converted the song âShi-i-Na-Na Ya-Ruâ into âShe Ainât Got No Yo-Yo.â
One of our more inexplicable habits is the tendency to keep the Anglo-Saxon noun but to adopt a foreign form for the adjectival form. Thus fingers are not fingerish; they are digital. Eyes are not eyeish; they are ocular. English is unique in this tendency to marry a native noun to an adopted adjective. Among other such pairs are mouth/oral, book/literary, water/aquatic, house/domestic, moon/lunar, son/filial, sun/solar, town/urban. This is yet another perennial source of puzzlement for anyone learning English. Sometimes, a Latinate adjective was adopted but the native one kept as well, so that we can choose between, say, earthly and terrestrial, motherly and maternal, timely and temporal.
Although English is one of the great borrowing tonguesâderiving at least half of its common words from non-Anglo-Saxon stockâothers have been even more enthusiastic in adopting foreign terms. In Armenian, only 23 percent of the words are of native origin, while in Albanian the proportion is just 8 percent. A final curious fact is that although English is a Germanic tongue and the Germans clearly were one of the main founding groups of America, there is almost no language from which we have borrowed fewer words than German. Among the very few are kindergarten and hinterland. We have borrowed far more words from every other European language, and probably as many from several smaller and more obscure languages such as Inuit. No one has yet come up with a plausible explanation for why this should be.
3. WORDS ARE CREATED. Often they spring seemingly from nowhere. Take dog. For centuries the word in English was hound (or hund ). Then suddenly in the late Middle Ages, dog âa word etymologically unrelated to any other known wordâdisplaced it. No one has any idea why. This sudden arising of words happens more often than you might think. Among others without known pedigree are jaw, jam, bad, big, gloat, fun, crease, pour, put, niblick (the golf club), noisome, numskull, jalopy, and countless others. Blizzard suddenly appeared in the nineteenth century in America (the earliest use is attributed to Davy Crockett) and rowdy appeared at about the same time. Recent examples of this phenomenon are yuppie and sound bites, which seem to have burst forth spontaneously and spread with remarkable rapidity throughout the English-speaking world.
Other words exist in the language for hundreds of years, either as dialect words or as mainstream words that have fallen out of use, before suddenly leaping to prominenceâagain quite mysteriously. Scrounge and seep are both of this type. They have been around for centuries and yet neither, according to Robert Burchfield [ The English Language, page 46], came into general use before 1900.
Many words are made up by writers. According to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one-tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. But then Shakespeare lived in an age when words and ideas burst upon the world as never before or since. For a century and a half, from 1500 to 1650, English flowed with new words. Between 10,000 and 12,000 words were coined, of which about half still exist. Not until modern times would this number be exceeded, but even then there is no comparison. The new words of today represent an explosion of technologyâwords like lunar module and myocardial infarction ârather than of poetry and feeling. Consider the words that Shakespeare alone gave us: barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, and some 1,685 others. How would we manage without them? He might well have created even more except that he
One of our more inexplicable habits is the tendency to keep the Anglo-Saxon noun but to adopt a foreign form for the adjectival form. Thus fingers are not fingerish; they are digital. Eyes are not eyeish; they are ocular. English is unique in this tendency to marry a native noun to an adopted adjective. Among other such pairs are mouth/oral, book/literary, water/aquatic, house/domestic, moon/lunar, son/filial, sun/solar, town/urban. This is yet another perennial source of puzzlement for anyone learning English. Sometimes, a Latinate adjective was adopted but the native one kept as well, so that we can choose between, say, earthly and terrestrial, motherly and maternal, timely and temporal.
Although English is one of the great borrowing tonguesâderiving at least half of its common words from non-Anglo-Saxon stockâothers have been even more enthusiastic in adopting foreign terms. In Armenian, only 23 percent of the words are of native origin, while in Albanian the proportion is just 8 percent. A final curious fact is that although English is a Germanic tongue and the Germans clearly were one of the main founding groups of America, there is almost no language from which we have borrowed fewer words than German. Among the very few are kindergarten and hinterland. We have borrowed far more words from every other European language, and probably as many from several smaller and more obscure languages such as Inuit. No one has yet come up with a plausible explanation for why this should be.
3. WORDS ARE CREATED. Often they spring seemingly from nowhere. Take dog. For centuries the word in English was hound (or hund ). Then suddenly in the late Middle Ages, dog âa word etymologically unrelated to any other known wordâdisplaced it. No one has any idea why. This sudden arising of words happens more often than you might think. Among others without known pedigree are jaw, jam, bad, big, gloat, fun, crease, pour, put, niblick (the golf club), noisome, numskull, jalopy, and countless others. Blizzard suddenly appeared in the nineteenth century in America (the earliest use is attributed to Davy Crockett) and rowdy appeared at about the same time. Recent examples of this phenomenon are yuppie and sound bites, which seem to have burst forth spontaneously and spread with remarkable rapidity throughout the English-speaking world.
Other words exist in the language for hundreds of years, either as dialect words or as mainstream words that have fallen out of use, before suddenly leaping to prominenceâagain quite mysteriously. Scrounge and seep are both of this type. They have been around for centuries and yet neither, according to Robert Burchfield [ The English Language, page 46], came into general use before 1900.
Many words are made up by writers. According to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one-tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. But then Shakespeare lived in an age when words and ideas burst upon the world as never before or since. For a century and a half, from 1500 to 1650, English flowed with new words. Between 10,000 and 12,000 words were coined, of which about half still exist. Not until modern times would this number be exceeded, but even then there is no comparison. The new words of today represent an explosion of technologyâwords like lunar module and myocardial infarction ârather than of poetry and feeling. Consider the words that Shakespeare alone gave us: barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, and some 1,685 others. How would we manage without them? He might well have created even more except that he
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