I love the English language. Why? French is beautiful, they say, and German strident, with a thousand words for different shades of angst, and Latin is the language of history. Why do I love English, the mongrel language, son of something Germanic and something French, cousin to every language in Europe, thief from every language out of it?

In the first place, English is my language. I know a smattering of Latin (vaguely) and a little less Greek (badly) and ten words or so in a dozen other languages, but English is my mother tongue, my father tongue, in which I know the world. Just as I love my home, I love English, for English is my home in history, my place in history’s halls. For each of us, our language is just this: an abiding and ineluctable connection to the past and the future and the present. English heralds the atrocities of my heritage, yes, Bloody Mary’s reign, Sherman’s March to the Sea, Jacobson v Massachusetts, the murder of a million children every year in America alone, but these are true and I may not deny them. English heralds, what is more abiding, the triumphs of my history: Beowulf,¹ Gawain and the Green Knight, Wycliffe, the Geneva Bible, the Puritans, Plymouth, the War for Independence, Adoniram Judson,² World War Two,³ and many thousands unsung. So I love English because it is mine and I am in it.

In the second place, English is my language. No, I’m only technically repeating myself, because here I mean something different. English is the language I write with. I twist and smooth English on this keyboard, running words together and pulling them apart, using commas and apostrophes and periods and disdaining or including conjunctions as I will. My stories are built from English’s bits and pieces, assembled in its peculiar⁴ strictures, disregarding some rules I find less-than-rules, abiding to those I believe must be held. By English I take a story from my mind and give it to you, turn vibration into resonance, make all sound and fury signify something. For this I love English as a carpenter loves his tools, his wood, and as a duelist loves the blade.

Third place, then, is the first bit that’s about English as a language (whether these are arranged in order of importance, I’m sure I don’t know. Probably.): the multitudinous variety of verbiage, the many choices for words, the myriad candidates in each semantic domain. To cut the long story short, English has a plethora of words to choice from, not the most (according to Wikipedia, admittedly) but a lot. English has, moreover, a vast array of word flavors, near-synonyms distinguished by connotation, words that mean technically the same thing but sound so different because they came from different sides of the continent. I can call something majestic or royal or awesome according to what fits the situation, how the words link together, how they alliterate, their assonance and consonance and rhyme and rhythm. So many words to choose from, and usually one of them is the right one.

So I love English because it gives me a thousand words for the price of one. It lacks that pragmatic German convention of slamming words together into ever-larger compounds until they work, at least somewhat (if you don’t care about being formal, compound all the words you want. If you do, just make sure you justify the coining!), but where German makes twenty words into one, English just uses the twenty words, with a whole list of alternatives to make sure those twenty words are the right ones. I can choose words from France and from the Saxons and put them next to each other, then steal one from some American Indian language, say, ‘The ruddy, royal wigwam….’ Not sure why I would do that in particular, but the idea holds: English has a rambling panoply of words, words that can be a joy to multiply, words that can condense till one or two together hit like a train in the heartstrings.⁵ This too is why I love English.

Fourth place goes to English syntax. I won’t call it unique; even if its peculiar mix isn’t seen elsewhere, I doubt its parts aren’t shared by dozens and hundreds of languages. No, I won’t call it unique, but I will call it delightfully idiosyncratic. English syntax is at once vital to its meaning and irrelevant. On one hand, English is only partly inflected and requires certain syntax to be understandable; we can’t throw modifiers and verbs and nouns in a blender and pour them out on a page, the way the Romans could, and expect to be understood.⁶ English relies on syntax for meaning. On the other hand, though, sentences English put into odd orders can be hard enough if you try do.⁷ Which is not to say it’s always a good idea. English is actually reliant on word order for comprehensibility, but this reliance means that I can use that word order to alter meaning. It’s another tool to communicate, to create beauty.

Then, over there, there’s the part of English that outlaws⁸ ‘red, big house’ and allows ‘big, red house,’ for reasons not entirely clear to anybody involved. There are vowels orders nobody learns (but all native speakers know) and an order to adjectives similarly mysterious, similarly ubiquitous. This too I love in English, subtle shibboleths which signal subtleties of meaning, the violation of which draws attention as surely as conformity evades it.

The fifth place is taken by English’s magpie tendencies. See, like corvids, like magpies and crows and jackdaws and ravens, English speakers have a proclivity for grabbing the words of other languages, mispronouncing them terribly, and incorporating them into English in more or less mangled forms. Sometimes they remain ostensibly foreign words, bits of French or Latin or German still remembered to be French or Latin or German. Vis a vis and quid pro quo fall into this category. Often, however, we just borrow the word, scrub off the ‘property of’, and go on our merry way, trailing ‘teepee’ and ‘emperor’ and as many others as we can get our grubby fingers on. This means that when I want a word, I have carte blanche (see?) to nab it for myself, provided I can make a good enough case to keep it.

More commonly, though, I’m not ‘borrowing’ a word, I’m making it up, and English is a language made of these. Germans can throw words together all they like; I’ll just make up a new one, define it in the text, and move on. I get to propose these new words, of course, but I don’t decide whether they’ll work out. All I do is present it to the world, knowing that in a hundred years it’ll be famous, an obscure dictionary entry, or a dead-end historical oddity nobody ever noticed. Regardless, I love this capacity for ‘neologism’ and don’t even care that it’s probably far from uncommon.

In the end, I really like playing around with English. To toot my own horn with what I hope is a becoming level of loudness, I’m good at making the English language work. I love its tricks and turns, you see. I love the puns, the trips-and-turns of word order, the linguistic jokes that are possible. I love stringing the English language into a story, making it sing or growl or sigh. Every day I get a little better, hopefully, and I hope never to stop that process. What I must declare, though, is that my love for English is not what everybody must have. If you wish to be a writer, learning to love a language will aid immensely, will bring joy and strength, but it doesn’t need to be English. Languages have each their own virtues and histories,⁹ their own twists and cants and foibles, all for you to discover. So, in the name of God, learn the language he has given you and take joy in it.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – No, I don’t care that it’s Old English and technically a different language.

2 – Howdy, Burma.

3 – It was a mixed bag. On the one hand, no more holocaust, no more Japanese balloon-bombs in California. On the other hand, America engaging in impressive levels of war crimes in carpet bombing cities, then establishing the administrative state with the help of Nazi scientists. See, as always, Romans 8:28. On the whole, I admit, atrocities are much more clear-cut than triumphs and much more picturesque.

4 – Meaning not ‘strange’, though perhaps that is true, but ‘unique’. This too is a reason to love English.

5 – ‘For sale, baby shoes, never worn.’

6 – Actually, Latin has word-order syntax too. Prepositions need to be near their objects, for instance, and modifiers have a conventional placement vis a vis words modified.

7 – ‘On the other hand, English sentences can be put into odd orders if you do try hard enough.’

8 – Or ‘sanctions’, except that’s a contranym. What’s a contranym? A word that means its own opposite. Sanction, aught, peruse, all contranyms.

9 – Not Esperanto. Esperanto and its ilk can go hang. Come back in six hundred years with a history and some real ancestors, not the current utopian gobbledygook. As conlangs go, Sindarin and Quenya are leagues better.