sábado, 31 de enero de 2015

AREA 1. ORIGINS AND CONCEPTS OF ENGLISH - REVIEW -

SUBAREA: 
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.


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