More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it
some times seems, try to.
It would be charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed.
Consider this hearty announcement in a Yugoslavian hotel: "The flattening of
underwear with pleasure is the job of the chamber-maid. Turn to her
straightaway." Or this warning to motorists in Tokyo: "When a passenger of the
foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he
still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor." Or these instructions
gracing a packet of convenience food from Italy: "Besmear a backing pan,
previously buttered with a good tomato sauce, and, after, dispose the cannelloni,
lightly distanced between them in a only couch."
Clearly the writer of that message was not about to let a little ignorance of
English stand in the way of a good meal. In fact, it would appear that one of the
beauties of the English language is that with even the most tenuous grasp you
can speak volumes if you show enough enthusiasm—a willingness to tootle with
vigor, as it were.
To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner.
Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a
means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to
be mangled. Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that in English one
tells a lie but the truth, that a person who says "I could care less" means the same
thing as someone who says "I couldn't care less," that a sign in a store saying
ALL ITEMS NOT ON SALE doesn't mean literally what it says (that every item
is not on sale) but rather that only some of the items are on sale, that when a
person says to you, "How do you do?" he will be taken aback if you reply, with
impeccable logic, "How do I do what?"
The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers
cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his
first day in Britain. Indeed, Robert Burchfield, editor of the Oxford EnglishDictionary, created a stir in linguistic circles on both sides of the Atlantic when
he announced his belief that American English and English English are drifting
apart so rapidly that within 200 years the two nations won't be able to
understand each other at all.
That may be. But if the Briton and American of the twenty-second century baffle
each other, it seems altogether likely that they won't confuse many others—not,
at least, if the rest of the world continues expropriating words and phrases at its
present rate. Already Germans talk about ein Image Problem and das Cash-Flow,
Italians program their computers with il software, French motorists going away
for a weekend break pause for les refueling stops, Poles watch telewizja,
Spaniards have a flirt, Austrians eat Big Macs, and the Japanese go on a
pikunikku. For better or worse, English has become the most global of
languages, the lingua franca of business, science, education, politics, and pop
music. For the airlines of 157 nations (out of 168 in the world), it is the agreed
international language of discourse. In India, there are more than 3,000
newspapers in English. The six member nations of the European Free Trade
Association conduct all their business in English, even though not one of them is
an English-speaking country.
When companies from four European countries—France, Italy, Germany, and
Switzerland—formed a joint truck-making venture called Iveco in 1977, they
chose English as their working language because, as one of the founders wryly
observed, "It puts us all at an equal disadvantage." For the same reasons, when
the Swiss company Brown Boveri and the Swedish company ASEA merged in
1988, they decided to make the official company language English, and when
Volkswagen set up a factory in Shanghai it found that there were too few
Germans who spoke Chinese and too few Chinese who spoke German, so now
Volkswagen's German engineers and Chinese managers communicate in a
language that is alien to both of them, English. Belgium has two languages,
French and Flemish, yet on a recent visit to the country's main airport in
Brussels, I counted more than fifty posters and billboards and not one of them
was in French or Flemish. They were all in English.
For non-English speakers everywhere, English has become the common tongue.
Even in France, the most determinedly non-English-speaking nation in the
world, the war against English encroachment has largely been lost. In early
1989, the Pasteur Institute announced that henceforth it would publish its famed international medical review only in English because too few people were
reading it in French.
English is, in short, one of the world's great growth industries.
"English is just as much big business as the export of manufactured goods,"
Professor Randolph Quirk of Oxford University has written. "There are
problems with what you might call 'after-sales service'; and 'delivery' can be
awkward; but at any rate the production lines are trouble free." [The Observer,
October 26, 1981
Indeed, such is the demand to learn the language that there are now more
students of English in China than there are people in the United States.
It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other
languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster's Third New International
Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has
615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would
add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use,
more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000 ).
The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms,
means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to
non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between
house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between
"I wrote" and "I have written." The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from
a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. In Russia
there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun,
or take care [all cited in The New York Times, June 18, 1980]. English, as
Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of
synonyms like Roget's Thesaurus. "Most speakers of other languages are not
aware that such books exist." [The Miracle of Language, page 54]
On the other hand, other languages have facilities we lack. Both French and
German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition
(respectively connaitre and kennen) and knowledge that results from
understanding (savoir and wissen).
Portuguese has words that differentiate between an interior angle and an exteriorone. All the Romance languages can distinguish between something that leaks
into and something that leaks out of.
The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass
(culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word
for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey.
(Wouldn't they just?) It's sgriob. And we have nothing in English to match the
Danish hygge (meaning "instantly satisfying and cozy"), the French sang-froid,
the Russian glasnost, or the Spanish macho, so we must borrow the term from
them or do without the sentiment.
At the same time, some languages have words that we may be pleased to do
without. The existence in German of a word like schadenfreude (taking delight
in the misfortune of others) perhaps tells us as much about Teutonic sensitivity
as it does about their neologistic versatility. Much the same could be said about
the curious and monumentally unpronounceable Highland Scottish word
sgiomlaireachd , which means "the habit of dropping in at mealtimes." That
surely conveys a world of information about the hazards of Highland life—not to
mention the hazards of Highland orthography.
