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
