A client recently asked me why English is so bizarre.  She was trying to explain its quirks to a precocious, bi-lingual eight-year-old, and not doing very well.  Not that I did much better – English is a genuinely freaky language, with random spelling rules, no particular sentence structure, and far more words than any reasonable language needs.  Part of the reason it’s so confused is that it’s perfectly happy to steal useful words from just about anywhere it can get them, from Hindi (“shampoo”) to Tshiluba, one of the languages of the Congo (“chimpanzee”).

But the root of English strangeness comes from the way it was formed when two sources of language flowed together.  Old English originally grew out of Anglo-Saxon, which is more-or-less Germanic.  Then Old English was conquered literally and figuratively by Norman French, which was still fairly close to Latin at the time.  As a result (outcome), English at its heart (essentially) has at least two words (expressions) for every concept (thought), one from each of its two mother streams (foundations) of language.

But while this hot mess of a history makes English hard to use, it does give writers a chance to control how their work feels just by picking which source they draw their language from.  Short, consonant-packed words grounded in Anglo-Saxon have strength and punch, while longer, vowel-infused Latinate derivatives feel more cerebral and anemic.  There’s a reason all of the most effective obscenities come from Old English.  Calling someone a coprophagous, copulating, progeny of a female canine just lacks . . . spunk. [Read more…]