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0:00
One video, the entire history of the English language. What are we waiting for? Let’s just get cracking. Let’s begin with what’s best described as English’s pre-history, which doesn’t take place in England, but most likely all the way over here on the banks of the Black Sea where a collection of late stone age clans and tribes are speaking a language that would one day eventually spawn our own. Their Proto-Indo-European language is the ancestor English shares with languages as
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geographically far apart as India and Iceland, and as diverse as Latin, Russian, Persian and Sanskrit. It’s in this ancient mother-language - theorised by linguists - that words we still have now appear in their earliest forms. Words like “mother” and “brother”, “sun” and “star”. Terms that speak to universal human concepts. Oh and speaking of stars, the little asterisk at the start of each of these tells you that they’ve never actually been seen written down. Why?
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Because they never were. This was a culture that didn’t write. These are just what linguists have worked out the terms were likely to be by working their way backwards from later languages. Another of them is this root *gembh-, which to the Proto-Indo-Europeans meant something like “tooth” but survives in English to this day as the word “comb”. Do you see the link? Anyway, these Proto-Indo-Europeans slowly dispersed, taking their language with them.
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And the ones we want to follow are the ones who headed west into what’s now northern Europe. As they did so, their way of speaking their language changed and became distinct, evolving into what we nowadays call Proto-Germanic. Another ancient ancestor of English. And in Proto-Germanic, words that had previously been pronounced with a “puh” sound started to be pronounced with a “fuh” sound. Meaning this became this – an early form of our word “father”.
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“Kuh” sounds turned into “huh” sounds too, meaning this became this – an early form of our word “head”. And these early Germanic tribes were also linguistic innovators, borrowing words from other groups or inventing them from scratch. From them, we get our words “blood” and “bone”, “ground” and “gate”, “soul” and “sea”. Again: earthy, universal concepts. And as their culture spread, their language divided up further still into what linguists describe as three groups:
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North Germanic, which would produce the Scandinavian languages, East Germanic, which spawned the extinct Gothic, and West Germanic, which would soon birth English. But we’re not there yet because we’re still on the continent, in what would become modern day Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany. Here, West Germanic tribes are speaking a variety of dialects, but are largely understandable to one another. Also, they’re encountering the Romans, who are also in the neighbourhood
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and borrowing some of their Latin words. Words that tell you a lot about Roman life, actually. This is when we first get “camp” and “wall”, “mile” and “street”, and “cheese” and “wine”. Ha ha. Yummy yummy. Then, in the fifth century, over in Britain, where the Romans have recently hopped it, discord is raging among the Celtic tribes that inhabit the southern portion of the island, and they’re also facing a constant threat from the Scots and the Picts up north.
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So the story goes that a Celtic king called Vortigern calls in some of the rough lads from across the water to help him cling onto power. Only, the Germanic tribes that heed the call for backup end up themselves being the threat. First the Jutes, then the Angles and the Saxons end up taking control of the majority of the Celtic territory. The area under the combined control of these Jutes, Angles and Saxons - these Anglo-Saxons - becomes known as Angleland – or to you and me, England.
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And the mutually-intelligible West Germanic dialects brought over from continental Europe combine and take on their own character becoming the language that we now call Old English. And English is born. So you can see how, even before it became English, our language had travelled across a continent. And you too can be a globetrotter from the comfort of your own sofa with the help of this video’s sponsor, NordVPN. NordVPN enables you to change your online location,
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Oh, and Old English’s grammar? Oh boy, is it different. It has a complicated system of word endings based around four grammatical cases. Don’t worry if that means absolutely nothing to you. It shouldn’t. And it has three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Oh, and you know we have singular and plural pronouns? Well, Old English had a third type: dual pronouns that you use when referring to two people. But although Old English is incomprehensible to the modern reader –
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and it really is, even after the Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity and adopted the Roman alphabet – we are using their Old English in every sentence that we utter. The words I am saying now all come from Old English. What’s more, Old English has or develops sounds that still make English distinct from its modern-day Germanic siblings. Sounds like the “th” and “th” sounds in “that” and “three”, or the “juh” sound in “edge” and “bridge”.
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And also, a lot of our weird plurals are direct holdovers from Old English grammar. We have “feet” and “mice” instead of “foots” and “mouses” as a result of the weird way Anglo-Saxons changed vowel sounds in some plurals. “Oxen” is the last vestige of the Old English N plurals and “wolf” becomes “wolves” because of the way the Anglo-Saxons would pronounce an F like a V sometimes, depending on the sounds that were around it.
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Their word for seven, for example, is spelt with an F, but it’s pronounced syor-van. And there’s a very day-to-day way in which we evoke Old English all the time and that is with our names for the days of the week. The Anglo-Saxons’ pre-Christian gods appear in the names of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Now, some of those gods may look familiar, because you are perhaps acquainted with their more showbiz cousins worshipped by the Vikings.
