From New York City, this is Luxicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWhorter, and this week I want to share with you some toys of mine, something

that has fascinated me now for almost 20 years.

It is a thesis about the birth of English for one thing that some people have been developing

for a while.

It's considered either controversial or ridiculous and like many such things.

It is actually worthy to hear these people out, even if it turns out that what they're

saying is not true because it very well might.

What this is about is something that I've often alluded to on this show, which is that

English is odd.

I've written a piece that you can find online about how English is a very odd language

as the 7,000 languages of the world go.

English is weird and it's not only English, as you might guess, it's English and it's

friends, English and it's sisters.

There is this Indo-European language family that bestrides Europe and Iran and India.

Of course the family has sub-families and one of them is called Germanic.

You've got your German, you've got your English, you've got your Dutch, you've got Swedish,

Norwegian and Danish and you've got some others.

But Germanic in general is a weird sub-family if you look at the other ones in Indo-European.

It feels very normal to us the way English works and if you've taken some German that

may seem hard of an English but still quite normal but that's because we're fish that

don't know that we're wet.

...