So let’s talk about English. It’s spoken as a native language by over 350 million people
worldwide, and as a second language by over a billion more. And, pretty much all of
you watching this video speak it pretty well, too, right? So English must be easy
and simple and make sense, right? WRONG. English is super weird, and the reason why all comes
back to its stormy history. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
So, if you speak English, and especially if you learned it as a second language,
you probably know that parts of it seem to make no sense. Like, for verbs, you have “I read,
you read, she reads”. And then back to “read” for the plural we and you and they! So, what’s
up with that s? Or just look at the, um, richness of English spelling, like “thorough” or
the fact that “wind” and “find” don’t rhyme, even though they really look like they should.
And then we have words like “uncouth”, where “couth” isn’t even really a thing.
So, what’s going on there? Well, it all comes down to the fact that Great Britain is a super
hot island. Metaphorically. It’s so hot, with all its natural resources and defensible
shores, that over the history, group after group of people has just wanted to go hang
out there. And with each new wave of invasion came a new language, which influenced and
mingled with whatever people were speaking before. So let’s take a trip back through
time to try to pry apart all the influences that crafted that English language that we
know and ...maybe love today.
The earliest inhabitants of England were mostly Celtic, like a lot of the societies in that
area. Early on, though, in the first millennium CE, groups of people from the North
Sea coast of mainland Europe migrated to Britain. Two of these groups were the Angles and the
Saxons, and that’s why the version of Germanic that came to spoken in Britain is sometimes
called Anglo-Saxon. But more accurately, since there were a bunch of other invaders too,
let’s just call it Old English.
This is the language the famous epic Beowulf was written in, and if you could travel back in
time a thousand years Chronoguard-style to the England of that day, you’d have a really
hard time communicating. A lot of the vocabulary was different, even if we get bunches of words
we still use today straight from Old English: like “book”, “Thursday”, “daughter”,
stuff like that. But because this is a Germanic language, you get a big ol’
set of grammar, with things like case on nouns to tell you what’s the subject or object,
or grammatical gender, which are things we still have in modern German. You end up
with something that doesn’t really sound like English at all. So, for example, a sentence
like “the cruel man cut a page from the book” would have ended up something
like this: “Se slīþene mann slāt ān tramet fram þære bēc”. Pretty different, right?
Most of the grammar of Old English has withered away by now. But even so, if English
were a house, Old English would be its foundations. We get a lot of the shape and structure of
our modern language from its Germanic ancestor.
That funky spelling full of useless letters? That's a holdover
from the time when that gh in “drought” actually did something, and we pronounced it like [druxt].
Old English stuck around for centuries, evolving slowly like languages do. A bunch of Viking
invasions in the 9th and 10th centuries sped that change up, and gave us new sound
clusters, like the sk- you get in skirt or script. Actually, skirt and shirt are just two versions
of the same word, which originally meant some kind of tunic-y thing. The Anglo-Saxon version, with the
[ʃ], ended up meaning the top part, while the Norse version that we got from the
Vikings, with the [sk], ended up meaning the bottom.
And then, in the 12th century, something happened that would change everything. The Norman kings
of France took over England. With them, they brought their culture and their government
- and also words like fiction, special, parliament, and money. They brought their awesome French
cooking, too, and that's why we have “beef” from the French “boeuf”, “pork” from “porc”,
and so on. If you look at English today, most of the words for meat come from French,
but the original Anglo-Saxon terms live on in the animals themselves - so, cow, swine, etc.
But the Norman Conquest changed a whole lot more than just vocabulary. English was renovated
top to bottom by the accelerated process of language change, and most of that Germanic
syntax was just carted away. So, let’s say the Viking invasions supplied the English house with
some new windows and a cool chimney. So then the French went in there and replaced the plumbing,
and tore out the walls, and stuck another floor on there and then painted the whole thing blue.
The Germanic foundations still give English its overall shape, but there’s
a whole lot of French in there.
Around the same time as the French were introducing beef and parliament to the English language
- and honestly, where would England be without beef and parliament? - another language, related to
French, was quickly becoming the must-know language of Europe. Theology, philosophy,
medicine, science... Those were all conducted mostly in Latin, so if you wanted in on all the cool
discussions the scholarly types were having, that’s what you needed. Because of this, and because
Christianity sank itself into pretty much every part of medieval life, we got a whole lot of Latin
into English, too. Latin gives us our -isms and our -ologies, our -itises and -oses.
Put all this together, and by the end of the 12th century, English was so different
from what it was 400 years before that it actually gets a new name: Middle English.
This is the language of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and if you found yourself wandering
in a book of Chaucer’s verse, you might have a fighting chance at getting yourself
understood. So if you hear “The folk of Swindone seken laweles chese”, you might
get an idea that the people of Swindon are looking for some law-breaking cheese.
The later middle ages and renaissance is also when English started gaining some social prestige.
For a long time, Latin and French were the languages of royalty and art, politics and
religion. But more and more, you started to see playwrights, like Shakespeare and Marlowe,
writing their plays in English. And, you even saw bibles translated into English, and - horror or horrors! - higher
education conducted in English. Maybe it was because more people across all classes of society
were speaking English to each other. Or maybe it was because the Black Death in the 14th
century caused huge migrations of people across England to try to get away from the disease. Or maybe
it was for some as yet undiscovered reason. But somehow, during this time period, something
fundamental changed in English that was just as big as the impact it got from French. Except this time,
it wasn’t due to an invasion, for a change. The shift came from the inside out.
Around the time of Shakespeare, the way people spoke was quickly changing. A word like [ti:m],
which had been pronounced like [ti:m] for hundreds of years, suddenly started sounding like [tajm]. [na:m]
turned to [nejm], [hu:s] turned to [haus], and [stɔ:n] to [stown]. The vowels of English started
sliding around to make a whole new pattern, in what’s now known as the Great Vowel Shift.
It’s responsible for how English sounds today, and it accounts for most of the weird
spelling things that weren’t already explained by the loss of [x] sounds and stuff like that from Old
English. It also marks the beginning of what we call Modern English.
Modern English has been changing constantly too; I mean, languages always do. Shakespeare is usually
considered modern, and generally you can read him without a translation, unlike Beowulf
or Chaucer. But that doesn’t mean all the sounds and meanings of his time have stayed
the same until today. Like when Hamlet said, “I do not set my life for a pin’s fee”.
However you look at it, though, the changes since the 16th century have been a lot slower
and less varied than what came before. One of the main reasons is probably that the printing
press was introduced to England in 1476. Things got a lot more standardized once printed
text was widespread. But there have been some important changes in the last few hundred years.
For one thing, we stopped distinguishing between singular and plural “you” forms, like
thou and ye. We rearranged the alphabet a bit, too, so, splitting up i and j, and v and u.
We also scrapped symbols like thorn for [θ], and ash for [æ]. And, we stopped rolling our Rs.
Even today, the English language changes all the time, like from region to region or through the
long-distance communication magic that is the internet. English is a living language,
and so it's gonna keep growing and changing as long as there are people to speak it.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you followed the tide of
historical change, you learned that Old English was brought to the shores of Great Britain by
Germanic invaders; that English used to be far more Germanic before adapting to the French
invasion; that going into Modern English, our vowels shifted all over our mouths;
and that even if we’re still within Modern English, it doesn’t mean that the language won’t keep changing.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Élise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our production assistant is Georges Coulombe, our music and
sound design is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments
below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our website, where we have some extra material
on this topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding
your own personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Sīen gē hāl!