The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000). Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. “It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary.
The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him.” The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage:īrowning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat-which meant precisely the same then as it does now-but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. “The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term.
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way At all events, the descended larynx explains why you can speak and your dog cannot.” It descends sometime between the ages of three and five months - curiously, the precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In modern humans, the lowered larynx isn't in position from birth. But with Homo sapiens food and drink must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a constant risk that some will be inadvertently inhaled. They can breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of food going down the wrong way. Other mammals have no contact between their air passages and oesophagi. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well articulated speech.
And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. “These Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: they had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks.
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