Prints of Whales

English is a funny language, isn’t it?

Take our orthography, or spelling, for example. Exactly why is there still a “p” in pneumonia, or ptarmigan? How come know and no are pronounced the same? And why do the Brits insist on spelling it “neighbour” while the Americans want “neighbor”? If you’re going to get finicky about silent letters, then what are the “gh” doing in either variation?

Complicating things even more is the matter of pronunciation, even if the spelling is agreed. If you are in England, “flaw” and “floor” are homonyms, while on this side of the Atlantic, by and large, they are not. “Pawed” rhymes with “poured” or with “pod”, depending on where you live.

The verb “to cleave” can mean to adhere to, or it can mean to chop apart– nearly opposites in meaning, depending entirely on context. If you are sanctioned, does it mean you are approved, or disapproved? Well, that depends on the context. And does “overlook” mean to watch carefully, or not at all? Again, context. These are examples of contronyms, single words which can have contrary meanings depending on use.

And do you pronounce t-e-a-r as “tare” or “teer”? Again, it depends on the context. Words of this sort are known as heteronyms. And dear, deer, there are also homophones!

Unlike Italian which is more or less a direct descendent of Latin or German whose evolution has been pretty homogeneous, English has multiple parents and antecedents. Beginning as a Germanic tongue stretched over the frame and idioms of Romano-British, just as it was getting its legs under it as a national language, it was brought under the overlordship of the Norman French, whose language itself was the “love child” of Vulgar Latin and Frankish, with a sound dose of old Norse thrown in for good measure. And if that didn’t throw enough into the soup which was to become modern English, recall that for centuries the universal language of all of Europe’s theologians and scholars remained Latin, such that the vocabulary of science, medicine, law, and other disciplines still is heavily latinized.

We’ve ended up with a language which is something like learning to play guitar– easy to grasp, hard to master. The world’s primary language of aviation, commerce, and entertainment has nothing like l’Académie française to monitor its purity, being rather more like a linguistic Petri dish into which anyone is welcome to spit. The language of Shakespeare, of Shelley, and of HipHop.

What’s my conclusion? There is none. Like our language, who knows what’s next?

And, oh yes, what would be the perfect gift for the Prince of Wales? Well, prints of whales, of course.