Semantics of English

What is English to me? I connote the word with the language itself. It is a confusing system with no solid rules. A lovely language to grow up speaking as a first language, but a terrible pain to learn later in life. Engligh is several languages Frankensteined together to create another. Some of our words are still in other languages, loanwords that have wormed into a language they help create. The human brain is a pattern-based machine, and when the patterns only exist part of the time, it becomes incredibly bewildering to me how I learned it, much less someone who is already secure in a first language. English is the second most spoken language in the world, and is highly influential. This is interesting to me because English itself varies so drastically within dialects, and even within the evolution of the language over time. 

The difference between Old English and Modern English is so drastic that most words are not recognizable. The Old English word “æscwigan,” for example, means “spear-warrior” in Modern English. Even within Modern English things have changed. The use of the second person informal (thou, thy/thine, and thee) was phased out in the mid 17th century in favor of solely using the formal second person “you/your”. Even between Italian and Latin, the dead precursor to both Italian and English, there are so many similarities, but English hardly resembles itself. English is an etymological freak show. Look at the phrase, ‘their our know rules’. It’s spelled differently, but pronounced the same as the actual sentence ‘there are no rules.’ This type of sentence is incredible, and something I haven’t encountered in any other language, speaking from experience with Spanish, Russian, and Latin. Because of examples like this, it’s intriguing to me how widely spoken English is. The pronunciation of words vary from region to region as well, making is difficult to fully grasp English. In my previous example, the word ‘our’ can be pronounced two ways: ow-wer or are. These differences extend to slang, too. In New England, “wicked” is used as an amplifier, just as “very” is used. In the south, “y’all” is common, but not “wicked.” Like Amy Tan, author of Mother Tongue, I, too, consider myself “fascinated by language in daily life” (Tan 1). Fascinated, yet frustrated.

I am also an English major. I am quite literally devoting my studies to this language of grammatical nightmares. The grammar, the structure, the nouns upon nouns upon nouns. Words. Words are just that. An object is itself, no matter what it is called. I could call something rubber and spherical a ball, a sphere, a globe, an orb, even a third-dimension circle if I really felt like it. Language has no meaning until we give it meaning, and English is no different. Robin Wall Kimmerer describes English as, “based on a profound error in grammar” (Kimmerer 168). She says this because of the depersonification of nonhuman beings. English speakers use “it” for anything that isn’t a person, which is perhaps my least favorite part of the English language, verb conjugations aside. Why should English speakers, who have a word for everything, refuse to give an animal the same respect as a person? In Italian, animals have the same verb conjugations as the third person used for a human. So why does English refuse to do the same? 

English also differs from other languages in that it has multiple mother languages such as Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, and many more. English is such a mystery language that it matters not how you phrase things. Know you what mean I, but do you know what I mean? Both of these phrases make perfect sense to the English speaker’s ear, something that will never fail to bother me. English, while being a useful and well-spoken language, has some of the worst grammar and lack of innate structural rules I have ever seen, a feature that will haunt me to no end. The differences in pronunciation, the loanwords, the regional slang, all of these features make English my nightmare, but also intrigue me and make me want to learn more about this language.

Works Cited:

Kimmerer, Robin Wall.  “Learning the Grammar of Animacy.”  The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World. Ed. Alison Hawthorne Deming and Lauret Savoy. Milkweed Editions, 2011.  pp. 167-77.

Tan, Amy.  “Mother Tongue.”  The St. Martin’s Custom Reader.  Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom and Louise Z. Smith.  Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2002. pp. 16-21.