Where McWhorter Steps in a Controversy

Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English by John McWhorter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've read books by John McWhorter that are more entertaining than this one, which is still pretty entertaining, but it's excellent information well-presented and worth a read.

The main idea behind the book, or the unifying principle, is language change--how and why it happens--and how to categorize, compare, and evaluate the resulting variants. Most of the beginning section is dedicated to giving a framework for understanding what we mean by an accent, a pidgin, a creole, and other terms describing a language undergoing change. Useful.

I liked the bit about Shakespeare and his refreshing personal opinion about how his plays should be studied in the present. Maybe I like it because I agree with it. Having taught both English as a second language and mainstream high school literature, my opinion is that there is very little utility in teaching Shakespeare in the original. Beyond giving students cultural knowledge and the sense of accomplishment of going through a whole play, which are probably good enough reasons to justify doing one Shakespeare play at some point, there is very little learned by struggling to make sense of language that even educated adults only half comprehend.

(I have read all of Shakespeare's plays in the original, and I have enjoyed the process, but even now I find the very best way to read a play, even one I know pretty well, is to read a portion in modern English, as in "No-Fear Shakespeare," and then read the corresponding section in the original, back and forth. I'm far from a Shakespeare scholar, but compared to every other adult in my life I might as well be. And compared to 15-year-old students, I'm a master of Shakespeare. And it's still hard.)

The point is that while Shakespeare is still recognizably English, easier to understand than, say, Chaucer, and much nearer our own language than the Anglo-Saxon of a thousand years ago, it is very different from modern English and is only diverging more and more over time. English from the year 1600 is not a foreign language, but maybe halfway? (My words, not his.) And our modern English is just as beautiful as Elizabethan English. We're not speaking a debased version or anything. No reason to genuflect to Shakespeare's version of the language.

The main discussion here is about Black English, and it's a difficult conversation, even for the author, who is himself Black. His thinking emerged from the situation in the 90s when "ebonics" was being discussed. I remember the controversy pretty well, because I was teaching ESL at that time and the idea was that Black English should be considered a different language so that the schools could use additional resources to better transition them to standard English. And the point of that was to improve overall achievement, helping them succeed in all of their classes. I supported their goals at the time, but I wasn't well enough informed in the matter to have a strong opinion about whether it would work or not.

There were several responses to this movement. One was to mock it, and with it Black English. McWhorter does an excellent job of responding to this, as it is the central idea of the book still--showing how language changes over time and under certain conditions, producing different varieties within a language and even new languages. He gives Black English the respect that detractors will not, showing how it is systematic, following rules in pronunciation and sentence formation that are as regular as any other language variety, and just as flexible and expressive as any other form of language. (He gives many examples from around the world of similar bundles of varieties, such as forms of German and types of Finnish, that have survived alongside the standard form, which is, after all, just one among many.)

However, he also shows that the evidence doesn't support treating Black English like a second language, disputing some of the claims made by ebonics supporters about how different it is. This put him on the outs with many black scholars, but I found his arguments persuasive. Teaching teachers that Black English is not substandard or something to be despised is useful, elevating the prestige of the home language to the place it should be, helping students avoid the stigma to often placed on such varieties, which does great harm to those students and those communities. But mainstreaming instruction in standard English appears to be the most efficient way to achieve proficiency in that variety, based on studies in many countries, and I am inclined too agree at this point.

In any case, it's an interesting debate, and I feel like he treats all aspects of it with respect and integrity.

I recommend the book for those interested in the topic or in language in general, especially if you enjoy his distinctive style and voice, which I do.

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Where I Learned a Lot About Very Little

The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English by Henry Hitchings
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this about 10 years ago, stretched out over a long period of time. Didn't much like it, but I finished it. Gave it 3 stars.

Then I forgot I read it. Zero memory of the book. Bought it again at a thrift store. Paperback, this time. (To be fair, I'm a bit of an idiot. Also, I've read tons of books about the origins of English. One of my favorite subjects.)

So now, I read it again, all the way through, and guess what?

Didn't ring any bells. None of it. And I still didn't like it. Yes, many little stories within are interesting, like a series of clever blog posts, but his purpose is so scattered and varied that I don't know what the big picture is meant to be. I never got it.

Here's my review: the author gives a thousand word origins, offering hundreds of opinions, making hundreds of claims on many topics within the general history of English. With the author, we meander through the centuries, across the globe, seeing pieces of the story of English, and many curious sources for random bits of vocabulary, and are treated to a discussion of many cultural forces that had an impact on the language. Nothing, however, is done in a thorough or exhaustive way. It feels like English is a whole broad landscape, and it would make sense if we looked up and described it in a holistic way, but we don't see any of that because we're keeping our eyes down, looking at random shells and stones and insects he's pointing at because he thinks they are curious and fun.

