The Mother Tongue: English And How It Got That Way Quotes
"More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to."
"English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner."
"Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled."
"One of the beauties of the English language is that with even the most tenuous grasp you can speak volumes if you show enough enthusiasm."
"For non-English speakers everywhere, English has become the common tongue."
"English is, in short, one of the world’s great growth industries."
"The richness of the English vocabulary means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers."
"English is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus."
"English also has a distinctive capacity to extract maximum work from a word by making it do double duty as both noun and verb."
"But perhaps the single most notable characteristic of English—for better and worse—is its deceptive complexity."
"In many countries, people use one language for some activities and a second language for others."
"Language is often an emotive issue and has brought down many governments."
"People can feel incredibly strongly about these matters."
"The situation is so hair-triggered that when a French-speaking group of villages in Flanders known as the Fourons elected a French-speaking mayor who refused to conduct his duties in Dutch, the national government was brought down twice."
"All the evidence suggests that minority languages shrink or thrive at their own ineluctable rate."
"We naturally lament the decline of these languages, but it is not an altogether undiluted tragedy."
"This singular lack of linguistic influence is all the more surprising when you consider that the Anglo-Saxons had freely, and indeed gratefully, borrowed vocabulary from the Romans on the continent before coming to the British Isles."
"It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world."
"We feel more at ease getting a hearty welcome than after being granted a cordial reception."
"We can distinguish between house and home (as, for instance, the French cannot), between continual and continuous, sensual and sensuous, forceful and forcible, childish and childlike, masterful and masterly, assignment and assignation, informant and informer."
"The rise of the progressive verb form has significantly altered how we express continuous actions, a change that Shakespeare himself would not have recognized in his language."
"English was still considered a second-rate language during its greatest flowering, with many seminal works in science and philosophy being published in Latin."
"The English language's capacity for creating new words is unparalleled, allowing for a rich variety of expressions to suit every level of our culture: popular, literary, and scholarly."
"Despite the abundance of words at our disposal, English speakers show a peculiar affection for redundant phrases, underlining the language's penchant for verbosity."
"The phenomenon of polysemy, where a single word carries a multitude of meanings, adds a layer of complexity and richness to English, unparalleled by many other languages."
"The creation of new words through various means—error, borrowing, invention, and evolution—keeps the English language vibrant and continually adapting."
"English's adoption and adaptation of words from an array of languages underscore its eclectic nature, making it a linguistic tapestry woven from global threads."
"The shifts in pronunciation over centuries, particularly during the Great Vowel Shift, highlight the dynamic and evolving nature of English, constantly reshaping itself across generations."
"Our ability to communicate with such rapidity and subtlety, shaping air into a myriad of sounds to express a vast range of meanings, is a testament to the complexity and beauty of spoken English."
"Before the shift house was pronounced 'hoose' (it still is in Scotland), mode was pronounced 'mood,' and home rhymed with 'gloom,' which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday."
"It is from misspellings in letters of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that we can be pretty certain that boiled was pronounced byled, that join was gine, that merchant was marchant, and so on."
"Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling, and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines."
"People say things sometimes because they are easier or more sensible, but sometimes simply because that’s the way everyone else is saying them."
"In America, a case is sometimes made to consider Cajun a separate tongue."
"Gullah is as capable of poetry and beauty as any other language."
"We have some forty sounds in English, but more than 200 ways of spelling them."
"Some people contend that English orthography is not as bad as all that—that it even has some strengths."
"English preserves the spelling of borrowed words, so that people of many nations are immediately aware of the meanings of thousands of words which would be unrecognizable if written phonetically."
"A mere 3 percent of our words may be orthographically troublesome, but they include some doozies."
"The absence of a central authority for the English language for three centuries meant that dialects prospered and multiplied."
"English spelling has caused problems for about as long as there have been English words to spell."
"The printing press brought a much-needed measure of uniformity to English spelling."
"Many words have shed a pointless final e—deposite, fossile, and secretariate, for instance."
"We need just five inflections to deal with the act of propelling a car—drive, drives, drove, driving, and driven."
