What is the history of English language?

Question

What is an old basic language of it? Latin?

Answer 1

English is an Anglo-Frisian language brought to southeastern Great Britain in the 5th century AD by Germanic settlers from various parts of northwest Germany (Saxons, Angles) as well as Denmark (Jutes).

The original Old English language was subsequently influenced by two successive waves of invasion. The first was by speakers of languages in the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who colonised parts of the British Isles in the eighth and ninth centuries. The second wave was of the Normans in the eleventh century, who spoke Norman (an oïl language closely related to French).

While modern scholarship considers most of the story to be legendary and politically motivated, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported that around the year 449, Vortigern, a legendary king of the Brythons, invited the Angles to help him against the Picts (of modern-day Scotland). In return, the Angles were granted lands in the southeast and far north of England. Further aid was sought, and in response came Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. The Chronicle talks of a subsequent influx of settlers who eventually established seven kingdoms.

These Germanic invaders dominated the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants, whose languages survive largely in Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and Ireland. The dialects spoken by the invaders dominated what is now modern England and formed what is today called the Old English language, which resembled some coastal dialects in what are now northwest Germany and the Netherlands (e.g. Frisia). Later, it was strongly influenced by the closely related North Germanic language Old Norse, spoken by the Vikings who settled mainly in the northeast and the east coast down to London (see Danelaw, Jórvík).

For about 300 years following the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the Norman kings and the high nobility spoke only Anglo-Norman. A large number of Norman words found their way into Old English, leaving an unusual parallel vocabulary which persists into modern times. The Norman influence strongly affected the evolution of the language over the following centuries, resulting in what is now referred to as Middle English.

During the 15th century, Middle English was transformed by the Great Vowel Shift, the spread of a standardised London-based dialect in government and administration, and the standardising effect of printing. Modern English can be traced back to around the time of William Shakespeare.

Answer 2

Modern English developed out of Old English, which is a Germanic language. It borrowed some words from Latin, but that's all. English and Latin have more of a great-aunt/great-niece reciprocal relationship. No direct descent involved.

You want to take an on-line History of English course at a university? http://www.english.usu.edu/lingnet/CourDesc/history.htm

Answer 3

The history of the language can be traced back to the arrival of three Germanic tribes to the British Isles during the 5th Century AD. Angles, Saxons and Jutes crossed the North Sea from what is the present day Denmark and northern Germany.

The inhabitants of Britain previously spoke a Celtic language. This was quickly displaced. Most of the Celtic speakers were pushed into Wales, Cornwall and Scotland. One group migrated to the Brittany Coast of France where their descendants still speak the Celtic Language of Breton today.

The Angles were named from Engle, their land of origin. Their language was called Englisc from which the word, English derives.

Answer 4

THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH

In the beginning, the universe came to exist. Exactly how this happened is still up for debate, as you can clearly see in the Religion topic here.

Fast-forward to about 6,000-4,000 BCE, when a people called the Indo-Europeans lived in Turkey, or maybe Afghnistan, or possibly the Balkans, we can't be sure. They eventually spread out to cover almost all of Europe, a sizable chunk of India, a swath of the Middle East and the western edge of China, and they took their language--Proto-Indo-European-- with them. As bands of the Indo-Europeans became seperated by distance, however, their languages changed and diverged from one another. One such band of Indo-Europeans became the ancient Greeks; one settled the peninsula that is now modern Italy, and their descendants were the Latin-speaking people of Rome; and one settled in Central Europe and became the Germanic tribes.

These tribes in turn spread out into three branch--East, which is extinct, North, which includes Norwegian and Swedish, and West, which included a couple of minor tribes known as the Angles and the Saxons. When the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain, it was the Angles and the Saxons who invaded the islands, and brough their flavor of West Germanic with them--Anglisc, also known as Old English.

The Anglo-Saxons ruled England for several hundred years before the Norman Conquest installed a French-speaking king on the throne. For about two hundred years, then, three major languages were spoken in England--French by the government, Latin by the church, and English (now in its Middle form) by everybody else. After that time the government began working in English, and Latin liturgy went out of style for everyone but Catholics by 1600. Modern English dates from about this time (when Shakespeare wrote) forward.

Facts: English is not a pidgin or a creole. There is a lot of vocabulary borrowed from French, Latin and Greek, but this isn't atypical--those were languages of power and scholarship for centuries, and the kinds of words we borrowed reflect that. Tom MacArthur in his book "The English Languages" shows that the easiest English texts to understand are the ones that use the fewest Latin/Greek/French borrowings, and "The History of English" by Algeo and Pyles has a little gimmick where an entire page is written without using a single borrowed word.

The grammar of English is also distinctly Germanic --three genders (he, she and it) and a very simple set of verb tenses. Latin and its descendants do all kinds of crazy stuff with verbs, and French only has two genders.

That's probably far more than you wanted to know. :-)

Answer 5

English began as a kind of German (as noted above, Saxon) which blended with French due to the invasion of the French-Speaking Normans. The resulting Pidgin language, Middle English, then slowly became simpler and more regular, thus creating Modern English.

Answer 6

ENGLISH, GERMAN, DANISH, SWEDISH, NORWEGIAN are germanic languages.

ITALIAN, FRENCH, SPANISH, PORTUGUESE are latin languages.

POLISH, CROATIAN,RUSSIAN etc. are slave(=from the east) languages.


I agree with 'tonalc1'

Plus, there has also been a latin influence: Ceasar invaded England with his troups (70 BC)and subsequently S. Augustin and other monks broght Catholic religion into the island.

Traces of latin in English are, for example, the name of the town Winchester: from WIN (vinum =wine) CHESTER (castris= military settlement).

Answer 7

saxony