Everyday english introduction

EVERYDAY ENGLISH

Introduction

Modern English is one of the Germanic languages (West Germanic group). It is native to 410 million people, it is owned by at least 1 billion people. It is the official language of Great Britain, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Ireland (in Canada along with French, in Ireland with Irish, in Malta with Maltese), one of the official languages of India (temporarily) and 15 states of Africa (South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, etc.). One of the official and working languages of the UN.

The English language originates from the language of the ancient Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons and Jutes), who migrated from the continent in the 5th-6th centuries. in Celtic-populated Britain. The interaction of the tribal dialects of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, which developed under the conditions of the formation of the English people, led to the formation of territorial dialects.
But in the UK itself there are many varieties of this language, called dialects, and accents.
It is quite difficult to draw a line between the concept of a language variant and the concept of dialect speech, because by definition, both of them can be characterized as a variant of the pronunciation of a given language, specific to a certain group of people. But we should not forget that the main difference is that some varieties of the language, in this case English, have already begun to establish themselves as independent languages (others will inevitably follow their example), which will never happen with dialectal speech.
The paper considers English in all variants - official, regional, national.

1. General characteristics of the English language

English (English [ the ] English [ language ]) - the language of the British (the official language of England and the whole of Great Britain), residents of the United States (the official language of thirty-one states), one of the two official languages of Ireland, Canada and Malta, the official language of Australia, New Zealand. It is used as official in some states of Asia (India, Pakistan, etc.) and Africa.

It belongs to the Germanic languages of the Indo-European family of languages. The number of speakers is about 510 million people (2000). One of the six official and working languages of the UN.
The language is dominated by analytical forms of expression of grammatical meaning. Word order is mostly strict. Refers to inflectional types of languages. About 70% of words in the vocabulary are borrowed. Writing based on the Latin alphabet has existed since the 7th century (in ancient times, additional letters were used, but they all fell into disuse). In orthography, a significant place is occupied by traditional spellings.
There is no consistent systemic correlation between the spelling of words and phonology, that is, without knowing the traditional pronunciation in advance, it is not always possible to correctly read the word “from a sheet”.
In the third person, the pronouns "he" - he , and "she" - she (or "they" - they , for persons of unknown gender) are used for people, most other nouns (including animal names) are replaced by the pronoun "it" - it . Exceptions are the names of countries and unique vehicles, which can (but usually not have to) be referred to by the pronoun "she", as well as the sun - "he" and the moon - "she". Often the pronouns he and she are used to refer to animal characters in fairy tales or pets.
There is practically no inflection depending on the role of the word, including cases; case relations are conveyed by the position of words in a sentence and by prepositional constructions.
Frequent conversion - the identity of single-root words of different parts of speech (for example, flower and flower are denoted by one word flower ). In view of this, the sequence of words in phrases is extremely important.
Species relations in the system of tenses of verbs are expressed in various forms, both simple and analytical.
There are articles.
No double negatives (however, the rule is often broken in American vernacular).
If we take as a unit of comparison the so-called standard pronunciation of the English language in England, the colonies and the USA, without taking into account the peculiarities of modern dialects and adverbs of the USA, then we can note:
almost complete absence of "soft", i.e. palatalized consonants,
lack of muting, with rare exceptions, final consonants; for example head is pronounced with a final d, not t, as this combination of sounds would sound in Russian,
assimilation and dissimilation in English is much less common than in Russian,
the stress in a word, as well as in Russian, is expiratory, but unlike Russian, it does not pass from one syllable to another, but is attached to a specific syllable.
One of the most characteristic features of the English language is a short word.
The short word in English prevails, but there are also long words, for example. individualisation . But there are relatively few such words in the dictionary, and most importantly, they are rarely found. The fact is that monosyllabic and generally short words are more often of German origin, and long ones are of French and Latin. In colloquial language, jargon, in poetic speech there are more short words than in scientific prose and in a newspaper. The words of the English language have become shorter due to two processes: the first, covering the entire language completely, is the falling away of endings. This process transformed the synthetic Old English into an almost purely analytic New English. A striking example of such abbreviations is the ancient Gothic word habaidedeima , compared with the English word had , which has the same meaning . The second process captures only part of the English vocabulary. This is the assimilation by borrowed words of a stronger Germanic stress. In this case, the words are abbreviated as follows: 1. one or more initial syllables disappear: vanguard - from the old French avant-guarde - avant-garde. Sometimes the changed word coexists in the language along with later borrowing, not changed, but they acquire different meanings: history - history and story - story;
. a syllable falls out in the middle of a word: fantasy gives fancy - fantasy. The disappearance of inflection inevitably led to the establishment of a fixed word order. Violation of this order, the so-called inversion, occurs in English (except for interrogative phrases, which are common) less frequently than in related Germanic languages. The fixed word order, which, like in other analytical languages, acquires a syntactic meaning, makes it possible and even sometimes necessary to eliminate the formal-sound distinctions between the so-called parts of speech: I heard her name his name "I heard her say his name." In the first case, name is the verb "named", and in the second case it is a noun with the meaning "name".

2. The main varieties of the English language