Today is English Language Day. 10 things you might not know about the English language:
English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family. People who speak it are called Anglophones. The name comes from the Angles, ancient Germanic peoples who migrated to the island of Great Britain. While English has a lot of words it has “borrowed” from other languages, most of the core vocabulary and the first words learned by children are mainly Germanic words from Old English. In fact, it is not possible to speak or write English without using any of these words.
How many words are there in the English language? A tricky question as words are constantly being added at a rate of something like 14 new words a day, or one every 98 minutes. A group of people called The Global Language Monitor have taken it upon themselves to keep track of how many words there are in English. On 10 June 2009 they announced the 1,000,000th word. (It was “Web 2.0” meaning the second generation of the Internet.) And it goes on. An English dictionary from 1989 has about 170,000 words, 220,000 if obsolete words are included. The average English speaker only knows about 40,000 of them. Over 1,500 of them were invented by William Shakespeare.
English is the most spoken language in the world thanks to the British Empire’s influence. It’s the third most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. However, it’s estimated that there are more people who’ve learned English as a second language than there are native speakers.
There are some jobs for which a reasonable command of English is a requirement. It’s the language used in aviation so airline pilots must be able to speak it and understand it well enough over a radio with interference. They are required to take a proficiency test which includes aviation terminology. Also scientists would find English pretty useful as over 80% of published scientific papers are in English.
English is an official language in 59 countries including India, Ireland, and Canada. It isn’t, however, an official language in the USA or the United Kingdom, because it’s the dominant language for historical reasons and it’s never been deemed necessary to define it as such. It’s also a co-official language of the United Nations, The EU, and many other international and regional organisations.
It’s often said that the English word with the most definitions is “set”. This was certainly the case in 1928 when the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. “Set” had 430 definitions and took up several pages in the dictionary. More recently, Set’s crown has been stolen by “Run”, probably due to technology, for example, running a computer programme or trains running on time.
There is a word for words that are used which don’t add meaning to a sentence, ie. words such as “like”, “actually,” “honestly,” and “basically”. No, the answer is not “annoying”! The technical term is “crutch words”.
Many other languages have genders for objects, French and German for example. English only uses genders when talking about people (or possibly animals or ships). However, in the olden days, English used genders in the same way other languages do. However, when the Vikings invaded and brought their language with them, the genders of many nouns differed from the Anglo-Saxon ones, so it’s theorised that people stopped using them to avoid confusion.
English can be a tricky language to learn, what with words which can mean the opposite of each other (eg “cleave” and “overlook”). Pronunciation isn’t always straightforward, either. The combination “ough” can be pronounced in 10 different ways, as in this sentence: “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”
It used to be even more complicated as the English alphabet used to have more letters, including ‘thorn’, a letter written like a p, but pronounced ‘th’. Also there was a ‘yogh’, pronounced as ‘ch’ in Middle English; and the long S that looks much like the letter F you often see in inscriptions in churches.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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