A Language for the Whole World
From time to time different natural languages have been used as universal tongues. As result of conquest or colonialism subjugated nations have been forced to abandon their own language or have gradually adopted the language of the conqueror; conversely, occupying forces have often gradually assimilated the languages of the conquered, as was the case of the Normans in England. In other cases, people neighbouring on a commercially, culturally, or politically pre-eminent nation have voluntarily, although usually only partly, adopted the language of the nation as auxiliary to their own. By such means the Latin language came closest of all native languages to becoming a truly universal tongue. Similarly, French from the 18th to the 19th century and English in the 20th century enjoyed relative universality in diplomatic, scientific, and commercial circles.
Other attempts at universal means of communication have been made by the use of a lingua franca or pidgin, or by simplifying existing languages; an example of the last is Basic English devised between 1925 and 1930.
Basic English is a simplified from of the English language based on 850 key words was developed by the English psychologist Charles Kay Ogden and publicized by the English to non-English spelling and grammar, however, were major hindrances to the adoption of Basic English as a second language.
The fundamental principle of Basic English was that any idea, however complex, may be reduced to simple units of thought and expressed clearly by a limited number of everyday words. The 850-word primary vocabulary was composed of 600 nouns (representing things or events), 150 adjectives (for qualities and properties), and 100general "operational" words, mainly verbs and prepositions. Almost all the words were in common use in English-speaking countries, more than 60 per cent were one-syllable words. The abbreviated vocabulary was created in part by eliminating numerous synonyms and by extending the use of 18 "basic" verbs, such as make, get, do, have, and be. These verbs were generally combined with prepositions, such as up, among, under, in, and forward. For example, a Basic English student would use the expression "go up" instead of "ascend".
Although it was supported by people such as Churchill and Roosevelt, it proved difficult to write the language in a way that meaning was clearly preserved. The use of living native languages has generally, however, proved to be impracticable because of difficulties in learning them or because of nationalistic prejudices.
For these reasons, many attempts have been made to construct artificial universal language, based on elements of natural languages with simplifications of grammar and spelling. For example, Esperanto, invented in 1887 by a Polish doctor, Dr. Ludwik L. Zamenhof, was based on a combination of Latin, the Romance languages and the Germanic languages. Esperanto is still the most widely spoken of the artificial languages. It is used at international conferences, several newspapers and journals are published in the language, and there is a large translated literature, including the Bible and the Qur'an. Despite this, Esperanto still does not have official status as an international language. Interlingua, created in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association, is derived from English and the Romance languages with a standardized vocabulary based on the main West European languages; it has primarily been used in international scientific and technological journals, thus eliminating the need for costly multiple translations. In 1981, Glosa, a language with a 1,000 words vocabulary derived from Green and Latin roots, was pioneered by its inventors, W. Ashby and R. Clark. Little progress has been made, however, towards the goal of an internationally recognized and universally used language.
The English Language is the chief medium of communication of people in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and numerous other countries. It is the official language of many nations in the Commonwealth of Nations and is widely understood and used in all of them. It is spoken in more parts of the world than any other language and by more people than any other tongue except Chinese.
The English vocabulary has increased greatly in more than 1,500 years of development. The most nearly complete dictionary of the language, the Oxford English Dictionary (13 vols., 1933), a revised edition of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (10 vols., 1884 - 1933; supplements), contains 500,000 words. It has been estimated, however, that the present English vocabulary consists of more than 1 million words, including slang and dialect expressions and scientific and technical terms, many of which only came into use after the middle of the 20th century. The latest edition of the New Oxford English Dictionary was published in 1998, after six years' revision by a team of 30 editors. It contains over 2000 new words. The English vocabulary is more extensive than that of any other language in the world. although some other languages -Chinese, for example- have a word-building capacity equal to that of English. It is, approximately half Germanic (Old English and Scandinavian) and half Italic or Romance (French and Latin) and extensive, constant borrowing from every major language, especially from Latin, Greek, French and the Scandinavian languages, and from numerous minor languages, accounts for the great number of words in the English vocabulary. From Old English have some cardinal and ordinal numbers, personal pronouns, and numerous nouns and adjectives: from French have come intellectual and abstract terms, as well as terms of rank and status, such as duke, marquis, and baron. In addition, certain processes have led to the creation of many new words as well as to the establishment of patterns for further expansion. Among these processes are onomatopoeia, or the imitation of natural sounds, which has created such words as burp and clink; affixation, or the addition of prefixes and suffixes, either native, such as mis-and-ness, or borrowed, such as ex-and-ist; the combination of compounds, such as bonehead and downpour; back formation, or the formation of words from previously exiting words, the forms of which suggest that the later words were derived from the earlier ones -for example, to jell, formed from jelly; and functional change, or the use of one part of speech as if it were another, for example, the noun shower used as a verb, to shower. The processes that have probably added the largest number of words are affixation and especially functional change, which is facilitated by the peculiarities of English syntactical structure.
The influence of the mass media appears likely to result in a more standardized pronunciation, more uniform spelling, and eventually a spelling closer to actual pronunciation. Despite the likelihood of such standardization, a unique feature of the English language remains its tendency to grow and change. Despite the warnings of linguistic purists, new words are constantly being coined and usages modified to express new concepts. Its vocabulary is constantly enriched by linguistic borrowings, particularly by cross-fertilizations from American English. Because it is capable of infinite possibilities of communication, the English language has become the chief international language.