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Title: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

Subtitle: The Untold History of English

Author: John McWhorter

Narrator: John McWhorter

Format: Unabridged

Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-03-09

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 2561 votes

Genres: History, World

Publisher's Summary:

Covering such turning points as the little-known Celtic and Welsh influences on English, the impact of the Viking raids and the Norman Conquest, and the Germanic invasions that started it all during the fifth century A.D., John McWhorter narrates this colorful evolution with vigor.

Drawing on revolutionary genetic and linguistic research, as well as a cache of remarkable trivia about the origins of English words and syntax patterns, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue ultimately demonstrates the arbitrary, maddening nature of English - and its ironic simplicity due to its role as a streamlined lingua franca during the early formation of Britain. This is the book that language aficionados worldwide have been waiting for. (And no, it's not a sin to end a sentence with a preposition.)

Editorial Reviews:

There is something about the English language. Belonging to the Proto-Germanic language group, English has a structure that is oddly, weirdly different from other Germanic languages. In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, John McWhorter has achieved nothing less than a new understanding of the historic formation of the English language in McWhorters words a revised conception of what English is and why. The linguist and public intellectual McWhorter accomplished this scholarly feat outside the tight restrictor box of academic publications. He did it with a popular book and thoroughly convincing arguments framed in richly entertaining, informal colloquial language.

The audiobook production of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue takes McWhorters transformation of scholarship to a new level. The book is about the spoken word and how and why the English languages structure that is the syntax, and which linguists term the grammar changed through time. McWhorter tells the story the way it should be told: in spoken English by a master of the subject of how the languages under study sounded. The author has a remarkable, animated narrative voice and his delivery has an engaging and captivating personal touch. He is a great teacher with a world-class set of pipes, who clearly has developed a special relationship with studio microphones.

McWhorters intent is to fill in a chapter of The History of English that has not been presented to the lay public, partly because it is a chapter even scholars of Englishs development have rarely engaged at length. The changes of English under study are from spoken Old English before 787 C.E. and the Viking invasions and the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the Middle English of Chaucers time. (With Chaucer we are a hop, skip, and a jump away from the English we easily recognize today.) The influences that altered the language, in McWhorters new formulation, include how, beginning in 787 C.E., the Viking invaders beat up the English language in the same way that we beat up foreign languages in class rooms, and thus shed some of the English grammar, and the native British Celtic Welsh and Cornish mixed their native grammars with English grammar. After the Norman Invasion, French was the language of a relatively small ruling class and was thus the written language.