Our magnificent bastard tongue The untold history of English

A scholar raises suspicions about the ancestry of English. ENGLISH is subjected to a great number of descriptors in "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue," John McWhorter's brief and engaging look at some of the history of our language. It is, among other things, "very special," "not normal," "miscegenated," "interesting," "peculiar" and, in case we haven't yet gotten the point, "genuinely weird." McWhorter's goal is to shine some light on topics he feels that authors of the typical "grand old history" of English, with their "fetish" for vocabulary at the expense of grammar, have left out. McWhorter is a past professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell; a current senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; and the author of numerous books on both language and race. Refreshingly, this book is neither a dry examination of academic minutiae nor an excessively simplified history. McWhorter's book is a welcome change from the sort of scholarly book in which the foundation of an idea seems often to be built on the corpses of the author's enemies. He may disagree with a number of his predecessors, but he is unflaggingly polite in doing so, either not mentioning them by name, or emphasizing that he enjoys and respects their other work immensely. "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" is by no means a complete chronicle of our language. McWhorter is more interested in, as the subtitle puts it, "the untold history of English." He points out that English has what he calls "kinks" in its grammar, qualities that are not shared by any of its relatives in the Germanic family of languages, but which do exist in a number of the Celtic ones, and questions why it is that these Celtic influences on English have gone unnoticed. I am frequently of the opinion that "untold histories" have remained untold for a very good reason, and it is testament to McWhorter's persuasiveness that I took umbrage on behalf of Welsh and Cornish. McWhorter states that he has two lessons that he intends to get across. "First, there is nothing unique about English's 'openness' to words from other languages." And "second, there is no logical conception of 'proper' grammar as distinct from 'bad' grammar that people lapse into out of ignorance or laziness." ("Grim little rules" like the one against using "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, he writes, make no sense - hey, Shakespeare did it - but laymen cling to it "like Linus to his blanket.") It's not so surprising that English's "openness" to words fails to overwhelm McWhorter - he's a linguist, and as a bunch linguists tend to be less impressed with the words that make up a language's vocabulary than they are with how those words fit together. Along the way he also touches on what the Vikings took away from our grammar, takes a skeptical look at the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which holds that language affects thought patterns) and raises the question as to whether the ancient Phoenicians may have had more of a hand in our language than is currently thought. As for his own language, McWhorter occasionally adopts a tone that is jarringly colloquial. He has already established a relaxed yet informative style in which to explain linguistic history to a general audience, and he does it quite well - he gains nothing by beginning sentences, as he is wont to, with "Yeah" or "But check this out." A more comprehensive history of the language can be found in David Crystal's "Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language" or "The Story of English," by Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil and William Cran. But McWhorter has provided a pleasingly dissenting view - one that wears its erudition lightly. / Ammon Shea is the author of "Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages."