15.11. Discussion points.

Where does English come from? What other languages and cultures have influenced English? English has a long and complex history. The reason that it is so irregular and has such awful spelling is not our fault. It is the fault of foreigners! The letters used come from Latin. It was the Romans who were the first to try to write down the sounds of English using their own alphabet. Bad idea! The vowels A, E, I, O, U are not enough for a language that currently has twelve vowels, plus diphthongs. The consonants are pronounced similarly in most romance languages. If the Romans had only added a few new letters, then none of us would have these problems with pronunciation or spelling. The other ‘guilty’ parties were the French, the Dutch and the Scandinavians. The Vikings and the Celts strongly influenced the early history of English (during that period virtually a different language). The biggest modern change in the language came after the Norman Conquest in 1066 when the French invaded, bringing their own language. In fact for three hundred years English kings spoke French; what remained of Old English moved temporarily north. It is estimated that up to forty percent of words in English have a French influence, either in meaning, pronunciation or spelling. The Dutch are equally guilty of ‘interferring’ with the structure of English too. With the invention and popularisation of the printing press, Dutch printers ‘edited’ and shortened a lot of words to make their job of printing easier. An example: The words ‘old’ ‘young’ ‘queen’ and ‘March’, were historically spelt ‘olde’, ‘yonge’ ‘queene’ and ‘Marche’. Greek, Latin and Germanic influences are also predominant. So don’t blame your English teacher, if our language is difficult and lacks rules and regularity. It’s your fault.

How many English accents can you recognise? Which are the most difficult to understand? The general consensus seems to be that English from some parts of England is the most accessible. Irish English the most charming. American English requires only half the mouth with the addition of a strong chewing gum. Australian English requires only half the brain with the addition of strong mouth. In Scotland forget the chewing gum and forget the brain. Why not just forget about English too? Because the entire English-speaking world agrees that this is the most difficult dialect of English to understand. Scottish films are subtitled in the USA. English, like Italian, is often just a name given to a whole variety of mutually unintelligible dialects. Imagine a Jamaican, a Texan, a Welsh farmer and a South African in the same room together. What would happen? Yes, there would probably be a fight. But they might find it a bit difficult to communicate. Well, there are a thousand student and hostel rooms like that all across London Town…. and probably the only person they’ll all understand is you.

What are the main differences in regional accents, vocabulary and grammar in your country’s language(s)? Are there many dialects of the main language? Do you consider these different forms to be bad? To give you some idea of the variety of language and accent, consider the following words; ‘Aye’, ‘Ay’, ‘Yeah’, ‘Yep’, ‘Uh huh’, which are different varieties of the word ‘Yes’ in speech. As mentioned above, Italian can be seen as a series of dialects, Spanish is a little more uniform grammatically, but has many lexical differences in the twenty-five or so different countries where it is spoken. Arabic and Chinese have one written form, but many different dialects, many of which differ from each other as much as Portuguese differs from Spanish or Italian. Some are so different that they are not understood by speakers of other dialects in different regions. English certainly doesn’t have problems that compare to these. It has, perhaps, as much variety of vocabulary as Spanish does. Australian English, for example, has an extra 20,000 words and idioms particular to that region. What English does have though, is grammatical consistency. Apart from a few differences of prepositions and the use of tenses, the grammar is much the same everywhere.

What is your opinion about academies that try to preserve a language’s identity? Do they have an academy for your language? Does it have much influence? Does your language need protecting from the influence of English? Should laws be passed about the use of English in foreign government texts and official documents, like they have introduced in France? Should there be an academy to unify and regulate English? There are many language academies in the world, many of which are based on the French model. Arabic has several important ones. Spanish has several too. But the question of how much respect and influence that these have is highly questionable. English has none. Whether this is a good thing or not is open to debate. The problem is that English is already so hopelessly inconsistent, so full of irregularities, and so changeable, that an academy couldn’t possibly keep up with its frequent innovations. A new ‘buzzword’ from an advertising slogan or a Hollywood film, comes into global use, in so little time that by the time an academy had agree to ‘officially’ incorporate it into the language, it would probably have gone out of fashion, changed meaning or altered in spelling. English is a hard enough beast to dominate, not to mention tame.

What about class accents? Is it always easy to tell which class people come from in your country? This is one area that is often overlooked by foreign students. They fail to see that English accents in Britain are influenced as much by geographical location as they are by class background. You can go to a single city and hear a dozen varieties of accent. In America this would be impossible, but Britain still has a well-developed class system. People will probably judge you more in Britain on your accent than on your clothes. Foreign students don’t have to worry too much about this, because you don’t speak the language properly. In Britain we understand this. What do we do to solve this problem?  We think of you all as equally stupid, and we shout louder. It is depressingly true, that if you can’t speak English really well, people will think you are a little dense. You have been warned.