They ended up learning English even in Russia and in China.

It was necessary. The technology comes in English first, weeks and months before it appears very poorly translated in other languages.

English is the number one language because of the way England ruled its complicated Empire starting more than 200 years ago, built up its fleet, defeated Napoleon, and then came out poor but victorious in the two terrible wars of the 20th century.

And England also had Shakespeare.
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The Westminster Palace is the United Kingdom parliament where the Empire figured out its framework.

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Windsor Castle : It is the largest castle in the world, probably the most famous, and it has been inhabited all the time for about 900 years and is the Queen’s official country residence.

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The Tower of London. It was a fortress, but also the king’s residence and a prison.

There is a curtain wall of 13 towers, and each tower has its own well-known name. The White Tower is also called the Bloody Tower because it was the scene of some high profile executions.

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Buckingham Palace is the Queen’s official London residence. It is called the Buck House. Her own picture is known the world over, though she keeps herself at an incredible distance :

Here she is, just getting married. Her name is Elizabeth the Second, because there was another queen of that name = Shakespeare’s Elizabeth, a hard act to follow.

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All of this is or was very great, and behind that was the fleet.

And then, as of last century, the cultural hegemony of the United States brought about an immense expansion of English.

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The Tower Bridge with its twin drawbridges. From the bridge you can see Her Majesty’s Ship “Belfast”, a monument to D-Day = June 6, 1944 :

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Below is Blenheim, the place where Churchill was born.

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So the greatest of them all, Shakespeare and Churchill :

Churchill as the greatest military and civil leader, maybe of all times or at least since the Greeks, also as a writer ;

and Shakespeare as the greatest of poets in the Western world.

[Dante, Goethe, the poets of Greece and those of the Bible come second because they are not as widely read anymore and cannot be read by so many people in their original language.]

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Finally, riding the wave, come the global bestsellers : the Beatles, Alice, the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter each with an intricate Wonderland of their own :

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The sunset panorama view and the goose with her daisies are from >>>> the gallery of David Diliff

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Saint Exupéry saw WWII from up close. He flew reconnaissance for the Allied and once he crashed in the desert.

When France surrendered to Germany in 1940, Saint Exupery traveled to the US.

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He wrote The Little Prince in 1942 in Asharoken on Long Island. A year later he again joined the French in the war against the Germans.

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On the evening of 31 July 1944 he left from an airbase on Corsica and was never seen again.

In 1998 a fisherman found his identity bracelet.
In 2000 a diver found the remains of his plane in the seabed near Marseille.

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The little prince lives all alone on a distant star.

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The star is small and he has to weed it frequently….

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to prevent those terrible baobab from growing too big and taking over :

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One day at sunrise he finds a rose and falls in love with her.

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She is vain and a bit of a liar, but he enjoys looking after her. He sets up a screen for her so she would not catch a cold.

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But her lies make him sad, and he leaves his planet and travels  around the universe to meet various strange men, each alone, each on his own little star breeding strange habits.

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He ends up on Earth, just where Saint Exupéry’s plane has crashed and  he is trying to fix it.

They are both in a North African desert, miles away from water, food, people, and they talk.

The Little Prince explains his story and its philosophy. He is  sweet, sad, and captivating.

He tells the story of his rose, his planet, the strange people he met on his travels in the universe.

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In the end he will  leave Earth to go back to his star via suicide. He asks a viper to bite him. He wants it to be quick and painless, and the Viper agrees.

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There was a French 50 franc note with his picture
and there is an Asteroid 2578 named Saint Exupery.

→ → → English version + pictures  free at http://home.pacific.net.hk/~rebylee/text/prince/14.html

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Quotes:

You can see only with your heart. The important things are not visible to your eyes.

You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

It is the time you have spent with your rose that makes your rose so important.
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Sainty Exupéry’s drawing of a large serpent has swallowed an elephant.

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Native speakers are expected to deal with vocabularies of about 3000 words.
Many foreigners know that many and yet can’t speak.

Why is that?

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A native speaker knows his 3000 words each with more than one meaning.

If there is an estimated average of 5 meanings per word, your 3000 word vocabulary represents a 15 000 item knowledge.

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HOWEVER, here comes the catch: a native speaker also combines his 3000 words all with each other to create thousands of new meanings :

Bring up ….educate
bring down ….topple
bring in …. earn
bring out…publish
bring off ….succeed

Break up ….. interrupt
break up ….disintegrate
break down …. collapse
break down …. analyze
break off … interrupt
break away ….escape
break out…erupt, escape

Estimating about 10 new combinations per word, that would give your native speaker a command of over 150 000 lexical items.

Now add ……

…… literary quotes
…… fixed phrases
…… abbreviations
…… technical terms

and you end up with 200 000 lexical items known to the native speaker .

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Definitions

………………….. Active vocabulary = words that you use

………………….. Passive vocabulary = words that you recognize in context. The passive vocabulary is always much larger than the active one.

