English Language

I

Introduction

English Language, chief medium of communication of people in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and numerous other countries. It is the official language of many nations in the Commonwealth of Nations and is widely understood and used in all of them. It is spoken in more parts of the world than any other language and by more people than any other tongue except Mandarin Chinese.

English belongs to the Anglo-Frisian group within the western branch of the Germanic languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. It is related most closely to the Frisian language, to a lesser extent to Netherlandic (Dutch-Flemish) and the Low German (Plattdeutsch) dialects, and more distantly to Modern High German. Its parent, Proto-Indo-European, was spoken around 5,000 years ago by nomads who are thought to have roamed the south-eastern European plains.

II

Vocabulary

The English vocabulary has increased greatly in more than 1,500 years of development. The most nearly complete dictionary of the language, the Oxford English Dictionary (13 vols., 1933), a revised edition of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (10 vols., 1884-1933; supplements), contains 500,000 words. It has been estimated, however, that the present English vocabulary consists of more than 1 million words, including slang and dialect expressions and scientific and technical terms, many of which only came into use after the middle of the 20th century. The latest edition of the New Oxford Dictionary of English was published in 1998, after 6 years' revision by a team of 30 editors. The publication caused much controversy as it describes how people speak English today, rather than how prescriptivists believe English should be used. It contains over 2,000 new words, including such 1990s phenomena as Prozac, tamagotchi, and eye candy; new guidelines for acceptable usage are also included, such as the non-sexist generic singular pronoun they.

The English vocabulary is more extensive than that of any other language in the world, although some other languages—Chinese, for example—have a word-building capacity equal to that of English. It is approximately half Germanic (Old English and Scandinavian) and half Italic or Romance (French and Latin) and extensive, constant borrowing from every major language, especially from Latin, Greek, French, and the Scandinavian languages, and from numerous minor languages, accounts for the great number of words in the English vocabulary. From Old English have come cardinal and ordinal numbers, personal pronouns, and numerous nouns and adjectives; from French have come intellectual and abstract terms, as well as terms of rank and status, such as duke, marquis, and baron. In addition, certain processes have led to the creation of many new words as well as to the establishment of patterns for further expansion. Among these processes are onomatopoeia, or the imitation of natural sounds, which has created such words as burp and clink; affixation, or the addition of prefixes and suffixes, either native, such as mis- and -ness, or borrowed, such as ex- and -ist; the combination of parts of words, such as in brunch, composed of parts of breakfast and lunch; the free formation of compounds, such as bonehead and downpour; back formation, or the formation of words from previously existing words, the forms of which suggest that the later words were derived from the earlier ones—for example, to jell, formed from jelly; and functional change, or the use of one part of speech as if it were another, for example, the noun shower used as a verb, to shower. The processes that have probably added the largest number of words are affixation and especially functional change, which is facilitated by the peculiarities of English syntactical structure.

III

Spelling

English is said to have one of the most difficult spelling systems in the world. The written representation of English is not phonetically exact for two main reasons. First, the spelling of words has changed to a lesser extent than their sounds; for example, the k in knife and the gh in right were formerly pronounced (see Middle English Period below). Second, certain spelling conventions acquired from foreign sources have been perpetuated; for example, during the 16th century the b was inserted in doubt (formerly spelled doute) on the authority of dubitare, the Latin source of the word. Outstanding examples of discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation are the six different pronunciations of ough, as in bough, cough, thorough, thought, through, and rough; the spellings are kept from a time when the gh represented a back fricative consonant that was pronounced in these words. Other obvious discrepancies are the 14 different spellings of the sh sound, for example, as in anxious, fission, fuchsia, and ocean.

IV

Role of Phonemes

Theoretically, the spelling of phonemes, the simplest sound elements used to distinguish one word from another, should indicate precisely the sound characteristics of the language. For example, in English, at contains two phonemes, mat three, and mast four. Very frequently, however, the spelling of English words does not conform to the number of phonemes. Enough, for example, which has four phonemes (enuf), is spelled with six letters, as is breath, which also has four phonemes (breθ) and six letters. See Phonetics.

The main vowel phonemes in English include those represented by the italicized letters in the following words: bit, beat, bet, bate, bat, but, botany, bought, boat, boot, book, and burr. These phonemes are distinguished from one another by the position of articulation in the mouth. Four vowel sounds, or complex nuclei, of English are diphthongs formed by gliding from a low position of articulation to a higher one. These diphthongs are the i of bite (a glide from o of botany to ea of beat), the ou of bout (from o of botany to oo of boot), the oy of boy (from ou of bought to ea of beat), and the u of butte (from ea of beat to oo of boot). The exact starting point and ending point of the glide varies within the English-speaking world.