During the last three years I’ve fallen deeply in love with the Enlisc language, also known as English. I used to struggle with it for a long time, trying to understand the confusion underlying its words, grammar and pronunciation. Now I’m finding the beauty of the language assisted by my blogger friends Richard and Linda. Both of them are writers and masters in weaving words, if you know what I mean.
English is a Western Germanic language spoken originally in England, and is now the most widely used language in the world. It is spoken as a first language by a majority of the inhabitants of several nations, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and a number of Caribbean nations. It is the third most common native language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. It is widely learned as a second language and is an official language of the European Union, many Commonwealth countries and the United Nations, as well as in many world organizations.
During the last month, I’m removing the layers of the language in an effort to understand how it started and how it expanded to rule most of the world, together with Mandarin and Spanish. Richard suggested a book to help me in my linguistic quest. The name of the book is dubbed, The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg. It’s one of those books you don’t want to keep your eyes off the printed text or let it down for a while to take a pause. You want to read it from beginning to end in one day.
Below is an excerpt from the aforementioned book. Here we go.
“The American influence on English has been and continues to be crucially important and one of the lucky turns in the adventure is that it was English and not, as it just might have been, French or Spanish or German which adopted or was adopted by that new-found land—that engine of the new and modern world. America has brought much treasure to the word-hoard but also, like the British Empire it succeeded, its English has caused casualties, and in both empires they are part of this story.
There had been luck but also cunning and the beginning of what was to become English’s most subtle and ruthless characteristic of all: its capacity to absorb others. Two brief examples of the linguistic osmosis are:
- Frisian: Laam (lamb), goes (goose), bûter (butter), brea (bread), see (sea), stoarm (storm), boat (boat), rein (rain), and snie (snow). Indoors, there’s miel (meal) and sliepe (sleep).
- Latin: Planta (plant), win (wine), catte (cat), candel (candle), ancor (anchor), cest (chest), forca (fork), weall (wall), straet (street), mortere (mortar), spitula (letter), and rosa (rose).
The way in which a few tribal and local Germanic dialects spoken by a hundred and fifty thousand people grew into the English language spoken and understood by about one and a half billion people has all the characteristics of a tremendous adventure.
English like a living organism was seeded in England a little over fifteen hundred years ago. England became its first home. From the beginning it was exposed to rivalries, angers and threats: there was an escape from extinction, the survival of an attempt at suffocation; and there are casualties. It has often been a fierce war over words—whose language rules?—but also there were and are treasures: literatures, unified governance, and today the possibility of a world conversation, in English
Only writing preserves a language. Writing gives posterity the keys it needs. It can cross al boundaries. A written language brings precision, forces ideas into steady shapes, secures against loss. Once the words are on the page they are to be challenged and embellished by those who come across them later. Writing begins as the secondary arm but soon, for many, becomes the primary source, the guardian, the authority, the soul of language.
But who found the first words? Who finds new words today? We know that Shakespeare put into print at least two thousand new words, but the majority of words come out of the crowd. An American frontiers-man like Davy Crockett can be as good a word spinner as a master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Early words came from those who worked the land, those whose centuries of nose to the earth made them acquainted with the minutiae of nature and most likely it was they who, often out of necessity, had to name what they saw: basic things, and creatures which might endanger or nourish them. The giving of names could be called the most democratic communal effort in our history. Language is the finest achievement of culture—and in my view, the English language is the most remarkable of the many contributions these islands have made to the world.”
If English is your second language, I encourage you to keep hanging in there making new discoveries and soon you will unwrap the beauty of the language. I can’t emphasize enough how much I enjoy reading and learning abut this Lingua Franca of our times. Good Day.
To add to the confusion I just found this online:
English: the Perfect Language
We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?
Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!
Let’s face it, English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
Neither apple nor pine in pineapple,
And English muffins weren’t invented in England.
We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes,
We find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
And a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing,
Grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?
Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend.
If you have a bunch of odds and ends
And get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English
Should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
We ship by truck but send cargo by ship.
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
While a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
In which your house can burn up as it burns
Down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out,
And in which an alarm goes off by going on.
And, in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother’s not Mop?
We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?
Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!
Let’s face it, English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
Neither apple nor pine in pineapple,
And English muffins weren’t invented in England.
We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes,
We find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
And a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing,
Grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?
Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend.
If you have a bunch of odds and ends
And get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English
Should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
We ship by truck but send cargo by ship.
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
While a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
In which your house can burn up as it burns
Down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out,
And in which an alarm goes off by going on.
And, in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother’s not Mop?
Yes, my friend, English is a crazy language, yet in the proper hands it glows like a diamond. You and Linda have been my English mentors and I’m glad to say I’m infatuated with the language.
I have read this article before at Chiriqui Chatter posted by Don Ray. We have had a few laughs now and then about the linguistic confusion of the language.
Take care,
Omar.-
I think you would enjoy this video interview with W.S. Merwin. You can substitute “learning English” for “writing poetry”, for one thing. And what he says about the work of translation is very interesting. Beyond that, his poetry is great!
Thanks Linda. Will take a peek in a short while. Will comment later. Thank you for being one of my English mentors.
P.S.
I just viewed Mr. Merwin’s video in YouTube. I agree that to be good at something; I mean real good at it, you must practice daily. I do that with English, at least three hours a day when I prepare my daily web posts. It’s hard work, because it’s not my native tongue. But yet, I struggle trying to unveil the beauty of the language.
I love his poem about his wife and the way he read it. It was very emotional.
Regards,
Omar.-