However the writing contained variability structure that is randomly reflected the different speech community especially in the pronunciation. By the beginning of seventeenth century, the first monolingual dictionary was emerged by Robert Cawdrey in order to simplify the hard words that are derived from other languages especially Latin and French. Although many dictionaries appeared to serve simplifying the difficult words, but the real standard dictionary didn’t appear until 1755 when Samuel Johnson published “Dictionary of the English Language”, which is the basic dictionary for English codification that serve for educational purposes. Later on, the nineteenth century witnessed more demand for pedagogical dictionaries to get the 'correct English '. Therefore, we can notice how the implementation of standard English passed through many stages for codification and prescriptivism that ranged from fourteenth century till nineteenth.
Johnson was the first English lexicographer to use citations in this way, a method that greatly influenced the style of future dictionaries. He had scoured books stretching back to the 1500s, often quoting from those thought to be 'great works ' such as Milton or Shakespeare.” (The British Library, Literary quotations). In the eighteenth century, the language changed due to the time of the empire. Because of the people who came from foreign countries to England for commercial trading purposes, the language was affected from both foreign countries and England. “Johnson argued that as a country grows, so does the language.” (Seargeant and Swann, 2012, p.
British English is used in the United Kingdom and also in the Commonwealth Countries as the British was responsible for the Commonwealth nations. American English is used in the United States predominantly. Although English was introduced to America by the British, there is a vast differences. This English diversity reflects to different cultures in Britain and America. Therefore, if the individuals want to better realize the different cultures between this two countries, it is necessary to cognize the three major differences between American English and British English which are vocabulary used, spelling and grammar.
Addition to this, writing made it possible for numerous historical facts to be passed down till today. One of the writing inventions by our ancestors that we are using it till today is the alphabets. In the book “A Little History of the World” written by E. H. Gombrich, the chapter “I C-A-N R-E-A-D” discusses the origin of the alphabets we use today. Gombrich states that Phoenicians, who were the merchants, developed the letters we use as the alphabets today and communicate with their families and friends in the hometown. However, Gombrich’s “A Little History of the World” was criticized due to the several implications it consists of; the oversimplified historical facts, inaccurate information, and unsuitable structure and organization of the presentation of the information.
In Hong Kong this sign is viewed as something quotidian and straightforward, the use of Simple English gets the message across readers who graduated from different levels of education. However, imagine putting this sign 12,719 kilometers across the world in the United States, it will no longer be one of those ordinary signs that people look at and walk pass. Instead, it will be considered as one of those, “language errors” that gets on the headlines of The New York Times, being criticized and ridiculed. During the years, 1841 to 1997, Hong Kong was a colony of the British Empire. As a result, the official language of the British Empire 一 English, has been introduced to our Cantonese-speaking society.
The word ‘Saxon' was used by angry celts at English conquerers and English cultural imperialists. Henry Sweet insisted to use 'Old English' in one of King Alfred’s translations to highlight the independence of the the English language. Some years later, King Alfred himself referred to the English used by himself and the English of
Over the last hundred years or so many Second language methods and theories have been born. There are good aspects to the, activities, theories, styles and techniques, but none of them can stand alone to accommodate the task of second language learning and its varied needs. Most of these theories have been born from the theories and philosophies of prominent linguists throughout the 19th century. There are many valid hypotheses about the best approach to learning language but as linguists their main objective is to dissect language into its many parts, they see language in terms of structure, rules and dynamics. “The different components of language (pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, etc) have no meaning when they are isolated from each
Bhagat’s novels bring out the important role played by English language in establishing one’s position and status in present time. Even though we have seen many heated debates across the country over English versus vernacular language education, it needs to be accepted that the language of the Britishers does not belong to them anymore and is rather, a ‘lingua franca’ and the most viable medium of communication in the global context. Quoting the situation in contemporary India, Bhagat in an interview says, “It isn’t just the English versus Hindi class divide anymore….The new class divide is varying degrees of English….A lot more people are in the English fold, but with varying levels of proficiency. The elites laugh and sneer at their country cousins who are trying to learn English in India, and that is what Half Girlfriend is about.” (The National) The novel, Half Girlfriend projects the trials and tribulations of Bhagat’s hero, Madhav Jha from a rural place in Bihar, and his difficulties to make a place for himself in the upper class Delhi circle. His distress stems mainly from his inability to express himself in English.
More over, one is able to know, for example why something of the past has become successful or not. For instance, one can regard new racism fashions toward refugee as a current example with caution. The past has shown that political oppression and racism has lead to unhuman behaviour. Nevertheless, one can not learn a language without the cultural background in context. More over, studying the English Teaching History consists also of individual findings.
One has to know how English language took changes, from proto-English to the present modern English there were several changes such as Phonological changes, grammatical changes, and the evolution of English pronouns too. Phonological history of English language will give us in detail the changes that English had phonetically. By knowing the phonological history one can understand that for over two thousand years English has undergone several changes in its vowels than consonants, in old English period, several umlaut processes affected vowels in complex ways, this eventually lead to a loss of grammatical case and grammatical gender in the early Middle English. One of the most important umlaut process was I-mutation (c. 500CE), which lead to pervasive alterations of all sorts, among those many of them survive in the modern day English that we use at present. It made changes to several parts of speech such as noun paradigms (foot vs. feet), verb paradigms (sold vs. sell), normal derivatives from adjectives (strong vs. strength), from other nouns (fox vs. vixen), verbal derivatives (food vs. to feed), and comparative adjectives (old vs. elder).