How English took over the world

How English took over the world

By Steffani McChesney

JAKARTA (JP): According to the 1995 World Almanac, 470 million
people speak English worldwide, 322 million of which are native
speakers. English is the second most widely spoken language in
the world after Mandarin. These are unbelievable statistics
considering the inauspicious beginnings of the language which
only developed into its present form about 400 years ago on and
off the coast of Europe.

Linguists place English within the Indo-European family of
languages alongside such dissimilar ones such as Sanskrit and
Persian. English developed from the West Germanic branch which
includes German, Dutch, Frisian, Flemish and other related
dialects. The links are obvious when examining words common to
several languages. The English word brother is bruder in German,
bhrathair in Gaelic, bhara in Sanskrit and biradar in Persian.

English did not begin life as a native language on the island
that gave it its name. According to Danish linguist Otto
Jespersen, the roots of the language were brought to England by
the Anglo-Saxons in the form of a Germanic dialect. The Anglo-
Saxons had liberally borrowed many Roman words before making the
voyage, particularly names for common household articles.
Jespersen dubbed the result "rich in possibilities". The language
spread across the island along with Christianity and literacy
with the help of St. Augustine who arrived in 597 and converted
King Ethelbert of Kent to the faith.

The island and the language were under attack for the next 300
years by Viking invaders. Many Scandinavian and Danish words
replaced the old English ones or became synonyms such as the
words craft and skill. The language also adopted grammatical
forms such as they, them and their from Scandinavian.

The Norman Conquest in 1066 opened the door to 10,000 words,
from a rural form of French spoken only in the northern parts of
that country. Their domination was so complete that no English
king spoke English for the next 300 years. English remained the
language of the people. The lords of the manors had to be
bilingual so they could speak to both the peasants who farmed
their land and the nobility at court.

English proved to be a persistent language. Because of its
lowly position, English became a simpler, less inflected
language, losing noun genders and many declinations and
conjugations. Intermarriage between the natives and the Norman
helped English overcome French as the language of the court. By
the end of the 14th century the children of noble families had to
be sent to Paris to learn a proper form of French needed for
diplomatic relations with the continent.

English speakers have always been willing to accept new words
from the successive waves of invaders of the Misty Isles,
enriching the language and developing the nuances and subtleties
which make English literature and poetry the glory that it is.

The freewheeling rules of the language and its changing
structure allowed artists to express themselves in ways that
never existed before. For example, Shakespeare and his
contemporaries used nouns as verbs and adverbs as adjectives.
Shakespeare personally coined some 2,000 words and countless
phrases still used in everyday speech by people who may never
have read a word or seen a play written by him. He can be thanked
for such colorful phrases as "the sound and the fury", "flesh and
blood", "play fast and loose", "vanish into thin air", "foul
play" and "tower of strength".

For all that, English still didn't get the respect it
deserved. Scholars considered it a second-rate language as late
as 1582 when sage Richard Mulcaster said "The English tongue is
of small account, stretching no further than this island of ours,
nay not there over all." In 1616, the year of Shakespeare's
death, William Harvey wrote his treatise on the circulation of
blood in Latin. Edward Gibbon thought so little of the language
that he wrote his histories in French before translating them
into English.

Spelling, still a problem for both native and non-native
speakers, is a result of all the outside influences that have
given English its texture and richness. The development of the
printing press helped to standardize English spelling but this
coincided with a period when the language was undergoing one of
its frequent upheavals. So the spelling reflects the
pronunciation of people living 400 years ago. The practice of
freely adopting words from other languages and retaining their
spelling further confuses the issue.

Over the centuries there have been efforts on both sides of
the Atlantic to simplify English spelling. British proponents
included Charles Darwin, Lord Tennyson and Arthur Conan Doyle.
George Bernard Shaw felt it was so necessary that he left the
bulk of his estate to promote spelling reform. Americans from
Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain through Andrew Carnegie and
Theodore Roosevelt also called for simplified spelling.

Noah Webster of dictionary-writing fame has been blamed for
changing American spelling from British. The truth is he decried
the practice of dropping the u from words such as color and
humor. In the preface of his American Dictionary of the English
Language he argued that "it was desirable to perpetrate the
sameness of British and American spelling and usage".

Some experts over the centuries have suggested that spelling
reform should be phonetic. Considering the many different accents
of English speakers around the world, spelling reform based on
pronunciation would never work. So the world is stuck with
inconsistencies as they stand.

That other major headache of the English language, grammar, is
so complex because it uses the rules and terminology of a
language with which it has nothing in common. About the only
thing Latin and English share are some word roots and an
alphabet, though the grammar of the language has obsessed
scholars over the centuries. The noted French grammarian
Dominique Bonhous is purported to have said on his deathbed: "I
am about to -- or I am going to -- die ; either expression is
used."

After the American Revolutionary War, there was some
discussion of further separating America from Britain by adopting
a new language. The idea was not taken seriously. A perusal of
the literature of the period shows no widespread debate and the
Founding Fathers thought so little of the idea that there is no
mention of it in the Constitution. Besides, educated Americans of
the time loved the language for all the same reasons it is still
appreciated, though people such as Thomas Jefferson and Noah
Webster expected American English and British English to evolve
into separates languages over time.

Benjamin Franklin was worried that different speech
communities would develop based on the language of the immigrants
living in the area. His home state of Pennsylvania had a large
German-speaking population. He needn't have worried. The
continuous movement of Americans across the continent ensured
that English would be widely disseminated.

Even with the huge influx of non-English speaking immigrants
in the 1800s and early 1900s there was no danger of English being
overtaken. From 1607 to 1840 almost all of the one million
immigrants were either slaves or came from the British Isles. By
time the rest of the immigrants got to American shores, English
was firmly entrenched. And the broad influence of the British
Empire in the 19th century was to spread the language around the
rest of the world.

In the first half of the 20th century the problem for English
was to keep from changing so much that native speakers around the
world could not talk to each other. As early as the 1880s Henry
Sweet, an eminent linguist, said "In another century England,
America and Australia will be speaking mutually unintelligible
languages." In 1936, H.L. Mencken, an American journalist, only
half in jest, said that British English was becoming an American
dialect. And in 1939, the preface of An Anglo-American
Interpreter suggested than an American could be taken ill on the
streets of London and die before he was able to make himself
understood enough to ask for help.

The greatest divergence between British and American English
occurred before World War II, but the war changed all that. So
did the advent of global communications in the form of
telephones, television, telecommunications satellites and the
Internet.

English has become a communications medium on countries with
many languages. India, home to 1,652 languages and dialects,
adopted English as an official language even though only about 40
to 50 million people speak it. English is also an official
language in 44 other countries around the world.

So, love it or hate it, English is here to stay. Not
necessarily because it is better than any other language, it just
happened to be in the right places at the right times.