Six Consequences of Our Native Tongue

“English Is Not Normal,” says John McWhorter, and as a long-time linguist and lecturer on the subject, he should know. I collect such articles like a beaver collects sticks, so I’m familiar with the general outline, but McWhorter brings out some facts I didn’t know. Having “little Latin and less Greek,” (that’s from Shakespeare, but it describes me), I’m pretty much a monolingual; otherwise I’d be more aware of these anomalies. But, assuming you and I are both English speakers, here are the consequences we can expect as we English our way through life.

1. Spelling Bees. Yes, anyone who’s been through an American elementary school knows that English is fiendishly difficult to spell—but so much so that spelling is an actual competitive academic sport. Scripps-Howard would have no meat to chew on in other countries where the language is spelled more or less phonetically.
2. Nobody else in the western hemisphere can understand us. Portuguese and Spanish speakers can communicate well enough, as can the Dutch and the Germans—even (stepping out of the western hemi) the Thais and the Laotians. But there’s no other language that is even moderately close to English.
3. We’re genderless. Yep, it seems very odd to us that all the major European languages retain a sense of noun genders (feminine turnips and neutered English maidens,* etc.), while English does not. We think they’re weird; they think we’re weird, so it’s even. After years of studying Latin, though, I’m happy to dispense with the he-trees and she-souls, along with adjectives that must agree both in gender, declension, and case. Agreeable adjectives was the point at which my daughter decided Latin was NOT FUN.
4. Superfluous do’s and the’s. This probably isn’t too unique—other European languages have their little lardy poke-ins. But none, to my knowledge, have definite and indefinite articles: those embellishments that must adorn a singular noun. Or an undistinguished, general noun. Or the noun—yes, that one over there. Also, according to McWhorter, the Celtic languages are the only others that incorporate do as a means of asking a question. Do English speakers? Why, yes they do. 
5. 50-cent words. In most other languages, “big words” don’t have any special cachet. English received a dose of sophistication with the Norman invasion (they spoke French), but around the 16^th century “Latinate” words were deliberately adopted as a way to sound smart. And with a wave of scientific progress in the 19^th century, scientific minds decided that science and tech words should derive from Greek: thus, photograph (light writing) and sodium (salt).
6. Etymology. Thousands of English words have such an interesting background that a whole division of academia developed to study them. To one little Island, whose the blue-painted inhabitants were called Celts, came first the Romans, then the Angles and Saxons, then the Danes and Norsemen, then the Normans. From one little island went Sir Francis Drake and John Smith and Captain Cook, bringing back the wealth of nations and their quirky words. “To be fair,” writes  John McWhorter, “mongrel vocabularies are hardly uncommon worldwide, but English’s hybridity is high on the scale compared with most European languages.”

The result is one word-rich mongrel language with enormous flexibility in structure. A real wordsmith’s playground!

*See Mark Twain’s essay, “The Awful German Language”