English, ‘Here’s to You!’ by John Caverhill
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To advertise here, please contact Tami@villagerpublications.com According to The Story of English , which was published in 1986, the average English-speaking person has a vocabulary of 15000 words. William Shakespeare, writing in the late 1500s, had a huge vocabulary of 30000 words. His plays are noted for their colourful figures of speech and playful use of soundalike words with different meanings. Some of his sayings still survive in our everyday speech – ‘More in sorrow, than in anger,’ for example, or ‘Though this be madness, there is method in it.’ Language changes with technology. Up until around 1960, one went to the wall-mounted ‘telephone’, lifted the receiver, and listened to hear if the ‘partyline’ was clear. One then turned the crank to contact ‘Central’ to give the desired number, or turned the crank to produce a series of short and long rings, i.e., ‘two longs and two shorts’, to directly contact your neighbour on the partyline. That phone was replaced by the ‘cradle phone’ and This wide variety of words from other languages has created the bewildering diversity of pronunciations and meanings of words with similar spelling patterns or different letter combinations giving the same sound. For example, there are 13 different spelling variations of the ‘sh’ sound: shoe, sugar, issue, mansion, mission, nation, suspicion, ocean, conscious, chaperone, schist, fuchsia, and pshaw. English also has many words with the same general meaning. From the Oxford Dictionary, here is a partial list of meanings for the verb ‘run’: race, sprint, jog, trot, dash, hustle, hasten, hurry, hie, scamper, scurry, rush, and speed. The following verse illustrates another problem for newcomers learning English; the problem of similar spelling patterns having different pronunciations. “Beware of heard, a dreadful word The English language has a vocabulary of over 500000 words, and this doesn’t include many scientific and technological terms. New words are being constantly added and old unused words are dropped. As a result, English remains up-to- date and vibrant and has become the favoured language of commerce around the world. The famous American journalist H. L. Mencken wrote, “A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages and what it needs above all is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.” I have always enjoyed English in both written and spoken form but it was only when I started to write these monthly missives that I came to appreciate what a wonderful communication tool the English language is. I am indebted to an excellent book, The Story of the English Language (McCrumb, Cran, MacNeil) for much of the following. Because of its multiple origins, English is unique in both flexibility and adaptability. It originated from three Germanic tribes; the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. Now, over 1500 years later, at least 80% of present-day English is foreign-born and derives from language groups such as Celtic, Germanic (German, Dutch, Scandinavian) and Romance (Latin, French, Spanish). English also has many words in common with German, Yiddish, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. that looks like beard but sounds like bird, And dead: It’s said like bed, not bead – For goodness’ sake, don’t call it deed!”
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