English is Our Second Language: Why Learning to Speak and Write English Properly is Damn Near Impossible

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend;

Of course, inside a dog it’s too dark to read.

~Groucho Marx

English is a very difficult language to learn-especially as a “second” language. It has been said that “English has no rules”. This is not true; English has rules it just does not always obey them. This is largely due to the fact that English is a “dynamic” language and not a “dead” language. The rules for speaking and writing Latin or Ancient Greek will never change. The rules for speaking and writing English on the other hand have and will continue to change. Fortunately for us, these changes have taken place and will continue to take place over long periods of time. Even its name is borrowed from a Germanic tribe that has long since disappeared from history and about whom little is known: the Angles.

I Blame the Parents

English is one of many Germanic and Scandinavian languages that are in turn part of a larger family of Indo-European languages (along with Latin, Ancient Greek and the Semitic and Slavic languages). Whether or not these Indo-European languages share a distant “Parent Language” one from which they all derive, is a subject of much academic speculation that is far too complex to summarize here. As an example of what a parent language is, Latin is the parent language of all of the Romance languages: French, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese and of course, Italian. Each of these Romance languages survives Latin as a dynamic language that represents a local adaptation of its Latin parent. The first and foremost casualty of these adaptations was Latin grammar principally they all lose Latin case endings. In Latin grammar noun-stems and verb-stems acquire an ending depending on the “case” of the verb. [We will discuss this later.]

Just as the Romance languages derive from a known common source, English derives from an unknown source that was common to it and many of its predecessors. Once again the principal difference between the parent language and its heirs seems to be the loss of case ending-agreements. For example, we know that Old English (the language Beowulf was written in) employed case ending-agreements; Middle English (the language of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) did not. Some of the confusion that resides in Modern English may be attributable to the loss of case ending agreements.