Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

The Untold History of English

By: John McWhorter

Narrated by: John McWhorter

Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar. Why do we say "I am reading a catalog" instead of "I read a catalog"? Why do we say "do" at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue distills hundreds of years of fascinating lore into one lively history.

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.)

©2008 John McWhorter (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

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)

Very technical in places

With little in my background for formal study in linguistics, this book was an enjoyable challenge for me. There were times when I thought I would have understood the discussion better if I had the text in hand but the author brought a lot of humor and animation to the subject.

John McWhorter does it again

A much more succinct version of his analysis on the English language available in the Great Courses Plus catalogue, this book is fun, funny, and will broaden your understanding of English.

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.

A great find for language nerds

Any additional comments?

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.

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.

Interesting, but guilty of what he warns against

Any additional comments?

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.

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.

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.

easy to follow, fascinating, well-narrated

I find Prof. McWhorter is one of my favorite lecturers/writers on the Great Courses and beyond. I usually don't like authors who narrate their own books, but here it was wonderful. As in the other Audible offerings of his I have listened to, he makes the discussion of linguistics funny, fascinating and easy to follow. This would be an interesting one to listen to traveling or commuting, and discuss with fellow travelers, though I was listening before sleep (with a timer since I didn't want to miss a word).

McWhorter has strong opinions and this book piqued my interest to read others who might disagree. That said, this was completely interesting as a free standing book. I would also recommend his Great Courses for anyone who enjoys this.

Loved it

This guy reads his own work as well as Neil Gaiman does. The story is both utterly fascinating and impressively boring, as he goes over points of grammar and word usage to argue that the generally accepted ideas about how English evolved just don't hold water in the light of new evidence (some of it genetic) which forces us to look again and consider other options... such as welsh and celtic which tend to be neglected because none of the academics studying the topic ever bothered to learn those two .... and other facts...