ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Baugh & Cable
(2002) A history of the English language – REVIEW –
Original Source:
1. English
Present and Future (p. 1-15)
1.
The History of the English
Language as a Cultural Subject.
The diversity of
cultures that find expression in it is a reminder that the history of English
is a story of cultures in contact during the past 1,500 years. It understates
matters to say that political, economic, and social forces influence a
language. These forces shape the language in every aspect, most obviously in the
number and spread of its speakers, and in what is called “the sociology of
language,” but also in the meanings of words, in the accents of the spoken
language, and even in the structures of the grammar. The history of a language
is intimately bound up with the history of the peoples who speak it.
2.
Influences at Work on
Language.
The English language of
today reflects many centuries of development. The political and social events
that have in the course of English history so profoundly affected the English people
in their national life have generally had a recognizable effect on their
language.
In a similar way the
Hundred Years’ War, the rise of an important middle class, the Renaissance, the
development of England as a maritime power, the expansion of the British
Empire, and the growth of commerce and industry, of science and literature,
have, each in their way, contributed to the development of the language.
3. Growth
and Decay.
The change that is
constantly going on in a living language can be most easily seen in the
vocabulary. Old words die out, new words are added, and existing words change
their meaning. Much of the vocabulary of Old English has been lost, and the
development of new words to
meet new conditions is
one of the most familiar phenomena of our language. When a language ceases to
change, we call it a dead language (Like Latin for instance).
4. The Importance of a
Language.
Languages become
important because of events that shape the balance of power among nations. It
is clear, however, that the language of a powerful nation will acquire importance
as a direct reflection of political, economic, technological, and military strength;
so also will the arts and sciences expressed in that language have advantages, including
the opportunities for propagation.
English, French,
German, and Spanish are important languages because of the history and
influence of their populations in modern times; for this reason they are widely
studied outside the country of their use.
5. The
Importance of English.
In numbers of speakers
as well as in its uses for international communication and in other less
quantifiable measures, English is one of the most important languages of the
world. Spoken by more than 380 million people in the United Kingdom, the United
States, and the former British Empire, it is the largest of the Western
languages. English, however, is not the most widely used native language in the
world.
The ascendancy of
English as measured by numbers of speakers in various activities does not
depend on nostalgic attitudes toward the originally English speaking people or
toward the language itself. In a world where “econo-technical superiority” is
what counts, “the real ‘powerhouse’ is still English.
6. The
Future of the English Language.
Since most of the
native speakers of English live in the developed countries, it can be expected
that this group will account for a progressively smaller proportion of the world’s
population. Counteracting the general trend somewhat is the exceptional
situation in the United States, the only country among the more developed ones
that is growing at slightly more than a replacement rate instead of actually
declining.
English would appear to
be entering a period of decline after four centuries of unprecedented
expansion. What makes this prospect unlikely is the fact that English is widely
used as a second language and as a foreign language throughout the world. The
number of speakers who have acquired English as a second language with near
native fluency is estimated to be between 350 and 400 million.
The growth of Spanish, as of Portuguese, will
come mainly from the rapidly increasing population of
Latin America, while
the growth in English will be most notable in its use throughout the world as a
second language. It is also likely that pidgin and creole varieties of English
will become increasingly widespread in those areas where English is not a first
language.
7. English as a
World Language.
The official languages
of the United Nations are English, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, and
Arabic. Since it is not to be expected that the speakers of any of these six
languages will be willing to subordinate their own language to any of the other
five, the question is rather which languages will likely gain ascendancy in the
natural course of events. Now more scientific research is probably published in
English than in any other language, and the preeminence of English in
commercial use is undoubted. The revolution in communications during the
twentieth century has contributed to the spread of several European languages,
but especially of English because of major broadcasting and motion picture industries
in the United States and Great Britain. It will be information technology.
During the 1990s the explosive growth of the Internet was extending English as
a world language in ways that could not have been foreseen only a few years
earlier.
