LANGUAGE AND HISTORY

Barry Blitt New Yorker cover (© Barry Blitt)

And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech … and they said, “Come let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us make us a name; lest we be scattered upon the face of the whole earth.” And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be witholden from them, which they purpose to do. Come let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth; and they left off to build the city. Therefore was the name of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.

GENESIS 11:1–9 (King James Version)

LANGUAGE FAMILIES

Language is a human activity, and like all human activities, it seems to have infinite variability. It is estimated that there are between 2,900 and nearly 10,000 living languages in the world.¹ Nevertheless, despite that variability, it is possible to distinguish the patterns and relationships of these languages to one another. As a result, they have been classified into families, the members of which are considered by linguists to be related because of similarities in structure, grammar, phonology, and vocabulary.

Yet, like every other kind of human activity, language is subject to change; and many languages have disappeared or evolved into other languages over the centuries. For example, Latin is no longer spoken, but it survives through its direct descendants, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Other ancient languages survive only in written form, and still others have disappeared without a trace because they were not written down, and their speakers were absorbed into other populations.

What Were They Saying?

What was the first language? Philosophers and linguists, kings and theologians have debated this question for several thousand years. Early Christian scholars maintained that the language spoken in the Garden of Eden was Hebrew, while an eighteenth-century Swedish clergyman jokingly suggested that in the Garden, God spoke Swedish, Adam spoke Danish, and the serpent who tempted Eve spoke French.

The major families, or trees, of human languages have many branches.

Sino-Tibetan

Most languages spoken in China belong to the Sinitic branch of this family. There are more than a billion speakers of the eight varieties of Chinese that are regarded by some linguists as separate languages, united only by a common writing system.

More than 300 languages in the Tibeto-Burman branch are spoken in parts of Burma,Tibet,Thailand,Vietnam, and Laos.

Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic)

The Afro-Asiatic family includes over 250 languages that are spoken in North Africa and southwest Asia. The Semitic languages, which include Arabic and Hebrew, as well as many of the languages of the ancient Near East, constitute the largest branch of this family.

Among other languages belonging to this family are nearly 175 that are spoken in North Africa, including Amharic (the official language of Ethiopia) and Hausa, the primary language of more than 25 million people in West Africa.

Austro-Asiatic

There are three branches and over 100 languages that belong to the Austro-Asiatic family spread across southeast Asia. The largest of these branches is Mon-Khmer, which includes the languages of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and parts of Burma and Malaysia.

Dravidian

The Dravidian family is composed of more than seventy languages spoken primarily in southern and eastern India, although speakers are found as far away as southern and eastern regions of Africa. Although the vast majority of the population of India speaks languages that belong to the Indo-European family, the Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 230 million people. Tamil is the most diffuse, with 50 million speakers in India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia, as well as other areas of the Indian and South Pacific Oceans.

Niger-Congo

It is estimated that there are between 1,000 and 3,000 languages spoken in Africa by over 400 million people², but fewer than 5 percent have more than a million speakers. The largest African language family is the Niger-Congo group, which encompasses about a thousand languages, and several thousand dialects. Within this family are the approximately 700 languages belonging to the Benue-Congo branch, which includes more than 500 Bantu languages, among them Swahili, Rwanda, Khongo, Xhosa, and Zulu. Since there is such an extraordinary diversity of African languages, Swahili or Arabic is often used as a lingua franca.³

Uralic

The two branches of the Uralic family are the Finno-Ugric languages, spoken in central and northern Europe (including Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Lapp), and the much smaller group of Samoyedic languages that are spoken by perhaps 30,000 people scattered across Siberia and the Arctic.

Altaic

The geographical distribution of the Altaic languages ranges from the Balkan Peninsula to Central Asia, and includes over forty languages that are divided into three groups: Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu.

The largest group, Turkic, includes Turkish, Uighur (whose speakers are found mainly in China), and the languages of Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

Although Korean and Japanese share some similarities with other members of this family, the connections have not been determined precisely.

Caucasian

The region of the Caucasus Mountains, between the Caspian and Black Seas, contains the highest concentration of languages in the world; although smaller in area than Great Britain, more than twenty different languages are spoken there, but only Georgian has more than a million speakers.

Because this region formed part of the former Soviet Union, the vocabulary of these languages has been heavily influenced by Russian.

