The World’s Language

 

Practical High-Level English Expertise for Graduate Students, Researchers, Tech Geeks and Language Lovers from All Linguistic Backgrounds. 

 

Richard Summerbell 

 

All chapters can be downloaded as free pdf files from this website.  

 

As a graduate student or technical writer, you have to write a high standard of practical English, even if it’s your second language.  Here’s your quick path to being as much an expert in practical English as you are in your major subject. 

 

Authored by a noted scientific journal editor and award-winning humorist

 

 

Description:  

 

This isn’t a beginner’s book or an elementary grammar.  It’s for people who have learned the basic rules, and now want to read, write and thoroughly understand high quality native-level English.  It’s for those – whether second-language speakers or raised speaking English – who are ready to move to a level of understanding and skill that they didn’t think was possible.

 

With humour and insight, the author tells the inside story of where English came from, how it works, and how it got its many quirks.  Those who grew up speaking the language will encounter fascinating tales and new ideas, as well as practical suggestions for difficult situations, especially those encountered in technical or professional writing.  Those who are learning English as students or professionals will be amazed to discover secrets of clear English writing that they’ve never been told about in any class, textbook or manual.  

 

Academic scholars of English will encounter novel but hard-to-resist ideas, such as the suggestion that the pronunciation changes that distinguish Modern from Middle English were motivated by fear of plague and tuberculosis.  How does the ‘subjunctive mood’ tie in with modern experimental psychology studies on the development of expertise?  Which non-English structures are rapidly permeating our language thanks to the post-1989 surge in international scientific and technical English?  Find out here. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outline of Chapters 

 

1. The neighbours have taken over the house: how English came together as a language unifying people from different backgrounds.  The genesis of a non-tribal, open language.  

The history of English – Saxons, French and Vikings collide to produce two simplified English languages in one. The later importation of cougars, pumas and other words from almost everywhere.  The long reign of Latin for specialized talk and its replacement by acronyms.  From Futhorc to Fubar.

2. ‘Inglish speling: the nitemare beginz’  https://justpaste.it/6xek2

All the factors that went into making English spelling the bizarre hodgepodge it is. Reasons why changing it could be a ‘nitemare.’ A theory about how aversion to our own throats transformed our language.  The democratic underpinnings of illogic in spelling. 

3. ‘Never I will understand how the English’s grammar works’  https://justpaste.it/43xln 

The living fairy tale of the ‘strong verbs.’ Then, some canyons where linguistic dinosaurs roam even as English relentlessly simplifies its grammar, making itself a language that everyone can learn.  Some important quirks of grammar that are often left out of the textbook.

4. ‘English presents a more difficult writing style when compared to languages my parents spoke at home, respectively.’ English style.   https://justpaste.it/68yh8 

Even the national news is losing its ability to compose sentences logically. All over the world, English is being replaced in science, technology and newscasting by an ‘International Scientific Creole’ mixing English words with the formats and grammars of many languages.  The result can be mind-boggling.  How to disentangle the unreadable and make everything crystal clear. 

5. “A blaze of light in every word” (quote from Leonard Cohen) – English literature https://justpaste.it/1vsk1 

What makes literature work? What makes it excellent?  Can we really understand what the author was trying to say?  Is there a Zen of reading well?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The neighbours have taken over the house:  how English came together as a language unifying people from different backgrounds.  The genesis of a non-tribal, open language.

 

 

Before the Western Roman Empire was overrun by German tribes in the 400’s CE, there was no English language on the island of Britain.  There was nothing even related to it there.  On the European continent, the German tribes spoke languages that were distantly related to modern English, but none of these languages had native speakers in Britain.  Thanks to Roman organization, there were some temporarily posted German soldiers in British military bases, and perhaps a few officials and merchants who spoke Germanic languages amongst themselves.  In public, though, people spoke Latin or British.  The British languages of the day were related to today’s Welsh, Cornish and Breton languages.  Other than a few place names, these Celtic languages contributed surprisingly few words to what eventually became English. 

 

The path for the English language to come into being, however, was already being cleared in the late 300’s CE.  In Roman Britain, an ambitious general, Maximus, who was an Iberian Celtic immigrant, was proclaimed emperor Magnus Maximus (great Maximus) by his troops in 383.  He fought a brief war to defeat his rival Gratian, the official Western Roman emperor.  Gratian was soon killed in what is now Lyon, France.  Maximus then tried to defeat Gratian’s half-brother, the emperor Valentinian II.  Valentinian was a boy, not yet a teenager, but he had been made co-emperor with Gratian.  Under attack by Maximus, Valentinian at first had to flee, but he returned later with support from the Eastern Roman Emperor and defeated Maximus.  In the historical book On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, the monk Gildas (died 570 CE) claimed that Maximus withdrew many Roman troops from British frontier areas for his campaigns.  Archaeological evidence supports the idea that they left and never returned: no new Roman coin change was left lying around the military bases after they left.  Their departure created a power vacuum. 

 

The Roman army in general had suffered some horrific defeats in the late 300s, most notably the disastrous battle of Adrianopolis (modern-day Edirne, Turkey) in 378.  Many rulers had started hiring mercenary troops from among the powerful Germanic tribes who lived just beyond the Empire’s borders.  

 

In Britain, there was a struggle among the post-Roman rulers.  A number of small kingdoms were formed, dividing the Roman-influenced part of the island.  Also, there was fighting with neighbouring Celtic tribes, the Scotti from what is now Ireland and the Picts from what is now Scotland.  Somewhere around 449 CE, a controversial British ruler by the name of Vortigern held a council at which a decision was made to employ some German mercenaries to help out with the military situation.   As the monk Gildas reported, the Saxon mercenaries arrived in “three cyulis (or ‘keels’), ‘as they call ships of war.’” The word cyulis, plural of cyul, was clearly a quotation from someone speaking the Saxon language. 

 

The English language of today is directly descended from the Saxon language, so this word cyul, quoted by Gildas, can be said to be the first English word that was ever expressed in writing on the island of Great Britain.   It was taken up into the Old English language as ceol and appears today as “keel” in some regional English dialects, indicating a flat bottomed boat used on canals and rivers.  It looks the same as the word “keel” for the curved piece of material that runs down the length of a ship’s hull and prevents the ship from rolling in the water, but academics say that the two words may have separate origins.  In any case, we still have this first-ever English word in our language today.   The same word also exists in languages related to English, such as Dutch, where it appears as kiel. 

 

Now, at this point, I am going to interrupt this history and say something about my own connection to it.   It is not by accident that I happen to mention Dutch in relation to “keel,” rather than, let’s say, modern German, where the same word appears with one big letter as ‘Kiel.’  I have had much more contact with Dutch than German.  This book was born, in part, out of my personal fascination with English and related languages, and since I am not an academic in the field of languages, it is heavily based on my own experience.  Professionally, I am a scientific researcher, but beyond that, I have many different interests and like to bring distant areas of thought together. 

 

My first professional scientific job was in a Canadian provincial public health laboratory that eventually became threatened with extinction.  Even though I loved working there and took advantage of the free French lessons that were sometimes offered, I finally felt obliged to look for other employment, as did the rest of the scientific staff.  I was offered a research job in the Netherlands in 2000 and worked in a scientific institute there for six years before returning (My partner found it impractical to move and I was in a long-distance relationship the whole time).   As the only native English speaker at my workplace, I found myself constantly explaining the strange realities of our language to Dutch people who had learned most of what they knew from schoolbooks and movies.  Though many of my Dutch colleagues were eager to improve their already fluent English, they also, I found out, believed that English was not a language to use when one was discussing important matters of strategy with co-workers.  For that, one used Dutch, since everyone (except me) could speak it with every possible nuance of meaning.  Science is a very political business that involves a lot of networking and haggling over grant money, and to be able to hold my ground in important discussions, I was obliged to learn Dutch at a fairly high level.  Luckily, I discovered that Dutch subtitles on recordings of the old Star Trek television series contained almost all the technical and bureaucratic Dutch I needed to know in order to “live long and prosper” at meetings.  The Dutch language and I became friends and we spent many entertaining evenings together, somewhere between Amsterdam and the Delta Quadrant. 

 

At the same time, I was also the editor-in-chief of a scientific journal called Medical Mycology.  In that role, I was responsible for the quality of English in the journal.  The journal printed papers about a very technical topic, diseases caused by microscopic fungi in humans and animals.  It was owned by a good-natured international society that felt that high quality science from all countries should be able to get published, even when the authors had no money, and even when they had serious problems writing English.   Many other scientific journals charged large publication fees that shut the door on the developing world.  They also rejected manuscripts thought to have poor English. Ours had an open door.   This meant that I constantly received problematic English in the mail. 

 

Since our journal didn’t charge those big fees, there was no money in the budget for people to correct the English, and most of this work came down to me.  It was quite a task:  I had to understand what people were trying to say, even though they were expressing complicated technical matters in confusing ways.  I soon realized that in many cases, the key to understanding what people were saying was to understand that they were using the grammar of their native languages when they wrote English.   For example, “the bathroom’s floor presented a high level spores count” was terrible English (better would be “the bathroom floor had a high spore count” or “the bathroom floor yielded a high spore count”), but if it was translated back into the author’s native Portuguese, it was a perfectly good sentence.   I didn’t want to correct the same mistakes over and over, so I wrote my authors many emails explaining how English differed from the language structures they had used in their papers.  

 

One of the reasons I could recognize non-English grammar easily was that I had studied several languages.  As a Canadian, I’d taken plenty of French courses and, with a little warmup, could speak conversational French passably well.   This gave me access to the Romance language family that includes French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and related languages.  I could read scientific papers in my field in all these languages with little difficulty.  Now I had also learned Dutch, which gave me access to the Germanic language family.  The more Dutch I learned, the more German I understood, especially when I also looked into the German grammar book from time to time.  In addition, I had once taken a university course on scientific Russian and I understood Slavic grammar, so that I could read languages from Serbian to Polish to Belarussian fairly easily with a dictionary.  For fun, I had studied Cantonese, the Chinese language spoken “in Fragrant Harbour and the surrounding Broad East province of Centreland” (which is what it looks like to a Chinese person if they read “in Hong Kong and the surrounding Guangdong province of China”).  In travelling, I had dabbled a little in basic Arabic, Finnish, Persian, Turkish, Japanese, Xhosa and so on, and had learned the alphabets used in Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Korean just in order to be able to read street and shop names.  I even, thanks to some high school friends, had some understanding of Secwépemc (Shuswap), the native language of my Canadian hometown of Kamloops (a city name based on the Secwépemc Tk’mlups, meaning approximately, “Butt-Crotch Junction;” city officials, knowing that the junction in question is a river junction, prefer the euphemism “Meeting of the Waters.” By the way, the ‘c’ in ‘Secwépemc’ is pronounced like the ‘ch’ in ‘Loch Ness’).  Yes, the picture becomes clear:  I am a language nut.  It gives me great pleasure to sit in an Amsterdam train station café and understand what passersby are saying in four or five languages.  I listen to every word in subtitled movies.  

 

All this language experience convinced me that something is missing in how many people are learning English today.   People seem to be doing it the hard way, learning it by rote as a set of arbitrary rules.   To be fair, all language learning involves some painful memorizing, but there are many interesting stories contained within English that could really reduce the pain.   My feeling is that language should be fun.  The purpose of this book, then, is to find the fun way to show how some of the difficult aspects of English work.  I am going to start with the most painful aspect of all, the spelling.  Then I’ll go on to some aspects of grammar and sentence structure, but I am going to pick and choose, not cover everything.   I’ll concentrate especially on some vital things that most people who learn English as a second language never learn.  Finally, I will say something about interpreting the truly complicated English that readers will encounter if they start reading English literature.   There is more fun there than anywhere else in the language, but again, as in mountain climbing, the fun may seem painful at first.  Some of the things I will say will apply to reading literature in any language, but I won’t let that stop me.  We’ll take our journey right to the top of the language.

 

But first, we are going to go back to the history of English.  The reason is that it explains a lot about why the language is so strange.  

 

There is a common saying, “too many cooks spoil the broth.”  In many ways, English doesn’t make sense – it’s not an utterly logical language in the way that Finnish is, for example.  Partly, though, that’s because it has always been very “democratic.”  It was generated when separate peoples mixed together, bringing various strands of language into contact, and then it was renewed several times through the same process.  This mixing of elements has always made it confusing.  At the same time, though, its democratic nature tends to say “everyone welcome.”   Like a slightly goofy but fun-loving cousin at a family reunion, it is both friendly and a little hard on the brain.  

 

So let’s go back to those three keel ships bringing German soldiers to the British Isles.  Their leader, according to another monk historian, Bede (“Prayer,” who lived approximately from 672–735) was a chief named Hengest (“Stallion”) who was a member of the German tribe called the Jutes.   The British leader who had hired him, Vortigern (“Overlord”), apparently neglected to follow through on some promised payments, leading Hengest to launch a revolt and to invite more Germanic warriors to join in and strengthen the German position on the island.  There was a terrible slaughter (maybe) and the Celtic Britons were driven westward towards Wales and Cornwall.  Over the following decades, eastern and southern Britain became heavily colonized by members of three Germanic sub-groups, all speaking related languages.  The smallest group was the Jutes (name origin uncertain, related to “Goth”), who were people from the Jutland peninsula in modern Denmark and north Germany.  A larger and more powerful group were the Saex (“war knives”) or Saxons, who were from in and around what is now the Holstein area of northern Germany.  (This area contains a seaport with the interesting name Kiel.)  Lastly and most famously, there were the Englisc, as they called themselves, or Angles, who were people from a hook-shaped area called “the angle” in the narrow neck of the Jutland Peninsula.  All these people spoke related languages that have been grouped together as the Ingvaeonic or North Sea Germanic group.  In today’s continental Europe, the Frisian language of the northern Netherlands and nearby parts of Germany is the main descendant of this language group.  This makes Frisian the modern language most closely related to English, other than languages like Jamaican Creole that are directly derived from English. 

