When you work teaching English to Romanians, it is quite extraordinary how often you hear two defeatist mantras, usually (but certainly not exclusively) from the older generation:
“Niciodată n-am reuşit să invaţ engleză. O înţeleg, da, cât de cât, dar este o limbă germanică!” (“I’ve never had any luck with English, I can understand it a bit, sure but it’s a Germanic language” i.e.* not Latinate, and therefore alien to me!)
and
“Gramatica voastră e groaznică; foarte complicată, nu înteleg nimic.”
(Your[English] grammar is awful; terribly complicated, I just don’t get it”)
Let’s tackle these points in order:
Firstly, “English is Germanic”. Absolutely true. And, then again, not quite. It’s, er, way more complicated than that.
It is true that, of the three main branches of the Indo-European tree (Italic, Germanic and Slavonic) English is usually attached to the Germanic branch. But most academics agree that this is a massive oversimplification. One cannot reasonably argue that Rock ‘n’ Roll is African tribal music simply because it has a family connection!
Granted, modern English has a significant Germanic/ Anglo-Saxon wordbase, but grammatically it has relatively little in common with either Latin or German (a point to which I shall return later). Furthermore, the German language itself not only has a huge Latin content but also shares most of its grammatical structure with Latin (more so in fact than most so-called Latin languages including Romanian!).
So what’s the breakdown? In fact, the percentage of the English lexicon deriving directly from Latin is generally estimated to stand at between 45% and 60%, which makes it compare quite favourably with Romanian (for which the figure is generally given as 75%. If we include the influence of French, Spanish, Italian and other romance languages upon English, then the figure rises to around 70%. Clearly this only leaves 30% for directly Germanic vocabulary, but we also need to take into account other languages e.g .** Greek, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, Swedish and so on, all of which have left their mark on the English language. Even if these amount to no more than 5% of English vocabulary (which seems to me to be a conservative estimate) then that leaves a maximum of 25% for Anglo-Saxon and Germanic vocabulary. By way of comparison, Romanian is typically estimated to owe around 15% - 20% of its lexicon to Slavic languages (but nobody who’s anybody would suggest that it is a Slavic language).
Of course, says the cynic, you can prove anything with statistics…..
Now to the second point: “English grammar is terribly complicated”.
This argument is so simple to beat that it is like shooting fish in a barrel. English is one of the least complex languages in the northern hemisphere. One oft-cited proof of this is its ongoing popularity and rapid uptake across the world. This is a bit of a false argument, of course: the fact that a language lacks complexity does not make it easy to learn (chess is a simple game to learn but it takes years of practice to master). But English has gone viral, nevertheless, for numerous socio-political reasons and it is indeed true – as with chess – that its lack of complexity does make it easy to get started and to communicate effectively, even if it may take years to perfect.
There are many features of English which make it tricky to master, but its grammar is certainly not complicated: it has only two true tenses, past and present and no conjugations to learn apart from an ‘s’ on the 3rd person present tense and the difference between ‘was’ and ‘were’ (for the verb ‘to be’ in past tense). It has no declensions, genders or adjective agreements, the subjunctive is an endangered species altogether(!) and its syntax is primitive and rigid. I could continue, but I am already getting boring.
It is pretty simple to illustrate the comparative complexity of Romanian, on the other hand, by looking at one of the ‘mantras’ I alluded to at the beginning of this post (I have highlighted the grammatical inflections in red):
“Gramatica voastră e groaznică; foarte complicată, nu înteleg nimic.”
(= [English] grammar is awful; terribly complicated, I just don’t get it”)
In just these nine words of Romanian (and a relatively simple sentence, too) we have to take into account one nominal inflection for the definite article on the noun Gramatica, a gender accord on the possessive pronoun voastră (because gramatica is feminine), another gender agreement for groaznică (because it also refers to gramatica) and conjugation of the verb to indicate first person (i.e. înteleg from the infinitive ‘a întelege’). Since none of these complications is applicable to English, it must be a simple language, Q.E.D***.
Concluzie - daca eşti studentul meu, fă temele şi nu te mai plânge ca-i grea engleza!
*Abbreviation of 'id est', or 'that is' (a popular English expression borrowed by the Romans)
**Abbreviation of 'exempli gratia', or 'for example' (another popular English expression borrowed by the Romans)
***Abbreviation of 'Quod erat demonstrandum' (where do these damn Romans get off with stealing our verbiage??)
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