English language

Language belonging to the Germanic languages branch of the Indo-European language family, widely spoken on six continents.

The primary language of the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various Caribbean and Pacific island nations, it is also an official language of India, the Philippines, and many sub-Saharan African countries. It is the second most widely spoken native language in the world, the mother tongue of more than 350 million people, the most widely taught foreign language, and the international language of science and business. English relies mainly on word order (usually subject-verb-object) to indicate relationships between words (see syntax). Written in the Latin alphabet, it is most closely related to Frisian, German, and Dutch. Its history began with the migration of the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons from Germany and Denmark to Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries. The Norman Conquest of 1066 brought many French words into English. Greek and Latin words began to enter it in the 15th century, and Modern English is usually dated from 1500. English easily borrows words from other languages and has coined many new words to reflect advances in technology.

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Introduction

      West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related to Frisian, German, and Netherlandic languages. English originated in England and is now widely spoken on six continents. It is the primary language of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various small island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is also an official language of India, the Philippines, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa.

Origins and basic characteristics

      English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have roamed the southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups descended from this ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups: East (Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic, all extinct), North (Icelandic, Faeroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish), and West (German, Netherlandic [Dutch and Flemish], Frisian (Frisian language), English). Though closely related to English, German remains far more conservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system of inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language most nearly related to Modern English. Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living language most nearly resembling Old English in grammatical structure.

      Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages (e.g., German, French, Russian, Greek), was synthetic, or inflected. During the course of thousands of years, English words have been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms found in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Russian, and German, toward invariable forms, as in Chinese and Vietnamese. The German and Chinese words for “man” are exemplary. German has five forms: Mann, Mannes, Manne, Männer, Männern. Chinese has one form: jen. English stands in between, with four forms: man, man's, men, men's. In English only nouns, pronouns, and verbs are inflected. Adjectives have no inflections aside from the determiners “this, these” and “that, those.” (The endings -er, -est, denoting degrees of comparison, are better regarded as noninflectional suffixes.) English is the only European language to employ uninflected adjectives; e.g., “the tall man,” “the tall woman,” compared to Spanish el hombre alto and la mujer alta. As for verbs, if the Modern English word ride is compared with the corresponding words in Old English and Modern German, it will be found that English now has only five forms (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden), whereas Old English ridan had 13, and Modern German reiten has 16 forms.

      In addition to this simplicity of inflections, English has two other basic characteristics: flexibility of function and openness of vocabulary.

      Flexibility of function has grown over the last five centuries as a consequence of the loss of inflections. Words formerly distinguished as nouns or verbs by differences in their forms are now often used as both nouns and verbs. One can speak, for example, of “planning a table” or “tabling a plan,” “booking a place” or “placing a book,” “lifting a thumb” or “thumbing a lift.” In the other Indo-European languages, apart from rare exceptions in Scandinavian, nouns and verbs are never identical because of the necessity of separate noun and verb endings. In English, forms for traditional pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs can also function as nouns; adjectives and adverbs as verbs; and nouns, pronouns, and adverbs as adjectives. One speaks in English of the Frankfurt Book Fair, but in German one must add the suffix -er to the place-name and put attributive and noun together as a compound, Frankfurter Buchmesse. In French one has no choice but to construct a phrase involving the use of two prepositions: Foire du Livre de Francfort. In English it is now possible to employ a plural noun as adjunct (modifier), as in “wages board” and “sports editor”; or even a conjunctional group, as in “prices and incomes policy” and “parks and gardens committee.”

      Openness of vocabulary implies both free admission of words from other languages and the ready creation of compounds and derivatives. English adopts (without change) or adapts (with slight change) any word really needed to name some new object or to denote some new process. Like French, Spanish, and Russian, English frequently forms scientific terms from Classical Greek word elements.

      English possesses a system of orthography that does not always accurately reflect the pronunciation of words; this is discussed below in the section Orthography (English language).

Characteristics of Modern English

Phonology

      British Received Pronunciation (RP), by definition, the usual speech of educated people living in London and southeastern England, is one of the many forms of standard speech. Other pronunciations, although not standard, are entirely acceptable in their own right on conversational levels.

      The chief differences between British Received Pronunciation, as defined above, and a variety of American English, such as Inland Northern (the speech form of western New England and its derivatives, often popularly referred to as General American), are in the pronunciation of certain individual vowels and diphthongs. Inland Northern American vowels sometimes have semiconsonantal final glides (i.e., sounds resembling initial w, for example, or initial y). Aside from the final glides, this American dialect shows four divergences from British English: (1) the words cod, box, dock, hot, and not are pronounced with a short (or half-long) low front sound as in British “bard” shortened (the terms front, back, low, and high refer to the position of the tongue); (2) words such as bud, but, cut, and rung are pronounced with a central vowel as in the unstressed final syllable of “sofa”; (3) before the fricative sounds s, f, and θ (the last of these is the th sound in “thin”) the long low back vowel a, as in British “bath,” is pronounced as a short front vowel a, as in British “bad”; (4) high back vowels following the alveolar sounds t and d and the nasal sound n in words such as tulips, dew, and news are pronounced without a glide as in British English; indeed, the words sound like the British “two lips,” “do,” and “nooze” in “snooze.” (In several American dialects, however, these glides do occur.)

      The 24 consonant sounds comprise six stops (plosives): p, b, t, d, k, g; the fricatives f, v, θ (as in “thin”), [eth] (as in “then”), s, z, ∫ (as in “ship”), Ʒ (as in “pleasure”), and h; two affricatives: t∫ (as in “church”) and dƷ (as the j in “jam”); the nasals m, n, ŋ (the sound that occurs at the end of words such as “young”); the lateral l; the vibrant or retroflex r; and the semivowels j (often spelled y) and w. These remain fairly stable, but Inland Northern American differs from British English in two respects: (1) r following vowels is preserved in words such as “door,” “flower,” and “harmony,” whereas it is lost in British; (2) t between vowels is voiced, so that “metal” and “matter” sound very much like British “medal” and “madder,” although the pronunciation of this t is softer and less aspirated, or breathy, than the d of British English. Like Russian, English is a strongly stressed language. Four degrees of stress may be differentiated: primary, secondary, tertiary, and weak, which may be indicated, respectively, by acute (´), circumflex (ˆ), and grave (ˋ) accent marks and by the breve (˘). Thus, “Têll mè thĕ trúth” (the whole truth, and nothing but the truth) may be contrasted with “Têll mé thĕ trûth” (whatever you may tell other people); “bláck bîrd” (any bird black in colour) may be contrasted with “bláckbìrd” (that particular bird Turdus merula). The verbs “permít” and “recórd” (henceforth only primary stresses are marked) may be contrasted with their corresponding nouns “pérmit” and “récord.” A feeling for antepenultimate (third syllable from the end) primary stress, revealed in such five-syllable words as equanímity, longitúdinal, notoríety, opportúnity, parsimónious, pertinácity, and vegetárian, causes stress to shift when extra syllables are added, as in “histórical,” a derivative of “hístory” and “theatricálity,” a derivative of “theátrical.” Vowel qualities are also changed here and in such word groups as périod, periódical, periodícity; phótograph, photógraphy, photográphical. French stress may be sustained in many borrowed words; e.g., bizárre, critíque, duréss, hotél, prestíge, and techníque.

      Pitch, or musical tone, determined by the rate of vibration of the vocal cords, may be level, falling, rising, or falling–rising. In counting “one,” “two,” “three,” “four,” one naturally gives level pitch to each of these cardinal numerals. But if a person says “I want two, not one,” he naturally gives “two” falling pitch and “one” falling–rising. In the question “One?” rising pitch is used. Word tone is called pitch, and sentence tone is referred to as intonation. The end-of-sentence cadence is important for meaning, and it therefore varies least. Three main end-of-sentence intonations can be distinguished: falling, rising, and falling–rising. Falling intonation is used in completed statements, direct commands, and sometimes in general questions unanswerable by “yes” or “no”; e.g., “I have nothing to add.” “Keep to the right.” “Who told you that?” Rising intonation is frequently used in open-ended statements made with some reservation, in polite requests, and in particular questions answerable by “yes” or “no”: “I have nothing more to say at the moment.” “Let me know how you get on.” “Are you sure?” The third type of end-of-sentence intonation, first falling and then rising pitch, is used in sentences that imply concessions or contrasts: “Some people do like them” (but others do not). “Don't say I didn't warn you” (because that is just what I'm now doing). Intonation is on the whole less singsong in American than in British English, and there is a narrower range of pitch. American speech may seem more monotonous but at the same time may sometimes be clearer and more readily intelligible. Everywhere English is spoken, regional dialects display distinctive patterns of intonation.

Morphology

Inflection

      Modern English nouns, pronouns, and verbs are inflected. Adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections are invariable.

      Most English nouns have plural inflection in (-e)s, but this form shows variations in pronunciation in the words cats (with a final s sound), dogs (with a final z sound), and horses (with a final iz sound), as also in the 3rd person singular present-tense forms of verbs: cuts (s), jogs (z), and forces (iz). Seven nouns have mutated (umlauted) plurals: man, men; woman, women; tooth, teeth; foot, feet; goose, geese; mouse, mice; louse, lice. Three have plurals in -en: ox, oxen; child, children; brother, brethren. Some remain unchanged; e.g., deer, sheep, moose, grouse. Five of the seven personal pronouns have distinctive forms for subject and object.

      The forms of verbs are not complex. Only the substantive verb (“to be”) has eight forms: be, am, is, are, was, were, being, been. Strong verbs have five forms: ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden. Regular or weak verbs customarily have four: walk, walks, walked, walking. Some that end in a t or d have three forms only: cut, cuts, cutting. Of these three-form verbs, 16 are in frequent use.

      In addition to the above inflections, English employs two other main morphological (structural) processes—affixation and composition—and two subsidiary ones—back-formation and blend.

