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Invented Words
How words came into being:
No one knows exactly when humans first began to form words.
There is the "bow-wow" theory of language which says that the
first words were imitations of the sounds of nature. According
to this theory, early language might have been a series of
sounds, which took on the meaning of the things they imitated.
"Boom" might have meant thunder, for example, or "chirp" could
have meant bird." Bow-wow" could have meant dog, and still
does, in the baby talk of many languages.
The dictionary calls words like boom and chirp imitative words,
and modern English has many of them. Listen to the sounds
and think of the meanings of giggle, splash or burp. Many
birds and insects are named for the sounds they make. If you
have ever heard the cry of a cuckoo or the chirp of a cricket
it is easy to see why they have the names they have.
But the bow-wow theory does not explain how or when people
formed the words for ideas and feelings, such as love, hate,
peace, anger, belief, enemy, friend. Nor does it explain about
the source of prepositions and adverbs that express time and
place─words such as before, after, in, out, near, far,
and so on. There is much disagreement about how language began.
We may never know for certain, simply because we cannot go
back in time to hear the first words spoken. It was only when
writing was invented that we could learn more about the words
of our ancestors, and how those words came to be the words
we use today.
Just exactly who was the first
person to write and exactly when it was done are as mysterious
as the beginnings of speech. But we can guess that somewhere
along the line people saw the need for a more permanent form
of communication than speech. Spoken words are easily forgotten.
Written words can be referred to again and again. Since we
have so few facts about this early time we can only imagine
when and how people thought up symbols and began marking them
down. It is possible someone began by making scratches on
a piece of bark, because the earliest word we know for write
is writan, which means "to scratch", and our word book
comes from boc, the name of the bark of the beech tree.
Writing is a set of symbols
which stand for objects, ideas and the sounds of speech. The
story of the development of writing and of the alphabets of
the world is a long book in itself. It is mentioned here just
to show how language scholars, or linguists, discovered the
very early beginnings of the English we speak today.
The most important discovery
linguists made about language is that words, like people,
come in families. Languages do not just suddenly spring up
all by themselves out of nowhere; they are related to each
other, and take a long time to develop. Linguists reasoned
that if languages are related to each other, then many of
them must have come from a single ancestor thousands of years
ago. English, they found, is a cousin of most of the languages
spoken in the western world today.
Language
notes:
1.
There is no need to say anything else
about these words, for they speak for themselves.
Speak
for itself/themselves means to
be very clear and need no further explanation or proof.
e.g.
The company has had a very successful year: the figures speak
for themselves.
2.
Linguists guess that these are nonsense
words because they have not been able to trace them back to
any of the ancestor languages.
Trace
back means to find the origins of by finding proof or by going back in
time.
e.g.
His family can trace its history back to the 10th
century.
Text
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History
of English
Culture
notes:
The orthography of English was more or less established by
1650, and, in England in particular, a form of standard educated
speech (known as Received Pronunciation) spread from the major
public (private) schools in the 19th century. This
accent was adopted in the early 20th century by
the BBC for its announcers and readers, and is variously known
as RP, BBC English, Oxford English, and the King’s or Queen’s
English. It was the socially dominant accent of the British
Empire and retains prestige as a model for those learning
the language. In the UK, however, it is no longer as sought
after as it once was. Generally, Standard English today does
not depend on accent but rather on shared educational experience,
mainly of the printed language. Present-day English is an
immensely varied language, having absorbed material from many
other tongues. It is spoken by more than 300 million native
speakers, and between 400 and 800 million foreign users. It
is the official language of air transport and shipping; the
leading language of science, technology, computers, and commerce;
and a major medium of education, publishing, and international
negotiation.
Language notes:
1.
So, for a time, England was a
land where there were two languages─the French of the ruling
class, and the Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, of the servant
class, the English people.
For
a time means for a short period of time.
e.g.
For a time the police thought she might be guilty.
2.
During the lifetimes of these two great
writers and over all the years between, the English language
was sorting itself out from the chaos of Middle English.
Sort
out from means to separate from
a mass or group.
e.g.
Sort out the papers to be thrown away, and put the rest back.
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