The Mother Tongue: The First Thousand Years
The Mother Tongue: The First Thousand YearsAbout 1500 years a few people in a remote corner of what we now call England, an awkward Germanic tongue was spoken which we now call English. But how did this insignificant language of barbarians grow to become the dominating language of the western world? This journey was a delicate and risky survival and adaptation of our language. When English was first spoken is was a tongue that nearly no modern English speaker could comprehend. The English language has gone through three major renditions, from a Frisian-Germanic language to Old English, Old English to Middle English and Middle English Modern English. Although little is known about Old English given that few scripts of it still survive, much can be gathered from the history we do know. After the fall of the Roman Empire England was inhabited by the vulnerable jutes, needless to say they were invaded by multiple tribes, primarily the Angles and the Saxons. Our word for England comes from the tri . . .
In fact English has undergone many changes since Shakespeare’s time. With this new transformation to Middle English came many problems. With All these new words and influences in the English language and new influence from the Normans and the Scandinavians, many synonyms began to fall into place. Although these words make up merely 1 percent of the dictionary, of them are all of the 100 most used words in the English language. When reading Shakespeare you would be surprised that his language is what we call modern English. Some of the most obvious are the decline of the terms thee and thou. For the next 300 years England was controlled by French speakers. Of the words are the days of the week, derived from Anglo Saxon gods, and the Anglo-Saxon words; sweet, pillow, wine, inch, mile, table and chest. This change triggered the switch from Old English to Middle English. If you traveled less than 100 miles from any one place in England to any other the dialects would be so vastly different that you would not even be understood. ” This coin is the earliest dating piece of English writing. Although nearly 30,000 Anglo-Saxon words were lost during this time, 4,500 of the most fundamental words survived. Chaucer’s language however, the tongue of London, was the most common and was the variation to evolve into modern English. For example there were many variations of the English language.
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