Reddit mentions of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

That's a really interesting question. You might want to take this to /r/linguistics. The change seems to have occurred when Old English (spoken c. 500AD-1100AD) formed out of Proto-Germanic (spoken c. 500BC-500AD).

In Proto-Germanic, the sentences would've been something like this (obviously, I'm not translating everything, just giving you a rough idea):

• This is *es car, ask *immai. (Two different words)
  
  
• This is *ezōz car, ask *ezōi. (Two different words)
  
  In Old English, they would've looked like this:
  
  
• This is his car, ask him. (Two different words)
  
  
• This is hire car, ask hire. (Same word)
  
  Why, I'm not sure. We may not even know - change just happens in languages, sometimes for no reason at all. However, we do know that, the farther back you go in English's history, back through Old English and Proto-Germanic, all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, you can see that noun cases have been dropping like flies. We used to have a very complex system of cases, and now we only have remnants of that (his/him, I/me, etc). You might be interested in reading Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter, which goes into some hypotheses as to why English has simplified so much.

Probably Germanic actually.

English: What, where, when. That, there, then.

German: Was, wo, wann. Das, da, dann.

Spanish: Que, donde, cuando. Eso, ahi, entonces.

EDIT: Germanic, not German. I've also corrected the words based on people who speak better German and Spanish than myself. Anyone who is interest in the orgin of English as a language should check out this book It shows how English, more so than other languages, is a real bastard tongue which combines Germanic, Latin, and Celtic languages.

Read this book by John McWhorter.

When people learn a second language, the structural differences between the first and second languages tend to be the hardest to pick up. For example, if your first language doesn't have honorific speech levels like Japanese or Korean, then you may never pick them up if you can communicate (albeit roughly) without them. Another example might be a complex case system like Russian. If you can make yourself understood in the second language without all the subtlety of total mastery then you may never take the time (or even be able) to master it.

The history of England (and the British Isles in general) is one of repeated invasion. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes displaced the Britons. The Vikings invaded and displaced the locals. Then the Normans invaded a thousand years ago and replaced the elite. Each invasion and displacement rubbed away some of the complexities as locals and invaders alike learned to communicate, and each introduced a layer of vocabulary. As a consequence, English now has very few of the grammatical features that make Germanic languages Germanic. John McWhorter put it like this:

> English's Germanic relatives are like assorted varieties of deer - antelopes, springboks, kudu, and so on - antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme. English is some dolphin swooping around underwater, all but hairless, echolocating and holding its breath. Dolphins are mammals like deer: they give birth to live young and are warm-blooded. But clearly the dolphin has strayed from the basic mammalian game plan to an extent that no deer has.

For a very easy introduction to English (and the source of that wonderful analogy) see Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.

> The evidence for Celtic is sketchy, though not entirely without merit.

I'd recommend this book.

He talks a lot about the relationship between English and Celtic languages, and is quite convincing.

John McWhorter's book has a chapter on it. It's written for a popular audience, and it gives the standard arguments. Personally, I'm not convinced by it, but it's easy to read, that's for sure. A lot of scholarship on this can get quite technical, and it's quite easy to fool those who don't actually know a Brittonic language.

its arguable. The basic rule I would advise people is that if you can spell it logically it is latin based. If you can't spell it logically its german. If the verb changes tense in the middle of the word, then its of semetic origin, as all germanic strong verbs are.

If you are curious please see:

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412209131&sr=8-1&keywords=our+glorious+bastard+tongue

The book will actually make you laugh. Well written.

As the poster below said, that's a borrowed word from Old Norse (The Vikings raided England and actually ruled the island for a few years almost a millennium ago. The show Vikings depicts this event.) .

There's actually a good book about the history of English, with a great name. "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue". The tl;dr is in the title: English has a lot of words borrowed from other languages.

https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944

As for stuff like "Knight" of "Thought", the "gh" used to be pronounced like the "ch" back of the throat sound in "blech" but it eventually got dropped.

Then there's the famous "Vowel Shift" which changed how basically every vowel was pronounced, which was most likely influenced by the large number of borrowed words in the middle ages.

http://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/history_early_modern.html

This is a pretty good book ... Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

Thanks for the info! Linguistics is fascinating to me. Especially since you used the word bastard to describe English, I'm reminded of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter. It's one of my favorite books and it does try to explain why the impact of other languages was seemingly higher on English. It's very entertaining too and not just "...for a linguistics book".

Though If you listen to McWhorter there's a whole lot of other Celtic words that we don't usually regard as such. Which has always made sense to me. I never understood how Celtic languages were supposed to have had 0 influence on English given the history of pre-existing populations before the Anglo-Saxons came in.

You may like this book in that case! It's a good read

Are you sure about that? I'm not very learned yet, but I read one of John McWhorter's books and pretty much the whole thing is him talking about how there are certain grammatical concepts like 'do' that had to come from Celtic languages. After all it's a pretty unique thing and the Celtic languages are the only ones that have something just like it. And in any case, Early Modern English sounds like way too late for it to appear. I think I remember reading that those grammatical trends were incorporated into spoken English pretty much immediately, although they didn't show up in writing until a couple centuries after the Norman Invasion, when people started to actually write in English again.

1. I'm American and have no issue with your spelling (for the record). We have some dialectic differences and I think it's what makes each population just that much more unique.
   
   
2. This is a great book related to this subject.

Did you know Amazon will donate a portion of every purchase if you shop by going to smile.amazon.com instead? Over $50,000,000 has been raised for charity - all you need to do is change the URL!

Here are your smile-ified links:

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

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absolutely. language is constantly evolving and rules are determined purely by consensus.

I'm particularly interested in a quirk of english where you end a sentence in "that" or "they".

e.g. "trolls... solitary creatures, they"
or
"fucking interesting, that."

no clue what you'd call it but I bet that syntax has an interesting history.

also check out this book. we get a lot of fun quirks of english compared to other germanic language because of the Celts
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944

It sounds like you had formal education with multiple years studying the language. Everything worth achieving takes time and effort. You have put in a ton of 'mental reps.'

Good for you. Don't discount your achievements. I tell my daughters the same thing, just because you can do something or know something doesn't mean it easy and it doesn't mean that someone who cannot do it or doesn't know it is lesser or put in less effort. It is easy for you (now), because you have mastered or are on your way to mastering it.

There are native speakers who don't understand or properly use the subjunctive. That doesn't even get into the whole argument that helping verbs aren't necessary and appear to be slowly falling out of use.

If you are interested, and it sounds as though you might be the type of person who would be, a great read is https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944

Check out Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter if you haven't already. It's a fascinating read and it illuminates many of the idiosyncrasies of English and how they came to be here.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is one of my favorite books. It's such a short and easy read, too! I see it for low, low prices at Barnes and Nobles all the time.

Like I said, I find his theory dubious at best. He also suggested that the Grimm's Law shift which changed p to f was also due to Semitic influence, despite the fact that it is in fact a very common sound shift in all sorts of languages, and in fact occurred again in High German languages in the Middle Ages.

In case you were wondering, this is the book I'm referring to http://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404495707&sr=1-2&keywords=john+mcwhorter

John McWhorter wrote a really solid book about how all the invasions of England warped and shaped the language called Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. Definitely check it out if you get a chance.

It used too. Old English was a gendered language.
After getting invaded by everyone else in Europe and all living near each other one of the things that changed was use the of gendered nouns.


Interesting book on the development of modern English
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944