Scarica the english language. a guifed tour of the language - David Crystal e più Appunti in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity!
1. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TODAY
- In the glorious reign of queen elizabeth (from 1558 to 1303) the number of english speakers were between 5 e 7 million.
- At the beggining of the reign of the second queen elizabeth, 1952: 250 million spoke english as a mother tongue; 100 million had learned it as a foreign language.
- The most recent estimates tell us that mother tongue speakers are now over 300 million.
- The estimated population of the usa was just under 239 million in 1985, of whom about 215 million spoke english as a mother tongue. The british, irish, australian, new zealanders, canadians, and south africans make up most of the others.
ENGLISH AS A 'SECOND' LANGUAGE
The iceberg i really in two parts, reflecting two kinds of language learning situation:
- The first part relates to those countries where english has some kind of special status where it has been chosen as an 'official language'. This is the case in Ghana and Nigeria.
- In such cases, people have to learn english if they want to get on in life. They have their mother tongue to begin with, and they start learning english, in school or in the street, at an early age. For them, english becomes their 'second' language.
- In nigeria they would have to choose between other languages belonging to different ethnic groups.
- But why english? In Ghana, Nigeria, and many other countries, the choice is motivated by the weight of historical tradition from the british colonial era.
- But english is an offcial or semi-official language in over 70 countries of the world.
- Most of these countries are in underdeveloped parts of the world, where educational opportunities are limited. The country may espuse english officially, but only a fraction of the population may be given an opportunity to learn it.
- For example India: in 1985 the population of india was estimated to be 768 million. English is an official language here, alongside Hindi.
- It is a major language in parliament; and it is a preferred laguage in the universities and in the all-india competitive exams for senior post in such fields as the civil service and engineering.
- But it is thought that those with an educated awareness of english may be as little as 3% of the population.
- 10% or more include several varities of pidgin english.
- The english speakers of india may only nuber 70 millions.
conferences, of diplomacy, of sport.
- Over 2/3 of the world's scientists write in english.
- ¾ of the world's mail is written in english.
PIDGINS AND CREOLES
People remember 'me tarzan – you Jane', or other examples of primitive people arely able to communicate with each other.
- In many parts of the world pidgin languages are used routinely in such daily matters as news broadcast, safety instructions, newspaper and commercial advertising.
- All pidgin languages originally start when peoplewho don't have a common language try to communicate with each other – especially in those parts where the british, french, spanish, portoguesem and dutch built their empires. We tlk of 'pidgin english', 'pidgin french', and so on, depending on wich language the pidign derived from.
- Pidgin englishes are mainly to be found in two big 'families': one in the atlantic and one in the pacific.
- The atlantic varieties developed in west africa, and were transported to the west indies and america during the years of the slave trade.
- The pacific varietes are found from the coast of china to the northen part of australia, in such places as hawaii, papua new guinea...
- in the americas, they are found in most of the islands and on the mainland, spoken largely by the black population.
- While the american were in vietnam, a pidgin english grew up there, but it quicly disappeared when the troops left.
- Many pidgins have ceased to exist, because the countries which were in contact stopped trading with each other.
- In multilingual parts of the world, the pidgin is found to be so useful that the peoples in contact find the cannot do without it. The pidgin becomes a common language, or lingua franca.
- When a pidgin becomes widely used, its form changes dramatically. To begin with, pidgin are very limited forms of communication with few words, a few simple construction, helped a lot by gestures and miming. But when pidgin expands, its vocabulary increases greatly, it develops its own rules of gramatical construction, and ti becomes used for all the functions of everyday life.
- A very significant development can then take place. People begin to use the pidgin at home.
- Instead of being seen as subordinate to other languages, it starts to compete with them. In such cases linguist talk about creoles.
- Creolized varieties of english are very important throughout the carribean, and in the countries to which carribean people have emigrated.
- Black english in the usa is also creole in origin.
- There is often conflict between the creole and standard english in these places. The creole gives its speakers their linguistic identity, as an ethnic group.
