Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English

For those with only a passing interest in the history of English, I recommend "The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language". It's a more casual overview of the English language that focuses more on history and vocabulary (a very good listen).

That being said, "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" is a great listen for those interested in the origins and evolution of the English language told not only through history and vocabulary but also through grammar and linguistics.

Don't freak out, the treatment of grammar is fairly straightforward and mostly limited to examples of case endings or nouns having genders. This will be familiar to anyone who has studied a Romance or Germanic language. (Basically, the Vikings helped kill off our case endings)

Etymologies tend to be fairly straightforward too, e.g. the author provides examples of how sounds from Indo-European words (e.g. "peter" (can't do the correct symbols) tend to change in fairly predictable ways in various languages, cf. Latin "pater" or French "pere") to Old Norse "fadir", or Germanic "vater" (pronounced "fah-ter").

That's about as scary/difficult as the etymologies get.

There is also a big chunk of a chapter dedicated to unique English peculiarities like our use of the (mostly) meaningless word "do" (e.g. "this doesn't work" instead of "this not work") and our use of "ing" to convey a present state of doing something, rather than just the present active indicative ("I'm typing" instead of "I type") (The Celts are responsible!)

The author also addresses how and why written English was different from spoken English, the theory that language shapes the way we think (he mostly disagrees), and the Semitic influences on the proto-Germanic language.

Any student of English even, if just elementary school grammar, knows English is weird. This book help explain why and how it got that way. I loved this book.

I tutored English as a Second Language for a couple of years and I wish had known some of this before starting to tutor. It would have made explaining some of the quirks about English easier.

I enjoyed the narration as well. John McWhoter is enthusiastic about is work and that comes through to the listener.

I don't know how boring I must be to become so engrossed in a text about the history of English grammar, but I was rapt nonetheless. McWhorter makes some good points and backs them up, but is realistic about the chances of his conclusions being adopted by the linguistics community.


A book so dependent on the way words are pronounced SHOULD be read by a linguist and fortunately McWhorter is a very good narrator. He sounds neither dry nor melodramatic. My only complaint is that when speaking Japanese his accent is almost as bad as my own, but given the number of languages referenced he does an admirable job of delivering phrases from such a wide range of sources.

I liked the author's sense of humor, and he does a good job reading the text. However, the material truly does repeat itself, giving the effect of an article fleshed to book length.

Interesting concepts that I hadn't heard before. The author reads his own book. He had to since there are lots (i.e. a few too many) spoken examples from various languages. Nevertheless, the author renders his ideas clearly and humorously.

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.

McWhorter presents a fascinating argument about how English came to its present, rather unique state. His history emphasizes how we got our grammar, and quirks like "the useless 'do'", based on the interaction of German and the indigenous languages (e.g., Celtic). The author reads; I found him very pleasant to listen to. There's some nice humor, too. The only negative is the chapter on the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis. It seems like it's in the wrong book and the polemics seems a bit overwrought, given that it's an old argument about whether language shapes thought to any great extent. Skip that chapter and it'll be a fascinating listen/read.

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.

It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect: a bit of a background on why English is the kind of language it is. Not particularly surprising or novel, but it was interesting enough to pass the time. English seems to be different from its "related" languages and the author is quite, err, let's use the word "adamant" (rather than ranting) about the Celtic impact on English. Yes, he does admit that traditional scholars disagree and offers his own "evidence" but it isn't his disagreement with the establishment that got a little annoying but his repetitive "digs" on the subject.

I think it's very suitable for audio because he discusses nuances of language/pronunciation which I don't think would have been as noticeable in writing. He narrates it fairly well, but you can tell it's not his primary job. I think his pronunciation of foreign words was clear enough, and I have no idea if it was correct.

This book was fabulous! And read by the author! Really, nobody else could have read it with all the original language references. Besides that, the content was tremendously interesting written in an extremely easy-to-understand and skillful style that showed the author's tremendous knowledge on the subject as well as his good sense of humor. I would recommend this book to anyone.