North and South American Languages

At the time of the arrival of Europeans, there were perhaps 300 languages spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of North America. More than half of these have disappeared, with fewer than 300,000 speakers of these languages still remaining.

In South and Central America, there are approximately 11 million speakers of Amerindian languages. Among these is Quechua (the official language of the Incas and spoken by more than 6 million people). There once may have been as many as 2,000 languages spoken in South America.

Who Are You?

There are also some languages that are called “orphans” or “isolates,” single languages that seem to bear no relationship with any other, such as Ainu, a now nearly extinct language spoken in areas of Japan but unrelated to Japanese, or Basque, the language of the inhabitants of the Pyrenees region of Spain and France.

THE BRANCHES OF THE INDO-EUROPEAN TREE

The largest and most widely diffused of these language families is Indo-European, with over 2 billion speakers around the world. Of course the origins of all language families are difficult to pin down with any certainty, but historical and comparative linguists have constructed a model that would explain most fully the development of the Indo-European tree and the growth of its various branches. They posit a common ancestor of these languages that they label as Proto-Indo-European (PIE), a language thought to be spoken by a people living in what is now southwestern Russia and Kazakhstan about 6,000 years ago. As this population spread out in all directions, PIE evolved into dialects and then into mutually incomprehensible languages, but their common source could be established through similarities in grammatical structure and vocabulary. Here's an example:

English	Sanskrit	Persian	Russian	Greek	Latin
brother	bhrata	buradar	brat	phrater	frater

Linguists have classified the surviving branches of the Indo-European family as follows:

Indic
Hindi	Bengali	Gujarati	Marathi	Oriya
Punjabi	Romany	Sinhalese	Urdu	Sanskrit*4

Iranian
Baluchi	Kurdish	Pashto	Farsi (Persian)	Avestan*

Italic
Latin* >
Italian	French	Spanish	Portuguese	Romanian

Hellenic
Ancient Greek* >	Medieval Greek* >	Modern Greek

Germanic
German	Dutch	Afrikaans	Flemish	Yiddish
Danish	Icelandic	Norwegian	Swedish

Anglo-Saxon (Old English)* >

Middle English* >

Modern English

Balto-Slavonic
Russian	Belorussian	Latvian	Lithuanian	Czech
Polish	Slovak	Slovene

Celtic
Breton	Gaelic	Irish	Scots	Welsh
Manx*	Cornish*

Survivors, or Against All Odds

Some branches of the Indo-European tree have withered and disappeared; others, such as Armenian and Albanian, survive as a single offshoot.

Yes, languages die too, like individuals. They may decompose into fine dust or a heap of bones from which it is difficult to reconstruct the image of the living organism that was once there. They may be embalmed and preserved for posterity, changeless and static, lifelike in appearance but unendowed with the breath of life. While they live, however, they change.

—MARIO PEI, The Story of Language

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH

Although English is classified as belonging to the Germanic branch of the Indo- European tree because of its structure, grammar, and basic vocabulary, it has been strongly influenced, through the accidents of history and politics, by other Indo- European languages, most notably Latin and its offshoots, the Romance languages, and, to a lesser extent, Greek.

Latin and the Power of Rome

At the height of its power in the second century CE, the Roman Empire extended from the Euphrates River in the East to Britain in the West. Everywhere in Europe and North Africa that the Romans went, they brought with them not only soldiers and government officials, but also their language; and therefore, in order to do business with the ruling powers, one had to learn at least a little Latin. Over several centuries, the Latin spoken in the provinces often became mixed with the local languages, out of which evolved the foundations of at least some of the languages spoken in Europe today.

By the fifth century CE, the Roman Empire had begun to disintegrate, as a series of invaders, mostly Germanic, began to carve out sections of the empire as their own. In 410 CE, the Roman army withdrew from Britain, leaving the island to its Celtic inhabitants and those Latin-speaking missionaries who had come to convert them to Christianity. But less than forty years later, beginning in 449 CE, southern Britain was overrun by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, all Germanic tribes from the mainland of Europe.

