2009 At least that’s according to the Global Language Monitor (GLM), a website managed by a group of computer scientists using what they call an ‘algorithm’ to ‘crawl the web’ in search of new words. And the millionth English word? It was a close-run thing, with ‘Web 2.0’ beating ‘slumdog’ by a whisker.
Interviewed on BBC TV’s Newsnight on the evening of 10 June, the English-usage expert Professor David Crystal called the GLM’s ‘English Language World Clock’ ‘the biggest pile of chicken droppings ever’. Crystal estimates that English already has around 1.5 million words, 70 per cent of them scientific or technical.
At least 1.5 billion people speak the language, whether in its standard form or one of its local dialects. This is a bit like the Latin spoken in the Roman empire, with a formal level on top and a number of variants at the spoken level, which later diverged into Portuguese, Italian, French, Spanish and so on.
Why so many words, though? Crystal says because of England’s and Scotland’s early lead in science. Language follows power, he says, and English was the language of an empire. That’s the imperial model. But the strength of English lies also in its openness to new influences. There is no cultural resistance to neologisms – no ‘academy’, as in France, to rule for or against new words.
This may have as much to do with weakness as imperial might. Contrary to the mythology of an island fortress, Britain has been invaded again and again, by peoples laying down linguistic layers from the Celtic languages, through Latin, Anglo-Saxon (a form of German) and Danish, to French, which came in with the Norman conquest and quickly became the language spoken at court, while ordinary people carried on in Anglo-Saxon.
So English has a rich redundancy of vocabulary – more words than needed to get through the day – in which to express tone as well as bare content. Thanks to the Norman invasion (see 14 October), we use words derived from French for ‘cooked’ and cultivated things, Anglo- Saxon for ‘raw’ and natural. We raise pigs and cows and sheep, but eat pork and beef and mutton.
Poets too can speak plainly of shady caves or – if they want to be posh – umbrageous grots, blue sky or the azure firmament. Chaucer was the first great English writer to exploit this double vocabulary of official French and informal vernacular. Here is the beginning of ‘The Knight’s Tale’ in The Canterbury Tales:
Whilom [once], as olde stories tellen us
Ther was a duc that highte [was called] Theseus;
Of Atthenes he was lord and governour,
And in his tymes swich [such] a conquerour,
That gretter [greater] was ther noon under the sonne.
And this is the start of ‘The Miller’s Tale’, the antimasque, or ironic companion piece, to ‘The Knight’s Tale’:
Whilom ther was dwellynge at Oxenford
A rich gnof [lout] that gestes [guests] held to bord,
And of his craft he was a carpenter.
Or even better, how about the endings of the two tales?
And thus with alle blisse and melodye
Hath Palamon ywedde Emelye. …
And he hire [her] serveth so gentilly,
That nevere was ther no word hem [them] between
Of jalousie or any other teene [trouble].
Thus endeth Palamon and Emelye;
And God save all this faire compaignye!
Amen.
Thus swyved [fucked] was this carpenteris wyf,
For all his kepyng [caution] and his jalousie;
And Absolon hath kist her nether ye [eye];
And Nicholas is scalded in the towte [arse].
This tale is doon, and God save all the rowte [crowd]!