Mcwhorter pgs 44-87

    This chapter in Mcwhorter's book, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, describes the possible relation between Celtic and English. How although there are hardly any words borrowed from Celtic into English, there are certain grammatical similarities. He then goes on to point out that English has changed throughout the centuries, not only through new words, but through ways of speaking and what has become acceptable. That what was once considered déclassé is now normal. Mcwhorter then brings up the redundancy of "do" and the fact that English is the only European language that does not designate gender to its nouns and does not refer back to oneself with many verbs, such as “I go” in English compared to “I go myself” in the Spanish translation.  He goes on to explain the differences between Old English and Modern English. English has dropped many traits that other languages have not and Mcwhorter asserts that someone had to have done this to English, “loosened all of its screws.” The quote, “In Africa, colonial languages, like English, French, and Portuguese, have certainly poured words into small local languages-but they have had almost no effect on these languages’ grammars” (pg 83) relates back to the video about the linguists that were trying to preserve those small local languages, because there is little to no relation between them and the national language of the area they exist in. Although someone may learn both languages, they are completely separate and will remain so, unless someone came in and intentionally meshed them together, like McWhorter is proposing was done to English. The quote I am unclear on is where Mcwhorter says that “Quite a few European languages have a word that refers to people in a generic sense. Spanish’s Se habla Español…in comparison, English settles for making poor you do an awful lot of work” (77). In English when I am referring to the generic person, I can use you or one. The author neglects using one completely, why? He is excruciatingly detailed on everything else, but this.