Matthew Cobb called my attention to this short article from io9 (he’s too lazy to post it himself), showing the history of the English language in graphic form.
Triangulations blogger Sabio Lantz recently put together this rather clever diagram showing how the English language has evolved over the past 3,000 years.
And yes, though it first emerged as a West Germanic language spoken in early medieval England, its roots go as far back as the Celts. It was carried by Germanic settlers to various parts of the Netherlands, northwest Germany, and Denmark. One of these Germanic tribes, the Angles, eventually made its way to what is now Britain. At the time, the native population in Roman Britain spoke Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, that had certain Latin features.
Lantz’s diagram is also fascinating in that it beautifully illustrates how cultural injections influence the evolution of language. For English, this ranged from the Viking and Norman invasions through to the Renaissance mixing and empiric imports, such as Hindi and Arabic.
Old English, which I took in college so I could read Beowulf in the original, begins around 500 CE (or AD). The poem itself was problem written several hundred years after that, and the manuscript, in the British Library, dates from the 11th century. (I was so excited to see it and make out some of the words!) Some of the poem, but not all, is intelligible to a modern English speaker.
To complement this, there’s a nice 11.33-minute video, produce by the Open University, giving more information on the history of English
I didn’t see a mention of Spanglish in the video. Maybe I missed it.
Odd to see American English listed as an import. I would rather think it should qualify as an export. Perhaps there was some importation of native American in the process.
Yes, I think that is referring to the number of words that entered English from Native American languages.
If you live on the correct side of the pond, anything American is an import! ;O)
Here’s a list. There are probably also some coinages like “OK” which can be considered imports from America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_from_indigenous_languages_of_the_Americas
I should think the “Renaissance mixing” period has really continued to today with words like vitamin, refrigerator, telephone, video, and neonatal.
It’s a production of the Beeb’s Open University, so, from the perspective of somebody living in England, American English is, indeed, a foreign import.
b&
Just for the elimination of confusion the OU and the BBC are completely separate institutions. But they do co-operate on a lot of projects.
Thanks for that clarification. I’ve only ever experienced OU through the BBC — including during a brief trip to England — and, as such it never occurred to me that they were separate entities.
b&
I have a huge respect for people who have done an OU degree since they have managed to study whilst raising kids, holding down a job etc etc. All very different from spending 3 or 4 years at a traditional uni …
Thanks, I graduated last year. 🙂
The BBC was founded in the early 1920s for wireless broadcasting on the radio – a couple of hours a day of “classical” music and news. The OU was founded by Harold Wilson’s government in about 1968, with first broadcasting in about 1970, mostly in the late evenings and weekend mornings on BBC channel 2. People of a certain age will have memories, fond or not, of monochrome beardy weirdos in kipper ties burbling on in front of blackboards covered in incomprehensible equations.
The last time I did an OU course – an astronomy practical on Mallorca in 2009 – the university was the largest degree-awarding organisation in the country by a factor of “several”, with around 150000 students.
I really should look at another prospectus to pick another course for the coming year.
Foreign students are welcome. Take a look here.
The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg is one of my favorite books. (It’s best as an audio book or as the video series based on the book because it helps to be able to hear the words spoken. ) I actually now appreciate the wackyness of English. Many topics in the book are mentioned briefly in this video.
One thing I found amazing is that even though there are relatively few Old English words, they remain powerful. In Churchill’s We Will Fight on the Beaches speech, every word is from Old English — except the word “surrender”.
Interesting, in that it was a speech against an invasion from Germany.
Please don’t tell me that “surrender” is a French word…
OMG I so hope it is just for the LOLs!
Merriam Webster tells me it’s Middle English.
from Old French surrendre to yield, from sur-1 + rendre to render]
and the LOLz begin.
According to Wiktionary, “Anglo-Norman, representing Old French surrendre, from sur- + rendre ‘render’.”
The companion book to the pbs series The Story of English Is a similar great and easy read.
I think English swearing is pretty good. I suspect it’s the Anglo-Saxons we have to thank for that.
Well, taking the classic English swearword, and consulting the F-word’s Wikipedia page(!), it seems it was first recorded in the 15th century, but may be much older than that, and probably has its roots in Germanic languages. But OTOH Latin has futuere which spawned the French foutre, so it could have come from either.
(Google Translate gives the French as above. Somewhat to my amusement, Verb2verbe, while it conjugates the verb, delicately gives its English meaning as ‘to do’).
I learned the word “foutre” from Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” He has an entire scene in French just so he can make a pun on “foot” and “foutre.”
Yes the Germanic languages swear in the same way. Anglo-Saxons are Germanic.
Fans of the new Doctor should search for Malcolm Tucker on youtube for some epic (Scottish) swearing
Oh yes, The Thick of It. ‘Yes Minister’ with fangs.
Damn Normans! 🙂
I always like to use the evolution of languages as a metaphor for evolution. There are various language evolutionary trees out there, for example. But one can see that it is more complicated than just ‘descent with modification’.
As long as languages change through time and diverge across barriers, they behave like evolving and speciating populations of free-living animals. In other respects they’re like parasites or diseases, because they can coexist without displacement in a single host (bi- or multilingualism). Some are really hybrids, like English or pidgins (which are creoles when they grow up), and there’s a lot of loose genetic material drifting about and resulting in lateral transfer…
My mother is pretty sure that Jesus spoke English.
The evolution of the English language was guided from above so that the words of Jesus could once again be quoted in his native Early Modern English, after the Great Vowel Shift. Hence “I beseech you in the Vowels of Christ”.
