gender marking, but after that it’s smooth sailing.
Nonsense. English really is easy(-ish) at first and hard later, while other languages like Russian are hard at first and then just as hard later ! Show me one person who has said that learning Russian was no problem after they mastered the basics—after the basics, you just keep wondering how anybody could speak the language without blacking out. English is truly different. Why?
Not because so many immigrants have learned it, either amid the British slave trade or later in America. We must always ask: in our modern world, how would the way the language is spoken by subordinate people, usually ridiculed as “bad grammar,” make its way into how middle-class native-born people spoke, and especially how they wrote? Some words, maybe—but as always, grammar is key. There is the way the Bosnian cabdriver speaks English now—and then there is the way the people on National Public Radio talk. Just how would Zlatko the cabdriver’s locutions affect how Terry Gross expresses herself? Obviously, not at all—even if there were millions of Zlatkos.
Besides, English drifted into its streamlined state long before the colonial era, when it was still a language only occasionally written in, and spoken by only some millions of people on a single island. The reason English is easy is a story which, like the Celtic one, traditional linguists have missed most of, in favor of seeing an uncanny number of developments in the same direction as “just happening,” though they are unheard-of in any other Germanic language or, often, anywhere on earth.
Namely, the Danes and Scandinavians who invaded and settled Britain starting in the eighth century battered not only people, monasteries, and legal institutions, but the English language itself.
Before we go on, by the way, don’t worry that “Germanic” means keeping track of twelve vastly different tongues. Really, just think of it as four.
The first “language” is Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, sometimes called Mainland Scandinavian. These three are variants of the same language; their speakers can converse.
The second language is Dutch. “Dutch” for us can include Frisian, a close relative, and Afrikaans, which is Dutch after centuries of separate development in South Africa.
The third language is High German. Yiddish is an offshoot of what also became High German, and is in essence a German dialect with a lot of words from Slavic and Hebrew. Some Yiddish scholars bristle when you say that, but it’s true, with all due respect for Yiddish’s position in a culture quite separate from the Teutonic one. So you can just think, for our purposes, of “German.”
Finally, there is Icelandic. Faroese is so similar to it that you can just think of a general “Icelandic.”
That really is all you need: Volvos, Vermeers, Volkswagens, and Volcanoes.
The Tip of the Iceberg: Suffixes
Traditional scholarship on The History of English recognizes that the Vikings played a part in a single thing that happened to English besides words, words, words. Namely, as we have seen, Old English shed a lot of endings in its day, such that in comparison Middle English seems like one of those nearly hairless cats.
It happened on verbs as well as nouns. Where in Modern English we have I love , you love, he loves, we love, where the only ending is the third person one with its -s , Old English had ic luf-ie , þū luf-ast, hē luf-að, wē luf-iað. (Quick sidebar on something we’ll see a lot of in this chapter—nothing hard: in Old English spelling, þ was the th sound in thin , and ð was the th sound in this .)
It is more or less accepted that the Vikings must have had something to do with this. Modern Danish and Norwegian didn’t exist yet; rather, the Vikings spoke the ancestor of those languages, an early branch of Proto-Germanic called Old Norse. Old Norse was, like Old English, a language all ajangle with suffixes like
Nonsense. English really is easy(-ish) at first and hard later, while other languages like Russian are hard at first and then just as hard later ! Show me one person who has said that learning Russian was no problem after they mastered the basics—after the basics, you just keep wondering how anybody could speak the language without blacking out. English is truly different. Why?
Not because so many immigrants have learned it, either amid the British slave trade or later in America. We must always ask: in our modern world, how would the way the language is spoken by subordinate people, usually ridiculed as “bad grammar,” make its way into how middle-class native-born people spoke, and especially how they wrote? Some words, maybe—but as always, grammar is key. There is the way the Bosnian cabdriver speaks English now—and then there is the way the people on National Public Radio talk. Just how would Zlatko the cabdriver’s locutions affect how Terry Gross expresses herself? Obviously, not at all—even if there were millions of Zlatkos.
Besides, English drifted into its streamlined state long before the colonial era, when it was still a language only occasionally written in, and spoken by only some millions of people on a single island. The reason English is easy is a story which, like the Celtic one, traditional linguists have missed most of, in favor of seeing an uncanny number of developments in the same direction as “just happening,” though they are unheard-of in any other Germanic language or, often, anywhere on earth.
Namely, the Danes and Scandinavians who invaded and settled Britain starting in the eighth century battered not only people, monasteries, and legal institutions, but the English language itself.
Before we go on, by the way, don’t worry that “Germanic” means keeping track of twelve vastly different tongues. Really, just think of it as four.
The first “language” is Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, sometimes called Mainland Scandinavian. These three are variants of the same language; their speakers can converse.
The second language is Dutch. “Dutch” for us can include Frisian, a close relative, and Afrikaans, which is Dutch after centuries of separate development in South Africa.
The third language is High German. Yiddish is an offshoot of what also became High German, and is in essence a German dialect with a lot of words from Slavic and Hebrew. Some Yiddish scholars bristle when you say that, but it’s true, with all due respect for Yiddish’s position in a culture quite separate from the Teutonic one. So you can just think, for our purposes, of “German.”
Finally, there is Icelandic. Faroese is so similar to it that you can just think of a general “Icelandic.”
That really is all you need: Volvos, Vermeers, Volkswagens, and Volcanoes.
The Tip of the Iceberg: Suffixes
Traditional scholarship on The History of English recognizes that the Vikings played a part in a single thing that happened to English besides words, words, words. Namely, as we have seen, Old English shed a lot of endings in its day, such that in comparison Middle English seems like one of those nearly hairless cats.
It happened on verbs as well as nouns. Where in Modern English we have I love , you love, he loves, we love, where the only ending is the third person one with its -s , Old English had ic luf-ie , þū luf-ast, hē luf-að, wē luf-iað. (Quick sidebar on something we’ll see a lot of in this chapter—nothing hard: in Old English spelling, þ was the th sound in thin , and ð was the th sound in this .)
It is more or less accepted that the Vikings must have had something to do with this. Modern Danish and Norwegian didn’t exist yet; rather, the Vikings spoke the ancestor of those languages, an early branch of Proto-Germanic called Old Norse. Old Norse was, like Old English, a language all ajangle with suffixes like
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