- Standard english, on the other hand, gives them access to the rest of the english- speaking world.
- Social and political circumstances vary so much that no simple generalization is possible.
2.GRAMMAR
There are two reasons why people are contemptuous of english grammar.
- first: there's the influence of latin. For centuries, the latin language ruled the grammar-teaching world. People had to know latin to be accepted in educated society, and their knowledge of grammara was based on how that language works.
- English has less than a dozen types of regular ending (and a few irregular ones).
- Among the exceptions are certain nouns and adjective, such as mice, men, better and worst, and about 300 irregular verbs, such as gone, taken, saw, and ran.
- The language makes very little use of word structur, or morphology to express the meanings that latin conveys in its word-endings.
- Most of english grammar is taken up with the rules governing the order in which words can appear: the field of syntax.
- Word order is crucial for english, as we can see from following examples, where the meaning of the sentence alters dramatically once the order varies: Dog bites postman v. Postman bites dog they are here v. are they here?
- And there are thousand of rules forbidding us to put words in a certain order.
- Mother-tongue speakers never think twice about them, because they learned these rules as children.
- Mother-tongue speakers instinctively know that.
GRAMMAR IN SPEECH AND WRITING
A surprisingly large number of people who have spoken english since they were children are willing to admit that they 'don't speak english correctly', or claim that 'foreigners speak bettere english than we do, because they've learned the rules'.
- There are indeed many differences between the way grammar is used in writing english and the way it is used in speaking it.
- In such circumstances, we make use of all kinds of grammatical features that wouldn't be necessary in writing – in particular phrases as you know , you see , i mean , and mind you. We make great use of and and but to join sentences together – marks a break in the rhythm of the speech.
- It's important not to overstimate the differences between speech and writing.
- Spoken english may be different, but it certainly does not lack grammatical structure.
KNOWING GRAMMAR AND 'KNOWING ABOUT' GRAMMAR
The advertisement at the beginning of this chapter is that when you learn a language, you don't need to know any grammatical terminology.
- that language school's teaching method is an oral approach.
- The origins of the problem lie in the eighteenth century, when the first grammars of english were written.
- The grammarians shared the sporit of that age to establish order in the languagem after what they saw as a chaotic period of expansion and experiment.
- Shakespeare and his contemporaries had added thousands of the words and usages to the language.
- From the 1760s , grammarias laid down rules which they thought should govern
obscienities, as well as the slang of specific social group and areas, such as the army, sport, thieves, public school, banking, or medicine.
- In 1937 eric partridge devoted a whole dictionary to this world of 'slang and unconventional english'.
- Some of the words it contained were thought to be so shocking that for several years many libraries banned it from their open shelves!
- The life-span of a word or phrase may be only a few years – or even months. The expression might fall out of use in one social group, and reappear some time later in another.
SOME MARGINAL CASES
Proper names aren't part of any one language: they are universal,
- Fauna and flora present a further type of difficult. Around a million species of insects have already been described, which means that there must be around a million designations available to enable english-speaking specialists to talk about their subject.
- The largest dictionaries already include hundreds of thousand of technical and scientific terms, but none of them includes more than a fraction of the insect names – usually just the most important species.
TYPES OF VOCABULARY
The core vocabulary, as a reflected in such dictionaries as the unabridged oxford english dictionary or webster's third new international seems to be something over half a million.
- There are really only a few ways or creating new words. Quite a large number are simply taken over from other languages; they are called 'borrowings' or 'loan words'.
- It's clear that an extraordinary range of languages is involvedm with some (such as french, latin, and Greek) being repeatedly used over the centuries.
- An even more important way of creating new words is to add prefixes and suffixes to old ones. There are over 100 common prefixes and suffixes in english, and the can be used singly or in various combinations.
- The prefixes include anti-, co-, de-, ex-, non-, super-,ultra-, and -un.