Affixation (affix)

      Affixes, word elements attached to words, may either precede, as prefixes (do, undo; way, subway), or follow, as suffixes (do, doer; way, wayward). They may be native (overdo, waywardness), Greek (hyperbole, thesis), or Latin (supersede, pediment). Modern technologists greatly favour the neo-Hellenic prefixes macro-“long, large,” micro- “small,” para- “alongside,” poly- “many,” and the Latin mini-, with its antonym maxi-. Greek and Latin affixes have become so fully acclimatized that they can occur together in one and the same word, as, indeed, in “ac-climat-ize-d,” just used, consisting of a Latin prefix plus a Greek stem plus a Greek suffix plus an English inflection. Suffixes are bound more closely than prefixes to the stems or root elements of words. Consider, for instance, the wide variety of agent suffixes in the nouns actor, artisan, dotard, engineer, financier, hireling, magistrate, merchant, scientist, secretary, songster, student, and worker. Suffixes may come to be attached to stems quite fortuitously, but, once attached, they are likely to be permanent. At the same time, one suffix can perform many functions. The suffix -er denotes the doer of the action in the words worker, driver, and hunter; the instrument in chopper, harvester, and roller; and the dweller in Icelander, Londoner, and Trobriander. It refers to things or actions associated with the basic concept in the words breather, “pause to take breath”; diner, “dining car on a train”; and fiver, “five-pound note.” In the terms disclaimer, misnomer, and rejoinder (all from French) the suffix denotes one single instance of the action expressed by the verb. Usage may prove capricious. Whereas a writer is a person, a typewriter is a machine. For some time a computer was both, but now, with the invention and extensive use of electronic apparatus, the word is no longer used of persons.

Composition

      Composition, or compounding, is concerned with free forms. The primary compounds “already,” “cloverleaf,” and “gentleman” show the collocation of two free forms. They differ from word groups or phrases in phonology, stress, or juncture or by a combination of two or more of these. Thus, “already” differs from “all ready” in stress and juncture, “cloverleaf” from “clover leaf” in stress, and “gentleman” from “gentle man” in phonology, stress, and juncture. In describing the structure of compound words it is necessary to take into account the relation of components to each other and the relation of the whole compound to its components. These relations diverge widely in, for example, the words cloverleaf, icebreaker, breakwater, blackbird, peace-loving, and paperback. In “cloverleaf” the first component noun is attributive and modifies the second, as also in the terms aircraft, beehive, landmark, lifeline, network, and vineyard. “Icebreaker,” however, is a compound made up of noun object plus agent noun, itself consisting of verb plus agent suffix, as also in the words bridgebuilder, landowner, metalworker, minelayer, and timekeeper. The next type consists of verb plus object. It is rare in English, Dutch, and German but frequent in French, Spanish, and Italian. The English “pastime” may be compared, for example, with French passe-temps, the Spanish pasatiempo, and the Italian passatempo. From French comes “passport,” meaning “pass (i.e., enter) harbour.” From Italian comes “portfolio,” meaning “carry leaf.” Other words of this type are daredevil, scapegrace, and scarecrow. As for the “blackbird” type, consisting of attributive adjective plus noun, it occurs frequently, as in the terms bluebell, grandson, shorthand, and wildfire. The next type, composed of object noun and a present participle, as in the terms fact-finding, heart-rending (German herzzerreissend), life-giving (German lebenspendend), painstaking, and time-consuming, occurs rarely. The last type is seen in barefoot, bluebeard, hunchback, leatherneck, redbreast, and scatterbrain.

Back-formations and blends

      Back-formations and blends are becoming increasingly popular. Back-formation is the reverse of affixation, being the analogical creation of a new word from an existing word falsely assumed to be its derivative. For example, the verb “to edit” has been formed from the noun “editor” on the reverse analogy of the noun “actor” from “to act,” and similarly the verbs automate, bulldoze, commute, escalate, liaise, loaf, sightsee, and televise are backformed from the nouns automation, bulldozer, commuter, escalation, liaison, loafer, sightseer, and television. From the single noun “procession” are backformed two verbs with different stresses and meanings: procéss, “to walk in procession,” and prócess, “to subject food (and other material) to a special operation.”

      Blends fall into two groups: (1) coalescences, such as “bash” from “bang” and “smash”; and (2) telescoped forms, called portmanteau words (portmanteau word), such as “motorcade” from “motor cavalcade.” In the first group are the words clash, from clack and crash, and geep, offspring of goat and sheep. To the second group belong dormobiles, or dormitory automobiles, and slurbs, or slum suburbs. A travel monologue becomes a travelogue and a telegram sent by cable a cablegram. Aviation electronics becomes avionics; biology electronics, bionics; and nuclear electronics, nucleonics. In cablese a question mark is a quark; in computerese a binary unit is a bit. In astrophysics a quasistellar source of radio energy becomes a quasar, and a pulsating star becomes a pulsar.

      Simple shortenings, such as “ad” for “advertisement,” have risen in status. They are listed in dictionaries side by side with their full forms. Among such fashionable abbreviations are exam, gym, lab, lib, op, spec, sub, tech, veg, and vet. Compound shortenings, after the pattern of Russian agitprop for agitatsiya propaganda, are also becoming fashionable. Initial syllables are joined as in the words Fortran, for formula (computer) translation; mascon, for massive (lunar) concentration; and Tacomsat, for Tactical Communications Satellite.

Syntax

       Simple sentences-first patternSentences can be classified as (1) simple, containing one clause and predication: “John knows this country”; (2) multiple or compound, containing two or more coordinate clauses: “John has been here before, and he knows this country”; and (3) complex, containing one or more main clauses and one or more subordinate clauses: “John, who has been here before, knows this country” or “Because he has been here before, John knows this country.” Simple, declarative, affirmative sentences have two main patterns with five subsidiary patterns within each. Verb and complement together form the predicate. “Complement” is here used to cover both the complement and the object of traditional grammarians (see table (Simple sentences-first pattern)).

      In (1) the complement is the direct object of a transitive verb; in (2) it is a predicative nominal group forming the second component of an equation linked to the first part by the meaningless copula is; in (3) it is a predicative noun linked with the subject by the meaningful copula becomes; in (4) it is a predicative adjective; and in (5) it is a predicative past participle.

       Simple sentences-second patternIn the next table (Simple sentences-second pattern) each sentence contains four components: subject, verb, and two complements, first and second, or inner and outer. In (6) inner and outer complements consist of indirect object (without preposition) followed by direct object; in (7) these complements are direct object and appositive noun; in (8) direct object and predicative adjective; in (9) direct object and predicative past participle; in (10) direct object and predicative infinitive.

      One can seldom change the word order in these 10 sentences without doing something else—adding or subtracting a word, changing the meaning. There is no better way of appreciating the importance of word position than by scrutinizing the 10 frames illustrated. If, for instance, in (6) one reverses inner and outer complements, one adds “to” and says, “John gives a ring to Mary”; one does not say “John gives a ring Mary.” Some verbs, such as “explain” and “say,” never omit the preposition “to” before the indirect object: “John's father explained the details to his son.” “He said many things to him.” If, in (10), the inner and outer complements are reversed (e.g., “We want to know you”), the meaning is changed as well as the structure.

      Apart from these fundamental rules of word order, the principles governing the positions of adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions call for brief comment. For attributive adjectives the rule is simple: single words regularly precede the noun, and word groups follow—e.g., “an unforgettable experience” but “an experience never to be forgotten.” There is a growing tendency, however, to abandon this principle, to switch groups to front position, and to say “a never to be forgotten experience.” In the ordering of multiple epithets, on the other hand, some new principles are seen to be slowly emerging. Attributes denoting permanent qualities stand nearest their head nouns: “long, white beard,” “six-lane elevated freeway.” The order in multiple attribution tends to be as follows: determiner; quantifier; adjective of quality; adjective of size, shape, or texture; adjective of colour or material; noun adjunct (if any); head noun. Examples include: “that one solid, round, oak dining table,” “these many fine, large, black race horses,” “those countless memorable, long, bright summer evenings.”

      Adverbs are more mobile than adjectives. Nevertheless, some tentative principles seem to be at work. Adverbs of frequency tend to come immediately after the substantive verb (“You are often late”), before other verbs (“You never know”), and between auxiliaries and full verbs (“You can never tell”). In this last instance, however, American differs from British usage. Most Americans would place the adverb before the auxiliary and say “You never can tell.” (In the title of his play of that name, first performed in 1899, George Bernard Shaw avowedly followed American usage.) Adverbs of time usually occur at the beginning or end of a sentence, seldom in the middle. Particular expressions normally precede more general ones: “Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon at 4 o'clock in the morning on July 21, 1969.” An adverb of place or direction follows a verb with which it is semantically bound: “We arrived home after dark.” Other adverbs normally take end positions in the order of manner, place, and time: “Senator Smith summed it all up most adroitly [manner] in Congress [place] last night [time].”

      In spite of its etymology (Latin prae-positio “before placing”), a preposition may sometimes follow the noun it governs, as in “all the world over,” “the clock round,” and “the whole place through.” “This seems a good place to live in” seems more natural to most speakers than “This seems a good place in which to live.” “Have you anything to open this can with?” is now more common than “Have you anything with which to open this can?”

      The above are principles rather than rules, and in the end it must be agreed that English syntax lacks regimentation. Its structural laxity makes English an easy language to speak badly. It also makes English prone to ambiguity. “When walking snipe always approach up wind,” a shooting manual directs. The writer intends the reader to understand, “When you are walking to flush snipe always approach them up against the wind.” “John kept the car in the garage” can mean either (1) “John retained that car you see in the garage, and sold his other one” or (2) “John housed the car in the garage, and not elsewhere.” “Flying planes can be dangerous” is ambiguous because it may mean either (1) “Planes that fly can be dangerous” or (2) “It is dangerous to fly planes.”

