The English language

· language is a principal means of communication (= you mainly/typically use language to communicate with other people)

· mother tongue – you learn it from your mother/as your first language

· second language – you learn it later in life, not as a baby/small child

· third language – another language you learn/know apart from mother tongue/second language

· foreign language – you learn it at school

· lingua franca – a language used all over the world (eg English: English is the lingua franca of the modern world now.)

ENGLISH AROUND THE WORLD:

How many people use it as their mother tongue?

· USA 280 – million (about 73%)

· UK – 55 million ( about 14%)

· Canada – 18 million (about 5%)

· Australia – 16 million (about 4%)

· others – 16 million (about 4%)

TOTAL: about 385 million

– apart from those, there are millions of people who learn/use English as their second language (=you use it at school/work) or third language

HISTORY OF ENGLISH:

· OLD ENGLISH – (circa 400-1100) – was similar to modern German or Czech

· MIDDLE ENGLISH (circa 1100-1500) – changed dramatically under the influence of French

· EARLY MODERN ENGLISH (circa 1500 -1650) – the English of Shakespeare: the vocabulary of English expanded greatly during the early modern period; it spread to other continents (new colonies were established in America)

· LATE MODERN ENGLISH (1650 up to present-day) – By 1700, scholars had come to prefer English over Latin as the language used in their publications; schools and universities in the English speaking countries had moved away from Latin.

ENGLISH VOCABULARY AND ITS SCTRUCTURE:

· there are at least 600,000 words in English (the largest vocabulary of all living languages)

· educated native speakers of English use and understand between 20,000 and 25,000 words

· as far as Czech goes, it has at least 250,000 words

· English has always borrowed words from other languages

· the most frequent are as follows: Greek and Romance languages (especially Latin and French, about 60%), borrowings from Germanic languages (25%) are less frequent

SOME CZECH WORDS IN ENGLISH:

· robot (coined by Josef Čapek, used by Karel Čapek in RUR, based on robota)

· pistol (˂ dated French pistole ˂ German Pistole ˂ Czech píšťala)

· polka (˂ půlka (=half-step)

· slivovitz does not come from Czech

 GRAMMAR:

· in comparison with its extensive vocabulary, there are only about 3,000 distinct grammar structures, which implies you spend much more time learning vocabulary than grammar

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS:

· flexibility – the same form has several functions (eg record, work, play and others can be used both as nouns and verbs)

· simplicity of form (dělám, děláš, dělá, děláme, dělají vs I/you/ we/they do, she/he/it does)

· openness of vocabulary (new words are constantly coming into English)

· versatility – language of business, aviation /eɪviˈeɪʃn/, technology, the Internet …

BRITISH ENGLISH VS AMERICAN ENGLISH:

· differences in spelling: labour BE /labor AE, theatre BE /theater AE, travelling BE/traveling AE

· differences in pronunciation: pass BE [pɑːs]// [pæs] AE

· differences in grammar: I haven´t done it yet BE/ I didn´t do it yet AE infml.

· differences in vocabulary: motorway BE/highway, expressway AE