Bill Bryson - Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

It would be charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed.

Consider this hearty announcement in a Yugoslavian hotel: The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chamber-maid. Turn to her straightaway. Or this warning to motorists in Tokyo: When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor. Or these instructions gracing a packet of convenience food from Italy: Besmear a backing pan, previously buttered with a good tomato sauce, and, after, dispose the cannelloni, lightly distanced between them in a only couch.

Clearly the writer of that message was not about to let a little ignorance of English stand in the way of a good meal. In fact, it would appear that one of the beauties of the English language is that with even the most tenuous grasp you can speak volumes if you show enough enthusiasma willingness to tootle with vigor, as it were.

To be fair, 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 gentlemans apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that in English one tells a lie but the truth, that a person who says I could care less means the same thing as someone who says I couldnt care less, that a sign in a store saying ALL ITEMS NOT ON SALE doesnt mean literally what it says (that every item is not on sale) but rather that only some of the items are on sale, that when a person says to you, How do you do? he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, How do I do what?

The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain. Indeed, Robert Burchfield, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, created a stir in linguistic circles on both sides of the Atlantic when he announced his belief that American English and English English are drifting apart so rapidly that within 200 years the two nations wont be able to understand each other at all.

That may be. But if the Briton and American of the twenty-second century baffle each other, it seems altogether likely that they wont confuse many othersnot, at least, if the rest of the world continues expropriating words and phrases at its present rate. Already Germans talk about ein Image Problem and das Cash-Flow, Italians program their computers with il software, French motorists going away for a weekend break pause for les refueling stops, Poles watch telewizja, Spaniards have a flirt, Austrians eat Big Macs, and the Japanese go on a pikunikku. For better or worse, English has become the most global of languages, the lingua franca of business, science, education, politics, and pop music. For the airlines of 157 nations (out of 168 in the world), it is the agreed international language of discourse. In India, there are more than 3,000 newspapers in English. The six member nations of the European Free Trade Association conduct all their business in English, even though not one of them is an English-speaking country.

When companies from four European countriesFrance, Italy, Germany, and Switzerlandformed a joint truck-making venture called Iveco in 1977, they chose English as their working language because, as one of the founders wryly observed, It puts us all at an equal disadvantage. For the same reasons, when the Swiss company Brown Boveri and the Swedish company ASEA merged in 1988, they decided to make the official company language English, and when Volkswagen set up a factory in Shanghai it found that there were too few Germans who spoke Chinese and too few Chinese who spoke German, so now Volkswagens German engineers and Chinese managers communicate in a language that is alien to both of them, English. Belgium has two languages, French and Flemish, yet on a recent visit to the countrys main airport in Brussels, I counted more than fifty posters and billboards and not one of them was in French or Flemish. They were all in English.

For non-English speakers everywhere, English has become the common tongue. Even in France, the most determinedly non-English-speaking nation in the world, the war against English encroachment has largely been lost. In early 1989, the Pasteur Institute announced that henceforth it would publish its famed international medical review only in English because too few people were reading it in French.

English is, in short, one of the worlds great growth industries.

English is just as much big business as the export of manufactured goods, Professor Randolph Quirk of Oxford University has written. There are problems with what you might call after-sales service; and delivery can be awkward; but at any rate the production lines are trouble free. [The Observer, October 26, 1981

Indeed, such is the demand to learn the language that there are now more students of English in China than there are people in the United States.

It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Websters Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000 ). The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between I wrote and I have written. The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care [all cited in The New York Times, June 18, 1980]. English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Rogets Thesaurus. Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist. [The Miracle of Language, page 54]

On the other hand, other languages have facilities we lack. Both French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition (respectively connaitre and kennen) and knowledge that results from understanding (savoir and wissen).

Portuguese has words that differentiate between an interior angle and an exterior one. All the Romance languages can distinguish between something that leaks into and something that leaks out of.

The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldnt they just?) Its sgriob. And we have nothing in English to match the Danish hygge (meaning instantly satisfying and cozy), the French sang-froid, the Russian glasnost, or the Spanish macho, so we must borrow the term from them or do without the sentiment.

At the same time, some languages have words that we may be pleased to do without. The existence in German of a word like schadenfreude (taking delight in the misfortune of others) perhaps tells us as much about Teutonic sensitivity as it does about their neologistic versatility. Much the same could be said about the curious and monumentally unpronounceable Highland Scottish word sgiomlaireachd , which means the habit of dropping in at mealtimes. That surely conveys a world of information about the hazards of Highland lifenot to mention the hazards of Highland orthography.