Transcripts

John McWhorter:
As languages go, English is somewhat less complex in its basics than many other languages.

John McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley and author of the book, The Power of Babel.

That's because English is one of many languages where at one point in its history, more people were using it as a second language than as a first. There's some people that think this happened after the Vikings came. And so that's why English is so much easier to get the basics of.

Professor McWhorter says there are other fascinating things about English that you've probably never thought about.

In English, we have the words "a" and "the" so there's "a cat" and "the cat." And we would think that any language would have to make that distinction between a cat that you bring into the conversation now and the cat that you talked about yesterday. And actually, most languages in the world do not have two words, "a" and "the." In the same way when you go to other places in the world, they'll be different ways of saying "my", depending on whether you're talking about something that is part of you, like your ear or your mother, versus a bucket or a couch. So in many, many languages around the world, you have different ways of saying "my" "your" and "his." To us, that seems absolutely absurd.

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