Not normal

[supergee]

English is weirder than pretty much every other language

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[weofodthignen]

Interesting, but although I know he is a big shot, I found things that made me raise my eyebrows. Back at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, people in that part of the world tended to live in small villages - hamlets, really - and so the fact 250,000 people seems very few to us isn't really relevant. The case that there was considerable intermingling with the Romano-British is disputed. And the do/does/did particle isn't in evidence in Anglo-Saxon. Also, there's considerable evidence that unlike the Celtic speakers, the Scandinavians of the Danelaw could understand Anglo-Saxon, and their own language had the same grammatical genders, so why would they have dispensed with it? Grammatical gender disappears in Middle English, after the Norman Conquest. What he fails to emphasize enough in my view is how major a shock that was; there appear to have been a century or two when commoners and aristocracy could hardly communicate, and what emerges on the other side in written texts bears all the hallmarks of a pidgin, including loss of grammatical gender and inflectional endings, reduction of pronouns, and simplification of verb forms. Middle English is a very different language from Anglo-Saxon. (I see from his Wikipedia article that McWhorter is an expert in creole formation, so I find it odd he wouldn't point that out.)

Anglo-Saxon had a rich learned vocabulary, including many loan-translations of Latin and Greek words. He mentions this without apparently realizing how it prefigured the Enlightenment expansion of vocabulary. The Anglo-Saxons were unique in Western Europe for a century or so prior to the Conquest for promoting universal literacy and translating the Bible. The Pope's objection to this was a major reason he backed William's invasion.

The point about its being hard to objectively measure the complexity of languages, particularly those of indigenous peoples, is well taken; the notion that "primitive" peoples have "simple" languages is part of the evolutionary fallacy associated with colonialism, and my impression is that it's better to assume the reverse, that a hitherto unknown language will be tremendously difficult to learn and sophisticated in its distinctions. Native American languages have provided many examples. But some languages have been so suppressed that they do approach minimal useful vocabulary: Finnish is a well known example. And Hebrew is not a good yardstick for ease of mastery, since it is a revived language, largely reconstructed, and techniques for teaching it are particularly well developed.

For a language whose perceived inflexibility has led to its not spreading, try standard German, whose grammar was reformed in the 19th century on the model of Silver-Age Latin and that has consistently failed to catch on, partly because of that grammatical straitjacket.

As I understand it, you actually said var in ON also, but it was such a breathy sound it was often spelled vas - part of changes that were happening to final -r in general, and thus English wound up with 3rd-person -s but it was originally spelled -th. I'm also disturbed that he's shed some accents - indicating long vowels - on his Anglo-Saxon, and forgotten he needs a "when" word. In fact I suspect good A-S would have used a participle there; the language is interesting in its liking for participles (which we still have!) and the fact it inflects the things.