How was the English Language formulated, and why do we interpret letters, words and symbols in the way we do?

Answer 1

There are some languages that are formulated, but English is not one of them. Some languages (Esperanto being the best known example) are consciously developed as one would write a program: these are also called "artificial languages." Other languages are intentionally simplified and regularized by some ruling body: examples would be Russian (when the communists took over they officially dropped several letters which no longer had independent uses) or Spanish and French (through their academies of the language).

English, on the other hand, has taken influences from all over. The two most prevalent are old Germanic languages, which formed the basis of what's called Old English/Anglo-Saxon, and Latin, which added most (not all) of its words into English after the Norman Invasion of 1066. To lesser extents, English has always been quite at home taking in words from other languages, and usually leaving them more or less in their original forms. You can see this, for example, in the many words English took from medieval French; in modern French those words have a different form, but English mostly maintains the original medieval French form.

This makes English a language that is curiously multi-cultural. In this way, English is like Latin, which also took many words from surrounding cultures and was thus "impure." I imagine this had a lot to do with why Latin evolved into the Romance languages we know today.

As for why we interpret them the way we do, the best reason I can think of is so that we can communicate with each other. If I, like Humpty-Dumpty, made a word mean exactly what *I* want it to mean, we would have a difficult time having this conversation! You have to have standards, either enforced (in the example of planned languages) or agreed upon.

Now, linguists have come up with various ingenious theories as to why these things evolved - the so-called "Bow Wow" and "Ding Dong" theories being two (no I am not making these up) - and these may be of some use as to the way languages originally came to be. But for us, we're not in the same situation: I think the best explanation is because it's in our best interest to speak the same way as other people. Thus, what we hear, we use. That's true for your native language or for foreign languages you learn: when I hear a native Spanish speaker say a certain thing in Spanish, I remember that as one way to say it in the future.

Answer 2

The English language has never actually been 'formulated'. It is a natural language and, with a few reservations, has just been allowed to grow. The only languages that are formulated, in the strict sense of the word, are artificial ones, such as Esperanto, Ido, Volapük and so on.

Some languages, although natural, are regulated by national academies, who try to control the words people use and the way people pronounce the language; e.g. French, Icelandic and Indonesian. Such attempts are often only partly successful: the Académie Française makes valiant attempts to keep out a flood of English words, but many French speakers just ignore these attempts. When people try to control the words that we use in English, it is often branded as 'political correctness' or even 'political correctness gone mad'.

The same thing goes for the way we read the letters - in English, the way words are spelled has largely grown up in a haphazard way. Our alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet of 23 letters, which, in the Classical period, was reasonably well adapted to the sounds of Latin. One problem was that the Latin language had letters for only 5 vowels*, which was already insufficient, even in the Classical period, as Latin had ten vowel sounds (5 short and 5 long) and woefully inadequate for the 20 or so different vowel sounds that we have in English. Classical Latin also lacked sounds such as our J, sh, th and V. (They had a letter V, but this represented the sound of U or W.)
[*: not counting Y which was hardly ever used]
So, for many centuries, people have been writing English as they saw fit, with no-one in over-all control; it was only in the 18th century that partly successful attempts were made to standardise the spelling.

I'm not sure if that answers your question - I hope it does.

Answer 3

I think the language evolved, formulated implies that it was invented all at once.

We interpret words and symbols through being taught and then through the culture and society we live in.

Answer 4

The engligh language is a mixture of norman french, saxon english, and latin - that is what I was told in history class,and has evolved though the cntureis into the modern english we speak today - U What!

Answer 5

indexed under are in basic terms 3 words in the English language that contain 3 contraptions of consecutive double letters. they are: bookkeeper bookkeeping sweettooth There are others that contain 3 contraptions of double letters yet no longer consecutively. some are: assessee keelless Mississippi committee keenness addressee

Answer 6

Main article: History of the English language
English is an Anglo-Frisian language. The following is an outline of the traditional view long held by an overwhelming majority of scholars: When the Romans came to Great Britain, all native peoples in the southeast of the island spoke an early form of Brythonic (the ancestor of Modern Welsh). Unlike in Gaul and Hispania, the indigenous population did not adopt Latin as a native language during the Roman era, where it was mainly confined to the Roman cities and garrisons. After some centuries of Roman occupation, the inhabitants belonged to a culture labelled Romano-British, in which most people used the Brythonic as the language of everyday life. Germanic-speaking peoples from various parts of northwest Germany (Saxons, Angles) as well as Jutland (Jutes) invaded around the 5th century AD, killing or driving off the Brythonic-speaking natives and replacing them.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that in AD 449, British king Vortigern invited warriors from 'three peoples of Germania' (Old Saxons, Angles and Jutes) to come to Great Britain to fight against the Picts, giving them land as payment. These Germanic peoples then sent for reinforcements and attacked the Britons. Essentially this version of events was accepted at face value by scholars for a long time.