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And it is the arrival of the people of the Norse on English shores that brings about the next big moment in our language’s history. What begins with a few sporadic raids on some unsuspecting seaside monasteries eventually – to cut a long story VERY short – results in the Vikings taking control of a huge chunk of England. An area that became known as the Danelaw. And in this area, the North Germanic language of the Vikings, Old Norse,
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came into conflict with the West Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons, Old English. I use the word conflict advisedly there, because it is at this time that a lot of violent Viking vocab enters English. Words like “ransack”, “slaughter”, “knife” and of course, “berserk”. But such terrible terms by no means tell the whole story because the Old Norse words that enter English also speak to the mundanity of everyday life in mixed Anglo-Saxon/Danish households.
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The Norsemen also gave us such essential elements of our language as the verb “to take”, our pronouns “they”, “them” and “their”, and a word as basic as “are”. Meaning “take them as they are” is almost entirely Scandinavian. Old English and Old Norse were similar enough that speakers of one could understand speakers of the other. But the differences between them may have caused them to influence one another too.
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Rubbing up against Old Norse may have been what finally finished off English grammatical gender. But no one’s really sure about that one. It’s a mystery. Anyway, it’s the arrival of another bunch of “Norse men” that would trigger the next – and perhaps single biggest – event in the history of our language. In 1066, the Normans turn up and seize the English throne from the Anglo-Saxons. William the Conqueror becomes king and Norman French becomes the language of England’s elite.
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Now, I called the Normans “Norse men” because that is what they were. They were Vikings who settled in northern France and learned the local lingo. And once their leader Willy got his hands on the levers of English power, he had no intention of letting go of them. He replaced the Anglo-Saxon nobility – the earls, thanes and athelings – with his own French barons, dukes and princes. He sacked the English bishops and installed French as the language of leadership.
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The now subdued Anglo-Saxons needed to learn French words if they wanted to get by. So English absorbs a whole host of French terms associated with power, justice, art, government, law and culture such as… “power”, “justice”, “art”, “government”, “law” and “culture”. But not only those. All these as well. In fact: the quantity of French terms that English adopts is so enormous that it’s practically impossible to form a sentence without using some.
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I’m serious. The changes wrought on English by the arrival of the French are so “profound” – that’s another French word – that we call the before and the after by different names. The before is “Old English” and the after is “Middle English”. The first few centuries of the Middle English period are really English’s “wilderness years”. England goes 300 years without an English-speaking monarch. However, events such as the Hundred Year’s War with France and the upheaval
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brought by The Black Death conspire to bring our language back to life. In 1362 England’s parliament is opened in English for the very first time. English soon becomes the official language of the courts too, and Henry IV, an actual English speaker, ascends to the throne. The Middle English that emerges from the darkness is more comprehensible to us than Old English was. But it’s still pretty tricky. The most notable writer of the period is a certain Geoffrey Chaucer,
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and if you’ve ever tried to read The Canterbury Tales in his original dialect, it is hard going. But hey, our poetry rhymed now, which it didn’t before. Gone for good is the grammatical gender of Old English. As are the Hs – perhaps because the French couldn’t pronounce them – at the start of a load of words like “hlaford”, which has become “lord”, “hring”, which has become “ring”, and “hnutu”, which has become “nute”. Nut.
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Another major figure of the Middle English period is a fella called William Caxton, who single handedly initiated a process that would ultimately turn English into what it is today. He set up Britain’s first printing presses and produced the first printed books in English. This not only made books in English much more widely available than they had been when they had to be written out by hand, greasing the wheels of the proliferation of knowledge,
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but it also kick-started the standardisation of the language. Caxton was printing books in his own preferred dialect, London Chancery English, and this very specific form of Middle English was therefore being read across the country. Despite the enormous variations in how English was being spoken in different places, a standard way of writing it was starting to catch on. As a result of this, Caxton’s printers held a huge amount of power in their ink-stained hands.
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Decisions they made about how certain words should be spelt were bound to be adopted country-wide: for better, or for worse. And sometimes it was for worse. A lot of the people working at early presses had been brought over from the continent, and had their own ideas about how English words should be spelt. For example, they thought that “gost” should be spelt with an H, like it was in Dutch. So now it is.
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They thought “thum”, “crum” and “lim” should have silent Bs like “comb”, “lamb” and “womb”. So now they do. And they thought that “coud” should have an L to match with “should” and “would”. So now it does. Even though “will” and “shall” have Ls in them, but can doesn’t. What’s more, they reckoned all these HW words should be WH words instead, to match English’s many TH, SH and CH words. So guess what. Now they are. The standardisation of spellings, initiated by the printing press,
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could not have come at a worse time really. Because just as it was beginning, English was going through a revolution: the famous Great Vowel Shift. Over a couple of hundred years from the 15th century onwards, the way English speakers pronounced long vowel sounds changed. A word being pronounced like “bought” at the start of the shift, was being pronounced closer to how we say it now, “boat”, by the end of it.
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Pre-shift “maaat” becomes post-shift “meat”. So spelling was being standardised mid-transition, meaning they sometimes represented pronunciations that were already out of use. And we still have those dodgy spellings today. The way we write out long vowel sounds is an absolute mess. The Great Vowel Shift began in the Middle English period, but it ended in the next major phase of English: what we nowadays call Early Modern English.