I really wanted some introductory paragraphs. Maybe a topic sentence here and there with the main idea. We don't get that. Every page and every paragraph can be about a different thing.

Every chapter I asked myself, "What is his point?" In its absence, I kept hoping there would be a summary at the end, maybe a conclusion drawing it all together. "Here with these thousands of bits of data," I hoped he'd say, "we can make this sweeping generalization, or these five important points that make sense of all that information." Nope. None of that.

Instead, the book is just a thousand separate points, like "Here are some words that came from Dutch." It's interesting when we learn that words from mining, like cobalt, quartz, shale, gneiss and zinc, all come from German. Cool. Good to know. But then he also tells us that's also the source for bergschrund, thalweg, and geest.

Excuse me?

He did that many times. For example, some cool words came from the Great Exhibition of 1851, like saxophone, lorry, and hydromechanics. But other words from that same event that didn't catch on are dhoop, hyawaballi, and jusi.

I don't get it. Why tell us that? It cost me some energy trying to fit his information into some kind of schema, and I'm annoyed because I just couldn't do it.

At times, he expresses strong opinions, mostly one-offs at the end of paragraphs that he never returns to, like a professor in a lecture throwing out his opinions to an audience that will never demand he prove his points because he's already gone on to something else. A few times, he went further than that. For example, he makes a more concerted effort to rail against the language of "political correctness," which he claims is about demonstrating moral purity more than about accomplishing anything useful. He goes on to say:

This cultural sensitivity, which tends to be most visible in academia and social work, can mutate into patronizing tokenism, a licence for political ineptitude or inertia, and a grotesque repression of personal freedoms. At its most extreme, political correctness is capable of destroying family life and rewriting history.

What? How? What in the world are you talking about?

He doesn't explain. He just leaves it hanging out there.

In general, I could not figure out where he was going. What is the main point? It felt like he aimed at more than anecdote, at something more significant, but I'm not getting it.

And I tried two times.

(Check with me in 2035 or so. Maybe third time's the charm.)

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Where I Realize I Have a Favorite Linguist. Huh.

The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language by John McWhorter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a useful, informative book that is a pleasure to read. It does exactly what it says it will do: show how the differences in languages make no appreciable difference in how people think. But in addition to that, it is clearly written, entertaining, and full of surprises.

A key to McWhorter's take on language is his scientific stance. He doesn't overlook what the research does say, but neither does he exaggerate it or read too much into it. He is careful to always describe exactly how far his claims or anyone else's can be taken, based on the evidence. He gives credit where it is due, explains the significance of various studies, and gives support for his claims. This means that he will sometimes knock down extravagant claims and pull the rug out from under exciting but flawed ideas about language, and that's a bummer, but it's also good science.

McWhorter popularizes the information for interested amateurs, but he doesn't sensationalize it. He shows how the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis--the notion that the form of a language affects its speakers' world view--can be demonstrated in a reduced way, at an academic level, but how it does not hold true in any significant way, how it does not, in fact, make any appreciable difference in the way groups of people think.

He makes a case for Whorfianism to represent only tiny differences which ultimately don't make a difference.

Even though he is debunking an idea that until now made for entertaining conversation, he isn't killing the fun; he still manages to provide his own entertaining revelations, which is one of the joys of reading his books. The tidbits about languages, the strange rules in this language and odd vocabulary in that one, are the details that I find most intriguing, and they're abundant here. Some are famous examples, some seem vaguely familiar, but many are new, and amaze me as they always do with the strangeness and variety of language and human experience.

Another thing I appreciate about his writing is his empathy. He knocks down patronizingly glowing attitudes toward certain languages, especially those of the Amazon or New Guinea or other native groups, while recognizing how those attitudes emerged from a genuine attempt at progressive thought and respect for others eighty or ninety or one hundred years ago, back when most academics were hopelessly dismissive of such "savage" or "unsophisticated" cultures. He accomplishes a similar feat with his discussion (here and elsewhere) of Black English, where he neither minimizes its complexity nor treads unnecessarily carefully around it, even though the subject has long been fraught with controversy. It helps, frankly, that he is an African American linguist, and so able to approach the subject in a respectful and sensitive way while maintaining rigor and academic distance.

He analyzes a single overheard sentence here in such a brilliant way that the reader almost wonders how we ever put a sentence together. He is able to show how clear meaning emerges from usage that appears inaccurate to some (looking at you, prescriptivists...), demonstrating that Black English can communicate precise ideas as flexibly as standard English. At the the same time, he shows that the differences in form do not correspond to a difference in thought.

Or maybe those are the same thing, said two different ways...

This is not a long book, but it's full and complete and entertaining. For people interested in language, it is highly recommended.

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