English

English is a panyparic language spoken, with some variations and under different names, on many worlds, planes, and cosmoi. On True Earth, English is the most widely spoken language of England, from which it gets its name, and of a number of former English colonies, including Australia, Canada, and the United States of America. It is very widely spoken as a second language in many countries, however, and while as a native language it ranks only third or fourth in number of speakers (after Mandarin, Spanish, and by some accounts Hindi), counting those who learn it as a second language English is the most widely spoken language in the world, spoken and understood according to some estimates by more than a quarter of the Earth's population. In the interplanar æalogical community, English remains one of the most common and widely spoken languages, though to a much lesser degree than on Earth. (Of course, on many worlds it's called by other names than "English", but remains essentially the same language.)

English is an Indo-European language, and more specifically belongs to the Germanic branch of that group, its closest extant Euterran relatives being Scots, Frisian, and Low German, with Afrikaans, Dutch, German, and Yiddish being slightly more distant relatives. The English language has a vocabulary, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, of more than a quarter of a million words. Of course, this excludes many technical words that don't make it into the dictionary, as well as words not in use on True Earth.

History

On True Earth, the oldest roots of English as a distinct language may have arisen about the fifth century CE, when the separate Germanic dialects of a number of allied groups combined as they jointly settled southeastern Britain, displacing the Celtic peoples who had been there before them. The language thus formed is now called Old English (or Anglo-Saxon, after the names of two of the united German peoples), and, while recognizably related to modern English, was different in many respects. It was a somewhat more inflected language, and was originally written with a runic alphabet. Even after the Latin alphabet was introduced by Irish missionaries around the ninth century, Old English had several letters that modern English lacks (eth, thorn, and ash), and lacks several letters present in modern English (J, K, Q, V, and Z), as well as having different forms for some letters (G, W, and in some contexts S).

Like any language, Old English evolved over time, borrowing many words from Old Norse and later from Latin and Greek, and still later, after the Norman conquest, by Old Norman. It was around this time that Old English developed into what is now called Middle English, still very different from modern English but somewhat more recognizable. Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was written in Middle English, and, notwithstanding some unfamiliar words and odd constructions, is readable, with difficulty, by modern English speakers, though the aid of a glossary makes it somewhat easier. The thorn and eth letters fell into disuse around the thirteenth century, replaced by the th still used for their sounds today, though the ash stuck around a little longer.

A defining moment transforming Middle English to modern English was the Great Vowel Shift, when, around the fifteenth century, for reasons that are still not entirely clear but may have been connected to migrations in the wake of the Black Death, many abrupt changes in pronunciation occurred in English vowels, not always accompanied by changes in spelling. Following the shift, England's rise in world status helped solidify the language's form, along with contributions to its literature by respected authors and playwrights, most notably William Shakespeare. The first English dictionary of note was published in 1755 by Samuel Johnson.

In recent years, English has continued borrowing from many different languages, adopting local words for unfamiliar flora, fauna, and phenomena, and often taking in wholesale foreign words coined to describe new philosophical and scientific developments. Particularly common are learned derivations from Greek and Latin, which are still to some extent seen as the touchstones for linguistic respectability, despite their somewhat distant relation to English. These sentiments peaked in the eighteenth century when Latin especially was considered the language par excellence of academia, to the extent that some would-be reformers attempted to twist English to better follow the rules of Latin grammar, and invented new grammar rules accordingly. Many of these spurious rules continue to be promulgated today by people unfamiliar with their artificial origin; it is thence that such misconceptions arise as the false ideas that it's ungrammatical to end an English sentence with a preposition, or to insert an adverb between "to" and the infinitive (the so-called split infinitive).

