Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English

by John McWhorter (Author)

297 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-1592403950

ISBN-10: 1592403956

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A survey of the English language's usage mysteries considers the ways in which English developed and how it may reflect cultural values, in a reference that covers such topics as Celtic and Welsh influences, the origins of specific syntax patterns, and the role of language in forming early Britain. 25,000 first printing.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This evolutionary history of the English language from author and editor McWhorter (The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language) isn't an easy read, but those fascinated by words and grammar will find it informative, provocative and even invigorating. McWhorter's history takes on some old mysteries and widely-believed theories, mounting a solid argument for the Celtic influence on English language that literary research has for years dismissed; he also patiently explains such drastic changes as the shift from Old English to Middle English (the differences between written and spoken language explain a lot). Those who have learned English as a second language will recognize McWhorter's assertion that "English really is easy(-ish) at first and hard later"; for that, he says, we can "blame... the Danish and Scandinavian" influence. McWhorter further proves his bona fides with deft analogies, like a comparison between the evolution of English and popping a wheelie on a bicycle; he also debunks, handily, the popular notion that "a language's grammar and the way its words pattern reflect aspects of its speakers' culture and the way they think." McWhorter's iconoclastic impulses and refreshing enthusiasm makes this worth a look for anyone with a love for the language.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

John McWhorter is the author of The Power of Babel and numerous other acclaimed books, most recently All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop CanÂt Save Black America (Gotham Books, 2008). A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to The New Republic, he has taught linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and has been widely profiled in the media.

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Product details

Publisher : Gotham (October 30, 2008)
Language : English
Paperback : 256 pages
ISBN-10 : 1592403956
ISBN-13 : 978-1592403950
Reading age : 18 years and up
Item Weight : 12 ounces
Dimensions : 5.26 x 1.01 x 7.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,558,124 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,026 in Etymology (Books)
- #200,492 in Textbooks

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297 ratings

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Mountain Nomad

A must read for English speakers...I wish this would have been part of English curriculum!

Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2020

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I purchased the paperback edition and the book quality met my expectations. I really enjoyed this book. I read it after reading The Power of Babel. The only thing that turned me off a bit in that book was all the American jokes and pop cultural references, which seem to be less in this book and more excusable as this is a book dealing specifically with English. The author mentions in the introduction that he's trying to provide a new explanation of the English language, going beyond the surface, symptomatic explanations like English adopted French words or English dropped gender and case markers, to an explanation of WHY those major shifts in English happened. He does an excellent job in demonstrating why English is such a unique language not just among Indo-European languages but also within the Germanic family. If this book would have been part of my English curriculum in high school or university, I would have found the language so much more interesting! As I'm not a trained linguist, the only thing I have reservations about is (SPOILER- I'll try not to give away too much!) just how mainstream some of the theories put forward in this book are among the academic community specifically the impact of the Celtic languages on English (seems reasonable to me) and the supposed impact of a non Indo-European language (I won't say which one, but it sounds whacky!) on the Germanic languages. As these two theories drive the majority of the book, it would be nice to know just how well they are accepted. I thought the book was a bit short and it seems the book is a little smaller, the font a little bigger and the margins a bit wider to make the book look larger than it really is, however it was a great read and I recommend it to others.

7 people found this helpful

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Justin Brent

Shrewd and Delightful

Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2017

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McWhorter tends to delight in moments of language mixing and often would call those instances brand spankin' new languages, rather than Creoles. But in this book his impulse to expose the bastard origins of the English language are delightfully subversive. I would encourage any would-be purchasers on the merits of his "Miscegenated Grammar" chapter alone. The latter shows pretty irrefutable evidence of Celtic-language influence that shakes up many of our traditional notions of the English language's history.

16 people found this helpful

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Anne Mills

Interesting Look at a Puzzling Question

Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2013

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The question is: what happened to Celtic? The population of the British Isles up to somewhere in the middle of the first millenium was mostly Celtic, and Celtic tongues survive on the edges, in Wales, Eire and Scotland. And many Britons before the Germanic invasions were probably Latin speakers. But English itself is basically Germanic, with only a smattering of Celtic words in the lexicon, and Latin-based influences coming in later in its development. That's unusual. Germanic groups came to dominate much of the rest of Europe, but in areas where Latin-based languages had emerged, they persisted. Why not in Britain?

