13 things you didn’t know about English.

The Brexit is on everyone’s lips. Newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, News on TV…. That is why I decided not to write about the Brexit this time.

The English language is the most important one in the world. The English language has the most speakers worldwide and , of all world languages, is used most in different cultures, scienes and economy.

Most of the native speakers live in the USA, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Ireland, South Africa and New Zealand (sorted high to low number of native speakers).
The rise of the English language began in the 19th century when the British Empire with all its colonies comprised up to a third of the world’s population. After 1945 the super power of the USA was the main reason why the English language kept spreading all over the world. (http://www.weltsprachen.net/weltsprache-englisch.html)

And since English is such an important language, there are lots of interesting facts that were produced over time. Here are just some of them:

1. There are no rhyming words for orange, silver and purple in English which is why they are seldom used in poems
2. Oh by the way, there was no word for the colour orange in English until about 450 years ago.
3. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (oh how I love the movie Mary Poppin’s for this song) is not the longest word, but Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which is a t ype of lung disease caused by anhaling ash and dust.
4. There are such things as crutch words — These are words that we always use although they add no meaning. We slip them into sentences in order to give ourselves more time to think, or to emphasize a statement. “So”, “Um” and “Actually” are perfect examples for crutch words.
5. SWIMS will always be SWIMS even when put upside down. Those words are called ambigrams.
6. “Girl” used to mean child or young person. Orginally it was not referred to a specific gender.
7. The part of a wall between two windows is called interfenestration.
8. If you would write out every number in full (nine, ten, eleven….), you would not use a single letter B until you reach one billion.
9. Schoolmaster is an anagram of “the classroom”
10. Scarecrows were once known as hobidy-boobies.
11. The shortest -ology is oology which is the scientific study of eggs
12. Whipper-tooties are pointless misgivings or groundless excuses for not trying to do something.
13. Happy is used three times more often than sad in English.

What is more: over 80% of the electronicly saved data worldwide is in English and Frisian (Friesisch) ,of all the languages in the world, is the language that is closest to the English language.

If you want to know more fell free to check the links I inserted. :-)

( http://www.traducta.com/10-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-english-words/; https://www.grammarly.com/blog/10-interesting-english-facts-guest/; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-anthony-jones/66-facts-you-may-not-have_b_5508623.html)