** Taken from later part of " English is not normal - Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français"
Finally, as if all this wasn’t enough, English got
hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages. After the
Norse came the French. The Normans – descended from the same Vikings, as
it happens – conquered England, ruled for several centuries and, before
long, English had picked up 10,000 new words. Then, starting in the
16th century, educated Anglophones developed a sense of English as a
vehicle of sophisticated writing, and so it became fashionable to
cherry-pick words from Latin to lend the language a more elevated tone.
It was thanks to this influx from French and Latin
(it’s often hard to tell which was the original source of a given word)
that English acquired the likes of crucified, fundamental, definition and conclusion.
These words feel sufficiently English to us today, but when they were
new, many persons of letters in the 1500s (and beyond) considered them
irritatingly pretentious and intrusive, as indeed they would have found
the phrase ‘irritatingly pretentious and intrusive’.
(Think of how
French pedants today turn up their noses at the flood of English words
into their language.) There were even writerly sorts who proposed native
English replacements for those lofty Latinates, and it’s hard not to
yearn for some of these: in place of crucified, fundamental, definition and conclusion, how about crossed, groundwrought, saywhat, and endsay?
But language tends not to do what we want it to. The
die was cast: English had thousands of new words competing with native
English words for the same things. One result was triplets allowing us
to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin. Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin – note how one imagines posture improving with each level: kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.
Then there are doublets, less dramatic than triplets but fun nevertheless, such as the English/French pairs begin and commence, or want and desire. Especially noteworthy here are the culinary
transformations: we kill a cow or a pig (English) to yield beef or pork (French).
Why?
Well, generally in Norman England, English-speaking labourers did
the slaughtering for moneyed French speakers at table. The different
ways of referring to meat depended on one’s place in the scheme of
things, and those class distinctions have carried down to us in discreet
form today.
Caveat lector, though: traditional accounts
of English tend to oversell what these imported levels of formality in
our vocabulary really mean. It is sometimes said that they alone make
the vocabulary of English uniquely rich, which is what Robert McCrum,
William Cran and Robert MacNeil claim in the classic The Story of English
(1986): that the first load of Latin words actually lent Old English
speakers the ability to express abstract thought. But no one has ever
quantified richness or abstractness in that sense (who are the people of
any level of development who evidence no abstract thought, or even no
ability to express it?), and there is no documented language that has
only one word for each concept. Languages, like human cognition, are too
nuanced, even messy, to be so elementary. Even unwritten languages have
formal registers. What’s more, one way to connote formality is with
substitute expressions: English has life as an ordinary word and existence as the fancy one, but in the Native American language Zuni, the fancy way to say life is ‘a breathing into’.
Even in English, native roots do more than we always
recognise. We will only ever know so much about the richness of even
Old English’s vocabulary because the amount of writing that has survived
is very limited. It’s easy to say that comprehend in French gave us a new formal way to say understand
– but then, in Old English itself, there were words that, when rendered
in Modern English, would look something like ‘forstand’, ‘underget’,
and ‘undergrasp’. They all appear to mean ‘understand’, but surely they
had different connotations, and it is likely that those distinctions
involved different degrees of formality.
***
Nevertheless, the Latinate
invasion did leave genuine peculiarities in our language. For instance,
it was here that the idea that ‘big words’ are more sophisticated got
started. In most languages of the world, there is less of a sense that
longer words are ‘higher’ or more specific. In Swahili, Tumtazame mbwa atakavyofanya
simply means ‘Let’s see what the dog will do.’ If formal concepts
required even longer words, then speaking Swahili would require
superhuman feats of breath control. The English notion that big words
are fancier is due to the fact that French and especially Latin words
tend to be longer than Old English ones – end versus conclusion, walk versus ambulate.
