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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue
- The Untold History of English
- Narrated by: John McWhorter
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
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Publisher's summary
Covering such turning points as the little-known Celtic and Welsh influences on English, the impact of the Viking raids and the Norman Conquest, and the Germanic invasions that started it all during the fifth century A.D., John McWhorter narrates this colorful evolution with vigor.
Drawing on revolutionary genetic and linguistic research, as well as a cache of remarkable trivia about the origins of English words and syntax patterns, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue ultimately demonstrates the arbitrary, maddening nature of English - and its ironic simplicity due to its role as a streamlined lingua franca during the early formation of Britain. This is the book that language aficionados worldwide have been waiting for. (And no, it's not a sin to end a sentence with a preposition.)
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Editorial reviews
There is something about the English language. Belonging to the Proto-Germanic language group, English has a structure that is oddly, weirdly different from other Germanic languages. In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, John McWhorter has achieved nothing less than a new understanding of the historic formation of the English language — in McWhorter’s words “a revised conception of what English is and why”. The linguist and public intellectual McWhorter accomplished this scholarly feat outside the tight restrictor box of academic publications. He did it with a popular book and thoroughly convincing arguments framed in richly entertaining, informal colloquial language.
The audiobook production of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue takes McWhorter’s transformation of scholarship to a new level. The book is about the spoken word and how and why the English language’s structure — that is the syntax, and which linguists term the “grammar” — changed through time. McWhorter tells the story the way it should be told: in spoken English by a master of the subject of how the languages under study sounded. The author has a remarkable, animated narrative voice and his delivery has an engaging and captivating personal touch. He is a great teacher with a world-class set of pipes, who clearly has developed a special relationship with studio microphones.
McWhorter’s intent is “to fill in a chapter of The History of English that has not been presented to the lay public, partly because it is a chapter even scholars of English’s development have rarely engaged at length”. The changes of English under study are from spoken Old English before 787 C.E. and the Viking invasions and the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the Middle English of Chaucer’s time. (With Chaucer we are a hop, skip, and a jump away from the English we easily recognize today.) The influences that altered the language, in McWhorter’s new formulation, include how, beginning in 787 C.E., the Viking invaders “beat up the English language in the same way that we beat up foreign languages in class rooms”, and thus shed some of the English grammar, and the native British Celtic Welsh and Cornish “mixed their native grammars with English grammar”. After the Norman Invasion, French was the language of a relatively small ruling class and was thus the written language. But with the Hundreds Years’ War between England and France, English again became the ruling language, and the changes that had been created in spoken English found their way into written Middle English.
Listening to McWhorter articulate his points with his extraordinarily expressive, polemically powerful voice, and cutting through and continually upending the scrabble board of flabby etymological presumptions of the established view — it is like nothing you’ve ever heard. The audio edition of this groundbreaking work, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue – an otherwise scholarly study twice transformed into a popular book and then into the audiobook that gives such impressive expressive voice to the changes of the English language — is a milestone in audiobook production. —David Chasey
Critic reviews
"McWhorter's iconoclastic impulses and refreshing enthusiasm makes this worth a look for anyone with a love for the language." (Publishers Weekly)
"McWhorter’s energetic, brash delivery of his own spirited and iconoclastic text will appeal to everyone who appreciates the range and caliber of today’s audio production. In some ways, audio is superior to printed text in portraying tone, attitude, values, and in this case, a discussion whose theme is the sound and grammar of words." (AudioFile magazine)
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"If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd sound like an American." "English accents are the sexiest." "Americans have ruined the English language." "Technology means everyone will have to speak the same English." Such claims about the English language are often repeated but rarely examined. Professor Lynne Murphy is on the linguistic front line. In The Prodigal Tongue she explores the fiction and reality of the special relationship between British and American English.
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TOO MUCH BITTERNESS
- By Tina on 08-27-20
By: Lynne Murphy
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Words and Rules
- The Ingredients of Language
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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First published in 2000, Words and Rules remains one of Pinker's most provocative and accessible books, illuminating the fascinating relationship between the brain, the mind, and how language makes us humans.