Anglo-Saxon Culture and Old English

The culture and language of these Germanic peoples are called Anglo-Saxon; and within a relatively short period of time, they had become the dominant political and linguistic power in Britain, as the Celts fled west into Ireland and Wales. Although Latin had all but disappeared as a spoken language, its influence could be seen in place names: -chester, as in Dorchester, and –caster, as in Lancaster, which derive from the Latin castra, a military camp. And when the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity in 597 CE, Latin was reintroduced, as the language of the Church.

The greatest work of Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, literature is the epic poem Beowulf, whose opening lines show how much English has changed in 1,500 years:

Hwœt, we gardena in geardagum
peodcyninga prym gefrunon
hu ða œpelingas ellenfremedon!⁵

The Norman Conquest and Middle English

The language spoken in England would have remained basically Germanic in its vocabulary, grammar, and structure, had it not been for an accident of politics and genealogy. In 1066 CE, Edward, king of England, died without an heir; and the Anglo-Saxon nobles elected Harold, who was not related to Edward, as their king. But perhaps out of family loyalty, perhaps out of a desire for more power, William, ruler of Normandy, whose wife was related to Edward, challenged Harold's right to the throne. William and his army invaded Britain, and at the battle of Hastings, Harold was defeated and killed. On Christmas Day, 1066 CE, William, now called the Conqueror, was crowned King of England and Normandy.

William brought with him a new ruling class, made up of French-speaking Normans,⁶ who imposed their politics, customs, and language on the Anglo-Saxons. And just as those who had wanted to do business with the Romans had had to learn Latin, so those who wanted to be accepted by the Norman power structure had to learn French. For nearly 150 years, French was the language of government, law, and religion. In the thirteenth century, however, as relations deteriorated between England and France, the use of English increasingly became an expression of nationalism; and English began once more to reassert itself. Nevertheless, in part because of the influence of French, in part because all languages change over time, it was radically different from the Anglo-Saxon ofBeowulf. Thousands of new vocabulary words had been added to English either from French, a Latin-based language, or directly from Latin, with the result that today English contains twice as many words derived from French and Latin as from German. This newly evolved form is called Middle English, and although it is difficult for a speaker of modern English to read easily, it contains many recognizable forms and words, as the opening lines of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales demonstrates:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour.⁷

Modern English

Like Old and Middle English, Modern English has been shaped by a number of historical, political, and social events: the European Renaissance and the rebirth of interest in ancient Greek and Roman literature and culture, the development of modern science and technology, British colonialism, and the founding of the United States. But perhaps the greatest single influence on the formation of Modern English was the printing press, whose invention is generally credited to the German Johannes Gutenberg (d. 1468), and which was introduced into England by William Caxton in 1476. This invention led not only to the standardization of spelling⁸, usage, and pronunciation, but was instrumental in the growth of literacy, and in the increase in the number of schools. It is not surprising, then, that speech became an indication of social class.

Although Latin and Greek continued to be held in high esteem because of the renewed interest in the heritage of the classical tradition, the Renaissance and the rise of the modern nation-state saw the growth of vernacular⁹ literatures throughout Europe. Increasingly, it was maintained by many that the English language could be employed as effectively as Latin or Greek to express serious thought. After all, as a sixteenth-century English scholar pointed out, the ancient Greeks wrote in Greek, the Romans composed in Latin, and thus it was only natural that the English should employ their own native tongue. At the same time, however, there was the recognition on the part of at least some writers and scholars of a need for a greatly enriched English vocabulary. The coinage of new vocabulary by authors in this period added more than 10,000 new words to the language; ironically, the vast majority derived from Latin and Greek roots. Not all of these newly minted words, however, entered into popular usage, and some did not survive.

Not all of the new words were adapted from Latin or Greek. The argument among sixteenth-century scholars about the “purity” of English vocabulary grew more heated as diplomacy and trade broadened the possibility of linguistic interchange. Although as a matter of national pride vehement objections were raised about the introduction of Italian, French, and Spanish words into English vocabulary, many words, such as vogue, essay, bizarre, piazza, mustache,gazette, and bravado, found a permanent place.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the development of modern science, which also added thousands of new vocabulary words to English, was grounded, at least in part, in the view that all activity, including language, could be explained logically and rationally. The focus on standardization of language and usage also produced an increased interest in etymology, or the history of individual words, as a way of determining the precise meaning of words and their correct usage. In 1755, Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) published A Dictionary of the English Language, which contained 40,000 words and their definitions, pronunciations, and varied usages. Its intent, he said, was “to reserve the purity and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom.” Dr. Johnson'sDictionarywas a landmark in the history of English lexicography, and marked the first methodical attempt to establish a standard English vocabulary. During the eighteenth century, there was also the attempt to regularize English grammar and syntax. Although the scientist Joseph Priestley argued that “the custom of speaking is the original and only just standard for any language,” most grammarians subscribed to Dr. Johnson's insistence that “every language must be formed after the model of one of the ancient.” And as a result, they transposed the rules of Latin grammar onto English, despite the fact that at least a few scholars recognized that Latin grammar was not particularly well suited as a model for English.