- Among the suffixes are -able, -ation, -eer, -ful, -ish, -let, -ness and -ly.
- A simply way of making new words is just to change the way they are used in a sentence, without adding any prefixes or suffixes. This process is known as conversion.
- Verbs can be converted from nouns, as when we sat we're going to tape a programme or butter some bread.
- Nouns can be made from adjectives, as in He's a natural or they're regulars.
- Adjectives ca be amde from nouns, as in a liverpool accent.
- Verbs can be made from prepositions, as in to down tools. And there are several other types.
- Another important technique is to join two words togethe to male a different word, a compound, as in balckbird, air-conditioning.
- There are hundreds of thousands of compounds in english, especially in scientific fields.
NEW WORDS FOR OLD
there is often an antagonistic reaction to new words. Computer jargon has its adherents, but also has its critics.
- old rural dialect words may be admired, but the new words from urban dialects are often reviled.
- Vocabulary – and especially change in vocabulary – is one of the most controversial issues in the field of language study.
- Some people are simply against language change on principle.
- Obkection are only made to words that are currently in the process of change. For instance, many people complain that they can no longer use gay, now that the meaning of 'homosexual' has been added to the previous meaning of 'joyful'.
- The processes that govern chande seem too compex and deeply rooted in society for the voices of a few individuals to have much effect.
- The evidence seems to support the opposite view. The objections which were being raised to new -ize verbs a few years ago have not stopped the acceptance of dozens of these verbs into the language.
- The first edition of sir ernest gowers' the complete plain words appeared in 1954. it included warnings about the use of publicize, hospitalizem finalize, these three have sinco come to be accepted, despite all the warnings.
5.SPELLING
'Chaotic', 'unpredictable', 'disorganized', 'a mess' – these are just a few of the more repatable expressions used to describe english spelling.
- It isn't easy to arrive at a definite figure – to say tha x % of english words are irregulare in their spelling.
- If we include all the proper names (of people and places), the irregularity percentage will be enormous.
- If we include the thousands of lenghty scientific or technical terms o english, we will find that the vast majority of the syllables are spelled according to quite regular rules, as we sense when we 'sound out' these long words to ourselves, syllable by syllabke.
- If we say that friend is irregular, then do we say that firends is another irregular word, or is it the same word with an -s ending? The same point would apply to their and theirs, do and does and many more. If we got the first way, we dramatically increase the total od irregular words int he language; if we go the second way, we keep the total down.
- Hence if we were to count all the irregular words in a large sample of english writing, the results would vary enormously, depending on whether we were counting word types or word tokens.
- The trouble is that many of these words are amongst the most frequently used words in the language;ù
- english spelling gives the impression of being more irreguare than it really is.
- Once the cilg learned to spell 'the', the number of errors would fall immediately by 11%. Learning this one word wouls produce a noticeable general improvement.
- Everything depends on what is counted, and how
- the main conclusion from the studies which have been carried out is that we must not exaggerate the problem.
- English is much more regular in spelling, tha the traditional criticism wouls have us believe.
containing a sequence of these letters were difficult to read:
- by the beggining of the fifteenth century, english spelling was a mixture of two systems – old english and french.
- The introduction of printing in 1476 brought further consequences. In the early fifteenth century, there were many ways of spelling, words, reflecting regional variations in pronunciation.
- Wlliam Caxton had to choose one system as a standard to follow in his printing house.
- He chose the system which reflected the speech of the london area. As a result, the spelling of many words became stable for the first time, and the notion of a 'correct' spelling began to grow.
- During the fifteenth century, the sounds of london speech were undergoing the greatest chande in its history. Six of the vowel of middle english altered completely. In Chaucer's time, the word 'name' was pronounced with an 'a' vowel sound like that of 'calm, which is why it is spelled with an 'a' now. It was the fifteenth-century 'vowel shift' which changed the pronunciation, and changed the spelling to suit. The consequence is that ourmodern spelling in many respects reflects the way words were pronounced in Chaucer's time.