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Early Modern English is most notably the English of Shakespeare and I’m sure you’ve read some of his stuff. It’s understandable, right? It’s a bit odd, but it’s understandable, isn’t it? Well, he’s writing in the 16th and early 17th centuries, which is also when English is also gaining a new powerful position within the religion of the land. In 1539, every church gets an English translation of the Bible. A huge achievement considering centuries past had seen people
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executed for daring to transcribe the Lord’s words into such a lowly tongue. And then in 1611 we get the masterpiece that is the King James Version. You know, no book is thought to have contributed more words to the English language than The Bible. And by the same token, no individual is said to have contributed more than William Shakespeare. There are hundreds - if not thousands - of words that first appear in print in the works of William Shakespeare.
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It’s either because he coined them or because he was simply the first to write them down. There are so many that the subject deserves its own video, which I just so happen to have recently made. Give it a watch later. A lot of his contributions are reworkings of existing words. He’s the first to call the dawn the “dawn” instead of the “dawning”. He coins “successful” by sticking “ful” to the end of “success” and invents “grovel” by knocking the end off “grovelling”.
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He also seems to be the first to import the word “hostile” from French and “bandit” from Italian. But that isn’t “the be-all and end-all”, “as luck would have it” he gave us all manner of idiom “for goodness’ sake”. Shakespeare is without doubt the big beast of the Early Modern English period. Him and Jesus. Jesus is also quite a big deal. But other things are going on too. Another major development is that English is leaving Britain’s shores.
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Colonialism sees it landing in America and India, and later on Australia. And the transatlantic slave trade results in the creation of English creoles Where people in Africa and the Caribbean are being forced to learn bits of the language just to get by. Separately from that, the scientific revolution brings its own wave of new words, like gravity, energy, experiment, and microscope. And the need to understand all these new-fangled Latin and Greek imports leads to the writing
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of the very first dictionaries. Any history of the English language should dwell for at least for a little while on Samuel Johnson, whose Magnum Opus published in 1755 was a dictionary with 40,000 entries, intended to nail down our language. Or as he wrote as he was planning it: “to preserve the purity and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom.” His dictionary isn’t perfect. In fact, at times it’s a bit hilarious.
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But it created the template for dictionaries to come. So what did Early Modern English sound like? Well, I’m going to dub it English’s lazy period, because it’s the time when we start dropping a lot of sounds. It’s when the K and G stop being pronounced at the start of words like knight and gnome. We stop pronouncing the Ts in words like castle and hasten. And the Ls in folk and palm disappear for a lot of people.
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Some accents did keep them, and others have since reinstated them inspired by the spellings. Also during this period, we start to use “do” in a host of really weird ways. We start putting it into questions like “Do you not love me?” That’s Shakespeare. We use it to create negatives like “I do not enjoy Shakespeare”. Sacrilege. And we use it for emphasis, like “I DO think you should click subscribe now.” Go on – you’ve made it this far.
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In all of these constructions the “do” isn’t really do-ing anything. It’s just there. And it turns up in Early Modern English. Next comes the 1800s, and with it the reign of Queen Victoria and the start of the period of English that we’re living in right now: The Modern English, or Present Day English period. The last two hundred years of development in our language have been to a large extent driven by technology, be it by the invention of the Victorian penny post back in 1840,
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the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic in 1865, Bell’s telephone, Edison’s phonograph, Marconi’s radio, the Lumière brothers’ motion picture camera, or John Logie Baird’s “idiot box”. …the TV. We’ve also picked up all manner of borrowed vocab through colonialism, commerce, culture, and a couple of world wars. There are a few characteristics of how we speak today that are distinctly Modern English,, beyond the, “like, obvious”. Yeah, I don’t meant that sort of thing.
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I mean like the fact we use the passive voice way more than English speakers of old did. Passive sentences are ones where you don’t say who is doing an action. “My cat is being neutered today” has the cat as the subject of the sentence, despite it actually being the thing the neutering is happening *to*
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…poor thing. “James got beaten up yesterday” – yeah, but by whom? Phrasal verbs are also a huge feature of modern English, and are a nightmare for adult learners of the language. To “come up with”, “to come across”, “to come down” or “to come out” are all very different actions despite using the same verb. And there isn’t always a logic to them. And our language is of course still changing. Why? “Because reasons”.
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New constructions like “because reasons” are being spread by the internet like linguistic memes. The rise of the Internet and the might of America mean that English’s position in the world has never been stronger. Around 1.5 billion people can speak it. That’s like one in every 5 humans. And are there any signs of it being knocked off its perch as the closest thing we’ve ever had to a global language? Well I mean, I don’t personally think so.
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By the end of the century, these are on course to be the four biggest countries by population, and three of them have English as an official language. But the future of English is a question for another video. Thanks for watching this one giving the entire, I think, history of the English language. I have made other videos about so many of the things that we’ve covered here. I’ll link to them all in the description. If you enjoyed this, you should sign up to my totally free newsletter.
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Go to robwords.com/newsletter. And please hit “like” and “subscribe”. They tell the algorithm to show you more of my stuff. I’ll see you in whatever you choose to watch next. In the meantime, take care.
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