Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (26 page)

There are, however, genderless Indo-European languages beyond Europe. Armenian has no gender “just because”—but has seven cases (!), and so has hardly undergone an English-style sloughing-off experience. Persian has no gender—but then this is almost definitely because of a drive-by in its history similar to the one English underwent, upon which if you’re really interested, if I may be forgiven for plugging myself, see my
Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Among Germanic languages, Afrikaans has no gender, but it is Dutch filtered through southern African peoples transforming it in like fashion to, but to a lesser extent than, what Vikings did to English (and thus retains almost everything otherwise that German and the gang do, as we’ll see as we go on).

For those who care, in “normal” Germanic languages: you say “She washed me the hair” rather than
She washed my hair
when talking about things done to your person; there remains alive a bouquet of prefixes that are long dead or fossilized in English, like
be
- (
bedecked
) and
for
- (
forbear
—did you ever think about what
for
- “means”?); the word
become
is used to mark the passive voice instead of just
be
; there is a pronoun especially for singular
you
like English’s
thou
now gone in the standard dialect; and then on top of that lots of endings are retained, such as to mark adjectives or the subjunctive.

There have been arguments that Chinese grammar was affected by the languages of its foreign rulers (most prominently some work by Mantaro Hashimoto). I find this hard to support, and highly suspect that most evaluators would agree with me in light of advances in the study of language contact since Hashimoto wrote. I present an alternate analysis of the history of Chinese grammar (indeed based on contact, but long before Genghis Khan and the Manchus) in
Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)(sorry for plug number two).

This is a mock sentence.

A useful summary of the record of this hypotheses from its inception up to the eighties is John A. Lucy,
Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). It should be noted that since then, there has been work faintly favorable to the hypothesis, albeit in no way bearing it out as proposed by Whorf and his followers. This has included work by Lucy, as well as work by scholars such as Paul Kay, Lera Boroditzky, and Daniel Colasanto.

In fact, there was one other ancient Indo-European branch that was about as slim around the waist as Proto-Germanic. Hittite, a long-extinct language spoken in what is now Turkey, had two genders rather than the classic three that Proto-Indo-European is thought to have had, and less verb-marking equipment than a card-carrying early Indo-European language typically hefted around. However, many heavy-hitting scholars of Indo-European have long argued that Hittite was what Proto-Indo-European itself was like, and that languages like Latin came later. That is, at first Proto-Indo-European, a language about as elaborated as Hittite but nowhere near as elaborated as Latin, split into two languages. One was Hittite itself, or more properly, the small family of now extinct languages Hittite was a part of, called Anatolian. Hittite and company stayed like Proto-Indo-European, which would have had, for example, just two genders rather than three. Call that “
P
roto-Indo-European Number One” or PIE1. But then there was the other first branch of Proto-Indo-European, which we will call PIE2. PIE2 happened to sprout a bunch of new conjugations, and a new gender alongside the original two. This busy language then morphed into all of the modern Indo-European families, including Germanic. Among these families, if grammar were foliage, only Germanic proceeded to clip the hedges into bushes instead of letting them become trees. Thus Proto-Germanic remains the odd one out, having alone shed so much of what Hittite, albeit looking similar to it, cannot have shed since it never had it.

Vennemann also called my attention to the article in
Der Spiegel
reporting the discovery of the artifacts in Schleswig-Holstein.

I have not included Vennemann’s argument that the reason Germanic languages (except English) keep the verb up front in second place because early Semitic languages put their verbs first, such that Phoenicians would have preferred keeping verbs as close to the beginning of sentences as possible in rendering Proto-Germanic. Although the argument is interesting, my intent has been to maintain a focus on what made for Modern English, and Modern English lacks the V2 rule (although Old English had it).

Similarly, Vennemann is devoted not only to the Phoenician argument, but to one stipulating that Proto-Germanic vocabulary and accent patterns were affected by relatives of Basque once spoken across Europe before Proto-Indo-European spread across the continent and marginalized Basque. (Today, Basque is spoken in a small region straddling France and Spain and has no living relatives.) Vennemann’s work in this vein is also admirable, but I have not included it because it applies to other Indo-European language families as well, including Celtic and the Romance languages. For the sake of keeping the throughline as focused as possible, I have restricted this book to issues unique to English.

Vennemann puts forth both of these arguments in “Zur Entstehung des Germanischen,”
Sprachwissenschaft
25 (2000): 233-69.