Of course, every language has areas in which it needs, for practical purposes, to
be more expressive than others. The Eskimos, as is well known, have fifty words
for types of snow—though curiously no word for just plain snow. To them there
is crunchy snow, soft snow, fresh snow, and old snow, but no word that just
means snow.
The Italians, as we might expect, have over 500 names for different types of
macaroni. Some of these, when translated, begin to sound distinctly
unappetizing, like strozzapreti, which means "strangled priests." Vermicelli
means "little worms" and even spaghetti means "little strings." When you learn
that muscatel in Italian means "wine with flies in it," you may conclude that the
Italians are gastronomically out to lunch, so to speak, but really their names for
foodstuffs are no more disgusting than our hot dogs or those old English
favorites, toad-in-the-hole, spotted dick, and faggots in gravy.
The residents of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea have a hundred
words for yams, while the Maoris of New Zealand have thirty-five words for
dung (don't ask me why). Meanwhile, the Arabs are said (a little unbelievably,perhaps) to have 6,000 words for camels and camel equipment. The aborigines
of Tasmania have a word for every type of tree, but no word that just means
"tree," while the Araucanian Indians of Chile rather more poignantly have a
variety of words to distinguish between different degrees of hunger. Even among
speakers of the same language, regional and national differences abound. A
Londoner has a less comprehensive view of extremes of weather than someone
from the Middle West of America. What a Briton calls a blizzard would, in
Illinois or Nebraska, be a flurry, and a British heat wave is often a thing of
merriment to much of the rest of the world. (I still treasure a London newspaper
with the banner headline:
BRITAIN SIZZLES IN THE SEVENTIES!)
A second commonly cited factor in setting English apart from other languages is
its flexibility. This is particularly true of word ordering, where English speakers
can roam with considerable freedom between passive and active senses. Not
only can we say "I kicked the dog," but also "The dog was kicked by me"—a
construction that would be impossible in many other languages. Similarly, where
the Germans can say just "ich singe" and the French must manage with "je
chante," we can say "I sing," "I do sing," or "I am singing." English also has a
distinctive capacity to extract maximum work from a word by making it do
double duty as both noun and verb. The list of such versatile words is practically
endless: drink, fight, fire, sleep, run, fund, look, act, view, ape, silence, worship,
copy, blame, comfort, bend, cut, reach, like, dislike, and so on. Other languages
sometimes show inspired flashes of versatility, as with the German auf, which
can mean "on," "in," "upon," "at," "toward," "for," "to," and "upward," but
these are relative rarities.
At the same time, the endless versatility of English is what makes our rules of
grammar so perplexing. Few English-speaking natives, however well educated,
can confidently elucidate the difference between, say, a complement and a
predicate or distinguish a full infinitive from a bare one. The reason for this is
that the rules of English grammar were originally modeled on those of Latin,
which in the seventeenth century was considered the purest and most admirable
of tongues. That it may be. But it is also quite clearly another language
altogether. Imposing Latin rules on English structure is a little like trying to play
baseball in ice skates.The two simply don't match. In the sentence "I am swimming," swimming is a
present participle. But in the sentence "Swimming is good for you," it is a
gerund—even though it means exactly the same thing.
A third—and more contentious—supposed advantage of English is the relative
simplicity of its spelling and pronunciation. For all its idiosyncrasies, English is
said to have fewer of the awkward consonant clusters and singsong tonal
variations that make other languages so difficult to master. In Cantonese, hae
means "yes." But, with a fractional change of pitch, it also describes the female
pudenda. The resulting scope for confusion can be safely left to the imagination.
In other languages it is the orthography, or spelling, that leads to bewilderment.
In Welsh, the word for beer is cwrw—, an impossible combination of letters for
any English speaker. But Welsh spellings are as nothing compared with Irish
Gaelic, a language in which spelling and pronunciation give the impression of
having been devised by separate committees, meeting in separate rooms, while
implacably divided over some deep semantic issue.
Try pronouncing geimhreadh, Gaelic for "winter," and you will probably come
up with something like "gem-reed-uh." It is in fact "gyeeryee." Beaudhchais
("thank you") is "bekkas" and ("Oh-seeg-da?") is simply "O'Shea." Against this,
the Welsh pronunciation of cwrw—"koo-roo"—begins to look positively self-
evident.
In all languages pronunciation is of course largely a matter of familiarity
mingled with prejudice. The average English speaker confronted with
agglomerations of letters like tchst, sthm, and tchph would naturally conclude
that they were pretty well unpronounceable. Yet we use them every day in the
words matchstick, asthma, and catchphrase. Here, as in almost every other area
of language, natural bias plays an inescapable part in any attempt at evaluation.
