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The Secret History of the English Language
In a hugely enjoyable read with gloriously corrosive prose, MJ Harper slashes and burns through the whole of accepted academic thought about the history of the English Language.
According to Harper:
1. English does not derive from Anglo-Saxon.
2. French, Italian, and Spanish did not descend from Latin.
3. Middle English is a wholly imaginary language created by well-meaning by deluded academics.
And that’s just the beginning! Part revisionist history, part treatise on the real origins of English, and part impassioned argument against staid academe, The Secret History of the English Language is essential reading for language lovers, history buffs, Anglophiles, and anyone who has ever thought twice about what they’ve learned in school.
According to Harper:
1. English does not derive from Anglo-Saxon.
2. French, Italian, and Spanish did not descend from Latin.
3. Middle English is a wholly imaginary language created by well-meaning by deluded academics.
And that’s just the beginning! Part revisionist history, part treatise on the real origins of English, and part impassioned argument against staid academe, The Secret History of the English Language is essential reading for language lovers, history buffs, Anglophiles, and anyone who has ever thought twice about what they’ve learned in school.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
225 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 2, 2024
Fun read. Good for awakening dogmatic slumbers. You don’t have to accept all the authors premises for this to be worthwhile.
May 12, 2008
What a trainwreck! This is one of the worst attempts at pseudo-linguistics I have ever read (and that's saying a lot). The main premise of the book is that English is not at all derived from Anglo-Saxon, but in fact is the indigenous language of Britain (in other words the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes never invaded Britain, they were from there), and linguists are involved in covering up this fact or choose to remain blind to it.
Shoddy history, extremely shoddy linguistics, and quite a bit of profanity for what claims to be a serious scientific investigation into the "true" history of English round out this awful book.
I'm glad I borrowed this book from Borders rather than buying it. I encourage anyone with a firm grounding in linguistics to read it. You might want to drink heavily while so doing.
Shoddy history, extremely shoddy linguistics, and quite a bit of profanity for what claims to be a serious scientific investigation into the "true" history of English round out this awful book.
I'm glad I borrowed this book from Borders rather than buying it. I encourage anyone with a firm grounding in linguistics to read it. You might want to drink heavily while so doing.
July 25, 2023
Several things:
1. I bow down to the author’s mastery of snark.
2. Why did no one ever tell me there is a career field other than law school (Applied Epistemology) where I can pick apart people’s arguments all day every day?
3. I wish I’d known before I started reading and become very invested in the author’s argument that the About the Author section contains zero bona fides or credentials, nor are there (seemingly) any available online.
4. Therefore, read with caution. This was going to get five stars until issue #3 popped up.
1. I bow down to the author’s mastery of snark.
2. Why did no one ever tell me there is a career field other than law school (Applied Epistemology) where I can pick apart people’s arguments all day every day?
3. I wish I’d known before I started reading and become very invested in the author’s argument that the About the Author section contains zero bona fides or credentials, nor are there (seemingly) any available online.
4. Therefore, read with caution. This was going to get five stars until issue #3 popped up.
May 19, 2025
The author of this book is a crank. They are very smart, well educated in linguistics, but their analysis is completely polluted by their far right wing political ideology. They believe nothing ever changes, and at the end of the book they praise National Socialism for its approach to cultural identity.
March 31, 2020
A long winded explanation of where the English language may have stemmed from. A sort of roundabout linguistic analysis that is interesting, but doesn’t provide enough evidence for the claims it makes. Still a good read and something that is interesting to think about.
April 18, 2009
For several centuries, linguists (and philologists before them) have taken for granted the long-standing theory that English has its roots in Anglo-Saxon – a language whose only evidence comes from such archaic documents as Beowulf and a few other odd poetic fragments. This theory has not just stood the test of time, but also modern academic scrutiny. Harper, a cheeky bloke who makes his home in London, blows many holes in this prevailing assumption about the roots of the English language by arguing that it is entirely ass-backwards.
Not only does he pointedly argue the applied epistemological viewpoint that is wrong-headed, but he also posits that the roots of English are in the language itself – whose pre-Chaucerian form has never been Anglo-Saxon. In fact, he fervently suggests that what we call Anglo-Saxon has no direct roots in German – as so much of the cultural and archeological remains in no way suggest that an “invasion” of a supposed Germanic horde ever occurred. He also makes the observation – one that I recently and casually did in my last review – that the language of Beowulf is not in the least bit English, and more Welsh. (Which give precedence to its possible roots or kinship with Gaelic.)
On a related point, Harper also puts the spin on the equally long-standing assumption that the Romance languages of French (including Occitan in the southwest), Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Catalan, and Romansch are direct descendants of Latin. Which always sounded strange to me. Surely these indigenous people were speaking another, completely unrelated language prior to the arrival of Caesar and his troops? And why would they all so quickly abandon their mother tongues in quick order? (Never has this occurred with any other language – even with English in the past six hundred years after countless movement of peoples and eve- increasing industrialization. If it has happened with our language in the time of greatest human innovation and rapid change, then it sure as heck didn’t occur during the supposed “Dark Ages” when not much changed in the last half of the first millennium.)
Rather, Harper suggests that Latin came directly from these collective Romance languages, and was used as a lingua franca – one which has hasn’t changed a bit in two thousand years. (Which recalls to my mind the modern invented languages of Swahili, Hebrew, and Esperanto.) Why in the world would so many people and languages so quickly adopt the supposed language of the conquerors? (After all, Latin as we know it was never actually spoken on a day-to-day basis by anyone within the Republic. Rather it was a legal language used for formal occasions.) It makes much more sense that Latin is derived from them. But let’s get back to the main issue of Harper’s narrative.
