English is not normal, says John McWhorter

In summary: take a look at some of the other differences between English and other languages.As English began as a German dialect, it should come as no surprise that there are many words which are difficult to translate literally. For example, "geardagum" is a difficult word to translate into other languages, as it means both "tribe-kings" and "days of yore." Another difference between English and other languages is the way that words are borrowed. For example, "sassenach" is a word which has been borrowed from French, and is pronounced similarly to "English." However, this is not the only borrowed word which English has borrowed. For example, "brea" is a word which
  • #1
Astronuc
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I just stumbled across an essay by linguist John McWhorter from 2015.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages

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 that Frisian seems more like German, which it is.

English started out as, essentially, a kind of German. Old English is so unlike the modern version that it feels like a stretch to think of them as the same language at all. 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 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 their language to England, the island was already inhabited by people who spoke very different tongues. Their languages were Celtic ones, today represented by Welsh, Irish and Breton across the Channel in France. The Celts were subjugated but survived, and since there were only about 250,000 Germanic invaders – roughly the population of a modest burg such as Jersey City – very quickly most of the people speaking Old English were Celts.
 
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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.

Why the 'for example' in there.
Does the rest of his article sound as confusing too.

Nevertheless, English has no siblings, maybe cousins, since it has borrowed a word or phrase from wherever.
So reading a sentence in english, one may recognize, french, german, american native ( not just one language ), latin, just to name a few. Of course, it stand to reason, anyone would have to familiar with a great many languages, it they did not know english, in order to 'translate' on the fly.
 
  • #4
256bits said:
since it has borrowed a word or phrase from wherever.
A favorite quote of mine, which I am sure I posted before, is from James Nicoll:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary"
 
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  • #5
I really love all these language posts.
Fascinating in all that they entail.
 
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  • #6
jedishrfu said:
Ah cannae ken how come sassenach is sae weel-kent.

http://www.scotranslate.com/

I cannot understand why English is so popular
As spoken 2am downtown Saturday night.
"I cannot know how come sasquash is so weel-kent."
Unfortunately, my 'inebriated to english' translator balked at the term 'weel-kent.
 
  • #7
jedishrfu said:
Ah cannae ken how come sassenach is sae weel-kent.

http://www.scotranslate.com/

I cannot understand why English is so popular
And Google cannae xlate that back to English!

(The only "Scottish" I could find on Google is "SCOTS GAELIC")

Which, given the English, Google comes up with:
Chan urrainn dhomh tuigsinn carson a tha fèill cho mòr air Beurla

ay yi yi!

Anyone have any clues for what's going on?
 
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  • #8
I'd say "weirdly different from other European languages." I have to say it seems easily explained by England being an island. I have for thirteen years lived on islands and their languages seem to me to be at least as "weird" as English. The only thing truly weird about English is that in their borrowing of foreign words they don't usually Anglicize the spelling. So you have words in many different pronunciation schemes. Bad idea. To make it even worse, sometimes they then pronounce the foreign word phonetically, as though it were English.

But I'm used to Japanese. It's such a mess I refused to try to learn it. Balinese is IMO really two languages. The place was conquered long ago and the conquerers still have their own language. Or there's the very complex grammar of Papua. Or Indonesian, which has even more borrowed words than does English. I don't think English is all that unusual. Not unusually unusual.
 
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  • #9
Astronuc said:
I just stumbled across an essay by linguist John McWhorter from 2015.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages
As has been pointed out, McWhorter must consider Scots as an English dialect, rather than a separate language. Let's take the opening stanza of Tam o'Shanter by Robert Burns:

When chapman billies leave the street,
And drouthy neebors neebors meet,
As market-days are wearing late,
And folk begin to tak the gate;
While we sit bousin, at the nappy,
And gettin fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps, and stiles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Whare sits our sulky, sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

Is that too close to English to be a different language?
 
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  • #10
Tom.G said:
Anyone have any clues for what's going on?
Gaelic is a completely different language. There are Scots and Irish Gaelic, which are related but significantly different. Hence the need for qualification as "Scots" Gaelic.

