I used to think that maybe English was a Celtic language. Or at least wonder. After all, it's right there on a pair of islands where most of the surviving Celtic languages come from. But no, linguists insisted it was a Germanic language with a lot of French and Latin borrowings. And it's true that English doesn't have a lot of confirmed Celtic cognates. One of the few common English words traced to Welsh is "penguin", which originally referred to far north seabirds like puffins and auks.
But Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, an intriguing and accessible book by John H. McWhorter, questions this conclusion. Or at the very least complicates it.
German, Dutch, Swedish, and the gang are, by and large, variations on what happened to Proto-Germanic as it morphed along over three thousand years. They are ordinary rolls of the dice. English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up as Welsh on lonely nights.
Its resemblances to Celtic languages like Welsh and Cornish include both the way it uses "do" to construct verbal phrases and the way that gerund verbs are used in sentences. In these English is unlike any other Germanic language. Or nearly any other language at all, with the exception of the Celtic ones.
To be sure there could be more debate. McWhorter does, however, point out that only a couple hundred thousand from the Anglo-Saxon tribes invaded Britain. Not enough to kill everyone and replace their language full-on, even assuming that's what they wanted to do.
2 comments:
Considering your background I can well understand how you found this book to be of great interest. I understand the book isn't meant for professional linguists but rather for people like me who are interested and entertained by accounts of the mysterious inception of our favorite language.
Since I don't have a copy of the book I did look up John McWhorter and found several videos (including courses that must be paid for) and this one was particularly current. The point he makes in the video Wokeness hurts Black communities is one I've mentioned before and that's that we've been through with actual racism since the 90s and maybe before. There are Black members of every profession, including a former president. There's no doubt that a number of people in the Black community need help but it needs to be targeted at particular problems.
I agree with you it's unlikely there was a deliberate effort to change whatever language people used to speak in Britain but the interesting thing is just how slick the language is at incorporating new terms and ideas now more than ever.
It is very much the kind of thing that interests me. Language is something that's been with humanity for millennia, so you can look for hints within it of what things used to be like. McWhorter probably could write for professional linguists and for all I know he has, but he's also very good at making the material accessible.
I like his aside about "what woke meant until 10 minutes ago." Yeah, he's a versatile thinker with a number of things to say about the present as well. I think he's a needed counterpoint to someone like Ibram X. Kendi, one of those academics who spent so much time on his doctoral thesis that he doesn't recognize anything outside of it.
Starting off as Celtic land and seeing rule by Romans, Teutons, Vikings and Normans within a few centuries had an interesting effect on the language of the Britons. And probably on other aspects of the culture, there and to the places on Earth where it radiated out to.
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