Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, John McWhorter (Avery, 2009). Knew you that John McWhorter has a day job? When he writes not his column for the New York Times, nor podcasts with Glenn Loury, nor opines about race and wokeness in America, he is a professional linguist.
Another great review and discussion! I would add that Adam Smith makes much the same case as McWhorter here regarding the simplification of language by adult learners dropping the tricky bits in Smith's "Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages." Effectively his argument is that more isolated nations can create highly detailed and complex language systems because everyone learns them early so super precise and accurate grammar is fine, but with societies that interact frequently or otherwise mix with outsiders the rules of grammar begin to simplify down to what everyone can handle. It is part mixing and borrowing and part normalization of simpler forms to normalize the language among many people who can't get all the fine points done right.
"But anyone learning Latin, or German, or Russian — probably the languages with case markings most commonly studied by English-speakers — has to contend with a handful of grammatical cases. And then, of course, there’s Hungarian."
This actually does not make much difference. To stick a "to" in front of a word and call it a preposition or to stick -ba at the end of the word and call it an allative grammatical case, neither is more complicated than the other. If measured in effort to learn or effort to use.
Now the lack of grammatical gender is indeed an important thing, as these features are useless, they convey no information. Perhaps they used to, der Rock for skirt is masculine because it used to mean a kind of robe or cloak for men. But it means nothing at all that die Kapitalismus and die Sozialismus are both female.
"But wait! There’s more! Because the Germanic languages have another weird feature: strong verbs. These are the ones where you make the past tense not by adding “-ed” to the end but by changing the vowel, and which it takes a child years to master: no, you didn’t “drinked” your milk, you “drank” it. Again, this is something foreign to most Indo-European languages, but familiar to Semitic ones (sort of — the Semitic triconsonantal root system is much more complicated than “you change the vowel to make it past,” but does include that).19 And hey, just like English has way fewer endings and cases than any other Germanic language, Proto-Germanic has way fewer endings and cases than any other contemporary Indo-European language! And Proto-Germanic has all kinds of ocean-related borrowings that don’t appear to be cognate with words in other Indo-European language
But ablaut is found in PIE, and in non Germanic European languages, including some Celtic ones.
No, it's common in other IE languages. In Latin it manifests more often as differences in vowel length: video/vīdi, but also in vowel quality: ago/ēgi. In Latin as in Germanic, the pattern of ablaut is obscured by later changes; it is much more evident in ancient Greek and Sanskrit. In any case, the development of Proto-Germanic strong verb patterns from IE ablaut follows the regular developments in sound; there is neither need nor reason to posit a Semitic influence at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_strong_verb#Strong_verb_classes
Mind you, it's quite likely that the Germanic languages developed from the variety of PIE (or a slightly later form) spoken by a non-Indo-European-speaking people who took the language for whatever reason; somewhere around a fourth to a third of common Germanic vocabulary cannot be shown to have IE roots, indicating a non-IE substrate. The common Germanic consonantal changes (Grimm's First Law) are thought to reflect the pronunciation of that substrate. However, they are more likely to reflect the development of a more phonetically natural system than PIE had, as it was highly unbalanced and weird (probably reflecting earlier developments from a more normal system--it had voiced, voiceless unaspirate, and voiced aspirate consonants, and the last of these were marked by two distinct features, which was simplified in all daughter languages except Sanskrit, where the system was balanced out by the development of voiceless aspirates from clusters of voiceless stops and laryngeals, a variety of h-sounds that disappeared in all the daughter languages after playing merry hell with the vowel system, though still attested in Hittite as actual consonants); heavily aspirated consonants are normal enough in the languages of the world, and more importantly can easily develop in any language (you just have to change the time after the release of the blockage of the airflow constituting the consonant and the vibration of the vocal cords in the following vowel, and this easily changes over time, especially when the contrast with other consonants needs to be retained after the other consonants change.
This is good fun! I took two historical linguistics courses in college with Don Ringe, who argued strongly against language contact as a driver of language change. The highlights: deriving proto-Polynesian and noticing that he read Dante in Italian while we took exams. His range could be terrifying, as when he demonstrated the development of Greek grammar with examples from Old Irish and Vedic Sanskrit, from memory.
In any case, Ringe is on the opposite side as McWhorter. I remember we did some exercises that demonstrated how French didn't really affect English in a substantial way, which I was wholly convinced of at the time but don't recall the details of now.
I grew up French-English bilingual (well, I'm Acadian, so really it was a mix...) and I cannot imagine an argument that would convince me that French didn't substantially influence English: maybe not grammatically, but the impact on the vocabulary is profound.
'Chiac', the Acadian pidgin, is notable for applying french grammar to English words, and also using a very archaic French while it's at it. As an example take the sentence "J'ai parké mon char", "I parked my car". 'Park' is not a word in French, and the meaning of 'char' has evolved in France to now mean 'tank' (in the military sense).
For linguists interested in language change, I don't think lexical additions matter that much. What matters to them are vowel shifts and things like that.
