Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (9 page)

The judgment must be the same on Celtic’s impact on English. The facts in this particular case do not lend themselves to mere parenthetical civil surmises that Welsh and Cornish “may have
influenced
” English grammar, with the treatment otherwise proceeding as usual, describing meaningless
do
and the verb-noun present drifting into existence by themselves for no reason. The facts do not indicate that the Welsh and Cornish features merely pitched in on a process that would have happened by itself anyway. If Old English had been brought to an uninhabited island—or, say, Cyprus, Greenland, or Fiji—rather than an island where Celtic languages were spoken, then there would be no such thing as a Modern English sentence like
Did you see what he’s doing
? That sentence would be rendered as
See you what he does
?, as it is in any normal Germanic—or European—language.

English is not normal. It is a mixed language not only in its words, but in its grammar. Every time we say something like
Did you see what he’s doing
?, we are structuring our utterance the way a Welsh or Cornish person would in their own native tongue. When well-intentioned chroniclers take in from scholarship on The History of English that “the English language has been indifferent to the Celts and their influence” (Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil’s
The Story of English
) or that “the Celtic language of Roman Britain influenced Old English hardly at all” (David Crystal’s
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language
), they have been misled, despite the brilliance of their books overall (both of these are among my favorite books of all time).

English is not, then, solely an offshoot of Proto-Germanic that inhaled a whole bunch of foreign words. It is an offshoot of Proto-Germanic that traded
grammar
with offshoots of Proto-Celtic. The result was a structurally hybrid tongue, whose speakers today use Celtic-derived constructions almost every time they open their mouths for longer than a couple of seconds.
Do you want to leave now? What’s he doing? Did he even know? What are you thinking? I don’t care. She’s talking to the manager.

Celtic grammar is underneath all of those utterly ordinary utterances in Modern English. Our language is a magnificent bastard.

Two

A LESSON FROM THE CELTIC IMPACT

THE “GRAMMATICAL ERRORS”
EPIDEMIC IS A HOAX

 

 

 

 

Oh, those
lapses
, darling. So many of us walk around letting fly with “errors.” We could do better, but we’re so slovenly, so rushed amid the hurly-burly of modern life, so imprinted by the “let it all hang out” ethos of the sixties, that we don’t bother to observe the “rules” of “correct” grammar.

To a linguist, if I may share, these “rules” occupy the exact same place as the notion of astrology, alchemy, and medicine being based on the four humors. The “rules” make no logical sense in terms of the history of our language, or what languages around the world are like.

Nota bene: linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not—I repeat,
not
—that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage. No argument there.

The argument is about what constitutes artful and effective usage. Quite a few notions that get around out there have nothing to do with grace or clarity, and are just based on misconceptions about how languages work.

Yet, in my experience, to try to get these things across to laymen often results in the person’s verging on anger. There is a sense that these “rules” just must be right, and that linguists’ purported expertise on language must be somehow flawed on this score. We are, it is said, permissive—perhaps along the lines of the notorious leftist tilt among academics, or maybe as an outgrowth of the roots of linguistics in anthropology, which teaches that all cultures are equal. In any case, we are wrong. Maybe we have a point here and there, but only that.

Over the years, some of the old notions have, in truth, slipped away, although this is due less to the suasive powers of linguists than to the fact that the particular rules in question were always so silly anyway.

No one taken seriously thinks it’s wrong to end a sentence with a preposition anymore, such that
That’s a store I wouldn’t go to
is “awkward.” Similarly, the grand old rule that one does not split infinitives is on the ropes. In our guts, few of us truly feel that there is anything wrong with where
slowly
is placed in
Imagine—to slowly realize that your language lost all of its suffixes as of this morning
!

The preposition rule was cooked up in the seventeenth century under the impression that because Latin doesn’t end sentences in prepositions, English shouldn’t. That makes one wonder when we are going to start cutting our English to conform to Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, and other languages with grand histories and literatures. The split-infinitive business was a nineteenth-century fetish, and may also have been based on the fact that Latin doesn’t split infinitives—because its infinitives are just one word! We say
to end
; Latin had
terminare
, period, as unsplittable as the atom was once thought to be.

But the “rules” that have hung around make no more sense than those two, and yet laymen cling to them like Linus to his blanket.

Take the idea that it is wrong to say
If a student comes before I get there, they can slip their test under my office door
, because
student
is singular and
they
“is plural.” Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using
they
as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the
Sir Amadace
story, one finds the likes of
Iche mon in thayre degree
(“Each man in their degree”).

Maybe when the sentence is as far back as Middle English, there is a sense that it is a different language on some level than what we speak—the archaic spelling alone cannot help but look vaguely maladroit, as if Middle English speakers were always a little tipsy on their mead.

But Shakespeare is not assumed to have been in his cups when he wrote in
The Comedy of Errors
, “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me / As I were
their
well-acquainted friend” (Act IV, Scene III). Later, Thackeray in
Vanity Fair
tosses off “A person can’t help their birth.”

