English: FUTURE
January 2010
MODERN / FUTURE ENGLISH - Forever Flux:
FUTURE of ENGLISH
INTRODUCTION / DEBATE QUESTIONS
Where is English going?
CONCLUSION: FUTURE:
(1) There is so much going on nowadays that it is extremely difficult to
understand, categorize, or know where it is going next.
Whatever, it is certainly exciting.
It is changing and changing fast.
But, as we have seen from the past, English has always changed.
It did with the advent of the
(2) Yet despite these external forces / pressures / influences, there is a
CORE of STABILITY.
This is yet another of the unseen / hidden strengths of English
(unwittingly planted there by the Anglo-Saxons).
I believe that that strength of English IS its Happy-go-Lucky nature.
DO WE NEED ANY MORE NEW WORDS?
How and why are new words created?
Let’s just take a look at NEW WORDS and their RAPID RATE of GROWTH
FACTS + FIGURES of INCREASE (based upon Bill Bryson p.143)
No one knows! Do DICTIONARIES hold the answer? = PARTLY.
1755
Dr. Samuel Johnson
43,000 words
1961
Webster’s 3rd.New Int.
450,000 "
1969 Henry Alexander (p27) 500,000 "
1989
Oxford English Dictionary
615,000 "
NOTE: But do counts of words in dictionaries give us an accurate number of words
in a language? No, they are only the tip of the iceberg. Multiple meanings can
be given to each word (e.g., mouse: animal or computer part; mousy, mice, mouse-like). Plus all the plants and animals = 1.4m species.
1990
Jacobson / Morris
3-5,000,000 words
ENGLISH
200,000 words
GERMAN
184,000 words
FRENCH
100,000 words
(Bill Bryson p.3)
1900
1,000 new words per year
1989 15-20,000 " " " "
1987
Random House Unabridged Dictionary 2nd.Edition since 1966:
In 21 years:
50,000 new words
75,000
new definitions of old words
210,000
out of 315,000 words were revised (66.6%)
1997 (4 Nov) GUARDIAN (p15) / Quinion since 1992 traced 50,136 distinct new words
or meanings. BSE, new man, CJD, granny dumping, Bobbitt, Britpop, Blairite,
Chelski, etc.
CONCLUSION: A phenomenal amount of change
over a short period.
NEW WORDS generated by NEW SITUATIONS
SCIENTIFIC
IT: Information Technology
MEDICINE (+ Madness)
EDUCATIONAL
LITERATURE
ECONOMICS
MEDIA: Newspapers
POLITICS
WARS
ENVIRONMENT
FOOD
TRAVEL
SPACE TRAVEL
PORTMANTEAUX or BLEND WORDS
THE RAPID and WIDE SPREAD USE OF ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE (Berlitz p.309)
Previous dominant languages spread to other countries by the force of military
might. The spread of English today, however, is not being spread in that
destructive manner.
Instead, it is fuelled by:
SCIENTIFIC
Brain drain
2/3rds (66%) of scientific papers are published in English
Hi-TECH
COMMUNICATIONS and COMPUTER JARGON
byte
Most Internet communications are still in English.
NOTE:
The deep-rooted Anglo-Saxon love of prefixes and suffixes still show themselves
highly adaptive to the need of modern-day communications.
COMMUNICATIONS
Most telephone communications spoken in English (even between Asia and Africa).
ansaphone
MEDICAL and MADNESS
eating disorder
myocardial infarction
Even the Pasteur Institute Journal in Paris is published in English since 1989
because too few French subscribers.
Joke: Keyhole surgery at Yale University!
MADNESS:
- euphemisms
Mentally ill
EDUCATIONAL
English is the most studied and emulated language in the world - it even shapes
the syntax of other languages.
There are more people studying English in China then there are citizens of the
USA.
English is the principal foreign language taught around the world.
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES:
Scientific / Political / Industrial / Educational - most conducted in English.
Most literate people speak English than any other tongue.
Teaching English is Britain's sixth largest source of invisible earnings = £500m
per year.
Globally, this amounts to £6billion.
LITERATURE
PRINTED ENGLISH: When it comes to the printed word, English by far outstrips any
other language:
50% of world's
BOOKS in English
50%+ of ACADEMIC publications in English
70% of world's MAIL in
English
90% of the INTERNET
conducted in English (hard to calculate - and changing fast)
ECONOMICS / Business
Britair
50% of business in Europe is conducted in English.
VW plant in Shanghai = German engineers and Chinese staff speak to each other in
English.
HIGH STREET SIGNS: Hairdressers are at the cutting-edge of language change
MEDIA
NEWSPAPERS –
5,000 newspapers printed in English
paparazzi
FILM:
Dumb and Dumber
THE DUMBING DOWN of ENGLISH Example from Beavis & Butthead
Teacher "We don't need TV to entertain us"
POP MUSIC / CULTURE
miniskirt
POLITICS
on/off message
Afro-American
WARS
WWI:
Tank - because it was a secret experimental weapon disguised as a water carrier.
