The Adventure of English

Sanskrit is certainly one of the older attested members of the family of languages out of which come all the languages of Europe (save Basque, Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian) and many in Asia. Sanskrit was an inflected language which relied on changes at the ends of words (inflections) to indicate grammatical functions in nouns (through case and number) and verbs (through person, tense and mood)

The way in which a few tribal and local Germanic dialects spoken by a hundred fifty thousand people grew into the English language spoken and understood by about one and a half billion people has all the characteristics of a tremendous adventure

But English was too smart to be pinned down, even by the English

Phrases once thought of as translations from Indian languages — “How?” for “hello,”

When, at the end of the eighteenth century, the astronomer William Herschel discovered a new planet, he had to find a name. But what do you call a new planet? He wanted to call it “George’s Planet” after King George. That however was considered rather too vulgar . . . they worried that the French wouldn’t like it very much if a whole planet was called after England. So in the end they Latinised it and called it “Uranus” instead..

This magnificent fertility of English spelling was everywhere. There were over five hundred ways of spelling the word “through” and over sixty of the pronoun “she,” which is quite hard to imagine.

We use them still: “scapegoat,” “let there be light,” “the powers that be,” “my brother’s keeper,” “filthy lucre,” “fight the good fight,” “sick unto death,” “flowing with milk and honey,” “the apple of his eye,” “a man after his own heart,” “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” “signs of the times,” “ye of little faith,” “eat, drink and be merry,” “broken-hearted,” “clear-eyed.”

New words are new worlds.

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