      Two ways in which “John gives Mary a ring” can be stated in the passive are: (1) “A ring is given to Mary by John” and (2) “Mary is given a ring by John.” Concerning this same action, four types of question can be formulated: (1) “Who gives Mary a ring?” The information sought is the identity of the giver. (2) “Does John give Mary a ring?” The question may be answered by “yes” or “no.” (3) “John gives Mary a ring, doesn't he?” Confirmation is sought of the questioner's belief that John does in fact give Mary a ring. (4) “John gives Mary a ring?” This form, differing from the declarative statement only by the question mark in writing, or by rising intonation in speech, calls, like sentences (2) and (3), for a “yes” or “no” answer but suggests doubt on the part of the questioner that the action is taking place.

Vocabulary

      The vocabulary of Modern English is approximately half Germanic (Old English and Scandinavian) and half Italic or Romance (French and Latin), with copious and increasing importations from Greek in science and technology and with considerable borrowings from Dutch, Low German, Italian, Spanish, German, Arabic, and many other languages. Names of basic concepts and things come from Old English or Anglo-Saxon: heaven and earth, love and hate, life and death, beginning and end, day and night, month and year, heat and cold, way and path, meadow and stream. Cardinal numerals come from Old English, as do all the ordinal numerals except “second” (Old English other, which still retains its older meaning in “every other day”). “Second” comes from Latin secundus “following,” through French second, related to Latin sequi “to follow,” as in English “sequence.” From Old English come all the personal pronouns (except “they,” “their,” and “them,” which are from Scandinavian), the auxiliary verbs (except the marginal “used,” which is from French), most simple prepositions, and all conjunctions.

      Numerous nouns would be identical whether they came from Old English or Scandinavian (Scandinavian languages): father, mother, brother (but not sister); man, wife; ground, land, tree, grass; summer, winter; cliff, dale. Many verbs would also be identical, especially monosyllabic verbs—bring, come, get, hear, meet, see, set, sit, spin, stand, think. The same is true of the adjectives full and wise; the colour names gray, green, and white; the disjunctive possessives mine and thine (but not ours and yours); the terms north and west (but not south and east); and the prepositions over and under. Just a few English and Scandinavian doublets coexist in current speech: no and nay, yea and ay, from and fro, rear (i.e., to bring up) and raise, shirt and skirt (both related to the adjective short), less and loose. From Scandinavian, “law” was borrowed early, whence “bylaw,” meaning “village law,” and “outlaw,” meaning “man outside the law.” “Husband” (hus-bondi) meant “householder,” whether single or married, whereas “fellow” (fe-lagi) meant one who “lays fee” or shares property with another, and so “partner, shareholder.” From Scandinavian come the common nouns axle (tree), band, birth, bloom, crook, dirt, egg, gait, gap, girth, knife, loan, race, rift, root, score, seat, skill, sky, snare, thrift, and window; the adjectives awkward, flat, happy, ill, loose, rotten, rugged, sly, tight, ugly, weak, and wrong; and many verbs, including call, cast, clasp, clip, crave, die, droop, drown, flit, gape, gasp, glitter, life, rake, rid, scare, scowl, skulk, snub, sprint, thrive, thrust, and want.

      The debt of the English language to French (French language) is large. The terms president, representative, legislature, congress, constitution, and parliament are all French. So, too, are duke, marquis, viscount, and baron; but king, queen, lord, lady, earl, and knight are English. City, village, court, palace, manor, mansion, residence, and domicile are French; but town, borough, hall, house, bower, room, and home are English. Comparison between English and French synonyms shows that the former are more human and concrete, the latter more intellectual and abstract; e.g., the terms freedom and liberty, friendship and amity, hatred and enmity, love and affection, likelihood and probability, truth and veracity, lying and mendacity. The superiority of French cooking is duly recognized by the adoption of such culinary terms as boil, broil, fry, grill, roast, souse, and toast. “Breakfast” is English, but “dinner” and “supper” are French. “Hunt” is English, but “chase,” “quarry,” “scent,” and “track” are French. Craftsmen bear names of English origin: baker, builder, fisher (man), hedger, miller, shepherd, shoemaker, wainwright, and weaver, or webber. Names of skilled artisans, however, are French: carpenter, draper, haberdasher, joiner, mason, painter, plumber, and tailor. Many terms relating to dress and fashion, cuisine and viniculture, politics and diplomacy, drama and literature, art and ballet come from French.

       Equivalent compounds and derivativesIn the spheres of science and technology many terms come from Classical Greek through French or directly from Greek. Pioneers in research and development now regard Greek as a kind of inexhaustible quarry from which they can draw linguistic material at will. By prefixing the Greek adverb tēle “far away, distant” to the existing compound photography, “light writing,” they create the precise term “telephotography” to denote the photographing of distant objects by means of a special lens. By inserting the prefix micro- “small” into this same compound, they make the new term “photomicrography,” denoting the electronic photographing of bacteria and viruses. Such neo-Hellenic derivatives would probably have been unintelligible to Plato and Aristotle. Many Greek compounds and derivatives have Latin (Latin language) equivalents with slight or considerable differentiations in meaning (see table (Equivalent compounds and derivatives)).

      At first sight it might appear that some of these equivalents, such as “metamorphosis” and “transformation,” are sufficiently synonymous to make one or the other redundant. In fact, however, “metamorphosis” is more technical and therefore more restricted than “transformation.” In mythology it signifies a magical shape changing; in nature it denotes a postembryonic development such as that of a tadpole into a frog, a cocoon into a silkworm, or a chrysalis into a butterfly. Transformation, on the other hand, means any kind of change from one state to another.

      Ever since the 12th century, when merchants from the Netherlands made homes in East Anglia, Dutch words have infiltrated into Midland speech. For centuries a form of Low German was used by seafaring men in North Sea ports. Old nautical terms still in use include buoy, deck, dock, freebooter, hoist, leak, pump, skipper, and yacht. The Dutch in New Amsterdam (later New York) and adjacent settlements gave the words boss, cookie, dope, snoop, and waffle to American speech. The Dutch in Cape Province gave the terms apartheid, commandeer, commando, spoor, and trek to South African speech.

      The contribution of High German has been on a different level. In the 18th and 19th centuries it lay in technicalities of geology and mineralogy and in abstractions relating to literature, philosophy, and psychology. In the 20th century this contribution has sometimes been indirect. “Unclear” and “meaningful” echoed German unklar and bedeutungsvoll, or sinnvoll. “Ring road” (a British term applied to roads encircling cities or parts of cities) translated Ringstrasse; “round trip,” Rundfahrt; and “the turn of the century,” die Jahrhundertwende. The terms “classless society,” “inferiority complex,” and “wishful thinking” echoed die klassenlöse Gesellschaft, der Minderwertigkeitskomplex, and das Wunschdenken.

      Along with the rest of the Western world, English has accepted Italian as the language of music. The names of voices, parts, performers, instruments, forms of composition, and technical directions are all Italian. Many of the latter—allegro, andante, cantabile, crescendo, diminuendo, legato, maestoso, obbligato, pizzicato, staccato, and vibrato—are also used metaphorically. In architecture, the terms belvedere, corridor, cupola, grotto, pedestal, pergola, piazza, pilaster, and rotunda are accepted; in literature, burlesque, canto, extravaganza, stanza, and many more are used.

      From Spanish, English has acquired the words armada, cannibal, cigar, galleon, guerrilla, matador, mosquito, quadroon, tornado, and vanilla, some of these loanwords going back to the 16th century, when sea dogs encountered hidalgos on the high seas. Many names of animals and plants have entered English from indigenous languages through Spanish: “potato” through Spanish patata from Taino batata, and “tomato” through Spanish tomate from Nahuatl tomatl. Other words have entered from Latin America by way of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California; e.g., such words as canyon, cigar, estancia, lasso, mustang, pueblo, and rodeo. Some have gathered new connotations: bonanza, originally denoting “goodness,” came through miners' slang to mean “spectacular windfall, prosperity”; mañana, “tomorrow,” acquired an undertone of mysterious unpredictability.

      From Arabic (Arabic language) through European Spanish, through French from Spanish, through Latin (Latin alphabet), or occasionally through Greek, English has obtained the terms alchemy, alcohol, alembic, algebra, alkali, almanac, arsenal, assassin, attar, azimuth, cipher, elixir, mosque, nadir, naphtha, sugar, syrup, zenith, and zero. From Egyptian Arabic, English has recently borrowed the term loofah (also spelled luffa). From Hebrew, directly or by way of Vulgate Latin, come the terms amen, cherub, hallelujah, manna, messiah, pharisee, rabbi, sabbath, and seraph; jubilee, leviathan, and shibboleth; and, more recently, kosher, and kibbutz.

