English is weird
John McWhorter, The Week,
December 20, 2015
English speakers know that
their language is odd. So do nonspeakers saddled with learning it. The oddity
that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare.
In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a spelling
bee. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence
to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal...
Even in its spoken form,
English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since
Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn
other languages. Our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish
not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels “normal” only until you get a
sense of what normal really is.
There is no other
language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about
half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest
effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai
and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern
European language called Frisian. If you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is
Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en
griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one,
and overall, we tend to find Frisian more like German, which it is.
We think it’s a nuisance
that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with
French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s we who
are odd: Almost all European languages belong to one family–Indo-European–and
of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders.
More weirdness? OK. There
is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending
only in the third-person singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she
talks–why? The present-tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings
or a bunch of different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). And try naming
another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question
something. Do you find that difficult?
Why is our language so
eccentric? Just what is this thing we’re speaking, and what happened to make it
this way?
English started out as,
essentially, a kind of German. Old English is so unlike the modern version that
it’s a stretch to think of them as the same language. Hwæt, we gardena in
geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon–does that really mean “So, we Spear-Danes
have heard of the tribe-kings’ glory in days of yore”? Icelanders can still
read similar stories written in the Old Norse ancestor of their language 1,000
years ago, and yet, to the untrained English-speaker’s eye, Beowulf might as
well be in Turkish.
The first thing that got
us from there to here was the fact that when the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (and
also Frisians) brought Germanic speech to England, the island was already
inhabited by people who spoke Celtic languages–today represented by Welsh and
Irish, and Breton across the Channel in France. The Celts were subjugated but
survived, and since there were only about 250,000 Germanic invaders, very
quickly most of the people speaking Old English were Celts.
Crucially, their own
Celtic was quite unlike English. For one thing, the verb came first (came first
the verb). Also, they had an odd construction with the verb do: They used it to
form a question, to make a sentence negative, and even just as a kind of
seasoning before any verb. Do you walk? I do not walk. I do walk. That looks
familiar now because the Celts started doing it in their rendition of English.
But before that, such sentences would have seemed bizarre to an English
speaker–as they would today in just about any language other than our own and
the surviving Celtic ones.
At this date there is no
documented language on Earth beyond Celtic and English that uses do in just
this way. Thus English’s weirdness began with its transformation in the mouths
of people more at home with vastly different tongues. We’re still talking like
them, and in ways we’d never think of. When saying “eeny, meeny, miny, moe,”
have you ever felt like you were kind of counting? Well, you are–in Celtic
numbers, chewed up over time but recognizably descended from the ones rural
Britishers used when counting animals and playing games. “Hickory, dickory,
dock”–what in the world do those words mean? Well, here’s a clue: hovera,
dovera, dick were eight, nine, and ten in that same Celtic counting list.
The second thing that
happened was that yet more Germanic-speakers came across the sea meaning
business. This wave began in the 9th century, and this time the invaders were
speaking another Germanic offshoot, Old Norse. But they didn’t impose their
language. Instead, they married local women and switched to English. However,
they were adults and, as a rule, adults don’t pick up new languages easily,
especially not in oral societies. There was no such thing as school, and no
media. Learning a new language meant listening hard and trying your best.
As long as the invaders
got their meaning across, that was fine. But you can do that with a highly
approximate rendition of a language–the legibility of the Frisian sentence you
just read proves as much. So the Scandinavians did more or less what we would
expect: They spoke bad Old English. Their kids heard as much of that as they
did real Old English. Life went on, and pretty soon their bad Old English was
real English, and here we are today: The Norse made English easier.
I should make a
qualification here. In linguistics circles it’s risky to call one language
easier than another one. But some languages plainly jangle with more bells and
whistles than others. If someone were told he had a year to get as good at
either Russian or Hebrew as possible, and would lose a fingernail for every
mistake he made during a three-minute test of his competence, only the
masochist would choose Russian–unless he already happened to speak a language
related to it. In that sense, English is “easier” than other Germanic languages,
and it’s because of those Vikings.
Old English had the crazy
genders we would expect of a good European language–but the Scandinavians
didn’t bother with those, and so now we have none. What’s more, the Vikings
mastered only that one shred of a once lovely conjugation system: Hence the
lonely third-person singular -s, hanging on like a dead bug on a windshield.
Here and in other ways, they smoothed out the hard stuff.