 

The North Sea Germanic languages differed from the ancestral languages of modern German and Dutch.  For example, they systematically lost the letter “n” in a number of words where the “n” was followed by a breathy sound.  You can see this if you compare English “tooth” with Dutch “tand,” English “other” with Dutch “ander,” English “five” with German “fünf,” and English “us” with Dutch “ons.”   They also had some changes in verb forms and had simplified plurals.  The Jutes, Angles and Saxons probably spoke different North Sea Germanic dialects, and they also occupied different parts of Britain. The Jutes mostly settled in the southeastern area called Kent, the Angles in the eastern area called Anglia as well as in some northeastern areas, and the Saxons in places where their name can still be seen today in the county names:  Middlesex, Essex and Sussex (in other words, places of the Middle Saxons, East Saxons, and South Saxons.).   There was also a kingdom called Wessex, the West Saxon kingdom, that was later split into multiple English counties west of London.  The language now known as Old English or Anglo-Saxon (called ‘Englisc,’ a word pronounced rather like ‘aingleesh,’ by its speakers) had four major dialects:  the Anglian dialects called Mercian and Northumbrian, plus the West Saxon dialect, derived from Saxon, and the Kent dialect derived from Jutish.  You may recognize Northumbria as similar to the modern name of a northeastern English county, Northumberland; ‘Mercia’ comes from a word meaning ‘border’ and relates to the river Mersey, which flows from Manchester west to the sea at Liverpool. 

 

Not long after these languages became established, Viking invasions of Britain began, with long ships bringing over the fierce, dreaded Scandinavian warriors.  These Vikings, who spoke the Old Norse language, took over large segments of the country, especially in the northeast.  When the Saxon King Alfred (“elf counsel”) “the Great” fought off the Vikings and unified most of England in 878 CE, his West Saxon dialect from Wessex became the literary standard Old English.  Nonetheless, the Viking invasions had introduced many Old Norse words into Old English, especially in the eastern dialects.  Some well known examples that are still in use in English today are ‘sky,’ ‘leg,’ and ‘they.’  There are also many other, less commonly used words that come from Old Norse, such as ‘blunder’ and the ‘mail’ in ‘blackmail.’

 

Here we need to take another moment away from history and talk about what happens to languages when they mix together.   You might imagine that languages would start off simple and become more complicated over the course of time.  Perhaps that was true very early in the history of the human species when we were still making up words.  In more recent times, the opposite trend seems to occur:  newer languages are simpler than older ones.  Languages spoken by long-isolated tribes or old, relatively remote nations tend to be very complex.  And with some thought, you can imagine (perhaps wrongly) why that might be:  all the thousands of years of oral culture where tribal people would spend the winter, or some other slow-paced season, sitting around and exchanging complex, memorized tales, must have been ideal for the composing of elegant, beautiful languages.  With no monopoly boards or video games possible, and wine and beer not yet invented, the intricate conjugation of verbs must have been one of the popular games to play around the cooking fire for centuries.  There was plenty of time in pre-literary, tribal life, to put together a precise, classical symphony of a language where all the grammatical forms were beautifully logical and individual.  Though perhaps, to give that symphony the liveliness of Joseph Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony (#94), enough irregularities might be left in to confuse the uneducated:  this is always the privilege of experts.  

 

The world still contains or remembers many of these ultra-logical (but also, at times, beautifully irregular) languages such as Latin, Finnish, Russian, classical Arabic, Greek and Secwepemc (mentioned above).  When languages collide, however, especially when the less common language becomes nearly as common or important as the majority language, a fusion tends to occur.   A linguist, Derek Bickerton, studied language mixing and came up with a theory that has become famous.  His theory began with the observation that when two linguistic groups mixed, adults who had to speak to members of the other group would often do so in a highly simplified version of the other language, a ‘pidgin.’  A pidgin is typically awkward and has very basic function.  Most commonly it is used in trading, e.g., “hey boss you buy twenty piece shirt from me very good no prollem.”  (The word “piece” in this bit of pidgin English shows that the speaker’s first language is East Asian; this is an English translation of a Chinese style “counting word.”).  I’ve been spoken to in trader’s pidgin myself in Morocco: “hello my friend, buy from me hashish zero zero price very good you will like.”  (Said with small variation by multiple people; I declined each time). 

 

As Bickerton pointed out, though, the children of pidgin users are still in the phase of life where people soak up language ‘like a sponge.’  A pidgin is too simple for them.  If children of two language groups are mixing together regularly, they rapidly transform the two common pidgin languages into a more elegantly structured, mixed language called a ‘creole.’  The creole lacks the complicated grammatical elements of the original languages, but it can be highly functional.  It is a full-fledged language with simplified grammar. 

 

Not all linguists agree with Bickerton that creoles arise in exactly this way, or even that creoles can be exactly defined.  Definitely, though, some process along these lines produces simplified languages from mixtures of complicated languages.   During the times when Europeans made colonies all over the world and transported slaves and free worker populations around, many dozens of local Creole languages developed in different parts of the world.   Some of these are now official languages of countries, including Kreyol Ayisyen (Haitian Creole) and Papuan Tok Pisin (despite its name meaning ‘talk pidgin’).  Others were only spoken in one or two towns and are now extinct or endangered, like the Kristang (‘Christian’) creole of Portuguese and Malay origin, used only by Christians in the neighbouring cities of Malacca and Singapore.  Interestingly, there is even a creole, the Jamaican Maroon Spirit Possession Language, spoken only spoken by spirits of the dead.   The language is heard only when ancestral spirits possess worshippers’ bodies in a Voudoun (voodoo)-like religion that formed when African ex-slave and Native American Taíno cultures came together in the independent Maroon settlements of the Jamaican hills.  It is very different from the language the Maroons use in daily life, and is related to Sranan, the creole language of distant Surinam.  Clearly the forces giving rise to creoles are very strong if even the dead can develop a creole.  Lol (internet English for “lots of laughs”).

 

Many linguists distinguish creoles from another category, “mixed languages,” and they may not recognize English as having belonged to either category at any stage of its development.  Nonetheless, English shows the simplification that arises when languages mix together.   There are not many highly parallel cases among the modern languages, but one very similar case is the Italian-Arabic-English mixture that has coalesced as modern Maltese. 

 

The North Sea Germanic languages that came together to form Old English were possibly already simplified through contact.  They had lost such niceties as the elaborate system of plurals that survived in related languages and ended up in modern German.   Let’s have a look at some of those plurals and just be secretly glad that they didn’t migrate into English:  die Jacke, the jacket, becomes die Jacken the jackets; der Mann, the man, becomes die Männer, the men; der Vater, the father, becomes die Väter (plural visible only in the article die and in the two dots over ‘ä’ in the middle of the word); der Tisch, the dish, becomes die Tische; der Löffel, the spoon, remains nearly unchanged as die Löffel; the imported word der Zoo, the zoo, becomes die Zoos; das Jahr, the year, becomes die Jahre; das Haus, the house, becomes die Häuser, and so on.  A system of plurals like this is like a detailed Belgian lace or a top quality Qashgai carpet – it takes time and artistry to put it all together and keep it intact.  The young populations who develop playground creoles out of their parents’ shopping pidgins do not have the patience.  Now compare the German system for plurals with the English system, “add ‘s’ to nearly everything except a few words dealing with people, large mammals and birds”– jackets, men, fathers, dishes, spoons, zoos, years, houses.   You can see the advantage of learning a simplified language.  Only “men” sticks out in that list as a rare exception to the “add ‘s’” rule. 

 

Old English, though its plurals were more simplified than German plurals, still had many elaborate features that were not passed on to modern English.   For example, it had five “cases,” almost as many as Russian!  A word had one form when it was the grammatical subject of a sentence (nominative; the ball is red), another when it was a direct object (accusative; I hit the ball), another when it was an indirect object (dative; I gave the ball to him), another for possession (genitive; it was the ball’s fault the window broke), and sometimes a fifth one for agency (instrumental; with this ball I will break your window).   As you can see, in modern English, the word ball manages to stay the same in four out of five situations.  Only possession, the genitive case, remains different, with its normal ‘apostrophe-s’ for nouns: “the ball’s.”    Now compare Old English.  To make a simple example, I will just drop the relevant Old English form into a modern English sentence for four of the five cases.  Se cyning (the king) gave it to me.  I gave it to thone cyning (the king).  I gave thaes cyninges (the king’s) sword to him.  After his capture, I gave thaem cyninge (the king) over to his enemies. 

 

Old English was also one of those hard-working languages that assigns a gender to everything, as occurs in German, French or Russian.   The sun was feminine as ‘sēo sunne,’ while the moon was masculine as ‘se mōna.’  As you can see in the example about the king, he is masculine – but the ‘se’ that serves as his masculine article changes with each case, becoming ‘thone,’ ‘thaes’ and ‘thaem.’  In the plural, it gets worse, with ‘se’ changing into ‘tha,’ ‘thara’ or ‘thaem’ according to the case.  Add in the queen, ‘seo cwēn,’ to represent the feminine gender, and you get five more changes of ‘the’ to memorize, as you go through the cases in singular and plural (there should be seven more, but some case forms, willy-nilly, are the same as others).  And then there is the wife, ‘thaet wīf,’ who represents the neuter case, neither masculine nor feminine.  Somehow, this doesn’t seem very kind to wives.  In any case, she, or I should say, ‘it,’ gets yet another set of case changes.  And then there are some additional noun forms I won’t even mention. 

 

What this all adds up to, very simply, is the word WHEW!!!

 

Thank HEAVENS English forgot to retain this ultra-complicated system of case changes and genders. 

 

One of the main forces responsible seems to have been the invasion of the Vikings.  When their Old Norse language mixed with the Anglian dialects of eastern Old English, a lot of the ornamental structure of English was lost.  Mind you, linguists again dispute how important the Vikings were in this.  It does seem true, though, that case structure disappeared in northern and eastern Old English dialects long before it disappeared in the southwestern form that was used in literature.  These northeasterly areas were just where the Viking invasions were most influential.    People often picture the fierce Vikings descending from their ships with sharpened broadswords, violently attacking the seaports of Europe.  In Britain, it seems, their tongues were even more powerful than their swords.   As they spoke, their language laid waste to the finely detailed structures of Old English grammar.   If this idea is true, they truly earned their place in linguistic Valhalla. 

 

Despite the efforts of Alfred the Great and his successors to drive away the Vikings, the Scandinavians were notoriously persistent.  From their main seat of power, Denmark, they organized a series of attempts to raid and invade England.   The English King Ethelred (“noble counsel”) the Unready, worried about these invasions, ordered the slaughter of all the remaining Danish inhabitants of England so that they could not collaborate with Viking invaders.  This attempt at ethnic cleansing was not completely carried out, but many Danes did die.  In 1013, the overseas relatives of these Danes retaliated by successfully invading England and installing a Viking as king.  He had the colorful name Sveinn Tjúguskegg (pronounced ‘tyooguskeg’), rendered in English as Sweyn Forkbeard or Sven the Dane.  (His first name, Sveinn, means ‘free-born servant,’ and like the related English word ‘swain,’ it has the sense of an up-and-coming young man, such as a knight’s page.)   Sveinn then died suddenly, and the English tried to bring Ethelred back.  This brought on a second successful Viking invasion by Sveinn’s son Knútr (meaning ‘knot’), called ‘Canute the Great’ in English.  Canute was a remarkable warlord who became king of England, Denmark and Norway, not to mention parts of Sweden and Scotland, and ruled all three of his kingdoms until the end of his life.  His son Hörthaknútr (more-or-less pronounced hurtha k’nooter), known in English as Harthacanute (meaning ‘hard knot’), was the last Viking king of England.  By this time the Vikings of England and the Anglo-Saxons had intermarried, and Hörthaknútr was succeeded in 1043 by his half-Anglo-Saxon half-brother Edward (‘happy guard’) the Confessor, who had been in exile in Normandy.   (In a classic case of ‘hedging your bet,’ Edward’s mother, Emma [‘whole, strong’] of Normandy, had produced Edward as an Anglo-Saxon claimant to the English throne by her first husband Ethelred the Unready, and Hörthaknútr as a Viking claimant by her second husband Knútr the Great.  Someone really ought to make a movie about Emma.)  Edward, as a son of Ethelred, was part of the same Anglo-Saxon royal family that had ruled England before the Viking invasion.  His rule brought to a close 30 years of Danish Viking rule in England.  There had been plenty of opportunity there for Scandinavian to infiltrate the English language. 

 

Actually, the Old Norse language spoken by the Viking invaders had nearly the same set of grammatical cases as Old English had.  It still seemed to cause the neutralization of those cases in English.  Given its devastating effect, imagine what might happen if there was an invasion bringing in a language with no cases at all, such as French.   Of course, as most people know, this did indeed happen in 1066, just a few years after the Anglo-Saxons regained their kingship.   

 

That year, the world-famous William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, crossed over from the French mainland and invaded Britain, defeating the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson.  It was quite an accomplishment for an illegitimate royal son, often referred to in early life as William the Bastard, offspring of a duke and a tanner woman (leather worker).  William’s victory is often thought of as a successful French invasion of England.  The real picture is not quite so simple.  Even when you ignore his unusual origins, William was a long way from being an archetypical Frenchman, even at that period of history.  The inhabitants of Normandy, including William, were predominantly the descendants of Vikings.  The very name Normandy referred to Norsemen (“Normands” in French), in other words, Scandinavians.  Vikings had been invading the coastal regions of France for generations, and in 911 AD, Charles the Simple of France had signed the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte with a group of them, offering them a permanent home on the French coast if they would defend it against the other Vikings.  These Norsemen or Normans intermarried with the local population and dropped their Norse language in favour of local coastal French dialects, which were distinct from the inland dialects of places like Paris.  A few distinctly Norse words, such as ‘canne’ (meaning ‘can,’ the container) from Old Norse ‘kanna,’ found their way into the Norman language, but most words were of French origin.  Mind you, French itself, at that time, was fairly recently derived from the mixing of Gallic popular Latin (Vulgar Latin) and Frankish dialects of German, so it had a Germanic influence that gave it some overlap with Anglo-Saxon.   Norse, in turn, derived from another branch of the Germanic language family.   The language that William brought over to England, then, was a unique linguistic fruitcake where the cake itself was French, but the nuts and candied fruits giving it texture consisted of Norse and Frankish German.   Eventually, this recipe began to appeal to the English, who always did like a good mixed pudding or cake.

