Why English Grammar is Simpler

A discussion of John McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

Language isn’t Etymology

Author John McWhorter begins Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by noting a paucity of quality history written about the English language. There’s no shortage of writing on etymology, but there’s more to language than words. Yes, everyone knows that a bunch of English words come from French, but almost every language contains loan words. The majority of Albanian words derive from nearby languages, and one can hear numerous Mandarin words in Japanese.

Anyone who has attempted to learn a new language has felt that the new language’s words seem to be in the wrong order. McWhorter provides an illuminating example from German:

Sagte sie meiner Tochter, dass mein Vater allein getkommen ist und sich besser fuehlt?

Even if you don’t know any German, you can probably guess what most of these words mean. Still, you’ll probably struggle to comprehend the sentence. Here’s a word-by-word-translation

Said she my daughter, that my father alone come is and himself better feels?

You might remain confused, so here’s a proper English translation:

Did she say, to my daughter, that my father has come alone and is feeling better?

If we focus on etymology, we won’t see the difference between these two West Germanic languages. Only grammar can show the two languages diverged.

One of the striking differences between English and German grammar, McWhorter argues, is the presence of the verb “do” in our sentences. We employ “do” in its literal sense, of course, as in “he is doing his homework.” Yet, there’s not much doing in the sentence above. A simple “Said she” would communicate the same idea, and that’s what one sees in both German and Dutch. Out of all the Indo-European languages, only English questions require a form of “do.” We also need a “do” for negation. I can say “he lives in the Netherlands,” but I can’t say “he lives in the Netherlands not” or “he lives not in the Netherlands.” In English, we need to add a meaningless do: “he does not live in the Netherlands.”

So, how did the word “did” end up in this sentence? McWhorter finds a clear suspect: the Celtic languages. After all, these remain the only other European where one finds the auxiliary “do.” Celtic also shares another grammatical quirk with English: an unusual present tense. In Dutch, the present tense for “I am eating” is Ik eet. English, meanwhile, requires a gerund (also called a “verb-noun”) to communicate the same idea: “I am eating.” One could say “I eat,” of course, but this implies a habitual nature to one’s eating habits. It would not, as it does in Dutch, indicate that you are currently in the process of eating. In all of Europe’s languages, only Celtic shares this quirk. The connection makes sense, as pre-historic English speakers would have had a lot of interaction with Celtic speakers.

Yet, McWhorter notes, many linguists don’t attribute the auxillary “do” to the Celts. Some argue that the Germanic invaders wiped the Celts out, but that claim doesn’t mesh with DNA tests, archeological evidence, or our understanding of contemporary weaponry. Others argue that English “do” and gerund-requiring present tense developed on their own, but it would seem to be a cosmic coincidence that these changes would just happen to match Celtic grammar.

Other historians note that the auxiliary “do” doesn’t appear in English writing until centuries after initial contact with the Celts. McWhorter counters with the fact that writing rarely represents speech. Italians, Iberians, and Frenchmen wrote in classical Latin, for example, for centuries after their local tongues lost Latin’s case system. The same phenomenon is occurring in modern Arabic. One will see the same Standard Arabic written down in Saudi Arabia and Algeria, but residents of the two countries differ substantially in their speech. We can even hear this in English. McWhorter notes a dialect in northern England with unusual verb conjugations. Speakers will apply the “s” declination to the pronoun “they,” but these Brits won’t apply it to regular nouns. For example, a speaker might say “Bob and John drive” in one sentence and “they drives” in the next. You won’t find that in The Economist.

As a result, these new grammatical constructs appear rather suddenly in English writing. That doesn’t indicate the change was sudden. Rather, it indicates that written grammar differed from the spoken version for hundreds of years. McWhorter argues that written English only began to look like the spoken version after a 150-year blackout. While the Normans controlled England, the historical record contains little English writing. Afterward, writers likely decided to ditch the archaic English for one that sounded more like what they heard in their day-to-day lives. In other words, spoken English probably gained the auxiliary “do” and lost the case system hundreds of years before people decided to reflect these changes in the written word.

Furthermore, McWhorter shows that linguistic borrowing occurs everywhere. Neighboring southern African groups acquired the famous clicks of the Khoisan language. The auxiliary “do” itself has also found its way to Jamaica, via English speakers.

Why is English so Simple?

We’ve established that the history of language requires an understanding of grammar. Given that, how do we explain the simplicity of English? Before answering that, I’ll note that some reject the idea of English’s simplicity. McWhorter thinks they’re wrong. He’s heard some argue that English is “easy to learn but hard to master.” People will point to subtle differences, like the connotative distinction between “do not” and “don’t.” However, McWhorter says that every language contains these subtle distinctions. It’s just that most also contain less subtle ones. The author lists multiple ways that English grammar remains simpler than many of its Germanic siblings.

• Lack of a case system¹

• Lack of grammatical gender

• Fewer verb conjugations

• Reflexive verbs

  • In English, we say phrases like “we hurry.” The Dutch version would translate to something like “we hurry ourselves,” because speakers of other Germanic languages must specify when a verb occurs to one’s self. We have a few cases in English (I clean myself), but not nearly as many.

• A distinction between something coming “here” and being “here.”

  • On hears this “hither” and “thither” distinction in older versions of the English. Modern German maintains this distinction, with “hier” referring to something that’s currently here and “her” referring to something that’s coming here.