They also left their mark
on English grammar. Blissfully, it is becoming rare to be taught that it is
wrong to say Which town do you come from?–ending with the preposition instead
of laboriously squeezing it before the wh-word to make From which town do you
come? In English, sentences with “dangling prepositions” are perfectly natural
and clear and harm no one. Yet there is a wet-fish issue with them, too: Normal
languages don’t dangle prepositions in this way. Every now and then a language
allows it: an indigenous one in Mexico, another in Liberia. But that’s it.
Overall, it’s an oddity. Yet, wouldn’t you know, it’s a construction that Old
Norse also happened to permit (and that modern Danish retains).
We can display all these
bizarre Norse influences in a single sentence. Say That’s the man you walk in
with, and it’s odd because (1) the has no specifically masculine form to match
man, (2) there’s no ending on walk, and (3) you don’t say in with whom you
walk. All that strangeness is because of what Scandinavian Vikings did to good
old English back in the day.
Finally, as if all this
weren’t enough, English got hit by a fire-hose spray of words from yet more
languages. After the Norse came the French. The Normans–descended from the same
Vikings, as it happens–conquered England and ruled for several centuries, and
before long, English had picked up 10,000 new words. Then, starting in the 16th
century, educated Anglophones began to develop English as a vehicle for
sophisticated writing, and it became fashionable to cherry-pick words from
Latin to lend the language a more elevated tone.
It was thanks to this
influx from French and Latin (it’s often hard to tell which was the original
source of a given word) that English acquired the likes of crucified,
fundamental, definition, and conclusion. These words feel sufficiently English
to us today, but when they were new, many persons of letters in the 1500s (and
beyond) considered them irritatingly pretentious and intrusive, as indeed they
would have found the phrase “irritatingly pretentious and intrusive.” There
were even writerly sorts who proposed native English replacements for those
lofty Latinates, and it’s hard not to yearn for some of these: In place of
crucified, fundamental, definition, and conclusion, how about crossed,
groundwrought, saywhat, and endsay?
But language tends not to
do what we want it to. The die was cast: English had thousands of new words
competing with native English words for the same things. One result was
triplets allowing us to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help
is English, aid is French, assist is Latin. Or, kingly is English, royal is
French, regal is Latin–note how one imagines posture improving with each level:
Kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is
somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.
Then there are doublets,
less dramatic than triplets but fun nevertheless, such as the English/French
pairs begin/commence and want/desire. Especially noteworthy here are the
culinary transformations: We kill a cow or a pig (English) to yield beef or
pork (French). Why? Well, generally in Norman England, English-speaking
laborers did the slaughtering for moneyed French speakers at the table. The
different ways of referring to meat depended on one’s place in the scheme of
things, and those class distinctions have carried down to us in discreet form
today.
The multiple influxes of
foreign vocabulary partly explain the striking fact that English words can
trace to so many different sources–often several within the same sentence. The
very idea of etymology being a polyglot smorgasbord, each word a fascinating
story of migration and exchange, seems everyday to us. But the roots of a great
many languages are much duller. The typical word comes from, well, an earlier
version of that same word and there it is. The study of etymology holds little
interest for, say, Arabic speakers.
To be fair, mongrel
vocabularies are hardly uncommon worldwide, but English’s hybridity is high on
the scale compared with most European languages. The previous sentence, for
example, is a riot of words from Old English, Old Norse, French, and Latin.
Greek is another element: In an alternate universe, we would call photographs
“lightwriting.”
Because of this fire-hose
spray, we English speakers also have to contend with two different ways of accenting
words. Clip on a suffix to the word wonder, and you get wonderful. But–clip an
ending to the word modern and the ending pulls the accent along with it:
MO-dern, but mo-DERN-ity, not MO-dern-ity. That doesn’t happen with WON-der and
WON-der-ful, or CHEER-y and CHEER-i-ly. But it does happen with PER-sonal,
person-AL-ity.
What’s the difference?
It’s that -ful and -ly are Germanic endings, while -ity came in with French.
French and Latin endings pull the accent closer–TEM-pest, tem-PEST-uous–while
Germanic ones leave the accent alone. One never notices such a thing, but it’s
one way this “simple” language is actually not so.
Thus English is indeed an
odd language, and its spelling is only the beginning of it. What English does
have on other tongues is that it is deeply peculiar in the structural sense.
And it became peculiar because of the slings and arrows–as well as caprices–of
outrageous history.
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