Read by John McWhorter

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 McWhorter.s 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 McWhorter.s
transformation of scholarship to a new level. The book is about the spoken word
and how and why the English language.s 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.

McWhorter.s 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
English.s 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 Chaucer.s 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 McWhorter.s 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.
But with the Hundreds Years. War between England and France, English again became
the ruling language, and the changes that had been created in spoken English found
their way into written Middle English.

Listening to McWhorter articulate his points with his extraordinarily expressive,
polemically powerful voice, and cutting through and continually upending the
scrabble board of flabby etymological presumptions of the established view . it
is like nothing you.ve ever heard. The audio edition of this groundbreaking work,
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue . an otherwise scholarly study twice transformed
into a popular book and then into the audiobook that gives such impressive
expressive voice to the changes of the English language . is a milestone in
audiobook production. . David Chasey

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