[00:00.00] Some languages resist the introduction of new words. Others,like English,seem to welcome them.
[00:10.76]Robert MacNeil looks at the history of English and comes to the conclusion
[00:18.13]that its tolerance for change represents deeply rooted ideas of freedom.
[00:25.31]THE GLORIOUS MESSINESS OF ENGLISH by Robert MacNell
[00:32.16]he story of our English language is typically one of massive stealing from other languages.
[00:40.23]That is why English today has an estimated vocabulary of over one million words,
[00:46.76]while other major languages have far fewer.
[00:51.51]French, for example, has only about 75,000 words, and that includes English expressions like snack barand hit parade.
[01:02.69]The French, however,do not like borrowing foreign words because they think it corrupts their language.
[01:11.24]The government tries to ban words from English and declares that Walkman is not desirable;
[01:19.23]so they invent a word, balladeur, which French kids are supposed to say instead but they don't.
[01:27.75]Walkman is fascinating because it isn't even English. Strictly speaking,
[01:35.14]it was invented by the Japanese manufacturers who put two simple English words together to name their product.
[01:43.47]That doesn't bother us, but it does bother the French. Such is the glorious messiness of English.
[01:52.51]That happy tolerance, that willingness to accept words from anywhere,
[01:59.07]explains the richness of English and why it has become, to a very real extent, the first truly global language.
[02:09.33]How did the language of a small island off the coast of Europe become the language of the planet
[02:16.70]more widely spoken and written than any other has ever been?
[02:22.71]The history of English is present in the first words a child learns about identity (I, me, you);
[02:32.63]possession (mine, yours); the body(eye, nose, mouth); size (tall, short); and necessities (food, water).
[02:48.78]These words all come from Old English or Anglo-Saxon English, the core of our language.
[02:57.92]Usually short and direct, these are words we still use today for the things that really matter to us.
[03:06.54]Great speakers often use Old English to arouse our emotions. For example, during World War II,
[03:16.81]Winston Churchill made this speech, stirring the courage of his people
[03:23.15]against Hitler's armies positioned to cross the English Channel:
[03:28.74]"We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,
[03:35.04]we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.
[03:43.56]Virtually every one of those words came from Old English,
[03:49.20]except the last-surrender, which came from Norman French. Churchill could have said,
[03:57.53]"We shall never give in," but it is one of the lovely-and powerful-opportunities of English that a writer can mix,
[04:04.85]for effect, different words from different backgrounds.
[04:11.79]Yet there is something direct to the heart that speaks to us from the earliest words in our language.
[04:19.29]When Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 B.C., English did not exist. The Celts, who inhabited the land,
[04:30.11]spoke languages that survive today mainly as Welsh.
[04:36.06]Where those languages came from is still a mystery, but there is a theory.
[04:42.02]Two centuries ago an English judge in India
[04:47.24]noticed that several words in Sanskrit closely resembled some words in Greek and Latin. A systematic study revealed
[04:58.37]that many modem languages descended from a common parent language, lost to us because nothing was written down.
[05:07.70]Identifying similar words,linguists have come up with what they call an Indo-European parent language,
[05:16.40]spoken until 3500 to 2000 B.C.These people had common words for snow, bee and wolfbut no word for sea.
[05:31.05]So some scholars assume they lived somewhere in north-central Europe,where it was cold. Traveling east,
[05:41.05]some established the languages of India and Pakistan, and others drifted west toward the gentler climates of Europe.
[05:51.09]Some who made the earliest move westward became known as the Celts, whom Caesar's armies found in Britain.
[06:00.57]New words came with the Germanic tribes-the Angles,the Saxons, etc
[06:07.60]that slipped across the North Sea to settle in Britain in the 52 century.
[06:14.26]Together they formed what we call Anglo-Saxon society.
[06:20.50]The Anglo-Saxons passed on to us their farming vocabulary, including sheep, ox, earth, wood, field and work.
[06:31.76]They must have also enjoyed themselves because they gave us the word laughter.
[06:38.71]The next big influence on English was Christianity.
