The Wonderful English Language
Have you ever wondered why English is such a wonderful, wacky language? Why there are 3 or 4 different words for everything? Why it is at the same time simple and complex in its rules and grammar?
It is that way because of its rich history.
Let me tell you a story. In 1857 the British Philological Society, (yeah, a bunch of guys sitting around talking about language – because… the British) decided to create a dictionary with all the English words in it. They figured it would be, what?, 10,000 words? Should take about 10 years on the outside?
They came up with a plan. They came up with a rigorous plan to find all these words.
They had volunteers read every scrap of English literature in existence since 1150. The volunteers would write down on a small slip of paper the word, it’s source, it’s usage. Then they would put all these together into the dictionary. Piece of cake.
But, they bit off more than they could chew. At one point they had over 2.5 Million little slips of paper. The first complete edition of the dictionary wasn’t ready until 1928 – 71 years later. At that point they had over 400,000 words captured and defined.
You see English is a very rich language.
Let me tell you another story.
In 1786 there was a British guy in India who was studying Sanskrit to learn more about the Indian legal system, because, you know, the British. This guy, Sir William Jones, also happened to be a Greek and Latin Scholar. When he started studying Sanskrit, he started to notice that it was quite like Greek and Latin. The words and the building blocks of the words were very similar.
From this comparison he, and others, were able to determine that Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Persian, Celtic and, indeed, , most of the European languages were derived from an original Indo-European language. This original language was spoken by a tribe in the area of Ukraine around 4,000 years ago. They were a talented bunch and spread out from their homeland to the edges of the continent.
Now, before you get all racist on me, we’re talking a linguistic group, not a genetic group, although there is some overlap.
One of the other branches of Indo-European was German. Guess who spoke old German? The Anglo-Saxons. You know who else? The Scandinavians.
Now let’s look at the timeline of the English language in England. How did we get to modern English? We first had to go through Old-English and Middle English. Bear with me, it all comes together.
Originally the British Isles were populated by the Celts. Then the Romans marched through under Claudius, then the Antonines and Hadrian – all settling in Celtic England and spreading a bit of Roman around. They were there for a couple hundred years. But they had a rough patch when the Western Roman Empire fell and they went into the dark ages. A bit of a zombie apocalypse.
Why couldn’t the Romano British just hang out and start their own little Roman state? Well, you see, the Roman state was based on a standing army and that army was taken away from England.
A character with one of the top ten historical best names, a British Roman ,Magnus Maximus, declared himself Emperor of Gaul in 383, because, you know, Romans… He didn’t last long. He over-reached and got spanked by Theodosus I. But the net result was most of the army was pulled out of England and the Romans there were left to fend for themselves.
Legend has it that these Romano-Britains were getting raided by the Picts so they called in some Anglo-Saxon Mercenaries from the continent to help out. Then the Anglo-Saxons decided they’d just take the whole country.
Now – this is where Old-English was spoken. You may think, “Oh, you mean like Shakespeare?” No. Shakespeare is modern English. A bit Archaic, but modern. So you may say, “Oh, you mean like Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales?” No, that’s Middle English.
Old-English was essentially German. You could not understand Old English. But, still many of the most common words in modern English are still Old English words. Old-English wasn’t written down much. We have Beowulf and some royal charters, but the Dark Age Anglo-Saxons weren’t super literate. They did more sword swinging than writing.
There weren’t a lot of words in the language. A bit like a toddler who calls every animal with fur and 4 legs a ‘dog’. Like all German dialects they had a lot of compound words. Like ‘wilderness’, which literally mean wild-deer-place. ‘Deer’ being a catch all term for wild animals.
They also had that thing where words changed depending on the tense of the verb. Not just male and female tense, like modern romance languages, The nouns would have different inflections or endings for past, present, future, etc. The didn’t need pronouns and word-order wasn’t as important.
That’s Old-English. It seems that the Old-English wasn’t influenced much by the pre-existing Celtic or Latin. It came in with the Anglo-Saxons and replaced what was already there.
The next big thing that happened to the language was that boatloads of homicidal gingers from Scandinavia showed up – the Vikings. Over the course of a couple decades they settled in the North of England. Remember, Old-Norse and Old-English were distant cousins. These guys when they weren’t raping, pillaging and slaving could understand each other’s words. Not the grammar, but the words.
Old-English borrowed a bunch of Old-Norse words. This is where some of our richness comes from. Instead of picking one of two similar words, they’d just keep both. This is also where they started to chuck out all those noun-tenses and instead use pronouns and verbs. Basically they were simplifying the language so they could talk to each-other across the different dialects.
OK – so what is Middle English? Middle English starts when a new bunch of ex-Vikings, now called Normans and living in France took advantage of a secession crises and defeated the last Anglo-Saxon king Harrold in 1066. (By the way, Harrold wasn’t really and Anglo-Saxon, he was from another Scandinavian usurper – Knute, but by this point they had all intermarried so much anybody could trace a line back to Alfred the Great.)
The Normans came over and took over and made everyone speak French for awhile. Now remember French is a Romance language, i.e. derived from Latin spoken in the Roman province of Gaul before the Franks kicked out the Visigoths. This means it is from the same Indo-European roots as Old-English and Old-Norse.
Seeing a pattern? They just kept mixing together different versions of the Indo-European language.
Turns out English was a very resilient language. Instead of being wiped out by the Norman French it absorbed them. And the pattern held. Where there were two words that meant the same thing they just kept both and kept simplifying the grammar to squeeze them in.
From Middle English to Modern English there was a major shifting of vowels to get where we are now. When you see English words with too many letters in them and silent letters, part of this is because they used to be pronounced, part of it was scribes trying to give you a hint as to how it was supposed to be pronounced.
That, my friends is a short overview of why English is such a wonderful, whacky, rich language. It mixed German, Latin, Norse, French, Latin again from the church, Greek again when science came back and French a couple more times to get where it is. And all these languages had a common ancestor.
This is why writing in English is fun because you have four words to choose from for everything you want to say.
Aren’t you glad you came to class today? And I told you all of this why?
Because, you know, me…