"What is less often noticed is that spelling reform has been quietly going on for centuries, in a small but not insignificant way, and without the benefit of any outside agencies."
"So while spelling reform has exercised some of our finest minds for nearly two centuries, the changes attributable to these efforts have generally been few and frequently short-lived."
"What is certain is that the number of words we use is very much smaller than the number of words we know."
"By virtue of their brevity, dictionary definitions often fail to convey the nuances of English."
"In short, dictionaries may be said to contain a certain number of definitions, but the true number of meanings contained in those definitions will always be much higher."
"English is changing all the time and at an increasingly dizzy pace."
"No dictionary of a living tongue can ever be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some are fading away."
"The English-speaking world has the finest dictionaries, a somewhat curious fact when you consider that we have never formalized the business of compiling them."
"The first American pilgrims happened to live in the midst of perhaps the most exciting period in the history of the English language—a time when 12,000 words were being added to the language and revolutionary activities were taking place in almost every realm of human endeavor."
"Although the residents of the New World began perforce to use new words almost from the first day they stepped ashore, it isn’t at all clear when they began pronouncing them in a distinctively American way."
"America also introduced many words and expressions that never existed in Britain, but which have for the most part settled comfortably into domestic life there."
"It is an arresting irony that the more dismissive they grow of American usages, the more lavishly they borrow them."
"People don’t often appreciate just how much movies and television have smoothed the differences between British and American English."
"It can take years for an American to master the intricacies of British idiom, and vice versa."
"Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity."
"In common speech, some 4,000 words are used differently in one country from the other."
"It would be ironic indeed if the millions of children in Germany, Japan, and China who are diligently learning the language of Shakespeare and Eliot took more care in their use of English and showed more pride in their achievement than those for whom it is the native tongue."
"We might sometimes wonder if we are the most responsible custodians of our own tongue."
"Many, perhaps most, immigrants to America modified their names in some way to accommodate American spellings and phonics."
"It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the British have such distinctive place-names not because they just accidentally evolved, but rather because the British secretly like living in places with names like Lower Slaughter and Great Snoring."
"Over time most names have been variously battered and knocked about."
"This is often most vividly demonstrated in place-names."
"The names of countries are even more at variance with their English versions."
"Sometimes the names we use are simply imposed by outsiders with scant regard for local nomenclature."
"Names are in the most literal sense big business."
"Wordplay is as old as language itself, and about as various."
"A good palindrome is an exceedingly rare thing."
"The varieties of wordplay available in English are almost without number."
"We may not have holorimes in English, but we do have tricks that the French don’t have."
"Named after their deviser, one E. Clerihew Bentley, they are pithy poems that always start with someone’s name and purport, in just four lines, to convey the salient facts of the subject’s life."
"To wit: Sir Humphry Davy / Detested gravy. / He lived in the odium / Of having invented sodium."
"A peach / looks good / with lots of fuzz / but man’s no peach / and never was."
"Don’t take a curve / at 60 per. / We hate to lose / a customer."
"If wifie shuns / your fond embrace / don’t shoot / the iceman / feel your face."
"No literature in the world abounds as English does in characters made ridiculous to the reader by the manner in which they misapply or distort ‘big’ words."
"You have hissed my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. You will leave Oxford on the next town drain."
"Customers who think our waiters are rude should see the manager."
"Thank you so much for the book. I shall lose no time in reading it."
"Your work is both good and original. Unfortunately, the parts that are good aren’t original, and the parts that are original aren’t good."
"A hardworking German named Otto inspired the term otting for diligent work."
"A heavy rain was a trashlifter and a really heavy rain was a loglifter."
"The television stations alone generated nearly $300 million in Spanish-language advertising in 1987."
"Do come to dinner tonight to meet our new Fellow, Casson."
"You just hope I’ll say one of those… things."
"The English language needs official protection about as much as the Boston Celtics need elevator shoes."
"But I also want to have—be the President that protects the rights of, of people to, to have arms."
"Your family, my family—which is composed of an immediate family of a wife and three children, a larger family with grandparents and aunts and uncles."