Well, hello everybody and welcome to this talk about the English language. Let me begin by making a statement, which I’ll then try to defend with evidence and examples. My opening statement is: the English language is a thief. It steals words — the polite term is loan words — from other languages, and this is one reason why it has the largest lexicon of all languages — about 700,000 different items and growing by the day. English takes words from almost anywhere — shampoo from the Hindi language of India, caucus from the Algonquin Indian language of North America, ketchup from Chinese, potato from the Haitian language, sofa from Arabic, and boondocks from the Tagalog language of the Philippines. 

 It’s interesting to note that apart from Hindi — like English a branch of the Indo-European family of languages — the other languages I have just mentioned all belong to very different groupings. Chinese, for example, belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family and is itself split into many regional dialects — of which Putonghua and Cantonese are just two examples. As English is a Germanic language — strictly speaking (along with Dutch) a dialect of German and developed from the language of the Germanic Anglo-Saxon people who colonized England from the fifth century — it has borrowed many words from the German language. Among these are kindergarten and hinterland.

Key words:

hinterland: an area that is a long way from a town or city

 Latin has given a great deal to English. The words jaunty, gentle, gentleman, and genteel all come from the Latin gentilis. Quiet, sordid and entirety come from the Latin quietus, sordere and integritas respectively. One Latin word, discus, has given English at least four separate words: disk, disc, dish and desk. More than half of all words adopted into English from Latin now have meanings quite different from their original ones. A word that shows just how great these changes can be is nice, which is first recorded in the fourteenth century with the meaning of “stupid” or “foolish.” Then the word came to be associated with extravagance. In the fifteenth century its meaning was similar to shyness, while a hundred years later it meant “fastidious.” Actually, nice today describes someone or something pleasant but perhaps a little boring.

Key words:

jauty: lively and confident

genteel: typical of polite well-educated people

sordid: immoral, dishonest, and unpleasant

 Apart from other languages, influential individuals, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, made great contributions to the lexicon. Consider the words that William Shakespeare alone invented: critical, monumental, majestic, frugal, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, hurry, lonely, and summit and 1,690 others. How would we manage without them? He might well have created even more but he had to make sure audiences could understand or infer the meanings of his new words.

Key Words:

dwindle: to become gradually less or smaller over time until almost nothing remains

  Shakespeare, then, was at the centre of the linguistic creativity of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he was by no means the only influential contributor to the lexicon. Ben Jonson, for example, gave the language damp, defunct, clumsy, and strenuous among many other useful terms. Isaac Newton coined centrifugal and centripetal. Sir Thomas More came up with absurdity, acceptance, exact, explain, and exaggerate. The classical scholar Sir Thomas Elyot fathered, among others, animate, exhaust, and modesty. More recently, but still a long time ago, Samuel Coleridge produced intensify, Jeremy Bentham produced international and Thomas Carlyle gave us decadent and environment. George Bernard Shaw invented the “modern” term superman about a hundred years ago!

Key Words:

defunct: not existing or working any more

centrifugal: moving away from the centre

centripetal: moving towards the centre

absurdity: unreasonableness or stupidity

decadent: involving pleasure that is considered immoral

  English not only borrows and allows the creation of new words — coinages to give the new creations their correct name — it can also manipulate the forms of words. Prefixes and suffixes are good examples of this manipulation. English has more than a hundred common prefixes and suffixes, e.g. -able, -ness, -ment, pre-, dis-, anti-, etc. and with this transformative capacity, it can form and reform words with an ease that yet again sets it apart from other languages. For example, we can take the French word mutin (rebellion against authority) and turn it into mutiny (noun: the act of mutiny), mutinous (adjective), mutinously (adverb), mutineer (noun: person involved in a mutiny), while the French have still just the one form of the word, mutin.

Key Words:

manipulate: to influence someone or control something in a clever way

  But this flexibility also promotes confusion among learners. English has at least eight ways of expressing negation with prefixes: a-, anti-, in-, il-, im-, ir-, un-, and non-. It is arguable whether this is a sign of variety or just a lack of systematicity. It can be very frustrating for foreign students to learn that a thing that cannot be seen is not unvisible, but invisible, while something that cannot be reversed is not inreversible but irreversible and that a thing not possible is not nonpossible or antipossible but impossible. 

 Students must also learn not to make the mistake of assuming that because a word contains a negative suffix or prefix it is necessarily a negative word. In-, for instance, almost always implies negation but not with invaluable, while -less is equally negative, as a rule, but not with priceless. The confusion increases when we consider that two different forms may mean exactly the same thing: flammable and inflammable, for example. 

 Some suffixes are quite rare. If you think of angry and hungry, you might conclude that -gry is a common ending, but in fact it occurs in no other common words in English. Similarly -dous appears in only stupendous, horrendous, tremendous, and hazardous, while -lock survives only in wedlock and warlock, and -red only in hatred and kindred. Forgiveness is the only example of a verb with the suffix -ness form in the whole language. Why certain forms like -ish, -ness, -ful, and -some should continue to exist while others like -lock and -gry that were once equally popular should fall into disuse is a question without a good answer. 

  Some prefixes and suffixes have been saved from extinction: the suffix -dom was long in danger of disappearing, except in a few established words like kingdom, but it has returned to give us modern word forms such as officialdom, boredom and stardom. Another thriving suffix is -en. It is today one of the most versatile ways we have of forming verbs from adjectives (harden, loosen, sweeten, etc.) and yet almost all such word forms are less than 300 years old. 

Key words:

thriving: very successful

versatile: able to be used in many different ways

 Finally, but no less importantly, English possesses the ability to make new words by fusing compounds — airport, seashore, footwear, wristwatch, landmark, flowerpot, and so on, almost endlessly. All Indo- European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. 

   Well, I hope you found the talk stimulating. Now, are there any questions?