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ENGLISH AND HOW IT GOT THAT WAY

'A vISuAL, vErbAL, AND INTELLEcTuAL DELIGHT.' STEvEN PINkErProfessor, Harvard University, and author of The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, and The Stuff of Thought.

Purchased by virojana tantibadaro, [email protected] #7051156 Downloaded for Free from http://EnglishOutThere.com - English speaking practice courses that work and cost from just 8 UK pence per hour!

FOR WANT OF A BETTER WORD


Copyright © 2008 Jaime Diskin and Jae Morrison.

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Languages Out There.

The right of Jaime Diskin to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by him in accordance with the copyright, designs and patents act 1988.

Design & Illustrations by Jae Morrison. Photography by Elliot Muir, Alun John and Getty Images.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electric, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-7528-8306-8

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Wyvern.


For a language that boasts the largest number of speakers in the world, it turns out there’s a lot of English that isn’t actually English at all.

English has a long tradition of borrowing words from other languages.

The word “Tradition” is Latin. The word “Language” is French. The word “Word” is German.

Tellingly, the word “Borrow” is quintessentially English.

Studies suggest that almost a third of our vocabulary comes from French, another third from German and almost a quarter from Latin.

And that’s not including the myriad of words from other cultures.

Tea is a Chinese Word. Crumpet is Irish. Cricket is French. Mash is Swedish.

And as for the phrase, “God Save The King”,the only word that can be reliably traced back to Old English, is the word, “the”.

So if English is already full of foreign languages, why do people find it so difficult to learn?


Part of the difficulty with learning English is our penchant for words that are pronounced or spelt the same, but have very different meanings.

They’re called homonyms and English is full of them.

English is the only language in the world in which you can use polish to polish something Polish.

The best way to remove dust from something is to dust it

Farmers produce produce A heroine can use heroin Chaps wear chaps.

There’s no time like the present to present a present to someone, (as long as they’re present)

You can draw curtains with a pencil. You can draw curtains with a drawstring.

It’s the only language where you can snap something together, then snap it apart.

Or watch someone wind a watch in the wind.

And for students who have just come to the language, this is just the first in a long line of quirks that makes English not only funny (ha-ha), but also downright funny (peculiar).


English has a maddening habit of pronouncing words with only a scant regard for their spelling.

Take the word ‘Colonel’ for example.

It clearly contains no R, and yet we pretend it does.

In English, words that bear almost no similarity in spelling are virtually identical when spoken.

The word ‘Meat’ is pronounced the same as the word ‘Suite’. ‘Straight’ rhymes with ‘Great’. ‘Threat’ with ‘Debt’.

Conversely, words that appear almost identical are pronounced as though they’re not even distantly related to one another.

How do you explain to someone that the word ‘Rough’ sounds like ‘Tough’ but not ‘Dough’ or ‘Cough’ or ‘Plough’ or ‘Through’?

Or that, despite sharing all but one letter, the words ‘Low’, ‘Paid’ and ‘Heard’ sound almost nothing like the words ‘How’, ‘Said’ and ‘Beard’?


George Bernard Shaw once noted that the word “fish” could easily (and preposterously) be spelled “ghoti” under the existing system of English spelling:

“gh” for f, as in tough, “o” for i as in women, and “ti” for sh as in motion.


There are 42 different sounds in the English language more than any other language on earth.

And in our inexhaustable capacity for complicating things, we have invented over 400 ways to spell them.

The sh shound, for instance, has 19 spellings, including ss in issue,

sc in crescendo, ch in chute, ce in ocean,

and a single t in negotiate.

These spelling patterns are governed by more than 650 rules that often contradict each other or worse yet,

simply don’t work.


Along with a logic defying system of pronunciation, English also adds “Silent Letters” to the mix.

A silent letter is a letter you have to write, but aren’t allowed to read. And English is curiously laden with these things.

We don’t pronounce the A in Aisle or the B in Crumb.

In the word “Lincoln”, you sound out the first L but not the second, while in the word “Mnemonic”, you sound the second M but not the first.

Some words may have whole syllables that aren’t pronounced and may even be left out in writing. Contemporary is often pronounced and spelled contempory; itinerary is similar.

The English village “Cholmondeley” contains a mind-boggling five silent letters It is pronounced “Chum-ley”, though almost half of it remains invisible to the ear.