With the growth of the British Empire, beginning in the seventeenth century, politics once again played a role in the history of the English language. Not only did the native languages of North America, Africa, and Asia contribute large numbers of words to English (such as moccasin,jungle, hurricane, and tobacco), but also colonialism led to the spread of the use of English around the world. By the mid-nineteenth century, the recognition that both the addition of “new” words to English vocabulary and the intricate history of the English language demanded a new kind of dictionary gave impetus to the monumental project that is known as the Oxford English Dictionary.¹⁰ Begun in 1879, under the editorship of James Murray, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was not completed until 1928. Consisting of twelve volumes, it not only gave the various definitions and usages, but detailed the history of each of the over 400,000 entries. Successive teams of lexicographers have produced several supplements, and the OED now extends to twenty volumes and contains over 500,000 items.

The differences between a dialect and a language are a matter of great debate among linguists, since there is no accepted criterion for making any distinction between the two. The simplest definition is that it is a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. But who gets to determine what is “standard” and what is a “variety” is often a matter of politics, history, and social structure. As an old joke goes, “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

American English

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (early twentieth-century playwright and critic)

Like the general history of English, the history of American English can be divided into periods. The earliest, and most influential, began with the first permanent English-speaking settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and ended with the establishment of the United States as an independent country after the American Revolution. During this period, the majority of European settlers were from Britain, and they brought with them the speech patterns, vocabulary, and grammar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.

The American Revolution was grounded in the struggle for political independence, and at least for some, that meant linguistic independence as well. In 1774, an American patriot declared, “The English language has been greatly improved in Britain within a century, but its highest perfection, with every other branch of human knowledge, is perhaps reserved for this land of light and freedom.” Perhaps the most noteworthy individual in the formation of American English is Noah Webster (1758-1843), who compiled three books: a speller, a grammar, and a reader. The speller was an extraordinary success, and over the next century it would sell more than 80 million copies. His most lasting and influential work, however, was An American Dictionary of the English Language, which he wrote as a contribution “into the common treasure of patriotic exertions.” Webster believed that a national language was an instrument of unity:

It is not only important, but, in a degree necessary, that the people of this country should have an American Dictionary of the English language; for, although the body of the language is the same as in England, and it is desirable to perpetuate that sameness, yet some differences must exist. Language is an expression of ideas; and if the people of our country cannot preserve an identity of ideas, they cannot retain an identity of language. (Preface to An American Dictionary, 1828)

Hand from a monumental statue of the Roman Emperor Constantine (313–337 CE) (Museo Capitolino, Rome)

American English is, of course, the product of both normal linguistic change and the “melting pot” of American society. Each wave of immigration to the United States—from Northern, Southern, and Eastern Europe, from Asia, from Africa, and from South America—has made its own contributions to the development of a distinctly American English, not only in terms of vocabulary but also in patterns of speech and usage.Yet, despite some regional variations, what marks American English is its uniformity. In the last century, the advent of radio, the movies, and television accelerated the process of homogenization of American speech and vocabulary.

According to the 2011 U.S. census, over 60 million Americans speak a language other than English at home. The largest numbers belong to the Indo-European family, but among the top ten are Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Tagalog.

How Do You Spell That?

Noah Webster's eagerness to create an “American” English led to the Americanization of the orthography of many English words that had entered the language through French. Thus, honour became honor, and centre became center. Of course, spelling reform can also create confusion. Although Benjamin Franklin urged that the silent letters in words be eliminated, that would mean that we work hard to put bred on the table. And what about the pronunciation of through, although, tough, and thought?

