Read The Mother Tongue Online

Authors: Bill Bryson

The Mother Tongue (2 page)

lence, worship,
copy,
blame, comfort, bend, cut, reach, like,
dislike,
and so on. Other languages sometimes show inspired flashes of versatility, as with the German
auf,
which can mean

"on," "in," "upon," "at," "toward," "for," "to," and "upward," but these are relative rarities.

At the same time, the endless versatility of English is what makes our rules of grammar so perplexing. Few English-speaking natives, however well educated, can confidently elucidate the dif-ference between, say, a complement and a predicate or distinguish a full infinitive from a bare one. The reason for this is that the rules of English grammar were originally modeled on those of Latin, which in the seventeenth century was considered the purest and most admirable of tongues. That it may be. But it is also quite clearly another language altogether. Imposing Latin rules on En-glish structure is a little like trying to play baseball in ice skates.

The two simply don't match. In the sentence "I am swimming,"

swimming is a present participle. But in the sentence "Swimming is good for you," it is a gerund—even though it means exactly the same thing.

A third—and more contentious—supposed advantage of English is the relative simplicity of its spelling and pronunciation. For all its idiosyncrasies, English is said to have fewer of the awkward con-sonant clusters and singsong tonal variations that make other lan-guages so difficult to master. In Cantonese,
hae
means "yes." But, with a fractional change of pitch, it also describes the female pu-denda. The resulting scope for confusion can be safely left to the imagination. In other languages it is the orthography, or spelling, that leads to bewilderment. In Welsh, the word for beer is
cwrw--
an
impossible combination of letters for any English speaker. But Welsh spellings are
as
nothing compared with Irish Gaelic, a lan-guage in which spelling and pronunciation give the impression of having been devised by separate committees, meeting in separate rooms, while implacably divided over some deep semantic issue.

Try pronouncing
geimhreadh,
Gaelic for "winter," and you will probably come up with something like "gem-reed-uh." It is in fact

"gyeeryee."
Beaudhchais
("thank you") is "bekkas" and
6 Seaghda
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THE WORLD'S LANGUAGE

("Oh-seeg-da?") is simply "O'Shea." Against this, the Welsh pro-nunciation of cwrw—"koo-roo"—begins to look positively self-evident.

In all languages pronunciation is of course largely a matter of familiarity mingled with prejudice. The average English speaker confronted with agglomerations of letters like
tchst, sthm,
and
tchph
would naturally conclude that they were pretty well unpro-nounceable. Yet we use them every day in the words
matchstick,
asthma,
and
catchphrase.
Here, as in almost every other area of language, natural bias plays an inescapable part in any attempt at evaluation. No one has ever said, "Yes, my language is backward and unexpressive, and could really do with some sharpening up.- We tend to regard other people's languages as we regard their cultures—with ill-hidden disdain. In Japanese, the word for for-eigner means "stinking of foreign hair." To the Czechs a Hungarian is "a pimple." Germans call cockroaches "Frenchmen," while the French call lice "Spaniards." We in the English-speaking world take French leave, but Italians and Norwegians talk about depart-ing like an Englishman, and Germans talk of running like a Dutch-man. Italians call syphilis "the French disease," while both French and Italians call con games "American swindle." Belgian taxi driv-ers call a poor tipper "un Anglais." To be bored to death in French is "etre de Birmingham," literally "to be from Birmingham" (which is actually about right). And in English we have "Dutch courage,"

"French letters," "Spanish fly," "Mexican carwash" (i.e., leaving your car out in the rain), and many others. Late in the last century these epithets focused on the Irish, and often, it must be said, they were as witty as they were wounding. An Irish buggy was a wheel-barrow. An Irish beauty was a woman with two black eyes. Irish confetti was bricks. An Irish promotion was a demotion. Now al-most the only slur against these fine people is to get one's Irish up, and that isn't really taken as an insult.

So objective evidence, even among the authorities, is not always easy to come by. Most books on English imply in one way or another that our language is superior to all others. In
The English
Language,
Robert Burchfield writes: "As a source of intellectual
THE MOTHER TONGUE

power and entertainment the whole range of prose writing in En-glish is probably unequalled anywhere else in the world." I would like to think he's right, but I can't help wondering if Mr. Burchfield would have made the same generous assertion had he been born Russian or German or Chinese. There is no reliable way of mea-suring the quality or efficiency of any language. Yet there are one or two small ways in which English has a demonstrable edge over other languages. For one thing its pronouns are largely, and mer-cifully, uninflected. In German, if you wish to say you, you must choose between seven words:
du, dich,
dir,
Sie, Ihnen,
ihr, and
euch.
This can cause immense social anxiety. The composer Rich-ard Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, were part-ners for twenty-five years and apparently adored each other and yet never quite found the nerve to address each other
as
anything but the stiff "Sie." In English we avoid these problems by relying on just one form: you.

In other languages, questions of familiarity can become even more agonizing. A Korean has to choose between one of six verb suffixes to accord with the status of the person addressed. A speaker of Japanese must equally wend his way through a series of linguis-tic levels appropriate to the social position of the participants.

When he says thank you he must choose between a range of meanings running from the perfunctory
arigato
("thanks") to the decidedly more humble
makotoni go shinsetsu de gozaimasu,
which means "what you have done or proposed to do is a truly and genuinely kind and generous deed." Above all, English is mercifully free of gender. Anyone who spent much of his or her adolescence miserably trying to remember whether it is "la plume" or "le plume" will appreciate just what a pointless bur-den masculine and feminine nouns are to any language. In this regard English is a godsend to students everywhere. Not only have we discarded problems of gender with definite and indefi-nite articles, we have often discarded the articles themselves. We say in English, "It's time to go to bed," where in most other European languages they must say, "It's
the time
to go to
the
bed."