• Have vs Be verbs

  • In English, “have” suffices for almost every past verb: hate eaten, have written, etc. Elsewhere, speakers use “be” for some verbs and “have” for others.

• Verb placement

  • English verbs sit after the subject, and they call stick together. See the following sentence: “Yesterday, I should have gone to the grocery store.” In Dutch, the “yesterday” would push the “I” after the “should.” Next, the words Dutch words for “have” and “gone” would find themselves at the end of the sentence. It can also get trickier than this. Some conjunctions move all verbs to the end of a clause, while others keep them in the same positions. Dependent and independent clauses contain different verb locations. Meanwhile, in English, [subject] + [all the verbs] gets the job done.

Who Killed English Grammar?

In my last language article, I discussed a hypothesis around language simplicity. Linguist Guy Deutscher has found that the most intricate grammatical systems occur in small groups of people, and modern Indo-European languages seem simpler than their ancient counterparts. Thus, the expansion of a language to millions of people across large swaths of land may simplify its grammar. Some objected to this theory, noting the plethora of French verb tenses, the nuances of Russian grammar, or the fact that there are more cases in Hungarian than there are atoms in the visible universe. As such, the simplification trend appears far from universal. This theory also can’t explain much about English, since the simplification of its grammar predates the British Empire. So, how did English grammar lose so many features? According to Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, commentator C MN has it right

On complexity, the important factor is probably contact between different languages--specifically, adult second language learners. Adults have an impaired ability to master languages, so large numbers of adult second language learners tend to lead to simplification of languages. English, for example, seems to have lost its case system when it had a large influx of non-native English speakers settle in the British Isles (IIRC my class on the history of English). These (mostly) men took English wives and had English children who copied some of their fathers' idiosyncrasies in their own speech, including likely their fathers' non-mastery of case, eventually eroding the case system to basically nothing.

You can see [a] somewhat similar process still happening with some of the only remaining case markers, "who" and "whom". Even native English speakers can't reliably remember which one they're supposed to use when, and so each following generation is even shakier on how to use them and so stop making any distinction.

McWhorter shows that the Vikings constituted this "large influx of non-native English speakers²." Two pieces of evidence point toward the Viking. First, English grammar changed faster in the places with more Viking settlements. Second, Viking writing erred in places where Old Norse (the Viking tongue) differed from Old English. Where Old Norse happened to match Old English, meanwhile, the Viking writing got the grammar correct. Conversations between the natives and Norse, therefore, contained numerous errors, until these errors became proper speech.

Other Language Simplifications

Latin Case System

I understand that McWhorter wrote a book about English, but I would be interested in hearing other examples of this simplification mechanism. I had assumed Latin lost its case system via similar events, but that change seems to have ensured for more banal reasons. I know this isn’t the most academic source, but there’s a solid Reddit thread on the Latin case system’s death.

Taking the first declension as an example:

Loss of final /-m/, which was realized merely as nasalization in Classical times.

• stēllam (acc) > stēllã > stẹlla (= nom)

Transphonologization or loss of vowel length.

• stēllā (abl) > stẹlla (= nom, acc)

Replacement of degenerating case forms with prepositional phrases.

• stēllae (gen) > dē stēllā > dẹ stẹlla

• stēllae (dat) > ad stēllam > a stẹlla

Analogy.

• stẹlla : dẹ stẹlla :: stẹllas : ? > de stẹllas

In simpler terminology, the cases died because they sounded similar. Hence, this simplification had little to do with broader historical forces. The same process caused “she” and “they” to become the same word in Dutch and German. The two words sounded similar until, after a view vowel changes, they sounded exactly the same.

Indonesian

I don’t know much about the language, but Indonesian seems to boast one of the simplest grammatical systems in the world. I’m referring to the common, spoken version, not the formal, written one. This article list a few reasons why Indonesian grammar is simple:

1. There are no verb conjugations

[…]

2. There are no cases

[…]

3. In informal Indonesian, the plural forms of nouns are hardly used. Most of the time it’s clear from the context if something is more than one.

[…]

7. Indonesian doesn’t have verb tenses. This means that verbs don’t change depending on the tense. Instead, they use certain words to show when the activity took/takes/or will take place.

[…]

8. Indonesian nouns don’t have a gender.

[…]

9. Unlike other Asian language [sic] such as Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai, Indonesian doesn’t have tones

Granted, the article’s next section contains a few reasons why one might find Indonesian difficult. Still, the article concludes that English speakers will find Indonesian easier than almost any other non-Indo-European language.

I also like that the author forgot a plural in point 9. It’s probably a typo, but I’d like to believe he intended it as a subliminal argument for point 4.

So, did the Indonesian language have its own Vikings? I couldn’t find a conclusive answer to this. Histories of the language tend to focus on how Indonesian became both the lingua franca of the people and the official language of the government. For some weird reason, historians find colonialism, national unity, and geopolitics more interesting than adjective declinations. Still, these articles do offer a few hints. Indonesian has, for hundreds of years, been the second language of choice among residents. Most residents can speak Indonesian with each other, but few learn it as their first language. This seems like a situation ripe for mistakes. One can imagine a conversation between non-native speakers losing the complexities found in the formal version of the language.

1. One of my readers insists that English still has a genitive case, noting that the “ ‘s ” construct constitutes a noun declination. I’ll leave that aside for now. If English does have a case system, we can at least agree that, when it comes to grammatical cases, modern English is simpler than German and Old English.

2. I should note that the gender imbalance (Viking men and English women) is not mentioned in the book.