      English has freely adopted and adapted words from many other languages, acquiring them sometimes directly and sometimes by devious routes. Each word has its own history. The following lists indicate the origins of a number of English words: Welsh—flannel, coracle, cromlech, penguin, eisteddfod; Cornish—gull, brill, dolmen; Gaelic and Irish—shamrock, brogue, leprechaun, ogham, Tory, galore, blarney, hooligan, clan, claymore, bog, plaid, slogan, sporran, cairn, whisky, pibroch; Breton—menhir; Norwegian—ski, ombudsman; Finnish—sauna; Russian—kvass, ruble, tsar, verst, mammoth, ukase, astrakhan, vodka, samovar, tundra (from Sami), troika, pogrom, duma, soviet, bolshevik, intelligentsia (from Latin through Polish), borscht, balalaika, sputnik, soyuz, salyut, lunokhod; Polish—mazurka; Czech—robot; Hungarian—goulash, paprika; Portuguese—marmalade, flamingo, molasses, veranda, port (wine), dodo; Basque—bizarre; Turkish—janissary, turban, coffee, kiosk, caviar, pasha, odalisque, fez, bosh; Hindi—nabob, guru, sahib, maharajah, mahatma, pundit, punch (drink), juggernaut, cushy, jungle, thug, cheetah, shampoo, chit, dungaree, pucka, gymkhana, mantra, loot, pajamas, dinghy, polo; Persian—paradise, divan, purdah, lilac, bazaar, shah, caravan, chess, salamander, taffeta, shawl, khaki; Tamil—pariah, curry, catamaran, mulligatawny; Chinese—tea (Amoy), sampan; Japanese—shogun, kimono, mikado, tycoon, hara-kiri, gobang, judo, jujitsu, bushido, samurai, banzai, tsunami, satsuma, No (the dance drama), karate, Kabuki; Malay—ketchup, sago, bamboo, junk, amuck, orangutan, compound (fenced area), raffia; Polynesian—taboo, tattoo; Hawaiian—ukulele; African languages—chimpanzee, goober, mumbo jumbo, voodoo; Inuit—kayak, igloo, anorak; Yupik—mukluk; Algonquian—totem; Nahuatl—mescal; languages of the Caribbean—hammock, hurricane, tobacco, maize, iguana; Aboriginal Australian—kangaroo, corroboree, wallaby, wombat, boomerang, paramatta, budgerigar.

Orthography

      The Latin alphabet originally had 20 letters, the present English alphabet minus J, K, V, W, Y, and Z. The Romans themselves added K for use in abbreviations and Y and Z in words transcribed from Greek. After its adoption by the English, this 23-letter alphabet developed W as a ligatured doubling of U and later J and V as consonantal variants of I and U. The resultant alphabet of 26 letters has both uppercase, or capital, and lowercase, or small, letters. (See also alphabet (writing).)

      English spelling is based for the most part on that of the 15th century, but pronunciation has changed considerably since then, especially that of long vowels and diphthongs. The extensive change in the pronunciation of vowels, known as the Great Vowel Shift, affected all of Geoffrey Chaucer's seven long vowels, and for centuries spelling remained untidy. If the meaning of the message was clear, the spelling of individual words seemed unimportant. In the 17th century during the English Civil War, compositors adopted fixed spellings for practical reasons, and in the order-loving 18th century uniformity became more and more fashionable. Since Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755), orthography has remained fairly stable. Numerous tacit changes, such as “music” for “musick” (c. 1880) and “fantasy” for “phantasy” (c. 1920), have been accepted, but spelling has nevertheless continued to be in part unphonetic. Attempts have been made at reform. Indeed, every century has had its reformers since the 13th, when an Augustinian canon named Orm devised his own method of differentiating short vowels from long by doubling the succeeding consonants or, when this was not feasible, by marking short vowels with a superimposed breve mark (˘). William Caxton (Caxton, William), who set up his wooden printing press at Westminster in 1476, was much concerned with spelling problems throughout his working life. Noah Webster (Webster, Noah) produced his Spelling Book, in 1783, as a precursor to the first edition (1828) of his American Dictionary of the English Language. The 20th century has produced many zealous reformers. Three systems, supplementary to traditional spelling, are actually in use for different purposes: (1) the Initial Teaching (Augmented Roman) Alphabet (ITA (Initial Teaching Alphabet)) of 44 letters used by educationists in the teaching of children under seven; (2) the Shaw alphabet of 48 letters, designed in implementation of the will of George Bernard Shaw; and (3) the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), constructed on the basis of one symbol for one individual sound and used by many trained linguists. Countless other systems have been worked out from time to time, of which R.E. Zachrisson's “Anglic” (1930) and Axel Wijk's Regularized English (1959) may be the best.

      Meanwhile, the great publishing houses continue unperturbed because drastic reform remains impracticable, undesirable, and unlikely. This is because there is no longer one criterion of correct pronunciation but several standards throughout the world; regional standards are themselves not static, but changing with each new generation; and, if spelling were changed drastically, all the books in English in the world's public and private libraries would become inaccessible to readers without special study.

Historical background

      Among highlights in the history of the English language, the following stand out most clearly: the settlement in Britain of Jutes, Saxons, and Angles in the 5th and 6th centuries; the arrival of St. Augustine in 597 and the subsequent conversion of England to Latin Christianity; the Viking invasions of the 9th century; the Norman Conquest of 1066; the Statute of Pleading in 1362 (this required that court proceedings be conducted in English); the setting up of Caxton's printing press at Westminster in 1476; the full flowering of the Renaissance in the 16th century; the publishing of the King James Bible in 1611; the completion of Johnson's Dictionary of 1755; and the expansion to North America and South Africa in the 17th century and to India, Australia, and New Zealand in the 18th.

Old English (Old English language)

      The Jutes (Jute), Angles (Angle), and Saxons (Saxon) lived in Jutland, Schleswig, and Holstein, respectively, before settling in Britain. According to the Venerable Bede, the first historian of the English people, the first Jutes, Hengist and Horsa, landed at Ebbsfleet in the Isle of Thanet in 449; and the Jutes later settled in Kent, southern Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. The Saxons occupied the rest of England south of the Thames, as well as modern Middlesex and Essex. The Angles eventually took the remainder of England as far north as the Firth of Forth, including the future Edinburgh and the Scottish Lowlands. In both Latin and Common Germanic the Angles' name was Angli, later mutated in Old English to Engle (nominative) and Engla (genitive). “Engla land” designated the home of all three tribes collectively, and both King Alfred (known as Alfred the Great) and Abbot Aelfric, author and grammarian, subsequently referred to their speech as Englisc. Nevertheless, all the evidence indicates that Jutes, Angles, and Saxons retained their distinctive dialects.

      The River Humber was an important boundary, and the Anglian-speaking region developed two speech groups: to the north of the river, Northumbrian, and, to the south, Southumbrian, or Mercian. There were thus four dialects: Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, and Kentish (see Figure 13). In the 8th century, Northumbrian led in literature and culture, but that leadership was destroyed by the Viking invaders, who sacked Lindisfarne, an island near the Northumbrian mainland, in 793. They landed in strength in 865. The first raiders were Danes, but they were later joined by Norwegians from Ireland and the Western Isles who settled in modern Cumberland, Westmorland, northwest Yorkshire, Lancashire, north Cheshire, and the Isle of Man. In the 9th century, as a result of the Norwegian invasions, cultural leadership passed from Northumbria to Wessex. During King Alfred's reign, in the last three decades of the 9th century, Winchester became the chief centre of learning. There the Parker Chronicle (a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) was written; there the Latin works of the priest and historian Paulus Orosius, St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and the Venerable Bede were translated; and there the native poetry of Northumbria and Mercia was transcribed into the West Saxon dialect. This resulted in West Saxon's becoming “standard Old English”; and later, when Aelfric (c. 955–c. 1010) wrote his lucid and mature prose at Winchester, Cerne Abbas, and Eynsham, the hegemony of Wessex was strengthened.

      In standard Old English, adjectives were inflected as well as nouns, pronouns, and verbs. Nouns were inflected for four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative) in singular and plural. Five nouns of first kinship—faeder, mōdor, brōthor, sweostor, and dohtor (“father,” “mother,” “brother,” “sister,” and “daughter,” respectively)—had their own set of inflections. There were 25 nouns such as mon, men (“man,” “men”) with mutated, or umlauted, stems. Adjectives had strong and weak declensions, the strong showing a mixture of noun and pronoun endings and the weak following the pattern of weak nouns. Personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, indefinite, and relative pronouns had full inflections. The pronouns of the 1st and 2nd persons still had distinctive dual forms:

      There were two demonstratives: sē, sēo, thaet, meaning “that,” and thes, thēos, this, meaning “this,” but no articles, the definite article being expressed by use of the demonstrative for “that” or not expressed at all. Thus, “the good man” was sē gōda mon or plain gōd mon. The function of the indefinite article was performed by the numeral ān “one” in ān mon “a man,” by the adjective–pronoun sum in sum mon “a (certain) man,” or not expressed, as in thū eart gōd mon “you are a good man.”

      Verbs had two tenses only (present–future and past), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, and imperative), two numbers (singular and plural), and three persons (1st, 2nd, and 3rd). There were two classes of verb stems. (A verb stem is that part of a verb to which inflectional changes—changes indicating tense, mood, number, etc.—are added.) One type of verb stem, called vocalic because an internal vowel shows variations, is exemplified by the verb for “sing”: singan, singth, sang, sungon, gesungen. The word for “deem” is an example of the other, called consonantal: dēman, dēmth, dēmde, dēmdon, gedēmed. Such verbs are called strong and weak, respectively.

      All new verbs, whether derived from existing verbs or from nouns, belonged to the consonantal type. Some verbs of great frequency (antecedents of the modern words “be,” “shall,” “will,” “do,” “go,” “can,” “may,” and so on) had their own peculiar patterns of inflections.

      Grammatical gender persisted throughout the Old English period. Just as Germans now say der Fuss, die Hand, and das Auge (masculine, feminine, and neuter terms for “the foot,” “the hand,” and “the eye”), so, for these same structures, Aelfric said sē fōt, sēo hond, and thaet ēaġe, also masculine, feminine, and neuter. The three words for “woman,” wīfmon, cwene, and wīf, were masculine, feminine, and neuter, respectively. Hors “horse,” sċēap “sheep,” and maeġden “maiden” were all neuter. Eorthe “earth” was feminine, but lond “land” was neuter. Sunne “sun” was feminine, but mōna “moon” was masculine. This simplification of grammatical gender resulted from the fact that the gender of Old English substantives was not always indicated by the ending but rather by the terminations of the adjectives and demonstrative pronouns used with the substantives. When these endings were lost, all outward marks of gender disappeared with them. Thus, the weakening of inflections and loss of gender occurred together. In the North, where inflections weakened earlier, the marks of gender likewise disappeared first. They survived in the South as late as the 14th century.

