Anyone know the answer ? This has happened before with another article.
I tried to print this out "as is," standard format with 12 point type,
exactly
as it appears in the e-mail. Instead, the whole thing printed out in
8 point type --except, for the title. Tried to re-reformat with a
fresh e-mail but same results. Why can't I get this to print
in 12 point typeface ? Thanks
Billy
-------------------------------------
( Mysteries of English Language Explained )
The American
Journal of AEI
American Enterprise Institute
English: The Inescapable Language
_By John Steele Gordon_ (http://www.american.com/author_search?Creator=John
Steele Gordon) Thursday, August 18, 2011
Native speakers of English have a great advantage. Learning English at our
mothers’ knee is
almost like being born able to do algebra.
One night years ago when I was visiting Buenos Aires, I had dinner with an
acquaintance. We were speaking in English because he spoke my language far
better than I did his. I apologized for my inadequacy in Spanish and
complimented him on his bilingualism.
He replied, “That’s understandable. After all, English is so easy to learn
and Spanish is very difficult.”
I was stunned. In school, Spanish had been regarded as the gut course among
foreign languages, far easier than French, German, or Latin. And English,
at least among English-speakers, was thought very difficult, with its
irregular spelling and pronunciation given as the usual reason. I have never
tested this hypothesis, but I bet every culture regards its native tongue as
difficult to learn. After all, foreigners always struggle with it, so it
must be difficult, right?
Not necessarily. Most people are oblivious to the oddities and weirdnesses
of their native tongue—as well as its simplicities—for precisely the same
reason that fish are oblivious to water. My Argentinian friend, for
instance, had no idea that Spanish spelling and pronunciation are absolutely
regular. To hear a Spanish word is to know how to spell it and to see one is
to
know how to pronounce it. There are no spelling bees in Spanish-speaking
schools because there are no bad spellers among native speakers of the
language.
So, is English actually hard to learn? Well, yes and no.
Historically, English is one of the Germanic languages but because of its
insular evolution it now bears little resemblance to the other Germanic
languages, such as German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. And while
there is some overlap in vocabulary with French, the two grammars are very
different. Indeed, English grammar is quite unlike any other language in the
world.
That’s the bad news for foreigners. The good news is that basic English
grammar is ridiculously easy to master. In French there are three conjugations
of verbs (the so-called -er, -ir, and -re verbs, after their infinitive
endings). Each conjugation has its own set of endings for each tense and each
mood (such as the indicative and subjunctive). A typical French verb has
more than 50 endings that must be learned. Spanish also has three
conjugations. Portuguese has four, Latin five, German two.
English has only one conjugation. And most of the endings (“inflections”
is the linguistic term) disappeared with the transition from Old English to
Middle English 800 years ago. So a regular English verb has a grand total
of only four forms: walk, walks, walked, and walking. The most irregular
verb in the language, to be, has only eight forms: be, am, is, are, was,
were, being, and been.
And while many other languages, such as French and Spanish, make frequent
use of the subjunctive mood, it has nearly disappeared in English. (The
Rodgers and Hart song “I Wish I Were in Love Again” is the only instance in
popular culture I can think of that uses the subjunctive.) Also vanished is
the second person singular (thee and thou), which in many other languages is
booby-trapped with social nuance.
Even English irregular verbs are simple. They all come from Old English
and, except for to be and to have, are all irregular in the same way: they
change the radical to express the past and perfect tenses. Thus swim, swam,
swum. (There’s one verb in English that is either regular or irregular
depending on the subject of the sentence. People are hanged, but other things
are
hung.) All the irregular forms of all the irregular verbs in English can
be listed on less than a page of a paperback dictionary. It takes 16 pages
to do that with Spanish irregular verbs.
English nouns are equally easy to deal with. They have no gender, for
instance. French nouns, however, are all either masculine or feminine. And
while there are a few helpful rules (French nouns ending in -tion are almost
always feminine, those that end in -eau are almost always masculine) most of
the time the student of French simply has to memorize which gender a French
noun belongs to, and it is maddeningly arbitrary. You might think that the
French words for army and navy would be masculine, but you’d be wrong. A
few French nouns, amour, for instance, are masculine in the singular and
feminine in the plural.
German and Latin divide nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter with an
equal arbitrariness. The German words for knife, fork, and spoon are,
respectively, neuter, feminine, and masculine. In these languages adjectives
must agree with the noun they modify in both gender and number. English
adjectives are invariable.
And let’s not even get into Latin nouns, which have endings to mark what
part of speech they are being used as (and are divided into no fewer than
five different groups, called “declensions,” each with its own set of
endings.)
Some languages, but not English, have very different written and spoken
forms. French has a past tense that is only written, not spoken, while casual
spoken German and Greek are practically different languages from the formal
written versions of those tongues.
.
But English, of course, while known to linguists as the “grammarless
language,” is hardly without its difficulties for foreigners. English spelling
and pronunciation are, unlike Spanish, not well coordinated.