The lengthy introduction is to explain why this is such an interesting -- if not entirely convincing -- book. It provides an unusual historical look at English -- not an overview, but a specific consideration of the ways in which English grammar has diverged from that of the other Germanic languages. This, McWhorter proposes, reflects the underlying influence of Celtic. What happened to the Celtic language(es) presumably spoken by most of the inhabitants of Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions is a tantalizing question that most histories of the language brush over. McWhorter doesn't; his argument is interesting, but I still wonder if Celtic could have had that much grammatical impact with so little impact on the lexicon. Whether or not McWhorter is right (and is there a "right" answer?} he is certainly worth reading.

37 people found this helpful

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Reviewer

Entertaining

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2020

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John McWhorter's funny and irreverent writing style adds humor to the already interesting topic of the structure of English grammar and word usage. He addresses common myths, such as how English excels beyond other languages at incorporating new vocabulary. He provides rich examples illustrating how conquest and migration influenced the language. He richly contrasts English with it's sister Germanic languages to illustrate how English has changed over time, and also discusses the probable contribution of other languages such as Welsh. A great read.

2 people found this helpful

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Tyler G

More Facets Than the Title Would Indicate

Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2017

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The book is well written, highly cogent, and congenial in the best sense. The arguments not only flow well, but have the perfect pieces of information to provide a solid backbone to them. A few of his anologies are a stretch and seem a tad far-flung, but the vast majority are extremely apt. He also touches on issues such as a singular "they" and comments on how language does not determine culture, rather the other way around.

4.7/5 If I had to be overly critical and specific.

19 people found this helpful

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Tori

I know McWhorter tries to write for popular consumption - ...

Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2018

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I know McWhorter tries to write for popular consumption - and I'm very interested in the source of languages and regional differences. But this was way too scholarly for me. I finally gave up on it. Not his fault - it's just over my head.

7 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Great book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 21, 2018

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I bought this for my partner as a gift and he is enjoying it.
It's led to some interesting conversations and further reading, so it's use (at least for us) has gone far beyond just the actual book itself.
Interesting and educational without the dryness of an academic book, I recommend this to people who have an interest in language as a whole.
It's a good starting place for those with an interest in the origin of language and apleasant light read for the more advanced student.

One person found this helpful

auto-didact

Breathless

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 30, 2012

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This is a curious book, being on an academic subject, but not written in an academic style. Enjoyment lies in the lively and vigorous presentation of its ideas.
The main topic is the influence that there is likely to have been on Old English (and hence on the language we now use) from the indigenous Celtic tribes and the Vikings. I find this interesting, because of my interest in the Dark Ages. That was a period that determined the fundamental shape of the future English people and state, yet the developments have largely to be inferred, in the absence of customary historical sources. The information on this topic could be summed up in a page or two, but its exposition is expanded through arguing against the more traditional kind of scholarship, which is reluctant to approach the topic in the way this author does.
A related topic consists of arguing against misguided attempts to correct other people's English; on the grounds that so much of what we take as correct now, was once seen as bad grammar. This argument that we have to let language develop in its own way, and not be judgmental about the outcomes, is something I'm ambivalent about, as I like to see language used as a precision instrument, not a blunt one. Do we lose something when testament becomes accepted as a replacement for testimony? More generally, do you sometimes feel, when reading a piece of American prose, that you can tell roughly what is meant, but there are words that are similar to ones which would be much more meaningful?
So, this book is entertaining for what it says and how it says it, though rather meagre fare, and certainly only for those with a particular interest in language study.

One person found this helpful

miw

Makes compelling points, but belabors them

Reviewed in Canada on May 13, 2019

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I enjoyed this book. I was familiar with most of the arguments from previous research. His arguments are compelling. However, he often belabors the point and so I found myself skipping whole pages because I got the point and wanted to move on.
The book seems keen to make a point about how English was affected by outside influences (hence the title), whether Cetlic or Viking, but if you want to understand the history of English this book will only be one piece of the puzzle. There is not enough narrative guidance to the history of English to provide you with a good understanding. He makes his points, and it may help you understand why English is the way it is, but you'll need more.