      Because of the greater use of inflections in Old English, word order was freer than today. The sequence of subject, verb, and complement was normal, but when there were outer and inner complements the second was put in the dative case after to: Sē biscop hālgode Ēadrēd tō cyninge “The bishop consecreated Edred king.” After an introductory adverb or adverbial phrase the verb generally took second place as in modern German: Nū bydde iċ ān thing “Now I ask [literally, “ask I”] one thing”; Thȳ ilcan gēare gesette Aelfrēd cyning Lundenburg “In that same year Alfred the king occupied London.” Impersonal verbs had no subject expressed. Infinitives constructed with auxiliary verbs were placed at the ends of clauses or sentences: Hīe ne dorston forth bī thære ēa siglan “They dared not sail beyond that river” (siglan is the infinitive); Iċ wolde thās lytlan bōc āwendan “I wanted to translate this little book” (āwendan is the infinitive). The verb usually came last in a dependent clause—e.g., āwrītan wile in gif hwā thās bōc āwrītan wile (gerihte hē hīe be thære bysene) “If anyone wants to copy this book (let him correct his copy by the original).” Prepositions (or postpositions) frequently followed their objects. Negation was often repeated for emphasis.

Middle English (Middle English language)

      One result of the Norman Conquest of 1066 was to place all four Old English dialects more or less on a level. West Saxon lost its supremacy and the centre of culture and learning gradually shifted from Winchester to London. The old Northumbrian dialect became divided into Scottish and Northern, although little is known of either of these divisions before the end of the 13th century (Figure 14). The old Mercian dialect was split into East and West Midland. West Saxon became slightly diminished in area and was more appropriately named the South Western dialect. The Kentish dialect was considerably extended and was called South Eastern accordingly. All five Middle English dialects (Northern, West Midland, East Midland, South Western, and South Eastern) went their own ways and developed their own characteristics. The so-called Katherine Group of writings (1180–1210), associated with Hereford, a town not far from the Welsh border, adhered most closely to native traditions, and there is something to be said for regarding this West Midland dialect, least disturbed by French and Scandinavian intrusions, as a kind of Standard English in the High Middle Ages.

      Another outcome of the Norman Conquest was to change the writing of English from the clear and easily readable insular hand of Irish origin to the delicate Carolingian (Carolingian minuscule) script then in use on the Continent. With the change in appearance came a change in spelling. Norman scribes wrote Old English y as u, ȳ as ui, ū as ou (ow when final). Thus, mycel (“much”) appeared as muchel, fȳr (“fire”) as fuir, hūs (“house”) as hous, and hū (“how”) as how. For the sake of clarity (i.e., legibility) u was often written o before and after m, n, u, v, and w; and i was sometimes written y before and after m and n. So sunu (“son”) appeared as sone and him (“him”) as hym. Old English cw was changed to qu; hw to wh, qu, or quh; ċ to ch or tch; sċ to sh; -ċġ- to -gg-; and -ht to ght. So Old English cwēn appeared as queen; hwaet as what, quat, or quhat; dīċ as ditch; sċip as ship; secge as segge; and miht as might.

      For the first century after the Conquest, most loanwords came from Normandy and Picardy, but with the extension south to the Pyrenees of the Angevin empire of Henry II (reigned 1154–89), other dialects, especially Central French (French language), or Francien (Francien dialect), contributed to the speech of the aristocracy. As a result, Modern English acquired the forms canal, catch, leal, real, reward, wage, warden, and warrant from Norman French side by side with the corresponding forms channel, chase, loyal, royal, regard, gage, guardian, and guarantee, from Francien. King John lost Normandy in 1204. With the increasing power of the Capetian kings of Paris, Francien gradually predominated. Meanwhile, Latin stood intact as the language of learning. For three centuries, therefore, the literature of England was trilingual. Ancrene Riwle, for instance, a guide or rule (riwle) of rare quality for recluses or anchorites (ancren), was disseminated in all three languages.

      The sounds of the native speech changed slowly. Even in late Old English short vowels had been lengthened before ld, rd, mb, and nd, and long vowels had been shortened before all other consonant groups and before double consonants. In early Middle English short vowels of whatever origin were lengthened in the open stressed syllables of disyllabic words. An open syllable is one ending in a vowel. Both syllables in Old English nama “name,” mete “meat, food,” nosu “nose,” wicu “week,” and duru “door” were short, and the first syllables, being stressed, were lengthened to nāme, mēte, nōse, wēke, and dōre in the 13th and 14th centuries. A similar change occurred in 4th-century Latin, in 13th-century German, and at different times in other languages. The popular notion has arisen that final mute -e in English makes a preceding vowel long; in fact, it is the lengthening of the vowel that has caused e to be lost in pronunciation. On the other hand, Old English long vowels were shortened in the first syllables of trisyllabic words, even when those syllables were open; e.g., hāligdaeg “holy day,” ærende “message, errand,” crīstendōm “Christianity,” and sūtherne “southern,” became hǒliday (Northern hăliday), ěrrende, chrǐstendom, and sǔtherne. This principle still operates in current English. Compare, for example, trisyllabic derivatives such as the words chastity, criminal, fabulous, gradual, gravity, linear, national, ominous, sanity, and tabulate with the simple nouns and adjectives chaste, crime, fable, grade, grave, line, nation, omen, sane, and table.

       Variations in verb inflections Variations in verb inflectionsThere were significant variations in verb inflections (inflection) in the Northern, Midland, and Southern dialects (see table (Variations in verb inflections)). The Northern infinitive was already one syllable (sing rather than the Old English singan), whereas the past participle -en inflection of Old English was strictly kept. These apparently contradictory features can be attributed entirely to Scandinavian, in which the final -n of the infinitive was lost early in singa, and the final -n of the past participle was doubled in sunginn. The Northern unmutated present participle in -and was also of Scandinavian origin. Old English mutated -ende (German -end) in the present participle had already become -inde in late West Saxon (Southern in the table (Variations in verb inflections)), and it was this Southern -inde that blended with the -ing suffix (German -ung) of nouns of action that had already become near-gerunds in such compound nouns as athswering “oath swearing” and writingfether “writing feather, pen.” This blending of present participle and gerund was further helped by the fact that Anglo-Norman and French -ant was itself a coalescence of Latin present participles in -antem, -entem, and Latin gerunds in -andum, -endum. The Northern second person singular singis was inherited unchanged from Common Germanic. The final t sound in Midland -est and Southern -st was excrescent, comparable with the final t in modern “amidst” and “amongst” from older amiddes and amonges. The Northern third person singular singis had a quite different origin. Like the singis of the plural, it resulted almost casually from an inadvertent retraction of the tongue in enunciation from an interdental -th sound to postdental -s. Today the form “singeth” survives as a poetic archaism. Shakespeare used both -eth and -s endings (“It [mercy] blesseth him that gives and him that takes,” The Merchant of Venice). The Midland present plural inflection -en was taken from the subjunctive. The past participle prefix y- developed from the Old English perfective prefix ge-.

      Chaucer (Chaucer, Geoffrey), who was born and died in London, spoke a dialect that was basically East Midland. Compared with his contemporaries, he was remarkably modern in his use of language. He was in his early 20s when the Statute of Pleading (1362) was passed, by the terms of which all court proceedings were henceforth to be conducted in English, though “enrolled in Latin.” Chaucer himself used four languages; he read Latin (Classical and Medieval) and spoke French and Italian on his travels. For his own literary work he deliberately chose English.

Transition from Middle English to Early Modern English

      The death of Chaucer at the close of the century (1400) marked the beginning of the period of transition from Middle English to the Early Modern English stage. The Early Modern English period is regarded by many scholars as beginning in about 1500 and terminating with the return of the monarchy (John Dryden's Astraea Redux) in 1660. The 15th century witnessed three outstanding developments: the rise of London English, the invention of printing, and the spread of the new learning.

 Although the population of London in 1400 was only about 40,000, it was by far the largest city in England. York came second, followed by Bristol, Coventry, Plymouth, and Norwich. The Midlands and East Anglia, the most densely peopled parts of England, supplied London with streams of young immigrants. The speech of the capital was mixed, and it was changing. The seven long vowels of Chaucer's speech had already begun to shift. Incipient diphthongization of high front /i:/ (the ee sound in “meet”) and high back /u:/ (as in “fool”) led to instability in the other five long vowels. (Symbols within slash marks are taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet.) This remarkable event, known as the Great Vowel Shift, changed the whole vowel system of London English. As /i:/ and /u:/ became diphthongized to /ai/ (as in “bide”) and /au/ (as in “house”) respectively, so the next highest vowels, /e:/ (this sound can be heard in the first part of the diphthong in “name”) and /o:/ (a sound that can be heard in the first part of the diphthong in “home”), moved up to take their places, and so on (see table—>). Every one of the sounds appearing in this table can still be heard somewhere in living English dialects.

      When Caxton (Caxton, William) started printing at Westminster in the late summer of 1476, he was painfully aware of the uncertain state of the English language. In his prologues and epilogues to his translations he made some revealing observations on the problems that he had encountered as translator and editor. At this time, sentence structures were being gradually modified, but many remained untidy. For the first time, nonprofessional scribes, including women, were writing at length.

      The revival of classical learning was one aspect of that Renaissance, or spiritual rebirth, that arose in Italy and spread to France and England. It evoked a new interest in Greek on the part of learned men such as William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre, Sir Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus. John Colet, dean of St. Paul's in the first quarter of the 16th century, startled his congregation by expounding the Pauline Epistles of the New Testament as living letters. The deans who had preceded him had known no Greek, because they had found in Latin all that they required. Only a few medieval churchmen, such as Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, and the Franciscan Roger Bacon could read Greek with ease. The names of the seven liberal arts of the medieval curricula (the trivium and the quadrivium), it is true, were all Greek—grammar, logic, and rhetoric; arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music—but they had come into English by way of French.

