Topic > The English Language - 1209

The English language, like many other languages ​​in the world, has evolved over time and has gone through many phases, including its near extinction. So where and when did this story begin? 2000 years ago, in what would now be the United Kingdom, the language was unintelligible. Anglo-Saxon, also known as Old English, was a language that sounded like the modern Frisian language. This language arrived when Germanic tribes invaded Britain and subjugated the native Celts. Nowadays some words have remained more or less the same over the centuries, words like: buter (butter), brea (bread), tsiis (cheese) miel (meal), sliepe (sleep), boat (boat), snie (snow ). , see (sea), stoarm (storm). It was the West Germanic tribes who invented these words. Anglo-Saxon, we speak it every day; nouns such as: youth, son, daughter, field, friend, house and land; prepositions: in, on in, from and from. And, a; they come from Old English, as do all the numbers and verbs such as: drink, come, go, sing, like and love. Great Britain was divided into several kingdoms: Wessex, Sussex, Kent, Essex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. During the 6th and 7th centuries, Christian missionaries brought the Latin language, so the Anglo-Saxons absorbed Latin words which helped the language evolve. Christian missionaries brought the Latin alphabet which would later become the primary means of writing Anglo-Saxon. Beowulf was the first great ritual poem written in Old English; from its appearance, it marked the beginning of a glorious tradition that would lead to Chaucer, Shakespeare and beyond. With this poem the descriptive and narrative power is revealed; the poem describes the glorious times of the Geat hero Beowulf. The language…half the paper…the language of the streets was not allowed in Jane Austen's world. During the late 18th and 19th centuries, the Industrial Revolution arrived with its new words to enrich the English language; not only did it change the language, but it also changed the world. The steam engine changed the meaning of words like "train," "locomotive," and "tracks" so they could adapt to the new technology. There was also a change in society, “cockney rhyming slang” appeared and became a new form of speech used by the lower classes. Today English circles the globe, living in the air we breathe. What began as an isolated guttural tribal dialect similarity on one small island is now the language of more than a billion people worldwide. The history of the English language is extraordinary, tenacity, near-extinction luck, dazzling flexibility and an extraordinary absolving power.