• 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-

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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 þ

  • 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.

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Talking Back, Talking Black . 2017 BvtLib 427.973 MCW . 190 pages

Truths About America's Lingua Franca

• p11 Introduction

• p45 Standard English i dipthong, rice "rahees", Black English rahs, monophthongization

• p25 It's Complicated

• p57 What Do You Mean "Sounds Black"?

• p61 dropping of the verb be, example "She my sister."

• p67 meal eel to ih-uhl, car to cawr

• p69 breath to ^BREF

• p69 code switching formal to intimate

• p70 "black voice" mostly modified vowels, five little frills
• p79 People comfortable with each other talk alike, certainly after generations. We're not there yet.
• p82 the basic sound of speech differs in particular but subtle ways

• p83 vocal fry

  • a slightly creaky tone that people frequently use
  • KHL I'll take your word for that, with my addled hearing I don't notice

• p90 But They Can't Talk That Way at a Job Interview!

• p94 North American English Dialects

• p101 diglossia, casual and formal speech differ

• p108 Informal white speech is 'approachable, real, sexy" Informal black speech sometimes classified as dim
• p109 Modern English isn't bad because Vikings massacred Old English to create it

• p112 Kiezdeutsch spoken by youth in German multilingual immigrant neighborhoods, similar to Black English in US

• p112 similar urban phenomena in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands

• p113 Swahili and Fula African city dialects

• p114 fish started out as fiks, mash started as mask, others said maks
• p115 Chaucer often used aks for ask

• p119 note: minstrel CD set Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 2005

• p119 Speaking Black or Speaking Minstrel?

• p120 minstrelese, pre-1950 theatrical parody of black speech

• p121 Buzzy the Crow minstrelese "black voice" cartoons from 1950

• p121 black voice caricature emerged from Civil War era minstrel shows

• p122 George Philip Krapp The English Language in America 1925

  • artificial lingo with little relation to Southern black speech
• p127 1970s Black slang ( Jive turkey, Right on!, boogie now antique, Black English has evolved

• p128 Minnesotans (and 1800's blacks) "tight pronunciation" of oh sound, no brief oo falloff at end.

• p129 George Johnson The Whistling Coon

• p129 The Merry Mailman no hint of black voice

• p129 Bert Williams and George Walker

• p132 otherwise historically accurate films about the early 1800 omit "ample" facial hair

• p133 McWhorter's 1901 Atlanta-born grandfather sounded West Indian to younger blacks, with residual "ay" and "oh" sounds from the 1800s, raised by children of slaves

• p134 minstrelese used "am" in place of "is", nobody actually talks like this.

• p134 Claude McKay 1928 novel Home to Harlem

• p136 ... McKay's minstrelese dialog "a window into the past" (inevitable conclusion ?? )

• p137 W. E. B. DuBois wrote that after reading it, he wanted a shower

• p138 "come" as a marker of pique, doesn't mean "approach"
• p139

• p148 Through a Lens Darkly?

• p164 Black men use nigga to mean "buddy", usage more than century old

• p167 Black English is complicated, not simply unravelled Standard English
• p167 Britain has dozens of distinct regional dialects. Black English is America's only centuries-old English dialect strikingly unlike Standard English

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What Language Is . 2012 BvtLib 400 MCW . 228 pages

and what it isn't and what it could be

This book is more about phonetics and pronunciation than about expression of ideas and meaning. With my poor hearing, I cannot "hear" what McWhorter writes about. For me, it feels like a silent movie for blind people. Many phonetic accent marks, a video with sound might help a full-hearing person understand what the phonetic marks mean.

• p001 Introduction

• p003 Richard Lederer 1989 Crazy English

  • tip of iceberg of nonsensicality in English
• p004 six thousand languages, two hundred written languages, some spoken by less than 2000 people

• p007 Khoi-San "click" languages of southern Africa have the biggest consonant inventories on Earth

• p009 "A language is a fecund, redolent buzzing mess of a thing, in every facet, glint, and corner, even in single words."

• p015 Chapter 1 . Languages are Ingrown

• p061 Chapter 2 . Language is Dissheveled

• p093 Chapter 3 . Language is Intricate

• p134 Chapter 4 . Language is Oral

• p167 Chapter 5 . Language is Mixed

• p199 Epilogue . This View of Language

• p207 Notes on Sources

• p215 Acknowledgements