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Amazing how much irregular verbs can teach.
- By Tristan on 04-10-16
By: Steven Pinker
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The Glamour of Grammar
- By: Roy Peter Clark
- Narrated by: Roy Peter Clark
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Early in the history of English, glamour and grammar were the same word, linked to enchantment and magical spells. Now grammar brings to mind language bullies and bored-out-of-their-skulls students. Roy Peter Clark, one of America’s most influential writing teachers, wants to change that by putting the glamour back into grammar.
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Wasteful
- By ABID on 12-05-13
By: Roy Peter Clark
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A Little History of the World
- By: E. H. Gombrich
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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E. H. Gombrich's world history, an international best seller now available in English for the first time, is a text dominated not by dates and facts but by the sweep of experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements, and an acute witness to its frailties.
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an enlightening book; very well read
- By A.B.Oxford on 06-03-06
By: E. H. Gombrich
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Babel No More
- The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
- By: Michael Erard
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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We all learn at least one language as children. But what does it take to learn six languages...or seventy? In Babel No More, Michael Erard, "a monolingual with benefits," sets out on a quest to meet language superlearners and make sense of their mental powers. On the way he uncovers the secrets of historical figures like Italian cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who was said to speak seventy-two languages; Emil Krebs, a pugnacious German diplomat, who spoke sixty-eight languages; and Lomb Kat, a Hungarian who taught herself Russian by reading Russian romance novels.
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Heavy on anecdote, light on science
- By S. Yates on 07-15-16
By: Michael Erard
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The Pun Also Rises
- How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics
- By: John Pollack
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The Pun Also Rises is an authoritative yet playful exploration of a practice that is common, in one form or another, to virtually every language on earth. At once entertaining and educational, this engaging book answers fundamental questions: Just what is a pun, and why do people make them? How did punning impact the development of human language, and how did that drive creativity and progress? And why, after centuries of decline, does the pun still matter?
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Punderful Little Book
- By B. Lane on 01-10-13
By: John Pollack
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Poetry in Person
- Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America's Poets
- By: Lucille Clifton, Alexander Neubauer - editor, Eamon Grennan, and others
- Narrated by: Alexander Neubauer
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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This first audio edition of Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversation with America’s Poets (Knopf, 2010), invites listeners into an intimate classroom with eight acclaimed poets. Full of compelling, in-depth conversation about manuscripts and drafts by the poets themselves, plus readings of the finished poems, these historic recordings offer one of the most detailed portraits ever produced of how poems are actually made.
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Fascinating
- By d on 08-28-16
By: Lucille Clifton, and others
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Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
- By: Umberto Eco
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this exhilarating book, we accompany Umberto Eco as he explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. Using examples ranging from fairy tales and Flaubert, Poe and Mickey Spillane, Eco draws us in by means of a novelist's techniques, making us his collaborators in the creation of his text and in the investigation of some of fiction's most basic mechanisms.
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big ideas presented simply
- By Ashton on 01-31-14
By: Umberto Eco
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Memory Craft
- Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History
- By: Lynne Kelly
- Narrated by: Nancy Linari
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Groundbreaking anthropologist and memory champion Lynne Kelly reveals how we can use ancient and traditional mnemonic methods to enhance and expand our memory.
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So grateful this is on Audible!
- By happy_reader on 02-19-22
By: Lynne Kelly
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How to Write Short
- Word Craft for Fast Times
- By: Roy Peter Clark
- Narrated by: Roy Peter Clark
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In How to Write Short , Roy Peter Clark turns his attention to the art of painting a thousand pictures with just a few words. Short forms of writing have always existed - from ship logs and telegrams to prayers and haikus. But in this ever-changing Internet age, short-form writing has become an essential skill. Clark covers how to write effective and powerful titles, headlines, essays, sales pitches, Tweets, letters, and even self-descriptions for online dating services.
