The English language is a truly marvelous and evolving means of communication at all levels of need: poetry, romance, art, science, technology, biology, history, etc., etc. It is unabashedly eclectic and unashamed of flagrantly borrowing from other language and peoples and incorporating new words as if they were standard English. The English of the original King James Version of the Bible was so different from modern English that it had to be remodeled into its current form in the eighteenth century; so, it could be understandable. When Joseph Smith dictated his Book of Mormon to his scribe, Oliver Cowdery in the early 1800s, the scribe could scarcely understand his prophet let alone the nearly unique words, phrases, and place names he was hearing. The next several editions required a modification to comply with Standard American English and to correct over 100,000 spelling and punctuation “errors”—none of which changed the meaning of the Book, but all of which were valuable to allow readers to understand the text.
English grows exponentially every year, adding 500,000+ words on a temporary basis and about 20,000 new words which are officially added to dictionaries as their usage becomes increasingly common. The History of Words was begun to be catalogued by the Philological Society of London in 1859. Over the next seventy-one years the initial ten volumes was published—now known as the Oxford English Dictionary. The current version contains over 600,000 entries (National Geographic, December, 2013).
The same National Geographic article—Exploration, A Graphic Look, English by the Book, listed some of the sources of English: Eskimo (e.g. igloo), Aleut (e.g. kayak), North American (e.g. Raccoon), Central and South American (e.g. Guacamole), Middle Eastern and Afro-Asiatic (e.g. seersucker), African, (e.g. safari), Indian (e.g. Bungalow), Australian Aboriginal (e.g. Kangaroo), Central Eastern Asian (Yogurt), Austronesian (e.g. Boondocks), and, of course, European (e.g. German-Hamburger, French-joyful, Italian-antipasto, Swedish-Smorgasbord, etc). At the time of the KJV version of the Bible’s compilation, English was more like German than it was like modern English.
Using only the Oxford English Dictionary as the historical source, the phenomenal development and accretion of English and its adaptability to change is not just remarkable, but it is unique among languages, many of which are losing users at a steady and disturbing rate. Prior to the 12th century there were fewer than 7,500 permanent words; 600+ were added during that century; more than 15,000 during the 14th century; nearly 19,000 during the 15th; over 80,000 the next two centuries; 100,000 during the 18th and 19th centuries; and 36,000 became standard new English words during the 20th century. The rate of acquisition of new words is skyrocketing as English receives contributions from all around the developed world for understanding and naming technological terms. As English speakers travel and learn new words and phrases and translate them into anglicized form; as foreign speakers interact with English speakers, especially Americans, new terms creep steadily in to give meaning to actions and meanings previously only clear to the foreign language. And there is the neologisms from science fiction and fantasy (blast-off, space shuttle, robot, cyberspace, cyborg, Lunarian) There is even a science fiction dictionary-–Brave New Worlds: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, ed. Jeff Prucher. All sorts of contributors to the twenty-first century have given us new words such as supernova, racist, techno, Icecapade, oink, and on and on into the hundreds of thousands.
Gone are wyrd, seax, good freer, my liege, scop, and atheling, and maybe here to stay are see ya, hey, what’s up, take care, bye now and even cool—as in very good—but wait a bit; even those phrases may go the way of the dodo bird. English is like that. Maybe we will live to see English adopt phonetic spelling as its mode of written expression. Maybe we will do away with punctuation; we are well on our way. Maybe James Joyce’s stream of consciousness will become the rage; oh, wait a moment, we’re already there—it’s called twitter, Facebook, and texting. And maybe all we will have left is SnapChat and Instagram where our communication is gone in seven seconds. I can hardly wait.