Panglish

“I am of this opinion that our own tung should be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges,” wrote Sir John Cheke in 1561, defending English against the deluge of language imported from French and Italian. The first professor of Greek at Cambridge University, Cheke did not object to foreign phrasing out of ignorance, but rather argued from principles so fastidious that his translation of the Gospel According to Matthew substituted the word crossed for crucified and gainrising for resurrection. Proud of his heritage, unbowed by European cultivation, Cheke refused to be indebted to other cultures in his expression, “wherein if we take not heed by tiim, ever borowing and never paying,” he warned, “[our tung] shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt.” Nearly half a millennium has passed, and Cheke’s disquiet seems ridiculous, not only because English has been incalculably enriched by mortgaged non-Germanic words such as democracy and education and science, but also because our own tongue has so flourished as to be seen on the European continent and around the world as the sort of cultural threat that Classical and Romance languages were to Cheke’s countrymen. The predominance of English is staggering. An estimated 1.5 billion people speak it, a number that the British Council predicts will increase by half a billion by the year 2016. Moreover fewer than a quarter of these people speak English as a first language; there are nearly twice as many nonnative speakers in India and China as native speakers on the planet. As might be expected given these statistics, few of the world’s 1.5 billion English speakers are fluent. Most get by with a vocabulary of a couple thousand words, as compared to the eighty thousand familiar to the average American or Briton. Pronunciations are often simplified, especially in the case of tricky consonant clusters. (For example, cluster becomes clusser.) Rules of grammar are frequently streamlined, irregularities dropped.