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Ironically long
- By Amazon Customer on 03-14-16
By: Roy Peter Clark
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You Say Potato: A Book About Accents
- By: Ben Crystal, David Crystal
- Narrated by: David Crystal, Ben Crystal, Jane Savage, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Some people say 'sconn' while others say 'schown'. He says 'bath' while she says 'bahth'. You say 'potayto'. I say 'potahto'. And - wait a second, no one says 'potahto'. No one's ever said 'potahto'. Have they? From reconstructing Shakespeare's accent to the rise and fall of received pronunciation, actor Ben Crystal and his linguist father, David, travel the world in search of the stories of spoken English.
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Wish there were more native recordings.
- By Matt Dobler on 07-01-16
By: Ben Crystal, and others
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The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead
- Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life
- By: Charles Murray
- Narrated by: Charles Murray
- Length: 3 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling social historian Charles Murray has written a delightfully fussy - and entertaining - book on the hidden rules of the road in the workplace - and in life - from the standpoint of an admonishing, but encouraging, workplace grouch and taskmaster. Why the curmudgeon? The fact is that most older, more senior people in the workplace are closet curmudgeons. In today's politically correct world, they may hide their displeasure over your misuse of grammar or your overly familiar use of their first name without an express invitation. But don't be fooled by their pleasant demeanor....
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Good Book: From one curmudgeon to another
- By DaWoolf on 05-22-14
By: Charles Murray
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The Book of Yokai
- Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore
- By: Michael Dylan Foster
- Narrated by: Tim Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on years of research in Japan, Michael Dylan Foster unpacks the history and cultural context of yokai, tracing their roots, interpreting their meanings, and introducing people who have hunted them through the ages. In this delightful and accessible narrative, listeners will explore the roles played by these mysterious beings within Japanese culture and will also learn of their abundance and variety through detailed entries on more than 50 individual creatures.
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Pt 2 was delightful (+no cringey pronunciations!!)
- By Julieanne on 06-04-19
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How to Speak and Write Correctly
- By: Joseph Devlin
- Narrated by: Shawn Grisden
- Length: 4 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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This book has no pretension about it whatever -- it is neither a Manual of Rhetoric, expatiating on the dogmas of style, nor a Grammar full of arbitrary rules and exceptions. It is merely an effort to help ordinary, everyday people to express themselves in ordinary, everyday language, in a proper manner.
By: Joseph Devlin
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Corporations are broken, reflecting no purpose deeper than profit. But the tools we are relying on to fix them - corporate social responsibility, divestment, impact investing, and government control - risk making our problems worse. With lively storytelling and careful analysis, O’Leary and Valdmanis cut through the tired dogma of current economic thinking to reveal a hopeful truth: If we can make our corporations accountable to a deeper purpose, we can make capitalism both prosperous and good.
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Adam Frankel’s maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust and built new lives, with new names, in Connecticut. Though they tried to leave the horrors of their past behind, the pain they suffered crossed generational lines - a fact most apparent in the mental health of Adam’s mother. When Adam sat down with her to examine their family history in detail, he learned another shocking secret, this time one that unraveled Adam’s entire understanding of who he is.
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Amazing story
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What listeners say about Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- Kindle Customer
- 01-06-23
Second reading--even more intriguing!
First I have to admit that John McWhorter could not be boring if he tried! IReading his books is a delightful experience because they contain a mixture of erudition and whimsy not often found in books about the history and development of language.
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- Piccolo Jr.
- 03-14-23
A fun & interesting take on the history of English
I can only speak as a layman, since I have little knowledge on the history of English prior to this book & even less on grammar in general. But the author presents the history through the lens of its grammar more than just the words it picked up along the way.
I won't lie though, when he got into the real nitty gritty of grammatical formatting, my head just kinda deflated & I zoned out a bit since I have little to no understanding of it. However, that only happened a few times & the information here is fascinating. No idea if any of it is accurate, but he certainly presents some convincing arguments for his cases. If you're like me & have a general interest in history, then I'd pick this up.
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- Gustav Hirsch
- 03-11-23
Did you hear what he is claiming?
I literally did and am richer for it! Mr. McWhorter answered
I’ve had regarding English oddities of vocabulary and grammar for most of my adult life. THANK YOU SIR!
And thank you Welsh & Cornish ancestors for making Old English easier to speak and unlike any other Germanic language.