Whatever the true history of English prior to Chaucer, several things can be confirmed. There is little evidence – if any – that Anglo-Saxon (if that’s what we want to call it) is the mother language of modern English. In addition, language change is typically very slow, even in these last two remarkable centuries in which English has spread far and wide. (Chaucer’s English being much more akin to ours today than his was to the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf, which is much closer chronologically to his.) Harper does contemporary linguistic theory and history a number by calling them on their inaccuracies and stubborn refusal to question not just their methodologies, but also their long-held assumptions. (In effect, he also calls into question most historical research practices and prevailing paradigms. Does this guy just want to throw rocks in glass houses for the sheer joy of it?)
If you want to have your head spin, as well as muse on an alternate theory as to the true roots of the English, look no further. Harper is your man to get your blood roiling, and your mind swirling with the possibilities. (But I will take a pass on his idea – albeit tentative -- that English is the mother tongue of most European languages. One that even he admittedly believes is whacked. And, oh, how whacked it is.)
Not only does he pointedly argue the applied epistemological viewpoint that is wrong-headed, but he also posits that the roots of English are in the language itself – whose pre-Chaucerian form has never been Anglo-Saxon. In fact, he fervently suggests that what we call Anglo-Saxon has no direct roots in German – as so much of the cultural and archeological remains in no way suggest that an “invasion” of a supposed Germanic horde ever occurred. He also makes the observation – one that I recently and casually did in my last review – that the language of Beowulf is not in the least bit English, and more Welsh. (Which give precedence to its possible roots or kinship with Gaelic.)
On a related point, Harper also puts the spin on the equally long-standing assumption that the Romance languages of French (including Occitan in the southwest), Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Catalan, and Romansch are direct descendants of Latin. Which always sounded strange to me. Surely these indigenous people were speaking another, completely unrelated language prior to the arrival of Caesar and his troops? And why would they all so quickly abandon their mother tongues in quick order? (Never has this occurred with any other language – even with English in the past six hundred years after countless movement of peoples and eve- increasing industrialization. If it has happened with our language in the time of greatest human innovation and rapid change, then it sure as heck didn’t occur during the supposed “Dark Ages” when not much changed in the last half of the first millennium.)
Rather, Harper suggests that Latin came directly from these collective Romance languages, and was used as a lingua franca – one which has hasn’t changed a bit in two thousand years. (Which recalls to my mind the modern invented languages of Swahili, Hebrew, and Esperanto.) Why in the world would so many people and languages so quickly adopt the supposed language of the conquerors? (After all, Latin as we know it was never actually spoken on a day-to-day basis by anyone within the Republic. Rather it was a legal language used for formal occasions.) It makes much more sense that Latin is derived from them. But let’s get back to the main issue of Harper’s narrative.
Whatever the true history of English prior to Chaucer, several things can be confirmed. There is little evidence – if any – that Anglo-Saxon (if that’s what we want to call it) is the mother language of modern English. In addition, language change is typically very slow, even in these last two remarkable centuries in which English has spread far and wide. (Chaucer’s English being much more akin to ours today than his was to the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf, which is much closer chronologically to his.) Harper does contemporary linguistic theory and history a number by calling them on their inaccuracies and stubborn refusal to question not just their methodologies, but also their long-held assumptions. (In effect, he also calls into question most historical research practices and prevailing paradigms. Does this guy just want to throw rocks in glass houses for the sheer joy of it?)
If you want to have your head spin, as well as muse on an alternate theory as to the true roots of the English, look no further. Harper is your man to get your blood roiling, and your mind swirling with the possibilities. (But I will take a pass on his idea – albeit tentative -- that English is the mother tongue of most European languages. One that even he admittedly believes is whacked. And, oh, how whacked it is.)
November 4, 2012
If The Secret History were not such an enjoyable read, it would only deserve two stars. I am disappointed that after plausibly arguing, albeit with little evidence besides his genius to offer: that English does not derive from Anglo-Saxon/Old English, that the Celtic peoples never occupied more of Europe than the rocky, western fringes; that English has always been spoken in most of Great Britain and Ireland; that the "Romance" languages do not derive from Latin; that there are some basic flaws in Darwin's Theory of Evolution; and that academics are a bunch of idiots, M.J. Harper fails to prove his final hypothesis, which I think is that the "Latinate" vocabulary in English is not, in fact, derived from Latin or even French, but was always present in our glorious mother tongue - long may she rule.
May 10, 2008
I couldn't put this book down - not surprising, given my interest in both linguistics and suggestions that things are not as they seem. Harper makes a convincing argument that many of the assumptions underlying our understanding of the development of English (and a number of other familiar languages) are fairly unreasonable, and offers a simpler explanation of how things might have actually happened. The claim that English, in a form that would be recognizable to speakers of the language today, has been spoken in Britain and Ireland for thousands of years is only the first of his iconoclastic hypotheses - and he saves the best one for the end. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in language and an open mind.
March 6, 2009
What's great about this book is the logic behind the author's claim that English is the original language spoken by the people in England way before the Anglo-Saxons ever showed up. Harper's argument also claims that French and German are versions of English. Ha! And the commentary on academia is right on. So far I've read the book twice, the applied epistomological approach is a challenge to understand. I would love to hear a linguist's viewpoint on this.
February 12, 2008
"Mind-blowing, incredibly entertaining stuff...A well-written and funny book." -- Daily Mail
September 27, 2008
Entertaining, if you're interested in language history. Harper has many very novel ideas about the development of English, but unfortunately they are rather unbelievable.
September 26, 2009
talk about having a chip on one's shoulder. Still, some interesting theories here, even if a bit radical; I'm glad I read it.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews