"Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" by John McWhorter

This is an intriguing little book whose goal is to advance some interesting arguments about English, indeed a magnificent, bastard tongue. Unlike other books I have read on the topic, OMBT does not approach the history of English from the standpoint of vocabulary (though there is some at the end) but from the grammar. Specifically, he attempts to account for some of the quirks of English that are not easily accounted for by mainstream narratives of the development of the language.

English, in John McWhorter's view is a language spoken by Germans, heavily influences by Celtic-speakers, battered by Vikings and heir to a rich influence from Semitic languages.

He leads with his strongest argument: that, far from having a negligible influence limited to only a few words, the Celtic languages spoken at the time of the German invasions of England left their fingerprints everywhere. The most important evidence for this is the meaningless "do" (as in "Did you hear that Celtic languages exerted a lot of influence on English?) and the "ing" marker used to denote the present progressive. These features are not present in any Indo-European language, except for the Celtic languages.

From there he continues to show how Vikings ruling in England and speaking Northumbrian were instrumental in eliminating the case endings from the Germanic language of the English, leading to the simplified grammatical structure we have today. English is the least inflected language of the European languages, and it is because of these Viking influences.

Finally, and most controversially, he advances a notion that Proto-Germanic, the mother tongue of English and the other Germanic languages, was heavily influenced through contact with at least one of the Semitic languages, possibly Phoenecian. One-third of the vocabulary of Germanic languages is not easily traceable to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European roots. Among these are words heavy in certain consonantal sounds and those which mark a change in tense by changing the vowel.

Along the way, McWhorter takes issue with the notion of "bad" grammar, scoring points against the whole notion in a way that makes this reviewer a little uncomfortable. He also effectively demolishes the notion that grammar is a wholesale representation of the way speakers of a language group think. The meat of the book is the three arguments above, and they are presented in the order of their strength beginning with the strongest and using the momentum to carry through the argument about Semitic influence. I am not enough of a linguist to evaluate them in terms of linguistics, but all seem worth considering.

Satisfying through and through, "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" is certainly worth reading. McWhorter approaches a subject that could easily be subsumed in dry technical jargon and presents it with humor throughout, while not straying from his argument. Anyone interested in the history of this wonderful, messed-up language we know and love should find much to enjoy here.