Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (2 page)

 

 

One might object that the typical Grand Old History is not quite as negligent of grammar, in the linguist’s sense, as I am implying. To be sure, popular treatments will often give it to the reader in bits and pieces.

Regularly, for instance, the layman will learn that whereas Old English was a language with ample conjugational endings and markers for gender and case, like Latin, over time it lost almost all of these. So,
man
was
guma
, but
The woman saw a man
was
Cwēn geseah guman
, because -
n
was an object ending. (The word
cwēn
comes down to us as
queen
, by the way.) Old English also split its nouns between masculine, feminine, and neuter:
the man
was
se guma
, but
the woman
was
sēo cwēn
.

Or we learn that the use of the -
ing
progressive form to mark the present tense—
You are reading this Introduction
—is something that started to creep into the language in the Middle English period. In Old English, I would much more likely have put it as
You read this Introduction
, just as one does in other European languages.

Okay, so we learn that English lost a bit of this and gained a bit of that. But this misses a larger picture. What is missing is that, compared to how languages typically change over time, English lost a perplexingly
vast
amount of grammar. Moreover, the grammar that it took on, like the -
ing
usage, seems ordinary only because we speak English. If we pull the camera back, the things English took on seem strikingly peculiar compared to anything its relatives like German and Swedish were then taking on—or in a case or two, what any languages on earth were taking on!

Modern English grammar is, in a word, weird.

 

 

English is one of about a dozen languages that are all so basically similar in terms of words and grammar, and mostly spoken so close to one another, that they all obviously began as a single language (although English is very much a prodigal son). The languages besides English include German, Dutch, Yiddish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic, plus some less familiar languages, like Faroese and Frisian, and Afrikaans in South Africa, which stemmed from the transplantation of Dutch amid the colonization of that country.

The parent to all of these languages was spoken about twenty-five hundred years ago in what is now Denmark (and a ways southward) and on the southerly ends of Sweden and Norway. We will never know what the people who spoke the language called it, but linguists call it Proto-Germanic. One might ask how we can even know that there was a language to give that name to. The answer is that we can reconstruct a great many of that language’s words by comparing the words in today’s Germanic languages and tracing back.

For example, English
daughter
is
Tochter
in German,
dochter
in Dutch,
datter
in Norwegian,
dotter
in Swedish,
dottir
in Icelandic. With techniques developed by linguists in the nineteenth century and refined since, we can deduce—with the help of now extinct Germanic languages preserved in ancient documents, like Gothic, in which the word was
daúhtar
—that all of these words are the spawn of a single original one,
daukhtrô.

In all of the Germanic languages but English, their descent from that same ancient language is clear first, it is true, from their words. No Germanic language’s vocabulary happens to be as mixed as English’s, and so the others’ vocabularies match up with one another more than English’s does with any of them. German’s word for
entrance
is
Eingang
, Dutch has
ingang
, Swedish
ingång
, Yiddish
areingang
, Icelandic
innganga
. Before the Invasion of the Words, Old English had
ingang
, but later, English took
entrance
from French.

However, the other Germanic languages are also variations on a single pattern in terms of how their grammar works. One can tell immediately, linguist or not, that they all began as one thing, like Darwin’s finches. For a Dutch person, learning Swedish is no picnic because learning a new language is always hard, but there are few surprises. Nothing comes off as maddeningly counterintuitive (as, say, nouns being boys and girls in so many languages seems to English speakers). The Germanic languages other than English are about as similar as French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.

English, however, is another story.

To see that English is the oddball, take a look at a sentence in English and German, where all of the English sentence’s words happen to be good old native ones, having come down from Old English. No Old Norse, French, or Latin:

 

The words, you see, are not a problem. Even if you have never taken German, you can match up the German words pretty well with the English ones.
Sagte
is
said
,
Tochter
is
daughter
,
allein
is
alone
, and so on.

 

Word for word, the German sentence is “Said she to my daughter that my father alone come is and himself better feels?” The way German puts the words together is a whole new world for an English speaker. English has
Did she say . . . ?
German has
Said she . . . ?
Why does English have that business with
Did she say . . . ?
Why
did
? “Did” what?

English has
to my daughter
; German bundles the “to-ness” onto the end of the word for
my
,
meiner
—i.e., German is a language with lots of case marking, like Latin. In English, case marking remains only in shards, such as the possessive
‘s
and moribund oddities like
whom
. In English, one
has come
, but in German one
is come
(just as many will recall from French’s grand old
passé composé
:
je
suis venu
). Then, German has its business of putting verbs last in subordinate clauses:
alone come
instead of
come alone
,
better feels
instead of
feels better
.

And even more: in German’s
sich fühlt
for
feels
, the
sich
, the only word that does not have an English equivalent, means “himself”—in German you “feel yourself” better, you “remember yourself” rather than just remembering, and in general, you mark actions having to do with feeling and thinking as done “to yourself.” Finally, where German has
fühlt
(“feels”), English has
feel
-ing. How come German can use just the simple form
feels
, while we have to mark it with -
ing
?

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
mein
em
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:

 

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.