Let's write about speaking with Englishisms

"Two Languages Walk Into a Bar", an echo essay by John McWhorter published in The New York Times: 

I have been asked often these days about a recent study on a form of Spanish-influenced English that has emerged in Miami. 

Phillip Carter, a linguist at Florida International University, assisted by Kristen D’Alessandro Merii in the study.

Miami is highly bilingual; in some neighborhoods, 90 percent of households use Spanish daily. 

But, more interesting, perhaps, are the ways in which many Spanish-English bilinguals use expressions in English that are modeled on Spanish. Like, they are sometimes seem to be speaking English “in Spanish.” This is true not only of those whose first language was Spanish, but of second- and third-generation bilinguals, too.

In this Miami English, for instance, you say “get down from the car” rather than “get out of it,” because this is how you would put it in Spanish: bajarse del carro. You “make” a party instead of “throwing” it for the same reason. (In Spanish, it’s hacer una fiesta.) And you get married “with” instead of “to” someone because in Spanish one says “casarse con” rather than “casarse a.”

But Carter’s study is also a useful demonstration of the typical although perhaps counterintuitive way in which languages gently alter one another. Our usual sense of a language is of something “pure” and unadulterated. When other languages stage incursions into one we know, we often process them along a continuum from amusement (Louisiana’s mock-French “Laissez les bons temps rouler!” for “Let the good times roll”) through perplexity (“Why are there so many French words in English?”) to even contempt. I once knew a Romanian who found something unseemly and even louche in the fact that his language — a Romance one related to Italian — had taken in so many Slavic words.

But, just as human beings might think it’s strange that animals walk on four legs when in fact it is bipedalism that is unusual, languages mixing together is the default, not a special case. Where lots of people are bilingual — such as in Miami — languages will almost always exchange words. And more than that, they will often also start to put words together in similar ways.

For example, one thing an English speaker typically has to unlearn when mastering a foreign language is the way we strand prepositions at the ends of sentences: “This is the house we went to.” Calls to avoid this practice — who among us did not learn in school to “never end a sentence with a preposition”? — have been silly and useless. (Cue here the possibly apocryphal anecdote about Winston Churchill’s verdict on the rule: “This is the type of errant pedantry up with which I shall not put!”) However, in other languages the rule is a real one. To make the similarly structured statement in Spanish, “Esta es la casa que yo fui a,” could practically get you fined. No pedant (i.e., a person who is obsessed with minor details) needs to warn people against it, as no native speaker would ever be inclined to say it. It simply isn’t Spanish on any level.

I encountered another variation on this theme during my annual stay at a Jewish summer bungalow colony. Why me? Long story, but it started during the pandemic and became a habit, and I am one of many non-Jews there. It’s called Rosmarins Cottages, and it is one of the last Reform Jewish colonies of a kind of which there were once dozens in the Catskills — immortalized in the film “Dirty Dancing” and, more recently, on the wondrous television series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

At Rosmarins, I get an earful of what happens to English when it is spoken alongside yet another language, Yiddish. Of course, most people don’t walk around the place thinking of themselves as speaking Yiddishisms. 

But,if you listen to them closely, you can hear how Yiddish infiltrated the English of earlier American Jews, such that it now seasons the speech of people a generation or more removed from actually speaking Yiddish.

For example, at Rosmarins, one says that one will be eating “by” someone’s bungalow later, not “at” it, e.g., “We’re going to be by Lenore’s. Are you coming?” This “by” is taken from the way Yiddish uses its word “bey”: “I am at grandpa and grandma’s house” is “Ikh bin bey zeyde aun bobe’s hoyz.” 

Just as Miami English is used by people who mostly speak English, at Rosmarins all but a sliver of the people using “by” this way do not speak Yiddish. Even the non-Jewish bungaleers (yes, that’s the term) come to use it. I and another gentile resident were using it just the other day, without a second thought.

A while ago, another resident and I were trying to find the light switch when leaving a big barn of a building. The resident, a lifelong English speaker who does not speak Yiddish, but had relatives who did, found the switch and said, “Oh, I found where to close that light.” That was modeled on Yiddish, in which one could put it the same way and say, “makh tsi de likht.”

Or, to go back in time a little, there was — of course — a 1950s Broadway musical about a Jewish bungalow colony. It was called “Wish You Were Here” and was a minor hit. The colony’s social director introduced himself with a song, set to a klezmer-like tune, in one stanza of which he sang about how his parents and older relatives hated that he had decided to become a social director. He imitates them:

Oh, woe, woe, woe!

A social director! A social director!

Don’t tell us our boy is a social director!

Let him be a loafer, let him be a bum.

Anything is better than our boy he should become

A social director!!!

I have always liked the line “Anything is better than our boy he should become,” because this is how the sentence would be put in Yiddish as well, and the parents of this Jewish man of 1952 would most likely have been Yiddish speakers. One often reads and hears similar phrasing in literary and dramatic depictions of Jewish people of that era.

However, things are different in, say, Copenhagen. Danish, and its sister languages Swedish and Norwegian, that happily strand prepositions in the same way English does. For “This is the house we went to,” the Dane says, “Dette er huset vi gik til.” All you have to know is that “til” means “to.”

The reason that preposition stranding is happening in London, Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm but not in Paris, Madrid or Moscow is that Scandinavian Vikings invaded Britain starting in the eighth century C.E. It is commonly noted that they left behind hundreds of words in the language, such as “skirt,” “ill,” “egg” and “happy.” But they also left ways of putting things, such as stranded prepositions. Before the Vikings came, no Old English speaker would have been caught dead stranding prepositions. But after the Vikings, in many ways English was spoken “in Viking.”

