Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter

English: Chaucer, Sir Gawain, a language with a certain queer dignity on the page, not exactly what we speak but obviously related: Whan that Aprille with hise shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote. Our tendency is to pronounce it with a vaguely Swedish lilt, which makes it pretty to our ear.
    Next, Shakespeare—enough said. Shakespeare and Chaucer would have had to work to converse, but we do not see Shakespeare as having deformed the language of the Canterbury Tales . Rather, we might imagine the transformation from Old English to Hamlet with stately medieval-style music on the sound track, full of French horns scored in tidy thirds and fourths. From Shakespeare we pass on to the King James Bible, Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, Jane Austen, and pretty soon we’re home.
    All of this is seen as noble, “historical,” a matter of our “mighty” and “open” language coming to be. But somehow, there seems to be an idea that the process had an inherent end point, beyond which we are not to go. It’s as if somebody somewhere had been endeavoring to meld a chunky Germanic tongue spoken by some restless warrior tribes into precisely the English we have right now, that they officially declared themselves finished sometime not long ago, and that from now on, we are not to mess up their creation.
    Obviously, there is a certain arbitrariness here. And here is where the Celtic influence first helps us. The transformation of Old English into Modern English was not, as we have seen, just a matter of new words. The entire grammar changed—and the sky did not fall in. Today we say that we do not “like” nouns being used as verbs: but there was a time when, surely, a lot of people didn’t “like” that people were walking around saying things like Did you see what he’s doing ?
    We can get an approximate idea of what English would have been like today if the Celts had not saddled English with their “mistakes.” English’s closest relative is Frisian, a Dutch relative today spoken by some hundreds of thousands in the Netherlands. Frisian, especially since it has lost a goodly number of Proto-Germanic suffixes, can be seen as an approximation of what English might be today if it had not met Welsh and Cornish speakers (or Vikings, but that’s the next chapter).
    Do we eat apples? in Frisian is Ite wy appels ? (“Eat we apples?”). No meaningless do . If we ask some Frisians with apples in their hands with bites out of them what they’re doing, they answer, Wy ite appels. They do not specify for us that they are in the process of eating the apples at this very instant !!!! As in any normal Germanic language, they would do this only if necessary: Wy binne oan’t iten (“We’re on the eating”).
    This business of people plugging in an oddly redundant do all over the place where it didn’t belong, and always sounding oddly caffeinated in describing what they were doing, even though there wasn’t even coffee, must have sounded pretty stupid, really, for a long time in England if you weren’t born to it. But it caught on, and now it’s the only English we know. What was once a mistake is now ordinary. The lesson, quite simply, is that the conception that new ways of putting things are mistakes is an illusion.
    But—do people perhaps have specific reasons for thinking that there is something different about our times that made change okay then but anathema now? One senses that when many people look back, they sense that something changed around the mid-1800s. Once we’re somewhere between roughly Jane Austen and Nathaniel Hawthorne, English is supposed to stay the way it is except for new words coming in for new things and old ones dropping out as things go obsolete.
    But why just then? What is it about our times that makes English inviolable, whereas in the olden days it was okay for English to morph every which way? Late in rehearsals for the musical Call Me Madam in 1950, the writers started