The Scots language itself is probably only considered a dialect of English and has almost died out. There are some in Scotland who want to revive it, but each generation uses fewer Scots words than the previous.
 
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  • #11
Anyone who thinks English is not normal needs to visit Wales for a weekend.
It is nice countryside.
 
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  • #12
... especially around Dwygyfylchi.
 
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  • #13
PeroK said:
... especially around Dwygyfylchi.
My post was a third draft. The first two stood next to, then crossed the line regarding pf rules. Fun to write, fun to read but then sensible to change.

Anyway, Dwygyfychi, I googled to check it was an actual place/word because it looks like random letters thrown together.
It is also on the way to Bangor from my end looking at the map.

The English steal from every language as has been pointed out and I was confident that of all the languages we would not have been able to get anything from the Welsh.

I was wrong, we got flannel, crumpet, pikelet and also penguin to name a few.

Penguin?
 
  • #14
256bits said:
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.

Why the 'for example' in there.
Does the rest of his article sound as confusing too.

Nevertheless, English has no siblings, maybe cousins, since it has borrowed a word or phrase from wherever.
So reading a sentence in english, one may recognize, french, german, american native ( not just one language ), latin, just to name a few. Of course, it stand to reason, anyone would have to familiar with a great many languages, it they did not know english, in order to 'translate' on the fly.
We are an Island and we were lucky to be invaded by so many interesting neighbours over the millennia. They brought war, rape and pillage but also language and culture.
When we finally got our act together by the 12th century (or so) we returned the compliment. To pretty much everyone I think.

The Lingua franca today as you know is English and some of my ancestors wrote some pretty decent books too.
Literature that will live forever.
Tom Sharp, Douglas Adams and of course the greatest Novelist of all time.
J R R Tolkien.
 
  • #15
pinball1970 said:
J R R Tolkien
so he is the kin of Tol, son perhaps. Or belongs to the Tol family from way back when nobody had last names.
Since he is from S. Africa, rather born there, it could be the name comes from the boer ( Dutch )
Are there many Tolkien's in England, and would they all be related in some fashion?
 
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  • #16
British English is getting progressively harder to understand. I've needed subtitles for Doctor Who in the last few years.
 
  • #17
256bits said:
so he is the kin of Tol, son perhaps. Or belongs to the Tol family from way back when nobody had last names.
Since he is from S. Africa, rather born there, it could be the name comes from the boer ( Dutch )
Are there many Tolkien's in England, and would they all be related in some fashion?
Tolkien is English, he was raised in Brum we are claiming him.
The English steal words then claim them it is nothing new. We also have stolen lands, peoples, kingdoms, the potato and the Elgin marbles.
One four year old is a trifle, that is, it is not a major thing, rather than the dessert.
Another example why English is fantastically ridiculous.
I am just so glad I was born here, no way I am smart enough to learn it from somewhere else.
 
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  • #18
Algr said:
British English is getting progressively harder to understand. I've needed subtitles for Doctor Who in the last few years.
That is because Dr Who stopped with Tom Baker, there could have been a renaissance with Christopher Eccleston but he left. I never forgave him for that.
I politely told him that face to face, he had "other projects" apparently.
A nice guy.(random pub meeting)
Mancunian English hit the world in the 1960s (back on track)
A taste of honey, Friday night Saturday morning and others.
BBC English is beautiful but regional English hit around then.

Just a quick thought, why gender words? You know who you are!

Call us crazy? sort that out first.
 
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  • #19
Algr said:
British English is getting progressively harder to understand. I've needed subtitles for Doctor Who in the last few years.
"Lots of planets have a North".
 
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  • #20
pinball1970 said:
The English steal words then claim them it is nothing new.
What is wrong with "stealing words?" It is not like the original language loses access to them. Who is harmed by this? Surely if someone has already given an object or idea a name, there is no need to invent another.

What is the Russian word for "plastic"? What is "internet" in Spanish? What is "quark" in French?
 
