Assets of the English

Language
◆ Prepared by Mario Pei and John Nist
◆ Edited and Narrated by David F. Maas
 Assets of the English
Language
◆ Worldwide Importance
◆ Immense Cosmopolitan Vocabulary
◆ Inflectional Simplicity
◆ Natural Gender
◆ Analytical Syntax
◆ Fixed Word Order
◆ Fixed Stress
 Worldwide Importance
◆ Mandarin Chinese with nearly a billion
speakers is numerically the first of the
world’s tongues.
◆ While Chinese is concentrated in central
Asia, English is spoken around the globe.
◆ Over a billion people use English either as a
first or second language
 Worldwide Importance
◆ 70% of the world’s mail addressed in
English
◆ 100% of communication of world’s airports
carried on in English
◆ After 1962 when China expelled Soviet
engineers,China’s second language became
English
 Immense Cosmopolitan
Vocabulary
◆ Anglo Saxon did not have over 100,000
words
◆ Most comprehensive dictionaries of Modern
English place the vocabulary at 1,000,000
words
◆ Today some estimates place the total
vocabulary at 5,000,000 words
 Sources of Vocabulary
◆ Victorian Expansion-Australia-boomerang South Africa-
khaki
◆ Science and technology- download,interface
◆ War-stockpile,escalate
◆ Invasion of Danes-sky Invasion of Normans plaintiff
◆ Missionary activities of Pope Gregory-vespers
◆ Laissez faire adoption-chic,savoire fairre
 Three layers of Synonyms
◆ Nixon quits-Anglo -Saxon
◆ Nixon resigns -Norman French
◆ Nixon abdicates- Latin
◆ The Senate asks Haldemann-Anglo-Saxon
◆ The Senate questions Haldemann-French
◆ The Senate interrogates Haldemann- Latin
 Inlectional Simplicity
◆ affixes or endings added to a stem word
which changes the meaning or form of that
word
◆ In Latin -Puella Agricolam Amat
◆ In English - Girl Farmer love
◆ The ambiguity can be cleared by adjusting
the word order: Girl love farmer
 Natural Gender
◆ All Indo-European languages other than
English arbitrarily divide words into
Masculine,feminine,and neuter
◆ German-Der Bleistift The pencil
(masculine) Die Feder -The pen (feminine)
◆ Spanish- El Camino The road (masculine)
La Mesa The table (feminine)
Old English had Grammatical
Gender
◆ Old English ◆ Modern English
◆ Se Mann (Masc.) ◆ The man
◆ Seo Hlaefdige (Fem.) ◆ The woman (or lady)
◆ δ aet Maegden ◆ The girl (or maiden)
(Neut)
 Liabilities of the English
Language
◆ Idioms- expressions which cannot be
comprehended (or translated) by knowing
the individual lexical units
◆ Orthography- the written symbols don’t
correspond with speech
 Troublesome Idioms
◆ I’m not going to stand for that
◆ Be here in nothing flat
◆ Sitting in the dark
◆ By and large
◆ Piece of cake
◆ Bark up the wrong tree
◆ Beating around the bush
 Verb particles
◆ Make out ◆ Sleeping in
◆ Make up ◆ Sleeping out
◆ Live up ◆ Sleeping it off
◆ Live down
 Be careful how you live it up
tonight or you won’t be able to
live it down tomorrow
 English Spelling Worst in
World
◆ English spelling is only 60% phonemic
◆ It is 40% Non-phonemic
◆ GHOTI -Fish
◆ gh from rough
◆ o from women
◆ t from nation
One Phoneme is represented
by different spellings
◆ grieve ◆ /i/
◆ deceive
◆ mean
◆ machine
◆ he
Same spelling represented by
different phonemes
◆ /i/ ◆ beak
◆ /e/ ◆ break
◆ /ε / ◆ bread