John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English (I linked to the hardcover edition because it’s actually cheaper than the paperback at the moment) bounces back and forth between wonky linguistics stuff and more plebeian arguments about how we use the English language today. I found the former stuff interesting but a little puzzling because McWhorter is arguing against a conventional wisdom that seems to ignore the facts (a familiar story), but that conventional wisdom was completely new to me, and I thought McWhorter didn’t give quite enough background in the current thinking in the History of English field to set the stage for his epic takedowns. The latter half was far more accessible even to someone who doesn’t share an interest in languages or linguistics, and a little more relevant to the current state of English.

McWhorter’s more academic arguments take aim at the intransigence (in his view) of History of English scholars who refuse to see what he considers obvious influences on the language by the Celts and, oddly enough, the Vikings, that explain our unusually simple grammar. English is part of the Indo-European language group, in the Germanic family, but unlike its Germanic siblings or most of its cousins within Indo-European, it has retained very little of the grammar of its proto-language ancestors. English doesn’t decline its nouns (as Slavic languages do) or its articles (as German does), and our verb conjugations are incredibly simple – we add an -s in the third person singular, and that’s pretty much it, with just a few irregular verbs. Why has English grammar become so much simpler than the grammars of its close relatives? According to McWhorter, the History of English groupthink has it that these changes happened spontaneously, without outside influences, but he feels that that’s nonsense because of the obvious similarities between English and Celtic. The language that became English came to the British Isles with the invaders who subjugated the Celts, and McWhorter attests that the Celts, rather than finding their language wiped out by the invasion, gradually melded their language with the proto-English spoken by the invaders, leaving vestiges like what the author calls “meaningless do” (our use of “do” with present participles, as in, “Do you like baseball, Adam?”). The Vikings, meanwhile, left their imprint largely in the simplification of our grammar, ignoring grammatical elements that their language lacked and “battering” English to lead it to drop verb and noun endings that most other modern languages have retained for centuries. If you’re wondering why we find Russian so hard to learn, or why English doesn’t have gender or noun cases or tables upon tables of verb endings, McWhorter lays out a compelling explanation.

The more accessible portion of the book comes in McWhorter’s discussions of what it means for a language like English to have a simpler grammar, and whether there is ever such a thing as “proper” grammar as long as meaning isn’t sacrificed. He turns his guns on linguistic anthropologists who’ve argued that language and grammar reflect thought, such as certain Native American tribes whose grammars lacked the future tense or specific numbering systems. But where I took issue with McWhorter’s views was in his criticism of what we might call the Lynne Truss school of grammar – the idea that language, written or especially oral, that does not hew tightly to the strict rules of English grammar, is inferior to “proper” English. He points out how supposed errors like ending sentences in prepositions actually date back centuries in common usage

There is, of course, a self-serving aspect to proper grammar – signalling. It’s difficult to gauge someone’s educational background without seeing a resume, and difficult to gauge someone’ s intelligence without extensive conversation (if it’s even possible then), so we send out and read signals that become proxies for things like intelligence, education, or even old-fashioned notions like “good breeding.” Attire is one. Accent may be another. Grammar is a third. When you meet someone who speaks proper English, you will likely notice, even subconsciously, whereas someone who can’t match verb and subject – even though the meaning of “he don’t got” is perfectly clear – will drop a notch or two in your estimation, whether you know it or not. Good grammarians, recognizing this, may seek to protect their turf by defending grammar as necessary to the survival of the language. McWhorter says, with some merit, that this is absurd: As long as meaning is clear, grammar isn’t that critical, and besides, all languages evolve over time, both in grammar and in vocabulary, so what is considered bad grammar today could easily become accepted usage in a few decades.

But beyond that, there’s value in having a standard grammar and insisting on some level that people hew to it, for simple reasons of comprehension. A universal set of rules for a language allows us to communicate effectively through written and oral means because we use grammar to fill in the missing context in sentences that are either complex or that leave out details provided in early sentences or paragraphs. In Italian and Spanish, the speaker/writer can omit the subject pronoun because the ending on the verb makes it clear who the subject is. Make the grammatical error and you lose clarity, so the reader has to go back to figure out who’s verbing, or the listener has to either accept his confusion or stop the speaker to ask for clarification.

I have also generally found text with bad grammar cacophonous, making it both slower and less pleasant to read than “proper” text. A misplaced modifier usually means I have to re-read a sentence, and an incorrect word choice – say, “flaunting” the rules rather than “flouting” them – is sort of like hearing a glass shatter in the background as I’m trying to read. We become accustomed to seeing or hearing the language operating within the rules of its grammar, and when someone flouts them (sorry), it affects our ability to understand or to move smoothly through the spoken or written text.

Our Magnificant Bastard Tongue does lapse occasionally into linguistics jargon, and I could see the Celtic/English chapter being dull to anyone not interested in languages, but McWhorter tries to keep it light with some humor and a healthy dose of snark directed at linguists who (in his view) refuse to see the obvious signs of connections between English and Celtic and English and the Vikings’ language.

Back before the dish existed – B.D.? – I reviewed McWhorter’s The Power of Babel, a more general-interest book on the history of human languages.

I’m all screwed up in terms of what I’m reviewing next, but I am almost halfway through reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.