The origins of the English language
English is a diverse and ever-changing language which is now widely seen as the international language. This, of course, wasn’t always the case. To start with there was the expansion of the British Empire which saw Britain colonising a large portion of the world’s population starting back in the 16th Century. Since then the empire has grown and then waned while America’s power has increased, promoting the language even more.
But even though most people speak English, the majority of them don’t take any time to think about the origins of words or why we use them in a particular context.
The language you speak will have evolved even since you were born. Words like internet, intranet, gigabyte obviously weren’t around until around 20 years ago as well as others spawned in the last century as a result of technological breakthroughs (television, computer, etc). The origins of recent words are generally obvious (‘tele’, greek root meaning ‘far’ + ‘vision’ (sight) = television, likewise with telephone) but some older words have deeper roots.
Some words have either died out or been transformed by the influence of other european languages and dialects but there are a few that remain unchanged to this day. Old English words like swift, seek, midst, shall are all Old English words that have survived a millenium of human history unchanged and others such as draught and wit are still used but in a slightly different context (‘wit’ used to mean know – the connection between the old meaning and new meaning is evident).
The latin influence came about when the roman empire turned up but also from the Norman Invasion which brought along Old French (also influenced by latin). Some latin words that we still use in everyday English are via, item, per, sponsor, census, ultra, agenda. These words often have the same or similar spelling in Spanish, French and Italian, three languages which are heavily influenced by Latin. Per favore and por favor, meaning ‘please’ in Italian and Spanish respectively show the similarity between these two languages. Long words that need translation from English to Spanish or French are often a blessing because they are quite specific and thus have the same Latin root. Most words ending with -ation can be translated letter for letter into French with the addition of a few accents, likewise with Spanish after changing the -ation to -acíon. Communication, contraction, complication, irritation, interrogation and association are identical in French and go to comunicacíon, contracción, complicación, irritación, interrogación y asociación in Spanish (a feature of Spanish is that only Ls, Rs and Cs can be used in pairs, so association loses an s to become asociacíon).
Another major influence to Old English was Old Norse which was introduced by the invading Vikings. This brought many new words and modified existing vocabulary. Words like hand, arm, finger are all the same or similar in germanic and scandanavian languages and the word ‘dog’ changes to ‘hund’ – which is where we get ‘hound’. Place names were influenced in this manner; Norfolk for instance, ‘Nor’ meaning ‘north or northern’ and ‘folk’ meaning ‘of the people’ is a result of the Nordic influence.
So there you go, without realising it most of us have been speaking words which have hundreds and in some cases thousands of years of history which makes you wonder if it would be possible to understand or even hold a conversation with an Old English speaker from 400 A.D.
Probably not but it might be amusing.
Rich Williams