 

William needed a large army to conquer and hold England, and some of his allies were from Picardy in western France.    People from Picardy spoke the Picard language, another variation on the theme of coastal French.   The Norman and Picard languages were distinct in sound from the neighbouring inland versions of French.  Most prominently, they had many ‘k’ and ‘g’ sounds, often derived from Latin pronunciation, that became softened in inland French.  For example, ‘cat’ (cat) in Norman became ‘chat’ (pronounced ‘sha’) in French; ‘vaque’ (cow; pron. ‘vak’ or ‘vak-uh’) became ‘vache’ (pron. ‘vash’ or ‘vash-uh’); ‘gambe’ (leg) became ‘jambe;’ ‘caudron’ (cauldron) became ‘chaudron;’ and ‘viquet’ (wicket; pronounced ‘veekay’) became ‘guichet’  (pron. ‘ggeeshay’ – ‘gg’ = hard ‘g’) As you can see in the modern English words ‘cat,’ ‘cauldron,’ and ‘wicket’ (and the slang word ‘gams’ meaning ‘legs’), coastal French was the main source of French words in our language.  The tough-talking dialects of Normandy and Picardy established themselves in England, fusing together to become a language called Anglo-Norman.  This language did not immediately replace Old English, but instead became the language of the Norman ruling classes, the prestige language. 

 

One of the keys to understanding English is to understand that it has a class system built into it.  This linguistic snob system arose when Anglo-Norman moved into England beside Anglo-Saxon, and it persists to this day.  Some words are aristocrats, and others are peasants.   I’m talking about ordinary, day-to-day words, not words from higher learning or specialized professions.  The aristocratic daily words are mostly derived from Anglo-Norman and the peasant words are from Anglo-Saxon.  A classic contrast is ‘residence,’ from Anglo-Norman, vs. ‘house’ from Anglo-Saxon.  A Wikipedia author has pointed out that a ‘cordial reception’ sounds much higher class than a ‘hearty welcome,’ even though these phrases represent the same idea in Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon root words, respectively.  Words for meats that are served at the table – beef, pork, mutton – are often Anglo-Norman, while words for the animals the meats come from – cows, pigs, sheep – are often Anglo-Saxon.   The upper level language group was served food at the table; the lower one raised the animals.  It’s all a question of which language was out there on the farm, being spoken to the pigs while they got their slop.  The distinction also applies to some game animals: for example, ‘venison’ is derived from French, while ‘deer’ is derived from German.  ‘Chicken’ doesn’t quite follow the pattern, but this Anglo-Saxon word for the animal and the food sounds much lower-class than the aristocratic ‘poultry,’ derived from French, that is now used to indicate the whole class of farm-raised fowl.   As you can see in ‘poultry’ and ‘residence,’ sometimes the snobbiness in the Anglo-Norman words is carried in their being a little more abstract than the closest Anglo-Saxon words.

 

“Sir, please exit these chambers immediately!”  “Man, I’ll gladly leave this room right now!”  The Anglo-Norman root words in the first sentence clearly show, to an English speaker, that the speaker places himself above the person using Anglo-Saxon roots in the second sentence.

 

Anglo-Norman began its history as the language of the new Norman ruling class.  Over time, it was learned by people ever lower on the social ladder until it worked its way into the mainstream of English.  Soon after it arrived, when it was still limited to the top ranks of society, it became the language of the law and courts.  The need for exact language in law was well served by a large list of very logical, abstract words brought over from Latin.  These Anglo-Norman words migrated directly into English over the course of time.  No doubt this was made easier by the tendency of educated people to learn Latin directly.  The abstract words tended to appear in inter-related series: for example, have a look at ‘proceed,’ ‘recede’ (literally, ‘forward go,’ ‘back go’), ‘progress,’ ‘regress,’ ‘ingress,’ ‘egress’ (‘forward step,’ ‘back step,’ ‘in step,’ ‘out step’), ‘produce,’ ‘reduce,’ ‘deduce,’ ‘seduce,’ and ‘educe’ (‘forward bring,’ ‘back bring,’ ‘down bring,’ ‘aside bring,’ and ‘out bring’).  These basic words then connected to other, logically related words:  for example, the last word listed, the rarely used ‘educe,’ is connected to the common word ‘to educate’ (‘out bring [from infancy and ignorance]’).  The way the basic words are constructed shows the abstract connections between many different, specific actions and ideas.  For example, seduce, most commonly meaning ‘lead into a questionable sexual adventure,’ is a much more exact idea than what’s implied its Latin root words: “to lead aside or away.”  But for the sake of elegant simplicity, the idea of provoking an extramarital fling can be reduced simply to ‘lead away,’ and connected to many other ‘-duce’ words where people are being mentally ‘pulled’ towards things, or, as in ‘produce,’ ‘pulling’ things out of themselves or their environment.  These two-part, interconnected, abstract words are upper-crust words, educated people’s words. 

 

Old English, naturally, did have words that could be used to express these ideas.  The Old English words for ‘seduce,’ for example, were like the Anglo-Norman word in that they were based on the notion of drawing someone away from something.   These words included spanan (urge on, induce, draw out), forspanan (seduce, lead astray, entice) and forlædan (mislead, seduce).    ‘Forlædan,’ in particular, is the elder sister of the modern Dutch word ‘verleiden’ (literally, ‘away lead’) meaning ‘to seduce.’  It might seem that Old English had the potential to be as systematic as Anglo-Norman. This impression disappears, though, when you look up the other ‘-duce’ words in an Old English dictionary.   The most common meanings of produce, reduce, deduce and educate could all be roughly represented by the Old English word ‘téon,’ meaning ‘to draw’ (in the sense of ‘to pull,’ not ‘to sketch’), related to the modern ‘to tow’ and ‘to tug.’  Then if a person wanted more specific words, he or she might need to go to slightly diverging concepts like ‘cennan’ (‘to create’) for ‘produce,’ ‘lýtlian’ (‘to lessen’) for ‘reduce,’ and ‘lǽran’ (‘to teach’) for ‘educate.’ 

 

For example, here’s a quote from the Old English writer Aelfric’s religious essay, the Passion of the Apostles Peter and Paul.  Besides illustrating the point I’m about to make, it also shows you how different Old English was from modern English.   The phrase contains ‘téon,’ to draw forth or induce, in one of its past tense forms, ‘teáh.’  The Emperor Nero is interrogating Paul the Christian apostle here in a fictional scene: “Hwá teáh thé?” Nero asks Paul, “Who educated you?” or literally, “Who drew you (into these ideas)?”  Paul replies, in part, “Se Hælend mé lærde mid onwrigenysse” – “The Saviour taught me with revelation.”  As you can see, Paul switches to the more specific word ‘lǽran,’ ‘to teach,’ in his answer.  (This word looks familiar because it gave rise to our modern English word ‘to learn.’  In a few country dialects in England and the southeastern USA you can still say “my uncle Fred is going to learn me to drive,” using ‘learn,’ as in Old English, to mean ‘teach.’) 

 

At this point, I hope you see the beauty of the Latin and Anglo-Norman system for making abstracts.  It takes the simplest possible ideas about movements or groupings in space –  ‘pro-’ (‘toward’), ‘re-’ (‘go back’), ‘de-’ (‘down’), ‘se-’ (‘aside’), ‘con-’ (‘with’), ‘in-’ (‘inward’) ‘e-’ (‘out of’), ‘trans-’ (‘across’), etc. – and combines them with simple actions like ‘pull,’ ‘step’ or ‘turn’ (‘volvere,’ yielding ‘revolve,’ ‘devolve,’ ‘involve’ and ‘evolve’.)  Abstractions are then formed, suitable for use in everyday life or in high academic description.  There’s something very efficient and minimal about this approach, and yet, it can cover countless possibilities.  

 

I should say, in defense of the Germanic language family, that modern Germanic languages do have many words that use the same approach.  An example is the Dutch ‘afleiden’ (‘off lead’), meaning ‘deduce.’  (The Anglo-Norman combination for ‘off lead,’ ‘abduct,’ has a radically different meaning!)   Many Germanic words that look like this sort of compound, though, are really something else.  These languages have come up with a related but very different system for forming abstractions.  The prefix ‘ver-’, which originally indicated a spatial movement like ‘away’ in abstractions like ‘verleiden’ (‘seduce,’ mentioned three paragraphs above), is now just tacked onto all sorts of words to show that an abstraction is being formed.  ‘Ver-’ in this context still seems to have the sense of ‘beyond’ (very similar to ‘away’) but it also carries the idea that an abstraction by nature goes ‘beyond’ a simple concept.  For example, ‘reduce’ in Dutch is most commonly ‘verminderen,’ ‘beyond (to) lessen,’ which is fancier than the simple ‘minderen,’ ‘make less,’ usually used very specifically to mean ‘reduce speed.’  

 

My favourite example of a recently developed Dutch ‘ver-’ abstract is something I saw one day in a cartoon in a student newspaper.  “Ik heb mijn examen vertiefd,” a student complained:  “I’ve typhus-ed up my exam.”  Disease names like typhus (‘tyfus’) and cancer (‘kanker’) are used as strong swearing in Dutch, so this was not a happy student.  The best English translation would be, ‘I f---d up my exam.’  In Dutch, you can’t have abstract violent sex with an exam, but luckily, the student could use this slangy abstraction, ‘vertiefd’ or ‘beyond-typhused,’ to express his dismay with suitable crudity.  You could, using principles I’ll explain later (e.g., ‘never mix Greek and Latin root words together in one word’), invent an exact English equivalent, ‘paratyphicated.’ Its meaning, though, would not be clear even to a linguistics student.  To a medical student, it would seem to refer to another disease called ‘paratyphoid fever.’  It certainly wouldn’t work as swearing about an exam.  Nor could we graft in a recognized English obscenity and say “I procoited my exam” (‘I f----d up my exam.’) We just don’t have this way of making abstract words. 

 

Anyways, coming back from continental Europe to Britain again, the merger of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons is one of history’s most fascinating national success stories.  Instead of yielding two ‘balkanized’ hostile groups, it yielded a single, successful nation that was seldom invaded again.  Why should it be?  The potential invaders, French, German and Scandinavian, already had a stake in it.  Meanwhile, the ruling-class language, Anglo-Norman, was studied by the upper level members of the conquered Anglo-Saxons, and came ever more into popular use.  Clearly, however, many speakers mixed its phrasings in with their native English language, leading to what we Canadians would call a ‘joual’ (a word used for colloquial Québec French that is heavily salted with English).  From this joual, a new language, Middle English, emerged. 

 

I can’t, in this brief book, do justice to the many factors that acted in merging the Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon languages and cultures together.  One stroke of organizing genius by William the Conqueror should be mentioned, though.  He rewarded his aristocratic Norman and Picard followers by giving them land taken from the Anglo-Saxon nobility, but he didn’t give them single, large domains.  Instead, he gave them relatively small tracts of land scattered around the country, preventing them from becoming powerful regional barons.  They were forced to travel, communicate with each other, and deal with the local people more as landlords than as warlords.  This led to the formation of a highly integrated class structure instead of a dispersed population of regional chiefs.  Even when this class switched from French to English, they had a vested interest in speaking a ‘classier’ English that was relatively influenced by French.   At the same time, the downtrodden native English people had an interest in maintaining their own earthy terminology, but also in adopting structures that allowed the more ambitious of them to appear learned, Latin-educated, and able to deal with the ruling class.  Thus, the two languages merged into streams within English. 

 

Intermarriage also aided the meeting of the languages.  The first epidemics of black plague struck Britain in 1349 and caused a fearsome death toll; in just a few years, the population was cut by half or more.  The deaths, combined with the movements of people fleeing plague areas, disrupted families and caused much mixing of the population. 

 

Anglo-Norman lasted longest in the courts, where it changed over time into a limited technical language referred to as Law French.  Though Parliament changed the official language of the courts to English in 1363, Law French lived on in some ceremonial and academic functions for centuries afterward.  It yielded numerous bits of legal terminology.  Some of these terms, distinctively, followed French grammar in placing adjectives (descriptive words) after nouns (words indicating objects or ideas):  court martial, attorney general, malice aforethought, fee simple.  English normally follows Germanic grammar in placing adjectives before nouns:  red book, beautiful sky, cold malice, military court. 

 

The last linguistic remnants of pure Norman French in Britain today are the three recognized languages of the Channel Islands of Jersey, Guernsey, and Sark.  These languages, Jèrriais, Guernésiais and Sercquiais, are still spoken by small numbers of people on the islands.  Evacuations of families and children during World War II, however, eliminated most daily use of the languages.  Otherwise, then, Norman lives on in Britain, and much of the rest of the world, mainly through its transformation of English.  It also survives as a local dialect in parts of Normandy. 

 

The grafting process that brought Anglo-Norman and Old English together had many effects that make learning English a challenge for the student.  One is that there are two distinct words for many different items.   You nearly need to learn two languages in order to learn English.  The duplicate words are seldom exact synonyms: often one is more abstract or elevated than the other.   Animal names are often Anglo-Saxon but the adjectives that correspond are from Anglo-Norman, influenced by Latin scholarship:  dog vs. canine, bear vs. ursine, wolf vs. lupine, cow vs. bovine.  The same goes for family words:  father vs. paternal, brother vs. fraternal, mother vs. maternal, son or daughter vs. filial.  In both nouns and verbs, there is often a higher-class, more literary or more general Anglo-Norman form and a lower, more basic Anglo-Saxon form – as we’ve already seen with exit and leave, residence and house.  Literary words with Latin roots like ‘scintillate’ seem to add colour that is missing from plainer Germanic words like ‘sparkle’ that mean almost the same thing.  Whole Anglo-Saxon expressions may be replaced by single words derived from French or directly from Latin, as in ‘cut off’ vs. ‘truncate,’ ‘leave alone’ vs. ‘abandon,’ ‘speed up’ vs. ‘accelerate.’    Sometimes long phrases may be compressed into single, almost laughably literary words: ‘cut out the guts’ vs. ‘eviscerate,’ ‘walk all the way around’ vs. ‘circumambulate,’ ‘getting around a lot’ vs. ‘peripatetic.’  Most native English speakers need to keep a dictionary ready when they go to read English literature.  It’s nearly impossible to fully learn literary English.  Yet, rare words like ‘coruscate’ (another word for ‘sparkle’) and ‘prestidigitation’ (‘nimble finger work’) may be used even in music reviews or restaurant reviews in daily newspapers, just to show that the writer is a real educated, upper-crust person.   In a way, such a writer is symbolically joining the Norman ruling class by latinizing his or her language.   Old privileges are still available to those who Normanize their English. 

