican patois sentence: Robert LePage and David DeCamp, Jamaican Creole (London: MacMillan, 1960).

  Twi sentence: Rev. J. G. Christaller, A Grammar of the Asante and Fante Languages Called Tshi. (Basel: Basel Evangelical Missionary Society, 1875), p. 118.

  Germanic do: Unfortunately the most thorough examination and the closest one to being handy is in German: Werner Abraham and C. Jac Conradie, Präteritumschwund und Diskursgrammatik (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001), pp. 83, 87.

  Nanai sentence: V. A. Arvorin, Sintaksicheshie Issledovania po Nanaiskomu Jazyku (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981), pp. 79-80.

  Italian do-support: Paola Beninca and Cecilia Poletto, “A Case of Do-support in Romance,” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22 (2004): 51-94.

  “Regularity” account of meaningless do: Andrew Garrett,

  “On the Origin of Auxiliary Do,” English Language and Linguistics 2 (1998): 283-330.

  Meaningless do and verb placement: Tony Kroch, John Myhill, and Susan Pintzuk, “Understanding Do,” Papers from the Chicago Linguistics Symposium 18 (1982): 282-94.

  Old High German sentence: Erich Poppe, “Progress on the Progressive? A Report,” in The Celtic Englishes III, ed. by Hildegard L. C. Tristram (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2003), p. 71.

  Colloquial Indonesian versus written Indonesian: David Gil, “Escaping Eurocentrism: Fieldwork as a Process of Unlearning,” in Linguistic Fieldwork, ed. by Paul Newman and Martha Ratliff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  Dante and Italian: Daniel J. Boorstin, The Creators (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 258-59.

  Arabic dialects: Alan Kaye and Judith Rosenhouse, “Arabic Dialects and Maltese,” in The Semitic Languages, ed. by Robert Hetzron (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 309.

  Spanish in Ecuador: John Lipski, Latin American Spanish (London: Longman, 1994), p. 251.

  Old English speakers’ culinary options: Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger, The Year 1000 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1999), pp. 136-38.

  Uralic and Russian: Valentin Kiparsky, Gibt es ein Finnougrisches Substrat im Slavischen? (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1969), p. 23.

  Dravidian and Indo-Aryan: Thomas Burrow, The Sanskrit Language (London: Faber & Faber, 1955), pp. 380-86.

  Possible Celtic loanwords: Andrew Breeze, “Seven Types of Celtic Loanword,” in The Celtic Roots of English, ed. by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Pitkänen (Joensuu, Finland: University of Joensuu Faculty of Humanities, 2002), pp. 175-81.

  Northern Subject Rule: Juhani Klemola, “The Origins of the Northern Subject Rule: A Case of Early Contact?” in The Celtic Englishes II, ed. by Hildegard L. C. Tristram (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2000), p. 337.

  Passage from traditional judgment of Celtic contribution: Tauno F. Mustanoja, A Middle English Syntax, Part I (Parts of Speech) (Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 1960), pp. 584-89.

  Going to history: Culled from an especially accessible account, Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language (New York: Metropolitan, 2005), pp. 146-51.

  Dalby: Andrew Dalby, Dictionary of Languages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 675.

  McCrum et al. quote: Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil, The Story of English (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 61.

  Crystal quote: David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.8.

  Two

  A LESSON FROM THE CELTIC IMPACT

  Cantonese data: Stephen Matthews and Virginia Yip, Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 56.

  Frisian data: Pieter Tiersma, Frisian Reference Grammar (Dordrecht: Foris, 1985), pp. 55-56, 77, 116.

  Nineteenth-century “errors”: Richard W. Bailey, Nineteenth-Century English (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 215-61.

  Portuguese-English book: Pedro Carolino, The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1883), p. 120. (This source is usually encountered today in abridged editions; I refer to an ancient copy of the entire book.)

  Three

  WE SPEAK A BATTERED GRAMMAR

  Old English and Old Norse sentences: Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger, The Year 1000 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1999), pp. 33-34.

  Sapir quote: Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1921), pp. 169-70.

  Number of Normans: John Gillingham, “The Early Middle Ages,” in The Oxford History of Britain, ed. by Kenneth O. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 121.

  William of Nassyngton: David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 31.

  Linguistic equilibrium: R. M. W. Dixon, The Rise and Fall of Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  Welsh case markers and Old English: An example is Hildegard L. C. Tristram, “Attrition of Inflections in English and Welsh,” in The Celtic Roots of English, ed. by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Pitkänen, (Joensuu, Finland: University of Joensuu Faculty of Humanities, 2002), pp. 111-49.

  Altaic-Mandarin hybrid languages: Examples most handy are three consecutive articles on the Hezhou, Tangwang, and Wutun dialects, on pp. 865-97 in a volume commonly available in university libraries: Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the

  Americas (Volume II.2), ed. by Stephen A. Wurm, Peter Mühlhäusler, and Darrell T. Tryon (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996).

  Concentration of Danes: John Blair, “The Anglo-Saxon Period,” in The Oxford History of Britain, ed. by Kenneth O. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 107-8.

  Northern English suffixes: Sarah Grey Thomason and Terence Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 278.

  Dorset gender: William Barnes, A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect with a Grammar of Its Word Shapening and Wording (London: Trübner & Co., 1886), p. 17-18.

  Case markers in Gamalson inscription: Tamas Eitler, “An Old Norse-Old English Conta
ct Phenomenon: The Retention of the Dative Plural Inflection -um in the Northumbrian Dialect of Old English, in The Even Yearbook 5, ed. by Laszlo Varga (Budapest: Eotvos Lorand University Department of English Linguistics Working Papers, 2002), pp. 31-48.

  “You mistake you” observation: Kirsti Peitsara, “The Development of Reflexive Strategies in English,” in Grammaticalization at Work, ed. by Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö, and Kirsi Heikkonen (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), p. 337.

  Matti Rissanen, “Whatever Happened to the Middle English Indefinite Pronouns?” in Studies in Middle English Linguistics, ed. by Jacek Fisiak (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 513-29.