so did you know that English has over a
million words we have 10 different kinds
of words for rain not surprising 10
different kinds of words for happiness a
lot for sadness and many more and don't
get me started on the spelling so why
does English have such an excess a glut
or a pather of words and why does the
spelling seem like it was invented by a
seven-year-old at random after he or she
had had too many sweets well this seems
to be a matter that requires further
exploration and research better get
stuck into the history books
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so welcome back to love English everyone
as you can see today's lesson is going
to be a little bit different as we are
not necessarily learning English we're
learning about English we're looking at
the history of English the origins and
we're going to try and understand some
of those strange things about English
like the Spelling's and like why we have
so many words this video will also be
useful if you're taking your English
language a level or your English
language GCSE 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're an island
and we've had a lot of invaders so
throughout history we've had lots of
people come and settle here and
obviously as they've 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 all 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've been adopted more recently
but to find out the real origins of
English we have to go further back way
back 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 barely 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 demonic language family split into
different strands or groups on 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'm 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've
hardly changed since three thousand
years ago now one thing that may be
interesting to you is that as you will
see this spelling was different this
spelling was actually more of a phonetic
spellings we have the e I which as you
know that E I symbol today is the
phoneme for the a sound as in train rain
came so it used to be spelt in more of a
phonetic way the next biggest influence
one 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 having
a syllabus theater 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 y candle extremely
similar but err very similar you can see
the similarity with cheese there Street
and month from Greek we get democracy
philosophy phobia geography in fact that
pH spelling which is said like a fuss
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
Bader's we then had invasions from
Germanic tribes coming from the area
which is currently known today as
Germany so we were invaded by the Jukes
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
fries frost sleep and blues 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 shun this was when we got
this shot sound so words that would
originally have been scaled 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
but it was the days that
if I keep spoke Old Norse which wasn't
that dissimilar to anglo-saxon in fact
as they've both grown out of the
Germanic language families Old Norse was
actually very similar to modern-day
Icelandic the Vikings again were here on
and off for hundreds of years and of
course with that came their language so
if you're 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 a
look at a few examples
skin leg skull freckle husband sky knife
gap you'll 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 us Brits we didn't want to have
the Vikings here forever and we
certainly didn't want them taking over
all of our 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 if it was the
language used to talk about religion and
it was also the language of science
medicine in law in general the learning
so Alfred would have included some left
in words in that as well we're going to
look here at a little extract from
Alfred's homily different Gregory the
Great let's see if we can recognize any
modern-day English words here
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you can see of course there but he and
him are actually still the same and you
can see the origins of words like were
and was but of course English was to
undergo a lot more changes to become the
modern form that it is today 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 had 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
cooked so this is where we get lots of
synonyms our anglo-saxon words and our
Germanic words will very often have a
French or Latin ate 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 as we said before it was
the language of the learners 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 our
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 Chuck sound during
period before child and cheese would
have been spelt like this but the
Normans changed it to the Chum which is
of course more similar to French also
the Oh you spelling in words like house
and Mouse again this was introduced
during the norman period so many of the
spellings will be 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 boom 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 our
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
we'll see you soon I love English guys
bye bye