 

I don’t want to seem to be exaggerating how unusual this situation is.  English is not the only language that can be divided into two nearly distinct layers.  For example, in Cantonese, the Chinese language spoken in Gwangdong province and Hong Kong, the normally spoken language is very different from the written language.  The written language follows the characters and the word order used by the northern Putonghua (Mandarin) language that is the common language of China, but the Cantonese reading of these characters pronounces every word differently than in Mandarin.  So where an elderly person on the street in Hong Kong might say, talking about a schoolteacher’s problem with her unruly class, “kéuih yáuh dì saimànjái gwo tàuh” (“she has too many children,” literally, “he/she has the little-mosquito-child over head,” i.e., “she’s over her head in kids”), the same phrase in formal writing is more likely to be 她有太多小孩 (“tà yáuh taai dò síu hàaih,” “she has too much small child,” corresponding to the Mandarin “tā yǒu tài duō xiǎo hái.”).  My spoken Cantonese phrase there, to a native speaker, seems very colloquial and old-fashioned (in recent times the Mandarin-derived ‘taai dò,’ ‘too much,’ has largely replaced the traditional ‘gwo tàuh,’ ‘crossing over the head,’ to indicate ‘too much’ in popular speech) while the written equivalent seems very stuffy and formal. 

 

I was quite surprised to learn conversational Cantonese to the point of being able to have an interesting chat with people, but then not to be able to understand Toronto’s nightly Cantonese-language television news at all.  The newscasts were read from a script, and therefore were in written Cantonese, which was much different than anything I had studied.  As you can see, this is very different from something a person learning English would experience.  In Cantonese, the spoken conversational language is kept out of print (except in dramatic scripts) and out of official use, a situation that stresses the idea that it is merely a local dialect.  The unity of China is felt to be best served if written Cantonese maintains the form of the majority language, Mandarin.  Mandarin is based on northern dialects of Chinese from around the Beijing area, and originally made its way south to Gwangdong partly through military force.  Rather than merging into Mandarin, the spoken local form of Cantonese is actually almost completely independent of it, while just the written form follows its norms.  Thus, Cantonese is not becoming part of a hybrid language like English; instead, it is possibly on its way to being eliminated.  This again underlines the idea that something special happened when Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman came together. 

 

By the way, I know this story is about English, but I hate to write using mysterious, unexplained marks that you, the reader, can’t translate into sound.  That has always struck me as unfriendly, or at least as something that would naturally prove frustrating to curious people.  For those interested, then, I am going to take a short sidetrack and give a rough guide to Chinese tone pronunciation, as indicated by the little marks (diacritics) I used above in phrases like ‘tà yáuh taai dò síu hàaih.’  Anyone not interested can skip to the fourth paragraph after the next one.  If this diversion seems a little mad, let me tell you my underlying philosophy.   I think that not only can English be fun, but all languages can be.  They don’t have to be strange, scary and difficult if they are well explained.  Since Chinese tones are the most mysterious language feature of all for many people, I think if you understand the next few paragraphs, you’ll feel very confident that you can understand everything else that follows, and the material about English will seem very easy going indeed. 

 

As an added benefit, the same Chinese tone marks I’m going to talk about here are also used in grammar texts to show English tone pronunciations in some situations, such as the rising tone we use when we ask questions?  My comments about tones are secretly a simple English lesson; we’ll harvest the benefit in Chapter 3.

 

Okay.  The tone marks I used followed the ‘Yale’ system of writing Chinese in English letters. The key to understanding Chinese tones is to know that they are not mysterious or musical.  We use them all routinely in English.  It’s just that we use them to show emphasis, mood or questioning, not to distinguish one word from the other.  Suppose you catch a small boy with his hand in the cookie jar twenty minutes before dinnertime, which is not allowed.  A Canadian parent might say “Hey!” or “So!” in a way that sounds like an accusation.  With Yale tone marks for Cantonese, this accusing tone could be written ‘Hèy’ or ‘Sò,’ assuming we keep the normal English spelling for the words.  No exclamation point is needed, because the exclamation is found in the tone.  The angled, so-called ‘grave’ accent I used (as on the letter ò) indicates an emphatic type of tone called ‘falling.’ Now suppose you want the boy to put cookie back into the jar because eating snacks isn’t allowed at this time of day.  The boy seems to be having trouble making up his mind, so you say “So?” meaning, “So are you going to put that cookie back like you’re supposed to, or not?”   This strongly questioning ‘So?’ can just as easily be written ‘Só.’  Again, you don’t need the question mark, because the ‘acute’ accent mark already indicates the questioning tone.  This questioning tone is called a ‘rising’ tone in Chinese.  Unlike in European languages, it doesn’t indicate the intention to ask something.  Questions are not asked by raising your vocal tone in Chinese; you use special question words instead. 

 

Now, suppose you had also caught the same child yesterday stealing a cookie at the wrong time of day.  Today you might say, ominously, “Well... so... then... are you planning to disobey me every day?”  The tentative, flat-sounding ‘so’ that appears here is written in Yale tones with no accent mark, ‘so.’  This is called a ‘level’ tone.  Now one more trick:  words that have an ‘h’ at the end in Yale Cantonese are less emphasized than words that lack the ‘h.’  Just as an accusing ‘so??’ (“so?? are you crazy??”) is more emphasized than a wondering ‘so?’ (“well... so? where’s he gone, maybe shopping”), ‘só’ with no ‘h’ tacked on is more strongly emphasized than ‘sóh.’  Similarly, when you’re happy to meet someone, you brightly say “Hi!!” but if you are actually displeased to meet them, you may grunt out an unenthusiastic, low-pitched “oh – uh, hi!...” In the Yale system, the bright one would be ‘hì’ (high falling tone) and the dull one ‘hìh’ (low falling tone).  Most English words are normally pronounced with a lot of falling tones, including one high one for the stressed syllable, e.g., (just pronounce it normally) ‘pròcèhssòhr’ (‘processor;’ note lack of ‘h’ in the stressed syllable ‘pro’).   OK, now, to show you how my written Cantonese phrase above (‘tà yáuh taai dò síu hàaih’) could be written to make its pronunciation obvious, here it is with English phonics and with punctuation marks giving you the correct rising, falling or level tones:  “ta!! yow? tie daw!! syew?? hi!”  Just make the rising tones little mini-questions, and you’ll do fine.  The Mandarin system is slightly different: it has a ‘high level’ tone. Suppose we said to our cookie stealing boy, “So—you bad kid, why do you do this every day?” You might hold the word ‘so’ at the beginning to show that you were evaluating or weighing his bad attitude.  Bored teenagers may write in their internet chats, “Sooooo— what should we talk about now?”  This high-pitched, level ‘so’ has a tone that can be indicated with a flat ‘macron’ mark, as in ‘sō.’  Finally, in Mandarin, the low-rising or dull questioning-type tone is written with a caron or háček mark (ˇ).  This shows that some degree of low falling tone may come before the low rising tone.  So “tā yǒu tài duō xiǎo hái” can be pronounced (I know it’s not easy) “taa— yo? tie!! dwaw— syow? hi??”  If only we could write English like this, we could accurately show the famous all-questioning California ‘valley girl’ accent in print:  “so then? I, like, said? to him?, you!! are, like, so?? cra??zy??, you know??  Like—  too! weird! dude?” or roughly, “so thén I, like, sáid to hím, yòu are, like, só crázý, you knów. Like tòo wèird, dúde.”  There, now you know about Chinese, and you can read along when I mention a few more terms below.

 

One advantage of learning a two-part language like English or Cantonese is that you get to learn large parts of another language ‘for free.’  The more literary your Cantonese gets, the more knowledge related to Mandarin you pick up.  On the other hand, colloquial Cantonese has much in common with ancient forms of Chinese, so Chinese words pronounced in Cantonese fashion give you a head start on Japanese and Korean.  These two languages imported a lot of Chinese words in ancient and medieval times.  For example, Cantonese ‘gwok’ connects much better with Japanese ‘koku’ for nation than does the Mandarin guó (written ‘國’in traditional characters or ‘国’ in simplified form).  Also compare the Cantonese for Korea, ‘Hòhn Gwok,’ with the Korean ‘Han Guk’ (‘한국’) and the Mandarin ‘Hán guó’ (written ‘韓國’ or ‘韩国’).  Modern Mandarin has lost the possibility of having a final ‘k’ end a word, even though this was common in ancient Chinese, and is still common today in Cantonese and Korean.  In Japanese the final ‘k’ sounds from imported ancient Chinese words still live on, but as the syllable ‘ku.’   A parallel example is the character ‘鐵,’ simplified form ‘铁,’ meaning ‘iron.’  This is pronounced in Mandarin as ‘tiě’, whereas the Japanese word ‘tetsu’ (鉄) and the Cantonese ‘tit’ (as in ‘地鐵,’ ‘deih tit,’ the subway, ‘ground-iron’) share the original second ‘t’ that the word had as an ending in ancient times.  The Korean word for ‘iron,’ ‘cheol’ (철) is unrelated. 

 

English also gives you instant access to other languages.  In fact, you’re at an advantage whether you go up or down the class system.  The more everyday, earthy, regional or archaic English you learn, the more you will pick up words that will be familiar if you look at Dutch, German, or other Germanic and Nordic languages.  The more literary your English gets, the more you will learn about French and Latin – and also, incidentally, Greek.  You can take your English and go to a French or Dutch course with the warm feeling that 40% or more of the vocabulary will already be familiar.  Much of the French knowledge embedded in English also transfers well into languages related to French, such as Spanish and Italian.  Even the Greek in English will serve you well:  when I first went to Greece and saw some washrooms labelled only ‘γυναίκα’ and ‘άνδρα’ (or some version of those words), I only needed to sound them out – ‘gynaika’ and ‘anthra’ (hard ‘th’ like in ‘the’) –  to realize that gynecology applied to women and anthropology, in traditional (sexist) speech, to ‘men.’ Thus I knew, from English, which door to go through. 

 

Old English had been a relatively closed, insular language.  When new concepts and inventions came along, they tended to be given words made of existing Old English elements.   The same policy tends to be followed today in some languages such as Icelandic, Chinese, and, to some extent, German and Russian.  The incorporation of Anglo-Norman into English completely shattered any sense of linguistic protectionism.  The neighbours had definitely taken over the house.   English became a ‘borrowing language’ that was happy to take in terms from all over.  For example, it readily took in the word ‘television’ in 1907, even though the word arrived at its doorstep unconventionally dressed in one Greek sock (‘tele’ meaning ‘far off’) and one Latin sock (‘vision’), and referred to something that would not actually be invented until the 1920’s.  Other ‘borrowing languages’ like Dutch picked up the term as it was, with minor changes (the Dutch word is ‘televisie’).  The more conservative languages reinvented the term, yielding Fernsehen (‘far seeing’) in German, sjónvarp (‘vision throw,’ glossed as ‘vision projection’) in Icelandic, ‘spiqw’ (‘look-thing’) in Secwépemc and ñawikaruy (‘distant eye’) in Quechua, the Inca language of Peru.  In Chinese, it became diàn shì in Mandarin, dihn sih in Cantonese (電視 in traditional characters or 电视 in simplified writing), ‘electric look.’  Modern-day users of Old English have coined the word ‘feorrsīen’ for ‘television,’ by analogy with the German word.  If we were protectionist about our language, we should be watching the ‘farsee’ rather than the television.  Currently, most world languages call a television something that looks very much like the word ‘television’ (e.g., televizyon in Turkish, телеви́дение / televídenie in Russian) so learning a ‘borrowing language’ that shares such terms, like English, will be advantageous for most students. 

 

There’s more to be said about English as a sticky language collecting terms from everywhere, but first, I want to talk about three more results of the merger of Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon.  One of these is an essentially happy result that comes at a small cost, and the others are what you might call ‘mixed blessings.’  The happy result is the loss of Germanic word order for parts of sentences called ‘subordinate clauses:’ see explanation and wild examples below.  ‘Mixed blessing’ number one is the loss of Germanic case structure and the corresponding rise of relatively inflexible word order in English sentences.  ‘Mixed blessing’ number two is the notoriously messy state of English spelling. 

 

The lack of Germanic-style subordinate clauses in English is something that most speakers, old and new, take for granted.  Since I recently learned a Germanic language, though – Dutch – I am very much aware of how lucky English students are in relation to students of Dutch. 

 

Dutch is a borrowing language like English, so it has two sets of words for many concepts.  For example, production, in the sense of ‘manufacturing things’ can be ‘productie,’ borrowed from French, or ‘vervaardiging,’ a native Dutch word.  The former is considered more general.  This sort of thing is normal for us English speakers.  But for the learner, there is another factor that makes Dutch like two languages rather than one.  That is, it has two grammars.  Technically, that’s not quite right:  no linguist would accept this statement.  But it does accurately describe the feeling the student gets while trying to learn the language.  Languages are now classified partly by their normal word order in typical statements of fact (‘declarative sentences’).  There are some languages like English and French that place the grammatical subject first, then the verb, then the grammatical object, as in “The dog sees the cat; le chien voit le chat.”  These languages are classified as SVO, subject-verb-object.  Then there are languages like Turkish and Japanese that are subject-object-verb, SOV, as in the Turkish ‘kadın kitabı okudu’ (‘the woman the book read [past tense],’ equivalent to the SVO ‘the woman read the book.’ By the way, the dotless ‘i’’s in ‘kadın kitabı’ are pronounced like the ‘u’ in English ‘put.’).   There are also some less common word orders like VSO, found, for example, in Hawai’ian: ‘’Ike au i ka papa’ele’ele,’ ‘See I the chalkboard,’ in other words, ‘I see the chalkboard.’ 

