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John McWhorter, The Week, December 20, 2015

English speakers know that their language is odd. So do
nonspeakers saddled with learning it. The oddity that we all perceive most
readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where
English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a spelling bee. For a normal
language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people
pronounce the words. But English is not normal.

Even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in
ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States
and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. Our monolingual
tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our
language feels “normal” only until you get a sense of what normal really is.

There is no other language, for example, that is close
enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without
training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that,
as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can
get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian. If you know
that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out
what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.
But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find Frisian more
like German, which it is.

We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages
assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats
and such. But actually, it’s we who are odd: Almost all European languages
belong to one family–Indo-European–and of all of them, English is the only
one that doesn’t assign genders.

More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth
whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third-person
singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talks–why? The
present-tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of
different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). And try naming another language
where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do
you find that difficult?

Why is our language so eccentric? Just what is this thing we’re
speaking, and what happened to make it this way?

English started out as, essentially, a kind of German. Old
English is so unlike the modern version that it’s a stretch to think of them as
the same language. Hwæt, we gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym
gefrunon–does that really mean “So, we Spear-Danes have heard of the
tribe-kings’ glory in days of yore”? Icelanders can still read similar stories
written in the Old Norse ancestor of their language 1,000 years ago, and yet,
to the untrained English-speaker’s eye, Beowulf might as well be in Turkish.

The first thing that got us from there to here was the fact
that when the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (and also Frisians) brought Germanic
speech to England, the island was already inhabited by people who spoke Celtic
languages–today represented by Welsh and Irish, and Breton across the Channel
in France. The Celts were subjugated but survived, and since there were only
about 250,000 Germanic invaders, very quickly most of the people speaking Old
English were Celts.

Crucially, their own Celtic was quite unlike English. For
one thing, the verb came first (came first the verb). Also, they had an odd
construction with the verb do: They used it to form a question, to make a
sentence negative, and even just as a kind of seasoning before any verb. Do you
walk? I do not walk. I do walk. That looks familiar now because the Celts
started doing it in their rendition of English. But before that, such sentences
would have seemed bizarre to an English speaker–as they would today in just
about any language other than our own and the surviving Celtic ones.

At this date there is no documented language on Earth beyond
Celtic and English that uses do in just this way. Thus English’s weirdness
began with its transformation in the mouths of people more at home with vastly
different tongues. We’re still talking like them, and in ways we’d never think
of. When saying “eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” have you ever felt like you were kind
of counting? Well, you are–in Celtic numbers, chewed up over time but
recognizably descended from the ones rural Britishers used when counting
animals and playing games. “Hickory, dickory, dock”–what in the world do those
words mean? Well, here’s a clue: hovera, dovera, dick were eight, nine, and ten
in that same Celtic counting list.

The second thing that happened was that yet more
Germanic-speakers came across the sea meaning business. This wave began in the
9th century, and this time the invaders were speaking another Germanic
offshoot, Old Norse. But they didn’t impose their language. Instead, they married
local women and switched to English. However, they were adults and, as a rule,
adults don’t pick up new languages easily, especially not in oral societies.
There was no such thing as school, and no media. Learning a new language meant
listening hard and trying your best.

As long as the invaders got their meaning across, that was
fine. But you can do that with a highly approximate rendition of a
language–the legibility of the Frisian sentence you just read proves as much.
So the Scandinavians did more or less what we would expect: They spoke bad Old
English. Their kids heard as much of that as they did real Old English. Life
went on, and pretty soon their bad Old English was real English, and here we
are today: The Norse made English easier.

I should make a qualification here. In linguistics circles
it’s risky to call one language easier than another one. But some languages
plainly jangle with more bells and whistles than others. If someone were told
he had a year to get as good at either Russian or Hebrew as possible, and would
lose a fingernail for every mistake he made during a three-minute test of his
competence, only the masochist would choose Russian–unless he already happened
to speak a language related to it. In that sense, English is “easier” than
other Germanic languages, and it’s because of those Vikings.

Old English had the crazy genders we would expect of a good
European language–but the Scandinavians didn’t bother with those, and so now
we have none. What’s more, the Vikings mastered only that one shred of a once
lovely conjugation system: Hence the lonely third-person singular -s, hanging
on like a dead bug on a windshield. Here and in other ways, they smoothed out
the hard stuff.

They also left their mark on English grammar. Blissfully, it
is becoming rare to be taught that it is wrong to say Which town do you come
from?–ending with the preposition instead of laboriously squeezing it before
the wh-word to make From which town do you come? In English, sentences with “dangling
prepositions” are perfectly natural and clear and harm no one. Yet there is a
wet-fish issue with them, too: Normal languages don’t dangle prepositions in
this way. Every now and then a language allows it: an indigenous one in Mexico,
another in Liberia. But that’s it. Overall, it’s an oddity. Yet, wouldn’t you
know, it’s a construction that Old Norse also happened to permit (and that
modern Danish retains).

We can display all these bizarre Norse influences in a
single sentence. Say That’s the man you walk in with, and it’s odd because (1)
the has no specifically masculine form to match man, (2) there’s no ending on
walk, and (3) you don’t say in with whom you walk. All that strangeness is
because of what Scandinavian Vikings did to good old English back in the day.

Finally, as if all this weren’t enough, English got hit by a
fire-hose 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 and ruled for several centuries, and before long, English had picked up
10,000 new words. Then, starting in the 16th century, educated Anglophones
began to develop English as a vehicle for sophisticated writing, and 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.” 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/commence and want/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 laborers did the slaughtering for moneyed French
speakers at the 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.

The multiple influxes of foreign vocabulary 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.”

Because of this fire-hose 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 an ending to the word modern
and the ending pulls the accent along 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 English is indeed an odd language, and its spelling is
only the beginning of it. 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.