- the same kind of reasoning explains many of the 'silent letters' of modern english spelling.
- The 'k' of such words as 'knee', 'know and 'knight' was pronounced in old english, but it ceased to be sounded during the fifteenth century.
- The 'e' became silent during this period.
- In sixteenth century, there was a fashion among learned writers to show the history (or etimology) of a word in its spelling, and several of these new spelling became standard.
- This is where the silent 'b' in debt comes from, from instance. The word has no b sound in middle english. The 'b' was added by people who wished to remind everyone that the word comes from debitum in latin.
- In the late sixteenth and early seventeeth centuries, a new wave of loan words arrived in english from such languages as french, latin, greek, spanish, italian, and portguese: words as 'bizarre', 'brusque', 'canoe', 'cocoa', 'gazette', 'moustache', and 'intrigue'.
- English spelling is a cuorious mixture of different influeces.
- The result is a system which has provèed to be sufficiently functional that it has so far resisted all proposals for its fundamental reform.
SPELLING REFORM
The main movements in favour of reform for spelling developed in Reform Association was founded in the USA in 1876, and the british Simplified Spelling Society in 1908.
- the nearest the Simplified Spelling Society came to success was in 1949, when their publication, called 'Nue Spelling', was presented to Parliament.
- One of the biggest problems facing the spelling reform movement is the lack of any universal agreement as to what the best alternative system might be.
- Some systems, such as Nue Spelling, stay with familiar letters and try to use them in a regualr way.
- The initial teaching alphabet devised by James Pitman in 1959 is of this kind, it was a system intended to help children when they were learning to read.
- In addition there are a few systems which present a totally radical solution – a fresh start in which all old letter are eliminated and brand new symbols
introduced.
9.OLD ENGLISH
There is an account in Bede's Ecclesiastical history of the english nation reporting of britain in ad 449 by by warlike tribes from north-west europe – the saxons, angles, and jutes, who lived in the regions now known as the Netherlands, germany and Denmark. Bede's account was written in latin about ad 731.
- The invaders were first called 'Saxon', but latin writers later began to refer to them as 'angles'.
- Until around ad 1000, the nation was called Angelcynn (nation of the angles), and then Englalond (land of the angles).
- The language was always referred to as Englisc (sc=sh), and this has led to the modern name.
- The name 'Anglo-Saxon' in this period did not exist. This label began to be used after the Reinassance, when it referred to all aspects of the period – people, culture, and language. It is still the usual way of talking about the cultural history, but since the nineteenth century, when the history languages came to be studied in detail 'old english' has been preferred for the name of the language.
SOME FEATURES OF OLD ENGLISH
The anglo-saxon scribesused a number of abbreviations, to speed ip the copying of manuscripts, and these have here been replaced by the full words.
- in present-day english, word order is relatively fixed.
- Old english was an inflected language: the job a word did in the sentece was signalled by the kind of the ending it had.
- Today, most of these inflections have died away.
- There are far more irregular verbs in old english than in the language today.
THE STORY OF OLD ENGLISH
Before the anglo-saxon invasions, the languages of britain were celtic, spoken in many dialects by people who had themselves invaded the islands several centuries before.
- the linguistic effects of the anglo-saxon wars were just as clearcut.
- Many celtic communities were destroyed, assimilated, or gradually pushed back westwards and northwards, into the areas we now know as Cornwall, wales, scotland.
- Here the celtic dialects were develop in separate ways, resulting in such modern languages as welsh and gaelic.
- The celtic language of roman britain had hardly any influence on the language spoken by the Anglo-saxons.
- Only a handful of celtic words came into english at the time.
- There is a 'dark age' between the arrival of the anglo-saxons and the first old english manuscripts.
- The literary age began only after the arrival of the roman missionaries, led by Augustine, who came to Kent in AD 597. Large number of latin manuscripts were produced, especially of the bible and other religious texts.
