aeon.co (13/11/2015) • Why is English so weird… (f5-6)

▤  •  M c W h o r t e r  (2 0 1 5)  •  W h y  i s  E n g l i s h  s o  w e i r d l y  d i f f e r e n t …  •

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In Old English, however, ‘Ving-Thor was mad when he woke up’ would have been ‹Wraþmod wæs Ving-Þórr›/‹he áwæcnede›. We can just about wrap our heads around this as ‘English’, but we’re clearly a lot further from ‹Beowulf› than today’s Reykjavikers are from Ving-Thor.

Thus English is indeed an odd language, and its spelling is only the beginning of it. In the widely read ‹Globish› (2010), McCrum celebrates English as uniquely ‘vigorous’, ‘too sturdy to be obliterated’ by the Norman Conquest. He also treats English as laudably ‘flexible’ and ‘adaptable’, impressed by its mongrel vocabulary. McCrum is merely following in a long tradition of sunny, muscular boasts, which resemble the Russians’ idea that their language is ‘great and mighty’, as the 19th-century novelist Ivan Turgenev called it, or the French idea that their language is uniquely ‘clear’ (‹Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français›).

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