h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There is a very good reason that english (british/american/etc) is so hard. This is due to the fact that every 40-100 years (until recently)britain has been invaded by a new bunch of foreigners. As they took control of the country, they insist that anyone who has to deal with them learn their language to do it in. This ment it was typically the people of high status that had to learn it, and the people who wanted to be like them started to copy the usage of the words (not always correctly).
This is why, when it was last printed, the complete oxford english dictionary (OED) had something like 450 million words in it. The total rises every time that they produce a new edition.
The other reason that the language gets so big is that when you have two communities living in proximity, but speaking different languages, the people who interact with both communities start editing their speach so that not only do they not use taboo words in either language, but they don't use anything that sounds faintly like a taboo word in either language. They then have to make up another word to replace the ones that they can no longer use.
The current best guess for the size of the english language with all of it's speciality words is in the order of 1,500,000,000 words, but that was 2 or 3 years ago, so it'sprobably bigger now.

I was under the impression that Britain had not been successfully invaded since 1066

If you really think English is difficult, you should consider Japanese, which has three different "alphabets" (Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji - the latter of which is the Chinese alphabet with over 10,000 characters), each serving different purposes, but combined in most written sentences. Not only that, but Japanese has different sentence structures, verb forms, even words for use depending on the relative social status of the person you're speaking to.
As a former English teacher, I think one reason that English comes across as being difficult is the popularity of teaching conversational English these days - which is often incorrect or at least different from the "proper" British or American English. Not that I don't agree with this practice, but it must be taken at face value since it often doesn't hold up to grammatical scrutiny.

Correct!!
William was last to successfully do us in!
Prior to that, though, it was (In no particular order!)
Vikings, Danes, Saxons, Huns, Goths, Visigoths and a few more I have forgotten.

'G'

No aliens?

... extraterrestrial I mean

None that I know of - Unless Erich von Daniken is correct after all!
'G'

What you seem to be missing is that although no one has successfully invaded and taken over Britain since 1066, there is a continuous influx of new people from all over the globe (OK and extra terrestrials if you must Mr von Daniken )who wash up here.
Each group bring some new words or phrases, some of these stick and become part of the English language.

If you add to that the effect of words imported from film TV etc which don't even require anyone to come here to add to the language and the ability of us natives to change the meaning of a word or add a new one purely on a whim there are lot of new words entering the language each year.

Unlike the French language which has an official committee who vet new entries to the dictionary to try and keep the language pure, here dictionaries record the language as it is used in print, so if a new word or phrase appears in print regurlarly it gets in the dictionaries and becomes "official".

The other side of the coin though is that a lot of words drop out of use each year ( although dictionaries are very slow to drop them or label them archaic ).

I read in the Gaurdian,(I think) a while ago that average persons vocabulary was only around 8,000 words so there are a lot of words in even quite a small dictionary that no one will ever get round to using.

This is one of the things which catch out anyone learning English as an extra language, by the time you have learnt it, its out of date

Wrong attitude, there. I think it's what makes it fun. (see the VERY long thread on British English)
Modern dictionaries (of recent words ) are a good thing to read in a pub if you want everyone to talk to you.
(I agree with the above posts:Japanese is much more difficult, and standard Brit/US writing is easy. Speaking is hell, especially if you're moving from one area to another)
I don't think the Guardian's figures are correct. When I started teaching I was given 8000 as the average for native English speakers starting secondary school and 15,000 for those graduating from secondary/starting university and I reckon to have a current vocabulary of 30,000. (This isn't a boast; I've been teaching English overseas for over 30 years, which means my working vocabulary is totally different from my leisure one)
Give us some examples of recent words that have come into English that we can discuss and have fun with.

While looking up some of the food words in the thread "Middle English" (Sorry, didn't find any, although I found lots of other interesting things) I came across this poem by Defoe:

The Romans first with Julius Caesar came
Including all the Nations of that name
Gauls, Greeks and Lowlands - and by computation
Auxiliaries or Slaves of every Nation -
With Hengist - Saxons, Danes with Sueno came
In search of Plunder, not in search of Fame.
Scot Pict and Irish from the Hibernian Shore
And conquering William brought the Normans o'er
.. From this amphibious ill-born mob began
That vain ill-natured thing - an English man -

The Customs, Surnames, Languages and Manners
Of all the Nations are their own Explainers
Whose relicks are so lasting and so strong
They have left a Shibboleth upon our tongue
By which, with easy search you may distinguish
Your Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman English

Fate jumbled them together - God knows how!
What'er they were - they're true-born English now.

***

Actually, on closer scrutiny, this seems rather satirical, and doesn't exactly make one proud of being English. What's a Shibboleth?

It's an idea that is meaningless or wrong, although a lot of people believe it. (Pick your own ) I think it's Hebrew originally, but it's been in English since the King James version of the Bible.
(eg It is a shibboleth that the Eskimoes have 23 words for snow) Nice verse. Although I'm 100% English, I think of myself as a Celt - short stature and reddish hair. Some of my fairly immediate ancestors were Cornish

Thanks for the quick answer. Seems to apply to a lot of the stuff talked about around here.

I am one eigth Celtic/Gaelic - dark hair, pale skin. Plus my best friends around here are all Irish or Scottish. So I am very careful when I use the words "English" and "British"

The 'countless invasion' idea is rather the wrong way round.
In addition to Britain being (at least in the past) a relative haven for people fleeing various parts of Europe, one reason we have imported many words from across the globe is the existence of the British Empire.

Whether that involved invasion, colonisation, political manipulation or simple trade varied from country to country, but on top of the influence of foreigners moving to Britain from throughout the empire, I suspect that one significant effect is that many people were sent as servants of the crown from Britain to all corners of the earth, and many eventually returned, often to positions of influence where they could propagate their new knowledge.

There isn't any rule in English which says that - in the absence of an existing word you can't just use the nearest one from any other language.

So rather than sit around in committee for weeks trying to think of an English word for, say, schadenfreud...we just use it.

This leads to some intersting side effects...namely that it is impossible for one person to know the entire English language and yet nearly everyone has a few words which would be allowed in English...even if they don't yet realise it

Well according to the OED web site, the second edition (1989) contains about 230,000 main entries of which 12,000 are for non naturalised words. I guess that means adn DJ(Spearcarier) has said we just use the nearest thing from another language to get the gist across.

Sorry to bring it back to this (I spend a lot of time there, so it's what I know) but Japanese is a perfect example of a language that borrows a great deal of it's vocabulary from other languages. Sometimes the words remain intact (like "supotsu ka"... "sports car") but more often than not, they're made completely unrecognizeable even to native speakers of the language the word was borrowed from (like "paso con"... a shortened verson of "personal computer").
Japanese even devotes an "alphabet" to borrowed words, so they might be recognized at a glance.
It actually makes sense. Why should we invent words for things that denote foriegn concepts?

Tell that to the Academie Francaise!!!

I totally agree with you that any orgnisation devoted to stopping a language from expanding is silly, but i think in the case of the french, they probably deserve to succeed. Then we could replace french with something sensible like esperanto, which has been designed to be easy for anyone to learn, totally orthoganal, and as a second language that no one speaks as their mother tongue, would be free from the cultural superiority and bigotry that seem to be about when people talk to others who don't know their language very well.

the most annoying of these new words which are added to the English language so frequently is "wusssup!!!!" ..... i cant stand it any longer but it feels good to finally get that off of my chest.

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