I’ve been pretty quiet around the book blogosphere this week, except for posting every day I needed to (which was every day since Tuesday!). Sorry about that-I miss y’all, but my fibro is acting up and my neck has been hurting badly all week. Yesterday, in the morning I thought it might be getting better, but when I woke up from a long-ish nap, it hurt so badly I couldn’t move it all and pretty much spend the evening in tears, watching my beloved Bones, and creating the perfect throw-pillow propping set up to read my books without any neck strain. This morning, it’s a little better but not much, so I’m going to be severely limiting my computer time! That means this review will probably be shorter than my normal ones; don’t take that as a sign that I didn’t enjoy the book!

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter is another book I read via review copy, and the publisher requested I post about it this week since the trade paperback edition has just hit the shelves here in the States. This is a nonfiction book about linguistics, specifically about the evolution of English grammar. If you’ve been reading the blog for awhile, you probably know I’m a language nerd; I studied Latin in high school, and in college one of my majors was Modern Languages (primary: Russian, secondary: French). And yes, I took a linguistics class. So I was really excited about this one.

And I definitely enjoyed it; I think any language or grammar nerd would. But it wasn’t perfect, and I’m going to talk about the not-great stuff first so I can gush later. McWhorter obviously has an axe to grind with his fellow academic linguists, and sometimes he spends several pages whining about why the other linguists don’t agree with his theory, even though it’s perfectly obvious that it’s the only explanation, etc., etc., etc. (Yes, I rewatched The King and I recently.) Now, in an article in an academic journal, I’d expect that. But in a ‘popular linguistics’ book, that for the most part doesn’t delve into the technical, uber-academic stuff, it felt misplaced. Also, his whininess/frustration alienated me, making me less excited about reading the rest of his writing. Most of these passages were concentrated in the first sixty or so pages, which made me really nervous; fortunately, after that they become less common. But they’re still there, so you’ll need to be able to deal with some kvetching in order to enjoy it.

The book was so much fun though! There are lots of pop linguistics books that look at English etymology (and McWhorter complains about that in his intro, lol), but Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue looks at the odd quirks of English grammar, and where they might have come from. I loved that; McWhorter obviously knows his stuff, and as he’s looking at Old, Middle, and Modern English, comparing it to the other Germanic languages, checking out some Welsh on the side, it was just delicious to be a part of. I was grinning from ear to ear. If you’ve ever studied another language and you’re a native English speaker, I bet it immediately made many things about English seem strange (like how we use ‘do’ in any interrogatory/negative sentence or why our verb endings only change in the he/she/it form). McWhorter has answers, based on a historical analysis of the English isles, and those answers involve not only Celts but Vikings too! (I love Medieval history.)

I also loved his occasional remarks about Russian, and the following passage had me howling with laughter (my parents wanted to know what I was reading):

English, as languages go, and especially Germanic ones, is kind of easy. …There is a canny objection one sometimes hears out there, that English is easy at first but hard to master the details of, while other languages are hard at first but easy to master the details of. Purportedly, then, Russian means starting out cracking your teeth on its tables of conjugations and case markers and gender marking, but after that it’s smooth sailing. Nonsense. English really is easy (-ish) at first and hard later, while other languages like Russian are hard at first and then just as hard later! Show me one person who has said that learning Russian is no problem after they mastered the basics-after the basics, you just keep wondering how anybody could speak the language without blacking out.

 

I think that gives you a good sense of McWhorter’s style too; he’s very down-to-earth and casual, even when he’s analysing grammar. It makes for a readable book that pulls you along.

I also love that McWhorter is firmly committed to the descriptive approach to linguistics (vs. the prescriptive one…basically, he thinks it’s nonsense to tell a native speaker that they’re saying something ‘wrong’). He debunks a lot of the generally accepted ‘rules’ of ‘proper’ English, and my favourite debunking involved using ‘they’ with a singular, gender-neutral meaning.

Take the idea that it is wrong to say If a student comes before I get there, they can slip their test under my office door, because student is singular and they ‘is plural.’ Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree (‘Each man in their degree.’)

 

So take that!

McWhorter actually devotes quite a bit of the book to debunking, and I literally squealed with delight when I saw the heading of chapter four: Does Our Grammar Channel Our Thought?  Y’all might recall I read Spoken Here earlier this year and absolutely, positively hated it. A lot of why I hated it is that the author (who isn’t a linguist) is totally gung-ho about the idea that a person’s native language actually shapes the thoughts they can have. I think this is ridiculous, and McWhorter agrees with me! If I could, I’d quote the whole chapter to you (he actually specifically references that other book, and pokes holes in the arguments). But I’ll settle for the concluding paragraph:

The idea that the world’s six thousand languages condition six thousand different pairs of cultural glasses simply does not hold water. The truly enlightened position is that, by and large, all humans, be they Australian Aborigines, Japanese urbanites, Kalahari hunter-gatherers, Cree Indians, Serbs, Greeks, Turks, Uzbeks, Amazonians, or Manhattanites in analysis, experience life via the mental equipment shared by all members of our species. No one is “primitive,” but just as important, no one is privileged over others with a primal connection to The Real.

Ok, my neck is seizing up again. So I’ll wrap this up: this book isn’t perfect, but I really enjoyed reading it, and I’d recommend it to anyone at all curious about languages. Going through McWhorter’s backlist, I realised I’ve actually read another book by him several years ago (The Power of Babel), and there are several more that I now have my eye on.

Do you have a favourite academic interest that you also read popular nonfiction books about? What is it, and what book would you recommend as a introduction to the field? (Yes-I’m now in all-out nerd mode and need more suggestions!)