      Renaissance scholars adopted a liberal attitude to language. They borrowed Latin (Latin language) words through French, or Latin words direct; Greek words through Latin, or Greek words direct. Latin was no longer limited to Church Latin: it embraced all Classical Latin. For a time the whole Latin lexicon became potentially English. Some words, such as consolation and infidel, could have come from either French or Latin. Others, such as the terms abacus, arbitrator, explicit, finis, gratis, imprimis, item, memento, memorandum, neuter, simile, and videlicet, were taken straight from Latin. Words that had already entered the language through French were now borrowed again, so that doublets arose: benison and benediction; blame and blaspheme; chance and cadence; count and compute; dainty and dignity; frail and fragile; poor and pauper; purvey and provide; ray and radius; sever and separate; strait and strict; sure and secure. The Latin adjectives for “kingly” and “lawful” have even given rise to triplets; in the forms real, royal, and regal and leal, loyal, and legal, they were imported first from Anglo-Norman, then from Old French, and last from Latin direct.

      After the dawn of the 16th century, English prose moved swiftly toward modernity. In 1525 Lord Berners completed his translation of Jean Froissart's Chronicle, and William Tyndale translated the New Testament. One-third of the King James Bible (1611), it has been computed, is worded exactly as Tyndale left it; and between 1525 and 1611 lay the Tudor Golden Age, with its culmination in Shakespeare. Too many writers, to be sure, used “inkhorn terms,” newly-coined, ephemeral words, and too many vacillated between Latin and English. Sir Thomas More actually wrote his Utopia in Latin. It was translated into French during his lifetime but not into English until 1551, some years after his death. Francis Bacon published De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, an expansion of his earlier Advancement of Learning) in Latin in 1623. William Harvey announced his epoch-making discovery of the circulation of the blood in his Latin De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (1628; On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals). John Milton composed polemical treatises in the language of Cicero. As Oliver Cromwell's secretary, he corresponded in Latin with foreign states. His younger contemporary Sir Isaac Newton lived long enough to bridge the gap. He wrote his Principia (1687) in Latin but his Opticks (1704) in English.

Restoration period

      With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, men again looked to France. John Dryden (Dryden, John) admired the Académie Française and greatly deplored that the English had “not so much as a tolerable dictionary, or a grammar; so that our language is in a manner barbarous” as compared with elegant French. After the passionate controversies of the Civil War, this was an age of cool scientific nationalism. In 1662 the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge received its charter. Its first members, much concerned with language, appointed a committee of 22 “to improve the English tongue particularly for philosophic purposes.” It included Dryden, the diarist John Evelyn, Bishop Thomas Sprat, and the poet Edmund Waller. Sprat pleaded for “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses, a native easiness; bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness” as possible. The committee, however, achieved no tangible result, and failed in its attempt to found an authoritative arbiter over the English tongue. A second attempt was made in 1712, when Jonathan Swift (Swift, Jonathan) addressed an open letter to Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, then Lord Treasurer, making “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining [fixing] the English Tongue.” This letter received some popular support, but its aims were frustrated by a turn in political fortunes. Queen Anne died in 1714. The Earl of Oxford and his fellow Tories, including Swift, lost power. No organized attempt to found a language academy on French lines has ever been made since.

      With Dryden and Swift the English language reached its full maturity. Their failure to found an academy was partly counterbalanced by Samuel Johnson (Johnson, Samuel) in his Dictionary (published in 1755) and by Robert Lowth in his Grammar (published in 1761).

Age of Johnson

      In the making of his Dictionary (Dictionary of the English Language, A), Johnson took the best conversation of contemporary London and the normal usage of reputable writers after Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) as his criteria. He exemplified the meanings of words by illustrative quotations. Johnson admitted that “he had flattered himself for a while” with “the prospect of fixing our language” but that thereby “he had indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience could justify.” The two-folio work of 1755 was followed in 1756 by a shortened, one-volume version that was widely used far into the 20th century. Revised and enlarged editions of the unabbreviated version were made by Archdeacon Henry John Todd in 1818 and by Robert Gordon Latham in 1866.

      It was unfortunate that Joseph Priestley, Robert Lowth, James Buchanan, and other 18th-century grammarians (Priestley was perhaps better known as a scientist and theologian) took a narrower view than Johnson on linguistic growth and development. They spent too much time condemning such current “improprieties” as “I had rather not,” “you better go,” “between you and I,” “it is me,” “who is this for?”, “between four walls,” “a third alternative,” “the largest of the two,” “more perfect,” and “quite unique.” Without explanatory comment they banned “you was” outright, although it was in widespread use among educated people (on that ground it was later defended by Noah Webster). “You was” had, in fact, taken the place of both “thou wast” and “thou wert” as a useful singular equivalent of the accepted plural “you were.”

      As the century wore on, grammarians became more numerous and aggressive. They set themselves up as arbiters of correct usage. They compiled manuals that were not only descriptive (stating what people do say) and prescriptive (stating what they should say) but also proscriptive (stating what they should not say). They regarded Latin as a language superior to English and claimed that Latin embodied universally valid canons of logic. This view was well maintained by Lindley Murray, a native of Pennsylvania who settled in England in the very year (1784) of Johnson's death. Murray's English Grammar appeared in 1795, became immensely popular, and went into numerous editions. It was followed by an English Reader (1799) and an English Spelling Book (1804), long favourite textbooks in both Old and New England.

19th and 20th centuries

      In 1857 Richard Chenevix Trench, dean of St. Paul's, lectured to the Philological Society on the theme, “On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries.” His proposals for a new dictionary were implemented in 1859, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge's grandnephew, Herbert Coleridge, set to work as first editor. He was succeeded by a lawyer named Frederick James Furnivall, who in 1864 founded the Early English Text Society with a view to making all the earlier literature available to historical lexicographers in competent editions. Furnivall was subsequently succeeded as editor by James A.H. Murray (Murray, Sir James), who published the first fascicle of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles in 1884. Later Murray was joined successively by three editors: Henry Bradley, William Alexander Craigie, and Charles Talbut Onions. Aside from its Supplements, the dictionary itself fills 12 volumes, has over 15,000 pages, and contains 414,825 words, illustrated by 1,827,306 citations. It is a dictionary of the British Commonwealth and the United States, a fact symbolized by the presentation of first copies in the spring of 1928 to King George V and Pres. Calvin Coolidge. It exhibits the histories and meanings of all words known to have been in use since 1150. From 1150 to 1500 all five Middle English dialects, as has been seen, were of equal status. They are therefore all included. After 1500, however, dialectal expressions are not admitted, nor are scientific and technical terms not in general use. Otherwise, the written vocabulary is comprehensive. A revised edition of this dictionary, known as The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford English Dictionary, The), was published in 1933.

Varieties of English

British English

      The abbreviation RP (Received Pronunciation) denotes the speech of educated people living in London and the southeast of England and of other people elsewhere who speak in this way. If the qualifier educated be assumed, RP is then a regional (geographical) dialect, as contrasted with London Cockney, which is a class (social) dialect. RP is not intrinsically superior to other varieties of English; it is itself only one particular regional dialect that has, through the accidents of history, achieved more extensive use than others. Although acquiring its unique status without the aid of any established authority, it may have been fostered by the public schools (Winchester, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and so on) and the ancient universities (Oxford and Cambridge). Other varieties of English are well preserved in spite of the levelling influences of film, television, and radio. In the Northern dialect RP /a:/ (the first vowel sound in “father”) is still pronounced /æ/ (a sound like the a in “fat”) in words such as laugh, fast, and path; this pronunciation has been carried across the Atlantic into American English.

      In the words run, rung, and tongue, the received-standard pronunciation of the vowel is /∧/, like the u in “but”; in the Northern dialect it is /u/, like the oo in “book.” In the words bind, find, and grind, the received standard pronunciation of the vowel sound is /ai/, like that in “bide”; in Northern, it is /i/, like the sound in “feet.” The vowel sound in the words go, home, and know in the Northern dialect is /ɔ:/, approximately the sound in “law” in some American English dialects. In parts of Northumberland, RP “it” is still pronounced “hit,” as in Old English. In various Northern dialects the definite article “the” is heard as t, th, or d. In those dialects in which it becomes both t and th, t is used before consonants and th before vowels. Thus, one hears “t'book” but “th'apple.” When, however, the definite article is reduced to t and the following word begins with t or d, as in “t'tail” or “t'dog,” it is replaced by a slight pause as in the RP articulation of the first t in “hat trick.” The RP /t∫/, the sound of the ch in “church,” becomes k, as in “thack,” (“thatch, roof”) and “kirk” (“church”). In many Northern dialects strong verbs retain the old past-tense singular forms band, brak, fand, spak for RP forms bound, broke, found, and spoke. Strong verbs also retain the past participle inflection -en as in “comen,” “shutten,” “sitten,” and “getten” or “gotten” for RP “come,” “shut,” “sat,” and “got.”

      In some Midland dialects the diphthongs in “throat” and “stone” have been kept apart, whereas in RP they have fallen together. In Cheshire, Derby, Stafford, and Warwick, RP “singing” is pronounced with a g sounded after the velar nasal sound (as in RP “finger”). In Norfolk one hears “skellington” and “solintary” for “skeleton” and “solitary,” showing an intrusive n just as does “messenger” in RP from French messager, “passenger” from French passager, and “nightingale” from Old English nihtegala. Other East Anglian words show consonantal metathesis (switch position), as in “singify,” and substitution of one liquid or nasal for another, as in “chimbly” for “chimney,” and “synnable” for “syllable.” “Hantle” for “handful” shows syncope (disappearance) of an unstressed vowel, partial assimilation of d to t before voiceless f, and subsequent loss of f in a triple consonant group.