I’ll listen to this again with the book open so I can learn more of the wealth of information presented.
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- R. MCRACKAN
- 09-02-24
Nowhere near as good as his lectures
Although the author attempts to make this consumable for the masses, this is much closer to an academic treatise with all the dull nuance that entails. There were a few parts which were fascinating. Overall though, I cannot recommend.
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- Orson
- 09-29-10
Brilliant Linguist makes his case
Not many authors read their own work very well, but McWhorter is superb - and who else could read snatches from so many languages and get them right (or at least plausible!)? The content of the book is outstanding. McWhorter makes his case for the strong Welsh influence on English despite the low number of Welsh words, and when he gets to the Carthaginian influence on ancient proto-Germanic, I was delighted. Unlike many scientists, McWhorter never overclaims; where the evidence is thin and the ideas are speculations, he says so and never lets you forget it. When you're through listening to this book, you understand the bones of our language better than ever.
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- Roxane
- 08-27-12
A great find for language nerds
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I was excited (and convinced) by the author's thesis that Old English was influenced by Welsh. It's a revolutionary idea, since most scholars who study Germanic languages ONLY study Germanic languages, but it's a very convincing explanation of one of English's peculiar quirks.
Whereas many "history of the language" titles deal mostly with etymologies of words and phrases, McWhorter is concerned mostly with grammar--notably, the differences in grammar that set English apart from other Germanic languages. For that reason, it might be heavy going for people with a casual interest and little knowledge of linguistic terminology. But the author's tone and wit help to keep it interesting. My husband, who has no background in linguistics but is curious about many topics, enjoyed it and got something out of it.
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- Neil Chisholm
- 03-03-13
English Grammar as I've never heard it taught
I wasn't expecting this book to be on English grammar, but an up to date version of where words came from. But what the book explained was the impact of the grammar of existing languages (gaelic, cornish, welsh etc) on English. How and why English is different from very similar languages that developed from proto-german in the years BC. It made fascinating listening not least due to the fact that the narrator was the researcher and made it fun and amusing to listen to.
My father was a stickler for correct English both spoken and written. I remember my childhood being spent constantly corrected for incorrectly constructed English. I now appreciate those lessons and take great joy when I see poorly structured or incorrect English spoken or written, particularly if its by someone who should know better. If I had been taught the reason why English is oddly constructed I might have made less mistakes but this book and the research is relatively new
I am sure that my father would have revelled in this book, I know I particularly enjoyed it and anyone with an interest in languages and the development of English would also enjoy this book.
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- hh
- 05-18-12
Interesting, but guilty of what he warns against
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Whorter has some very interesting things to say and since he is something of an "odd man out" from majority thinking, it is natural that much of his points are "push off" points. He makes some of them very well, too, but tends to go too far, becoming guilty of the very same kind of arrogance he accuses others of displaying. The last hour is shockingly preachy and just plain odd.
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- Joe Kraus
- 12-12-19
Believe it or not, but Fun and Brilliant
I am a nerd, of course, but not even I expect to find linguistics riveting and funny. That’s what happens, though, when you find yourself reading something by a brilliant thinker who’s not afraid to challenge many of his field’s presuppositions and who can spin a good story out of otherwise dry stuff.
McWhorter has a couple of ideas that he both presents with stunning clarity and that he juxtaposes to the dominant thinking of other linguists. Above all, he has a sense that language carries the residue of the people who spoke it rather than the conquerors of those people. It’s a great and liberating sense as far as I’m concerned; these conquered people often vanished from history, but they have left their mark in the way we speak.
The first theory he explores is the notion that our English grammar owes far more to the Celts than we have otherwise imagined. When the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived as conquerors, they did not, as some historians have insisted, wipe out the existing Celtic population. Instead, they became an upper-class; as recent DNA evidence suggests, the Celtic Britons seem responsible for more than 90 percent of the genetic make-up of modern-day English.