  • #21
Algr said:
What is wrong with "stealing words?" It is not like the original language loses access to them. Who is harmed by this? Surely if someone has already given an object or idea a name, there is no need to invent another.

What is the Russian word for "plastic"? What is "internet" in Spanish? What is "quark" in French?
Words? No problems. People land and resources big problems.
Quark is from a Novel I think?
 
  • #22
A relevant and related discussion.
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/problems-with-english.986040/
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/problems-with-english.986040/post-6318014

My wife sometimes needs subtitles to understand folks with strong Scottish, N. English (e.g., Yorkie), or Irish English.

I frequently visited Japan for work. During one trip, the team traveled to Matsuyama, Ehime Pref. on Shikoku Island. We did a two day seminar, and we have plenty of free time to explore the area. Our host arrange some trips to various parts of the island, including a dinner cruise on a river up in the mountains southeast of Matsuyama. We were with a larger group of colleagues from various Japanese nuclear utilities, and they had no problem understanding each other. However, the folks providing dinner on the boat spoke a local dialect of Japanese, and our host from Tokyo had some difficulty with the dialect. It was an old dialect that one would not normally hear in the major cities.

There were two dinner boats for our large group, and we were joined by local fishing boats on which the fishermen used cormorants (3 or 4 per boat) to catch fish. So we watched as the birds swam in front or to the side of the boat, diving underwater, then emerging with fish. The birds were retrieved and the fishermen would suspend them, and stroke the necks and breast until the birds regurgitated the fish. I'd seen the practice on TV before, but it was quite an experience to witness it in person.

We had a tour of the Ikata nuclear plant, including unit 3 which was undergoing testing at the time.
 
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  • #23
Algr said:
What is wrong with "stealing words?" It is not like the original language loses access to them. Who is harmed by this? Surely if someone has already given an object or idea a name, there is no need to invent another.

What is the Russian word for "plastic"? What is "internet" in Spanish? What is "quark" in French?
It's from James Joyce. Quark in French is probably Quark. Like bulldozer
 
  • #24
Vanadium 50 said:
"Lots of planets have a North".
Ate you saying the English language is polarising?
 
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Whether a language is called a dialect is pretty arbitrary. I speak German and can't understand a word of either Dutch or the swiss version of German but they are both considered dialects. At the other extreme, I'm told that Nepal has 129 languages. I decided to let linguists worry about this distinction.
 
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  • #27
Can we address the gender question? English is not normal YET assignment of gender to inanimate things is reasonable in other languages?
 
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  • #28
Le chat. Male. A cat in French is male? Really?
 
  • #29
pinball1970 said:
Can we address the gender question? English is not normal YET assignment of gender to inanimate things is reasonable in other languages?
Roman influence/interference perhaps
 
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  • #30
pinball1970 said:
Words? No problems. People land and resources big problems.
All land is stolen. The only question is how long ago it happened. The neanderthals and peking man want reparations.
 
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  • #31
pinball1970 said:
Can we address the gender question? English is not normal YET assignment of gender to inanimate things is reasonable in other languages?
My understanding is that English was simplified for the masses during a time when French was the language of the English Court. The genders, articles, adjectives and verb forms were all simplified. It happened in a generation, I believe.

The idea was that the court languages remained complicated as part of the barrier to entry.

For that reason English is a much easier language to get started. We have "the" where German has a table of 16 definite articles, depending on case and gender.
 
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  • #32
PeroK said:
My understanding is that English was simplified for the masses during a time when French was the language of the English Court. The genders, articles, adjectives and verb forms were all simplified. It happened in a generation, I believe.

The idea was that the court languages remained complicated as part of the barrier to entry.

For that reason English is a much easier language to get started. We have "the" where German has a table of 16 definite articles, depending on case and gender.
Ok that's fine but we replaced all that with "the" .Imagine assigning genders to elementary particles and forces?
 
  • #33
pinball1970 said:
Anyone who thinks English is not normal needs to visit Wales for a weekend.
It is nice countryside.

I remember seeing a humorous movie where a passenger is watching the town sign go by and go by and go by. It must have had a 100 letters in it. Can't remember the movie though.
 
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