 

Now Dutch, like German, starts off being SVO, as in ‘je ziet het boek,’ ‘you (the subject) see (verb) the book (the object)’ (pronunciation:  ‘ye zeet et buke.’).  As soon as you get to the parts of sentences called ‘subordinate clauses,’ though, you find something different.   Many of these clauses are things that, in English, begin with ‘that’ or ‘which.’  In Dutch, words like ‘that’ and ‘which’ are like trip-wires that trip up the entire grammar and cause it to fall over backwards.  It then becomes SOV:   ‘Je denkt dat ik het boek zie.’   (‘You think that I the book see,’ meaning, ‘You think that I see the book,’ usually reduced in ordinary English to ‘you think I see the book.’).   In the subordinate clause ‘dat ik het boek zie,’ ‘that I the book see,’ the subject ‘I’ comes first, then the object ‘the book’ and lastly the verb ‘see.’

 

Actually, in longer sentences, this grammatical accident is more like a train derailment than a trip-up.  It rearranges all the different parts of speech: adjectives, negations, adverbs and so on, so that they all uncouple from their usual order and pile up around one another like the railcars you see in those fearsome news photographs.  To learn Dutch, you have to learn how to reproduce this grammatical train wreck routinely, along with the Dutch version of the ‘normal’ SVO word order for principal clauses. 

 

Here’s an example for those who are curious (if you’re not curious, skip to the next paragraph):  “Ik weet nog precies het moment / dat we ons meer bij elkaar op ons gemak voelden” – (pronunciation:  ik wait nokh pre-seese het mo-ment dat we ons mare by el-car op ons khemak vooldeh’) – literally ‘I know still precisely the moment / that we us more with each other at our ease felt.’  This could be rendered in English as ‘I still remember the precise moment / when we felt more at ease with each other.’  Notice how the main clause of the translated sentence, before the ‘/’ sounds rather like English, while the second half doesn’t.  OK, there is a reflexive verb in the subordinate clause, ‘we feel ourselves at ease with each other’ that lacks an English equivalent.  If you think that one’s cheating, try “Zij heeft een periode doorgemaakt / waarin de maatschappij haar dat etiket opgeplakt zou kunnen hebben.”  (pronunciation: ‘Zeiye [almost rhymes with ‘sigh’] haift ain peiri-ode door-khemact wahr-in de mat-skhap-peiye har dat ettiket up-kheplact zow kooneh hebbeh’) “She has a time-period gone through / wherein society her that label on-pasted would be able to have.”  For those who are not familiar with labeling parts of speech, here’s a simplified version with the relevant S, V and O in boldface capital letters:  (She [Subject] has [Verb part 1] a time period [Object] gone through [verb part 2] wherein [makes the next clause subordinate] society [Subject] her [indirect object] that label [direct Object] on-pasted would be able to have [Verb form].’  In regular English:  ‘She lived through a time where society would have been able to stick that label on her’ (meaning ‘… when society would have been able to call her that unwanted group name.’)  In this example, even the principal clause is a little odd, with its verb in two pieces flanking the object ‘time-period,’ but the subordinate clause is spectacularly non-English in its structure. 

 

The point of mentioning this is that Old English, though not as consistent as Dutch, largely retained this Germanic SVO-SOV system.  Here’s part of an Old English proclamation from King Canute the Great to the English people.  The equivalents of ‘that’ beginning subordinate clauses are in italics and the SOV verbs at the end of subordinate clauses are in boldface.  For convenience, two letters of the Old English alphabet that are not used in modern English are written ‘th.’  I’ll talk about them later.  

 

Tha cydde man me, thæt us mara hearm to fundode, thonne us wel licode: and tha for ic me sylf mid tham mannum the me mid foron into Denmearcon, the eow mæst hearm of com: and thæt hæbbe mid godes fultume forene forfangen, thæt eow næfre heonon forth thanon nan unfrith to ne cymth, tha hwile the ge me rihtlice healdath.....

 

Then informed man me that us more harm had found than us well liked: and then fared (travelled) I, myself, with those men that me with travelled into Denmark, that to you most harm from came: and that [harm] have I with God's support beforehand prevented, [so] that to you never henceforth thence no disruption to not comes, the while that you me rightly hold (as your king)....

 

Or in modern English: 

 

‘Then people informed me that more harm had come to us than we could readily accept.  I then travelled, with the men who would come with me, into Denmark, which in the past had dealt you much harm, and that harm (this time), with God’s support, I was able to prevent, so that you never again would have your peace disrupted from that source as long as you rightly support me (as your king).’  

 

Now, I have to say, this is all very colourful and challenging, and I have nothing against SOV grammar whether or not it is mixed with SVO.   If I hadn’t fallen in love with Dutch, I wouldn’t be writing about all this so enthusiastically.   It just seems to me that from the practical point of view, since so many people need to learn English these days, it is a darn good thing that invaders came along and destroyed many of the difficulties in English grammar.  So thank you William the Conqueror for turning English around in a single direction and making it 100% SVO.  “William, I am so glad, that you English a pure SVO language made.” (Just joking!) 

 

Every good thing comes at a price, though.  When you have the same word order for main and subordinate clauses, all clauses start to look alike and you may sometimes get lost about where you are.  When you no longer have to learn funny gender classifications like moon-male, sun-female and wife-neuter, you lose your ability to easily track various ‘he’s,’ ‘she’s’ and ‘it’s’ in complex sentences.  Most items become the same ‘it’ pronoun and one ‘it’ can easily be confused with another.  One of the two ‘mixed blessings’ mentioned above also ties in here.   As Latin teachers always point out, when you simplify the case system so that subjects, objects, causal items, and so on, are no longer tagged with special word endings, you become very dependent on word order for the writing of understandable sentences.  Latin sentences and classic Germanic sentences are famously flexible.  To a large extent, you can just as easily write, ‘it gave he to me’ or ‘to me gave he it’ as ‘he gave it to me.’  ‘A nasty look gave the dog the cat’ could mean the dog gave the cat a look, or the cat gave the dog a look, depending on which animal was tagged as the subject and which was tagged as the object.  ‘Veronica Marcum amat’ is ‘Veronica loves Marcus;’ ‘Veronicam Marcus amat’ is the opposite, ‘Marcus loves Veronica.’

 

English, lacking cases, gender and subordinate-clause SOV, offers very few built-in clues to ‘who is doing what to whom’ in the sentence.   To write clearly, you must follow some rather inflexible rules about word order.   Is it any surprise, then, that in my time as an editor of scientific papers, I found that most second-language English writers unintentionally wrote confusing material because they had problems with English word order?  When Norse and French crashed into English and simplified it, learners were then spared a lot of arbitrary memorization of grammatical tags.  They were also, though, obliged to learn and get a feeling for a very deep, subtle logic of word order.  As I mentioned previously, this word order tends to be poorly taught in worldwide English courses.  You understand, therefore, why I will put some time into discussing it later on, in chapter 4. 

 

The second ‘mixed blessing’ mentioned above, English spelling, is a topic I will leave aside until the next chapter.

 

As Old English became simpler and ever more richly seeded with French, it transformed into Middle English.   In fact, Middle English still retained numerous traces of Old English structure.  There was still a dative (indirect object) case for some words.  Also, like modern Dutch, it formed the plural in ‘-s’ for some words and in ‘-n’ for others.  All in all, though, Middle English was similar to modern English and much of it is readable to the current English speaker.  Examples are often given from the beautiful poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, but since that poetry is rather literary, it makes the language look more difficult than it really is.  Here, instead, is a passage from the Wycliffe Bible of the late 1300s: 

 

And Zacarie seide to the aungel, “Wherof schal Y wite this? for Y am eld, and my wijf hath gon fer in to hir daies.  And the aungel answeride, and seide to hym, For Y am Gabriel, that stonde niy bifor God; and Y am sent to thee to speke, and to euangelize to thee these thingis.”   (Luke 1: 18-19). 

 

Here’s the same in the modern English ‘Webster’ version, with the Greek-derived word ‘evangelize’ (‘good-announce’) glossed as ‘show glad tidings,’ and with ‘has gone far into her days’ restyled as ‘[is] far advanced in years.’

 

And Zacharias said to the angel, “By what shall I know this? for I am an old man, and my wife far advanced in years.”  And the angel answering, said to him, “I am Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God; and am sent to speak to thee, and to show thee these glad tidings.” 

 

The main real difference from modern English in this particular piece of Middle English is the presence in Zak’s quotation of the verb ‘witen,’ ‘to know for a fact,’ related to the modern Dutch word ‘weten’ and the German ‘Wissen.’  Middle English does contain a few mysteries for the modern English speaker, but many of them are immediately understandable to someone who speaks Dutch or German.  A few extra simplifications occurred on the way to modern English, including the collapsing of two major senses of the word ‘to know’ into one all-knowing word.  (The two senses roughly correspond to ‘to know for a fact’ vs. ‘to have an ongoing acquaintance with,’ found as ‘witen’ vs. ‘knouen’ in Middle English, ‘weten’ vs. ‘kennen’ in Dutch, ‘savoir’ vs. ‘connaître’ in French, ‘saber’ vs. ‘conocer’ in Spanish, ‘jì’ vs. ‘sìk’ in Cantonese, and so on.)   

 

You may be wondering how a creole-like, low-class, popular mish-mash like Middle English ever managed to prevail against clean, orderly Anglo-Norman French.  The rise of Middle English is actually connected to the rise of democracy.  The first government document ever to be issued in Middle English was a charter, installed in 1258, limiting the rights of the English monarch and giving more rights to Parliament and to a council of barons.  This document, the Provisions of Oxford, was also issued in Anglo-Norman and Latin, but the Middle English translation was politically significant.  It seems that the king, Henry III, whose wife Eleanor was from Provence in southeastern France, distinctly favoured continental French officials over the good Anglo-Norman nobles of England.  One Frenchman, Peter des Riveaux, was sheriff of 21 English counties in addition to holding three major royal offices.  Eventually the sidelined barons fought back with an assertion of local rights. Their leader, Simon de Montfort, had as French a name as you could imagine.  Nonetheless, the barons’ cheering-on of the home team included the request that their demands, after royal acceptance, be officially translated into the local street language, incomprehensible to any official newly shipped in from France.  The Anglo-Norman, Latin and Middle English versions of the royal acknowledgment were shipped out to every county in England.  Perhaps Middle English, with its tolerant acceptance of words from both sides of a former conflict, really was the ideal language to represent the advance of democracy and civil rights, even if the immediate beneficiaries were mostly Anglo-Norman barons.  In 1362, Henry’s great grandson Edward III became the first king to make an English language speech to Parliament.  After that, there was no looking back for the language. 

 

Many scholarly sources say that the main change that caused Middle English to become Modern English was something called the Great Vowel Shift.   This phenomenon occurred approximately between 1200 and 1600.  When I look into what happened there, I would say that Middle English for some reason de-Dutch-ified itself.  Its transition out of Old English had left it with numerous features that were similar to those in the increasingly-distantly related Dutch language.   For example, a Middle English word spelled ‘feet’ would be pronounced much like the modern ‘fate,’ and a word spelled ‘boot’ would sound like ‘boat.’   In fact, the Dutch word ‘boot,’ meaning a boat, is pronounced much like our English ‘boat,’ while the Dutch ‘kreet’ (a cry) sounds like English ‘crate.’  Dutch, unlike English, is a phonetic language, so ‘ee’ is always pronounced like English ‘ay’ and ‘oo’ like ‘oa’ or ‘oh.’  Just as was often true in Middle English.

 

The word ‘boot,’ meaning ‘boat,’ does appear in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (The Merchant’s Tale, lines 211-212; written some time after 1380):

 

And eek thise olde wydwes, God it woot,

They konne so muchel craft on Wades boot.

So muchel broken harm, whan that hem leste,      

That with hem sholde I nevere lyve in reste...   

 

which translates as:

 

And also these old widows, God knows,

They know so much (magic) craft [as] on Wade’s boat.

So much petty harm, when it pleases them

That, with them, I would never live in rest

 

or more poetically, with some liberties taken: 

 

And also these old widows – God’s made note – 

They know so much dark art as on Wade’s boat.

So much petty grief, when it them please

That with them I could never live at ease

 

(This is part of the merchant’s argument against marrying older women.  He thought they knew far too much and that a man would be better off to marry a young wife who didn’t know how to get around her husband’s wishes.  In case you’re wondering about ‘Wade,’ also known as ‘Waetla,’ ‘Wat’ and ‘Vadi,’ he was a legendary folk-hero in popular medieval stories that are now mostly lost.  One fragment about him records that he had a boat with great travelling abilities, possibly a magic boat that could take him instantly from place to place.  According to one published interpretation of Chaucer’s verse, this would make Wade like those wise old widows who see everything that is going on, and are therefore much feared by unwise old men like the merchant.  However, there is a German epic called Gudrun where a singer with magic powers of song, Horant, lures a princess onto a mighty ship commanded by the old warrior ‘Wat.’ This boat turns out to be a clever trap – though the princess is captured willingly, knowing that she’s being taken off to marry a handsome northern king.  Chaucer’s merchant may be implying that old widows have similar powers of verbal attraction and double-crossing trickery.)

 

Just as the pronunciation of ‘boot’ in the verse was approximately ‘boat,’ the pronunciation of ‘woot’ was approximately ‘woat.’  We can’t credit Chaucer with inspiring the ‘w00t!’ cheer of hackers and other internetters from the mid-1990’s onward.    

 

Compare Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, lines 203-204:

 

His bootes souple, his hors in greet estaat.

Now certeinly he was a fair prelaat.

 

“His boots supple, his horse in great estate (meaning ‘condition and appearance’),

now certainly he was a good-looking prelate (meaning ‘a high ranking member of the clergy’).”

 

Here you have the footwear word ‘boot,’ pronounced approximately ‘boat’, as well as a word spelled ‘greet,’ meaning, and pronounced like, the modern ‘great.’  On the other hand, ‘estaat’ and ‘prelaat,’ modern ‘estate’ and ‘prelate,’ are still pronounced, in Chaucer, to nearly rhyme with North American English ‘caught.”  A more exact rhyme, at least for the vowel sound, would be with the Moroccan capital city Rabat (الرباط, ar-Rabāṭ or ar-Ribāṭ), best English pronunciation ‘R’baht.’  Rabat actually has a type of ‘t’ sound on the end that is not heard in English, but we will ignore that here. 

