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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English Paperback – October 30, 2008

by John McWhorter (Author)

4.4 653 ratings

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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.

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 ‏ : ‎ 12.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.26 x 1.01 x 7.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,323,536 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #552 in Etymology (Books)

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John McWhorter teaches linguistics, philosophy, and music history at Columbia University, and writes for various publications on language issues and race issues such as Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, CNN, and the Atlantic. he told his mother he wanted to be a "book writer" when he was five, and is happy that it worked out.
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Richard Posner

Celts and Vikings and Phoenicians, Oh My!

Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2009

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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter (Gotham Books) is the most entertaining book about linguistics that I've read. As a teacher and writer, I love English and its quirks, but I never could get my mind around all the charts, graphs, and jargon of formal linguistics. This book gave me a nice language fix without sounding like a calculus text.

It's relevant to mention that McWhorter is black, because a racial subtext runs through this book. McWhorter's linguistic specialty is Creole languages--those lilting mash-ups created by black slaves out of native tongues and European languages. In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, he suggests that English is a kind of Creole, and chides "traditional" linguists for ignoring the way English was "gumbo-ed" by the Celts, Vikings, and Phoenicians.

First, McWhorter attempts to show that Celts had a significant effect on Old English, evident in our unique use of the "meaningless do" (we say "Do you want to go shopping" whereas all other languages say something like "Want you to go shopping?") and progressive constructions (we say "Mary is singing" whereas all other languages say something like "Mary sings."). In another chapter, McWhorter agrees that Norse invasions of Angle-land caused many of our inflectional endings to drop off but goes further and insists that Norse influence truly battered our grammar. Finally, McWhorter goes out on an intriguing limb in proposing that Phoenician influenced Proto-Germanic (he gives as evidence striking similarities in Germanic and Semitic words). In the middle of these assaults on traditional linguistics, McWhorter pops in a rant against grammar rules, insisting that all grammar is just fashion.

All of this is fascinating and persuasively argued, with loads of examples; in fact, the avalanche of examples might bury all but the most committed reader. The "racial" undercurrent is an unspoken--well, partially spoken--complaint that traditional linguists want English to have a "purer" history than it does, and that the influences McWhorter argues for are those of common people speaking English, rather than educated people writing English. Traditional linguists dismiss the possibility of Celtic or Phoenician influence, McWhorter implies, just as they refuse to accept Creole tongues as real languages. Even the "all grammar is fashion" chapter carries a whiff of the Ebonics debate.

However, McWhorter's tone is always good-humored, and he writes delightfully. He makes strong cases for his theories, though I don't know enough formal linguistics to counter-argue (and McWhorter seems to be fluent in about forty different tongues!). I'm willing to agree with much of what he says, though I'm not as ready to dismantle Standard Written English as he is. If you enjoy English as a language, if you are curious about how and why we say things the way we do, if you like a good CSI story, and especially if you've wanted to know more about the history of English but were intimidated by forbidding textbooks, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue--a quick read at under 200 pages--can have you daydreaming about wild Celts, hairy Vikings, and exotic Phoenicians all chattering away and creating the rich and peculiar language we call English.

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gary medlock

Persuasive-though at times almost too persuasive

Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2011

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In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, it seems Mr. McWhorter is enjoying himself. While this is usually indicative of an author's appreciation for his subject and his ability to impart his knowledge of that subject to his audience, Mr. McWhorter has another motive at play. He seems, at times, to enjoy bringing an unorthodox grammar history to the reader, but even more so, he revels in such unorthodoxy's seeming requisite jabs at fellow critics whose ideas he's undermining and whose conservative linguistic pomposity he's attacking. Such attacks' circumstances work themselves out quite nicely. Mr. McWhorter presents a position that runs contrary to the mainstream, identifies why the position is more logical than the mainstream's position, and then writes off the mainstream position as simplistic or ignorant or merely entrenched in static academic thought. The most frequent critique of such conservative linguists (e.g., David Crystal) is his simple (and, I presume, simplistic) summation of their explanations of various English language changes: "it just happened." While I am no academic linguist, and, of Mr. Crystal's works, I've only read his Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, it is difficult to believe that Mr. McWhorter's ideas can be quite so revolutionary as he makes them out to be, though his arguments for the influence of Welsh and Norse influences of Old English are very persuasive. A bit too persuasive, actually. Such persuasiveness leads me to the belief that Mr. McWhorter overstates either his argument's uniqueness or its evidence. Thus his ideas aren't so unique, because who could overlook such obvious evidence and his subsequent logical deductions, or, despite what appears to be the overwhelming nature of his evidence, the preponderance of the (unseen in this book) evidence actually runs against his claims. Nonetheless, Mr. McWhorter's efforts at convincing me, especially of the influences of Celtic on English, have not fallen on deaf ears. I am keen to adopt several of his hypotheses, yet I will look further for the other side of the argument (i.e., conservative, mainstream linguists). That I am so eager to do so is a testament to my appreciation of Mr. McWhorter's book.

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Francesca

Very interesting

Reviewed in France on December 1, 2021

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I learned a lot about the English language and hope that this author continues to publish such interesting accessible information about languages

Jansen

Very interesting read!

Reviewed in Germany on June 1, 2020

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This was a really fascinating book that delves into a lot of aspects of English that I had never thought about. Things like the meaningless do and the progressive tense are dealt with in detail. As someone who grew up speaking English, but has spent his adult life learning Germanic languages, this was right up my alley!

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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.

2 people found this helpful

Sidharth

A good read for readers and writers of English language

Reviewed in India on June 16, 2017

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It's not as much about linguistics of etymology as much as it is about the development of English grammer. The investigation into the supposedly meaningless 'do' is remarkable.

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.

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