March 14, 2004

The universality, acceptability and copiousness of English apart, there is no denying the fact that it is a rather funny language

OF late, there has been a debate in the scholarly circles here about the ‘Pakistanization’ of the English language. Purists frown at coinage such as flying-coach, eveninger, dak rider, daily wager, seat-by-seat, ball pen, typing machine, tube light, etc. However, English is prone to such interpolation in the entire English-speaking world; so much so that the English spoken in Singapore is dubbed ‘Singlish.’ No living language (Urdu inclusive) is spared of this trend, and that is how languages flourish and maintain their sustainability.

According to a study published in the January 1995 issue of Reader’s Digest, people all over the world once spoke as many as 15,000 languages. Of the 6,000 languages that still remain, up to half may be dying because they are not being taught to children. If the present decline continues, almost 90 to 95 per cent of the world’s languages could be doomed to extinction by the year 2100. Unperturbed, English is gaining worldwide currency.

About one-and-a-half centuries ago, John Lubbock (1803-1865) said: “The English tongue is rapidly spreading and bids fair to become the general language of the human race.” His prophecy eventually came true. English has become the first truly universal language. It is the native language of nearly 400 million people, a lot fewer than the 850 million or so who speak Mandarin Chinese. Hundreds of million more have some knowledge of the English language which has official or semi-official status in almost 60 countries of the world. Today, about 1.5 billion people can speak some English. More than half of the world’s books and three-quarters of international mail are in English. The Chinese language has only 15,000 words, but it is considered a difficult language. English has a reservoir of 616,500 words, i.e. nearly thrice the size of any other language and is growing at 450 words a year. Yet, it is taken as a simple language. The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary had the longest entry for the word ‘set’ showing 154 main senses and more than 430 sub-senses.

The vocabulary of the English language was perhaps never more apparent than in a description by a lady about the character of her husband. “He is,” she contended, “an abhorred, barbarous, capricious, detestable, envious, fastidious, hard-hearted, illiberal, ill-natured, ill-mannered, jealous, loathsome, malevolent, niggardly, nauseous, obstinate, passionate, quarrelsome, raging, saucy, fussy, tantalizing, unkempt, clumsy, uncomfortable, vexatious, abominable, bitter, captious, casual, disagreeable, execrable, fierce, gross, hasty, malicious, nefarious, obstreperous, peevish, restless, ruthless, savage, tart, unpleasant, waspish, worrying, acrimonious, blustering, careless, discontented, fretful, growling, hateful, inattentive, malignant, noisy, odious, perverse, rigid, severe, teasing, angry, boisterous, choleric, disgusting, hectoring, incorrigible, mischievous, negligent, offensive, repulsive, pettish, roaring, sluggish, snappish, snarling, sneaking, sour, testy, tiresome, tormenting, touchy, arrogant, awkward, boorish, brawling, brutal, bullying, churlish, clamorous, crabbed, cross, currish, dismal, dull, dry, drowsy, untidy, horrid, huffish, insolent, intractable, irascible, ireful, morose, murmuring, oppressive, outrageous, overbearing, petulant, plaguy, rough, gruff, rude, rustic, rugged, spiteful, splenetic, stern, stubborn, stupid, sulky, sullen, surly, suspicious, treacherous, troublesome, turbulent, tyrannical, violent, virulent and wrangling fellow, to say the least.”

The universality, acceptability and copiousness of English apart, there is no denying the fact that it is a ‘fickle’, rather funny language. A few examples: Why is it that ‘curable’ and ‘incurable’ carry opposite meanings, but ‘flammable’ and ‘inflammable’ have the same meaning? A house can ‘burn up’ just as it can ‘burn down’. In spite of ‘few’ and ‘lot’ being poles apart, ‘quite a few’ and ‘quite a lot’ convey the same meanings. The case with ‘slim’ and ‘fat’ is even more interesting. Whereas ‘a slim chance’ means a small chance, ‘a fat chance’ implies almost no chance at all. Synonyms with a similar prefix sometimes give different meanings. Thus, when you ‘overlook’ your son’s activities, you simply ignore him, but when you ‘oversee’ his activities, you actually control him. If vegetarians eat vegetables and fruitarians fruits, what should be the diet of a humanitarian? Does it not sound odd that you can ‘ship’ your goods by truck also? When stars are ‘out’ they are visible, but when stocks are ‘out’, they are invisible.