Recently these ideas have been questioned by many scholars due to new genetic data[5] and re-evaluation of archaeological evidence. Some scholars have claimed that the Germanic-speaking invaders contributed only to a small proportion of population, and the native Romano-British population was not substantially displaced in any part of Britain. If correct, this interpretation of events would imply that the native Celts in the south and east of Britain, gradually adopted the language and culture of a politically and socially dominant ruling class (see Sub-Roman Britain). Celtic languages survived in parts of the island not colonised by the invaders: Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and, to some extent, Cumbria.

Other scholars have gone further and suggested that Germanic languages were already spoken in southeast Great Britain before the arrival of the Romans. The coast of southeast Great Britain was described as Litus Saxonicum (the Saxon Shores) in Latin, a title which first appears in the Notitia Dignitatum of around AD 425. It has long been debated whether the Romans gave it this name because it was attacked by Saxons, or settled with Saxons, possibly as part of the common Roman frontier policy of settling barbarians in areas which were subject to attack from other barbarians.[6] More recently it has been suggested that the real reason for the name was that its people during Roman times were labelled by the Romans as Saxons, and that they spoke a Germanic language.

Geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer in his Origins of the British, while acknowledging that the evidence is too slight to be certain, tentatively suggests the following. After the Last Glacial Maximum, the British Isles were colonised by people from the Basque Country. Their language is unknown. Several thousand years ago, a sea trade network linked the western British Isles to the Atlantic coast of Europe (France, Spain) and a separate sea trade network linked eastern Great Britain to other parts of the North Sea shore, particularly Scandinavia. The Atlantic trade network introduced the Celtic languages to the western part of Great Britain and the islands to its west very early (some millennia BC) and the North Sea trade network introduced the Germanic languages to eastern Great Britain, probably before the arrival of the Romans. However, the proportion of genetic intrusion is both cases is slight. Oppenheimer claims that in the British Isles as a whole, 60% of male gene groups come from the original Basque Country settlers, while this figure reaches 88% in Ireland. According to Oppenheimer's theory, Celtic languages were never spoken in eastern Great Britain: the Romans arrived there to find people speaking Germanic or some other language group now lost.

Iulius Caesar and Tacitus both tell us that peoples on the south coast of southeast Great Britain spoke the same language as the Belgae on the opposite continental coast. It has long been supposed that the Belgae spoke Celtic, but in fact the evidence is not clear. It seems most likely that the Belgae were not a linguistically homogenous group, but that some spoke Celtic, some spoke Germanic, and possibly another language group was also present.

Whatever their origin, these Germanic dialects eventually coalesced to a degree and formed what is today called the Old English language, which resembled some coastal dialects in what are now northwest Germany and the Netherlands (i.e. Frisia). Throughout the history of written Old English, it retained a synthetic structure closer to that of Proto-Indo-European, being based on a single literary standard, while spoken Old English became increasingly analytic in nature, losing the more complex noun case system, with a heavier reliance on prepositions and fixed word-order. This is evident in the Middle English period, when literature is first recorded in the various spoken dialects of English of the time, after written Old English lost its status as the literary language of the nobility. It has been postulated that the early development of the language may have been influenced by a Celtic substratum.[7][8] Later, it was influenced by the related North Germanic language Old Norse, spoken by the Vikings who settled mainly in the north and the east coast down to London, the area known as the Danelaw.

Then came the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. For about 300 years following, the Norman kings and the high nobility spoke only Anglo-Norman, which was very close to Old French. A large number of Norman words found their way into Old English. Later, a large number of words were borrowed directly from Latin and Greek, especially for scientific and technical terms, leaving a parallel vocabulary that 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. Early Modern English can be traced back to around the time of William Shakespeare.


u can find more info on the site wikipedia!!!

Answer 7

people are poney