Yet the notion that this usage is “wrong” holds on so hard that even linguists have to submit to their publishers’ copy editors’ insistence on expunging it, which answers the question we often get as to why we do not use constructions like this in our own writing if we are so okay with them. My own books are full of resorts to
he
, which I find sexist, occasional dutiful
she
s, which strike me as injecting a stray note of PC irrelevance into what I am discussing, or
he or she
, which I find clumsy and clinical—for the simple reason that I was required to knuckle under. At best I can wangle an exception and get in a singular
they
or
their
once or twice a book. (I must note that the copy editor for this book, upon reading this section, actually allowed me to use singular
they
throughout the book. Here’s to
them
in awed gratitude!)

Or there’s the objection to nouns being used as verbs. These days,
impact
comes in for especial condemnation:
The new rules are impacting the efficiency of the procedure.
People lustily express that they do not “like” this, endlessly writing in to language usage columnists about it. Or one does not “like” the use of
structure
as in
I structured the test to be as brief as possible
.

Well, okay—but that means you also don’t “like” the use of
view
,
silence, worship, copy, outlaw,
and countless other words that started as nouns and are now also verbs. Nor do many people shudder at the use of
fax
as a verb.

The linguist notes that in a language with a goodly number of endings showing what part of speech a word is, making a noun into a verb means tacking the appropriate ending onto it. In French, the noun
copy
is
copie
; the verb “to copy” is
copier
. But in a language like English with relatively few endings, making a noun into a verb requires no extra equipment, and so
copy
becomes just
copy
. This is not a quirk of English—i.e., a loosey-goosey stipulation linguists make out of “permissiveness”—but typical of countless other languages in the world that don’t make much use of suffixes to mark parts of speech. In Cantonese Chinese,
lengjái
can mean “good-looking guy,” “to become good-looking,” and “good-looking”: noun, verb, and adjective. No one in China is writing in to newspapers complaining about it.

But somehow, a sense persists that nouns becoming verbs in English is icky, a messy transgression. Told that English speakers have been, as it were, turning
fax
into
fax
forever, people remain convinced that there’s still something “wrong” with it. And we won’t even get into how people feel about
Billy and me went to the store
and the idea that
me
is wrong because it’s an object pronoun referring to a subject. (Actually, we will get into it, but not just yet.)

Trying to get into the head of how people feel about these things even when presented with linguists’ protestations, I sense that the resistance is based on an understandable pride in having mastered these “rules.” You’ve got your ducks in a row, and except when exhausted or on glass number three of wine, you have no trouble producing
Billy and I
. You learned what subjects and objects are, you learned your Parts of Speech. As such, you don’t like someone coming along and deeming your effort and vigilance worthless. It must feel like someone telling you that it would be perfectly appropriate, natural even, to give in to the untutored impulse to chew with your mouth open.

The problem is that with all due understanding of that feeling, the “rules” we are taught to observe do not make sense, period. All attention paid to such things is like medievals hanging garlic in their doorways to ward off evil spirits. In an ideal world, the time English speakers devote to steeling themselves against, and complaining about, things like
Billy and me
, singular
they
, and
impact
as a verb would be better spent attending to genuine matters of graceful oral and written expression.

Over the years, I have gotten the feeling that there isn’t much linguists can do to cut through this commitment to garlic-hanging among English speakers. There are always books out that try to put linguists’ point across. Back in 1950, Robert Hall’s
Leave Your Language Alone!
was all over the place, including a late edition kicking around in the house I grew up in. Steven Pinker’s
The Language Instinct
, which includes a dazzling chapter on the grammar myths, has been one of the most popular books on language ever written. As I write, the flabbergastingly fecund David Crystal has just published another book in the tradition,
The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left.
But the air of frustration in Crystal’s title points up how persistent the myths are. Maybe we just can’t get through.

However, in this chapter I want to venture one more stab. If you understand that the phrasing of
Did you see what he’s doing
? was injected into English by non-native speakers, and that there was once an English where no one would have put it that way, and that then, for a while there was an English where lots of people were putting it that way but it sounded quaint and awkward to others, you are in a position to truly “get” the message. The message: the notion that people are always “slipping up” in using their native English is fiction.

There is a paradox in how lovers of language often process English and the way it varies from mouth to mouth from decade to decade.

No one has trouble with the fact that the Old English of
Beowulf
is a different language than Modern English. On the contrary, the pathway from then until now is seen as a noble procession. First, majestic, flinty strophes of Old English handwritten on ancient paper, chronicling kings and battles and laws and such, a language closely akin to German. Then, Middle English: Chaucer, Sir Gawain, a language with a certain queer dignity on the page, not exactly what we speak but obviously related:
Whan that Aprille with hise shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote.
Our tendency is to pronounce it with a vaguely Swedish lilt, which makes it pretty to our ear.

Next, Shakespeare—enough said. Shakespeare and Chaucer would have had to work to converse, but we do not see Shakespeare as having deformed the language of the
Canterbury Tales
. Rather, we might imagine the transformation from Old English to
Hamlet
with stately medieval-style music on the sound track, full of French horns scored in tidy thirds and fourths. From Shakespeare we pass on to the King James Bible, Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, Jane Austen, and pretty soon we’re home.

All of this is seen as noble, “historical,” a matter of our “mighty” and “open” language coming to be. But somehow, there seems to be an idea that the process had an inherent end point, beyond which we are not to go. It’s as if somebody somewhere had been endeavoring to meld a chunky Germanic tongue spoken by some restless warrior tribes into precisely the English we have right now, that they officially declared themselves finished sometime not long ago, and that from now on, we are not to mess up their creation.