English was Britain’s biggest export but with two billion speakers worldwide today, many of whom are putting their own spin on the language, England no longer owns English.
So says retired Classics senior lecturer, Gail Symington, in the whimsical Wander Through the Wonder of Some Fascinating English Words: a two-day lecture series she recently delivered at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Summer School.
If you’ve ever been an international tourist seeking road directions in South Africa and been told to turn left at the robot, or a foreign student in a college study group in the United States and asked if anyone has a rubber, you’ll understand what Symington is talking about.
At the Catholic convent where she was educated in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, learning Latin was mandatory and she enjoyed it. So when she enrolled at UCT, it seemed a natural progression to continue studying Latin, as well as English, Greek and ancient history.
After completing a subsequent teaching qualification she became a school teacher, often heading to UCT after the school day had ended to lead Latin tutorials in the Classics Section.
“And then I fell pregnant and in those days – believe it or not – if you were pregnant, you were not allowed to teach until you’d had the baby because it was ‘unsightly’.”
There was no such antediluvian thinking at the university, though, and after she stood in for someone who had gone on sabbatical, she fell into an ongoing full-time role in the School of Languages and Literatures, lecturing in Classical Studies for 38 years before she retired at the end of 2017.
Until 1994, Latin was mandatory for all law students at UCT and Symington had about 350 students. By 1995, when law students could do Latin if they chose, as an elective, the number dropped to 100. By 1996, it was around 50. Now when she’s brought back to do the odd course, there are only about 20 law students taking Latin.
“It has helped with their approach to law,” she says. “They won’t be able to read law texts after one year of Latin, but they will not be afraid of those texts. Students who have not got any exposure to Latin are faced with looking at these texts that are so daunting and arcane. But if they’ve done the Latin, they can figure it out.”
During an exploratory overseas visit to other university Classics departments, Symington realised that her department – much like the ones she had encountered abroad – could not survive on Latin and ancient history alone. She and her colleagues would have to expand their academic offering if they were going to attract students.
So, in 1997, she conceptualised a course in etymology called Word Power while a colleague of hers developed a course on ancient mythology. Both courses were in English but about the ancient world.
Word Power starts with a general overview of the development of English from the Roman invasion of Britain through Shakespeare, to the 20th and 21st centuries. And then it focuses on fascinating words of Latin and ancient Greek origin – “and there are many”.
“Latin is the base of Romance languages so if you learn the structure of Latin, it helps with learning French, Portuguese, Romanian, Italian, Spanish. So it’s good for that but it’s just a very good mental discipline. There’s no shortcut to it because it’s not a spoken language so you can’t be immersed in it; you’ve got to be structured.” But it’s not only a springboard to learning Romance languages, she believes. “If you’ve got a sense of how Latin works, then you can apply it to any language.”
English is classified as a Germanic language, dating back to the time when the Germanic tribes – the Angles, Saxons and Jutes – settled in Britannia after the Romans had left (later changing its name to Angleland). Subsequent French and Norman invasions influenced the language, too, but the base vocabulary of English remains Germanic.
“You’ve got layers upon layers but at the base your everyday words – if you were looking at the etymology of everyday words – go back to Anglo-Saxon, back to Old English.”
And, with that, came all the declensions that any student of German today will know all too well. “Old English was Germanic-based but they started simplifying it, but they didn’t simplify German. If you look at an Old English text, it’s going to look more similar to German than it will to English as we know it today. You look at a Middle English Chaucer or to Shakespeare: it’s more similar to what we understand,” she says.
The English-speaking world is clearly much more loosey-goosey than its German and French speaking counterparts. Among native English speakers, words have cropped up over time and in certain situations and been incorporated into common parlance. World War One produced “dingbat”; World War Two produced “blackout”; the Covid era brought us “Blursday”. A TikToker came up with “rizz”; “amalgagender” rose out of the gender identity conversation, while the 21st century digital age birthed “nomophobia” (the fear of having no mobile phone).
Repurposed words often catch on – “lockdown” is one – or fail hopelessly. While “Google” has become a household noun and verb, its original name was the decidedly less catchy “BackRub”.
Taking a “selfie” has become such a dominant feature of speech (and behaviour) that it’s hard to believe the word was only coined, by an Australian, in 2002.
Social media platforms are a big contributor to “the pace of lexical change now”, leaning heavily on abbreviations – be they acronyms (such as LOL or ASAP) or initialisms (such as WFH or TMI) – and making them words in their own right.
In 1755, Johnson’s Dictionary published 50 000 English words. The first Oxford English Dictionary (OED) had 415 000 words in 1928. The current OED edition has 600 000, while the Global Language Monitor’s official estimate of the number of words in the English language is more than a million. Every year the OED adds 1000 entries to its serried lines of words.
Strict grammar of German keeps one within the rules “whereas English is getting more and more lackadaisical: changes in spelling, changes in punctuation, changes in everything. English is the most omnivorously receptive of other words. We borrow words from everywhere. We take them, we keep them and don’t ever give them back,” Symington says.
By contrast, there are on average 184 000 words in the French dictionary. “The French have not wanted to keep adding words; they’re linguistically insular. But they are starting. Look at le weekend. And, why? Because English is now global. English is impacting everywhere.”