      In South Western dialects, initial f and s are often voiced, becoming v and z. Two words with initial v have found their way into RP: “vat” from “fat” and “vixen” from “fixen” (female fox). Another South Western feature is the development of a d between l or n and r, as in “parlder” for “parlour” and “carnder” for “corner.” The bilabial semivowel w has developed before o in “wold” for “old,” and in “wom” for “home,” illustrating a similar development in RP by which Old English ān has become “one,” and Old English hāl has come to be spelled “whole,” as compared with Northern hale. In South Western dialects “yat” comes from the old singular geat, whereas RP “gate” comes from the plural gatu. Likewise, “clee” comes from the old nominative clea, whereas RP “claw” comes from the oblique cases. The verbs keel and kemb have developed regularly from Old English cēlan “to make cool” and kemban “to use a comb,” whereas the corresponding RP verbs cool and comb come from the adjective and the noun, respectively.

      In Wales, people often speak a clear and measured form of English with a musical intonation inherited from ancestral Celtic (Celtic languages). They tend to aspirate both plosives (stops) and fricative consonants very forcibly; thus, “true” is pronounced with an audible puff of breath after the initial t.

      Lowland Scottish (Scots language) was once a part of Northern English, but two dialects began to diverge in the 14th century. Today Lowland Scots trill their r's, shorten vowels, and simplify diphthongs. A few Scottish words, such as bairn, brae, canny, dour, and pawky, have made their way into RP. Lowland Scottish is not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language still spoken by about 90,700 people (almost all bilingual) mostly in the Highlands and the Western Isles. Thanks to Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, many Scottish Gaelic words have been preserved in English literature.

       Northern Ireland has dialects related in part to Lowland Scottish and in part to the southern Irish dialect of English. Irish pronunciation is conservative and is clearer and more easily intelligible than many other dialects. The influence of the Irish language on the speech of Dublin is most evident in the syntax of drama and in the survival of such picturesque expressions as “We are after finishing,” “It's sorry you will be,” and “James do be cutting corn every day.”

American and Canadian English

      The dialect regions of the United States are most clearly marked along the Atlantic littoral, where the earlier settlements were made. Three dialects can be defined: Northern, Midland, and Southern. Each has its subdialects.

      The Northern dialect is spoken in New England. Its six chief subdialects comprise northeastern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and eastern Vermont), southeastern New England (eastern Massachusetts, eastern Connecticut, and Rhode Island), southwestern New England (western Massachusetts and western Connecticut), the inland north (western Vermont and upstate New York), the Hudson Valley, and metropolitan New York.

      The Midland dialect is spoken in the coastal region from Point Pleasant, in New Jersey, to Dover, in Delaware. Its seven major subdialects comprise the Delaware Valley, the Susquehanna Valley, the Upper Ohio Valley, northern West Virginia, the Upper Potomac and Shenandoah, southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, western Carolina, and eastern Tennessee.

      The Southern dialect area covers the coastal region from Delaware to South Carolina. Its five chief subdialects comprise the Delmarva Peninsula, the Virginia Piedmont, northeastern North Carolina (Albemarle Sound and Neuse Valley), Cape Fear and Pee Dee valleys, and the South Carolina Low Country, around Charleston.

      These boundaries, based on those of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, are highly tentative. To some extent these regions preserve the traditional speech of southeastern and southern England, where most of the early colonists were born. The first settlers who came to Virginia (1607) and Massachusetts (1620) soon learned to adapt old words to new uses, but they were content to borrow names from the local Indian languages for unknown trees, such as hickory and persimmon, and for unfamiliar animals, such as raccoons and woodchucks. Later they took words from foreign settlers: “chowder” and “prairie” from the French, “scow” and “sleigh” from the Dutch. They made new compounds, such as “backwoods” and “bullfrog,” and gave new meanings to such words as “lumber” (which in British English denotes disused furniture, or junk) and “corn” (which in British English signifies any grain, especially wheat).

      Before the Declaration of Independence (1776), two-thirds of the immigrants had come from England, but after that date they arrived in large numbers from Ireland. The potato famine of 1845 drove 1,500,000 Irish to seek homes in the New World, and the European revolutions of 1848 drove as many Germans to settle in Pennsylvania and the Middle West. After the close of the American Civil War, millions of Scandinavians, Slavs, and Italians crossed the ocean and eventually settled mostly in the North Central and Upper Midwest states. In some areas of South Carolina and Georgia the American Negroes who had been imported to work the rice and cotton plantations developed a contact language called Gullah, or Geechee, that made use of many structural and lexical features of their native languages. This remarkable variety of English is comparable to such “contact languages” as Sranan (Taki-Taki) and Melanesian Pidgin. The speech of the Atlantic Seaboard shows far greater differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary than that of any area in the North Central States, the Upper Midwest, the Rocky Mountains, or the Pacific Coast. Today, urbanization, quick transport, and television have tended to level out some dialectal differences in the United States.

      The boundary with Canada nowhere corresponds to any boundary between dialects, and the influence of United States English is strong, being felt least in the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland. Nevertheless, in spite of the effect of this proximity to the United States, British influences are still potent in some of the larger cities; Scottish influences are well sustained in Ontario. Canada remains bilingual. One-fourth of its people, living mostly in the province of Quebec, have French as their mother tongue. Those provinces in which French is spoken as a mother tongue by 10 percent or more of the population are described as “federal bilingual districts” in the Official Languages Bill of 1968.

Australian (Australia) and New Zealand English

      Unlike Canada, Australia has few speakers of European languages other than English within its borders. There are still many Aboriginal languages, though they are spoken by only a few hundred speakers each and their continued existence is threatened. More than 80 percent of the population is British. By the mid-20th century, with rapid decline of its Aboriginal tongues, English was without rivals in Australia.

      During colonial times the new settlers had to find names for a fauna and flora (e.g., banksia, iron bark, whee whee) different from anything previously known to them: trees that shed bark instead of leaves and cherries with external stones. The words brush, bush, creek, paddock, and scrub acquired wider senses, whereas the terms brook, dale, field, forest, and meadow were seldom used. A creek leading out of a river and entering it again downstream was called an anastomizing branch (a term from anatomy), or an anabranch, whereas a creek coming to a dead end was called by its native name, a billabong. The giant kingfisher with its raucous bray was long referred to as a laughing jackass, later as a bushman's clock, but now it is a kookaburra. Cattle so intractable that only roping could control them were said to be ropable, a term now used as a synonym for “angry” or “extremely annoyed.”

      A deadbeat was a penniless “sundowner” at the very end of his tether, and a no-hoper was an incompetent fellow, hopeless and helpless. An offsider (strictly, the offside driver of a bullock team) was any assistant or partner. A rouseabout was first an odd-job man on a sheep station and then any kind of handyman. He was, in fact, the “down-under” counterpart of the wharf labourer, or roustabout, on the Mississippi River. Both words originated in Cornwall, and many other terms, now exclusively Australian, came ultimately from British dialects. “Dinkum,” for instance, meaning “true, authentic, genuine,” echoed the “fair dinkum,” or fair deal, of Lincolnshire dialect. “Fossicking” about for surface gold, and then rummaging about in general, perpetuated the term fossick (“to elicit information, ferret out the facts”) from the Cornish dialect of English. To “barrack,” or jeer noisily, recalled Irish “barrack” (“to brag, boast”), whereas “skerrick” in the phrase “not a skerrick left” was obviously identical with the “skerrick” meaning “small fragment, particle,” still heard in English dialects from Westmorland to Hampshire.

      Some Australian English terms came from Aboriginal speech: the words boomerang, corroboree (warlike dance and then any large and noisy gathering), dingo (reddish-brown wild dog), galah (cockatoo), gunyah (bush hut), kangaroo, karri (dark-red eucalyptus tree), nonda (rosaceous tree yielding edible fruit), wallaby (small marsupial), and wallaroo (large rock kangaroo). Australian English has slower rhythms and flatter intonations than RP. Although there is remarkably little regional variation throughout the entire continent, there is significant social variation. The neutral vowel /ə/ (as the a in “sofa”) is frequently used, as in London Cockney: “arches” and “archers” are both pronounced [a:t∫əz], and the pronunciations of RP “day” and “go” are, respectively, [dəi] and [gəu].

      Although New Zealand lies over 1,000 miles away, much of the English spoken there is similar to that of Australia. The blanket term Austral English is sometimes used to cover the language of the whole of Australasia, or Southern Asia, but this term is far from popular with New Zealanders because it makes no reference to New Zealand and gives all the prominence, so they feel, to Australia. Between North and South Islands there are observable differences. For one thing, Maori (Maori language), which is still a living language (related to Tahitian, Hawaiian, and the other Austronesian [Malayo-Polynesian] languages), has a greater number of speakers and more influence in North Island.

The English of India–Pakistan

      In 1950 India became a federal republic within the Commonwealth of Nations, and Hindi was declared the first national language. English, it was stated, would “continue to be used for all official purposes until 1965.” In 1967, however, by the terms of the English Language Amendment Bill, English was proclaimed “an alternative official or associate language with Hindi until such time as all non-Hindi states had agreed to its being dropped.” English is therefore acknowledged to be indispensable. It is the only practicable means of day-to-day communication between the central government at New Delhi and states with non-Hindi speaking populations, especially with the Deccan, or “South,” where millions speak Dravidian (non-Indo-European) languages—Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. English is widely used in business, and, although its use as a medium in higher education is decreasing, it remains the principal language of scientific research.

      In 1956 Pakistan became an autonomous republic comprising two states, East and West. Bengali and Urdu were made the national languages of East and West Pakistan, respectively, but English was adopted as a third official language and functioned as the medium of interstate communication. (In 1971 East Pakistan broke away from its western partner and became the independent state of Bangladesh.)

