McWhorter Blog 2: Structure & Grammar

In the section “One Last Assumption: Where Are the Celtic Words?” in Chapter One of McWhorters’ Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, the author begins by asserting that aside from the Normans and the Vikings, the Celts left no English words except for “a dozen-odd words that have been traditionally traced to Celtic, and most of them are arcane, obsolete ones introduced by Christian missionaries from Ireland” (45).  Regarding grammar, Russian, for example was spoken by plenty of people who used it as a second language and because of that the Russian language changed.  In the middle of the section is about how folks during Old English times used going or go as a verb in the future, referring to distance as “going somewhere” (McWhorter, 53) and not for the intent of doing something.  McWhorter ties up the section by finishing off with a story about the Robinsons and the Joneses.  Both of these families can play the piano with their feet but the question was who started using their toes to tickle the ivory first.  Turns out, the fact is, the Robinsons learned from the Joneses and thus, the analogy is that the Celts did have an impact on English.   

McWhorter offers in Chapter Two the notion that grammatical errors appear in all languages and English is not immune.  He adds that “one does not ‘like’ the use of structure as in I structured the test to be as brief as possible” (McWhorter, 67).  This mention of structure reminded me of structural analysis and structural ambiguity in George Yule’s The Study of Language, 4^th ed.  Structural analysis is a type of descriptive approach where the priority is to “investigate the distribution of forms in a language” (Yule, 87) which is different from structural ambiguity.  Structural ambiguity means that a sentence has “two distinct underlying interpretations that have to be represented differently in deep structure” (Yule, 98).  There is also deep and surface structures which are “two superficially different sentences” (Yule, 97).    For example, an active sentence would be Charlie broke the window and a passive sentence would be The window was broken by Charlie; according to traditional grammar (Yule, 97).

Speaking of structure, something I would like to be more clear about is McWhorter’s use of structure in the sentence I structured the test to be as brief as possible.  This sentence sounds right to me, but is that because I’m using Modern English instead of Old English?

McWhorterBlog1-What am I 'do' -ing?

Under the Indo-European umbrella of languages houses the Germanic which in turn encompasses Danish, English, German, and Swedish.  Adjacent to Germanic is Celtic which Breton, Gaelic, Irish, and Welsh are tied to.  In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, John McWhorter’s first chapter titled “We Speak a Miscegenated Grammar” explores how the English language has the meaningless do as well as discusses how –ing makes a verb into a gerund and, how –ing is used in the progressive construction which is our present tense.  McWhorter links the English language with the Celtic by saying, “Celtic was English’s deistic God – it set things spinning and then left them to develop on their own” (McWhorter, 9).  However, McWhorter did illuminate the fact that although the story has the Germans inflicting genocide upon the Celts , archeologists who went digging afterwards were able to find some evidence in material culture to indicate that Celts indeed survived in large numbers to bequeath their cultural traditions to future generations.  

The Study of Language (4^th edition) by George Yule has a history of English pertaining to Old English and Middle English where the former is about how “the primary sources for what developed as the English language were the Germanic languages spoken by a group of tribes from northern Europe who moved into the British Isles in the fifth century” (Yule, 229) and the latter is marked by the takeover at Hastings in 1066.  This is in common with McWhorter’s writings about those periods where he adds that           

The truth, then, is that if meaningless do and the verb-noun present did pop up in the first Old English documents, or even in Old English at all beyond the occasional peep, it would be very, very strange.  We would expect that the constructions would show up only after a historical catastrophe such as the Norman occupation, after which, in many ways, England learned to write again.  If the Battle of Hastings had not put a 150-year kibosh on written English, then “real” English might not have been committed to print until as late as after the Reformation in the 1500s (McWhorter, 43).

What this means is that Celtic influence on English has been documented as literacy rose and it shows that the meaningless do was well used prior to being in print.

One item in OMBT I found a bit confusing is about “the Italian varieties where do is not used in negative sentences, whereas in English, do is used in both negative and question sentences – just as in Welsh and Cornish” (McWhorter, 22).  I wondered why this was included because Italian is part of the Italic (Latin) family and I do not see the connection other than that the Italians employ do as well.  My questions are, can the Italian mention be just a remark, is it that simple?  This has me asking myself if I know what I am do –ing?