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Some History of English... in two words

    In 1582, Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of the Merchant Tailors’ school1 wrote that “our English tung is of small reatch, it stretcheth no further than this Iland of ours”. It didn’t stay that way. Today, English is spoken by more than a billion people all over the world. It is a colourful, vibrant and diverse tongue, that long has picked up words from the many languages with which its speakers have come into contact.

    One such word is Dictionary. It is a borrowing from medieval Latin dictionarius liber “book of words”; it first appeared in English in the 16th century, along with numerous adoptions from Latin and Greek.

    Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), although the most famous, is not the earliest; the first English dictionary was Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall (1604). Unlike a modern desk dictionary, Cawdrey set out to gloss only the most unfamiliar words, such as deambulate, pactation, and refractarie – whose meanings would have caused problems for those not educated in Latin and Greek.

    Another such word is Emoji2 , originally developed in Japan in the 1990s for use by teenagers on their pagers; the word emoji derives from the Japanese e “picture” + moji “character, letter”. Its successful integration into English has been helped by its similarity to words with the e-“electronic” prefix, such as e-mail and e-book. E-communication is a form of writing that resembles casual conversation more than formal prose, often situated in real time with a known recipient, but lacking the extra-linguistic cues such as facial expression, tone of voice, hand gestures, that help to convey attitude in face-toface interactions, and users are finding creative new ways to employ emojis.

(https://theconversation.com/Adaptado. Acesso em 18.08.2015)

1 a public school for 11-18 year olds, founded in 1561 in London just for boys back then.

2 iconic, visual representation of an idea, entity, feeling, status or event used alongside or instead of words in digital messaging. The plural form in English is either emoji or emojis.