This old post by Ringe (about language diversity in prehistoric Europe) gives a good introduction to how historical linguists think and is really interesting: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=980
Another great review and discussion! I would add that Adam Smith makes much the same case as McWhorter here regarding the simplification of language by adult learners dropping the tricky bits in Smith's "Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages." Effectively his argument is that more isolated nations can create highly detailed and complex language systems because everyone learns them early so super precise and accurate grammar is fine, but with societies that interact frequently or otherwise mix with outsiders the rules of grammar begin to simplify down to what everyone can handle. It is part mixing and borrowing and part normalization of simpler forms to normalize the language among many people who can't get all the fine points done right.
"But anyone learning Latin, or German, or Russian — probably the languages with case markings most commonly studied by English-speakers — has to contend with a handful of grammatical cases. And then, of course, there’s Hungarian."
This actually does not make much difference. To stick a "to" in front of a word and call it a preposition or to stick -ba at the end of the word and call it an allative grammatical case, neither is more complicated than the other. If measured in effort to learn or effort to use.
Now the lack of grammatical gender is indeed an important thing, as these features are useless, they convey no information. Perhaps they used to, der Rock for skirt is masculine because it used to mean a kind of robe or cloak for men. But it means nothing at all that die Kapitalismus and die Sozialismus are both female.
"But wait! There’s more! Because the Germanic languages have another weird feature: strong verbs. These are the ones where you make the past tense not by adding “-ed” to the end but by changing the vowel, and which it takes a child years to master: no, you didn’t “drinked” your milk, you “drank” it. Again, this is something foreign to most Indo-European languages, but familiar to Semitic ones (sort of — the Semitic triconsonantal root system is much more complicated than “you change the vowel to make it past,” but does include that).19 And hey, just like English has way fewer endings and cases than any other Germanic language, Proto-Germanic has way fewer endings and cases than any other contemporary Indo-European language! And Proto-Germanic has all kinds of ocean-related borrowings that don’t appear to be cognate with words in other Indo-European language
But ablaut is found in PIE, and in non Germanic European languages, including some Celtic ones.
You're right, but my understanding is that ablaut as a marker of tense is a uniquely Germanic feature.
No, it's common in other IE languages. In Latin it manifests more often as differences in vowel length: video/vīdi, but also in vowel quality: ago/ēgi. In Latin as in Germanic, the pattern of ablaut is obscured by later changes; it is much more evident in ancient Greek and Sanskrit. In any case, the development of Proto-Germanic strong verb patterns from IE ablaut follows the regular developments in sound; there is neither need nor reason to posit a Semitic influence at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_strong_verb#Strong_verb_classes
Mind you, it's quite likely that the Germanic languages developed from the variety of PIE (or a slightly later form) spoken by a non-Indo-European-speaking people who took the language for whatever reason; somewhere around a fourth to a third of common Germanic vocabulary cannot be shown to have IE roots, indicating a non-IE substrate. The common Germanic consonantal changes (Grimm's First Law) are thought to reflect the pronunciation of that substrate. However, they are more likely to reflect the development of a more phonetically natural system than PIE had, as it was highly unbalanced and weird (probably reflecting earlier developments from a more normal system--it had voiced, voiceless unaspirate, and voiced aspirate consonants, and the last of these were marked by two distinct features, which was simplified in all daughter languages except Sanskrit, where the system was balanced out by the development of voiceless aspirates from clusters of voiceless stops and laryngeals, a variety of h-sounds that disappeared in all the daughter languages after playing merry hell with the vowel system, though still attested in Hittite as actual consonants); heavily aspirated consonants are normal enough in the languages of the world, and more importantly can easily develop in any language (you just have to change the time after the release of the blockage of the airflow constituting the consonant and the vibration of the vocal cords in the following vowel, and this easily changes over time, especially when the contrast with other consonants needs to be retained after the other consonants change.
This is good fun! I took two historical linguistics courses in college with Don Ringe, who argued strongly against language contact as a driver of language change. The highlights: deriving proto-Polynesian and noticing that he read Dante in Italian while we took exams. His range could be terrifying, as when he demonstrated the development of Greek grammar with examples from Old Irish and Vedic Sanskrit, from memory.
In any case, Ringe is on the opposite side as McWhorter. I remember we did some exercises that demonstrated how French didn't really affect English in a substantial way, which I was wholly convinced of at the time but don't recall the details of now.
I grew up French-English bilingual (well, I'm Acadian, so really it was a mix...) and I cannot imagine an argument that would convince me that French didn't substantially influence English: maybe not grammatically, but the impact on the vocabulary is profound.
'Chiac', the Acadian pidgin, is notable for applying french grammar to English words, and also using a very archaic French while it's at it. As an example take the sentence "J'ai parké mon char", "I parked my car". 'Park' is not a word in French, and the meaning of 'char' has evolved in France to now mean 'tank' (in the military sense).
For linguists interested in language change, I don't think lexical additions matter that much. What matters to them are vowel shifts and things like that.
This old post by Ringe (about language diversity in prehistoric Europe) gives a good introduction to how historical linguists think and is really interesting: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=980
The second paragraph should begin with 'Separately,'