The multiple influxes of foreign vocabulary also
partly explain the striking fact that English words can trace to so many
different sources – often several within the same sentence. The very
idea of etymology being a polyglot smorgasbord, each word a fascinating
story of migration and exchange, seems everyday to us. But the roots of a
great many languages are much duller. The typical word comes from,
well, an earlier version of that same word and there it is. The study of
etymology holds little interest for, say, Arabic speakers.
To be fair, mongrel vocabularies are hardly uncommon
worldwide, but English’s hybridity is high on the scale compared with
most European languages. The previous sentence, for example, is a riot
of words from Old English, Old Norse, French and Latin. Greek is another
element: in an alternate universe, we would call photographs
‘lightwriting’. According to a fashion that reached its zenith in the
19th century, scientific things had to be given Greek names. Hence our
undecipherable words for chemicals: why can’t we call monosodium
glutamate ‘one-salt gluten acid’? It’s too late to ask. But this muttly
vocabulary is one of the things that puts such a distance between
English and its nearest linguistic neighbours.
And finally, because of this firehose spray, we
English speakers also have to contend with two different ways of
accenting words. Clip on a suffix to the word wonder, and you get wonderful. But – clip on an ending to the word modern
and the ending pulls the accent ahead with it: MO-dern, but
mo-DERN-ity, not MO-dern-ity. That doesn’t happen with WON-der and
WON-der-ful, or CHEER-y and CHEER-i-ly. But it does happen with
PER-sonal, person-AL-ity.
What’s the difference? It’s that -ful and -ly are Germanic endings, while -ity
came in with French. French and Latin endings pull the accent closer –
TEM-pest, tem-PEST-uous – while Germanic ones leave the accent alone.
One never notices such a thing, but it’s one way this ‘simple’ language
is actually not so.
Thus the story of English, from when it hit British
shores 1,600 years ago to today, is that of a language becoming
delightfully odd. Much more has happened to it in that time than to any
of its relatives, or to most languages on Earth. Here is Old Norse from
the 900s CE, the first lines of a tale in the Poetic Edda called The Lay of Thrym. The lines mean ‘Angry was Ving-Thor/he woke up,’ as in: he was mad when he woke up. In Old Norse it was:
Vreiðr vas Ving-Þórr / es vaknaði.
The same two lines in Old Norse as spoken in modern Icelandic today are:
Reiður var þá Vingþórr / er hann vaknaði.
You don’t need to know Icelandic to see that the language hasn’t changed much. ‘Angry’ was once vreiðr; today’s reiður is the same word with the initial v worn off and a slightly different way of spelling the end. In Old Norse you said vas for was; today you say var – small potatoes.
In Old English, however, ‘Ving-Thor was mad when he woke up’ would have been Wraþmod wæs Ving-Þórr/he áwæcnede. We can just about wrap our heads around this as ‘English’, but we’re clearly a lot further from Beowulf than today’s Reykjavikers are from Ving-Thor.
Thus English is indeed an odd language, and its spelling is only the beginning of it. In the widely read Globish
(2010), McCrum celebrates English as uniquely ‘vigorous’, ‘too sturdy
to be obliterated’ by the Norman Conquest. He also treats English as
laudably ‘flexible’ and ‘adaptable’, impressed by its mongrel
vocabulary. McCrum is merely following in a long tradition of sunny,
muscular boasts, which resemble the Russians’ idea that their language
is ‘great and mighty’, as the 19th-century novelist Ivan Turgenev called
it, or the French idea that their language is uniquely ‘clear’
(Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français).
However, we might be reluctant to identify just
which languages are not ‘mighty’, especially since obscure languages
spoken by small numbers of people are typically majestically complex.
The common idea that English dominates the world because it is
‘flexible’ implies that there have been languages that failed to catch
on beyond their tribe because they were mysteriously rigid. I am not
aware of any such languages.
What English does have on other tongues is that it is deeply peculiar in the structural sense. And it became peculiar because of the slings and arrows – as well as caprices – of outrageous history.
John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics and American studies at Columbia University. His latest book is The Language Hoax (2014).
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