My first wife was born in the Nederlands, and came to the U.S. as a young women who wanted to become a dental hygienist.
She and I watched all the episodes of Robert MacNeil's seminal work "The Story of English" on our local PBS station. I lost her at too young an age, but will always remember her correcting how the actors in the TV series mangled early and middle spoken English.
She had an intimate exposure to both forms of English during her numerous English classes.
I am certain Klaus that you know about the annoying habit native Dutch speakers have when an American or Brit say bedankt, and the Dutch fellow says "you're welcome."
To this day I watch MacNeil's television nine part television series. Of course, his work was a collaboration with authors Robert McCrum, and producer of the TV series, William Cran.
I highly recommend their work, and found the book version and television versions were a tie in terms of my enjoyment.
I actually don't have much experience in the Netherlands. I have spent time in Germany though, and they always responded in English once they heard the accent haha
This was such an interesting essay, Klaus! I didn’t know that “do” likely comes from the Celtic, or that English is likely simpler because it has absorbed so many non-native speakers. It resembles a pidgin in that respect, and in fact frequent business travelers will sometimes use Simple English, a version of English with a greatly-reduced vocabulary and present-tense grammar, to communicate.
I agree with you and McWhorter that English is an extremely easy language to learn to speak--the only difficult thing about English is the spelling. (An American friend who lives in Prague sends her youngest son--who is perfectly fluent in Czech--to a Czech school and homeschools him in English. He is so resentful about English spelling! The vast majority of alphabetic languages have phonetic spelling, as does Czech, and so most kids don’t grow up having to take spelling as a special class like we English-speakers do!) But the grammar is super-easy. My son likes to joke that the person who has done the greatest good for the most people is the dude who eliminated gender in English.
Finally, I have another, completely unscientific, theory about why English is not inflected. I took a class in Anglo-Saxon in college, and the case system was extremely robust and regular in the earliest texts. But 1000 years later, the cases were so irregular and used so sloppily that the system had totally broken down. I think people gave up on it because it was too difficult! This happened in Latin too (compare the Latin of Cicero to that of Aquinas, and it’s clear that by the medieval period people had just decided that cases were too complicated and stupid to bother with). I notice a similar phenomenon in Czech, which is related to Church Slavonic (and older Russian dialect). The cases in Czech are extremely irregular, complicated, and confusing. Heck, even German has begun to dispense with the genitive, which now only appears in formal written language. In normal speech people just use the dative. I suspect that we are watching a similar phenomenon with the apostrophe in English. People are so confused by it, and the rules are starting to break down in all but the most formal contexts. I predict that in a generation only old people will use apostrophes.
Anyway, thanks for writing such a thought-provoking article!
I don't think complexity is the issue. The Latin case system seems pretty simple compared to Russian's cases and infixes, let alone Navajo verbs.
If I'm understanding the Reddit posts correctly, the cases just kinda sounded the same. That's hard to tell in writing, but, there are things like the "m" just being a nasalization which would have made them difficult to tell apart. If you have trouble hearing whether or not a noun was dative or not, you might specify the preposition to make it heard. And then once a bunch of the cases sound the case, the whole system disappears.
I haven't read much about the history of Dutch, but I can speculate that something similar occurred there. In today's standard Dutch, the -en at the end of a word is pronounced as a schwa. So "Ik nemen de boeken" sounds like "Ik nem-uh de boek-uh." I could see the same thing happening with a case system. Words used to end with -er or -en or -em. If that all becomes "uh," then the case system is impossible to follow.
Funnily, some phrases maintain the old case system. They say "ter wereld," meaning "in the world", with the r being the old dative case.
My first wife was born in the Nederlands, and came to the U.S. as a young women who wanted to become a dental hygienist.
She and I watched all the episodes of Robert MacNeil's seminal work "The Story of English" on our local PBS station. I lost her at too young an age, but will always remember her correcting how the actors in the TV series mangled early and middle spoken English.
She had an intimate exposure to both forms of English during her numerous English classes.
I am certain Klaus that you know about the annoying habit native Dutch speakers have when an American or Brit say bedankt, and the Dutch fellow says "you're welcome."
To this day I watch MacNeil's television nine part television series. Of course, his work was a collaboration with authors Robert McCrum, and producer of the TV series, William Cran.
I highly recommend their work, and found the book version and television versions were a tie in terms of my enjoyment.
The television series can be found on Youtube.
I actually don't have much experience in the Netherlands. I have spent time in Germany though, and they always responded in English once they heard the accent haha
This was such an interesting essay, Klaus! I didn’t know that “do” likely comes from the Celtic, or that English is likely simpler because it has absorbed so many non-native speakers. It resembles a pidgin in that respect, and in fact frequent business travelers will sometimes use Simple English, a version of English with a greatly-reduced vocabulary and present-tense grammar, to communicate.
I agree with you and McWhorter that English is an extremely easy language to learn to speak--the only difficult thing about English is the spelling. (An American friend who lives in Prague sends her youngest son--who is perfectly fluent in Czech--to a Czech school and homeschools him in English. He is so resentful about English spelling! The vast majority of alphabetic languages have phonetic spelling, as does Czech, and so most kids don’t grow up having to take spelling as a special class like we English-speakers do!) But the grammar is super-easy. My son likes to joke that the person who has done the greatest good for the most people is the dude who eliminated gender in English.
Finally, I have another, completely unscientific, theory about why English is not inflected. I took a class in Anglo-Saxon in college, and the case system was extremely robust and regular in the earliest texts. But 1000 years later, the cases were so irregular and used so sloppily that the system had totally broken down. I think people gave up on it because it was too difficult! This happened in Latin too (compare the Latin of Cicero to that of Aquinas, and it’s clear that by the medieval period people had just decided that cases were too complicated and stupid to bother with). I notice a similar phenomenon in Czech, which is related to Church Slavonic (and older Russian dialect). The cases in Czech are extremely irregular, complicated, and confusing. Heck, even German has begun to dispense with the genitive, which now only appears in formal written language. In normal speech people just use the dative. I suspect that we are watching a similar phenomenon with the apostrophe in English. People are so confused by it, and the rules are starting to break down in all but the most formal contexts. I predict that in a generation only old people will use apostrophes.
Anyway, thanks for writing such a thought-provoking article!
I don't think complexity is the issue. The Latin case system seems pretty simple compared to Russian's cases and infixes, let alone Navajo verbs.
If I'm understanding the Reddit posts correctly, the cases just kinda sounded the same. That's hard to tell in writing, but, there are things like the "m" just being a nasalization which would have made them difficult to tell apart. If you have trouble hearing whether or not a noun was dative or not, you might specify the preposition to make it heard. And then once a bunch of the cases sound the case, the whole system disappears.
I haven't read much about the history of Dutch, but I can speculate that something similar occurred there. In today's standard Dutch, the -en at the end of a word is pronounced as a schwa. So "Ik nemen de boeken" sounds like "Ik nem-uh de boek-uh." I could see the same thing happening with a case system. Words used to end with -er or -en or -em. If that all becomes "uh," then the case system is impossible to follow.
Funnily, some phrases maintain the old case system. They say "ter wereld," meaning "in the world", with the r being the old dative case.