Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [41]
At the same time, English’s chief rival and predecessor in the lingua franca business has steadily been losing stature. In 2009, the European Commission reported that the percentage of its documents drafted in French had decreased from 40 percent in 1997 to only 11 percent. In response, Michel Serres, a French author, quipped, “There are more English words on the walls of Paris than German words under the Occupation.”
GREEK AND LATIN ROOTS
Europeans should welcome English as a family member. Their ancestors contributed greatly to its formation over the centuries. Today’s English is an amalgam of almost every earlier language of the Western world going back to Greek and Latin and the Indo-European languages that preceded them. Many of these early roots have bubbled up the language chain to attain their present forms in dictionaries.
Latin words include animal, animosity, audacious, bonus, calculus, conjugal, diary, disciple, domain, effort, feminine, final, fortune, judge, lunar, marine, matron, maximum, pedestrian, pessimist, rural, suburb, and village.
Greek words in English include the following, starting only with the letter a: abyss, academy, acme, acoustic, aerobic, agnostic, agonize, allegory, anchor, anemia, angel, angina, angle, apathy, arial, and athlete.
When I asked John Robertson, who runs the wordinfo.info website featuring Latin–Greek cross-references, if he had ever compiled a list of English words with Latin or Greek roots in a specific dictionary, he replied, “So many new words are being created in our modern times from those two sources that no one can keep up with the new entries.”
THE FRENCH CONNECTION
Outside of the basic Greek-Latin inheritance, French has had the next biggest influence on English. That is mostly because of the Norman invasion of England in 1066 and the subsequent control of that nation’s governing powers for nearly three centuries. As many as 30 percent of today’s English words are of French origin.
Some common examples in English are ballet, blasé, brunette, bureau, café, chauffeur, cliché, communiqué, critique, en route, entrée, gaffe, liaison, omelet, sabotage, silhouette, and unique.
During the period under French control in England, country folk tended to speak a mixture of French and English called Anglo-Norman, while city folk spoke mostly French. The turning point was the devastating Black Death in 1348–1350. It tended to kill off more city folks than country ones, thus making the latter, who spoke rudimentary English, especially influential in lifting English into the dominant role.
Since then, French authorities seem to have been burning because of their failure to win the language war in Britain. Led by the forty immortels, the French Academy has been fighting—and losing—a guerilla war of tongues much of the time since Cardinal Richelieu established it in 1635.
The standard-setting group requires all companies operating in France to communicate with employees in French. It also bans certain non-French words from being used by the media and other elements of society. It even sets the percentage of broadcast music that must be in French. The latest requirement is 40 percent.
One of the fiercest fighters for the fading glory of la langue français has been Helene Carrere d’Encausse, the first female permanent secretary of the academy. In 2002, she delivered a formal speech vigorously defending French and decrying the many “anglicisms that make proper French words die.” She noted sadly that the best French is now spoken in Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Dakar, and other distant iles de France. She ended by saying that French is taught in 118 countries, all of which consider it a “superior language.”
Former premier Jacques Chirac agrees. In 2006, a “deeply shocked” Chirac stormed out of an EU summit in protest when a French businessman addressed the delegates in English. This was the same Chirac who had reportedly used diplomatic