There are some words, of course, that might benefit from a firm editorial hand. Although we have all been taught that the longest non-technical word in English is antidisestablishmentarianism (twenty-eight letters), the prize actually goes to floccinaucinihilipilification (twenty-nine letters), a word said to have been coined as a joke by some British schoolboys but now listed in the OED. It is composed of a number of Latin words, all of which mean “of little or no value.” Its meaning is “the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.”

AN OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

The Roman Occupation of Britain: First century CE–410 CE

1.     The earlier presence of Celtic languages (which also belong to the Indo-European family)

2.     Introduction of Latin, the language of conquest and commerce

3.     Withdrawal of the Roman army (410 CE)

The Anglo-Saxons and Old English: 450-1150 CE

1.     Invasion of the Germanic tribes (449)

2.     Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity (597)

3.     Beowulf : eighth to ninth centuries (?)

4.     Viking raids on Britain: eighth to ninth centuries

5.     The Norman Conquest (1066)

Middle English: 1150-1500 CE

1.     The Anglo-French connection: loss of many Old English words; addition of thousands of Latin-based words via French; changes in grammar and structure

2.     Development of a vernacular literature Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400): Canterbury Tales William Langland (d. 1400): Piers Plowman

3.     First translation of Bible into English, attributed to John Wycliff (d. 1384)

4.     Introduction of the printing press into England by William Caxton (1476)

Modern English: 1500 CE-present

1.     Decline of Latin as common European language of discourse

2.     Translations of classical Latin and Greek texts into the vernacular

3.     William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

4.     Standardization of spelling (orthography) and enrichment of English vocabulary (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries)

5.     Dr. Samuel Johnson: A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

6.     The development of the scientific study of comparative, historical, and structural linguistics (eighteenth century)

7.     The influence of British colonialism and the impact of Empire (nineteenth and twentieth centuries)

8.     James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (1879–1928)

American English

From Jamestown to the end of the colonial period: 1607–1790

The establishment of the forms and patterns of American English, as distinct from British English.

Westward expansion: 1790–1860

1.     Immigration from Western Europe and Ireland

2.     Noah Webster: An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828)

3.     Settlement of the far west

Since the American Civil War: 1865–present

1.     Emancipation Proclamation (1863): influence of “Black” English

2.     Immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe (1880–1920)

3.     Immigration from Caribbean and South America (1945–present)

4.     Immigration from Asia and the Pacific Rim (1975–present)

5.     Uniformity of language vs. regionalism; the influence of radio, television, and movies

Creole

A Creole is a language that has been formed by the mixing of two or more “parent” languages and that has become the first language of a community. Creoles are often the result of trade or colonialism and slavery, developed out of the need for a common means of communication between different groups. Gullah, a combination of English and West African languages that is now spoken by perhaps 100,000 people who live in the islands off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, was shaped by Africans brought to America as slaves. Although its vocabulary is for the most part grounded in English, its grammar, sentence structure, and pronunciation have been influenced by the original African languages.

AND WHAT IS MORE

Although the strongest influences on the Germanic core vocabulary of English have been Latin and the Romance languages, most of these words have become “Anglicized,” or made to conform to specific English forms and patterns. Some, however, have retained the tones and inflections of their original home, and English contains a host of words and phrases from the Romance languages that have entered English unchanged in form and meaning. But words from many other languages have also found a new home in English. Here's a brief selection: there will be more in following chapters.

from the Romance languages

aficionado (Sp): literally, affectionate; an ardent fan

avant-garde (Fr): literally, guard before; experimentalists in any art in a particular period

carte blanche (Fr): literally, a blank document; unconditional authority

coup (Fr): literally, a blow; a clever action or accomplishment

desperado (Sp): outlaw

fiasco (It): literally, a bottle; a total failure

prima donna (It): literally, first lady; a temperamental individual

from further afield

bazaar (Persian bazar): market

candy (Arabic qandi): literally, a piece of sugar

guru (Hindi): literally, a teacher or priest. An influential teacher or mentor

pajama (Hindi): literally, a loose garment

tycoon (Japanese): literally, great prince; a businessperson having great wealth and power

Of course, the etymological road leads in two directions. Take, for example, the French “le weekend” or “le drugstore.”

