Continuing my thinking aloud on the flourishing of languages as I continue to read Robert Tombs’ very exciting book “The English and Their History”.
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An interesting perspective about growing up in an erstwhile British colony is that we fail to truly absorb how illogical the spellings and pronunciations in English are. Sanskrit, and several Indian languages such as Malayalam and Marathi, possess a long history of codified grammar and detailed pronunciation. So, reading and pronunciation in many Indian languages are almost WYSIWYG.1 This is of course not true for English. It is hard to see know the pronunciation differences in words (say, tough, cough, and dough) before hearing them.
A case in point. Many children in Indian elementary schools (and their parents) learn ‘e’ for “eye” without even blinking an eyelid. This pronunciation does not follow any first principles. However, it is “naturalized” in our brains as it is drilled into our training dataset when we are very young. At a much later point, when we come across another strikingly similar word — a semivowel caught in between two identical vowels — “ewe”, the correct way to pronounce it sounds strange.
Those of us who in India had limited exposure to spoken English have constantly tried to inject vernacular speak into English grammar and speech. For a long time, this mixture is the English that I have known. No one spoke the language outside the walls of the classroom except during “the English period” in schools. Reading books on phonetics and diving into diphthongs doesn’t quite inform you as much as hearing a language spoken. Despite having read Jane Eyre as a late teen, I did not know until years later that Eyre rhymed with Bare and not with Iyer. 🙂
Unsurprisingly, in deeply stratified India, several educated elites in India who profess to write and speak Queen’s English look down upon the potent mixtures (e.g. Hinglish, with Hindustani/Hindi mix) as sewer, and a social indicator of poor deportment.
However, English absorbed such words from many languages with ridiculous ease and grew tremendously. When we use expressions like “peace and quiet”, we don’t truly realize this borrowing.
Robert Tombs makes this excellent point, when he discusses how Old English changed to Middle English (pg. 130).
Alone of the Germanic Tongues, it had received massive influx of words from Latin and French, which double its vocabulary. […] English often acquired several words for the same concept. They were sometimes used in tandem to make meaning sure, or just for rhetorical purposes, as in “aiding and abetting”, “fit and proper” and “peace and quiet”. In due course, they could nuances of meaning as with “kingly”, “royal” and “regal”, or “loving”, “amorous” and “charitable” from English, French and Latin, respectively.
This linguistic flexibility, he points out, was greatly enhanced by acquiring even grammatical elements from other languages.
Amazing that it has continued till day. Just in the past week, I used the following words: catamaran, emoji, kowtow, alcohol, candy, and amok (as in “run amok”), which have come from Tamil, Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Malay respectively.
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Notes:
- Tamil is an exception. Sendhil, Chendil, and Senthil are variant anglicized versions of the same name.