I’m button-burstingly proud to announce that you’re reading my 500th column in the Union Tribune. Inspired by this milestone (never a millstone), I celebrate our glorious, uproarious, victorious, stupendous, tremendous, end-over-endous English language.
In the year 1599, the poet and historian Samuel Daniel sang of the English language that was coming to full flower during the Elizabethan Age:
And who, in time, knows whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be sent.
To enrich unknowing Nations with our stores?
What words in the yet unformed Occident
May come refined with the accents that are ours?
The answer to Samuel Daniel’s questions is that English, “the treasure of our tongue,” has been transported around the globe and has become the most widely spoken language in the history of humankind, the linguistic wonder of the modern world. English is the first or official language of 59 countries covering one-fifth of the earth’s land surface. More than a billion people understand and speak the English language in some form, and 70 percent of them are not native speakers.
The English language boasts more than a million words, more than twice the vocabulary of any other tongue. One reason English has accumulated such a vast word hoard is that it is the most hospitable and democratic language that has ever existed. English has never rejected a word because of its race, creed, or national origin. Having welcomed into its vocabulary words from a multitude of other languages and dialects, ancient and modern, far and near, English is unique in the number and variety of its borrowed words.
Fewer than 30 percent of our words spring from the original Anglo-Saxon word stock; the rest are imported. As the poet Carl Sandburg once said, “The English language hasn’t got where it is by being pure.” Joseph Bellafiore has described the English language as “the lagoon of nations” because “in it there are hundreds of miscellaneous words floating like ships from foreign ports freighted with messages for us.”
Do you know that you speak 300 languages? Well, you do because you are reading this column and, therefore, speak English. To appreciate how cosmopolitan is the word-bearing fleet docked in the great lagoon of English, examine the following list of 50 familiar English words, along with the languages from which they descend:
Afrikaans: aardvark Algonquian: moose Arabic: alcohol Arauncanian: poncho Australian: boomerang Bantu: zebra Basque: anchovy Bengali: bungalow Cantonese typhoon Carib: hurricane Cree: Eskimo Czech: polka Dakota: teepee Danish: skill Dutch: boss Egyptian: oasis Finnish: sauna German: kindergarten Guarani: jaguar Gullah: jukebox Haitian Creole: canoe Hawaiian: ukulele Hebrew: camel Hungarian saber Icelandic: whisk Irish: banshee Italian: opera Japanese: tycoon Javanese: batik Lapp: tundra Malagasi bantam Malay: ketchup Maori: kiwi Mexican Indian: coyote Norwegian: shingle Ojibwa: wigwam Persian: bazaar Polish: mazurka Portuguese: molasses Romany: pal Russian: vodka Sanskrit: sugar Spanish: rodeo Swedish: smorgasbord Tagalog: boondocks Tahitian: tattoo Tibetan: polo Turkish: jackal Welsh: flannel Yiddish: glitch
No wonder Ralph Waldo Emerson waxed ecstatic about “English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven” and Dorothy Thompson, employing a more prosaic metaphor, referred to “that glorious and imperial mongrel, the English language.” With its liberal borrowing policy English is easy to learn because it has a familiar look to speakers of other languages. And, by assimilating so many alien words, English has accumulated the most versatile of all vocabularies.
Over the course of a millennium and a half, English has evolved from the rude tongue of a few isolated Germanic tribes into an international medium of exchange in science, commerce, politics, diplomacy, tourism, literature, and culture — the closest thing we have ever had to a global language. If ever our descendants make contact with articulate beings from other planets and solar systems, English will doubtless start adding and assimilating words from Martian, Saturnian, and Alpha Centaurian and beaming its vocabulary across outer space. Then English will become a truly universal language.