2.3   General Characteristics

The English language enjoys the largest number of speakers in the world, just under Chinese, for historical, political and economic reasons. This world-wide appeal of the language is due to the qualities and characteristics inherent(内在的)in itself. The more obvious and striking features are summed up by Wrenn in his book, The English Language.

 

     1. Receptivity, Adaptability and Heterogeneity

    English has always had the ease and readiness to take to itself material from all other languages and has made the new elements its own. As we have already known, the Anglo-Saxon in the Old English period was almost a 'pure’ language, which created new words from its own compounded elements and had hardly any foreign words. Later on, through its historical development, it became the most heterogeneous (异质性的；多质性的) language, having received all kinds of foreign elements. The copiousness (丰富性) of vocabulary is outstanding, and more striking is its variety and heterogeneousness.

 

      2. Simplicity of Inflection 

    As one scholar notes, Old English was characterized by 'full endings', Middle English by 'leveled endings(词尾平化)', and Modern English by 'lost endings(去词尾化)'. In Old English, which was a synthetic(综合性的) language, the grammatical relationships of words in sentences were indicated by the changes of word endings, which are now reduced to minimum. Compare the following examples:

Old              Middle         Modern

leorn- tan         lern- en         learn

mon-a            mone-e           moon

stan- as           ston-es           stones

sun- ne            sun- ne           sun

Sun-u               sun-e              son

 

   3. Relatively Fixed Word-order

      In an inflected language, the arrangement of words is fairly free, as the inflections show clearly the proper relationship in the sentence, and ambiguity (歧义) is unlikely. But in an analytic language (分析型语言) like Modern English, the word-order is required to be relatively fixed. The semantic relation is closely connected to the positions of the words. The change of word-order may result in a change of meaning. This gives rise to the growth of the use of prepositions and roundabout (迂回的) ways of saying things to take the place of the lost endings. The development of new varieties of intonation to express shades (细微差别) of meaning is another consequence.

 These qualities are not all in themselves good, nor have they all contributed to the general success of English. It seems that the adaptable receptivity (合适的可接受性) and the simplicity of inflection have done most in this regard. On the other hand, the very copiousness and the heterogeneousness of English lead to vagueness or lack of clarity. Its resources are too vast for all but the well educated to use to full advantage. It may fairly be said that English is among the easiest languages to speak badly, but the most difficult to use well.