merriemarie's clog

Nicholas Ostler, in Empires of the Word, puts it down to the great and terrible plague that ravaged Europe in the mid-sixth century. The English areas, and the Celts living under English overlords, were less affected, he argues, for social and economic reasons (e.g. fewer trade links with southern Europe).

Now here’s F. W. Brownlow of Mt. Holyoke College, writing in the current (February) issue my favorite papo-paleo-con magazine, Chronicles.

Philologists have scratched their heads over this problem, and the best explanation they can come up with is that English, for some reason, is a “killer” language, which is to say that wherever it goes, it drives out other languages. There is no apparent reason why the Anglo-Saxons — who, like the Vikings in Normandy, were a relatively small group of warriors who married the female kin of the resident proprietors whom they dispossessed — should not have adopted the language of their wives, tenants, children, and children’s nurses. Instead the wives, tenants, children, and nurses adopted the Anglo-Saxons’ language, in the process importing some distinctively Brythonic syntax into English, so that we now say such peculiar things — by Germanic standards — as “Did you see what she’s doing to the cat?”

I don’t see why there shouldn’t be killer languages, just as there are killer apps, killer viruses, and killer nations. Mysterious are the ways of the human world. Let’s remember, though, that killerdom eventually fades. Lotus 1-2-3 was a killer app once; viruses generate resistance; and great military empires have been won by such unlikely (from today’s viewpoint) nations as Tibet, Sweden, and, well, England.

John has a very important contribution to the understanding of what it means to be a true conservative with his book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. A highlight, in which he discusses the loss of pessimism and the horrid results of it being wiped away by the immanentizers of the eschaton:

What’s happened to it? It’s gone, bleached and parched by the false sun of optimism, then blown away by the cold winds of reality, leaving all the roots of our liberty exposed to the colorless, feartureless glare on infantile cheeriness, to wither and die.

Our noble republic, founded by free men with a cold-eyed appreciation of human weakness, has fallen to smiley-face happy talkers bleating sentimental cant, assuring us that if we hand over ever more of our property and our freedoms to them, the wise and virtuous ones, we shall be secure and happy, able to fulfill the infinite potential of our noble natures. Idiots! [page 41]

Quite.

I urge all conservatives and libertarians to click here and order this wonderful book. Amazon.com: We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (9780307409584): John Derbyshire: Books http://bit.ly/9KDwTl

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We Are Doomed http://bit.ly/cqL078