Monday, 12 November 2007

The Origin of the English Language


English language has changed really much in the history of England, that's because there were many invaders.

The first inhabitants of the island were the Iberians, but in 700 B.C. arrived the Celts, german tribes who brought the german language with them. During 43 AD and 47 AD the Romans conquered Britain and brought Latin into the country.
However in 409 AD Emperor Honorious withdrew his soldiers to defend Rome, and other Germanic tribes, the Angles and the Saxons, invaded the future “England”(the land of the Angles).
Between the 8th and 9th centuries new invaders came in England from Norway and Denmark, the Vikings. And they imposed their language too.
The last invaders of England were the Norman who spoke the French language.

Finally, we can consider the English like the mix of German, Latin, French and various scandium languages.
In fact the old English was really different from the English spoken nowadays, it was similar to the modern German.
We also read the text of an old version of a Christian pray (Our Father) and that was literally misunderstandable, some words were pure German, and others strange mix of it.

In conclusion I can affirm that it's a great fortune for us that English language evolved so much in the centuries, if not it would be really harder to study it!
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6 comments:

  1. Lia14 November 2007 at 08:26

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Lia14 November 2007 at 17:00

    I've just read this article...English is a language with a lot of changes in its history!!!Maybe for this reason is too much difficult, specially for me!!!

    Lia

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  3. keating-johnny23 November 2007 at 20:29

    by the way.....I've just found a web page where you can see the translation of all the old alphabeth...May I post it?

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  4. ilarias23 November 2007 at 22:21

    Of course you can keating-johnny!

    ReplyDelete
  5. keating-johnny27 November 2007 at 20:24

    ok, follow the link below..
    http://www.runica.it/alfabeto.asp

    ah, don't worry...it's safe; promise..

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous28 November 2007 at 11:00

    The history of the English language is very interesting and we really liked it. We think these things are very important to know, everybody should know them.

    ReplyDelete