Modern English Structure and Usage - Report Example

Modern English structure and usage English is the official language of about 750 million people in the world, including those in the primary Englishspeaking nations like Canada, England, New Zealand and Australia and those countries where it is a second language (www.ielanguages.com). Both English and French are classified as Low West Germanic languages of the Indo-European family. Old English, i.e, the Anglo-Saxon language, was used as far back as 449 B.C. Since the Germanic tribes were exposed to Latin before their invasion of England, old English contains a lot of Latin. This evolved into middle English, beginning with the Norman invasion in 1066 CE. During this time, the use of French became popular, but despite the use of French becoming less prevalent, about 10,000 words from this language were borrowed into English. Since 1700, the modern form of English has evolved with several changes being introduced into it, such as an increase in the use of progressive tenses and the addition of a large number of words related to science and technology, which use Greek and Latin roots. This report compares the language structure and usage of grammar of two languages – English and French. There are many areas of similarity between the two languages. At the outset, both the languages have 26 letters in the alphabet, with the only difference being that they are pronounced differently. They also contain active and passive voices, present, past and future tenses, auxiliaries and participles. There are many words in English which are the same in French as well, due to their Latin roots, for example, words such as table, passport, airport, taxi, hotel and many others are the same in English and French, except for differences in pronunciation. But in some important aspects, the structure and use of grammar differs in the two languages. One of the most significant differences between English and French is the use of the article before every noun in French. In the English language, nouns are not gendered at all, but in French every noun is either masculine or feminine and must always be preceded by the article “the”. This would be the case even if the noun is preceded by “a”. Thus for example, table in English would be la table or the table in French, with a la being used because it is the feminine gender. Similarly book in English would be le livre in French with the article being masculine in this instance. The noun is never used by itself as in English, it is always used in combination with the article. The article changes, not merely in association with the change in gender but also with the change in number. As a result, tables in English would be les tables in French and books in English would be les livres in French. This rule also applies when “a” is used before a noun. The English “a table” would be “une table” in French and the English “a book” would be un livre in French. English is therefore structured differently from French in that the article is an integral part of the French language, while it is not used as pervasively in the English language. In reference to the use of the article, the above is the use of the definite article, as in the table and the book. The partitive article is also used in French, whereby it is used after the preposition “de” or “of”. When the preposition and article are combined in French, the “de le” would be transformed into “du”, while when feminine, it would be retained as “de la” (lilt.ilstu.edu). The “de” also changes depending upon the number; for instance when there is more than one table, it would be written as des tables rather than de les tables. This kind of structure is peculiar to French and is not characteristic of English, because there is no use of the definitive and partitive article with attention to gender as is the case in French. Gender would also be factored into the use of pronouns, because the pronouns would agree with the gender of the noun that they are associated with, just as possessive adjectives would also agree with the gender of the noun that they qualify. For example, the sentence in English - It is a table would be translated into the French as Elle a la table or translating literally, “she is a table”. An example of a possessive adjective used with a sentence for example, is my table – in English it would be “my” irrespective of whether it was a table belonging to a man or a woman, but in French, the “my” word would always be feminine because table is feminine in French. There are also differences between the two languages in the use of tense. The auxiliary verb “to do” is not commonly used in the French language. As a result, there may be differences in the way questions are framed in French as compared to English. The French would tend to frame their questions as sentences and then add an oral inflexion at the end of the sentence, such as for example, You want to go to the zoo? rather than the way it would be said in English: Do you want to go to the zoo? Alternatively, the subject of the sentence and the verb may be inverted, such as the English Do you see her often? might be converted in French as How often you see her? While the Subject-Verb-Object syntax is the same in both English and French, but the order of usage of these words in the two languages is different; in French the order of usage of verb and subject would be different from what it is in English. This could be noted especially in the use of the past tenses in French, as compared to English. The passé compose used in French is the past tense for the verb; in the case of the verb eat for example, the past perfect in English would be I have eaten, but in the French passé compose, this could also be translated as the English simple past (I ate) or the emphatic past (I did eat). As a result, the translation between French to English can be somewhat confusing, because the French equivalent of passé compose could translate into the English present perfect or the simple English past as well. Yet another aspect whereby French is different from English is in the use of the subjunctive verb. In English this is rarely used; however in French the subjunctive is generally used to indicate a lack of sureness about certain things. It may be used in conjunction with emotions or when something is an opinion rather than a known fact. In French, t he subjunctive is generally used in conjunction with a subordinate clause. In English, subordinate clauses are generally used with words like that, which, who and similar words, while in French those words are que, qui, ou or similar words. In conclusion therefore, it may be noted that English usage and sentence construction may be simpler in some instances because it is not necessary to learn the gender of objects, whereas in French, even inanimate objects may be masculine or feminine. There are also differences in that French tends to use the subjunctive verb a lot while it is not commonly used in English. The differential use of tenses, especially the past tense, may also change the structure of sentences in French, so that it is somewhat more ambiguous when translating into English. The use of the passé compose tense in French translates into either one of two forms of the English past, i.e., the simple past, the present perfect or the emphatic past. The equivalent in French translates only one way – the immediate past. In terms of the structure of sentences in English and French, such distinctions can also create differences between the placement of verbs and nouns in sentences in the two languages. In some instances, it could mean that sentences are constructed differently in French, i.e., the lack of the verb “to do” would tend to make the French pose flat statements which are converted into questions merely by placing a higher inflexion at the end when saying it orally. Despite these differences however, there are also similarities as outlined earlier, between the two languages, especially since they both originate from the same Latin roots. References: “French articles: definitive v partitive”; retrieved April 25, 2010 from: http://lilt.ilstu.edu/jhreid/grammar/articles.htm “History of English”, Retrieved April 28, 210 from: http://www.ielanguages.com/enghist.html Lawless, Laura K, “French past tenses – passé compose vs Imperfect”,; Retrieved April 25, 2010 from: http://french.about.com/od/grammar/a/pasttenses.htm “When do I use the subjunctive?” Retrieved April 25, 2010 from: http://www.french-linguistics.co.uk/grammar/subjunctive_when_intro.shtml Read More