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  • Words in English :: History

    From the page: "A Brief History of English, with Chronology by Suzanne Kemmer © 2001-2005 The language we call English was first brought to the north sea coasts of England in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., by seafaring people from Denmark and the northwestern coasts of present-day... more

    Reviewed by JIR Jul 04 2008, 07:15am ( 25 reviews ) • rice.edu

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  • Rated by gneek on Jul 03, 11:08pm

    @alwayslost: Very unlikely. China is isolated from the rest of the world both geographically and culturally. And plus, English is so much easier to learn.

  • Reviewed by civver on Jun 01, 7:48pm

    Interesting history of the English language, from its Proto-Indo-European origins to its current status as a global lingua franca.

  • Rated by pizzacica on Dec 08 2008, 3:35am

    A good overview of English language history.

  • Rated by blueinbrasil on Aug 10 2008, 5:27am

    Great, well-written site.

  • Rated by almilan on Aug 07 2008, 5:16am

    This is why knowing how to pronounce English words is so difficult - English is a hybrid language which combines pronunciation from a multitude of other languages. And this is what I tell my students.

  • Rated by alwayslost on Jul 20 2008, 5:09am

    It's a bit early to say that the 21st century belongs to English... China's going to take over everything.

  • Rated by JIR on Jul 04 2008, 7:15am

    From the page: "A Brief History of English, with Chronology by Suzanne Kemmer © 2001-2005 The language we call English was first brought to the north sea coasts of England in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., by seafaring people from Denmark and the northwestern coasts of present-day Germany and the Netherlands. These immigrants spoke a cluster of related dialects falling within the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Their language began to develop its own distinctive features in isolation from the continental Germanic languages, and by 600 A.D. had developed into what we call Old English or Anglo-Saxon, covering the territory of most of modern England. New waves of Germanic invaders and settlers came from Norway and Denmark starting in the late 8th century. The more violent of these were known as Vikings, sea-faring plunderers who retained their ancient pagan gods and attacked settlements and churches for gold and silver. They spoke a northern Germanic dialect similar to, yet different in grammar from Anglo-Saxon. In the 11th century, the attacks became organized, state-sponsored military invasions and England was even ruled for a time by the kings of Denmark and Norway. The Scandinavian influence on the language was strongest in the north and lasted for a full 600 years, although English seems to have been adopted by the settlers fairly early on. The Norman Invasion and Conquest of 1066 was a cataclysmic event that brought new rulers and new cultural, social and linguistic influences to the British Isles. The Norman French ruling minority dominated the church, government, legal, and educational systems for three centuries. The Norman establishment used French and Latin, leaving English as the language of the illiterate and powerless majority. During this period English adopted thousands of words from Norman French and from Latin, and its grammar changed rather radically. By the end of that time, however, the aristocracy had adopted English as their language and the use and importance of French gradually faded. The period from the Conquest to the reemergence of English as a full-fledged literary language is called Middle English. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, in Middle English in the late 1300s. William Caxton set up the first printing press in Britain at the end of the 15th century. The arrival of printing marks the point at which the language began to take the first steps toward standardization and its eventual role as a national language. The period from 1500 to about 1650 is called Early Modern English, a period during which notable sound changes, syntactic changes and lexical enrichment took place. The Great English Vowel Shift, which systematically shifted the phonetic values of all the long vowels in English, occurred during this period. Word order became more fixed in a subject-verb-object pattern, and English developed a complex auxiliary verb system. A rush of new vocabulary from the classical languages, the modern European languages, and more distant trading partners such as the countries of Asian minor and the Middle East entered the language as the renaissance influences of culture and trade and the emerging scientific community of Europe took root in England. "

  • Rated by mzmoxy on Jun 05 2008, 1:22pm

    English: the language of immigrants.

  • Rated by willtelloverdriv on May 15 2008, 10:14am

    From the page: "The language we call English was first brought to the north sea coasts of England in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., by seafaring people from Denmark and the northwestern coasts of present-day Germany and the Netherlands. These immigrants spoke a cluster of related dialects falling within the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Their language began to develop its own distinctive features in isolation from the continental Germanic languages, and by 600 A.D. had developed into what we call Old English or Anglo-Saxon, covering the territory of most of modern England."