- wiki.keithl.com/McWhorter
John McWhorter books
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McWhorter
- b 1965, PhD Stanford 1993
- taught linguistics at Cornell 1993-1995 and UC Berkeley 1995-2003
- Manhattan Institute 2003-
- Columbia University 2008-
Pronoun Trouble . 2025 BvtLib 425.55 MCW . 216 pages
The Story of Us in Seven Little Words
- I tried to read this book; if I was a language maven and had an "ear" for English as sound rather than printed words on a page, I would have learned far more from it.
- The overall message is that spoken languages evolve continuously, new words replace old, old words are modified, pronunciation changes
- over time, pronouns change, grammar changes, older and younger and second-language speakers use different pronouns, and what we talk about changes
The book does NOT explicitly list "seven little words", but the core personal pronouns of English are "I, you, he, she, it we, they" ... (him, her, them
p6 agita a feeling of agitation or anxiety
p12 amn't "am not "in Scotland and Ireland
p13 bowsy Obsolete spelling of boozy
p21 Proto Indo-European (PIE) language 4500-2500 BC
p27 Twilight Zone Five Characters in Search of an Exit
p27 me versus I: "I (subject pronoun) did it" or "me" (object pronoun) if single word used alone
- p36 Latin as model for the(snob) standardization of English
p45 linguistic agreement a word changes form depending on the other words it relates to.
- p48 Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are mutually understandable dialects of same language
- "language is a political definition, dialect is a linguistic definition"
p55 Ye is a misreading of "thorn" letter รพ
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen Ye=You, or Thee
p56 English inc meant "you two"
p57 origin of language hundreds of thousands to two million years ago
p57 Marie Kondo Japanese Organizing Consultant
p60 "status blind" use of Middle English pronouns was a grievous insult
- Shakespeare signified the social status of characters by their pronouns; Othello uses "thou" for underling Iago, Iago uses "you" for boss Othello. Quakers/Friends used "thou" for everyone in that sense.
p96 dual pronouns, two, between one and many
- .. and about here I ran out of energy and attention for this book.