- Old english manuscripts also began to be written. The earliest texts are glossaries of latin words translated into old english, and a few early inscriptions and poems, dating from around AD 700.
- many manuscripts were burned during the eight-century viking invasions.
- In ninth century northumbria, consisted of 31 letters.
- The inscriptions in anglo-saxon date from the fifth or sixth centuries AD. They are found on weapons, jewellery, monuments, etc.
- when runes came to be used in maniscripts, they were commonly used to convey 'secret' information.
10. MIDDLE ENGLISH
The year 1066 marks the beginning of a new social and linguistic era in Britain, but it does not actually identify the boundary between old and middle english. It was a long time before the effects of the invasion worked their way into the language, and in the meantime, old english continued to be used. Well past 1100, texts were still being composed in the west saxon variety that had developed in the yeard following the reign of king alfred.
- The series of manuscripts which from the anglo-saxon chronicle clearly illustrate the period of change. This long work, which began to be compiled in alfred's time, recounts events int eh historu of britain from the time of the anflo-saxon invasions until the middle of the twelfth century.
- The the writing begins again, in 1154, after the death of stephen, the syle is quite different. The language now seems much closer to modern eglish; the peterborough chronicle is the earliest extensive tect written in the east midland dialect, from which modern standard english developed.
- The system of old english word endings is beginning to die away. Several of the old endings are still present, especially on verbs, but they are not used with as much consistency.
- The word order is now critical, and very similar to that in use today.
THE STORY OF MIDDLE ENGLISH
the period we call middle english runs from the beginning of the twelfth century until the middle of the fifteenth, with the manuscripts at either end of this period showing the language in a state of change. The main influence on english was: french – the language introduced to britain by the normans. Following the accession of william of normandy, french was rapidly established in the corridors of power.
- The written records show that there was very little use of english among the hierarchy. Most of the anglo-norman kings were unable to communicate in the language.
- In 1204, the situation changed. King John of england came into conflict with King Philiph of france, and was obliged to give up control of Normandy.
- The english nobility lost their estates in france, and antagonism grew between the two countries.
- The status of French diminished as a spirit of english nationalism grew.
- During the twelfth century, english became more widely used among the upper classes.
- By the end of the twelfth century, contemporary accounts suggest that some children of the nobility spoke english as a mother tongue, and had to ben taught french in school. French continued to be used in parliament, the courts, and in public proceedings, but translations into english increased in frequency through the period, as did the number of handbooks written for the teaching of french.
- In 1362 english was used for the first time at the opening of parliament. By the end of the century, when Richard II was deposed, Henry IV's speeches at the
proceedings were made in English.
- By about 1425 it appears that English was universally used in england, in writing as well as in speech.
- The good relations between england and france lasted for only 150 years.
- This 150 years, no the less, is something of a 'dark age' in the histoy of the language. There is hardly any written evidence of english, and we can thus only speculate about what happened to the language during that period. It seems that french was the language of government, law, administration, and the church, with latin also used as a medium of education and worship.
- In the thirteenth century, we find an increasing number of sermons, prayers, romances, songs, letters, wills, and other documents.
- In the fourteenth century, we have the main achievements of middle english literature, culminating in the writing of Geoffrey Chaucer. VOCABULARY This linguistic influence of this period of french rule took to make itself felt, but it becomes increasingly evident in the english manuscripts of the thirteenth century.
- The main effect was the enormous number of french words chich came into the language – around 10,000.
- As the new vocabulary arrived, there were many cases where it duplicated a word that existed already in english from anglo-saxon times.
- Old english and french words often both survived, and when this happened, their meanings would begin to differ.
- The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were also a time when several thousand words came into the language directly from latin.
- 1384 translation of the bible initiated by John Wyclif, for example, contained over 1000latin words not previously known in english. Most of these words were professional or technical terms, belonging to such fields as religion, medicine, law and literature.
- Only a very small number of these 'aureate terms' entered the language.
- The result of the simultaneous borrowing of french and latin words led to a highly distinctive feature of modern english vocabulary – sets of three words which all express the same fundamental meaning.
