Modern English
Modern English or Modern English is the form of the English language, as it is in use since about the 18th century.
Even in the 16th and 17th century English was spoken almost exclusively in England and partly in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Today it is an international language that is spoken as a native language by over 340 million people in the British Isles, parts of Canada, the United States of America, Australia and New Zealand. It serves as the official language for teaching and administration in many other countries, such as India and Pakistan, as well as other African and Asian countries.
The great age of the grammarians and lexicographers was the late 17th and the 18th century. Samuel Johnson's "Dictionary of the English Language " was published in 1755 after more than eight years of preparation and long remained exemplary. The strict word order subject-verb - object that was common only in main clauses in Old English, is mandatory in modern English.
The modern English is mainly characterized by the following symptoms:
- A strong assimilation foreign available vocabulary; Modern-English borrowed in the course of its development words from more than 50 languages, including from other European languages such as Italian (volcano, violin ), Spanish ( alligator, sombrero ), Portuguese ( fetish, tank ), German ( kindergarten, zeitgeist ), Swiss German ( putsch, muesli ), Russian ( samovar, troika ), but also from the Arabic (magazine, coffee ), Persian ( naphtha, chess ), Hindi ( guru, chutney ), Japanese (sake, soy ), Chinese ( sampan, ginseng ), Indian ( coyote, wigwam ) and Australian ( kangaroo, boomerang ).
- Conversion, that is, the transition from one part of speech to another, without formal amendment; this is referred to as a " grammatical homonymy ".
- Word compounds in solid additions that need to be learned by non- native speakers as dialects or " phrasal verbs ".
- A historical orthography that reflects the volume level of the late Middle English substantially.
Especially the frühneuenglische Vowel Shift ( Great Vowel Shift) meant that the typeface does not correspond in many cases the debate. You can no longer recognize the pronunciation and not close to the spoken word to the spelling of the spelling in many cases. George Bernard Shaw once had sarcastically suggested ghoti fish as a conceivable spelling for the word: gh as in cough ( cough ), o as in women ( plural) and ti as in nation. In fact, for example, the sound [ f] in the English orthography through four different spellings ( f, ff, gh, ph) is represented. However, all efforts so far have failed to a sweeping Orthografiereform.