PARENT TO PARENT

English is a living language. That means it is constantly changing and evolving through active use by our society. British English and American English have become very different forms of the same basic language, due primarily to differences in geographic location and historical experiences.

When Europeans arrived on the continent they found many new wonders they had never imagined, including new flora and fauna, local artifacts, and especially new cultures of the indigenous peoples. Having never seen or heard of these many things, there were no European names for them. Hence, the visitors learned the local peoples’ names, and incorporated them into the language. Many words we consider "English" are actually derivations of Native American words. The many different Nations across the American Continents spoke different languages, so even the Native American vocabulary is diverse in and of itself.

Once Europeans were established in the America's, many different countries sent explorers to colonize sections of the New World. What is now the United States was previously owned by England, Spain, Portugal and France. Furthermore, immigrants have traditionally arrived in this country in "waves". Due to political and/or religious upheavals in their homelands, large numbers of people from specific regions have fled enmasse from the tyrannies in their countries to the freedom and safety of America. With them has come their dress, their traditions, their food - and their language. This is why we have many words from all languages around the world.

All of these words had to be incorporated into a symbolic language using only 26 symbols and 44 sounds for all communication. Many words and groups of words have been added with their foreign spelling intact.

Finally, modernization has always played a role in the extemporaneous development of our language. America has always lead the world in inventiveness and technological development. With the invention of new gadgets comes the necessity for names. Sometimes invention leads to the development of entire new industries, which in turn has created whole new vocabularies that get incorporated into our language. The invention of the personal computer is a perfect example. Words like megabyte, keyboarding, hard drive, Internet, cyber-anything didn’t exist just a decade ago. There are currently several dictionaries on the market dedicated solely to computer terms; there are some specifically addressing the new and developing Internet language!

With modernization came an increase in the speed of our culture. It used to take 3 months to get from Europe to America; now it takes about 6 hours. It used to take a month for a letter to get from Boston to San Francisco. Now it takes 3 days and we call that snail mail. When email takes 30 seconds to post we tisk in disgust at the "slowness" of our computers! The increased speed in which we live has, to some extent, caused a natural consolidation of our language for the sake of efficiency.

Add to this our natural lean toward egalitarianism, at least in theory, and the result has been a simplifying of many speech patterns. For instance, words ending in -cial were originally pronounced phonetically. We've slurred the sounds together to create the "shul" blend, but have not changed the spelling accordingly. Hence, we find many words that sound "almost" phonetic but not quite. They are indeed spelled correctly; we as the general masses simply can't be bothered to enunciate them perfectly.

The global complexity of our language can make it difficult to learn, but at the same time a most fascinating one to explore. Etymology, the study of word origins, is a wonderful glimpse into the world's cultures.

I hope this helps,
Michele

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