I have a great interest in Language. When I was about ten or eleven years old I decided I would like to increase my vocabulary so each day when I got home from school I would spend ten or twenty minutes with the dictionary. I would randomly choose a page and then with my eyes closed I would point out a word on the page. If the word was new to me, I would memorize the definition and pay close attention to the pronunciation. I repeated this two more times so that I had three new words each day. I would try to use the word in conversation with my family, but that didn't always come to pass, so I would use the words in school with the nuns. I loved to use words that they didn't know, I think in many cases we were both becoming educated. When it came to vocab tests on the "State of Ohio Every Pupil Tests" I was a whiz.
When I went to high school, we had to take Latin as one of our subjects, no one was exempt. From 'amo,amas,amat to translating Caesar, we all studied Latin! Almost every Latin text book had this opinion written in it," Latin is a dead language, as dead as it can be, first it killed the Romans and now it's killing me." I survived it, but not with out struggles. When I was in Rome, Italy a few years ago and walked up the stone paved embankment that Caesar trod to get to the Forum on that fateful ides of March day in Ancient Rome, I wished I had paid more attention during those high school days. A large percentage of our language (English) is derived from the Latin.
I have spent many years studying and teaching Linguistics. Linguistics is the science of language, including phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. When I was introduced to one class as a teacher of Linguistics, one of my students went home and told her parents that she had a new teacher and she was going to teach them about linguine.
English has more words than any other language. The word smiths estimate that there are more than a million words in the English language at this time. That's more than two or three European countries' languages put together. When Julius Caesar landed in Britain nearly two thousand years ago, English did not exist. When Shakespeare wrote his plays nearly a thousand years later, at the end of the sixteenth century, English was the native speech of between five and seven million Englishmen.There were fewer than 50,000 words at that time. Since the first people that landed at Plymouth Rock and established colonies there, were English, it became the language of our country as well.
When you speak English, you speak words from many different languages. Our language is often referred to as a polyglot of languages. It is thought that practically every language of the world has contributed something to English. Latin derivatives are of course the most common and can probably account for about 80% of our words but many of our everyday words are derived from the Greek, French, Native American, Spanish, German, Italian, African, Czech, Chinese, and Japanese to name just a few.
The first Anglo-Saxons were illiterate. The present generation of English users have more ways to write and record it than ever before. But alas! I am very concerned about the careless use and abuse of the language that is taking place today. The world of technology has ushered in an abomination of language usage. Grammar is totally ignored by many of the Tweeters, and Face Bookers, correct spelling has fallen by the wayside. We have over a million words, as I stated earlier, but we are reduced to using the symbol of a heart to express our love, emoticons to express our feelings, and abbreviated wrds to x-prs r thts. Oh,my.
We talk, write ,and discuss at length, the progress of our students and the quality of education they are getting. We've spent millions on testing materials through the years to make our judgements, but the students still say,"Me and him... Him and her... 'should have went... we are done... vee-hick-el... his pit-cher is in the paper...we was... How could our children spend 12 years in schools and not be able to speak grammatically correct sentences? Is English becoming a dead language? Are our kids killing English or is English killing our kids?
What is the future of the English Language? Do the changes in the English Language among the young, mean corruption and deterioration of the language? Will we still have those among us that can weave some of the million words, that we have to choose from, into lasting works of poetry, and writings that inspire, soothe, comfort, amuse ,entertain, or teach us? I hope the changes in language can revitalize it while helping us keep the beauty of the words that we now enjoy.Ciao.
ciao
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