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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English
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About the Author
John McWhorter is the author of the bestseller Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, and four other books. He is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor to The City Journal and The New Republic. He has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has appeared on Dateline NBC, Politically Incorrect, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
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Product details
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Avery (October 27, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1592404944
ISBN-13: 978-1592404940
Product Dimensions:
5.1 x 0.6 x 7.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
166 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#67,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The book is well written, highly cogent, and congenial in the best sense. The arguments not only flow well, but have the perfect pieces of information to provide a solid backbone to them. A few of his anologies are a stretch and seem a tad far-flung, but the vast majority are extremely apt. He also touches on issues such as a singular "they" and comments on how language does not determine culture, rather the other way around.4.7/5 If I had to be overly critical and specific.
The question is: what happened to Celtic? The population of the British Isles up to somewhere in the middle of the first millenium was mostly Celtic, and Celtic tongues survive on the edges, in Wales, Eire and Scotland. And many Britons before the Germanic invasions were probably Latin speakers. But English itself is basically Germanic, with only a smattering of Celtic words in the lexicon, and Latin-based influences coming in later in its development. That's unusual. Germanic groups came to dominate much of the rest of Europe, but in areas where Latin-based languages had emerged, they persisted. Why not in Britain?The lengthy introduction is to explain why this is such an interesting -- if not entirely convincing -- book. It provides an unusual historical look at English -- not an overview, but a specific consideration of the ways in which English grammar has diverged from that of the other Germanic languages. This, McWhorter proposes, reflects the underlying influence of Celtic. What happened to the Celtic language(es) presumably spoken by most of the inhabitants of Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions is a tantalizing question that most histories of the language brush over. McWhorter doesn't; his argument is interesting, but I still wonder if Celtic could have had that much grammatical impact with so little impact on the lexicon. Whether or not McWhorter is right (and is there a "right" answer?} he is certainly worth reading.
These 2 books are favorites of McWhorter (and mine) and he wastes no timein rehashing them. Instead he promotes several theories/topicsthat are different from the conventional wisdom, and for which heargues very convincingly.Namely these are thata) though most linguists argue that we inherited almost nothingfrom Gaelic languages, McWhorter points out that much of ourgrammar is Welsh and Cornish.b) that the transition from Old to Middle English did notrapidly occur in the 150 years after 1066, but that had beengoing on all along and was only committed to paper then whenscribes started writing English again after a gap. There isvery little real evidence for this, but it is also very veryplausible. Compare Mark Twain's writing when he attempts toput real speech down on paper with anything contemporary.c) some Semitic language was probably responsible for much ofthe wierdness of proto-Germanic in the Indo-European languagefamily. There is a far flung theory (which he notes as such)that this was the Phoenicians.McWhorter also spends a while exploring the intricacies of how Old Norseand Old English collided, fighting the grammatical dictocrats, and fartoo long debunking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. McWhorter's writing isentertaining and flawless.I would buy the Story of English as an intro, David Crystal's Cambridgeif you liked that, and this book 3rd. I wish he had a longer book on Englishor even the evolution of the Germanic languages.
McWhorter tends to delight in moments of language mixing and often would call those instances brand spankin' new languages, rather than Creoles. But in this book his impulse to expose the bastard origins of the English language are delightfully subversive. I would encourage any would-be purchasers on the merits of his "Miscegenated Grammar" chapter alone. The latter shows pretty irrefutable evidence of Celtic-language influence that shakes up many of our traditional notions of the English language's history.
I know McWhorter tries to write for popular consumption - and I'm very interested in the source of languages and regional differences. But this was way too scholarly for me. I finally gave up on it. Not his fault - it's just over my head.
John McWhorter's fresh and engaging presentation of evolutionary English is informed by the major forces of social and cultural flows through what we now call Europe and the U.K. While he is adept at making a larger picture out of detail, as one might expect, he is also bold enough to look in the other direction, from the sweep of history to the resultant detail left in its wake. Fascinating and entertaining, as well as diligent whole-brain detective work . . . makes the most complex and important language's history more comprehendible, and its continuing evolutionary usages easier to bear! I enjoyed it thoroughly, and would recommend Bryson's "The Mother Tongue" as a companion book. Both excellent!
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