SOME USEFUL TERMS

Etymology: the study of the history of a particular word; the derivation or origin of a word

Lexicography: the compiling of dictionaries; Dr. Johnson labeled lexicographers as “harmless drudges”

Lexicon: a dictionary

Linguistics: the science of language, including the history, formation, and structures of languages

Orthography: correct spelling

Philology: the study of written records; linguistics

Phonology: the science of speech sounds, speech elements, and pronunciation

Semantics: the study of linguistic meaning and form

Syntax: the rules or patterns of the formation of sentences

Let Me Count the Words

How many words are there in English? As the Oxford English Dictionary points out, there is no single sensible answer to this question, but it adds that there are 170,476 entries of words in current use; if distinct meanings were counted, the number would rise to nearly 750,000.

On the other hand, most lists of basic English vocabulary contain 800–1,000 words. That doesn't mean, of course, that one's vocabulary is limited to that number of words; there are 25,000 words in the Oxford Pocket Dictionary,but it is claimed that 90 percent of the concepts that these words define can be expressed with a vocabulary of 850 words.

Let Me Count the Words (Again) …

According to scholars, William Shakespeare's works contain 31,534 vocabulary words (yes, someone has counted them). And yet, perhaps as an illustration of the decline of the classical languages as an indication of learning, the playwright Ben Jonson, his contemporary, describes him with these words: “Though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.”

We Speak the Same Language, Don't We?

If in London you follow the sign marked subway, you will find yourself in an underground passage that allows you to cross a heavily traveled street. The London Underground is the New York City subway. Got that?

But What Does It Mean?

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Words, Words, and More Words

It is said that because of the various linguistic strands that form English vocabulary, English contains more synonyms than any other language. Some Latin-based synonyms are simply more elegant forms of Germanic-based vocabulary. For example,

Germanic-Based Word	Latin-Based Word
beg	supplicate
behead	decapitate
drink	imbibe
bitterness	asperity
greedy	rapacious
harmful	deleterious
hate	abhor
house	domicile
slander	calumniate
tiredness	lassitude

Studying Language Can Be Glamorous

The words grammar and glamour have the same etymology. Grammar, a system that describes the structures of a particular language, is derived from the Greek word gramma (something written). In medieval Europe, few people could read, and those who could were thought to possess special magical power. The original meaning ofglamour, which is a variant pronunciation of grammar, was magic or enchantment.

NAME __________________________________________________________________________

1. Approximately how many languages are there estimated to be spoken in the world?

2. List three ways by which language families are distinguished:

(a) _________, (b) _________, (c) _________

3. Name four language families other than Indo-European:

(a) _________, (b) _________, (c) _________, (d) _________

4. Where are the Dravidian languages spoken? _________ Mon-Khmer? _________

5. How many varieties of Chinese are there? _________ What common factor unites them? _________

6. To what language family does Quechua belong? _________ Where is it spoken? _________

7. How many, approximately, languages are spoken in Africa? _________

8. To what branch of the Indo-European family does English belong? _________

9. To which branch of the Indo-European family does Latin belong? _________

10. To which branch of the Indo-European family does Greek belong? _________

11. What percentage of English vocabulary is derived from Latin and Greek? _________ percentage of scientific and technical vocabulary? _________

12. List five Germanic languages that are still spoken today.

(1) _________ (2) _________ (3) _________ (4) _________ (5) _________

13. To which language family does Anglo-Saxon belong? ____________ To which branch? _________ Where and when was it spoken? _________

14. Name one work written in Old English. _________

15. Anglo-Saxon is a synonym for which language? _________

16. What event introduced a Latin-based vocabulary into English? _________ When did it occur? _________ Through which language did most of these words first pass? _________

17. Who wrote Canterbury Tales? _________ To which period of English does it belong? _________

18. Who is generally credited with the introduction of the printing press into England? _________ When? _________

19. What effect did the introduction of the printing press have on the development of the English language? ___________________________

20. Who compiled A Dictionary of the English Language? _________ When? _________

21. Eighteenth-century grammarians tended to look at which language when establishing the rules of English usage? _________.

