READINGS IN LANGUAGE

How English might be like had it stuck to its Anglo-Saxon roots

How would the English language look and sound today had it not been such a promiscuous acquirer of words from other languages?

In “Johnson: What might have been,” an article featured in the Books, Arts and Culture section of the January 28, 2014 issue of The Economist UK, a Berlin-based commentator under the byline R.L.G says that English having been originally a west German language at its core, its words today—to the modern Anglophone’s ear and sensibility—would sound “incredibly concrete and earthy,” “amusingly over-literal,” or “sometimes mildly shocking.”

R.L.G. observes that had not ancient English taken in a lot of Norse words from the Vikings, even more French words from the Normans, and a further cornucopia of words coined from Greek and Latin roots, the vacuum cleaner today would likely be called Staubsauger (translation: “dust-sucker”), the television a Fernseher (“far-seer”), and gloves Handschuhe (“hand-shoes”). Even more assaulting to the modern ear, a mother’s placenta would likely be called Mutterkuchen (“mother-cake”), pubic hair Schamhaar (“shame hair”), and warts and nipples Brustwarzen (“breast-warts”). Conversely, the intense borrowing of foreign words by the original English led to the loss of such old Anglo-Saxon words as inwit (for “conscience”), earthtillage (“agriculture”), and bodeword (“commandment”).

Read R.L.G.’s “Johnson: What might have been” in the Economist UK now!

OTHER INTERESTING READINGS:

In defense of the comma. In “Will We Use Commas in the Future?”, an article that came out in the January 28, 2014 issue of Slate, Matthew J.X. Malady argues that although it’s not surprising that commas are being dropped more frequently in the social media and online context, it’s unlikely that they will be dropped in more formal written pieces like newspaper articles and student compositions in college. This counters the recent claim of Columbia University professor John McWhorter, a noted linguist, that we “could take [the commas out of] a great deal of modern American texts and you would probably suffer so little loss of clarity that there could even be a case made for not using commas at all.”

Read Matthew J.X. Malady’s “Will We Use Commas in the Future?” in Slate now!

Tough feat for language buffs. In “Maths is all Greek to me: how language barriers influence mathematics,” an article in the February 6, 2014 issue of NewStatesman.com, science columnist Michael Brooks observes that to get a PhD in maths from Harvard, “every student is advised to acquire an ability to read mathematics in French, German and Russian” considering that almost all important work in the discipline is published in those languages. Even so, Brooks says, a mathematical pile-up at the language barrier cropped up recently when Mukhtarbay Otelbayev, the Kazakh mathematician, claimed to have solved a problem that has stumped mathematicians for almost 200 years. It’s a feat for which Otelbayev could claim a million-dollar prize. “Unfortunately,” Brooks says, “Otelbayev published his paper in Russian, and those looking to verify his claim can’t find mathematicians linguistically skilled enough to make sense of Otelbayev’s argument.”

Read Michael Brooks’ “Maths is all Greek to me” in NewStatesman.com now!

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