THE IMPORTANT ‘’LITTLE WORDS’’ in OUR LANGUAGE

Ever since the very earliest times of mankind there have been folk who seem to be driven to want to collect and study things around them – right up to the children of today who collect rocks or insects or… as well as those who can’t seem to resist dismantling anything they can get their hands on just to “See how it works, Nan”.  When they grow up they might become a motor mechanic; a scientist; a…

Those who are fascinated by languages; how people speak; how words can be put together; how they are pronounced; how those languages themselves change over the centuries are termed “linguists”.  I’m not talking here about those folk who speak several different languages; who seem to be able to pick up a new language apparently effortlessly.  No, I mean those who want to come to grips with the nuts and bolts of  either languages in general or one language in particular.

As far as English is concerned these “language scientists” (linguists) have decided that all the words of our language fit into one of two groups – no not nouns and verbs – but content words and function words.

The thousands upon thousands of content words are the ones you can get some sort of picture in your head; so long as it is within your own field of experience.  These are words like horse or run or blue or slow or fight or…

The function words on the other hand are those that many school teachers will tell children are the “little words”; the ones that make no sense on their own alone; no sense  until they are linked to an appropriate content word.  Consider for a moment in/on/by/at/out/of/off…  You need to link them to words like house or horse or horrid or happy and you can start to get a picture.

All in all there are only about a couple of hundred of these important “little words”.  Use the wrong one in the wrong place and your writing can easily become confusing or even meaningless.

Consider for a moment “the” and “a”:  many of us use these more or less indiscriminately, not realising that each has a specific meaning and must be used with care when writing.

“A” is generalist – yes, it is a word even though only a single letter; a dog/ a house/ a person are all non-specific – any dog, house or person whatever the size, shape, colour…

“The” on the other hand, is much more limited: “the dog” is one particular dog involved in a particular action; “the house” could be the one next door or the one you lived in as a child; or etc…

So, use with care.  Please.

A couple of other points:  “an” is merely “a” used when the next word begins with a vowel, e.g. “an apple”/”an orange” etc.  but even this is not so simple (wouldn’t y’ know it!!) as most of us have been taught that vowels are the letters a/e/i/o/u.  Not so. 

Vowels are sounds; speech sounds, that is.  And it is the beginning sound of the next word that governs the use of “a” or “an”.  Just say aloud to yourself “a happy holiday”.  No problem?  Now try it again but with “honourable person” instead of “happy holiday”.  Not so easy, is it.  “An honourable person” is much easier to say because the letter “h” is virtually silent. 

Forget using letters to decide whether to use “a” or “an”; go for the sound when you say aloud whatever it is that is puzzling you.  We do this without thinking when we are speaking so go for the spoken word/phrase if in doubt.  Much simpler than trying to remember a bunch of rules along with their exceptions.  There are always exceptions!!

There is more to say about function words, their glitchy bits and the angst they can cause those of us impelled to write but we’ll leave it for another time.

© Mary McDee 2024

Feature Photo: “Engrish” © L.M. Kling 2014