2006-07-16 00:50:19 · 11 answers · asked by Anonymous in Society & Culture ➔ Languages
English is NOT a "hodge-podge" or evolved from "many languages". English is a GERMANIC language that evolved from Proto-Germanic after that language started breaking up about 2500 years ago. Its grammar is nearly 100% GERMANIC and 80-90% of all words spoken in English on any given day are GERMANIC. English is a Western Germanic language closely related to the Frisian language. A little more distantly related is Dutch and Low German. A little more distantly than that is High German and Yiddish.
2006-07-16 06:10:51 · answer #1 · answered by Taivo 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
English is the descendant of a lingua-franca that developed in England following the Norman conquest of 1066. The Normans spoke a variety of French, and their English serfs spoke Anglo-Saxon, a Germanic language.
In order to communicate, the conquerors and conquered made a pidgin, using elements from both languages, that had a less formal grammar than either of the parent languages.
As a result, English contains both Germanic and romance root words; this can be seen in the many synonyms in English: pork and swine; beef and cow, etc.
As it grew and developed, the language developed its own sound rules, and a marked preference for dipthongal vowels. Eventually becoming enriched with latinate and Greek borrowings, English emerged as a international language due to its position as the language of two major world empires: the British and the American.
2006-07-16 08:02:03 · answer #2 · answered by P. M 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The expansion of the British ecomonic and political empire in the eighteenth, ninteenth and early twentieth centuries meant that, during those time periods, the language spoken by the people with the political and economic power was English. If you wanted power or any form of representation, you needed to speak the same language, and so English became a comman tongue for various parts of the emprie to communicate with each other. As the British economic powerbase grew, so did the proliferation of it's language. In the twentieth century, British economic, political and cultural power has been superceaded by American control of those same avenues, and so the tradiational English is now being replaced by American English. This process has been solidified by the American occupation of Japan after the Second World War: Japan grew into a global economic power as its economy boomed, but the language of trade they had learnt from their occupiers was American, rather than English.
2006-07-16 08:00:30 · answer #3 · answered by Foxie 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The English language has evolved from many languages. Some of the earliest words come from Low German. It is a mixture of the Romance Languages, ie Latin, Italian, French, Spanish,. It also consists of derivatives from Greek.
The difficulty with English for so many foreigners is that English does not follow any particular rules of pronunciation, as does many foreign languages. In many cases the pronunciation of a given word may adhere to the language from which it was derived.
This creates difficulty when "CH" is pronounced as a hard sound, such as "K", ie "chord". In some languages, it is a soft sound as "SH", ie "chute".
Foreign languages have a firm rule to pronounce those one way or another. And so, one recognizes that a person from one or the other language is confused, and may pronounce "chord" as "shord", while another may pronounce "chute" as "kute".
I think that our schools have failed to teach the derivative of English words and explain this phenomena.
English uses both sounds, related to the word's derivative.
2006-07-16 08:25:17 · answer #4 · answered by ed 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
there is no history to English Language
2006-07-16 10:30:53 · answer #5 · answered by RTH 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
it is derived from the invading peoples languages. English often has several words with similar meaning, one derived from french/Latin and another Germanic word. The English courts spoke French in the middle ages and the first literature in English was at the time Chaucer, google him as he is the farther of English.
Oh, and the person above who thinks English is derived from native American....what fuc*ing planet are you from?? Jesus
2006-07-16 08:03:47 · answer #6 · answered by gwbruce_2000 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
the English language is actually a Germanic one.
2006-07-16 07:55:17 · answer #7 · answered by Jason H 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Just a European/Native American mix. Ever notice how some spanish words sound like english?
2006-07-16 07:55:13 · answer #8 · answered by ? 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
England??
2006-07-16 07:53:22 · answer #9 · answered by jonnygaijin 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
it's a mix of german, french, nordic and latin, with a helping of the old gaelic languages thrown in for good measure.
2006-07-16 07:55:21 · answer #10 · answered by Arambol 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