One person found this helpful

Soobie Mennym

Huge disappointment!

Reviewed in Italy on September 27, 2015

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This book has been a huge disappointment!!!

I didn't like the tone the author used throughout the book: he's so I-know-it-all that I could barely stand him. In addition, his English was quite complicated. More than once I had to re-read a sentence in order to identify first the main clause and then its subordinates. That usually happens in German or in Italian: English is usually one of the most logic language in this aspect of grammar. But really, who cares if poor McWhorter couldn't find some lemonade during six weeks in Helsinki! If you're in Helsinki for six weeks, just go and try to eat some local food. JEEZ!!

What about the content of the book? Well, McWhorter's thesis is that English has been influenced by a lot of languages during his history. For instance, MacWhorter support the hypothesis that the meaningless do used in English derived from the Celts languages and tries to prove his point for the first half of the book. Really, he kept repeating the same concept over and over... It was a bit boring. Or, maybe, 50-60 pages less would have done good to his work.

I was intrigued by the Monnese dialect and the fact that it supposedly owns a meaningless do as well. Then I began asking myself: «Where do they speak the Monnese dialect? Google and I had a brief chat and apparently it's spoken around the town of Monno, in the province of Brescia. But I'm not sure; there was some monnese around Arezzo as well. These linguists... they just throw in fancy names and then who cares where those names come from.

I don't know. The few sentences in German he wrote has a spelling mistake in them. In that case the "schreiben" is a verb turned noun and it needs to be written with the capital letter.

Then we have the standard Italian word cappicola.... Just try to Google it. There's no mention of it whatsoever in an Italian context. However, it exists on the English Wiki searching for the word Capicola. It says: «Capocollo [kapoˈkɔllo] (in the United States, cappicola, coppa in Canada, capicollo or capicolla), is a traditional Italian pork cold cut (salume) made from the dry-cured muscle running from the neck to the 4th or 5th rib of the pork shoulder or neck. The name capocollo comes from capo ("head") and collo ("neck") of a pig. It is a whole muscle salume, dry cured and, typically, sliced very thin. It is similar to the more widely known cured ham or prosciutto, because they are both pork-derived cold-cuts that are used in similar dishes. However, coppa is not brined as ham typically is.»

I'm not splitting hairs here. Double consonants are distinctive: cane has four legs and barks, canne [reeds] are plants. And, by the way, I wouldn't considered meat cuts as standard Italian since they really do change from one region to the other, even from one province to the next.

I wonder also why McWhorter doesn't like to talk about genitive or dative... I mean, towards the end he finally explain what those are but at around page 46 is still talking about those endings that «connotes "of-ness" or "to-ness». I know that this book was written for an American audience - I guess not even Irish or Australian people will understand McWhorter's references - but surely Americans do study German, Latin or Russian and are familiar with those concepts.

What I absolutely hated about this book were the notes at the ending. When I start a book I rarely leaf through the end of it to see if it has notes... And I was so surprised to find notes here... But, who can remember to what they refer? And sure I'm not going to read this again. Footnotes in the text were actually useless. Of course, if you were more interested in McWhorter's own trivial experience, those were perfect.

Well, I also can't understand why he made a reference back to Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language by Bill Bryson. There were tons of inaccuracies there as well.

Now, the $64.000 question: I have two other books by McWhorte in my TBR list. What should I do? Give them a try or just leave them? I surely disliked his attitude... And the content... Nothing special.

One person found this helpful

Kindle Customer

English as a Creole

Reviewed in Canada on February 15, 2021

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I have followed McWhorter for years. In addition to his books I watched his lecture series on The Great Courses in which he explained the way that languages are created. It was obvious that although he did not use English as an example the fundamental ways in which English differs from all other European languages are precisely the ways in which a Creole differs from the languages which it borrows from. So I sought for resources which would examine this possibility, preferably from an author who was not personally invested in a specific conclusion and happily found that McWhorter himself had recently examined the evidence.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English

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