IMPROVE YOUR ENGLISH IMPROVE YOUR ENGLISH THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO ENGLISH GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION AND SPELLING J E Metcalfe and C Astle Constable & Robinson Ltd 55–56 Russell Square London WC1B 4HP www.constablerobinson.com First published by Right Way, an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2013 Copyright © J E Metcalfe and C Astle 2013 Originally published in the title Correct English in 1995, material having been drawn from The Right Way to Improve Your English, How Good is Your English? and The Right Way to Spell. All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-7160-2345-6 eISBN: 978-0-7160-2346-3 Printed and bound in the EU 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Cover design: www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk CONTENTS The English Language PART 1: GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION Introduction Grammar and Punctuation Checklist 1. Parts of Speech 2. Verbs 3. Pronouns 4. The Sentence and the Paragraph 5. Punctuation 6. Common Mistakes 7. Oddities of the Language PART 2: SPELLING AND VOCABULARY Introduction 8. Word Formation 9. Spelling Rules and Conventions 10. Notes on Selected Words Index THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE The supremacy of English as a world language is a relic of the age when Great Britain was an important world power. The inhabitants of the huge chunks of territory which in old atlases were coloured pink enjoyed the benefits of learning English from explorers, travellers, missionaries and settlers. It is rather remarkable that today, despite minor idiomatic and spelling differences, American custom, an infinity of verbal differences, and diverse political constitutions, there is general consistency in written English throughout the world. Speech, of course, is far, far older than writing, and the development of the written language from the spoken in different parts of the world is an absorbing subject. The symbols of language, formed to represent objects, actions or syllables of speech, developed, in time, into characters which could be combined to form words. The first language to be written was Sumerian, which began as simple pictures and which can be traced as far back as 3100 BC. The Canaanites are said to have developed the first alphabet in the middle of the second millennium BC. The convenience of this method of writing led to its adoption by other Semitic peoples and the ancient Greeks, and, while each nation developed its own, the scripts were all based on Canaanite characters. Today there are Hebrew, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Latin alphabets, besides the bewilderingly vast range of characters of the Far East (China and Japan). The Latin or Roman alphabet, now the most widely used in the world, is a derivative of archaic Greek script. The word alphabet is so named from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta, which in turn were named after the first two signs of the Phoenician alphabet aleph and beth. Also derived from the Greek alphabet is Cyrillic script, used in Russia, Bulgaria and some Balkan states, originally by members of the Orthodox Church, and called after St Cyril who died in AD 869. With Julius Caesar’s incursions into Britain in 55 and 54 BC, the native Britons perhaps picked up a few Latin expressions and words but, unlike the invaders, they knew nothing about writing. What happened, then, to the only “real” British languages which existed before the Romans came? These languages, themselves derived from even older forms of speech, were the original Celtic tongues, which, most remarkably, had little effect on the development of English. Today they survive in Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, Manx and Cornish, but not in English, despite the fact that English is a mixture of several languages. It was probably not until the beginning of the real Roman occupation, about a hundred years after Julius Caesar, that the Roman alphabet was introduced into Britain. For a few centuries writing was practised only by monks and other scholars, being chiefly for ecclesiastical and legal documents and in Latin. We read so much today that it is difficult to imagine a time when hardly anybody did any reading. For centuries people passed their time in other ways; perhaps they conversed far more than they do now, and stories would be told by travelling storytellers and bards. Even kings and other leaders had to employ scribes. Monks busied themselves in writing original works or copying others in beautiful manuscript, but “ordinary” people did not need to read them, even if they could. The development of English took place over a very long time, during which most of the people in Britain were quite content with the spoken language, based on the speech of the sixth-century Anglo-Saxon invaders. Latin persisted, later invaders from Scandinavia brought much of their language, and the Norman Conquest of 1066 brought French. By the thirteenth century three languages were in use – Latin for scholars, ecclesiastics, philosophers and lawyers, French for the aristocracy, and English for the rest. The schools began teaching English about 1300 and English was at last permissible in the law courts in 1362. Gradually the various languages mingled, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for example, probably written after 1373, was written in an attractive mixture of English and French. Chaucer has been accused of using too many French words as an affectation, but French was certainly more elegant, more melodious, than the