Summary of Chapter 1:
Present and Future in English.
English is the way that speakers of a language can communicate their ideas and feelings to
others, the tool with which they connect their business or the government of millions of
people, the vehicle by which has been transmitted the science, the philosophy, the poetry of
the culture is surely worthy of study.
English, like all other languages, is subject to that constant growth and decay that
characterize all forms of life. It is a convenient figure of speech to speak of languages as
living and as dead. Although we rarely think of language as something that possesses life
apart from the people who speak it, as we can think of plants or of animals, we can observe
in speech something like the process of change that characterizes the life of living things.
When a language ceases to change, we call it a dead language. Classical Latin is a dead
language because it has not changed for nearly 2,000 years. The change that is constantly
going on in a living language can be most easily seen in the vocabulary. Old words die out,
new words are added, and existing words change their meaning. Much of the vocabulary of
Old English has been lost, and the development of new words to meet new conditions is one
of the most familiar phenomena of our language.
In numbers of speakers as well as in its uses for international communication and in other
less quantifiable measures, English is one of the most important languages of the world.
Spoken by more than 380 million people in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the
former British Empire, it is the largest of the Western languages.
Conclusion:
This chapter talk about the importance that has English in our life as language. Also talk
about how the English have changed: for example Mc Donald’s has an slogan “ I’m lovin” it “,
this was never said in the pass, now it is not correct, but people use it and it shows how the
language has been changing in decades.
Chapter 2
The Indo-European Family of Languages
Indo-European it is call a linguistic phenomenon and is a family of languages including most
of the languages spoken in Europe, India, and Iran descended from a common tongue spoken
in the third millennium B.C. by an agricultural people originating in southeastern Europe.
The family of languages is the second oldest in the world, only behind the Afroasiatic family
which includes the languages of ancient Egypt and early Semitic languages. In terms of
written evidence, the earliest Indo-European languages that researchers have found include
the Hittite, Luwian, and Mycenaean Greek languages.
Branches of Indo-European include Indo-Iranian Sanskrit and the Iranian languages, Greek,
Italic Latin and related languages, Celtic, Germanic which includes English, Armenian, Balto-
Slavic, Albanian, Anatolian, and Tocharian. Some of the most commonly spoken IE languages
in the modern world are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Russian, Punjabi, and
Bengali.
Conclusion:
Indo-European today is not a people, is not a race. Indo-European mean language and
culture.
And thanks to the ancestors' invasion of every continent on earth and usurpation of much of
its natural wealth, the descendants of the Indo-Europeans represent one of the most
populous and pervasive cultural forces on the planet. But the price of that success has been
quite steep, in almost all cases, the extinction of native cultures. Seen this way, the
colonization of the Americas is just one more Indo-European invasion in which the modern
descendants of these most efficient conquerors overran and imposed their way of life on yet
two more continents of natives, just another set of hapless victims.