African English

      Africa is the most multilingual area in the world, if people are measured against languages. Upon a large number of indigenous languages rests a slowly changing superstructure of world languages (Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese). The problems of language are everywhere linked with political, social, economic, and educational factors.

      The Republic of South Africa, the oldest British settlement in the continent, resembles Canada in having two recognized European languages within its borders: English and Afrikaans, or Cape Dutch. Both British and Dutch traders followed in the wake of 15th-century Portuguese explorers and have lived in widely varying war-and-peace relationships ever since. Although the Union of South Africa, comprising Cape Province, Transvaal, Natal, and Orange Free State, was for more than a half century (1910–61) a member of the British Empire and Commonwealth, its four prime ministers (Botha, Smuts, Hertzog, and Malan) were all Dutchmen. In the early 1980s Afrikaners outnumbered Britishers by three to two. The Afrikaans language began to diverge seriously from European Dutch in the late 18th century and has gradually come to be recognized as a separate language. Although the English spoken in South Africa differs in some respects from standard British English, its speakers do not regard the language as a separate one. They have naturally come to use many Afrikanerisms, such as kloof, kopje, krans, veld, and vlei, to denote features of the landscape and occasionally employ African names to designate local animals and plants. The words trek and commando, notorious in South African history, have acquired almost worldwide currency.

      Elsewhere in Africa, English helps to answer the needs of wider communication. It functions as an official language of administration in Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland and in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malaŵi, Uganda, and Kenya. It is the language of instruction at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; at the University of Nairobi, Kenya; and at the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania.

      The West African states of The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria, independent members of the Commonwealth, have English as their official language. They are all multilingual. The official language of Liberia is also English, although its tribal communities constitute four different linguistic groups. Its leading citizens regard themselves as Americo-Liberians, being descendants of those freed blacks whose first contingents arrived in West Africa in 1822. South of the Sahara indigenous languages are extending their domains and are competing healthily and vigorously with French and English.

The future of English

      Geographically, English is the most widespread language on earth, and it is second only to Mandarin Chinese in the number of people who speak it. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has five official languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. The influence of these languages upon one another will inevitably increase.

      It is reasonable to ask if changes in English can be predicted. There will doubtless be modifications in pronunciation, especially in that of long vowels and diphthongs. In weakly stressed syllables there is already a discernible tendency, operating effectively through radio and television, to restore the full qualities of vowels in these syllables. This tendency may bring British English more into line with American English and may bring them both a little nearer to Spanish and Italian. Further, it may help to narrow the gap between pronunciation and spelling. Other factors will also contribute toward the narrowing of this gap: advanced technological education, computer programming, machine translation, and expanding mass media. Spelling reformers will arise from time to time to liven up proceedings, but in general, traditional orthography may well hold its own against all comers, perhaps with some regularization. Printing houses, wielding concentrated power through their style directives, will surely find it in their best interests to agree on uniformity of spelling. Encyclopaedic dictionaries—computerized, universal, and subject to continuous revision—may not go on indefinitely recording such variant spellings as “connection” and “connexion,” “judgment” and “judgement,” “labor” and “labour,” “medieval” and “mediaeval,” “plow” and “plough,” “realise” and “realize,” “thru” and “through.”

      Since Tudor days, aside from the verb endings -est and -eth, inflections have remained stable because they represent the essential minimum. The abandonment of the forms thou and thee may encourage the spread of yous and youse in many areas, but it is not necessarily certain that these forms will win general acceptance. The need for a distinctive plural can be supplied in other ways (e.g., the forms “you all, you fellows, you people”). The distinctions between the words “I” and “me,” “he” and “him,” “she” and “her,” “we” and “us,” “they” and “them” seem to many authors to be too important to be set aside, in spite of a growing tendency to use objective forms as emphatic subjective pronouns and to say, for instance, “them and us” instead of “they and we” in contrasting social classes. Otherwise, these distinctive forms may remain stable; they are all monosyllabic, they are in daily use, and they can bear the main stress. Thus they are likely to resist levelling processes.

      Considerable changes will continue to be made in the forms and functions of auxiliary verbs, catenative (linking) verbs, phrasal verbs, and verb phrases. Indeed, the constituents of verbs and verb groups are being more subtly modified than those of any other word class. By means of auxiliaries and participles, a highly intricate system of aspects, tenses, and modalities is gradually evolving.

      In syntax the movement toward a stricter word order seems to many to be certain to continue. The extension of multiple attributives in nominal groups has probably reached its maximum. It cannot extend further without incurring the risk of ambiguity.

      In vocabulary further increases are expected if the present trends continue. Unabbreviated general dictionaries already contain 500,000 entries, but even larger dictionaries, with 750,000 entries, may be required. Coiners of words probably will not confine themselves to Greek and Latin in creating new terms; instead they are likely to exercise their inventive powers in developing an international technical vocabulary that is increasingly shared by Russian, French, and Spanish and that is slowly emerging as the universal scientific language.

Simeon Potter

Additional Reading

Dictionaries

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 20 vol., ed. by John A. Simpson and Edmund S.C. Weiner (1989), incorporates all the words of the first edition and its supplementary volumes. Derivative dictionaries include The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1939); The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 6th ed. (1976); The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1969); The Little Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 4th ed. (1969); Oxford Illustrated Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1975); The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, 3rd ed. (1974); and the Oxford American Dictionary (1980). Other one-volume dictionaries include Chambers' Twentieth Century (1972); The Universal Dictionary of the English Language, rev. by E.H. Partridge (1952); Longmans English Larousse (1968); and P. Hanks, Encyclopedic World Dictionary (1971).The leading American dictionary is Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (1961), actually 8th in the series since the first appeared in 1828; it is updated by a separately published “Addenda” section, 6,000 Words (1976). Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1979) is an abbreviated version. Other comprehensive dictionaries are The New Century Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vol. (1959); and Funk and Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary of the English Language (1963). Two comprehensive dictionaries are outstanding: The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966); and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1969).Reliable etymological dictionaries include Ernest Weekley, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 2 vol. (1921, reprinted 1967); E.H. Partridge, Origins, 5th rev. ed. (1971); and Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vol. (1966–67). The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966) will long remain the most authentic work in this field.The two great historical dictionaries of American English are William A. Craigie and James R. Hulbert (eds.), A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, 4 vol. (1936–44); and Mitford M. Mathews, (ed.), A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, 2 vol. (1951).

Modern usage

H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), a somewhat eccentric work, has been thoroughly updated twice: 2nd ed. with the same title, rev. by Ernest Gowers (1965); and The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd ed. edited by R.W. Burchfield (1996). It has its transatlantic counterpart in the following two works: Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans, A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957); and Margaret Nicholson, A Dictionary of American-English Usage (1957). See also Roy H. Copperud, American Usage and Style (1980).

Grammar and structure of English

A.A. Hill, Introduction to Linguistic Structures: From Sound to Sentence in English (1958); Samuel Jay Keyser and Paul M. Posral, Beginning English Grammar (1976); Paul Roberts, English Sentences (1962); Martin Joos, The English Verb (1964); H.A. Gleason, Linguistics and English Grammar (1965); N.C. Stageberg, An Introductory English Grammar, 3rd ed. (1977); A.E. Darbyshire, A Description of English (1967); R. Quirk et al., A Grammar of Contemporary English (1972); B.M.H. Strang, Modern English Structure, 2nd ed. rev. (1968); R.W. Zandvoost, A Handbook of English Grammar, 7th ed. (1975).

Phonetics of English

Handbooks include Hans Kurath and R.I. McDavid, The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (1961); and A.C. Gimson, An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English (1963).

Histories

An excellent “external history” is A.C. Baugh, A History of the English Language, 3rd ed. (1978). Fernand Mossé, Esquisse d'une histoire de la langue anglaise (1947), is a masterpiece—brief, lucid, and profound. Karl Brunner, Die englische Sprache: Ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1960–62), is indispensable to advanced students.Two brief surveys written early in the 20th century are recognized classics and remain stimulating: Henry Bradley, The Making of English (1904, rev. by Simeon Potter, 1968); and J.O.H. Jespersen, Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905, reprinted 1971). Other fairly substantial histories include Stuart Robertson, The Development of Modern English, 2nd ed. rev. by Frederic G. Cassidy (1954); M.M. Bryant, Modern English and Its Heritage, 2nd ed. (1962); M.W. Bloomfield and L.D. Newmark, A Linguistic Introduction to the History of English (1963); W.N. Francis, The English Language, an Introduction (1965); Thomas Pyles, The Origins and Development of the English Language, 2nd ed. (1971); Simeon Potter, Our Language, rev. ed. (1968); J.W. Clark, Early English: A Study of Old and Middle English (1967); A.C. Partridge, Tudor to Augustan English (1969); J.A. Sheard, The Words We Use, rev. ed. (1970); Joseph M. Williams, Origins of the English Language: A Social and Linguistic History (1975); and B.M.H. Strang, A History of English (1970). F.T. Visser, An Historical Syntax of the English Language, 3 vol. (1963–73), provides copious illustrations and bibliographies.

Special studies

George W. Turner, The English Language in Australia and New Zealand (1966); Simeon Potter, Changing English (1969); John W. Spencer (ed.), The English Language in West Africa (1971); Mitford M. Mathews (ed.), The Beginnings of American English (1931); Thomas Pyles, Words and Ways of American English (1952); Albert H. Marckwardt, American English, 2nd. ed. rev. by J.L. Dillard (1980); and Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States (1972), also by Dillard.

Bibliographies

Arthur G. Kennedy, A Bibliography of Writings on the English Language from the Beginning of Printing to the End of 1922 (1927); Harold B. Allen, Linguistics and English Linguistics, 2nd ed. (1977). New books are recorded in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, edited for the Modern Humanities Research Association, and in The Year's Work in English Studies (annual), edited for the English Association. Books and contemporary studies are listed in the MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures (annual) of the Modern Language Association.Simeon Potter

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