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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.
In the extract from the fourth paragraph “E-communication
is a form of writing that resembles casual conversation”,
the bolded part is being used as