The English Language
Essay Preview: The English Language
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Whether it is the creation of the new or the dying out of the old, the shortening of one or the blending of two, words and their semantics are forever transforming. The English language, as with all “living,” i.e., currently spoken, read, and/or written, languages are constantly changing. But that change only happens as people use the language, try out changes in meaning or spelling, and then spread that change. Language meaning or usage does not change “overnight,” it changes over time. Words change their meanings because a community of speakers who use those words cause them to change.
Language changes when words get old and new words are created to replace these expired words. This change can also occur when there are no previous words to describe a certain thing. This development of the English language occurs through methods such as compounding, broadening, narrowing and affixation. Compounding is joining two separate words to make a whole new word. An example of this may include “gold-digger” which as two separate words means different things. However, the recent fusing together of these words now means that a gold-digger is a woman that is only together with a man because she wants his money. This neologism has been established to describe a certain type of woman who can be found within todays society. Broadening is when the meaning of a word becomes broader or more inclusive than its earlier meaning. A modern example of this shift in meaning is the word “mint”. Mint used to be a type of herb but is now used as an evaluative/descriptive adjective used especially by teenagers, meaning “cool”, “good”, “attractive”. This transition shows how the younger generations have such a big impact on language change. The opposite of this process is Narrowing. The word naughty used to mean something much worse, being of naught (zero) value to anyone. Now it means youre a bit troublesome, but not in a serious way. From this example it is obvious that the meanings of words shift over time due to new words with stronger implications such as wayward. Finally, affixation is a very common way in which new words are creates as new words are created by adding an affix to a pre-existing word. One interesting example includes the very recent affixation of famine to feminism. This word was just coined towards the end of the 20th century to accommodate social change whereby people recognised the need to promote the equality of women – it demonstrates that people nowadays have more social awareness and that more women in particular, are willing to fight for their rights. I find it fascinating that over the thousands of years of human and language evolution, it was only until late 20th century that a word was created for movements aimed at establishing and defending equal rights for women. Why did it take us so long for this simple change to occur?
Such change can occur because the times demand such changes. It is interesting to think that the word “web,” from Old English “webb” for “woven fabric” and originally from an even older Germanic word, would now be associated with computers and the internet.
A common trend in recent times is the changing of nouns into verbs.