And there are no rules to any of it.

You just have to memorise which words have silent letters, and then pretend they don’t exist.


The Mad Scribblings of Bishop Robert Lowth

In the Summer of 1762, Robert Lowth, an Anglican Bishop and amateur grammarian did something no one had done before.

He wrote a book about the English language.

It was called "A Short Introduction to English Grammar" and it enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life.

As the first, (and importantly, the only) English textbook of its time, Lowth's stylistic opinions acquired the force of law in the classroom.

As a result, English is now saddled with a mass of unfounded grammar myths such as "Never start a sentence with a conjunction", "Never end a sentence with a preposition, "Never split an infinitive" and a host of other dubious strictures that most writers no longer put up with.

Or rather, "up with which, most writers no longer put."

Much of the book's problems stem from the unusual idea that the rules of grammar for English should be based on the rules of grammar for Latin.

Which, to paraphrase Bill Bryson, is a little like asking someone to play tennis using the rules of medieval jousting.

Armed with this book and a virtually limitless amount of ego, Bishop Lowth set out to "correct" some of the greatest works of English literature.

He edited false syntax from the poetry of William Shakespeare and John Milton, removed passive verbs from the writings of Jonathon Swift and, rather breathtakingly for a clergyman, corrected the sentence structure of The King James Bible. Thankfully, he died in 1787.

So the next time you feel insecure about the correctness of your English, take heart. You're not the only one.

Thanks to Robert Lowth's unshakable faith in the Latin-ness of English, at times we can all feel a little as though we're speaking a foreign tongue.


Certain words follow one another for no other reason than because that’s what they do.

We may speak of a matter being “black and white”, but not “white and black”.

A house can be "spick and span” but not span and spick.

Similarly, you would never search every cranny and nook, listen to roll ‘n rock get the whole caboodle and kit. consider the cons and pros or fall heels over head in love.

And there are no rules to define these combinations. Words just seem to glue themselves together and stay that way.


When it's not raining cats and dogs, it's dry as a bone.

English is an idiomatic language, which is to say it uses colloquial metaphors that can't be deciphered from their literal meaning.

This is a fancy way of saying that most of what we say doesn't make a lot sense.

People can say they feel, "under the weather" or "as right as rain". You can describe someone as having a "sunny disposition" or being in a "stormy relationship" and none of it has anything to do with rain or sun or storms or weather.

In fact, some idioms are so confusing we no longer know where they came from. Theories abound over the etymology of the phrase, "Rule of thumb", but the truth is, we simply don't know where it comes from or why we ever started saying it.

Taken this way, English can seem about as crazy as a coconut.


You may not think of yourself in these terms, but the truth is, you're an expert on one of the world's most notoriously difficult languages.

You speak and hopefully read it everyday.

You talk with other English users without effort.

You organise your thoughts and ideas in English.

You probably even dream in English.

To new learners, English is an impossibly difficult language.

To you, it is a simple, uncomplicated thing that you use, almost without thinking. In fact, if you've made it this far, chances are you actually like the quirks and eccentricities of English.

You are the Sultan of Speech.

The da Vinci of Dialect.

Lord of the Language.

Which is why we would like to hear from you.


The book you've just read was produced by a small company called Languages Out There. They teach English in a very interesting way.

Rather than teach from a book, the course teaches students a little grammar and a little vocabulary and then takes them outside the classroom and into the real world.

It puts language students into conversations with regular English speakers. So they learn to speak English the same way you did.

From other people.

What this means is if you're reasonably proficient at English, ( which by getting this far is a good bet ), you can also help teach it. Languages Out There can help you meet new people, learn about other cultures. What's more, they'll even pay you for it.

So if you think you might be interested in teaching English or in talking with language students online or in person, please contact Jason West at www.languagesoutthere.com and help teach someone the wonderful, maddening, melodic mishmash that is, for want of a better word, English.

www.languagesoutthere.com


English is a wonderful language. It’s also notoriously difficult to learn.

How do you make sense of a language in which you can think green, see red, feel blue and go grey all at the same time?

Where farmers produce produce and chaps wear chaps?

With warm wit and a remarkable visual style, For want of a better word celebrates the quirks and eccentricities of the world’s most popular language and proves that while it may be difficult to learn, you can find an expert almost anywhere.

Even a bookstore.


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