 

Just to give one last example, in Middle English, the word ‘name’ would still have been pronounced much like its Dutch equivalent ‘naam,’ which almost rhymes with North American pronunciations of ‘Tom’ in modern English.  Its ‘e’ would have been lightly pronounced, though, so it would have been ‘nahmeh.’ 

 

This all sheds considerable insight into how English spelling went crazy – a topic we’ll return to.  Some sort of popular fashion took hold that caused vast numbers of words to be pronounced differently.  Sometimes the spellings changed when this happened, and sometimes they stayed the same.  Nothing is crazier than a new fashion: Middle English rapidly became ‘cool,’ and therefore nonsensical, and stayed that way.   And this is what made it ‘modern.’ 

 

But some other ‘de-Dutch-ification’ went on as well.  Have a look at an early Middle English poem written by the Franciscan monk William Herebert (died 1333).  The poem is based on verses in the biblical book of Isaiah.   

 

What is he, this lordling, that cometh in from the fight,

Wyth blod-rede wede so grislich ydight,

So faire ycointised, so semelich in sight,

So stiflich he gangeth, so doughty a knight?

 

Ich hit am, ich hit am, that ne speke bote right,

Chaunpioun to helen monkunde in fight.

 

translation: 

 

What is he, this young lord, who comes in from the fight

With blood-red clothing so fearsomely displayed,

So handsomely dressed, so seemly in our sight,

So sturdily he goes by, so doughty (brave) a knight

 

I it am, I it am, that doesn’t speak but right, (I am he, I am he, who only speaks what’s right)

Champion to the whole of mankind in the fight

 

The number of Dutch-like elements in this verse is truly impressive.  Firstly, look at those two funny words starting with ‘y,’ ‘ydight’ and ‘ycointised.’  Neither exists in Dutch but both derive their ‘y-’ from the Dutch-like, Old English way of making verb forms called ‘past participles.’  Compare the English ‘I break it; now it is broken’ with the Dutch ‘Ik breek het; nu is het gebroken.’  (Now you know that ‘breek’ rhymes with ‘cake,’ not ‘creek.’).  To make ‘broken’ in Dutch, an extra ‘ge-’ has to be added.  This will look familiar to anyone who speaks German.  This prefix was ‘ge-’ in Old English as well, but became ‘y-’ in early Middle English.  (For example, “ich habbe muchel ybroken,’ ‘I have broken much,’ from the 13^th century lyric Cristes milde moder, ‘Christ’s mild mother.’).  I’ll say more about this pronunciation change in the section about spelling.   By the time Modern English hit the scene, the Germanic past-participle prefix was nearly extinct in Britain.  It was no longer seen as necessary or useful.  In early Middle English, though, it was considered so necessary that it was even stuck on words derived from Anglo-Norman French, like ‘ycointised’ (from Old French ‘cointe,’ meaning pretty or clever, related to the modern English word ‘quaint.’). 

 

The word ‘grislich’ as used in the poem is still fairly close in meaning to the Dutch equivalent ‘griezelig,’ which means eerie/eerily or spooky/spookily.  It is much further from the English derivative ‘grisly,’ mostly used these days to mean ‘vomit-makingly and horror-inspiringly awful,’ as in ‘a grisly murder scene.’  

 

‘Grislich’ is one of three adverbs (words describing actions) in the verse with Germanic ‘-lich’ endings rather than the modern English ‘ly.’  Compare modern English ‘naturally’ with Dutch ‘natuurlijk’ and German ‘natürlich.’  Even the Old Norse-derived word ‘seemly’ gets a Dutch-like Saxon ending as ‘semelich’ in Middle English. 

 

Then there’s the ‘Ich hit am’ chant, equivalent to the Dutch ‘Ik ben het’ (‘I am it,’ in other words, ‘I am he’).  It features not just the Germanic ‘ich’ personal pronoun for ‘I,’ but also the Germanic mannerism of using a neuter ‘it’ pronoun to emphasize someone in a seemingly modest way.  (Randomly from the internet:  ‘Ik ben het die de vereniging van Het Ware Leven in God heeft opgericht;’ word for word, ‘I am it that the association of “The True Life in God” has set up,’ or, in regular English, ‘I am he who founded “The True Life in God” association’)  The ‘-ch’ sound in ‘ich,’ known in modern English only from the imported Scottish word ‘loch’ (as in ‘Loch Ness Monster’), is another, amazingly important item that I will discuss later when we get to spelling.  In explanations, I will write this sound in the common international English way, ‘kh,’ as seen in semi-familiar Russian place names like Khabarovsk and personal names from various languages, like Khrushchev, Akhmatova, Sakharov, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Khadija (first wife of Mohammed the prophet of Islam).  English speaking children may also know this sound as the final consonant in the outcry ‘yechhh,’ used just after spitting out cooked vegetables. 

 

Interestingly, a Dutch person who knew nothing about English would be a much better reader of William Herebert’s verse than someone who had studied our modern language.  He or she would even correctly pronounce ‘fight,’ ‘ydight,’ ‘sight,’ and ‘right’ not to rhyme with ‘white’ but instead as ‘fikht,’ ‘ydikht,’ ‘sikht,’ and ‘rikht.’ This would make all the words but ‘ydight’ recognizable Dutch words with nearly unchanged sound and meaning: vecht, zicht and recht. 

 

The synopsis is, modern English got all cool and trendy between 1200 and 1600 and ditched all sorts of Germanic stuff.  It was so hot to de-Dutch-ify that it played silly games with its spelling.  And this all took place before the Dutch partially destroyed the English navy in 1667!  English was simply shaking off its Saxon and French ancestry and going its own way.  It was a linguistic teenager getting ready to leave its linguistic parents behind, and fashion-forwardness appeared to prevail against all logic.  As occurs with real teenagers, though, much hidden logic did remain. 

 

Around about the time English was going through this period of trendiness, Western Europe in general was also getting involved in some new fashions.  One of these, begun by the Portuguese in the 1400’s, was the collecting of new chunks of land in far-flung parts of the world.  Portuguese explorers sailing out into the Atlantic discovered the uninhabited Madeira and Azores islands in the early 1400’s, and commerce soon took off.  Getting closer to tropical Africa, they looked for more underexploited country.   One tropical island that caught their interest was one they named São Tomé (‘St. Thomas;’ the mysterious ‘-ão’ ending in Portuguese words is a nasal ‘a,’ so ‘São,’ ‘saint,’ sounds much like the French ‘sans’ – ‘without’ – or ‘sang’– ‘blood.’  The sound involved can’t be represented in English text. [Brazilian pronunciation differs]).  This island, off the coast of the Congo, was uninhabited but was perfect for growing sugar.  It was definitively settled in 1493.  How to populate it with sugar cutters?  Well, an enterprising Portuguese explorer, Antão Gonçalves, had earlier shown his country that labour shortages in such areas could easily be solved by buying slaves from the thriving traditional slave trade in Africa.  He bought a pair of African slaves (one black African, one North African Berber) in 1441.  Many slaves were purchased in the 1490’s for São Tomé and its neighbouring colony Principe, and the two Portuguese islands became notably successful in the sugar trade.  

 

Once the idea of taking over other people takes hold, the idea of taking over their lands cannot be far behind.

 

And as we’ve discovered in recent times with economic globalization, once one country starts getting rich by going international, everyone else has to play the same game.  Within a couple of hundred years, the Spanish, French, Dutch, British, Germans and so on went on a mad collecting spree that ended up with Europeans ruling much of the earth’s surface.  Much of this was made possible by the notion that some people were inferior by nature, born to be ruled by Europeans.  In England, slavery had been banned shortly after William the Conqueror took over, so it was quite a step backward that England became heavily involved in the slave trade.  Mind you, slavery was common in Ottoman Turkey, a major European power at the time, and had been practised in the medieval Crusader kingdoms.   Now it formed the basis for European, including English, domination of the warmer parts of the world.  Needless to say, all this taking over of peoples and lands had some linguistic and cultural consequences.  English, always a sticky mixed pudding, began to take up words from languages and cultures all over the world. 

 

If you don’t mind me simplifying things a little, I would say that there were actually three main sources of foreign words that got mixed into the pudding dish of modern English.   One was words acquired directly in the process of colonizing distant lands, like ‘shampoo,’ derived from the Hindi command ‘champo!’ (‘Massage!’ – now, there’s a command that illustrates the colonial lifestyle).  This obviously came from the British colonization of India.  Another source was foreign words acquired from neighbouring European languages during all the international trading and knowledge exchange that was going on.  Many of these were in turn derived from European colonizing expeditions in distant parts of the globe and originated in non-European languages.   I’ll give an example in a moment.  A third source was foreign words acquired from academic study and books written in foreign languages. 

 

A good example of a foreign word borrowed from colonizing Europeans is ‘cougar.’ This is the name for a large and sometimes dangerous North and South American member of the cat family.  The word comes to English from French, via Portuguese or via the Neo-Latin of churchmen and scholars.  These source languages, however, originally acquired the word from the indigenous Brazilian Old Tupi language.   The original Tupi word seems to have been syuasuarana (the ‘y’ pronounced roughly like the muted ‘e’ in English ‘roses’), from syuasu ‘deer’ and ‘rana,’ ‘false.’   Apparently the cougar might be seen by a hunter as a flash of sandy colour through the trees, giving the false and potentially fatal impression that there was a deer there that should be followed.  Yes, this lovely word captures a little horror movie from the hunting cultures of old South America.   Or maybe not so old.  My guide on a recent trip to the Rio Negro in Amazonian Brazil assured me that ‘deer tiger’ is still a current euphemism for the cougar among some native hunters. 

 

The word still appears in Amazonian Brazilian as ‘suçuarana’ but passed into standard Brazilian Portuguese as ‘çuçuarana’ and into scholarly Latin as ‘cuguacuarana.’ From there it was adopted into French as ‘couguar’ before hitting English as ‘cougar.’  If it seems odd that the word picked up a hard ‘g’ in the middle, seemingly from nowhere, bear in mind that ‘gu’ in Spanish and some dialects of Portuguese may come close to sounding like the English ‘w:’ for example, the Arabic place name Wadi Al-Kabir, ‘big gully,’ became the city name Guadalquivir in Spanish.  The Tupi ‘deer’ word ‘syuasu’ could, in theory, be spelled in Spanish as ‘suguasu,’ thus inserting the ‘g’ and leaving it there for English and French speakers to mispronounce later. 

 

In the case of ‘cougar,’ it may seem especially curious that the ‘g’ first appeared in the Latin word, but I think that, in general, people’s attempts to render native American sounds in Latin tend to run into linguistic trouble.   I found this out one day when I tried to render the Secwépemc word ‘swucwt.’ (pronounced approximately ‘shwukhwht’), meaning ‘snow,’ into botanical Latin in order to use it as a name for a new fungal species I’d found growing in a perennial mountain snowbank.  Nothing worked well.  The species remained undescribed.  (Almost  30 years later, in 2007, bacteriologist Rosa Margesin from Innsbruck found it growing at the bases of French and Austrian glaciers and described it as Rhodotorula psychrophenolica after finding it was a champion at detoxifying problem chemicals related to phenol. It is now Phenoliferia psychrophenolica).  I speculate that the ‘gu’ in the new Latin word ‘cuguacuarana’ was an Iberian Latin speaker’s attempt to indicate a ‘w’ sound without using something that Latin speakers might turn into a ‘v.’ The last piece of the puzzle, though, is that the word for ‘deer’ in the Guarani language, closely related to Tupi, is not ‘syuasu’ but rather ‘guasu,’ and the Latin speaker who invented ‘cuguacuarana’ might have been influenced by that.  In the colonial Americas, Latin was mainly associated with the Catholic Church, and 17^th-century Catholic Jesuit missionaries in Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay were very fond of the Guarani people.  They famously attempted to protect them from being enslaved by European colonizers: they lost thousands to slave raiders but managed to protect some.  In the meantime, they produced religious literature in Guarani and otherwise legitimized the language in European eyes, with the result that today, it’s the only native American language recognized as a national language of a country – Paraguay.  No doubt some translation of Guarani terms to Latin occurred in missionary times.  The ‘g’ sound in the Guarani language, as found in ‘guasu’ is not a hard stop as in English but instead is a ‘gh;’ that is, it has air blowing through the whole ‘g’ sound, making it a throaty version of the famous ‘ch’ in ‘loch.’  No such sound occurs in Latin.   So even if Guarani was an influence, the ‘g’ in the newly coined Latin ‘cuguacuarana’ was not meant to represent a normal English hard ‘g’ sound. 

 

One of the features that makes ‘cougar’ such a good illustration of a loan word is you can see that every time it was passed from language to language, it was mispronounced anew.  It’s a little like the game where 30 children sit in a line and whisper a phrase along the line until it reaches the end.   My cub scout group once tried it and “David and Robbie went to the zoo” became transformed to “I have some properties to do” (which raised a good boyish giggle all around, since it seemed to suggest a massive need to use the toilet.)  ‘Cougar’ has a similar history.           

 

A word closely related to ‘cougar’ is used in English to refer a large, rare mountain animal from South America.    This animal, related to the guinea pig or cavy, is the ‘pacarana’, translating from Tupi as ‘false agouti’ (the agouti being another large South American rodent).  It has the same ‘-rana’ (‘false’) ending that ‘syuasuarana’ has.  This word, though, is almost unchanged from its original Tupi form, because the animal is so little known that it is almost never written about.   There has been no chance for linguistic chaos to take effect.  

 

The Tupi ‘-rana’ got embedded in back-country Brazilian Portuguese as a suffix meaning ‘false’ and is still producing new words today.  English has yet to pick up other ‘-rana’ common names like ‘caférana,’ ‘false coffee,’ a bitter-fruited relative of the coffee bush that is a traditional malaria remedy, and ‘canarana,’ ‘false sugar cane,’ a floating giant crabgrass that grows across lakes and pools in the Amazon and provides the perfect cover for young, alligator-like caimans.  As more of us travel to the Amazon, we could bring back some new linguistic relatives for the cougar. 

