ENTANGLED TONGUES

Kisch takes a brief look at the building blocks of modern English.

Where does the English that is currently spoken come from? Why does it function the way that it does? These are the questions that the author, a retired English professor, addresses in this examination of the many different pieces that have come together to form modern English. First, some history: The trail goes back to the year 449, when Anglo-Saxon tribes brought their own Germanic-based languages to what is modern day England. These languages formed the basis for what became Old English, but the Norman conquest of 1066 changed everything—French became the dominant tongue in England. By the time of King Henry V, English had re-emerged (per Kisch, Henry V was “probably the first king to speak and write English with ease”). In the years between 1066 and 1200, “about 900 words moved from French into English.” The author goes on to explain how different words from different backgrounds have survived, and how words have changed (house comes from the German haus, while mansion comes from the French maison). Then, there are additional considerations that often baffle those learning English, such as the language’s seemingly strange rules of spelling and grammar. A lot of information is condensed into fewer than 200 pages. Chapters progress in a conversational style; the reader is often addressed directly, as in this consideration of the Norman conquest: “Your life will never be the same again and your language may never be the same, either. This is what happened to the English people in 1066.” As hundreds of years of English history are rushed through, the book has many fascinating points to make. (For example, Shakespeare used “not only French words, but also French sentence structures which sound odd to an English ear.”) All told, the book offers readers different ways of looking at what they say.

An edifying account of the evolution of a complex language.