The Economics of English

English is a really random language. I mean, as native speaker, I rarely think of its nonsensical nuances. Throughout these past few months however, friends who aren’t native speakers and my brutal battles with Arabic have brought English’s laundry list of haphazard discrepancies to my attention.

For example, think of the sound “ough,” which is embedded within a variety of words. The “ough” completes words such as “rough,” “cough,” “dough,” and “through.” Yes, the endings of each of these words look exactly the same. So why, on earth, is the “ough” in each word symbolize completely different pronunciations?? The words don’t sound the same!! It’s weird, and took me 24 years to notice!

I believe I’ve found the answer, thanks to a brilliant book called “Imagined Communities,” by Benedict Anderson. So apparently back in medieval Europe there wasn’t the standard German and French and English that we know today. Rather, Europe’s communities all spoke different dialects of each of these languages – dialects so different inter-village communication was severely limited. It was not until the invention of the printing press that these dialects began to standardize. Though the printing press played a huge role in this standardization, its actually captilalism we have to thank for establishing the English, German and French we know today.

You see when the printing press gained steam in Europe, the capitalists minds began to brew. They quickly realized that to maximize profits through the press, they had to maximize its reach. Consequently, printers began piecing together all the different dialects of English (or French, etc…) and compiling them into one standard language that everyone in the region could somewhat understand. And wahla! Standard English was born. Obviously, the printing press and capitalism combined went on to stimulate revolutions in Europe, leading to the rise of democracy in the West.

It’s interesting the impact capitalism had on change. Moveable type was actually first invented in China – as much as 500 years prior to its invention in Europe. Most people, however don’t realize this, as the invention had little impact on Chinese society. Why is this? Take a wild guess. Yep, the absence of capitalism, apparently, it proved rather vital to stimulating social change.

Anyway, I’m not trying to promote any agenda here – I just thought this information was quite interesting. Personally, I am just glad that Arabic is not made up of a bunch of random sounds. It’s hard enough to learn even with its phonetic logic. So to anyone learning English as a second language – props to you – the language doesn’t really make a lot of sense.