History of English language | origin and facts

The history of english language.

So, did you know that English has over a million words?  why does English have such an excess a glut or a plethora of words and why does the spelling seem like it was invented by a seven-year-old at random after he or she had  too many sweets.

well this seems to be a matter that requires further exploration and research better get stuck into the history books.

  Today's lesson is going to be a little bit different as we aren't necessarily learning English we are learning about English. we are looking at the history of English the origins and we are going to try and understand some of those strange things about English like the spellings and like why we have so many words.

This article will also be useful if you are taking your English Language a level or your English language in other areas. So sit back and enjoy the rollicking ride through the evolution of our current global language.

 So first of all one of the reasons why English has so many words is because we are an Island and we have had a lot of invaders so throughout history we have had lots of people come and settle here and obviously as they have come they brought their languages English is truly a melting pot of many different languages but we can be a little bit more specific than this.

First of all English has about 29% of its words from Latin about 29% from French about 26% from old Germanic languages including Old English, middle English and Old Norse.

More about those later and finally we have about 6% from Greek and then 10% from other language families. Mostly because of globalization and they have been adopted more recently but to find out the real origins of English we have to go further  wayback in time to 5000 years ago.

English actually belongs to the indo-european family of languages which date back 5,000 years now this ancient language family gave birth to many of the languages currently spoken in Europe including in West Asia and even to Iceland. So English can be related to languages from Iceland to India.

So one of the language families to come from proto-indo-european was the Germanic language family and at this time this was the one that mostly shaped English. The Germanic language family split into different strands or groups and one of these included Old Frisian and this was spoken by the Dutch people who were living in that area as well as some of the German inhabitants in that area as well.

Frisian is actually the nearest relation to modern English in terms of the grammatical structure so it's got a lot in common with English and some of our extremely common everyday words are very similar to Frisian.

for example, take the English word foot in old Frisian this would have been foot. I am not quite sure how it would have been said but as you can see it's extremely similar look also at day rain summer and ship they have hardly changed since three thousand years ago.

The next biggest influence of English was of course the Roman invasion by Julius Caesar in 55 BC the Romans were here for a long time about four hundred years. So, they did have an influence on our language as well as building some great roads for us giving us a love of theatre and many other things. At that time the Roman Empire spoke Latin and some Greek.

So some Latin and Greek words were absorbed into the English language. Then let's have a look at a few examples win, wine, candle extremely similar, butter very similar. you can see the similarity with cheese there Street and munt from Greek. we get democracy, philosophy, phobia, geography in fact that pH spelling which is said like a f ound you can't blame the Brits for that.

That actually comes from Greek so the Romans gradually left the British Isles from 388 ad but that certainly did not stop the invaders. We then had invasions from Germanic tribes coming from the area which is currently known today as Germany.

 So we were invaded by the Jutes the Angles and the Saxons all of these peoples spoke a version of West Germanic which had evolved from the older Germanic language that we talked about. Before this really began to dominate and it took over any of the Celtic dialects that were in existence at the time.

Let's have a look at some of the words we got from their meal. Lamb, sea boat, storm, freeze, frost, sleep and blue the language at this point had evolved into Anglo-Saxon which is known as Old English. However something started to shift from looking as similar to the Old Germanic languages. The 'SK' consonant cluster became sh this was when we gotthis 'sh' sound so words that would originally have been 'skield' became shield, 'skip' became 'ship', ' disk' became a 'dish'.

Other words that have the 'SK' consonant cluster in English which we still do they came in later with the Viking. So the next invaders were the Vikings these rugged ruffians came from Scandinavia they came from Norway Sweden and Denmark but it was the Danes that came with the most force. The Vikings spoke Old Norse which wasn't that dissimilar to anglo-saxon. In fact as they had both grown out of the Germanic language families, Old Norse is actually very similar to modern-day Ice landic.

The Vikings again were here on and off for hundreds of years and of course with that came their language. So if you are from a Scandinavian country this is where you might recognize some of the Scandinavian words in English. They tend to be much shorter than any Latinate words and they tend to have stronger consonant clusters.

Let's have alook at a few examples - 

'skin' , 'leg', 'skull',  'freckle', 'husband', 'sky', ' knife' , 'gap'.  You will notice the English got a lot of its double letters in fact from Old Norse as well as that the eye sound being written as a wide also came from Old Norse. Also the notorious silent ' K 'that we have in ' knife' and  'know' and ' knee'.  Again we can blame the Vikings for that.

However, british didn't want to have the Vikings here forever and they certainly didn't want them taking overall of their anglo-saxon language. So King Alfred who was king at the time of one of the regions of England Wessex, he is often called Alfred the Great. He started to write historical documents in anglo-saxon to make sure that they were not lost as well as that he was a very religious man and at this time Christianity was in fact coming to England through missionaries from Rome and France and countries like that.

So at this time we started to get more Latin and Greek words coming into the language but mostly from Latin as it was the language used to talk about religion and it was also the language of science, medicine and law in general the learned. So Alfred would have included some Latin words in that as well.

So the next group of invaders were in fact the Normans. William the Conqueror in fact he was the first King of England he was actually French which may come as a bit of a shock to anyone who's feeling a bit patriotic now. This could explain why French and English spelling have so much in common because a lot of the Norman language a lot of French came into our language at this point but it doesn't explain. However is why we're not better cooks.

So this is where we get lots of synonyms our anglo-saxon words and the Germanic words will very often have a French or Latinate equivalent. This is one of the reasons why English has so many words.

If we look Motherhood, Maternity,  infant, child, Amity,  friendship, battle to fight, Liberty to freedom, and over time many many more. Now the French or Latin equivalent will often suggest a greater level of sophistication or formality as we said before it was the language of the learned and the ruling class.

So it was considered to be a little bit more sophisticated whereas anglo-saxon tended to be more considered the language of the peasants and that difference still exists.

Today if you think about the word castigate, castigate is a very old formal latin word whereas we would probably say tell off, we would say I'm going to tell you off not I'm going to castigate you. So we still have this difference between the formality level with Latin words and Old Norse or Germanic words.

Today the Normans actually changed a lot of English Spelling's, so where before we would have put ' C ', ' W ' when we wanted to say words like Queen or quick which but was perhaps more phonetic. This got replaced by a more Norman version which was ' qu ' we also got the ' Ch' sound during this period before child and cheese would have been spelt like this, but the Normans changed it to the ' Ch' which is of course more similar to French also the ' ou ' spelling in words like house and mouse again this was introduced during the norman period.

So many of the spellings where we get silent letters and certain vowels aren't pronounced, that will actually come from some sort of Norman version of anglo-saxon. Look at the words beautiful and enormous a lot of the vowels there are not said. However, we know that the sound is 'oo' and ' or ', so we blend the vowels together so it was the norman period that gave us this guys, so you can't blame the anglo-saxons for that of course.

Latin and greek carried on through christianity, medicine, law, and literature carried on flooding into the language but we did still keep the anglo-saxon and germanic roots. So there you have it the reason why we have so many words and such spelling. Inconsistencies comes from the fact that we are made up of so many different language families.

Latin, Greek, French the old Germanic language families Old Norse and one much more ancient relative which we really don't know that much about. So, I hope this lesson has been enjoyable as well as educational and now you have a much better idea about why English is the way it is today and perhaps you can be a little bit more forgiving.

please leave a comment below about a word that you like in English and tell me what you think the origin of that word could be or you can even give me an example of a word that you have in your language which has a lot in common with English.

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