If you are a word geek, as I am afraid that I am, you like to read books written by word geeks. This happened to me again recently, and I thought I should tell you about it. This book is by John McWhorter, a professor at Columbia, and is called Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.
As I think we should all be willing to acknowledge, English is something of a mutt. Our mother tongue contains elements from all over tarnation, and is apparently unembarrassed about it. The glory of English is the size of our vocabulary, but fifty percent of that comes from Latin. Another thirty percent comes from Greek. Most of the remainder, heavily monosyllabic, is Germanic. But vocabulary is just part of the story.
What McWhorter does in this book is explain how English came to be so different from other Germanic languages like Dutch or German itself. He does this quite deftly, playing with syntax the way a ninja does with numchucks.
As he seeks to explain a phenomenon like the “meaningless do,” he points to the Celtic influence of Cornish and Welsh. The meaningless do is seen in sentences like do you understand? or did you go to the dinner? The verb do contributes nothing, so what explains its presence? Other Germanic languages don’t have it. McWhorter points out that AngloSaxon operated for centuries alongside Welsh and Cornish, both of which have that feature. The thing that makes such an obvious point interesting is that the orthodoxy of linguistic scholarship today denies that this is the case. But McWhorter argues ably, and in my view he carries the day. You might wonder at a controversy over something like this, but it certainly held my interest.
Another thing he develops quite a bit is the idea that English descends from people who learned it as a second language. They didn’t like (or couldn’t handle) all the older features of case endings and nouns with gender, and so they stripped all that away. He is thinking primarily of Norse-speaking Vikings here who invaded England in 9th and 10th centuries. But he even makes a provocative case that English was influenced by . . . you guessed it, the Hittites. For that one, you will need to get the book, but I thought it was fun.
So then, if you have been having trouble with sleep because of the meaningless do, you could do nothing better than to get this book. And if you haven’t been concerned about that issue one way or another, you should probably get this book for other reasons.