Inventing English

I'm reading Inventing English by Seth Lehrer (I heard about it Language Hat). So far (two chapters in, still Old English) it's fascinating and well-written. But I've discovered that although Lehrer knows quite a lot about English (and probably the Germanic languages as a whole), he's not quite so knowledgeable about other languages.

One point was mentioned over at Language Hat: Lehrer uses Gaelic to mean Irish, and Erse to mean Scots Gaelic - and then pronounces "Erse" dead (p.9), which it isn't.

A nit.

Here's another. He says (p 8) "The word wind appears in Latin as ventus, in Russian as veter, in Irish Gaelic as gwent, and in Sanskrit as vatas." Um, no. GW- is most emphatically not an Irish phoneme; the letter W isn't even used in spelling Irish (or Scots Gaelic, for that matter). The Irish for "wind" is gaoth; gwynt is Welsh. (Note that it's gwYnt, too, not gwEnt, which is the name of an administrative division (county) in Wales - also well known (in some circles anyway) in the phrase "Viet Gwent" used for the feared Pontypool front row (rugby).)

And one more (p14):

Old English also shared with the other Germanic languages a system of grammar. All of the other ancient European languages - Greek, Latin, Celtic - could form verb tenses by adding suffixes to verb roots. In Latin, for example, you could say "I love" in the present tense (amo), and "I will love" in the future (amabo). In the Germanic languages, as in modern English, you would need a separate or helping verb to form the future tense. In Old English, "I love" would be Ic lufige. But for the future tense, you would have to say, Ic sceal lufian. This pattern is unique to the Germanic languages.

Not unless he's counting the Slavic languages as "Germanic" (and indeed Slavo-Germanic was an ancient family in Indo-European, but if he's going to refer to "Greek, Latin, Celtic" instead of to the Greco-Italo-Celtic family, he really should mention Slavic. In fact, he should mention it anyway). In Russian, for instance, "I love" is ya lyublyu, but "I will love" is ya budu lyubit'.

But nits aside, the man really does know his English. And so far I have to agree with Hat:

this is a wonderful book. It's not hard to find well-informed books about the history of the English language, and it's not hard to find good critical accounts of English literature, but to have the two intertwined in one book is remarkable. Lerer goes through the various periods of Old, Middle, and Modern English, explaining the changes the language undergoes and analyzing the literature of the time accordingly, and the results are consistently enlightening.