English, the world’s lingua
franca, has some intrinsic assets as well as liabilities. Today’s English
language reflects many centuries of development. During this long journey, English
has enriched itself from its contacts to other languages and cultures. Now, in
number of speakers as well as uses for international communication, English is
one of the most important languages of the world. But apart from the
advantages, English also has some disadvantages which are also not negligible. Here
follows a discussion on the relative advantages and disadvantages of English
language.
In A
History of The English Language, Abert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable pointed
out three assets of English language which are as follows.
Rich vocabulary
One of the prominent assets of
the English language is its enriched vocabulary. English has got mixed
character of it’s vocabulary. English is classified as a Germanic language.
That is to say,it belongs to the group of languages to which German, Dutch,
Flemish, Swedish, and Norwegian also belong. It shares with these languages
similar grammatical structure and many common words. On the other hand, more
than half of its vocabulary is derived from Latin. Some of these borrowings
have been direct, a great many through French, some through the other Romance
languages. As a result, English also share a great number of words with those
languages of Europe. To a lesser extend the
English vocabulary contains borrowings from many other languages. Instead of
making new words chiefly by the combination of existing elements, English has
borrowed from Hebrew and Arabic, Hungarian, Hindi- Urdu, Bengali, Malay,
Chinese, the languages of Java, Australia, Polynesia, West Africa and from one
of the aboriginal languages of Brazil.
And it has assimilated these heterogeneous elements so successfully. So, cosmopolitan a vocabulary is an undoubted
asset to any language that seeks to attain international use. Some examples of foreign
words that are in use in English language.
Words from Italian language:
balcony, canto, duet
Words from Spanish: alligator,
cargo, mosquito
Words from Persian : jasmine,
dervish, divan
Inflectional simplicity:
A second asset that English
possesses to a preeminent degree is inflectional simplicity. In the process of simplification,
English has gone further than any other language in Europe.
Inflections in the noun as spoken have been reduced to a sign of the plural and
a form for the possessive case e.g. boy, boys and boy, boy’s etc. The elaborate
Germanic inflection of the adjective has been completely eliminated except for
the simple indication of the comparative and the superlative degrees e.g. fast,
faster, fastest. The verb has been simplified by the loss of practically all
the personal endings, the almost complete abandonment of any distinction
between the singular and the plural, and the gradual discard of the subjunctive
mood. The complicated agreements that make German difficult for the non-native
speaker are absent from English.
Natural gender:
In the third place, English
enjoys an exceptional advantage over all other major European languages in
having adopted natural gender. Other European languages such as French require
a student memorizing, along with the meaning of every noun, its gender. In the Romance languages, for example, there
are only two genders- masculine or feminine. In the Germanic languages, the
distribution of the three genders appears to the English student to be quite
arbitrary. The distinction must be constantly kept in mind. In Germany,
for example, sonne (sun) is feminine
and mond (moon) is masculine. In the
English language all this was stripped away during the Middle English period.
Gender in English is determined by meaning all nouns naming living creatures
are masculine or feminine according to the sex of the individual, and all other
nouns are neuter. But when English speakers speak of a ship as feminine, sun
and moon as masculine or feminine, they only mean to use them is rhetorical
purpose , but not for grammatical purpose.
Reference:
A
History of the English Language. Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. 4th ed. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993.