The End of my Book.

In general Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue was an amazing book. I am so glad I chose this book because I learned so much from it, not only about English or Languages, but about the history of humans in general. To be honest, the title of the book did not really make me expect much from it, since I thought it would be more like about English, Grammar, and more English. But the book was actually more about the ancient civilizations which through migration and interaction shaped and reshaped languages, or even created them. For example, I had no idea that there were such things as Proto-Indo-European, and Proto-Germanic languages, and that all of our contemporary languages are actually branches of these. It was great to learn that my first language Spanish is a descendant language of Latin, which is itself a descendent of Proto-Indo-European. Knowing this, now I can more easily understand why Spanish and English or languages in general are so different from each other, in aspects such as gender, case markers, etc. In the English and Spanish case for example, even though these two languages are both late descendants of Proto-Indo-European, their differences are due to events that happened long before they even existed. It is actually a very long story, and I am going to summarize it for you because this was actually what I liked the most about the book.

So Proto-Indo-European is where everything started. This was the language spoken in Europe way before any of the languages we know today were even known. From this one, many other branches were created; among these branches was Proto-Germanic which is the branch from where languages such as English, German, Swedish and many others came. But the reason of why English is so different, is because Proto-Germanic, was actually the different one among Indo-European languages, since way before English was spoken, Phoenician speakers who migrated to Europe learned Proto-Indo-European, and beat up the language erasing plenty of grammatical properties from it, and creating Proto-Germanic. Then English itself suffered huge transformations, first mixing with Celtic languages such as Welsh and Cornish, second being all beat up and modified by the Vikings and finally being invaded by the Norman and French.

The story is actually much more complex than what I just showed, but as we can see even this little information can give us an understanding of how after such long History of change, a langue has to obviously in some way be unique.

The concluding chapters of my book were 4 and 5. In chapter 4, McWhorter talks about the influence of grammar or language in our way of thinking. This was specially very interesting since we started the semester reading the article Does Tout Language Shape How You Think?. And just like Guy Deutscher, McWhorter disagrees with the Whorf theory supporting his point with very convincing evidence.

In Ch 5, McWhorter goes on more deeply in the story of language even before English existed, explaining with more details what I just summarized above. These two chapters I have to confece were a little bit boring compared to chapters 1, 2, and 3 which I enjoyed more, but overall they actually taught me a lot.