Free Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter

English had been brought to an uninhabited island—or, say, Cyprus, Greenland, or Fiji—rather than an island where Celtic languages were spoken, then there would be no such thing as a Modern English sentence like Did you see what he’s doing ? That sentence would be rendered as See you what he does ?, as it is in any normal Germanic—or European—language.
    English is not normal. It is a mixed language not only in its words, but in its grammar. Every time we say something like Did you see what he’s doing ?, we are structuring our utterance the way a Welsh or Cornish person would in their own native tongue. When well-intentioned chroniclers take in from scholarship on The History of English that “the English language has been indifferent to the Celts and their influence” (Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil’s The Story of English ) or that “the Celtic language of Roman Britain influenced Old English hardly at all” (David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language ), they have been misled, despite the brilliance of their books overall (both of these are among my favorite books of all time).
    English is not, then, solely an offshoot of Proto-Germanic that inhaled a whole bunch of foreign words. It is an offshoot of Proto-Germanic that traded grammar with offshoots of Proto-Celtic. The result was a structurally hybrid tongue, whose speakers today use Celtic-derived constructions almost every time they open their mouths for longer than a couple of seconds. Do you want to leave now? What’s he doing? Did he even know? What are you thinking? I don’t care. She’s talking to the manager.
    Celtic grammar is underneath all of those utterly ordinary utterances in Modern English. Our language is a magnificent bastard.

Two
    A LESSON FROM THE CELTIC IMPACT
    THE “GRAMMATICAL ERRORS”
EPIDEMIC IS A HOAX
     
     
     
     
    Oh, those lapses , darling. So many of us walk around letting fly with “errors.” We could do better, but we’re so slovenly, so rushed amid the hurly-burly of modern life, so imprinted by the “let it all hang out” ethos of the sixties, that we don’t bother to observe the “rules” of “correct” grammar.
    To a linguist, if I may share, these “rules” occupy the exact same place as the notion of astrology, alchemy, and medicine being based on the four humors. The “rules” make no logical sense in terms of the history of our language, or what languages around the world are like.
    Nota bene: linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not—I repeat, not —that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage. No argument there.
    The argument is about what constitutes artful and effective usage. Quite a few notions that get around out there have nothing to do with grace or clarity, and are just based on misconceptions about how languages work.
    Yet, in my experience, to try to get these things across to laymen often results in the person’s verging on anger. There is a sense that these “rules” just must be right, and that linguists’ purported expertise on language must be somehow flawed on this score. We are, it is said, permissive—perhaps along the lines of the notorious leftist tilt among academics, or maybe as an outgrowth of the roots of linguistics in anthropology, which teaches that all cultures are equal. In any case, we are wrong. Maybe we have a point here and there, but only that.

Linguists’ Frustration
    Over the years, some of the old notions have, in truth, slipped away, although this is due less to the suasive powers of linguists than to the fact that the particular rules in question were always so silly anyway.
    No one taken seriously thinks it’s wrong to end a sentence with a preposition anymore, such that That’s a store