The official language the island came to speak was indeed “Old English,” a descendent of Old German, but it had a number of grammatical quirks, mostly an absence of case endings and verb conjugations as well as an odd “meaningless do” that featured in sentences like “Do you want…” Where conventional linguistic history has it that these features either just fell away from disuse (something that did not happen to most other descendants of Old German) or emerged as quirks in the case of the “meaningless do,” McWhorter marshals all sorts of evidence to show that what we see is the evidence of a conquered people attempting to speak a new language but mangling it in the process. The Celtic British language indeed featured some of those grammatical elements, and it seems fairly convincing to think that those “second language speakers” of that time – who constituted a substantial majority – mis-learned the invaders’ way of speaking.
McWhorter applies similar thinking in a later era. Convention has it that the Norman Invasion, with its French speakers, infused Middle English with the novelties that eventually turned it into Modern English. And it is clear that we receive many Romance-language words through that transfusion. But vocabulary is a more superficial change in language than its core grammar. McWhorter argues that there were simply never enough Normans around to influence the everyday language; there were perhaps only ten thousand on an island with millions in population, and many of them rarely interacted with the common people.
Instead, says McWhorter, there’s a much more substantial infusion of population from a series of Viking raids. Those small-time conquerors – who tended to land near the coasts and establish colonies that eventually intermarried with the existing population – were ultimately both more numerous and more engaged in the commerce of everyday life. They are the ones, McWorter says, who brought about the further erosion of conjugation and case endings that is distinct to English. What’s more, he points out triumphantly, while the written record will always be far behind the conventional ways most people talk, the written records show that such changes began in the regions where the Vikings settled rather than in places closer to Norman strongholds.
He offers one more intriguing hypothesis from the same pattern of analysis. He notes that Old German is itself already a somewhat trimmed down version of its precursor Old Indo-European. Among other strange changes, it’s a rare language that goes from hard consonants tike ‘P’ to softer ones like “F,” as in Pater becoming Father. Using a kind of CSI—History of Language, he speculates that it’s possible the alternation we see is the result of a transfusion from the way Semitic speakers would have learned and bastardized the language.
Then, in perhaps the most speculative part of the book, he considers the possibility that the Phoenicians of Carthage – they of the Punic Wars, and speakers of Semitic Akkadian – may have had a larger geographic presence in the Scandinavian areas where Old German first emerged. That is, he proposes that our language has never been “pure,” that it has always been altered by contact with peoples who, though they have not gone onto political power, have mis-learned and passed along a new kind of speech.
If all that weren’t enough – a coherent story that gives a glimpse of academic controversy and still manages to stitch together different historical developments – this also offers the best grammatical defense I have ever heard for why I should let go the, to-me, ear-scraping sound of using the plural “them” to refer to individuals as a gender-neutral pronoun. First, he says, there’s evidence for such a use going back to Shakespeare and before; it’s always been a part of the language.
Second, he reminds me, no language is without its logical inconsistency. He offers a lot of great examples I can’t reconstruct, but most persuasively he points at the example of “aren’t I?” I’d never thought of it before, but – if numerical agreement is so important – then why does the singular I take the plural aren’t in such a situation? Logically it should be “amn’t I,” but we hear that as wrong. It’s just a reminder that this is how language works. It’s always got some illogical elements from its strange inheritance, and it’s never going to be entirely consistent.
What we have with which to write and speak is, it turns out, the record of many long-defeated peoples. We’ve lost their ideas and many of their words, but something of their experience has crept into what we know through the bastardization process of linguistic change. I knew a lot of this going in, but McWhorter makes me feel smarter, and he certainly entertained me along the way.
As if all that weren't enough, McWorter also reads this with skill and humor.
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- Beth Snyder
- 04-11-12
Enjoyable Romp through the History of English
Where does Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
I found this book to be quite entertaining and informative. This is not the type of book I usually listen to, but the topic intrigued me so I thought I'd give it a try. I'm glad I did. The author/narrator had a well fleshed out theory about the origins of the English language. All of his ideas were quite reasonable and believable. He is also an entertaining narrator. This could have been a dry somewhat boring topic, but his added humor and pleasant voice kept me listening.
Have you listened to any of John McWhorter’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
Never listened to John McWhorter before, but I would again.
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