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The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
A foreign language is a language that is not an official language of, nor typically spoken in, a specific country. Native speakers from that country usually need to acquire it through conscious learning, such as through language lessons at school, self-teaching, or attending language courses.
The next most commonly mentioned foreign language, French (which is the most widely known foreign language in the UK and Ireland), could be used in conversation by 12 percent of respondents. [143] A working knowledge of English has become a requirement in a number of occupations and professions such as medicine [144] and computing.
Most of its grammar, its core vocabulary and the most common words are Germanic. [1] However, the percentage of loans in everyday conversation varies by dialect and idiolect, even if English vocabulary at large has a greater Romance influence. [2] [page needed] [3] Many loanwords have entered into English from other languages.
The term grammar can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writers rather than individuals. Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, English grammar could describe those rules followed by every one of the language's speakers. [2]
In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English, one says I see them and they see me: the nominative pronouns I/they represent the perceiver and the accusative pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are ...
Grammar can be described as a system of categories and a set of rules that determine how categories combine to form different aspects of meaning. [84] Languages differ widely in whether they are encoded through the use of categories or lexical units. However, several categories are so common as to be nearly universal.
Not all languages have both definite and indefinite articles, and some languages have different types of definite and indefinite articles to distinguish finer shades of meaning: for example, French and Italian have a partitive article used for indefinite mass nouns, whereas Colognian has two distinct sets of definite articles indicating focus ...