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C r e d i t s

The stats and the idea are based on “Cambridge Companion to the English Language”.

The little kid with his cell phone is from a drawing by Gary Olsen at http://www.dubuque.k12.ia.us/cartoons. He allows taking his drawing if you link it to his collection.

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Added March 24 2011

More recent examples:

Uptick …….. I asked three Spanish engineers. They knew “tick” and of course “up”, but were unable to guess the meaning of “uptick in the radiation readings” .

Axe ……. These three were also unable to understand “Calls to Axe MP” though they knew “axe” and understood “call”.

Their English level is high, but they only read technical literature. One of them very recenly passed the GMAT with a 6 and maximum punctuation in his essays ……

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http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/luceneweb/caption_direct.jsp?photoId=AS11-44-6549

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In the past they had to  make the best of little bits and pieces of information obtained from people who had been abroad and from the poets :

Here is a map made by Hecataeus in the fifth century bC:

This map is in public domain at http://www.livius.org/a/1/maps/hecataeus_map.gif

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And this is how Herodotus imagined his Earth, also in the fifth century bC :

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The map of Herodotus reconstructed and released to public domain by bibi saint pol at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Herodotus_world_map-en.svg

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Isaac Azimov wrote and illustrated a story on the shape of the Earth, in public domain at http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/earthpix.pdf

The Greeks saw that ships on the sea appear as if they came up from somewhere behind and below the horizon. They deduced that the Earth had to be round, but they had a hard time trying to explain why things don’t fall off.

(By the way: why don’t things fall off?)

Elsewhere some thought that the Earth rested on pillars, and a much older passage in the Bible says that God suspended the Earth from nothing.

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Socrates too had a theory and before he died he explained why he believed that the Earth probably looked like a sphere of luminous colour patches. He reasoned that those colours had to be brighter and purer than any you can see on Earth :

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And Aristotle said that from Egypt you could see stars that were not visible from Greece. He concluded that the Earth had to be round and not very large.

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And the next map was drawn by Saint Isidore in Seville, Spain:

It is in public domain at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karte_Isidor.jpg

Saint Isidore lived in Seville some 1500 years ago. He was a bishop and a scholar who was influential and world famous for several hundred years.

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And this map is from the 15th century, in theory 2000 years closer to us.

The Earth is spherical, but you cannot get to the other side because you would risk falling off the Equator.

In the upper part of this map there seems to be a ship on a mountain. It must be Noah’s ship, for the map was still largely a story-telling device.

The map is in public domain at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/T-O_Mappa_mundi.jpg

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Some of the maps tried to show all of the available knowledge:

It is called the Ebstorfer World Map and was destroyed in WW2, but put back together from fragments. There is a 5 mega version at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ebstorfer-stich2.jpg. It is similar to a modern film director’s storyboard showing what and where and when everything took place.

In the center of the map, if you look up the larger version,  you will find Jerusalem, because at the time most of the information still came from the Bible, and Jerusalem was the center of the world and also of the universe.

There are also animals on this map:

Published by Kolossos under a GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2  at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ebstorfer-stich2.jpg.

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Some maps included information about the monsters that the sailors had met at sea.

On the original map at Wikipedia you can see the monsters one by one, but it is a very large file : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carta_Marina

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Below is the map with the most illustrous copyright owner:

According to Wikipedia, it may have been drawn by Christopher Columbus and his brother Bartolomé. Now it is in public domain with a larger version published at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ColombusMap.jpg.

They drew it to figure out how to navigate around the globe.

They had studied the Bible and other books expensive to obtain at the time and they wrote their observations in the margins:

Notes by Columbus on a text by Marco Polo in public domain according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ColombusNotesToMarcoPolo.jpg

The ships that were built for Columbus to cross the Ocean are lost, but exact replicas have been made, and the photo shows them sailing past Cape Canaveral spaceflight center.

The photo is freely available for non-commercial use from NASA at http://mix.msfc.nasa.gov/IMAGES/HIGH/9265044.jpg

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World maps were based on imagination, tradition, and hearsay, and there was room to include castles and people, animals, and ships.

This map was a puzzle sold online, but the page is no longer available.

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This map  shows the Pacific Ocean. They still did not mind proportions. You can see individual people, the sailors on that ship and also a winged creature with a red skirt:  maybe it is an angel.

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….. The point is that in the past there were many divergent ideas on what the Earth was like. Even Socrates’ famous view was just one of many. They  had to make the best of little bits and pieces of information obtained from people who had been abroad and from the poets.

Everybody could have a try, and they did. –

Now there is only one theory, and everybody knows about it, but very few can understand it really.

The drawing is one of Chris Madden’s science cartoons

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And they sent up a laser beam to create  a referent for photography in the Milky Way.

Photo by  ESO/Yuri Beletsky  under CC Attribution 3.0 Unported license at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Laser_Towards_Milky_Ways_Centre.jpg

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