On the scent of an aging book is so welcome to bibliophiles. I was able to sniff the smell of yellowing
paper when I turned the cover of The English language: A Guided Tour of the
Language, by David Crystal. What a pleasure!
This
is the revised version, from 2002, of his 1988 classic. It explores English with a global perspective
and begins by identifying how only about half of the world’s English speakers
use the language as their main form of communication. As of about 15 years ago, some 400 million
people in America, Canada, India, Great Britain, Australia, Ireland, New
Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere spoke English as their primary
language. Another 500,000,000 people
speak it as their second language, meaning ESL-speakers exceed mother-tonguers.
English
is spoken throughout the world. The
author identifies 70+ territories where English is an official or semi-official
language, including Jamaica, Fiji, Pakistan, Rwanda, St. Lucia, and Cameroon.
In
the three-and-a-half centuries since Queen Elizabeth ruled (1558=1603) in
England, the number of English speakers rose from 5-7 million to 350 million
worldwide in 1952. A half-century later,
that number more than doubled.
The
total number of people who speak English at some level was estimated to be 1.5
billion people in 2000 – or one in four global citizens at that time. No other language is as widespread across the
planet, and yet 75% of the world doesn’t speak English.
The
book covers a lot of territory, including things like “top 10 complains about
grammar.” For instance, the list notes:
“I shouldn’t be used in between you and I.
The pronoun should be me after a preposition, as in, Give it to me.”
Perhaps
the best section was the one on vocabulary.
He notes the following:
How
many words are there in English? This
apparently simple little question turns out to be surprisingly complicated. Estimates have been given ranging from half a
million to over two million. It partly
depends on what you count as English words, and partly on where you go looking
for them. Consider the problems if
someone asked you to count the number of words in English. You would
immediately find thousands of cases where you would not be sure whether to
count one word or two. In writing, it is
often not clear whether something should be written as a single word, as two
words, or hyphenated… The more colloquial varieties of English, and slang in
particular, also tend to be given inadequate treatment. In dictionary-writing, the tradition has been
to take material only from the written language, and this has led to the
compilers concentrating on educated, standard forms. They commonly leave our non-standard
expressions, such as every day slang and obscenities, as well as the slang of
specific social groups and areas, such as the army, sports, thieves, public
school, banking, or medicine.”
The
English language, like America itself, borrows from other countries. The Greeks gave us “schizophrenia” and
“stigma,” China gave us “ketchup” and “typhoon,” Italy exported “traffic” and
“studio,” and Spain gave us “rodeo” and “cannibal.” An interesting list of such words can be
found in Crystal’s informative book.
The
book also discusses spelling, pronunciation, the size of one’s vocabulary,
which dictionary should be used, the variations of the language, Old English,
and the modernization of the language.
One
study featured in the book noted the 20 most common adjectives used in TV
advertising. Note how positive they are:
1.
New
2.
Good/better/best
3.
Free
4.
Fresh
5.
Delicious
6.
Full
7.
Sure
8.
Clean
9.
Wonderful
10.
Special
11.
Crisp
12.
Fine
13.
Big
14.
Great
15.
Real
16.
Easy
17.
Bright
18.
Extra
19.
Safe
20.
Rich
At
the end of the book, there’s a timeline about scores of events in English language
history that could be of importance.
Here are a few:
450-480 Earliest runic inscriptions in Old
English
650 Composition of Beowulf
1362 English is first used at the
opening of Parliament
1375-1400 Chaucer’s main works written
1476 Introduction of printing
1590-1616 Shakespeare’s main works were written
1604 Publication of Robert Cawdrey’s
A Tale Alphabeticall
1611 Authorized version of the Bible
1721 Publication of Nathaniel Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary
1755 Publication of Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary of the English Language
1762 Publication of Robert Loweth’s
Short Introduction to English Grammar
1794 Publication of Lindley Murray’s
English Grammar
1828 Publication of Noah Webster’s
American Dictionary of the English Language
1884-1928 Publication of the Oxford English
Dictionary
2000 OED goes online
The
book concludes with a chapter on the English of tomorrow, concluding the
following:
“The
future of a language is closely bound up with the influence and prestige of its
speakers – and who can predict such things?
What will be the balance of power among the major nations of the world a
century from now? Will American
supremacy continue to underwrite the role of English? Or will some momentous political or economic
event motivate people to look elsewhere for their world language? The role of English has developed to such an
extent, unprecedented in world history, that it is difficult to see how it can
now be dislodged. But people must have
thought that way about Latin once.”
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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog
are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter
@theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more
important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog
© 2015
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