A linguistic treasure box: exploring the amazing absorptive capacity of the English language.

A linguistic treasure box: exploring the amazing absorptive capacity of the English language. Global Mother Tongue: The Eight Flavours of English Howard RichlerVehicule Press 169 pages, softcover ISBN ISBNabbr.International Standard Book NumberISBNInternational Standard Book NumberISBNn abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m9781550652154 English is a magpie magpie,common name for certain birds of the family Corvidae (crows and jays). The black-billed magpie, Pica pica, of W North America has iridescent black plumage, white wing patches and abdomen, and a long wedge-shaped tail. It is altogether about 20 in. language. Not content with its own nest, ithappily ransacks others to expand its vocabulary and, historically, hasdepended on the generosity of foreign invaders. Book after book has beenwritten on the subject. There have been general overviews (DavidCrystal's English as a Global Language), dictionaries ofderivations (John Ayto's Dictionary of Word Origins),concentrations on origins of particularly fascinating words (Craig M.Carver's History of English in Its Own Words) and, the font of allcitations, the Oxford English Dictionary Oxford English Dictionary(OED) great multi-volume historical dictionary of English. [Br. Hist.: Caught in the Web of Words]See : Lexicography . Poke an English word and itbleeds history. Since the fifth and sixth centuries, when the Germanic-languagetribes known as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes Jutes:see Anglo-Saxons. moved to Britain from theContinent, elbowed aside the Celts The following pages provide lists of nations or people of Celtic origin, arranged by branch of Celtic ethnicity or language grouping:Goidelic Celts list of Irish people list of Scots list of Manx people Brythonic Celts and cobbled cob��ble?1?n.1. A cobblestone.2. Geology A rock fragment between 64 and 256 millimeters in diameter, especially one that has been naturally rounded.3. cobbles See cob coal.tr. together Old English asthe base of a new language, English has benefited from an infusion ofother Germanic tongues, of Latin-fuelled Romance languages such asFrench (hello, Norman Conquest of 1066), of Latin itself and of anyother language you might name. Montreal author Howard Richler visitsthem all in Global Mother Tongue: The Eight Flavours of English, amongthem Portuguese (which gave us flamingo and molasses molasses,sugar byproduct, the brownish liquid residue left after heat crystallization of sucrose (commercial sugar) in the process of refining. Molasses contains chiefly the uncrystallizable sugars as well as some remnant sucrose. ), Turkish (coffee,shish kebab), Hindi (juggernaut, guru) and Algonquian (moose and, fromthe Abenaki in Quebec, skunk skunk,name for several related New World mammals of the weasel family, characterized by their conspicuous black and white markings and use of a strong, highly offensive odor for defense. ). The gist of the book is that whileEnglish is far from the world's most common mother tongue, it hasmade great strides as everyone's second language of choice andtherefore qualifies as what Tom McArthur, in The Oxford Guide to WorldEnglish, calls a "global resource." English ingratiates itself with newcomers by dangling their ownwords in the shop window. Your first language is Spanish? Then you willundoubtedly recognize lariat lariat:see lasso. , tango and marijuana. Your language isMalay? Thanks for such words as compound (from kamppong), gingham (fromginggong) and amok. "People are likely to be motivated to learn ourlanguage because of the international flavour of our vocabulary,"Richler writes. "Teachers of English as a second language (ESL (1) An earlier family of client/server development tools for Windows and OS/2 from Ardent Software (formerly VMARK). It was originally developed by Easel Corporation, which was acquired by VMARK. )have mentioned to me that students frequently relate that a certainEnglish word they're learning comes from their mother tongue." He rightly quarrels with those who regret the introduction offoreign words into a language and argues that such fresh blood(including "a greater wealth of synonyms") is all that keepsthat language from the museum. But in view of his thesis that Englishdraws on more flavours than Baskin-Robbins, it is surprising that hereduced them to a mere eight in the subtitle of his book, even if itmade for tidier sorting and even if they are overarching categories:African, American, Australian/New Zealand, British, Canadian, Caribbean,South Asian, East Asian. A more accurate line would be: The InfiniteFlavours of English. Richler's restraint is understandable, though. A book likethis requires tough choices; otherwise the author's research wouldnever end. He devotes a measure of space to the many streams ofEnglish--Englishes--around the world, where a ghost in the Caribbean isa duppy Duppy is a Caribbean patois word of West African origin meaning ghost or spirit. Much of Caribbean folklore revolves around duppies. they are