Assets of the English

Language
 Worldwide Importance
 Immense Cosmopolitan Vocabulary
 Inflectional Simplicity
 Natural Gender
 Analytical Syntax
 Fixed Word Order
 Fixed Stress
 Worldwide Importance
 Mandarin Chinese with nearly a billion
speakers is numerically the first of the
world’s tongues.
 While Chinese is concentrated in central
Asia, English is spoken around the globe.
 Over a billion people use English either as a
first or second language
 Worldwide Importance
 70% of the world’s mail addressed in
English
 100% of communication of world’s airports
carried on in English
 After 1962 when China expelled Soviet
engineers,China’s second language became
English
 Immense Cosmopolitan
Vocabulary
 Anglo Saxon did not have over 100,000
words
 Most comprehensive dictionaries of Modern
English place the vocabulary at 1,000,000
words
 Today some estimates place the total
vocabulary at 5,000,000 words
 Sources of Vocabulary
 Victorian Expansion-Australia-boomerang South
Africa- khaki
 Science and technology- download,interface
 War-stockpile,escalate
 Invasion of Danes-sky Invasion of Normans
plaintiff
 Missionary activities of Pope Gregory-vespers
 Laissez faire adoption-chic,savoire fairre
 Three layers of Synonyms
 Nixon quits-Anglo -Saxon
 Nixon resigns -Norman French
 Nixon abdicates- Latin
 The Senate asks Haldemann-Anglo-Saxon
 The Senate questions Haldemann-French
 The Senate interrogates Haldemann- Latin
 Inflectional Simplicity
 affixes or endings added to a stem word
which changes the meaning or form of that
word
 In Latin -Puella Agricolam Amat
 In English - Girl Farmer love
 The ambiguity can be cleared by adjusting
the word order: Girl love farmer
 Natural Gender
 All Indo-European languages other than
English arbitrarily divide words into
Masculine,feminine,and neuter
 German-Der Bleistift The pencil
(masculine) Die Feder -The pen (feminine)
 Spanish- El Camino The road (masculine)
La Mesa The table (feminine)
 Old English had Grammatical
Gender
 Old English  Modern English
 Se Mann (Masc.)  The man
 Seo Hlaefdige (Fem.)  The woman (or lady)
 aet Maegden (Neut)  The girl (or maiden)
 Liabilities of the English
Language
 Idioms- expressions which cannot be
comprehended (or translated) by knowing
the individual lexical units
 Orthography- the written symbols don’t
correspond with speech
 Troublesome Idioms
 I’m not going to stand for that
 Be here in nothing flat
 Sitting in the dark
 By and large
 Piece of cake
 Bark up the wrong tree
 Beating around the bush
 Verb particles
 Make out  Sleeping in
 Make up  Sleeping out
 Live up  Sleeping it off
 Live down
 Be careful how you live it up
tonight or you won’t be able to
live it down tomorrow
 English Spelling Worst in
World
 English spelling is only 60% phonemic
 It is 40% Non-phonemic
 GHOTI -Fish
 gh from rough
 o from women
 t from nation
One Phoneme is represented
by different spellings
 grieve  /i/
 deceive
 mean
 machine
 he
Same spelling represented by
different phonemes
 /i/  beak
 /e/  break
 //  bread