I have fond, holy memories of Christ’s vowels….
b&
Interesting, quite a few Christians only remain Christian because:
a) they never read the bible
b) only attend service in Latin
When I was quite young I used to think how odd but convenient it was that Jesus spoke English. And of course so did everyone else in the Bible. 🙂
Somewhat related, when I was a kid, I couldn’t figure out why back when composers like Mozart and Beethoven were around, why they all had weird names instead of names like Bill or Fred.
Well Ludwig is a German variant of Louis, so you could call Beethoven “Lou”.
For once, Mel Gibson is closer to being correct than your mother. I hope that’s a rare occurrence, for your mother’s sake.
I’m surprised Oceanic English (or whatever you would call Aussie-Kiwi dialect) isn’t on the chart (haven’t watched the video), with their distinct pronunciation and adoption of Aboriginal & Maori words, but then I guess South African English is a similar case with the Boer Dutch and native African vocabulary, so I’m probably imagining differences of a different class from what the chart is about. I don’t think it’s navel gazing to admire what a fascinating tongue ours is!
I reckon those are the ellipses under Empire Imports …
Billabong! That is just fun to say!
You mean words like whanau and puku? Puku is used often in my house. 🙂
Hawaiian English is another one. Most people to know it off the islands, but words like Haole, Makua, Makai, etc are used in everyday English conversation.
They may be used in everyday American conversation, but not one of those words means anything to my native English-hearing ears, and I know I’ve got a wider vocabulary than most people.
All NZers know quite a few Maori words although very few speak the language. For things like fish, birds etc the Maori word is used if it’s shorter or easier, otherwise the English word is used e.g.
Paua – abalone
Kina – sea urchin
Hoki – whiptail
but
Fantail – piwakawaka
I think a lot of New Zealanders would know pāua but not abalone, kina but not sea-urchin, and tui but not “parson bird”. Quite a few birds, plants, shellfish and the relict reptile species, tuatara, have no English names.
It’s almost random whether a species goes by the English name or the Maori name. Probably as Heather says, whichever name is shortest and most convenient often has something to do with it.
Incidentally, ‘kina’ is used by Kiwis to refer to all types of sea urchin, which I suspect is not quite correct. I don’t know if NZ Maori follows the Cook Islands usage from which it derives, but there ‘kina’ refers to the short-spined sea urchin only, the ones with the long black spines are ‘vana’ and the slate-pencil urchins are ‘atuke’.
But names of things are always a minefield. I’m reminded of the story of the explorer who came back from Africa with a long list of native names of animals and plants, most of which were eventually found to translate to “I don’t know” or “Just another tree”.
You can see the same borrowing process in reverse in e.g. Maori. Not just borrowed words like ‘Otera’ for hotel, but if I listen to a Cook Islander speaking to a Cook Island audience in C.I. Maori (not the same as NZ Maori but similar) every now and then a phrase like ‘next Friday’ or ‘deposit for your booking’ will crop up where it’s convenient. They switch effortlessly from one to the other. (And I have no doubt other languages are similar. Except in Canada 😉
Both Australians and we would take strong exception to the idea that we speak the same variety of English. Australians use very few Māori words, and we use very few Aboriginal (and I suspect we use far more Māori than they use Aboriginal).
We find their accent quite distinct from ours,
(We have some distinct vowels:
short i: NZ “chups” Aust. “cheeps”
long ee: NZ “creem” Aust. “croieem”
oo+l: NZ “skoou” Aust. “skyooil” )
– and I think you will find any shared usages are also common in the south of England.
And of course the old favourite, that Kiwis can’t count any higher than six because they get distracted (the Kiwi version of six sounds like the word sex to an Aussie 🙂 ).
Ah yes. New Zealand. Where men are men and sheep are nervous. 😉
Thank you for the mention — I frequent this blog often.
If you have time, using the excellent feedback from folks on io9, I updated a few mistakes on the chart. So if you could post my most recent edition, I’d appreciate it.
Or folks will see it if they visit my blog.
Ah Sabio, you evidently don’t frequent this notablog often enough.
It’s one of those irregular conjugations –
you have a blog, I have a few pages, Prof Ceilingcat has a website. 😉
Sorry, inf, I didn’t follow that.
What is fascinating though, is the different types of comments on this thread and on io9.
Ahhh the sociology of blogs.
May this is not a blog, nor a website, but a catsite.
Sorry for being obscure.
Jerry is well-known (among the regulars on this site at least) to hate the term ‘bl*g’.
But I think he might well like the term ‘catsite’ 😉
Ah, yes. Well, I have read his book by the same title and visited here about 30 times but not read any posts on cats (not being a cat person), nor several other topics.
But as an atheist blogger, I love much of the stuff here. Compared to Jerry, I have been criticized as being an accomodationalist (which I had to look up), so Jerry makes me look soft — which I appreciate. 😉
I’m probably a bit accomodationist too. Jerry is fairly hard-line on that BUT he keeps the tone of this site civil, which all the regulars of whatever flavour appreciate.
Benjamin Bagby recites Beowulf in the original Old English:
http://www.bagbybeowulf.com/
I have seen him perform (though not this work specifically) and he was wonderful.
Nice diagram, though I think they need to add another major stream: Church Latin, somewhere between 400 and 800. Most of that would come considerably after the Roman occupation.
This is not a diagram of English really, but rather of the major language(s) spoken or influencing the languages spoken in England. English is not Brythonic Celtic – though it shares a common root in Indo-European. The influence of that on Old English is generally considered minimal. Old English may have had few speakers (few invaders – still a moot point), but they were culturally dominant, & language extinction in cases like this can happen in three generations.
The Latin influence on Old English dates mainly from after the arrival of (clears throat!) Christianity. It had an influence too in loan translation of biblical terms.
There is an argument that Old Norse & Old English were mutually intelligible on early contact at least.