 

Spanish colonizers in Peru also encountered the cougar, but since they didn’t know this word, they picked up ‘puma,’ the Quechua language word for the same animal.  This word from the plundered and enslaved Inca Empire has become the prevalent word for the cougar in Spanish, German and Dutch (in the last, it is phonetically spelled ‘poema’, but is still pronounced like the English ‘puma.’).   English, being a piece of sticky linguistic flypaper, has picked up both ‘cougar’ and ‘puma’ as equally valid names, as well as other, less specific names such as ‘mountain lion’ and ‘panther.’   We just can’t say ‘no’ to a good word. 

 

Ironically, then, one result of English speakers conquering large parts of the planet, taking slaves, and cooperating with other slave-taking Europeans, Middle Easterners and Africans, was that these days, nearly everyone worldwide can find something in English that reminds them of home.  Now that the British Empire has been disbanded and English speakers’ military assaults on foreign countries are, well, relatively uncommon, this gives English a very democratic, world-welcoming feeling.  The feeling of ‘your language is also included here’ has probably helped English become the common language of technology, science and cultural fashion-forwardness (e.g., as the first language of hip-hop music before it exploded into every other language that indignant boys and girls could wave their hands to). 

 

For example, suppose you’re a Turkish speaker learning English.  There are not many Turkish words in English: Turkey was never a colony of any European country, and, though it did colonize circa ten European countries itself, those countries were on the opposite end of Europe from Britain.   All the same, there are several Turkish words that most reasonably well-read English speaking people would recognize as English:  ‘horde,’ related to ‘ordu,’ an army, the citrus fruit ‘bergamot’ (not to be confused with an herb of the same name), derived from ‘bey armudu,’ the ‘governor’s pear,’ ‘pilaf’ (rice cooked with other ingredients), ‘bulgur’ (pounded wheat), ‘hummus’ (mashed chick-peas), the Afro-Asiatic wild cat species called the ‘caracal,’ from ‘karakulak’ (‘black ear’), ‘kaftan’ (a kind of cloak), ‘kefir’ (a fermented milk drink), ‘lackey’ (probably from ‘ulak,’ a messenger), ‘odalisque’ (a royal or very wealthy man’s mistress, from ‘odalik,’ based on ‘oda,’ a room), ‘pastrami’ sausage (from ‘pastırma,’ ‘dried beef,’ related to ‘bastırmak,’ ‘to compress’), ‘shish kebab,’ ‘yoghurt,’ and ‘yurt’ (a kind of round-topped tent made of flannel).   One word I expected to be able to include in this list, though, doesn’t fit:  the ‘caragana,’ an originally Central Asian flowering shrub that provided the best hummingbird-watching locations in my Canadian home town, turns out to be the welcoming word in English for people who speak the Kirghiz language, a close relative of Turkish.  The Kirghiz word ‘qaraghan’ was taken up into scientific Latin as ‘caragana,’ and then became established in English.  The Turkish language itself doesn’t seem to have a native word for this shrub. 

 

Similarly, the name of the karakul sheep breed, raised in desert areas worldwide, is not quite Turkish, even though it contains the common root word ‘kara,’ meaning ‘black’ or ‘dark,’ that is often seen in place names derived from Turkish and related languages.   ‘Karakul’ means ‘black lake’ in Kirghiz and Uzbek, and is originally the name of a lake in the mountains of Xinjiang Uighur province of China.  There are a couple of Kirghiz villages on the lake.  The equivalent Turkish name would be Karagöl, and indeed, there is a lake in Turkey’s Giresun province, near the Black Sea, that has this name.  But no breed of sheep is associated with it, and hence no English word.  That’s lucky, because it just wouldn’t be friendly to Kirghiz and Uzbek people if English didn’t include a few of their distinctive words. 

 

Turkish also passed on some words to English that it had imported from other languages.   For example, it gave us ‘tulip,’ derived from the Persian word ‘dulband,’ meaning a ‘turban.’  The Turkish word involved was ‘tülbent,’ which now means ‘muslin,’ ‘gauze’ or ‘cheesecloth,’ but originally also meant ‘turban.’ The word’s meaning clearly stretched out over time to include the thin types of cloth used in making some turbans.  Then, between 1554 and 1562, an enthusiastic Flemish gentleman named Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq served a term as Austrian ambassador to the Turkish Ottoman Empire, and went about Turkey discovering things and writing home about them.  It seems that his Turkish hosts described tulips to him as turban-like, and he mistook the descriptive word ‘tülbent’ as the name of the flower.  The actual name for a tulip in Turkish is ‘lale.’  In his book Turkish Letters, vol. 1, de Busbecq said “As we passed through this district (near Istanbul) we everywhere came across quantities of flowers – narcissi, hyacinths, and tulipans, as the Turks call them.”  He sent some bulbs home to friends, setting the stage for later episodes of ‘tulip mania’ that swept Western Europe and eventually caused the equivalent of a stock market collapse. 

 

Other interesting words that came to English via a Turkish adaptation of a Persian word are ‘caviar’ and ‘jackal.’  From Turkish adaptations of Arabic, we inherited ‘macramé,’ ‘harem,’ ‘minaret,’ ‘sherbet’ and ‘coffee.’ 

 

As you can see, many of the Turkish words in English relate to specific animals, plants, foods, or human-made items that originate in and around Turkey.  Many of the words from other languages also relate to items that were originally specific to a limited geographic area, but then later became known or popular worldwide.  Good examples include our common Australian aboriginal words ‘kangaroo,’ ‘wallaby,’ ‘boomerang,’ ‘budgerigar,’ ‘dingo,’ ‘koala’ and ‘wombat.’ 

 

On the other hand, there were circa five languages of higher education that gave us large numbers of abstract words:  Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Sanskrit.  There were also other languages of higher education that the English world didn’t learn much from until very recently, so they haven’t contributed much to our abstract language:  for example, Slavonic, Classical Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Ge’ez (the old church language of Ethiopia), Pali (the eastern Indian language in which classical Buddhist scripture is written) and Armenian. 

 

Something should be said about the way English has traditionally treated words imported from higher learning.  During most of the history of English, Latin was the principal language of educated people.  Many of the words we adopt from other book-learning languages are filtered through Latin first (‘latinized’) in order to make them seem pronounceable and otherwise acceptable.  Scientific names of plants and animals tend to be latinized no matter what language they come from.  An extreme example is Camassia quamash, the botanical name for what English speakers call ‘camas.’  This beautiful purple flower in the agave family has roots that were, and are, eaten as a vegetable by Salishan indigenous people in and near my Canadian home province, British Columbia.  Both parts of the botanical name derive from ‘qem’es’, the Nimíipuu (Nez Percé native nation of the northwestern USA) name for the plant.  In the first word of the botanical name, the genus name, ‘qem’es’ is completely latinized in sound to ‘camass’ and given a Latin suffix ‘-ia.’  In the second word, the ‘species epithet,’ it is only partly latinized.  Its throaty ‘q’ sound has been turned into the familiar Latin ‘qu’ as in ‘equestrian.’  The original ‘q’ sound is like a ‘k’ made from the far back wall of the mouth below the uvula – that little dangling thing back there –  and is also heard in the words ‘Iraq’ and ‘Qaddafi’ if they are pronounced in the classical Arabic way.  The ‘palatized s’ sound at the end of ‘qem’es’ has been anglo-latinized as ‘sh;’ the original sound is a slightly slurry ‘s’ half way between the English ‘s’ and ‘sh.’  English people can pronounce this sound, but only when they are imitating the speech of drunks, as in “ah dunno wut thaa hell [burp] yer sshayin’ ta me, buddy.”  And the central glottal stop seen after the ‘m’ in ‘qem’es’ has been completely removed.  This is not because of difficulty; the glottal stop is simply a full stop of the air flow, as heard in the Cockney English ‘bo’ol’ for ‘bottle,’ the casual English ‘ ‘uh-‘uh’ meaning ‘no,’ and the properly pronounced name Hawai’i, said ‘Ha-wye/complete stop/ ee.’  Latin, however, does not have glottal stops, so the stop couldn’t be included in the scientific name.  As you can see, the English word ‘camas’ resembles the most latinized form, without the Latin ending.   We made life easy for ourselves by mutating nearly every sound in the original word, using Latin as our guideline for the changes we made. 

 

Our Arabic words of higher learning tend to be quite Latin in appearance.  The Arabic ‘al-jabr’ (‘put back together’ or ‘reintegrate’), for example, became ‘algebra;’ the star name ‘(Al Nasr al) Waq’a’ (possibly ‘the descending vulture’) became ‘Vega;’ ‘am-malgham’ with its guttural ‘gh’ in the middle became ‘amalgam;’ ‘al-manakh’ (‘the climate’), with its ‘kh’ as in ‘Lo[kh] Ness Monster’ at the end, became ‘almanac;’ and ‘șifr’ (‘zero’) with its ‘emphatic s’ at the beginning (an ‘s’ said as if pronouncing it nearly stops the air flow through the mouth) became ‘cipher.’ And so on.   Our other importations from Arabic also tend to be written Latin-style.  An interesting example isعطر  or ‘atr’ a word next to impossible for English speakers to pronounce.  If you want to try, start with ‘a’ as in ‘father’ said as if the back of your throat were being compressed by a strangler, then say a ‘t’ as if saying it stopped the flow of air through your mouth for a moment, then say a Spanish- or Dutch-style rolled ‘r.’  This mysterious combination of throat and mouth gurgles became ‘attar,’ a pleasant, easily pronounced Latinized word for a floral extract used in making perfume.  ‘Amir al-bihar,’ ‘commander of the seas,’ became ‘admiral,’ ‘z‘afaran’ (with the letter ‘‘ayn,’ that strangled-‘a’ sound, appearing after the ‘z’) became ‘saffron,’ ‘dar eș-șina‘ah,’ ‘house of manufacture’ became ‘arsenal,’ and so on.  In that last word, by the way, the ‘șina‘ah’ part starts with the breath-restricting, emphatic ‘s,’ and ends in a normal ‘a,’ followed by an ‘ayn or strangled-‘a,’ followed by a soft ‘h’ sound.  Very challenging to say – if you grew up speaking English, try it only if you have a friend ready to catch you if you faint.  Juuuuust kidding.  Actually, all languages are easy to pronounce and babies make all the sounds.  Unfortunately, smiles and frowns from our parents then begin to regulate what we think we can pronounce in later life. 

 

Many of our educated words come from Greek, and most of them are also heavily latinized, not in classical Latin form but rather in the local forms of Neo-Latin developed by medieval European scholars.  For example, German biologist Ernst Haeckel first put together the word ‘ecology’ as an artificial construction in classical Greek, ‘oikologhia,’ approximately meaning ‘[fundamental-truth]-words about the household’ or, to be very general, ‘habitat studies.’  He rendered it in German as ‘Ökologie,’ and from that we obtained the English ‘ecology.’  This word has been both Neo-Latinized and then anglicized, with the ‘oi’ of the Greek becoming ‘e,’ the ‘k’ becoming the Latin ‘c,’ and the ‘gh’ sound of the Greek letter ‘gamma’ becoming the Anglo-Neo-Latin and English soft ‘g.’   A strongly related word is the scholarly Greek construction ‘oikonomia,’ literally meaning ‘household management,’ which moved into Neo-Latin as ‘oeconomia’ and into English as one of our most frequently heard educated words, ‘economy.’   Such words are so changed in English that their Greek roots are hard to recognize.  Who would guess that the word ‘diocese,’ which now refers to the geographic zone managed by one bishop in certain churches, is very closely related to ‘economy?’  Its Greek roots are the prefix ‘dia-,’ meaning ‘through,’ and the familiar ‘oikos,’ meaning a household.  Put them together to make a noun, and you have ‘dioikesis,’ originally meaning a thoroughly managed household or an economy, and later meaning an economically managed church ‘province.’  ‘Oikonomia’ and ‘dioikesis’ look like they may have some overlap, but after Latin and English have chipped all the Greek edges off the words, ‘economy’ and ‘diocese’ look as different as can be.  

 

English, over the course of its medieval history, became fundamentally friendly towards Latin in a way that no other Germanic language did.   This is doubtless because of its Anglo-Norman French component, since French and other Romance languages, derived from Latin, tend to base their scholarly words on Latin, or on Greek filtered through Latin.  If you contrast the Romance and English attitude with the attitudes of other European languages, a distinct difference shows up in words like ‘agriculture.’  The Latin ‘agricultura,’ ‘cultivation of fields,’ was taken into French and English as ‘agriculture,’ into Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese as ‘agricultura,’ into Italian as ‘agricoltura,’ and into Romanian ‘as ‘agricultură.’ (The ‘ă’ in ‘agricultură’ is pronounced as a neutral vowel or schwa [ə], like the ‘e’ in ‘taken.’)  Outside English and the Romance languages, though, it was another story.  German did take in ‘Agrikultur’ as a secondary term, but its principal word for ‘agriculture’ is its native ‘Landwirtschaft’ (‘land economy’).  Dutch stuck with its native ‘landbouw’ and ‘akkerbouw’ (‘land-build’ and ‘field-build’); Frisian went with the related ‘lânbou.’  Swedish went with ‘jordbruk’ (‘earth use’), and Danish with ‘landbrug’ (‘land use’).  Welsh plumped for ‘amaeth’ (‘tilling,’ ‘farming’) Russian for се́льское хозя́йство (‘selskoye khozyaistvo,’ ‘rural economy,’ literally ‘rural mastery’), Basque for nekazaritza (‘farming’), and so on.  Russia lacked a strong tradition of Latin at the time these words were coined, but this tradition existed in all the lands where the other languages I’ve mentioned were spoken. 