[06:44.14]It enriched the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary with some 400 to 500 words from Greek and Latin,
[06:52.53]including angel, disciple and martyr
[06:57.99]Then into this relatively peaceful land came the Vikings from Scandinavia.
[07:05.17]They also brought to English many words that begin withsk, like sky and skirt.
[07:13.32]But Old Norse and English both survived, and so you can rear a child (English) or raise a child (Norse).
[07:24.34]Other such pairs survive: wish and want, craft and skill, hide and skin.
[07:33.80]Each such addition gave English more richness, more variety.
[07:40.85]Another flood of new vocabulary occurred in 1066, when the Normans conquered England.
[07:48.79]The country now had three languages: French for the nobles, Latin for the churches and English for the common people.
[07:59.11]With three languages competing, there were sometimes different terms for the same thing.
[08:05.96]For example, Anglo-Saxons had the word kingly, but after the Normans,
[08:13.61]royal and sovereign entered the language as alternatives. The extraordinary thing was that French did not replace English.
[08:23.59]Over three centuries English gradually swallowed French,
[08:29.78]and by the end of the 15th century what had developed was amodified,
[08:36.39]greatly enriched language-Middle English-with about 10,000 "borrowed" French words.
[08:44.85]Around1476 William Caxton set up a printing press in England and started acommunications revolution.
[08:54.83]Printing brought into English the wealth of new thinking that sprang from the European Renaissance.
[09:02.25]Translations of Greek and Roman classics were poured onto the printed page,
[09:08.55]and with them thousands of Latin words likecapsule andhabitual, and Greek words like catastrophe and thermometer.
[09:18.52]Today we still borrow from Latin and Greek to name new inventions, like video, television and cyberspace.
[09:28.74]As settlers landed in North America and established the United States,English found itself with two sources-American and British
[09:39.60]Scholars in Britain worried that the language was out of control,
[09:45.27]and some wanted to set up an academy to decide
[09:51.46]which words were proper and which were not. Fortunately their idea has never been put into practice.
[09:59.01]That tolerance for change also represents deeply rooted ideas of freedom.
[10:05.86]Danish scholar Otto Jespersen wrote in 1905, "The English language would not have been what it is
[10:14.77]if the English had not been for centuries great respecters of the liberties of each individual
[10:22.39]and if everybody had not been free to strike out new paths for himself."
[10:28.69]I like that idea. Consider that the same cultural soil producing the English language
[10:36.66]also nourished the great principles of freedom and fights of man in the modem world. The first shoots sprang up in England,
[10:46.53]and they grew stronger in America.
[10:50.53]The English-speaking peoples have defeated all efforts to build fences around their language.
[10:57.82]Indeed, the English language is not the special preserve of grammarians,language police, teachers,
[11:05.44]writers or the intellectual elite. English is, and always has been, the tongue of the common man.
[11:14.51]Language Sense Enhancement
[11:17.72]2 Read aloud the following poem
[11:21.74]Languages Carl Sandbury
[11:26.73]There are no handles upon a language Where by men take hold of it And mark it with signs for its remembrance
[11:37.21]It is a river,this language,Once in a thousand years Breaking a new course Changing its way to the ocean.
[11:47.27]It is a mountain effluvia Moving to valleys And from nation to nation Crossing borders and mixing.
[11:58.16]3 Read the following quotation.Learn them by heart if you can. You might need to look up new words in a dictionary.
[12:08.82]The English language is the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven. Ralph Waldo Emerson
[12:20.65]Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers Georqe Orwell
[12:32.14]England and America are two countries separated by the same language. Georqe Bernard Shaw
[12:43.06]4. Read the following joke and see if you can tell what caused the misunderstanding of the technician's words by the woman.
[12:54.32]You might need to look up new words in a dictionary.
[12:59.81]An office technician got a call from o user. The user told the technician that her computer was not workling.
[13:09.11]She described the problem and the technician concluded that the computer needed to be brought in and serviced.
[13:17.62]He told her to "Unplug the power cord and bring it up here and I will fix it”