With England's colonization of distant parts of the planet, the English language threatened to diverge further; already, of course, many different dialects existed, but with the separation of an entire ocean between two English-speaking peoples, it seemed possible that they would divaricate to unintelligibility. That this did not happen may be largely attributable to the development of rapid travel that let people go around the world in hours rather than weeks, and of mass media that transmitted images and video even faster. In any case, today the English of America, of Great Britain, and of other English-speaking areas are spoken with different accents and have some different lexemes, but remain easily mutually comprehensible.

Phonology

English has a wealth of different consonant and vowel sounds, distinguishing consonants by place and manner of inflection and by vocalization, and vowels by position and openness. Tone and phonation are not phonemic, however, and English has no non-pulmonic consonants. For the vowels, the tendency is to pronounce the back vowels rounded and the front vowels unrounded; there are no rounded front vowels in English, and only for certain pairs of open back vowels is roundedness a phonemic feature ([ʌ] vs. [ɔ], and in some dialects [ɑ] vs. [ɒ]). In all, English has twenty-two different common consonant sounds, not counting affricates and a few sounds that are not phonemic and/or only appear in some borrowed words. The vowels are harder to count, since there are some vowels that are conflated in some dialects and distinct in others, but, not counting separately r-colored vowels and reduced vowels but counting common diphthongs, English has at least fourteen distinct vowel sounds, and in some dialects as many as seventeen. Adding in the r-colored vowels and reduced vowels may increase this number to almost forty.

One of the English language's most characteristic sounds is the alveolar approximant [ɹ], represented by the letter R. While certainly not entirely unique to English, this is still a fairly rare sound among languages in general, found in only a relative handful of other Euterran languages (including Faroese, Chukchi, Vietnamese, and Eastern Armenian). While different dialects of English vary as to whether or not to pronounce the R at the end of a syllable (those that do are called "rhotic", those that don't "non-rhotic"), all major dialects still preserve this unusual sound when it is followed by a vowel. (In general, most American and Canadian dialects are rhotic; most dialects in England and Australia are not—though there are many exceptions.)

Grammar

English is a very weakly inflected language. Most of the shades of meaning are given by word choice and word order, not by the inflections of the words themselves. Nouns inflect only for singular and plural number (and perhaps for possessive case, if one counts that as a separate inflection); adjectives don't inflect at all (with a couple of exceptions borrowed directly from French that have differing forms by gender, and even in these cases the inflections are obsolescent). Verbs have the most inflections of any English words, but even they have only four or five for most verbs, and eight at most, minimal compared to the scores of verb conjugations in a typical Romance language.

Nouns

Nouns in English may be of singular or plural number, but have only one case aside from the nominative, a simple possessive which is always formed by adding "'s", except to plurals already ending in -s, in which case it is formed by simply adding an apostrophe. (This case is a relic of an older possessive formation that involved the use of the possessive pronoun; the apostrophe s is a contraction of the pronoun "his".) Nouns regularly form the plural by simply adding "s", or "es" if the noun already ends in a sibilant.

However, while this is the pluralization method of regular nouns, English has a panoply of irregular nouns as well. Many of these are because of borrowings into other languages, but many also have their roots in Old English itself. Speakers frequently attempt to find new regularities in these irregularities, mistakenly applying irregular pluralizations to nouns that actually do form their plurals regularly. One of the biggest stumbling-blocks in this regard, for some reason, is the moderate number of words of Latin origin ending in -us that form their plurals in -i. While properly this plural ending only applies to a relatively small number of words, it's common to see other words erroneously pluralized in -i as well, including even some words that end not in -us but in -os or -on or other endings that strike the speaker as similarly Latinate.