There are three reasons for this. One is that English has a lot of phonemes
(the individual sounds that make up a language), and especially a lot of
different vowel sounds. Spanish has only five vowel sounds, one for each
vowel letter. English, depending on the dialect, has at least twelve, plus
diphthongs and even triphthongs. Another reason is that English just doesn’t
like diacriticals (accent marks and such) that many languages use to
indicate differences in the pronunciation of a letter.
Finally, English is orthographically conservative. When a word is borrowed
into English, we tend to maintain the spelling of the foreign word even as
we adapt the pronunciation to the English sound structure. We borrowed two
Greek words to coin photography and we still spell it in the Greek
fashion. In Spanish, they quite sensibly spell it fotografia.
But the lack of coordination between sound and spelling is no worse than,
say, French, with its myriad silent consonants and functionless accent
marks. For example, the circumflex accent in French, such as in hôtel, doesn’t
affect the word’s pronunciation. Indeed, all it tells the reader is that the
vowel used to be followed by an unpronounced S, an S that was dropped—
because it was silent—300 years ago, when French spelling was reformed. The
circumflex was then added to the preceding vowel to let the reader know the S
used to be there, as if the reader cared. This is known as French logic.
An even bigger problem with English for foreigners is the fact that its
everyday vocabulary is so immense, thanks to the many languages that
contributed to it over the 1,500 years of its existence. The average speaker
of
English has a vocabulary with about half again as many words as the average
speaker of, say, French or German. English abounds in synonyms, each with its
own slightly different nuance or meaning. That’s why the thesaurus and the
dictionary of synonyms are standard reference works in English but seldom
found in other languages. Learning the subtle differences in meaning and
tone between, say, “penniless,” “broke,” and “impecunious,” is, to put it
mildly, a chore for foreigners.
One of the quirks of the English language is that nouns originating from
Anglo-Saxon often have associated adjectives that come from Latin or Greek.
This is especially true of body parts, such as ear-aural, heart-cardiac,
liver-hepatic, etc. While the names of farm animals are usually Old English in
origin, the words for their meat are usually from French. (Possibly, this
is because after the Conquest the English-speaking peasants cared for the
animals, but it was the French-speaking Norman aristocracy who ate them.)
This multiplicity of words even extends to prefixes. To negate an
adjective, for instance, one uses un- (as in uninterested), dis- (dishonest),
in-
(inattentive), or a- (amoral). Which one to use often depends on the
particular word’s etymology, but some words take more than one, producing
thereby
a slight change in meaning (uninterested is not quite the same as
disinterested). Equally often, however, it is arbitrary, just as French gender
is. It
can even vary over time. Jefferson used unalienable in the Declaration of
Independence. Today we say inalienable.
The advantage of the huge vocabulary of English, of course, is that it
makes English a superb literary and scientific language, able to express fine
and precise shades of meaning far more easily than other tongues. This is no
small part of the reason English has become the near universal language of
science. It also makes English more efficient. The English version of a
lengthy text is always substantially shorter than versions in other
languages.
But while English has a very large everyday vocabulary, it also has the
maddening habit of using the same word to mean many different things. Fly, for
instance, means an annoying insect, a part of a pair of trousers, a part
of a theater, a means of locomotion, the outer edge of a flag, a type of hit
in baseball, and a type of hook for catching fish. A flyer can be either
one who flies or a printed advertisement that is handed out. A bill is
everything from the jaws of a bird to an invoice to a piece of legislation
under
consideration to an advertisement that is posted on a wall, not handed
out.
So English has its full share of oddities and complications for the
foreigner, and is as difficult to fully master as any foreign language. But,
thanks to its very simple grammar, it is probably easier to grasp its
rudiments, regardless of the student’s native tongue, than any other language
not
closely related to that native tongue. That’s fortunate, for English is now
inescapable.
In the Western world, Latin was the common language of the educated classes
for centuries, the last, linguistic, remnant of the Roman Empire. Newton
wrote his Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, in Latin, not English.
In the seventeenth century, French took over as the language of diplomacy,
a position it kept until the twentieth.
By the twentieth century, however, English had become the second-most
common native tongue (after only Mandarin Chinese). And it is by far the most
common second language, thanks, initially, to the British Empire and then to
America’s economic and cultural dominance in the post-war world. Thus
English became the world’s new lingua franca (to use an Italian term that
literally means “Frankish language”).
English dominates the Internet. It is the only language used in air traffic
control. It is the overwhelmingly dominant language of science. (Even the
premier French scientific organization, the Institut Pasteur, publishes its
papers in English first and only later in French). Sixty percent of all
students studying a foreign language today are studying English. It’s a
required course in school, starting early on, in an increasing number of
countries.
So we native speakers of English have a great advantage. Learning English
at our mothers’ knee is almost like being born able to do algebra. Those not
so fortunate can still get a handle on it fairly easily, however. That’s
lucky for them because, like it or not, acquiring a competence in English is
now a necessary part of every serious education around the world.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