No one has ever said, "Yes, my language is backward and unexpressive, and
could really do with some sharpening up.-
We tend to regard other people's languages as we regard their cultures—with ill-
hidden disdain. In Japanese, the word for foreigner means "stinking of foreign
hair." To the Czechs a Hungarian is "a pimple." Germans call cockroaches
"Frenchmen," while the French call lice "Spaniards." We in the English-
speaking world take French leave, but Italians and Norwegians talk about
departing like an Englishman, and Germans talk of running like a Dutchman.Italians call syphilis "the French disease," while both French and Italians call
con games "American swindle." Belgian taxi drivers call a poor tipper "un
Anglais." To be bored to death in French is "etre de Birmingham," literally "to
be from Birmingham" (which is actually about right). And in English we have
"Dutch courage," "French letters," "Spanish fly," "Mexican carwash" (i.e.,
leaving your car out in the rain), and many others. Late in the last century these
epithets focused on the Irish, and often, it must be said, they were as witty as
they were wounding. An Irish buggy was a wheel-barrow. An Irish beauty was a
woman with two black eyes. Irish confetti was bricks. An Irish promotion was a
demotion. Now almost the only slur against these fine people is to get one's Irish
up, and that isn't really taken as an insult.
So objective evidence, even among the authorities, is not always easy to come
by. Most books on English imply in one way or another that our language is
superior to all others. In The English Language, Robert Burchfield writes: "As a
source of intellectual power and entertainment the whole range of prose writing
in English is probably unequalled anywhere else in the world." I would like to
think he's right, but I can't help wondering if Mr. Burchfield would have made
the same generous assertion had he been born Russian or German or Chinese.
There is no reliable way of measuring the quality or efficiency of any language.
Yet there are one or two small ways in which English has a demonstrable edge
over other languages. For one thing its pronouns are largely, and mercifully,
uninflected. In German, if you wish to say you, you must choose between seven
words: du, dich, dir, Sie, Ihnen, ihr, and euch. This can cause immense social
anxiety. The composer Richard Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, were partners for twenty-five years and apparently adored each
other and yet never quite found the nerve to address each other as anything but
the stiff "Sie." In English we avoid these problems by relying on just one form:
you.
In other languages, questions of familiarity can become even more agonizing. A
Korean has to choose between one of six verb suffixes to accord with the status
of the person addressed. A speaker of Japanese must equally wend his way
through a series of linguistic levels appropriate to the social position of the
participants.
When he says thank you he must choose between a range of meanings running
from the perfunctory arigato ("thanks") to the decidedly more humble makotonigo shinsetsu de gozaimasu, which means "what you have done or proposed to do
is a truly and genuinely kind and generous deed." Above all, English is
mercifully free of gender. Anyone who spent much of his or her adolescence
miserably trying to remember whether it is "la plume" or "le plume" will
appreciate just what a pointless burden masculine and feminine nouns are to any
language. In this regard English is a godsend to students everywhere. Not only
have we discarded problems of gender with definite and indefinite articles, we
have often discarded the articles themselves. We say in English, "It's time to go
to bed," where in most other European languages they must say, "It's the time to
go to the bed."
We possess countless examples of pithy phrases—"life is short," "between
heaven and earth," "to go to work"—which in other languages require articles.
English also has a commendable tendency toward conciseness, in contrast to
many languages. German is full of jaw-crunching words like
Wirtschaftstreuhandgesellschaft (business trust company),
Bundesbahnangestelltenwitwe (a widow of a federal railway employee), and
Kriegsgefangenenentschadigungsgesetz (a law pertaining to war reparations),
while in Holland companies commonly have names of forty letters or more, such
as Douwe Egberts Kon-inlijke Tabaksfabriek-Koffiebranderijen-Theehandal
Naamloze Vennootschap (literally Douwe Egberts Royal Tobacco Factory-
Coffee Roasters-Tea Traders Incorporated; they must use fold-out business
cards). English, in happy contrast, favors crisp truncations: IBM, laser, NATO.
Against this, however, there is an occasional tendency in English, particularly in
academic and political circles, to resort to waffle and jargon. At a conference of
sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective
state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity
of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance."
That is jargon—the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might
instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement—and it is one of the great
curses of modern English.
But perhaps the single most notable characteristic of English—for better and
worse—is its deceptive complexity. Nothing in English is ever quite what it
seems. Take the simple word what. We use it every day—indeed, every few
sentences. But imagine trying to explain to a foreigner what what means. It takesthe Oxford English Dictionary five pages and almost 15,000 words to manage
the task. As native speakers, we seldom stop to think just how complicated and
illogical English is. Every day we use countless words and expressions without
thinking about them—often without having the faintest idea what they really
describe or signify.
What, for instance, is the hem in hem and haw, the shrift in short shrift, the fell
in one fell swoop? When you are overwhelmed, where is the whelm that you are
over, and what exactly does it look like? And why, come to that, can we be
overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but not semi whelmed or—if our feelings are
less pronounced—just whelmed? Why do we say colonel as if it had an r in it?
Why do we spell four with a u and forty without?
Answering these and other such questions is the main purpose of this book. But
we start with perhaps the most enduring and mysterious question of all: Where
does language come from in the first place?