Your English isn't your grandfather's English

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, words, linguistics, historical linguistics

I find John McWhorter fascinating: he digs out so many lovely examples of language usage, and writes about them so engagingly… In a prior book I reviewed in 2009 (Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue) he brought to our gaze the numerous chunks of other languages that were dragged together almost wholesale to produce what we today call "English". Now in Words on the Move; Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally), he provides an antidote to the amount of energy some of us "seasoned citizens" give to decrying the trends of change in language usage (Like, you know, gag me with a spoon if I have to keep hearing that!).

That last string of phrases caused much angst in my generation when "Valley Girl" (Val Gal) talk sprawled across the nation like a lanky teen on a love seat. In particular, "like" has gone from a word meaning (as a verb) "to desire or feel affinity to" or (adjective, adverb, etc.) "similarity", into a "piece of grammar", no longer really a word, but a functional sound that has morphed from the "similarity" end of things to at least three or four uses, most particularly a kind of bullet point, such as an example on page 215:

"So we're standing there and there were like grandparents and like grandkids and aunts and uncles…"

"Like" has become more a signal than a word, and this isn't new, it started almost a century ago, some 30 years before the Beatniks began to say, "Like, wow, man!". The new "like" has gathered new uses to the extent that McWhorter touches on it in three different chapters and spends a dozen pages on it in his last chapter, "This is your brain on writing." This word is an example of several he discusses, that are grammatical markers and have become very hard to explain as words. They are "grammaticalized." Consider what "well" or "so" might mean when used to begin a sentence. Could you explain them to an inquisitive five-year-old? Thought not!

Gliding back to the first chapter, "The FACEs of English", we find a long discussion of the acronym FACE, used to describe the uses of grammaticalized words such as "well" or "so", which a linguist would call "Modal Pragmatic Markers" or MPM's. Here "pragmatic" most closely means "personal". Our author states that a multitude of such words are needed so that we don't just speak English, we can talk.

This brings us to a major theme of the book, the difference between written and spoken (or "talked") English. Firstly, of course, we use fewer grammaticalizations when writing. I tend to write at full speed as though I were having a conversation with you, so I almost began this paragraph with, "Now, …". Were you and I really talking together, that's how I would have said it. But even writing full speed at 50wpm or so, I edit as I go and make the written form a little more compact, and, I hope, readable. (Those who find me long-winded are saying, "Oh, really!")

He dwells much more on spelling. For example, written English has a pronunciation rule of "silent, terminal e", that it makes the vowel before the prior consonant into a long vowel. Thus we have "mad", meaning crazy or angry, in which the "a" is pronounced as flatly as possible and is often called "short A"; and we have "made", meaning constructed or produced, in which the "a" is pronounced almost like "eh-ee" and is called "long A". The author tells us that nobody would design such a system from scratch, and that it had to arise from some process. Indeed it did. He discusses the "Great Vowel Shift" on pages 152-159, using a map of the placement of vowels in our mouth to show how the "short A" of 5 to 9 centuries ago morphed into a longer "E" sound then to the "long A", and that a final "eh" sound at the end of many words was gradually dropped. Thus, "made" was once pronounced "mah-deh", as the spelling suggests, shifted through "meh-də' ", which a much shorter final syllable, shown by the schwa (ə), which is more of a tiny grunt than a vowel, and then into the one-syllable word of today. The Great Vowel shift moved all the vowels about, leading certain words that once rhymed to have different sounds now than then, and they no longer rhyme. "Water" and "after", in "Jack and Jill", used to rhyme perfectly. No longer.

Dictionaries began to be written for English very early in the Great Vowel Shift. While this didn't exactly entomb all the spellings in stone, they did tend to hold things back, and today, dictionaries of "modern English" have to trot to keep up, having been rendered out of date by our movable language just in the time needed to research, typeset, and publish them. By the way, usage of the words "typeset" and "typesetting" is dropping, having peaked in the 1980's; they are being overtaken by "key in" and "keying in". As computers get better at speech recognition, those will drop off also.

Here is side point that I enjoyed. Do you ever hear the expression "willy-nilly"? I figured out long ago that it came from "will I, or nill I", but I wasn't sure just what "nill" meant. Dr. McWhorter has the answer. A millennium or so ago, negating words was done by adding the prefix "ne-", so to "not will", or not desire, something was to "ne-will" it. To say you don't have something, you would say, "I ne-have it", but by Chaucer's time it would have been "I nave it", with "nave" pronounced "nah-veh" or even "nah-və". And Chaucer spelled it næbbe. It seems the consonants have shifted as well, but the author has left that for a future book, I reckon.

I'll forbear further nerdifying. It is a delightful book, and an incredibly informative one. I am thinking of giving a copy to a friend who is a linguist, but primarily of Chinese, not English, to see what similar trends might have occurred in Mandarin, which the Chinese acknowledge is not a written language at all: the "written Chinese" language is one that nobody speaks, but they all know how to interpret it into whatever dialect they grew up speaking.