English: Past, Present, and Future
English: Past, Present, and Future
I. Why Study the History of English?
An interest in the past is one characteristic of human beings that distinguishes them from the other animals. Since it is the medium by which speakers of a certain language express their thoughts and feelings, conduct their business and government, transmit science, philosophy, and poetry, language is certainly worth studying. Of course, not everyone should be a philologist (i.e. a specialist in language, especially its history and development) or should master linguistics, but an educated person should know something about the structure of his/her language, its position in the world, its vocabulary and the sources of its enrichment, as well as its different varieties of speech. It is true that English is not your native language, but since you have chosen to specialize in it, it is reasonable to know something about its history.
The history of English is a story of cultures in contact during the past 1,500 years. The history of any language is closely bound up with the history of its speakers. The purpose of this book is to deal with the history of English not only as a matter of interest to specialized students but also as a cultural subject, i.e. an interesting study to all educated people.
II. Influences on English
Political, social, and cultural forces influence a language, and even shape it in every aspect, e.g. in the number and spread of the people who speak it, the meaning of words, the accents of the spoken language, and the structure of its grammar. As we have already pointed out in section I above, English has existed for 1,500 years, and hence the English language of today reflects fifteen centuries of development. The political and social events that have deeply affected the life of the English people have had a clear effect on their language. Among these events were the Roman Christianizing of Britain in 597 A.D., which brought England into contact with Latin civilization and resulted in important additions to English vocabulary. Other important events were the Scandinavian invasions, which led to a mixture of the two peoples and their languages. Also the Norman Conquest resulted in making English for two centuries the language of the lower classes, and making French the language of the upper classes. When English later regained its position as the language of all people, it was greatly changed in form and vocabulary from what it had been in 1066 when the Norman Conquest took place. Other important events were the Hundred Years' War between England and France (1337-1453), the Renaissance (1500-1650), and the expansion of the British Empire, which in their own ways, contributed to the development of English. The political, social, and cultural history of the English language is not simply the history of Britain and of America but an international history of very different societies, which have caused English to change and be enriched.
III. A Few Examples of Change
All languages, including English, are subject to constant growth and decay. When a language ceases to change, it is called a dead language, e.g. classical Latin, which has not changed for about 2,000 years. Change can be most easily observed in the vocabulary. Old words disappear, new words are added, and existing words change their meaning. Change of meaning can be illustrated by the words nice and rheumatism in Shakespeare's day, which meant foolish and "a cold in the head," respectively. Less familiar than change in the vocabulary is change in pronunciation, especially in the vowel sounds, e.g. Old English stân and cû, which have become Modern English stone and cow, respectively. Changes also occur in the grammatical forms, partly from the desire for uniformity -- a process known as analogy, which may also affect the sound and meaning of words. Thus, this book seeks to trace the changes that have altered spoken and written English from age to age to the extent that the English language of the year 1000 is unintelligible to English speakers of the year 2000.
IV. The Importance of a Language
People view their native language as having intrinsic advantages over foreign languages. But we should remember that no language acquires importance for internal advantages. Rather, languages become important because of political, economic, technological, and military events that reflect favorably on the peoples speaking these languages. Thus, any language among the 4,000 languages of the world could have attained the importance of the few languages most widely spoken if the conditions had been favorable to that language. English, French, German, and Spanish are important languages because of the history and influence of the people who speak them in modern times. For this reason, these languages are widely studied outside the country of their use. Classical Greek is still studied because of the former great civilization recorded in its literature, but modern Greek does not enjoy the same importance.
V. Why is English an Important Language?
English is one of the most important languages of the world because of the numbers of its speakers and its use for international communication. The English language is spoken by more than 370 million people as a native language in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the former British Empire. This number of speakers makes English the largest of the western languages. But English is not the most widely used language in the world. Chinese, for example, is spoken by more than a billion people in China alone. The English language is also important as a lingua franca in the former colonies of England and France, where diverse populations would otherwise be unable to communicate.
VI. The Future of English
The spread and importance of the English language today make us speculate about the position it will probably occupy in the future. Since growth in a language is essentially a matter of population, and since most of the native speakers of English live in the developed countries whose population is expected to decrease during the twenty-first century, English speakers will form a progressively smaller proportion of the world's population. But we should remember that English is also widely used as a second language by 50-300 million people throughout the world. In addition, English is one of the official languages in some developing countries with the greatest growth rate, e.g. in India, Nigeria, and the Philippines. In some countries English is a neutral language among several competing native languages, and in most developing countries communication in English is superior to that in the vernacular languages. It is also likely that pidgin and creole varieties of English will become progressively widespread in those areas where English is not a mother tongue. By a pidgin variety of English we mean a language which has developed from a mixture of two languages, and is used as a way of communicating by people who do not speak each other's languages. Pidgin English is also English that is spoken in a simple way, often with many mistakes, either by a foreigner or to a foreigner, as in the question "He come here?" for example. As for the creole variety of English, it is a language that has developed from a mixture of languages, e.g. creole-speaking tribes. Creole also means an American or West Indian language, which is a combination of a European language and another language and which is a main language in the southern US and in the Caribbean. In other words, pidgin is a language with a reduced grammatical structure, lexicon, and style. Pidgins are the native language of no one and become creoles when they are used as the mother tongue of a community.
VII. English as a World Language
The world has been in need for an international language. The evidence for this claim is the number of artificial languages that were proposed between 1880 and 1907, which amounted to fifty-three languages. For example, in 1889 Volapük was used by about a million people, but is forgotten altogether today. A few years later Esperanto was in vogue, but is used now by local groups and organizations. The establishment of an artificial language or a single natural language for international communication seems impossible. The United Nations has six official languages, namely English, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic.