The Miami story, then, is a modern version of what happened to English in the Middle Ages, except this time the language is Spanish rather than Danish or Norwegian.

I have always liked the line “Anything is better than our boy he should become,” because this is how the sentence would be put in Yiddish as well, and the parents of this Jewish man of 1952 would most likely have been Yiddish speakers. One often reads and hears similar phrasing in literary and dramatic depictions of Jewish people of that era.

As Carter put it in an interview, “When you have two languages spoken by most of the population, you’re going to have a lot of interesting language contact happening.” In other words, the new Miami English is a cool example of an utterly ordinary phenomenon.

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University.

Let's write about handwriting

An echo essay published in The New York Times by John McWhorter:  

It’s quaint to read how common it was in the late 1920s, when sound had just come to the movies, to assume it was just a fad. More than a few people thought films had been better without sound — that actors had been more expressive, that sound was intrusive upon the artistic illusion and so on.

I suspect that complaints these days that students are not learning cursive will look similar in a hundred years.
It seems as if students are learning cursive ever less. 

I now teach a generation of students who not only never knew the 20th century and think of CDs as quaint, but mostly they do not write in cursive. The idea behind this, at least implicitly, is that so much writing now takes place on the keyboard that cursive, designed for handwriting, is no longer essential. I remember one of my daughters coming home in second grade in 2016, and complaining that she couldn’t read one of her teachers’ comments because they were written in what she called “scrip,” seeming to process it as some exotic writing system like cuneiforms (ie,the oldest form of writing known). And she indeed, while able to read it, does not write in it now.

Even as an “old soul” who values things about the past on various levels, I see nothing wrong with this whatsoever.
I never even liked “scrip” — my mispronunciation was calling it “cursiff” for a good while — even though as a 1970s kid I was immersed in it early on. It always felt like being made to drive too fast. What was supposed to be more efficient by precluding the need to lift the pencil off the page always felt too prone to slips of the finger, to messiness that would make it hard for the reader to decode. Cursive always seemed a tad laborious to me.

I got used to it, but I had a history teacher in 10th grade who was especially good, and one day while taking notes as he lectured, I started writing in little capital letters because it was easier and allowed me to follow him more closely. For the first time, physical writing felt good to my hand and brain, and I never looked back. (That teacher was Gene Kerrick at Friends’ Select in Philadelphia, who has recently celebrated his 100th birthday!).

For one, I no longer worried about the mess. Cursive’s nonstop flow encourages a certain, shall we say, freedom — one falls into abbreviative little habits, one flattens, one extends. It’s a short step from that to the notoriously opaque signatures of people like the founders and various presidents. Think of the father of our country “George Wafhapter” (take a look at his signature!); the four-term steward of the New Deal, “Franklin A. Gorsuch” (or something quite close!); and the man who became president in 2016, “Sousle S. Sanford.” Cursive may be easier to write than print — for many, at least — but it’s harder to read.

And besides, because so many cursive letters differ significantly from their printed equivalents, they entail a learning burden that would be better spent on other, more useful tasks. The cursive capital G, for instance, is a lovely thing, but really? Given that our writing system already makes kids learn the difference between H and h, B and b, G and g, E and e, and so on, why must we saddle them with even more variations like the cursive capital I and S?
Many argue that writing in cursive encourages memorization, but it is unclear whether it is cursive specifically or handwriting itself that lends this benefit. 

I understand that handwriting imprints the memory better — I notice it even in adulthood — but I am skeptical that there is a reason the handwriting is better done in cursive. Especially given that other problem, of cursive’s tendency toward mess — the two Presidents Bush were, epigraphically Messrs. Cug Binch and Gzw Bul.  (Maine Writer - So I looked up the word "epigraphically":  the study of inscriptions.)

I am similarly unmoved by the argument that not learning cursive will leave old documents written in it unavailable to future readers to any significant degree. A vast majority of documents written in cursive that most people will ever need to consult have long been transliterated into print, and this includes a great many documents less consulted. As a scholar who occasionally needs to dip into obscure medieval manuscripts, I would need only one hand to count the number of times the handwriting was tough and there was no print version available somewhere in a library or online to consult.
Of course, this would not be the case for hard-core scholars of antiquity, and other people would occasionally run up against handwritten sources that presented a challenge. But niche scholarship and the blue-moon occasion do not justify a universal policy of childhood education. Rather, decoding “scrip” should become a skill imparted to aspiring specialists. There are already smart apps that decode cursive writing for the curious, perhaps not perfectly but well enough to serve general purposes.

By my lights, it is about as important for modern kids to learn cursive as it is for them to know their Roman numerals. The latter are kind of fun, and you have to know them to … well, for me they were for reading what the year was on “Looney Tunes” opening credits, and I guess one might want to be able to know what year a building was constructed without having to ask someone. But just as those aren’t enough to impose learning Roman numerals on all schoolchildren, cursive’s time is up, now that all people will spend so much less time writing by hand.

Is it possible that part of the reason many don’t want to see the eclipse of cursive is that it’s pretty? I get that. But so were Gilded Age ball gowns and fondue, and yet here we are. Or LP record jackets. Despite retaining about 150 LPs today out of obstinate nostalgia, I vastly preferred CDs to the scratchable, space-hogging things that LPs were, with their limit of about 25 minutes a side if you wanted good sound all the way, and wearing down after too many plays. I miss the artwork on the big cardboard square packages, but not so much as to miss the general inconveniences.
I march unconcerned, then, into the new world of no “scrip.” My children will prefer writing on keyboards, as I myself long have. 

I hope that the time once devoted to teaching cursive can now be diverted to teaching students about the content of their writing rather than its physical form. In a nutshell, handwritten English, to the extent that we need it, should simply parallel printed letters.   

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University.