a “Verbal Knightcap” by Robert M. Knight, AIW Board Member
It’s unruly, and harsh. Its spelling can be ludicrous. But English might well be the most beautiful of the dozens of languages and hundreds of dialects we call Indo-European. Depends on your definition of beauty.
That definition requires that we forget the sophisticated sound of French, the music of Spanish or Italian or the seductive sibilance of the Slavic languages. At its base, English is a Germanic language, as are Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Flemish and Norwegian.
English has accessorized itself with a myriad of words borrowed from about 30 other languages, mainly Latin, Danish and Norman French. Those words reflect when the Anglo-Saxons were invaded first by Roman Catholic monks, then by Vikings from Denmark and Norway and then by the Normans. The Normans were a Viking tribe who had settled in northern France about a century before the bastard son of a Norman duke, William the Conqueror, won the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
Hence the unruliness of English.
But just because English carries the occasional dissonance, it is not without rhythm, music and grace. To write or edit English well, we need to listen to its tumble of words.
Celts—the Irish, Scots and especially the Welsh—could do little to influence the vocabularies that Germanic languages brought to what is now England. That’s because after they arrived in the 5th Century, the Anglo-Saxons pushed the Celts westward and northward and refused to have daily contact with them. (By the way, “Celt” is pronounced with a hard K, not like a Boston basketball team.)
That doesn’t mean, though, that the Celts had no influence on English, period. Here we might use the cliché: “The English may have invented the language, but the Irish showed them how to use it.”
In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, linguist John McWhorter maintains that only Celtic and English use a form of do when it really doesn’t do anything—he calls it the meaningless do. (“Do you have a bastard son?” as opposed to “Have you a bastard son?”) And no other language uses its version of ing to express present tense.
In addition, some pithy and poetic English has resulted from a Germanic structure twisted into Celtic rhythms. In “Finnegan’s Wake,” for example, James Joyce mixes Celtic rhythm, alliteration and puns: “Hootch is for the husbandman handling his hoe. Hohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to become Mister Finnagain.”
Another reason Celtic rhythms sound poetic to proper English ears is that the Celtic idioms display no true past tense. “I went to the pub” becomes “I am after going to the pub.” Nor do Celtic tongues have a true word for “yes.” To Celts, “yes” means “I understand what you are saying. “ To express affirmation, they would use “indeed!”
Celtic rhythms have contributed mightily to the mongrel quality of English. And that quality has led to three important ways that English differs from other Indo-European languages: its simplicity of structure, its disposal of the need to match nouns and verbs by gender and its huge vocabulary—three or four times the size of any other Western language.
During the 15th Century, when Geoffrey Chaucer was ready to write in what we now call Middle English, English was ready for Geoffrey Chaucer. The French of the nobles, the Latin of the clergy and the “Englisc” of the peasants of “Angle-land” had begun to come together. This fusion of languages can be seen today; most words have at least two synonyms.
The Anglo Saxon-rooted ask, for example, corresponds with the French root question, and the Latin root interrogate. A random attack on a dictionary and a thesaurus reveals that the same occurs with dead-deceased-defunct, end-finish-conclude, fear-terror-trepidation, go-continue-proceed, gathering-society-community, happy-content-satisfied, help-aid-assist, hereafter-future-posterity, lovely-beautiful-pulchritudinous, lying-unverifiable-mendacious, mill-plant-factory, show-present-demonstrate, and thin-spare-emaciated.
These synonyms are not exact. For that reason, English provides more word precision than any other Western language. Writers need not worry about context or where a word enters a sentence; they can find the precise word to deliver a fact, opinion concept or idea, with the exact nuance needed.
It’s worth noting that of these randomly selected synonyms, Anglo-Saxon words average 1.5 syllables, French 2.3 syllables and Latin 3.1 syllables. The message? When in doubt, default to the Anglo-Saxon. It’s punchier and it sounds more honest. Latinizations make great accessories, they are invaluable to word precision, but the idiom of the Anglo-Saxon peasant that sets the tone.
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Robert M. Knight is author of Journalistic Writing: Building the Skills, Honing the Craft, to be released this spring by Marion Street Press. As a freelancer, Knight has written for more than 40 publications and news services. He began his career at United Press International and is a former senior editor and broadcast editor of the City News Bureau of Chicago and a former adjunct professor at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and Northwestern University in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois.
