One of the many facets of the recently-imposed third UK lockdown has been a return to home-schooling for my eldest daughter. She is now approaching six, which means a longer attention span and greater comprehension than in previous lockdowns. The school subjects have increased in depth and breadth to fit, meaning she is now knee-deep in something approaching proper maths, while other tasks prompt the investigation of materials (science) and discussion of whether things around us are natural or made by people (geography).
At the moment one subject takes up the most time: English. Together, we write sentences, practise spellings and learn new sounds. Thankfully, the school provides helpful videos to explain how the different sounds combine to form words. This approach, phonics, builds up a bank of sounds that are used to make words. It starts, innocuously enough, with m, a, s and d. Throw in some other friendly letters and you can build words like ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ with ease.
Then, things get more difficult. Should it be a ‘kicking k’ or ‘curly c’? One ‘m’ or two? Why is it ‘circle’ and not ‘sercul.’ Follow the sound chart to its end and you will meet 114 letter combinations. Given that English has only 44 sounds, this seems excessive.
Look at the sentence ‘I tie my kite up high.’ There are five ways to spell the same ‘I’ sound. Score, door, ore, raw and Audrey all share the same vowel sound but look different. Then we come to the incredible ‘ough,’ which crops up in cough, rough, through, bough and though. Four letters, five different sounds. There is a reason we spend so much time teaching this ridiculous language!
English is a Western Germanic language. Its story starts with the Angles, who came to the British Isles from the European mainland in around 400 AD. Their dialect became widely spoken as what is now called Old English, before the arrival of the Normans in 1066.
The Normans introduced a wealth of Romance (Latin) vocabulary to English, leading to the development of Middle English. It is at this point that the irregular spellings started to creep in, as the Angles and Normans hadn’t swapped notes on which letters made which sounds. We got duplicate spellings for the same sounds and different sounds for the same spellings. For example, the English ‘circle’ has the soft c because it came to England as the Old Norman ‘cercle,’ itself from the Latin ‘circus’ (ring).
The arrival of the Normans also explains why English seems to have too many words, more in fact than any other langauge. This is partly because, rather than replacing the older Germanic words, the French words were used in parallel. This was aided by the fact that only the high and mighty would use French, while the great unwashed stuck with what they knew. Most famously, this explains why a cow is a cow when it is raised by the poor old farmer, but transforms into beef (boeuf) by the time it is served at the nobleman’s table.
Over time the languages mixed into the early Modern English of Shakespeare, but the duplication was retained. Today, you can buy something or purchase it, want something or desire it, start something or commence it, eat something or consume it. Then, just as the printing press was hitting its stride, English spontaneously embarked on a ‘Great Vowel Shift,’ changing the pronunciation of the long vowels. The result? A huge disconnect between the spellings of words that had become standardised by the press and how they were actually spoken. New words were then added on top of all this, creating a truly unique mish mash, indeed one you think would die a rapid death.
However, its spread via the British Empire and the rise of the United States in the 1800s and 1900s respectively meant that English did the exact opposite. In the 21st Century it is more varied than ever before, with at least 160 distinct dialects and thousands of accents to choose from, from Johannesburg to Jamaica, Glasgow to Gibralta and Liverpool to Los Angeles. The unique use of both Romance and Germanic vocabulary in English allows speakers of these languages to rapidly gain a foothold, while (over)exposure and forgiving grammar (including the absence of gendered nouns) help others find a way in. Today, English remains the main language of international business, aviation and even the EU, despite the UK now having completed its Brexit.
However, despite its 1.2 billion speakers, English is the first language of only around 400 million. So, can it retain its position as the world’s favourite language, or will it split into new ones? This appears to already be happening, with hybrid forms such as Hinglish in India, Spanglish in the US and Chinglish in China. Soon, these may become mutually unintelligible, i.e. different languages altogether. At this point, my daughter may find that she has to learn English all over again...this time as a foreign language!