More scientific research is now published in English than in any other language. English is also preeminently used in commercial activities. Although the revolution in communications during the nineteenth century has contributed to the spread of several European languages, it has especially contributed to the use of English because of major broadcasting and motion picture productions in the United States and Britain.
Since World War II the importance of English and the number of speakers have increased rapidly. After the colonies gained independence, they continued to use English side by side with the vernaculars. In many of the new countries it is either the primary or a second language. In some countries, for example in Tanzania, where there is one official language, namely Swahili, English is still necessary in the schools and the courts.
VIII. The Advantages and Disadvantages of English
In this section we are going to assess the internal advantages and disadvantages of the English language. But before we set out to do this we should point out that all languages are adequate for the needs of their speakers, and that English has the ability to express all the ideas and refinements of thought that need expression, in modern civilization. In evaluating the assets and liabilities of English, we are then interested in examining the question of simplicity; in the sense of exploring how readily English can be learned by non-native speakers . In other words, does the English language possess characteristics of vocabulary and grammar that make it easy or difficult to acquire?
A. The Advantages of English
English has certain features or advantages that have long been characteristic of it. There are three such advantages, namely its cosmopolitan vocabulary, its inflectional simplicity, and its natural gender. Following is a brief discussion of each of these features.
1. Cosmopolitan Vocabulary
A prominent asset of the English language is the mixed character of its vocabulary. Since English is a Germanic language, it belongs to the group of languages to which German, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian belong. In addition to this fact, more than half of the vocabulary of English is derived from Latin, either directly borrowed, or mainly through French, or sometimes through the other Romance languages. Consequently, English shares a great number of words with the European languages that are derived from Latin, especially French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. This means that many English words look rather familiar to speakers of Germanic and Romance languages, and are learned with little effort or no effort at all.
The English vocabulary also contains borrowings from many other languages. For example, the words chipmunk, hominy, moose, raccoon, and skunk have been borrowed from the Native American languages. The words cruller, landscape, measles, uproar, and wagon are from Dutch. From Italian English has borrowed balcony, canto, duet, granite, opera, piano, umbrella, and volcano. From Spanish come alligator, cargo, contraband, cork, hammock, mosquito, sherry, stampede, tornado, and vanilla. From Greek, directly or indirectly, English has borrowed acme, acrobat, anthology, barometer, catarrh, catastrophe, chronology, elastic, magic, tactics, and tantalize, among many others. From Russian come steppe, ruble, troika, glasnost, and perestroika. From Persian, English has borrowed caravan, divan, khaki, mogul, shawl, and sherbet, and from Persian via other languages English has acquired jasmine, paradise, check, chess, lemon, lilac, turban, and borax. The English language has also borrowed from Arabic, Hungarian, Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Malay, and Chinese, as well as from the languages spoken in Java, Australia, Tahiti, Polynesia, West Africa, and Brazil.
There is no doubt that such a cosmopolitan vocabulary is a sure asset to the English language.
2. Inflectional Simplicity
The second advantage of the English language is its inflectional simplicity. The evolution of language in general is a story of progressive simplification. English has gone further than any other European language in this process of simplification. Inflections of the noun have been reduced to a sign of the plural and a form of the possessive. The inflection of the adjective has been eliminated except for the comparative and the superlative degrees. The verb has lost practically all the personal endings, and has almost completely abandoned any distinction between the singular and the plural. The verb has also gradually discarded the use of the subjunctive mood.
The absence of complicated agreements that would make it difficult for the non-native English speaker to learn the language is definitely an asset of the English language.
3. Natural Gender
The third advantage of English is that it adopts natural (rather than grammatical) gender. In other European languages every noun has a gender. For example, in the Romance languages there are two genders, and all English nouns, which are all neuter, are there either masculine or feminine. Another example is the Germanic languages, where there are three genders that appear arbitrary to the native English speaker. For example, in German sonne (sun) is feminine; mond (moon) is masculine, whereas kind (child), mنdchen (maiden), and weib (wife) are neuter.
In contrast, gender in English is determined by meaning, in the sense that all nouns that name living creatures are masculine or feminine according to the sex of the individual, and all other nouns are neuter.
B. The Disadvantages of English
It is important to recognize the difficulties that the foreign student faces in learning English. There are two such difficulties or disadvantages, which are briefly dealt with in what follows.
1. Idiomatic Expressions
Foreigners learning English often complain of having to express themselves not only logically, but also idiomatically. An idiom is a form of expression peculiar to one language, or a special way of saying things. An example of idiomatic expression in English is the contradictory use of the word fast in go fast and stand fast, (or hold fast), where in the first expression the word fast means "quickly", whereas in the second and third expressions it means "firmly remain in the same position" or "maintain the same opinion".
Another definition of an idiom is that it is a fixed phrase that consists of more than one word, with a meaning that cannot be inferred from the meanings of the individual words. Some examples of idioms in English are: snap out of it, bite your tongue, give a piece of your mind, and eat your heart out.
Such idioms, or idiomatic phrases undoubtedly are a source of trouble to a foreigner learning English.
2. Chaotic Spelling
By chaotic spelling is meant the frequent lack of correlation between spelling and pronunciation. For example, the vowel sound in the words believe, receive, leave, machine, be, and see is in each case represented by a different spelling. Conversely the letter a in father, hate, hat, and many other words has nearly ten values. The situation is even more chaotic in the case of the consonants. English has twelve spellings for the sound of sh, as in shoe, sugar, issue, nation, suspicion, ocean, nauseous, conscious, chaperon, schist, fuchsia, and pshaw.
A learner of English cannot tell how to spell many words by their pronunciation or how to pronounce then by their spelling.
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