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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

by John McWhorter

Introduction

Was it really all just about words?

The Grand Old History of the English Language, I mean. The way it is traditionally told, the pathway from Old English to Modern English has been a matter of taking on a great big bunch of words. Oh, yeah: and shedding a bunch along the way.

You may well know the saga already. Germanic tribes called Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invade Britain in the fifth century. They bring along their Anglo-Saxon language, which we call Old English.

Then come the words. English gets new ones in three main rounds.

Round One is when Danish and Norwegian Vikings start invading in 787. They speak Old Norse, a close relative of Old English, and sprinkle around their versions of words we already have, so that today we have both skirts and shirts, dikes and ditches. Plus lots of other words, like happy and their and get.

Round Two: more words from the Norman French after William (i. e. , Guillaume) the Conqueror takes over “Englaland” in 1066. For the next three centuries, French is the language of government, the arts, and learning. Voilà, scads of new words, like army, apparel, and logic.

Then Round Three: Latin. When England falls into the Hundred Years’ War with France, English becomes the ruling language once more, and English writers start grabbing up Latin terms from classical authors—abrogate and so on.

Too, there are some Dutch words here and there (cookie, plug), and a little passel from Arabic (alcohol, algebra ). Plus today we have some from Spanish, Japanese, etc. But those usually refer to objects and concepts directly from the countries in question—taco, sushi—and so it’s not precisely a surprise that we use the native words.

These lexical invasions did leave some cute wrinkles here and there.

Because when French ruled the roost, it was the language of formality; in modern English, words from French are often formal versions of English ones considered lowly. We commence because of French; in a more mundane mood we just start, using an original English word. Pork, très culinary, is the French word; pig— très beastly—is the English one. And then even cuter are the triplets, where the low-down word is English, the really ritzy one is Latin, and the French one hovers somewhere in between: Anglo-Saxon ask is humble; French-derived question is more buttoned up; Latinate interrogate is downright starchy.

But there’s only so much of that sort of thing. Overall the Grand Old History is supposed to be interesting by virtue of the sheer volume of words English has taken on. We are to feel that it is a good, and perhaps somehow awesome, thing that English has been “open” to so many words.

Yet even that doesn’t hold up as well as often implied. Throughout the world, languages have been exchanging words rampantly forever. Languages, as it were, like sex. Some languages resist it to an extent for certain periods of time depending on historical circumstances, but no language is immune. Over half of Japanese words are from Chinese, and never mind how eagerly the language now inhales English words. Almost half of Urdu’s words are Persian and Arabic. Albanian is about 60 percent Greek, Latin, Romanian, Turkish, Serbian, and Macedonian, and yet it is not celebrated for being markedly “open” to new words. Rather, quite simply, Albanians have had a lot of close interaction with people speaking other languages, unsurprisingly their vocabulary reflects it, and no one bats an eye. The same has been true with English—and Persian, Turkish, Vietnamese, practically every Aboriginal language in Australia, and . . . well, you get the point.