According to Hippocrates, “The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.” Mark Twain always adhered to this principle. He declared, “I never write metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city.” This also leads to the question of economy in words as Thomas Jefferson stressed, “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”

We Asians are very generous in the use of words. We are, for instance, fond of writing, ‘in the event of’ (for ‘if’), ‘for the month of August’ or ‘for the year 2003’ (instead of ‘for August’ or ‘for 2003’), ‘cheque for an amount of rupees’ (instead of ‘cheque for rupees’) ‘in the last resort’ (‘finally’) ‘with regard to’ (‘about’), ‘enclosed herewith’ (‘enclosed’) and so on. Regarding the size of words, too, the language offers a wide range of choice. Why write firmament for sky, callousness for cruelty and hallucination for illusion. By the way, here is the longest word of English: Pneumonoultramicro-scopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (a miners’ lung disease). If this is discarded as being a proper noun, take an abstract noun: floccinaucinihilipilification (setting little or no value).

Every language has its grammar which is the study of the classes of words, their inflections, and their functions and relations in the sentence. The grammar of a language is less subject to changes than its vocabulary. That is why grammar is generally made a fun of, as did Mark Twain: “Ignorant people think it’s the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating but it ain’t so; it’s the sickening grammar they use.” Difficulties in understanding grammar are obvious. Thus, if the plural of fox is foxes, shouldn’t the plural of ox be oxes? Again, if the past tense of last can be lasted, why can’t the past tense of cast be casted?

I was once at a foreign consulate for dinner. There, I found another local guest struggling with English. When the host urged a second serving on him, he smiled thoughtfully for a moment; then replied graciously, “My heart thanks you from the bottom, but I am totally fed up.”

These are but a few apparent inconsistencies of the English language due to which even those who use it as their mother tongue cannot always ensure its accuracy. Noah Webster’s wife once caught him in the pantry in the act of kissing his maid. “Why, Mr Webster?” she yelled. “I’m surprised.”

“No, my dear,” he replied. “I’m surprised; you’re amazed.”

Once Dr Samuel Johnson, the writer of the first English dictionary, was sitting on a park bench smoking a pipe. A woman was sitting on the other end of the bench. She did not like the smoke and protested, “Sir, you are smelling!”

Dr Johnson corrected the protesting woman’s language, “Lady, in fact I’m stinking and you are smelling.”

An English teacher in London suffered serious head injuries in a fall. He was taken in an ambulance to the nearest hospital and while waiting for test results, he thrashed around in agitation. A nurse called an orderly to calm him to prevent further injuries and the orderly responded by saying, “Lay down, man. Lay down!” From the semi-conscious teacher came the word, “Lie down, lie down.”

Will it not be fair, therefore, to give the people of our region a more liberal right to be wrong, specially when the mistake is innocent? The PA of a friend, anxious to please the boss, hurriedly finished a letter and gave it to him for signature. My friend detected a minor typing error, but signed the letter anyway. Before the letter was dispatched, the PA also noticed his mistake. So he typed a revision and placed it quietly on the boss’s desk with this note: ‘Kindly resign’.

However, it is not intended to plead that we should go scot-free to play havoc with the English language. A former boss of mine was very indiscreet in this matter. Never caring for correction and self-education, he used to debase the language with complete impunity. Once, an officer who was under suspension applied for earned leave. The boss was kind enough to sanction the leave, but ‘subject to no legal hitch is there’. Seeing his ridiculous notes on the files, I often felt like putting up a sign at his office door: ‘English broken here’.

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