the mother tongue... analisis

THE MOTHER TONGUE.                                

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to. It would be charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed.

Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. In other languages, questions of familiarity can become even more agonizing. A Korean has to choose between one of six verb suffixes to accord with the status of the person addressed.

THE DAWN OF LANGUAGE.

There are any number of theories to account for how language began. The theories have names that seem almost to be begging ridicule—the Bow-Wow theory, the Ding-Dong theory, the Pooh- Pooh theory, the Yo-He-Ho theory—and they are generally based in one way or another on the supposition that languages come ultimately from spontaneous utterances of al arm, joy, pain, and so on, or that they are somehow imitative , onomatopoeic of sounds in the real world.

The presumption was that our minds at birth were blanlk slates onto which the rules and quirks of our native languages were written. But then other authorities, notably Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began to challenge this view, arguing that some structural facets of language

GLOBAL LANGUAGE.

In all languages pronunciation is of course largely a matter of familiarity mingled with prejudice. The average English speaker confronted with agglomerations of letters like tchst, sthm, and

tchph would naturally conclude that they were pretty well unpronounceable.

English also has a distinctive capacity to extract maximum work from a word by making it do double duty as both noun and verb.

English also has a commendable tendency toward conciseness, in contrast to many languages.All languages have the same purpose to communicate thoughts and yet they achieve this single aim in a multiplicity of ways. It appears there is no feature of grammar or syntax that is indispensable or universal.

THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS.

The Saxons and Jutes, began a long exodus to Britain. It was not so much an invasion as a series of opportunistic encroachments taking place over several generations. The tribes settled in different parts of Britain, each bringing its own variations in speech, some of which persist in Britain to this day—and may even have been carried onward to America centuries later.