A clear (if personal) history of how English came to be.

I loved the author’s erudition and passion: it did come over as a rather partisan with regard to traditional theories.

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I read good the book

it was a bit hard getting your head round old Germanic why of talking, glad I speak English, very informative.

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Brilliant and insightful

This book was a great listen just as it was a great read the first time, it has thought me a lot about the English language as a whole and I would recommend it to anyone

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Brilliant!

Well written, well narrated and witty. Captivating and gripping from start to finish. This has changed the way I think about the English language and it will continue to do so in the future. Well done, John McWhorter!

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A polymath with a great sense of humour.

There's so much detail and analysis of this interesting topic that it makes your head spin! His grasp of what seems like dozens of languages and countless aspects of history, geography, psychology, etc marks him as one of the leading thinkers of our time. I would trust his opinion on almost any subject, given the uncompromising thoroughness and fairness of his reasoning and the clarity of his narrative.

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Compelling and Persuasive

McWhorter is a brilliant linguist and a skilled communicator. He has much to say and he's well worth listening to. Amongst his others audiobooks is a set of lectures which makes a good introduction to the subject, entitled "The Story of Human Language".

In this book, his personally revised history of English, he presents a compelling case that the most interesting thing about English is not the etymology of its words but the origin of its somewhat unique grammar both within the family of Germanic languages and within languages in general. From what he says, and he says this rather repetitively, the conventional histories of English largely ignore its grammar and when they do visit grammatical issues the explanations given are wan and unconvincing, as though English underwent various changes by some mysterious and unknowable whim otherwise called happenstance. Well the Prof. ain't too happy with that explanation! Oh no! He explains repeatedly that the changes seen in English grammar from Proto Germanic to Modern English have perfectly good explanations. And he is good enough to share his views with us. Its as if he is liberating himself from some sort of academic duress which leads him to repeatedly justify his conclusions even though they seem perfectly reasonable, even compelling to the uninititiated listener. Given his jocular and casual communication style this repetition can become a bit irritating. But its wholly worthwhile staying with the audiobook all the way through.

As for the substance of his argument, he argues that English has been much affected grammatically by the adjacent Celtic speaking communities of Cornwall and Wales. In particular, this explains the use of the meaningless "Do" verb in English and our frequent use of participles ending in "ing". In English we would say "Did you like it?" but "Liked you it?" is a much more normal grammatical construct. Similarly "Will you be walking?" compared to "Will you walk?". As for the loss in English of gender, cases, suffixes, reflexive verbs and & other grammatical features the explanation here is the proximity of the invading Vikings, that is the Danelaw, when England was half ruled by the Danes and half by the Anglo-Saxons. This meant that two close descendants of Proto Germanic were living side by side and when you have two very similar languages next to each other it can cause confusion, resulting in a loss of suffixes and so forth. Not sure this is the Prof's own theory as have read this before.

He goes on to point out that written English in earlier centuries or even today is not always a good indication of how people actually speak a language. In other words that written texts tend to lag behind the spoken language, using older more conservative forms. He also argues that when a nation is conquered by an elite, that elite does not necessarily communicate with the conquered people directly and so may not affect their language much. Instead they may communicate their will through a few deputies and translators. And the Norman invasion of 1066 may well be an example of this phenomenon.

In McWhorter's phrase, English grammar came about by being beaten up by invaders, traders and neighbours. They were busy people who had other things to think about than the niceties of each other's grammars and so the much simpler grammar of English came about by accident. And perhaps most interesting of all, not only did English experience this transformation, but so did Proto Germanic itself, although at an earlier time. The evidence for this comprises the fact that Proto Germanic has a simpler grammar in terms of cases and verb moods than many other Indo European languages including Latin, Slav and Celtic. Furthermore, a sizeable proportion of its vocabulary can't be traced easily to Indo European roots and seems more similar to Phonecian a Semitic language. The word "Sea" as opposed to Indo European "Mare" is an example. And archaeological evidence shows that the Phonecians apparently did trade all the way up into the North Sea. So they may well have set up a trading post or even colony on the misty shores of what is now Denmark and Holland.

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Absolute Americanised nonsense

An American voice, allegedly a linguist, mispronouncing English and Welsh (and likely several other languages) in a manner so irritating that I cannot listen past chapter 2.
The author uses his disproving of assumptions held widely in poorly educated America, to demonstrate his knowledge as a revelation to the reader, when those of us educated in the history of England and Wales already know that the Celts were not exterminated in a mass genocide, in fact much of their language, arts and culture remain today.
These inaccuracies outweigh the valid points regarding the formation and adaptation of the language into what we now call English, which again, this American author and narrator speaks poorly with far too many Americanisms.
My final statement being; in my opinion, Americans do not speak English, they speak American English. Therefore this book should be read in that context.

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2 people found this helpful