Since World War II,
English as an official language has claimed progressively less territory among
the former colonies of the British Empire while its actual importance and number
of speakers have increased rapidly. Braj B.Kachru (1988) notes that it is a
clear fact of history that English is in a position of unprecedented power:
“Where over 650 artificial languages have failed, English has
succeeded; where many
other natural languages with political and economic power to back them up have
failed, English has succeeded. One reason for this dominance of English is its
propensity for acquiring new identities, its power of assimilation, its adaptability for ‘decolonization’ as a
language, its manifestation in a range of varieties, and above all its
suitability as a flexible medium for literary and other types of creativity across
languages and cultures.”
During the 1990s the
explosive growth of the Internet was extending English as a world language in
ways that could not have been foreseen only a few years earlier. The development
of the technology and software to run the Internet took place in the United
States. In 2000 English was the dominant language of the Internet, with more
than half of the Internet hosts located in the United States and as many as
three-fourths in the United States and other English speaking countries.
8. Assets and Liabilities.
Because English
occupies such a prominent place in international communication, it is worth
pausing to consider some of the features that figure prominently in learning English
as a foreign language. It is important to emphasize that none of the features
that we are considering here has had anything to do with bringing about the
prominence of English as a global language.
The ethnographic,
political, economic, technological, scientific, and cultural forces discussed
above have determined the international status of English, which would be the same
even if the language had had a much smaller lexicon and eight inflectional
cases for nouns, as Indo-European did.
9. Cosmopolitan Vocabulary.
All of this means that
English presents a somewhat familiar appearance to anyone who speaks either a
Germanic or a Romance language. There are parts of the language which one feels
one does not have to learn, or learns with little effort.
Instead of making new
words chiefly by the combination of existing elements, as German does, English
has shown a marked tendency to go outside its own linguistic resources and borrow
from other languages (that makes for foreing speakers learning english easily
because the familiar words with their native languages).
10. Inflectional
Simplicity.
A second feature that English possesses to a
preeminent degree is inflectional simplicity. Within the Indo-European family
of languages, it happens that the oldest, classical languages—Sanskrit, Greek,
and Latin—have inflections of the noun, the adjective, the verb, and to some
extent the pronoun that are no longer found in modern languages such as Russian
or French or German. In this process of simplifying inflections English has gone
further than any other language in Europe. Inflections in the noun as spoken
have been reduced to a sign of the plural and a form for the possessive case.
It must not be thought
that these developments represent a decay of grammar on the one hand or a
Darwinian evolution toward progress, simplicity, and efficiency on the other.
From the view of a child learning a first language, these apparent differences
in complexity seem to matter not at all.
However, it is worth
trying to specify, as ongoing research in second language acquisition is doing, those features
that facilitate or complicate the learning of English by adult speakers of
various languages. To the extent that the simplification of English inflections
does not cause complications elsewhere in the syntax, it makes the task easier
for those learning English as a foreign language.
11. Natural Gender.
English differs from
all other major European languages in having adopted natural (rather than
grammatical) gender.
English is determined
by meaning. All nouns naming living creatures are masculine or feminine
according to the sex of the individual, and all other nouns are neuter.
12. Liabilities.
The three features just
described are undoubtedly of great advantage in facilitating the acquisition of
English by non-native speakers. On the other hand, it is equally important to
recognize the difficulties that the foreign student encounters in learning our
language. One of these difficulties is the result of that very simplification
of inflections which we have considered among the assets of English.
A more serious
criticism of English by those attempting to master it is the chaotic character
of its spelling and the frequent lack of correlation between spelling and pronunciation.
Answer the following
questions:
1. Reflect
if you consider English an impotant language in the present day. Why? Why not?
2. When
is a language considerated as a dead one?
3. Will
the language of English have its powerness in the future? Why? Why not?
4. Mention
what characterisitcs of English are considerated as an easy-to-learn language.
Alejandra
L.
