There is a lot more to studying English than just tenses, prepositions or phrasal verbs. English is a rich language with a fascinating history and if you look into it a little deeper, you will discover many interesting, surprising and sometimes very funny things!
So if you wish to find out a little more about our beloved language or just want to impress some people at the pub, read on.
Did you know?
Tense is a grammatical category that is realized by verb inflection (separate verb form). Since English has no special forms for the future, technically we only recognise two tenses, the present (e.g. I work) and the past (e.g. I worked). All the other tenses in English as we study them are a combination of an auxiliary verb + infinitive (e.g. I am working), a modal verb + infinitive (e.g. I will work) or other constructions (e.g. I am going to work) so, technically, they are not true tenses.
This is good news, isn’t it? 🙂
(adapted from Student’s Grammar of the English Language, S. Greenbaum, R. Quirk, Longman, 1990)
The word “set” has the highest number of separate definitions in the English Language (192 definitions according to the Oxford English Dictionary).
Why can’t one or two be enough? 🙂
There are a lot of words in English which come from names of real people. When a personal name is used in this way, it is known as an eponym. Perhaps we are all familiar with the origin of the word ‘sandwich’, which was named after the 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718–92), an English nobleman said to have eaten food in this form so as not to leave the gaming table. Can you think of any more eponyms? Here you are:
cardigan – a knitted jacket fastened with buttons, first worn during the Crimean War to protect against cold winters.
Source: English cavalry officer James Thomas Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan (1797-1868), who led the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ at Balaclava (1854).
teddy bear – a soft toy in the shape of a bear.
Source: US President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), whose nickname was Teddy. The usage emerged after a cartoon showed Roosevelt, known as a bear-hunter, sparing the life of a bear cub.
nicotine – chemical compound, known for its presence in tobacco.
Source: French diplomat and scholar Jean Nicot (1530-1600), who introduced tobacco into France.
magnolia – a genus of shrubs and trees with large showy flowers.
Source: French botanist Pierre Magnol (1638-1715), known for his system of plant classification.
boycott – to refuse to do business with someone.
Source: Charles C. Boycott(1832-1897), the Irish land agent for an absentee landlord. Boycott refused to conform to land reforms supported by the Irish Land League.
sideburns – strips of hair at the sides of the face.
Source: U.S. Army Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside(1824-81) who wore them. The word began as burnsidesand referred to a style of facial hair that consisted of flaring side whiskers joining in the moustache. The chin was clean-shaven.
(adapted from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language by D. Crystal; Cambridge University Press; 1995 and www.dailywritingtips.com)
It’s easy. You can’t because such a word does not exist in English. Despite the incredible richness of the English vocabulary (and the students’ despair trying to learn it!), there are words in other languages that English simply cannot translate. The Slovak „škodoradosť“ (and the German ‘Schadenfreude’) is one of them. Can you think of others?
(adapted from Mother tongue by Bill Bryson, Penguin Books, 1990)
Feels good to know that we give English native speakers a hard time with translating, too! 🙂
Would you say it is the ‘o’ of ‘hot’, the ‘a’ of ‘cat’, the ‘e’ of ‘red’, the ‘i’ of ‘in’ or the ‘u’ of ‘up’? In fact, it’s none of these. It is the sound of the schwa, represented by the symbol [ə]. It is the sound of ‘i’ in ‘animal’, of ‘o’ in ‘police’ and of ‘o’ and ‘e’ in ‘computer’. It is at least one of the vowels in almost every word with more than two syllables. It is everywhere – look at the dictionary.
(adapted from Mother tongue by Bill Bryson, Penguin Books, 1990)
That is, if our English pronunciation is correct, of course! 🙂
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was not only the greatest English poet and a prolific writer, but he also contributed a great deal to the English vocabulary. He coined – or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of – 2,035 words. Titus Andronicus and Love’s Labour’s Lost, two of his earliest works, have 140 new words between them. Hamlet alone gave audiences 600 words that, according to all other evidence, they had never heard before.
Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany and countless others (including countless). Where would we be without them?
(adapted from Shakespeare by Bill Bryson, Harper Perennial, 2007)
Did you know you spoke Shakespeare’s English? Not bad. 🙂
Because English is so rich and flexible in its grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary and pronunciation, people often play with it to make jokes. Some of them are funny, some of them less so and some not at all, especially if your English is not so good! Here are some common examples:
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Egbert.
Egbert who?
Egbert no bacon.(sounds like ‘egg but no bacon’)
What’s black and white and red all over?
A newspaper. (sounds like past form of ‘read’)
Waiter, waiter, what’s this?
It’s bean soup.
I can see that. But what is it now? (sounds like ‘It’s been soup’)
Why did Dracula go to the doctor?
Because of the coughing. (sounds like ‘coffin’)
Funny? Maybe not but we certainly need to know our English to get it 🙂
