This Island English

When I first moved The Netherlands, the language experience was somewhat disorienting. As I listened to everyone around me rattle on in Dutch, I felt as though I was on the verge of comprehension. If I could just listen a little harder, just pay attention a little more, the language would suddenly 'come into focus' and I would understand it.

Alas, that elusive comprehension remained over the horizon for many months of hard study.

But it's perhaps not surprising I felt this way. John McWhorter states in The Power of Babel that Dutch is probably the closest language to English, especially Old English.

Unfortunately, English isn't close to Old English. In fact true English words make up only about 1% of the modern English language! All the rest are imports from Old Norse, Norman French, Greek and of course Latin, not to mention bits and pieces from virtually every other culture we've ever come into contact with.

Grammatically, English remains in the Germanic family. But alas for us English speakers, it is really all alone in a class by itself. McWhorter says that that's what makes life hard for English-speaking natives when they decide to acquire a second language.

My experience in Amsterdam was that a native German speaker could be conversant in Dutch within about two months of arriving. McWhorter says that Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are so similar that they are really different dialects rather than languages. And a Dutch or German speaker would find many familiar things in them and acquire them rapidly.

Likewise, Spanish speakers are well on their way to speaking Italian and Portuguese. Even French, the odd-ball of the Romance languages, will come quickly, because for all its strange sounds it uses the same fundamental grammar and word-order.

Meanwhile, the English speaker who wants to learn a Germanic language finds that the core of the language is somewhat familiar. Those few Old English words that we have left are almost all important ones: a, an and the, and itself, the pronouns, words like water and old, and our irregular verbs, esp. the many odd forms of to be all have their roots in Old English.

Learning Dutch I was gratified to find that it had articles in common with English. Having articles of speech is actually a bit odd for languages in general, but Germanic languages tend to have them: an and the correspond nicely to een and het* in Dutch, for example. Also nice: if a verb is irregular in English, it's also probably irregular in Dutch, although probably in a different way. But at least you know what to look for.

So picking up the core of a Germanic language isn't too bad, but after that it gets hard. They treat complex verbs rather differently and the 'high level' language is completely alien. We use virtually no OE words for complex, multi-syllabic words, so unless one is lucky to find that the Germanic language in question also cribbed from Latin (occasionally the case in Dutch) then one is going to be doing a lot of rote memorization for several years just to read the newspaper.

Try and learn a Romance language, and the situation is reversed. The 'core words' are completely alien, as we don't use the Latin-descended words for 'is', 'love' or 'fish' in Modern English. Once you get into the higher-level language, though, the Latin-based suffixes and prefixes should be familiar. But conjugating those verbs and keeping track of noun gender is probably never going to come easily.

It's strange that English has taken such a separate path from other European languages. And while it's certainly not unusual for a language to take on outside words, for a language to be overwhelmed by them to the degree that English has been has certainly set it apart.

There is good news, at least for our great-great-grandchildren. Given English's momentum as the global lingua franca, it's likely that it will be with us and heard around the world for a long time. And when it does evolve into one or more different languages, well, hopefully our descendants will have a leg up on them from having spoken our unique mother tongue.

* I know it looks like a misspelled the, but it actually is closer kin to it.