InDepthNH.org (https://indepthnh.org/author/michael-ferber/page/2/)
They were created knowing some language or other, apparently, but the odd thing is that God seemed not to know it, or not very well, for after he created Adam he brought all the beasts and birds to him “to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
You would readily conclude that it considers itself a part of England, or did so once, because of its 234 cities and towns the majority are named after British cities and towns, and of these most are English.
Is “ish” a word? Until recently it was only a suffix, first attached to national names (“English, Swedish”), then to various nouns (“selfish, childish”), and then to almost any short adjective, meaning “sort of” or “in a way” (“brownish, youngish”).
So even on the lips of a well-educated speaker, the English subjunctive is a shadow of its former self.
A Conservative back-bencher named Sir Thomas Massey-Massey rose to propose that the name of the holiday be changed to “Christtide.”
Note, in any case, that, if we can substitute going to for gonna in every instance, the reverse is not true. I’m going to Chicago cannot be changed to I’m gonna Chicago.
You would think linguists would have a pretty good idea how many languages are spoken in the world. It’s not likely that more than two or three little bands of hunters in small villages have gone unnoticed up to now in the rugged mountains of Papua New Guinea.
At a meeting at UNH a few years ago I was taken to task by a graduate student for using the phrase “American Indians.”
For reasons that have nothing to do with its virtues, English has become “the world language.” Although more people speak Mandarin Chinese as a first language than English, hundreds of millions of people speak English fluently as a second language or, as in India, a second first language