 

English is always classified as a Germanic language, but because of its built-in class structure, where its French component is higher class than its Saxon-German component, it adopts educated words as if it was a Romance language like French or Spanish.  This makes a difference in the lives of English students in many ways.  For example, the spelling of our Latin-derived words differs from that of our Saxon-derived words, and the Latinized Greek words have yet another set of spelling principles.   Anyone who wonders why charity and charisma have different sounding ‘char’ syllables at the beginning need only look to the origins of the words – in this case, Anglo-Norman via Latin, and Latinized Greek.   And English has other ‘char’ sounds as well, as seen in charcoal and chardonnay.   I’ll say more about the historical nature of English spelling in the next chapter.  For now, suffice to say that the spelling and pronunciation of academic and technical English tends to be different from the spelling and pronunciation of most ordinary English words. 

 

Words coming into English from Latin and from Latinized forms, though, do tend to become pronounced more and more like English words over time.  I sometimes compare this process to shifting the gears on a car with standard drive.  For example, the word ‘fungi’ came into English directly from Latin pronounced ‘foon-gee;’ I am temporarily using ‘g’ in boldface type to represent the hard ‘g’ as in ‘game.’  Let’s call that ‘first gear’ in terms of English pronunciation.  Then, hypothetically, ‘fungi’ shifted to second gear, anglicized one step, and was pronounced ‘fun-gee,’ as the first vowel shifted to the English form.  This pronunciation is commonly heard today, but is not the most common pronunciation.  Arguably, the word soon shifted to ‘third gear’ as the ‘g’ softened in keeping with English (originally Anglo-Norman) norms, and the pronunciation became ‘fun-jee.’  This is heard quite often.  Finally, with those who really wanted to bring ‘fungi’ into the English word family, the pronunciation went to ‘fourth gear’ with the ‘i’ at the end becoming a long vowel, giving the pronunciation ‘funj-eye’ (‘-eye’ pronounced like the word ‘eye’).   English speakers tend to do this to Latin plurals ending in ‘-i,’ as seen in ‘octopi.’  ‘Funj-eye’ is probably the most common pronunciation, at least in North America, but most European English speakers dislike this overly anglicized sound and use one of the other pronunciations, even when speaking English. 

 

Europeans who learn English are in a dilemma because they feel recognizable Latin words ought not to be mispronounced in the English way.  Generally, they prefer to mispronounce them according to their national version of Neo-Latin, but a few good scholars actually want to use Roman pronunciations.  Thus, in an English context, continental Europeans tend to want to pronounce all technical terms in a foreign-sounding way.  The trouble this can lead to was once discovered by a Dutch scientist friend of mine when he was giving a talk involving trees.  He showed a slide with some colleagues standing beside a large pine tree, and very correctly said to his English speaking botanical audience, “here are Dr. So-and-So and Dr. Such-and-Such standing next to a very large Pinus.”   The problem is, he pronounced the scientific name Pinus perfectly correctly in Latin as ‘pee-nus,’ not as ‘pye-nus’ in the normal English way. Of course, another Latin word in English has already taken over the ‘pee-nus’ sound:  ‘penis.’  In Latin, ‘penis’ would be more like ‘pennis’ or ‘paynis,’ but English speakers don’t know that.  So my friend’s audience had to politely suppress quite a giggle at the thought of the two professors standing next to a huge genital organ.  In the long run, the saying ‘when in Rome, do as the Romans do’ can be extended to ‘when in English, pronounce Latin like the Romans don’t,’ or, in other words, ‘like the English do.’  If someone actually switches into Latin conversation with you, then you may use your Roman sounds. 

 

The close relationship between English and its Latin and Latinized-Greek school words is best illustrated by another story.   In 1982, the child psychologist and author Bruno Bettelheim caused much excitement in the press when he published an essay in the New Yorker magazine claiming that the works of Sigmund Freud had been disastrously translated into English.  The bad translations, Bettelheim said, had condemned the English speaking world to having a dim and faulty view of Freud’s thoughts.   This criticism was entirely based on what had been done with the technical terms Freud had coined for his psychology. 

 

Freud had followed a long-standing German-language tradition of turning ordinary words into technical terms.  For example, he named parts of the human personality the ‘Ich,’ the ‘Es,’ and the ‘Über-Ich,’ literally, the ‘I,’ the ‘it,’ and the ‘over-I.’  Translator James Strachey and his colleagues translated these words as ‘ego,’ ‘id’ and ‘superego,’ following the English tradition of using Latin for academic technical terms.  The Latin words do simply mean ‘I,’ ‘it’ and ‘over-I.’  Bettelheim found this use of Latin very alienating.  He was equally disturbed about how Strachey and friends had translated some of Freud’s more complex terms, such as ‘Besetzung.’ This term, literally translated as ‘occupation,’ referred to a person’s investment of emotional energy in an object, a person or an idea.  The English translation was ‘cathexis,’ the Greek for ‘holding on to’ or ‘occupation.’  Worst of all, in Bettelheim’s view, was what happened to Freud’s ‘Fehlleistung,’ which could be translated as ‘spoiled performance’ or the current ‘fail performance.’ This sophisticated word, indicating well-intended actions diverted into failure by impulses from the unconscious mind, was translated as the seldom-seen term ‘parapraxis’ (‘divergent action’).  Bettelheim pointed out that almost no one outside the psychological and psychiatric professions ever used this word.  English speaking people have grasped the concept, though; they simply tend to say ‘Freudian slip’ rather than ‘parapraxis.’  When one googles on ‘Fehlleistung,’ after blocking dictionary entries and pages mentioning Freud, one does find that it collects about 60,000 more Google hits than ‘parapraxis’ does right now.  ‘Freudian slip’ gets over 350,000 more hits than either, but based on the top hits, many of these references are jokes.  Perhaps Freud was just doomed to be taken lightly by naughty English speakers no matter what his translators did.  After all, he did speak about sex, and the English world is notoriously mischievous when that topic is raised.

 

The problem with Bettelheim’s viewpoint was not just that he seemed to overlook the centuries-old English tradition of making technical terms out of its upper-class-French-Latin-Greek half.  The real problem is that English speakers don’t expect to see ordinary words suddenly being subverted into being technical words.  We don’t feel obliged to ask, “do you mean ‘I’ in the ordinary sense of the word – or in the Freudian sense (as the Merriam Webster dictionary expresses it) of ‘one of the three divisions of the psyche in psychoanalytic theory that serves as the organized conscious mediator between the person and reality especially by functioning both in the perception of and adaptation to reality.’”  We expect ordinary words to stay home and be themselves, not to get launched into academic space.  German toilet stalls often have a little sign saying ‘besetzt’ when they are occupied.  We would expect the occupying (Besetzung) of a toilet to have a different word than an abstract investment of psychological energy.   Sorry, Bruno, but Strachey’s translations seem not to have been a linguistic parapraxis after all.  

 

The use of Latin has been declining everywhere, though, and, in very recent years, the stranglehold of the Romans on our English technical terms has been broken.  Twentieth century wars stimulated a technical boom, and it seems this boom required engineers who had no time to study Latin.  The engineers and their military clients came up with expressions that looked like Latin but actually were acronyms, composed of first letters of words.   An early example is ‘radar,’ for ‘radio detection and ranging,’ from 1941.  This invention was a handy response to the desperation summarized in the soldiers’ word ‘snafu’ (‘situation normal, all f--ed up’), first recorded the same year.  ‘Sonar’ or ‘sound navigation ranging’ appeared in 1946 and was soon followed by ‘scuba,’ ‘self-contained underwater breathing apparatus,’ from 1952.  The oldest military acronym that is still widely used in English is actually from German:  it is ‘flak,’ from ‘Fliegerabwehrkanone,’ ‘airplane defense cannon.’  Being German, it has a distinctly non-Latin look. 

 

The acronym game has become wildly popular in recent years, and has even turned out terms like ‘WYSIWYG’ (‘what you see is what you get,’ a reference to ease of computer use), which looks Welsh.  I use instant messengers on the internet, and the accepted lingo in this kind of communication includes liberal use of acronyms like ‘imo’ (‘in my opinion’), ‘idk’ (‘I don’t know’) and ‘g2g’ (‘got to go’), not to mention the omnipresent ‘lol’ (‘lots of laughs’).  ‘Lol’ has become a verb (“why are you lolling at me?” asked one friend) and a hearty belly laugh, LOLOLOLOLOL.  Emoticon symbols such as :) (smile) and :-P (mischievously self-satisfied tongue-out gesture) may follow, but I don’t think I would call them English. 

 

Incredibly, some English technical terms have actually been coined in recent decades from combinations of Anglo-Saxon words.  A prominent example is ‘software,’ which might be ‘sóftewaru’ in Old English.  Carl Berkhout, author of the current online Old English glossary of computer terms at http://www.u.arizona.edu/~ctb/wordhord.html, prefers ‘hnescewaru’ (also meaning ‘soft-ware,’ pronounced ‘khneisheh-waaroo’), but doesn’t say why.  Though ‘software,’ shows that English has finally rebelled against the Romance pattern, French has remained true to itself and plumped for ‘logiciel,’ based on the Latin ‘ars logica’ (‘art of logic’) and ultimately the Greek ‘loghos’ (‘word’).   Italian, perhaps recognizing English as the new Latin, has voted for ‘software,’ as have Spanish, German, Albanian, Romanian, Portuguese and many other languages.  A few languages have stuck with Latinized Greek by using words related to ‘program’ (from Late Latin ‘programma,’ based on Greek ‘pro graphein,’ to ‘write forth,’ i.e., ‘to write for the public’).  For example, Catalan uses ‘programari’ and Russian uses ‘програ́ммное обеспе́чение’ (‘programmnoye obyespecheniye,’ ‘program maintenance’).   A few bold languages have gone their own way; Turkish, for example, uses ‘yazılım,’ based on ‘yazı’, writing.  Chinese has translated ‘software’ directly as 軟件 (simplified characters 软件), ‘soft matter,’ pronounced ‘ruǎn jiàn’ in Mandarin and ‘yúhn gihn’ in Cantonese. 

 

Software as a starting point has yielded freeware, shareware, and so on.  French has paralleled these mostly Saxon forms with graticiel, partagiciel and so on, but so far, English hasn’t snapped up any of these more latinized terms. 

 

Interestingly, though, another common piece of modern computer terminology is quite classical.  ‘Algorithm’ is actually a medieval Latin mutation of the surname of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a famous mathematician from the Persian Empire, born around 780 C.E.    Al-Khwarizmi, among many other accomplishments, was the person who originally coined the word ‘algebra’ (‘al-jabr,’ ‘the putting-back-together’ or ‘the reintegration,’ as mentioned above).   Another very classical looking computer term is ‘cybernetics’ from the Greek ‘kubernetes,’ meaning a steersman, i.e., a person steering a boat.  A Greek word from the same root, ‘kubernan’ (‘to steer a ship’), after being filtered through ancient Latin as ‘gubernare’ also gave us the much older word ‘government.’  There’s your proof that computers rule! 

 

The most recent trend in technical English is the coining of nearly unlimited numbers of acronyms for genes, proteins, and other parts of cells.  None of these molecular-biological words are based in Latin.  It would seem laughably and pathetically old-fashioned if a scientist were to attempt to give a gene a Latin name.  One of the best known gene names is the ‘ras proto-oncogene,’ that is, the ‘reticular activating system’ gene that, in cases of malfunction, may cause cancer (hence, ‘proto-oncogene,’ ‘early version of a cancer-causing gene,’ an expression that is perfectly orthodox Latinized Greek English).  Here’s how Wikipedia defines the group of genes grouped together as ‘ras’ genes:  “The Ras superfamily of small GTPases includes the Ras, Rho, Arf, Rab, and Ran families.”  These acronyms are all pronounced as they look, ‘rass,’ ‘roe,’ etc., except GTPase, which is pronounced ‘jee-tee-pee-ayz.’   A GTPase, by the way, is an enzyme that breaks down the energy-bearing molecule guanosine triphosphate.  Gene names and their related protein names are often incredibly obscure in origin, and thousands of them are now taking flight as independent words.  For example, related to ras genes are the rac genes, and what does ‘rac’ stand for?  Why, of course, ‘ras-related C3 botulinum toxin substrate.’  Yes, the acronym ‘rac’ is mostly based on the older acronym ‘ras,’ with an added ‘c’ thrown in from a toxic protein called ‘C3’ produced by Clostridium botulinum, the bacterium that causes botulism poisoning.  And what is a rac?  Again, from wiki: “Rac1 is a small (~21 kDa) signaling G protein (more specifically a GTPase), and is a member of the Rac subfamily of the Rho family of GTPases.”  You can go to meetings where scientists will give several days’ worth of talks that all sound like that.  Very few of the people who routinely use terms like ‘ras’ and ‘rac’ could tell you what the original acronyms stand for.  Ras and rac are just normal words to people working in molecular genetics.  Oh, by the way, in case you’re following all this in detail, a kDa is a kilodalton, a thousand daltons, and a dalton is a measure of protein weight named after the early 19th century British chemist John Dalton. 

 

If you hear a word sounding like ‘berka’ coming from the mouth of an English speaker these days, the person might be anglicizing the much throatier word ‘burqa’ for the cloak that covers some muslim women from head to toe.  On the other hand, he or she might be talking about BRCA1 or BRCA2, genes involved in breast cancer.  These are probably the world’s most famous genes at the moment.  Many universities have major laboratories working on them; students doing projects on them are legion.  The ethics of detecting them are discussed, and public health programs consider screening populations to look for them.   In the midst of these discussions, some people say ‘bee-ar-see-ay’ and some say ‘braka,’ but the mouths of students are efficient, and ‘berka’ is the simplest reading of these acronyms.  I predict ‘berka’ will prevail in time. 

 

The Latin age is nearly over and we are now in the Acronym Age of English – or ‘the ac age,’ I guess we must call it.  We must keep these new compound words on our radar and take the flak, or risk becoming fubar (‘f—ed up beyond all recognition’).   

 

Back at the beginning of this section, I mentioned that the first ever recorded English word was the plural form of the word ‘cyul,’ a Saxon keel ship.  If you search the internet on ‘cyul’ today, you’ll find it is a very well established term – it’s the official airport code for Pierre Trudeau International Airport in Montréal, Quebec, Canada.  The history of English has come full circle, after over 15 centuries: the first English word exists again, but as a partly randomly generated technical acronym with 276,000 internet hits today, and more tomorrow.   

 

Continued - Chapter 2 --> https://justpaste.it/6xek2