We possess countless examples of pithy phrases—"life is short,"

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THE WORLD ' S LANGUAGE

"between heaven and earth," "to go to work"—which in other languages require articles.

English also has a commendable tendency toward conciseness, in contrast to many languages. German is full of jaw-crunching words like
Wirtschaftstreuhandgesellschaft
(business trust com-pany),
Bundesbahnangestelltenwitwe
(a widow of a federal railway employee), and
Kriegsgefangenenentschadigungsgesetz (a law
per-taining to war reparations), while in Holland companies commonly have names of forty letters or more, such as Douwe Egberts Kon-inlijke Tabaksfabriek-Koffiebranderijen-Theehandal Naamloze Vennootschap (literally Douwe Egberts Royal Tobacco Factory- Coffee Roasters-Tea Traders Incorporated; they must use fold-out business cards). English, in happy contrast, favors crisp trunca-tions: IBM, laser, NATO. Against this, however, there is an occa-sional tendency in English, particularly in academic and political circles, to resort to waffle and jargon. At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concern-ing reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance."

That is jargon—the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement—and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

But perhaps the single most notable characteristic of English—for better
and
worse—is its deceptive complexity. Nothing in En-glish is ever quite what it seems. Take the simple word
what.
We use it every day—indeed, every few sentences. But imagine trying to explain to a foreigner what
what
means. It takes the
Oxford
English Dictionary five
pages and almost 15,000 words to manage the task. As native speakers, we seldom stop to think just how complicated and illogical English is. Every day we use countless words and expressions without thinking about them—often with-out having the faintest idea what they really describe or signify.

What, for instance, is the
hem in hem
and haw, the
shrift in
short shrift, the
fell in
one fell swoop? When you are overwhelmed, where is the whelm that you are over, and what exactly does it look like? And why, come to that, can we be overwhelmed or under-
THE MOTHER TONGUE

whelmed, but not semiwhelmed or—if our feelings are less pronounced—just whelmed? Why do we say
colonel as
if it had an r in it? Why do we spell
four
with a u and
forty
without?

Answering these and other such questions is the main purpose of this book. But we start with perhaps the most enduring and mys-terious question of all: Where does language come from in the first place?

2.

THE

DAWN OF LANGUAGE

WE HAVE NOT THE FAINTEST IDEA

whether the first words spoken were uttered 20,000 years ago or
200,000
years ago. What is certain is that mankind did little except procreate and survive for 100,000 generations. (For purposes of comparison, only about eighty generations separate us from Christ.) Then suddenly, about 30,000 years ago, there burst forth an enormous creative and cooperative effort which led to the cave paintings at Lascaux, the development of improved, lightweight tools, the control of fire, and many other cooperative arrange-ments. It is unlikely that any of this could have been achieved without a fairly sophisticated system of language.

In 1857, an archaeologist examining a cave in the Neander Valley of Germany near Dusseldorf found part of an ancient human skull of a type never before encountered. The skull was from a person belonging to a race of people who ranged across Europe, the Near East, and parts of northern Africa during the long period between 30,000 and 150,000 years ago. Neanderthal man (or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) was very different from modern man. He was short, only about five feet tall, stocky, with a small forehead and heavyset features. Despite his distinctly dim-witted appearance, he possessed a larger brain than modern man (though not neces-sarily a more efficient one). Neanderthal man was unique. So far as can be told no one like him existed before or since. He wore clothes, shaped tools, engaged in communal activities. He buried his dead and marked the graves with stones, which suggests that he may have dealt in some form of religious ritual, and he looked after infirm members of his tribe or family. He also very probably en-
THE MOTHER TONGUE

gaged in small wars. All of this would suggest the power of speech.

About 30,000 years ago Neanderthal man disappeared, displaced by Homo sapiens sapiens, a taller, slimmer, altogether more agile and handsome—at least to our eyes—race of people who arose in Africa ,000

years ago, spread to the Near East, and then were

drawn to Europe by the retreating ice sheets of the last great ice age. These are the Cro-Magnon people who were responsible for the famous cave paintings at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain—the earliest signs of civilization in Europe, the work of the world's first artists. Although this was an immensely long time ago—some
20,
000 years before the domestication of animals and the rise of farming—these Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: They had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks.

And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech.

Other mammals have no contact between their airways and esophagi. They can breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of food going down the wrong way. But with Homo sapiens food and drink must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a constant risk that some will be inadvertently inhaled. In modern humans, the lowered larynx isn't in position from birth. It descends sometime between the ages of three and five months—curiously, the precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. At all the descended larynx explains why you can speak and your dog cannot. ,

According to studies conducted by Philip Lieberman at Brown University, Neanderthal man was physiologically precluded from uttering certain basic sounds such as the /é/ sound of
bee
or the /oo/

sound of
boot.
His speech, if it existed at all, would have been nasal-sounding and fairly imprecise—and that would no doubt have greatly impeded his development.

It was long supposed that Neanderthal was absorbed by the more advanced Homo sapiens. But recent evidence indicates that
THE DAWN OF LANGUAGE

Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted in the Near East for 30,000 years without interbreeding—strong evidence that the Neanderthals must have been a different species It is interesting to speculate what would have become of these people had they survived. Would we have used them for slaves? For sport? Who can say?

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