- The old english word is often the more popular one, with the french word being literary, and the latin word more learned.
GRAMMAR
Vocabulary ws onglu one of the major changes affecting the language in the middle english period.
- One other important change at this time was many if the irregular forms of old english lost their irregularity and began to follow the pattern of the regularly constructed words.
SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION
There were major changes in the way the language was spelled. The norman scribes listened to the english they heard around them, and began to spell it according to the conventions they had previously used french, such as ' qu' for ' cw'.
- Changes affected pronunciation too. The /v/ sound became much more important, because of its use in french loan words, and began to distinguish pairs of words, as it still does today.
11. EARLY MODERN ENGLISH
THE RENAISSANCE
The new invention provided more opportunities for people to write, and gave their works much wider circulation. As a result, more texts of the period have survived.
- The story of English thus becomes more definite in the sixteenth century.
- In this century, scholars seriously got down to talking about the english language.
- If the books were to sell, the language the language they contained had to be understandable throughout the country.
- Caxton made his decisions based on the speech of the London area.
- The main factor promoting the flood of new publications in the sixteenth century was the renewed interest in the classical languages and literatures, and in the rapidly developing fields of science, medicine, and the arts – a period called the 'Renaissance'.
- This was also the age of the reformation, of copernicus, and the discovery of america. The effect on the englishlanguage were immeiate.
- The focus of interest was vocabulary.
- But the period of worldwide exploration was well under way, and words came into english from over fifty languages of africa and asia.
- There were many translations of classical works during the sixteenth century, and thousand of latin or greek terms were introduces, as translators searched for an english equivalent and couls not find one. Often they would pause before a new word, and explain it, or apologize for it. The Mulcaster view triumphed. Latin continued to be used by several scientists uring the sixteenth century, but went out of general use during the seventeenth, apart from its continuing status in the roman catholic church.
SHAKESPEARE AND THE BIBLE
The two influences which dominate the final decades of the renaissance are the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible (the 'authorized version'). Dominate from a linguistic point of view.
- the authorized version of the bible introduced maby idioms into the language. It is a more conservative language. The authorized version of the bible doesn't contain large numbers of new words.
- The authorized version preserves manu of the forms and constructions which were falling out of use elsewhere. The main developments – the loss of word endings and the fixing of word order – had largely run their course in the medieval period.
- In early Modern English, what we see is the 'resuide' of this period of radical change.
- In shakespeare much greater use is made of the newer forms and constructions.
- The modern use of ' do ' with negatives and in questions is missing: we find they knew him not , instead of they did not know him. Both old and new constructions are used in Shakespeare, and the do construction became standard by about
- the third person singulare of the present tense of verbs is: -eth
- the second person pronouns were changing during this period: ye was the subject form; you was the form used as object or after preposition. By the end of the sixteenth century you was already being used for ye. That disappeared in the
later seventeeth century.
- Thou was originally used for addressing one person, and ye/you for more than one.
- Thou form ceased to be use at the end of the seventeenth century.
- His is used for its.
- The auxiliary verb shall is used for all persons; will is used in shakespeare in informal speech.
THE AGE OF THE DICTIONARY
1721: Nathaniel Bailey published his Universal Etymological English Dictionary.
- The first 'dictionary of hard words' was published by Robert Cawdrey in 1604: A Table Alphabeticall was compiled 'fro the benefit and helpe of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons. The book contained 3000 'hard usuall english wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, greeke, latine or french'.
- At the end of the eighteenth century, any english language history has to adopt a fresh perspective.
WORD THEN AND NOW
Language changes when society changes. The vast social and technological changes since the industrial revolution have had their linguistic consequences in the form of thousands of the new words.
- Since the seventeenth century, the flow of new words into the language has continued without interruption, especially in the fields od science and technology.
- Vocabulary chande is always the most frequently noticed aspect of language development, and it affects alla section of society.
