Blog 2/22

I thought A Brief History of English written by Paul Roberts was very interesting because the first sentence, “No understanding of the English language can be very satisfactory without a notion of the history of the language,” fit perfectly with the research paper I had just written about my great aunt coming to America. She had no knowledge of the English language and I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to be thrown into a school setting not knowing anything. Especially back then when schools were more “Americanized” rather than diverse with a lot of culture; she and my grandmother must have had an extremely difficult time.
Old World, New World by Bryson, really got me thinking when he points out that O.K, OK, and okay are used in so many different ways in the English language. I know I use many sayings throughout the day. It never really occurred to me how much our culture uses that word as space fillers, like Bryson points out; or to describe how lunch was or how our day was. It really fascinated me that Okay was the most “widespread of all English words”. I also think it’s very interesting how many languages emerged from other languages with different twists and turns to them. Every language has a connection and root from another language which I think is pretty cool. Plus, if you pay enough attention to those changes and roots it is easier to learn new languages because you apply the different roots from other languages that you know.
“How big is the English language?” In Order Out of Chaos, also written by Bryson, I began to think that the English language is bigger than we can measure. Yes, there are thousands of words in the dictionary, but what about the words we use day to day, such as slang, or saying and words that are popular in a certain region that aren’t in the dictionary. There is no way to indicate how many words exist in our language. I also thought, is it possible for an average student to have a vocabulary of 150,000 when a professor ( from what Bryson stated) , only has 30,000? Is it because as younger people we’re exposed to more vocabulary and slang than just what we are taught? It seems a little bit too extreme to be possible. After all, professors have gone through higher education than a current student and are elders. But, it’s definitely an intriguing argument.