Verbs

Most English verbs have at most five inflectional forms: one form for the infinitive, one for the present tense third person singular (all other present tense persons and numbers are identical to the infinitive), one for the past, and two participle forms, a present and a past. (The infinitive of an English verb is conventionally often written preceded by the word "to", although this is not actually part of the verb.) For the verb "to do", for instance, these forms are "do", "does", "did", "doing", and "done". Other moods and tenses can be expressed by auxiliary verbs combined with the infinitive or participles: the conditional can be expressed by "would" plus the present participle, for instance, the past progressive by "was" or "were" plus the present participle, and the past perfect by "had" plus the past participle. Many verbs have only four forms, the past participle being identical to either the past tense (as is the case for all regular verbs) or, less frequently, the present tense (like "run" and "come"). For instance, the only four inflectional forms of "to talk", a typical regular verb, are "talk", "talks", "talked", and "talking". There are also a smattering of defective auxiliary verbs which lack infinitives and participles and have no separate third-person form in the present tense, having therefore only two inflectional forms: "will"/"would", "can"/"could", and "shall"/"should", "may"/"might". The extreme case occurs with the verbs "ought" and "must", defective verbs which also have no past tense, and therefore have only one form. (The former originated as the past tense of the verb "to owe", but has developed into an auxiliary verb in its own right.)

The only verb to have more than five inflectional forms is "to be", which alone among English verbs has two different past tenses, depending on person and number ("was" and "were"), as well as a present tense plural (and second person) that differs from the infinitive ("are"), and a special form for the present-tense first person singular ("am"), making eight conjugations total ("be", "being", "been", "is", "am", "are", "was", "were").

Orthography

If its grammar is not overly complicated, though, where English really gets chaotic is in its orthography and pronunciation. While at one time English pronunciation may have been fairly regular, over the years there have been so many vowel shifts, changes in pronunciations of certain words, and direct borrowings from other languages left more or less intact that the spelling of an English word now has relatively little correlation with its pronunciation. Certainly there are still some general principles that hold true most of the time—the letter B, for instance, usually represents the sound /b/. But there are plenty of exceptions (B, for instance, can also be silent, as in thumb), and it's impossible to know for sure how to pronounce an unfamiliar word from its spelling, or to spell an unfamiliar word from its pronunciation. There are many letters and letter combinations that can stand for many different sounds, and sounds that can be spelled in many ways, and homophones and homographs are rampant, including homophones that are not homographs, and homographs that are not homophones. One notorious example is the letter sequence "ough", which can be pronounced /ʌ/ (as in tough), /oʊ/ (as in though), /uː/ (as in through), /ɔː/ (as in ought), /ɒ/ (as in cough), or /aʊ/ (as in bough), along with a few other rarer pronunciations in certain words. Conversely, the phonetic sequence /oʊ/, for instance, can be spelled "aohs" (as in pharaohs), "eaus" (as in plateaus), "eaux" (as in beaux), "ews" (as in sews), "oes" (as in does), "ohs" (as in matzohs), "os" (as in pros), "ose" (as in rose), "othes" (as in clothes), "ots" (as in depots), "oughs" (as in doughs), "owes" (as in owes), "ows" (as in rows), "oz" (as in cozy), or "oze" (as in doze). "Rain", "rein", and "reign" are all pronounced identically. The past tense of the verb "to lead" is both spelled and pronounced differently from the present tense, but the metal "lead" is spelled like the present tense of the verb but pronounced like the past tense.

One popular construction to illustrate the irregularity of English pronunciation is the letter sequence "ghoti", which is said to be a possible way to spell "fish" (that is, the phonetic sequence /fɪʃ/) using existing letter combinations that correspond to the appropriate phonemes. This, however, is a brazen cheat; the allowable pronunciations of a letter or sequence of letters often depend on its position in the word, which this "respelling" fails to take into account. "gh" is pronounced /f/ only in the sequences "augh" or "ough", and never at the beginning of a word; "ti" is pronounced /ʃ/ only in sequences such as "tial", "tian", or "tion", and never at the end of a word. Based on these considerations no English speaker seeing the word "ghoti" (and unfamiliar with what it is supposed to represent) would actually be likely to assume it was pronounced like "fish"; much more likely pronunciations would be /ˈgoʊti/ or /ˈgoʊtaɪ/.

See also

• English language on Wikipedia