The main features have a curious nautical flavour:
crew
WWII:
atomic bomb
POST-WWII:
Iron Curtain
ENVIRONMENT
eco-warrior
F O O D
800 new foods in Random House Dict between 1966-89:
chapatti
TRAVEL
2WENTYS / FLAVA
AIRLINES
157/168 agreed to use English as their international language.
All international flights communicate in English.
SPACE TRAVEL:
Star Trek
PORTMANTEAUX or BLEND WORDS:
ANECDOTAGE
= anecdote + adage
BRUNCH
= breakfast + lunch
GUESSTIMATE
= guess + estimate
HERSTORY
= as opposed to HIStory
SHERO
= Female / SHE Hero
SHAMPAGNE = shandy + champagne (but pun / joke for cheap champagne)
SNEET
= snow and sleet
NOTE:
English LANGUAGE v. English WORDS
There is a vast difference between Language and Words. Because foreign speakers
use English words, it does not necessarily follow that they fully understand the
language overall. ANTONY BURGESS
('Joysprick' - the Language of James Joyce): “It is one thing to USE
language. It is quite another to understand how it works”.
Some top international English words include:
Hello
CONCLUSION: English adopted worldwide because most words are short. Also, they
are familiar to foreigners via American films, television, tourism, sport,
business, etc.
LANGUAGES around the WORLD
2,796 known languages in the world today - there could be more.
While over 700 years ago, there were probably more than 10,000.
Today we can identify 12 key language families + 50 lesser ones
+ around 7,500 dialects.
Dialects themselves can become languages.
For example, French, Spanish and the Romance languages are regional dialects of
Latin;
Yiddish is a dialect of Hebrew and Medieval German.
INVENTED LANGUAGES:
Here are some invented language (simply listed in alphabetical order)
which hoped to gain worldwide usage - but never suceeded:
BASIC ENGLISH
DYING LANGUAGES IN THE WORLD:
English is often criticized as a world dominant language because many smaller / tribal tongues are dying out. But, perhaps, the difference between them and English is that they cannot cope with the flood of new words that every language must encounter, absorb and accommodate if it is to survive. English, however, (since its conception), had evolved to absorb, adopt and adapt new words to suit new situations.
QUESTION:
ANSWER: GLOBAL MEDIA and ENGLISH
People have been raising this same question for centuries (Thomas Jefferson, Noah Webster).
My answer = No.
The international media binds English together through movies / TV / books /
magazines / pop records / business / science / tourism - all these factors act
as a powerful binding influence (on an almost daily basis).
In one evening a TV viewer can watch
Neighbours from Australia / Cheers from Boston, USA / East Enders from cockney London, England
TV brings into people's homes a variety of vocabulary, accents, and linguistic influences that would have been unimaginable two generations ago.
The Internet and English = more research needed here.
OVERALL CONCLUSION
WORLD TONGUE
"English could probably be classed as the world's unofficial lingua franca".
AG: English no longer belongs to the English. It has evolved a life of its own.
It is now the Universal Tongue of the World.
Continental languages are prevented from being a global language by their
historic, in-built convoluted grammatical structures.
STANDARD ENGLISH
Standard English is in a strong position to be the world tongue. English
vocabulary is more than twice the size of any other language (German next in the
word league) with over one million words and rising and with the capacity to add
many more. These will come not just from foreign words, but also from:
SLANG / SCIENCE / INDUSTRY / CULTURE / etc.
GIVE-and-TAKE LANGUAGE
English sets no strict pre-conditions to the import or export of words.
It is essentially a laissez-faire / free trade philosophy.
With its roots deeply embedded in its historic vernacular soil, it will always
be Devil-may-care in its nature.
ABSORBS / ADOPTS
English easily absorbs foreign words because of more liberal rules of grammar:
NOUNS are not rigidly divided into genders.
NOUNS easily change into VERBS, which in turn easily change into ADJECTIVES and
ADVERBS (e.g. round, set, OK)
ADJECTIVES do not have cases or form plurals.
VERB tenses are simple and easy to understand.
PREFIXES / SUFFIXES highly inter-changeable.
PUNCTUATION open to change (Germans seem to struggle with commas and capitals
all over the place).
The more people that speak English, the simpler it will become in the future.
RULES BROKEN
Even a Paragon of the English-speaking world - Sir Winston Churchill - began his
critical speech to the Empire after the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940 with the
erroneous words:
"This is me, Churchill speaking..."
instead of the correct phrase:
"This is I, Churchill speaking..."(Berlitz.
p.314)
NLP = ENG
THE POWER of the MIND to see things differently requires a fluid flexible
language – and English is ideally suited to that complex need because it is
Happy-go-Lucky in nature.
The two hemispheres (left and right) appeal to the two main levels of English = Logical and Emotional. And these blend together in harmony with Latin and Teutonic roots of the language.
The English language is universal. It reflects the flexibility and imagination
of the human mind. It is a vigorous and volcanic language. Our creative and
chaotic minds cannot be contained by rigid rules and regulations of
gender-governed grammar. Yet the English take English for granted - they fail to
see it as our greatest asset.
English Rules OK!
“CHANGE” is written throughout ENGLISH
- like a stick of Brighton Rock!!