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By Root 557 0

there are properties of English that make it the language it is, and no other. Most of these were already present in the sixteenth century. From the perspective of the world’s plenty, it is a language with a very wide range of distinctly different vowels and diphthongs (e.g., in the British standard, mat, met, mitt, motte, mutt, put, mart, mate, meet, might, moat, moot, mute, mouth, moist, as well as mere, mire, flower, more, moor and immure) and relatively more restricted range of consonant sounds (bun, pun, spun, dun, ton, stun, con, gone, scone, chin, gin, Hun, train, drain, son, shin, led, red, bum, bun and bung, with zoom and leisure added later), although these have become more challenging when account is taken of the combinations allowed: consider scrounged, widths, strengths, fifths, sixths, sevenths, eighths, shrinks, mostly, thrust, scripture, contemptibly, constraints, spindly, adze and stupid. Some of the rules of its sound system come as a surprise to native speakers, since they have no role in the spelling, and so are seldom mentioned at school: for example, that the length of the vowels has everything to do with the last consonant in a syllable, and nothing to do with the vowel itself: mat, mace, mitt, right, rot, lout, motes, route, kilt, health and Alf all have short vowels, while mad, maze, mid, ride, rod, loud, modes, rude, killed, delve and pals all have long ones; or that the crucial puff of air that distinguishes, say, pin from bin, and tab from dab, is actually missing in spin and stab—so from a phonetic point of view, they might with more justice be written ’sbin’ and ’sdab’. The stress rules of English are complex (e.g. sweet sixtéen, but síxteen swéet lámbs), but are essential for the understanding of fluent speech; and intonation patterns for whole sentences are also highly various.

The structure of English words is fairly straightforward: the inflexion system of Old English, reminiscent of Latin or Greek, has long been lost, and most words are either simple, or clearly composed of stem with a few prefixes and suffixes.* Irregularity in English grammar mostly concerns the details of how suffixes are applied to particular words (not man+s but men, not strike+d but struck). Main verbs may appear with sequences of smaller verbs called auxiliaries and modals (be, have, do, shall, will, can, may, must), which may be mirrored under rather complex conditions (e.g., He has been taken for a ride, hasn’t he? They have too, haven’t they? but Everybody seems to have, don’t they?) Word order is crucial. In the simple sentence it is fairly rigidly Subject-Verb-Object (You saw a tiger), but a plethora of variations and nuances arise in questions and more complex sentences. Who saw a tiger? is still S-V-O, but then the fun begins: Such a tiger I saw! (O-S-V), Never have I seen such a tiger (Aux-S-V-O), Did you see a tiger? (Aux-S-V-O), What did you see? (O-Aux-S-V), What do you think you saw? (O-Aux-S-V-S-V), What do you think saw you? (S-Aux-S-V-V-O). This juggling with word order, though common in Germanic languages, was beyond the ken of grammar as developed by the Greeks and Romans, and hence as taught in medieval and early modern Europe. In fact, it was only in the 1950s that theoretical linguists found a fitting means to analyse it. Not surprisingly, it was only then that English became the prime subject for theoretical linguistics.

If we compare English to the other languages that have achieved world status, the most similar—as languages—are Chinese and Malay. Of course, we need to discount the main sources of its vocabulary: English has been in close touch all its short life with French and Latin; and since 1500 the education of very many of its elite speakers has involved Greek too. As a result these three languages have provided the vast majority of the words that have come into the language, whether borrowed or invented. But when the origins of its words—and hence their written look on the page—is set to one side, the amazing fact emerges that the closest parallels to English come not from Europe