written and spoken English of the time. Chaucer was not alone in trying to improve the language, and the following passage, written in 1385, not only shows the awareness of sensitive people to the imperfections of English but is an example of the extraordinary written language of the period: “As it is knowe how meny maner peple beeth in this lond; there beeth also so many dyvers longages and tongs. Notheless Walsche men and Scots that beeth nought medled with other nations, holdeth wel nyh hir firste longage and speche; . . . but the Flemynges that woneth in the west side of Wales, having left her strange spech, and speketh sexonliche now. Also Englishe men, they had from the bygynnynge thre maner speche: northerns, sowtherne, and middel speche in the middel of the londe, as they come of three maner of peple of Germania: notheless by commyxtion and mellynge first with Danes, and afterwards with Normans, in meny the contrary longage is apayred [corrupted]. . . . All the longage of the Northumbers, and specialliche at York, is so scharp, flitting and frotynge, and unschape, that we southerne men may that langage unethe understonde.” The Canterbury Tales shows that in Chaucer’s time (c. 1345–1400) Southern English consisted of Anglo-Saxon and Old French. The philosophers and scientists introduced a number of Greek and Arabic words, while the musicians and artists gave us some Italian and Dutch. Later, explorers and their men brought words from the East, from India, China and Malaya. The English language is thus a hotch-potch of other languages, and the gradual changes have divided its history into three chronological periods known as Old English, Middle English and Modern English. The Old English period is considered to have ended about 1150 and the Middle English period about 1500, since when Modern English has been enriched by countless influences and additions from many other languages to become the English of today. The “rules” of Modern English have evolved from the speakers of the language through custom, usage and logic, even if at times the logic appears to be curious. There has been an urge, especially important in law, to distinguish between shades of meaning. There has been a wish to avoid tiresome queries and explanations between two persons in conversation. There has been anxiety to express much in little. There has been, above all, the unconscious human desire for orderliness, for that certain kind of discipline which has embraced the other desirable qualities of communication in our language – writing and reading. The innovation which did more than anything to encourage the use of writing, and eventually to encourage more people to learn to read, was the invention of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century. Latin was still the language of the learned, and most of the early printed books were in Latin. Then, with the influx of other languages, came the development of written English with its confused vagaries of grammar and spelling. Before the introduction of printing, one or two monks in their manuscripts had attempted spelling reforms, but when the printers came on the scene they had authors at their mercy. Between 1480 and 1660 they had become accustomed to their own conventions, and ideas of “correct” and “incorrect” spelling were not considered. William Caxton and other early printers tended to adopt the Middle English word patterns of the scribes without, however, any standardisation. The gradual spread of literacy from the sixteenth century, accompanied by a surge in the publication of printed matter, led a number of scholars to appreciate that inconsistency was an embarrassment. As the English-speaking world became more organised, as communications developed, as more people became educated, as trade intensified, as ability to read and write became essential, as competition grew, as people’s outlooks broadened, as travel became practicable, it became evident that discipline and consistency in the language were not only desirable but necessary. Writers realised that there must be no doubt about meaning, and elimination of doubt could be made possible by observing a certain consistency. Inconsistency, of course, is still with us, and it can baffle many people. Others, accustomed to British English, appear to resent, even occasionally be enraged by, American spelling, pronunciation, usage, phraseology, idiom and meanings. Such emotion is unjustified, for the Americans have had over three hundred years to develop their own kind of English. When we consider the history of America – at least the history since the arrival of the Europeans – and the mixture of the races that have made it, we should be flattered that they have adopted our language and no other nation’s. The English introduced into Virginia in 1607 and into Massachusetts in 1620 was the English of the seventeenth century, and naturally the subsequent evolution followed by the language in America differed somewhat from the evolution followed in Britain. It is surprising that after four centuries the two kinds of English have so much in common, for it is only in the last hundred and fifty years that the speed of communication has tended to neutralise the differences between the two. With the global increase of American influence, some parts of the world have adopted American English simply because they have known no other. On the subject of inconsistency, it may be entertaining to quote from a work by John Hart. Published in 1569, the work bore the long title An Orthographie conteyning the due order and reason, howe to paint thimage of mannes voice, most like to the life or nature. Hart wrote: