Posted: Apr 05, 2020 5:38 am
1. The Bilingual Mind and What it Tells us About language and Thought - Aneta Pavlenko
2. Social Interaction and L2 Classroom Discourse - Olcay Sert
3. The Grammar of Knowledge: A Cross-Linguistic Typology - Alexandra Aikhenvald and R.M.W. Dixon (Eds.)
4. Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically : Interactional and Contextual Theories of Human Sense-Making – Per Linnel
5. Salvation - Peter F Hamilton
6. The Expression of Negation - Laurence R. Horn (Ed.)
7. Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind - Arthur Zajon
8. Bad Words and What They Say About Us - Philip Gooden
9 & 10. Tintin on the Moon - Herge
11. The East, the West and Sex: A History = Richard Bernstein
12. A Pragmatic Approach to English Language Teaching and Production - Lala U. Takeda and Megumi Okugiri (Eds.)
13. Salvation Lost - Peter F. Hamilton
14. The Written Language Bias in Linguistics: Its Nature, Origins and Transformations- Per Linnel
15. Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart - Jim Dawson
16. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue - John McWhorter
230 pp.
I have read several books by McWhorter over the years and he is a clear and accessible writer who wears his scholarship lightly.
This book was no exception.
In this book the author takes on the history of English and investigates the reasons why English is such an outlier among other European languages. The lack of grammatical gender stands in stark contrast to French, German, Russian, Spanish and all the rest. For English speakers tackling those languages there is always the massive embuggeration of matching each and every noun to a gender.
(A recent video I watched on YouTube had a fluent English/ French bilingual Brit saying that although he is often good enough to be mistaken for a native speaker of French, he still fucks up the genders!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz0XgAKR9Oc
Likewise, the relative lack of case marking in English. Pronouns vary a bit ('I' subject becomes 'me' object) but apart from that, word order bears a lot of the weight in English. Dog bites man and man bites dog vary the meaning by word order alone.
If you've ever had a crack at Russian, you'll know that the witch's brew of forms for number, gender and case on verbs, nouns, adjectives, relative pronouns and what not, makes it a bewildering maze for English speakers.
There is also the case of the weird use of the English use of the word 'do' in negative statements and in questions. My Japanese students have ongoing problems with this. "I not know the answer" and " Where you went?" are typical errors.
McWhorter details how the auxiliary 'do' seems to be a borrowing from the Celtic languages that were here when the Anglo-Saxons decided to pay a visit.
After integrating this Celtic form into the language, another bunch of adventurous seafarers (The Vikings) decided to come calling and made a bit of a hash of learning the language spoken by the locals. Over time this mix stripped the language of many of its bells and whistles (case marking, grammatical gender and what not). The written form of the language went underground for a bit after the unpleasantness of 1066 and when it emerged again a couple of hundred years later, there it was - an outlier among its mainland brethren in its lack of features that are commonplace in other languages from the Baltic to the Aegean.
The author goes a step further back in time and examines the Proto-Germanic language from which English and many of the other northern European languages derived. It turns out that this language (spoken about 500 B.C.E) was already a bit of an outlier among the Indo-European languages that had descended from the original P.I.E. Some of the sound shifts (P>F (Pater > Father)) are exceedingly rare elsewhere and quite a lot of core Germanic vocabulary is not from PIE. He suggests, a bit controversially, that early Phonecians may have had an effect on these early Northern Europeans. I'm not convinced that this is the case one way or another, but it does seem to be that case that Proto-Germanic was an outlier among the other daughters of Proto-Indo-European, and that English is a further outlier within the Germanic sub-group.
Trying to see your own language from the outside in is a difficult thing to do. This book is a good, readable and humorous take on this thing we call English, revealing it to be familiar and strange at the same time.
2. Social Interaction and L2 Classroom Discourse - Olcay Sert
3. The Grammar of Knowledge: A Cross-Linguistic Typology - Alexandra Aikhenvald and R.M.W. Dixon (Eds.)
4. Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically : Interactional and Contextual Theories of Human Sense-Making – Per Linnel
5. Salvation - Peter F Hamilton
6. The Expression of Negation - Laurence R. Horn (Ed.)
7. Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind - Arthur Zajon
8. Bad Words and What They Say About Us - Philip Gooden
9 & 10. Tintin on the Moon - Herge
11. The East, the West and Sex: A History = Richard Bernstein
12. A Pragmatic Approach to English Language Teaching and Production - Lala U. Takeda and Megumi Okugiri (Eds.)
13. Salvation Lost - Peter F. Hamilton
14. The Written Language Bias in Linguistics: Its Nature, Origins and Transformations- Per Linnel
15. Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart - Jim Dawson
16. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue - John McWhorter
230 pp.
I have read several books by McWhorter over the years and he is a clear and accessible writer who wears his scholarship lightly.
This book was no exception.
In this book the author takes on the history of English and investigates the reasons why English is such an outlier among other European languages. The lack of grammatical gender stands in stark contrast to French, German, Russian, Spanish and all the rest. For English speakers tackling those languages there is always the massive embuggeration of matching each and every noun to a gender.
(A recent video I watched on YouTube had a fluent English/ French bilingual Brit saying that although he is often good enough to be mistaken for a native speaker of French, he still fucks up the genders!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz0XgAKR9Oc
Likewise, the relative lack of case marking in English. Pronouns vary a bit ('I' subject becomes 'me' object) but apart from that, word order bears a lot of the weight in English. Dog bites man and man bites dog vary the meaning by word order alone.
If you've ever had a crack at Russian, you'll know that the witch's brew of forms for number, gender and case on verbs, nouns, adjectives, relative pronouns and what not, makes it a bewildering maze for English speakers.
There is also the case of the weird use of the English use of the word 'do' in negative statements and in questions. My Japanese students have ongoing problems with this. "I not know the answer" and " Where you went?" are typical errors.
McWhorter details how the auxiliary 'do' seems to be a borrowing from the Celtic languages that were here when the Anglo-Saxons decided to pay a visit.
After integrating this Celtic form into the language, another bunch of adventurous seafarers (The Vikings) decided to come calling and made a bit of a hash of learning the language spoken by the locals. Over time this mix stripped the language of many of its bells and whistles (case marking, grammatical gender and what not). The written form of the language went underground for a bit after the unpleasantness of 1066 and when it emerged again a couple of hundred years later, there it was - an outlier among its mainland brethren in its lack of features that are commonplace in other languages from the Baltic to the Aegean.
The author goes a step further back in time and examines the Proto-Germanic language from which English and many of the other northern European languages derived. It turns out that this language (spoken about 500 B.C.E) was already a bit of an outlier among the Indo-European languages that had descended from the original P.I.E. Some of the sound shifts (P>F (Pater > Father)) are exceedingly rare elsewhere and quite a lot of core Germanic vocabulary is not from PIE. He suggests, a bit controversially, that early Phonecians may have had an effect on these early Northern Europeans. I'm not convinced that this is the case one way or another, but it does seem to be that case that Proto-Germanic was an outlier among the other daughters of Proto-Indo-European, and that English is a further outlier within the Germanic sub-group.
Trying to see your own language from the outside in is a difficult thing to do. This book is a good, readable and humorous take on this thing we call English, revealing it to be familiar and strange at the same time.