22. Give one cause of the introduction of many non-Indo-European words into English.

___________________________

23. Who was the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary? _________ How long did it take to complete? _________

24. What was the first permanent English-speaking settlement in America? _________ When was it founded? _________

25. From which region of Europe did the earliest immigrants to the United States come?

___________________________

26. During the period 1880–1920, from which area did most of the immigrants come? _________ During the period since 1945? _________

27. What were Noah Webster's contributions to American English? __________________

_____________________________________________

28. What is etymology? ____________________________________

29. What is linguistics? ____________________________________

30. What is orthography? ________________________

31. If someone says, “It's only a matter of semantics,” what does she mean?

___________________________

32. What is the largest language family? __________________ How many people worldwide speak a language that belongs to that family? _________

33. Which language has the largest number of speakers? _________ Why? _________

34. How many people worldwide speak English as their first language? _________

35. What does the term vernacular mean? __________________

36. What has been the effect of television and the movies on American English?

____________________________________

37. What is lexicography? ___________________________

38. Why is French called a Romance language? ___________________________

39. What is an “orphan” language? _________ Give one example. _________

40. What is a lingua franca? _________ Give an example. _________

41. Sanskrit is no longer spoken, but how is it preserved? _________

42. From which language does the word tycoon come? _________ What is its literal meaning in that language? _________ What is its English usage? _________

43. From which language does the word fiasco come? _________ What is its literal meaning in that language? _________ What is its English usage? _________

44. From what language does the phrase carte blanche come? _________ What is its meaning in that language? _________ What is its English usage? _________

What are the Germanic-based synonyms for the following Latin-based words? Use your dictionary if you are not sure of the meaning of the Latin-based word.

45. acrimonious	_________
46. juvenile	_________
47. mordant	_________
48. bibulous	_________
49. execrate	_________

50. What is the biggest source of new vocabulary today? ___________________________

The following words have entered English unchanged (but sometimes with slight changes in spelling) from other languages. Use your dictionary to find the language of origin and meaning:

	Language of Origin	Meaning
51. angst	_______________	_______________
52. nadir	_______________	_______________
53. khaki	_______________	_______________
54. sputnik	_______________	_______________
55. pariah	_______________	_______________
56. robot	_______________	_______________
57. caravan	_______________	_______________
58. taboo	_______________	_______________
59. mummy	_______________	_______________
60. bungalow	_______________	_______________
61. guru	_______________	_______________

Footnotes

1. Estimates of the number of languages vary because of the question of what constitutes a distinct language (as opposed to dialect) and because many languages exist only in spoken form. According to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Languages, over 22,000 names of languages, living and dead, have been recorded. According to theCambridge Encyclopedia, there are, however, only 10 languages that have over 100 million speakers: Chinese (over one billion); English (750 million, including those countries that count English as an official language); Hindi (490 million); Spanish (420 million); Russian (255 million); Arabic (230 million); Bengali (215 million); Portuguese (213 million); German (129 million); and Japanese (127 million). These figures do not include non-native speakers of these languages and are all, of course, approximate.

2. The difficulty in calculating the number of languages spoken in Africa is due to the fact that many either are isolated geographically or have no writing systems to record them.

3. A lingua franca is any language that is used as a means of communication among speakers of different languages that are mutually incomprehensible.

4. An asterisk indicates that the language is no longer spoken although it may survive in written form. The sacred writings of many religions around the world sometimes preserve languages that are no longer spoken. For example, the Vedas, sacred texts of the Hindu religion, are preserved in Sanskrit.

5. “Behold! We of the spear Danes from old times
Of the people kings' glory have heard
How the princes deeds of valor performed.”

6. Who were the Normans? Actually, in their origins they were also Germanic, having come from Scandinavia (which is why they were called Northmen, or Normans) in the ninth century to settle in France. But they had so thoroughly adapted to the language and customs of the people that within a very short period of time they had abandoned their original language for French and given their name to that region of northwest France.

7. “When April with its sweet showers
The drought of March has pierced to the root,
and bathed every vein in such moisture
by whose quickening force is engendered the flower.”

8. The attempt to standardize English spelling had unintended consequences, for although the spelling of a word might become fixed, its pronunciation changed over time. As a result, many words now contain letters that are no longer pronounced, e.g., thought or weigh. On the other hand, the letter b was added to the spelling of the worddebtbecause it was derived from the Latin verb debeo (owe).

9. Vernacular is the language that is native to a country, but it is also a term to describe ordinary, or everyday, language as opposed to literary language and expression.

10. The members of the Philological Society of Great Britain, to whom the idea of the OED must be credited, argued that existing dictionaries were “incomplete and deficient.”