said to come out and haunt people at night mostly, and people from the islands claim to have seen them. and a past president in Nigeria is an outgone out��gone?v.Past participle of outgo. one. But apartfrom a passing mention of the neologism A new word or new meaning for an existing word. The high-tech field routinely creates neologisms, especially new meanings. Years ago, there was no doubt that a "mouse" referred only to a furry, little rodent. "McDonaldize," he doesnot tackle the fertile (and often maddening) development of new wordsthat smack more of the street or the boardroom than imported languages.Roger E. Axtell, writing of such words as scram scram? Slangintr.v. scrammed, scram��ming, scrams1. To leave a scene at once; go abruptly.2. To shut down automatically. Used of a nuclear reactor.n. and cockamamie in hisbook Do's and Taboos of Using English Around the World, observesthat American English "has evolved into a special dialect thatreflects the American obsession with idioms, slang, jargon, buzz words,acronyms and sports and military technology. Today, two Americans cancarry on a conversation that others in the so-called English-speakingworld might barely comprehend." Richler's goal is elsewhere: a freewheeling compilation of theinternational origins of the English we now speak. He jumps from theViking invasion (eighth century and on) to the "Semiticconnection" (Hebrew and Arabic). He devotes six pages to acatalogue, year by year from 1513 to 1899, of when food words enteredEnglish--brandy (1622, from Dutch), pumpkin (1647, Greek), caramel(1725, Spanish), tofu tofuSoft, bland, custardlike food product made from soybeans. Believed to date from China's Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), tofu is today an important source of protein in the cuisines of East and Southeast Asia. (1880, Chinese), cereal (1899, Latin). SometimesEnglish covers its tracks by changing a word's spelling, but"some words are so closely associated with their native languagethat we are loath to translate them"--concierge, fiasco, bourgeois,schadenfreude. (As an aside, this raises the question of italics, andthe point at which foreign words absorbed into English may safely stopbeing italicized and receive their linguistic citizenship papers.) Disappointing for those who would use it as a reference book,Global Mother Tongue has no index, perhaps because the massive accretionof data would have required an index half as long as the main text. Attimes the pages resemble a promotion for the OED OEDabbr.Oxford English DictionaryNoun 1. OED - an unabridged dictionary constructed on historical principlesO.E.D., Oxford English Dictionary , to which Richleracknowledges his immense debt. He credits it incessantly and devotes oneof eleven chapters to praising its online search function. (Thisenthusiasm may explain the occasional editing lapses. The definition ofnaches as "among Jews, a sense of pleasure and pride at theachievements of one's children" appears both on page 64 andpage 68, with conflicting dates for its inclusion in the OED.) The best use of the book is probably as a well-stocked fishinghole. Pick a page at random, cast your line and reel in an intriguingorigin or amusing anecdote. Richler tells of a group of 19th-centurypoets who believed that English should be more faithful to itsAnglo-Saxon (Old English) roots and accordingly drafted a list of wordsthey wanted everyone to use: lawcraft instead of jurisprudence,talecraft instead of arithmetic, faith-heat instead of enthusiasm and,my favourite, fireghost instead of electricity. Imagine paying thefireghost bill or playing a fireghostly guitar. (For all that,Anglo-Saxon hasn't fared badly. Richler notes that roughly 30percent of English vocabulary today consists of words surviving from OldEnglish, but that understates its influence, since, Carver writes in hisHistory, Old English is at the root of 83 percent of the 1,000 words weuse most frequently.) On with the fishing. England has 1,500 place names of Scandinavianorigin, including 600 that end in "'-by,' the Danish wordfor town or farm, e.g., Whitby, Rugby, and Derby." You may knowthat the word algebra derives from Arabic, but did you know that al-jebrmeans "the reuniting of broken parts"? You probably know thatal means "the" in that language, but did you know that this iswhy there is an "al" at the end of admiral, from the Arabicamir, commander? The Old English word seethe seethe?intr.v. seethed, seeth��ing, seethes1. To churn and foam as if boiling.2. a. To be in a state of turmoil or ferment: , now used for anger, beganas the boiling of water and appeared in Beowulf, which is a credentialto be reckoned with. Perhaps we should all resume seething seethe?intr.v. seethed, seeth��ing, seethes1. To churn and foam as if boiling.2. a. To be in a state of turmoil or ferment: the water inour fire-ghostly kettles. Somewhere, an Angle might get his wings. Warren Clements is a writer and editor on the editorial board ofThe Globe and Mail and writes the "Word Play" column for theSaturday edition. He is also co-author of The Globe and Mail Style Book.