Languages and the History of English English 112 Indo-European Languages English is an Indo-European language Its part of the Germanic subfamily of Indo- European languages What does that mean? Babel? Dissemination Indo-European Family Tree Indo-European Languages Today When did English appear? About 600 A.D. or so, when the Anglo- Saxons, or Angles, conquered Britain At the time, Britain was called Britannia by the Romans, and Prydain by the local peoples, who were driven north into Ireland and Scotland The Anglo-Saxons gave the southern part of Britain the name England (Angle-land) Anglo-Saxon (Old English) Spoken from about 600 A.D. to 1066 A.D. Bore strong resemblance to the German of the time Featured a slightly different alphabet, with letters such as thorn (, ) and eth (, ) No longer comprehensible to most Modern English speakers Caedmon and Bede Beowulf Middle English 1066 A.D Middle English is much more similar to Modern English It consists of Old English, plus Middle French, some Arabic, and some Latin how did those languages get in there? The Norman Conquest French Vs. English Animals (Old English Origins) Cow Swine Chicken Meats (Middle French Origins) Beef Pork Poultry Guess where the word comes from! (French, Old English, Latin, Arabic) Alcohol Timber Heaven Govern Stone Candle Orange Court Arabic - naranj French cohors, an enclosed space French - governer OE - heofonah OE timbrod, build OE - stan Latin - candelarius Arabic al-kol, spirit Chaucer, Mallory, Langland, the Pearl Poet Early Modern English Standardization of grammar and spelling occurred slowly In the interim between Chaucer and our modern English, people spoke EME, which is archaic, but comprehensible to the modern speaker Shakespeare, Milton, KJV, Austen Standardization of Spelling Modern English Modern English is the English that we speak today Its been roughly the same since 1800 Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charles Darwin